The Restless Wave

by John McCain

  We would be in session until the early morning hours of Friday. There were votes on various amendments to the bill, most of them decided by party line. Over the course of that long day and night, I heard from a good many people, some on their own initiative, but most pressed into service by the White House and the leadership, urging me to support the Republican measure. I spoke with Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, and with my old friend Phil Gramm. Governor Ducey, who had previously expressed serious reservations about the bill, called to say on balance he thought it was worth voting for. My closest advisors were divided on what I should do. Some believed I should vote no, others thought I should give the bill a chance to be improved in conference. A few were agnostic on the question.

  When I walked to the Senate floor around eleven o’clock that evening, I had mostly made up my mind that I would vote against the Republican substitute. Reporters pressed me for my decision, and I offered a smartass remark, “Wait for the show,” which sounded like I was trying to heighten suspense. That wasn’t my intention. I was just being a smartass with reporters, which, as most congressional reporters will tell you, is a daily routine for me. It would have been easier and certainly less dramatic had I announced my intention before the final vote. I knew the moment I stepped onto the floor that I would be lobbied by colleagues on both sides of the debate. I would listen respectfully and give a final consideration to the pros and cons, but I intended to let colleagues on each side know before the press knew which way I was leaning.

  I had a brief word with Chuck Schumer right after I entered the chamber to confirm I was likely to vote no. His smile probably alerted Republicans and reporters in the gallery to my intention, and I immediately apprised Republican friends of the same, including Lindsey, Mitch, and the Republican whip, John Cornyn. Others were delegated to try to change my mind. I was called into the cloakroom to take calls from Phil Gramm and Doug Ducey. I sat at my desk next to Lindsey for the first of two votes that started around midnight, and went over my reasons for voting no. I let Susan and Lisa know I was with them. Vice President Mike Pence was present that night in the event he had to break a tie vote. He talked to me at length, making the case for the bill and asking if there were any assurances he or the President could offer that would change my mind. He didn’t give me a hard time. Our exchanges were relaxed and respectful. No one did, really. There was an urgency to their task understandably, but no one lost their temper, including me. No one threatened me or did anything other than implore me to give it more thought. Word spread on both sides. And a little after one o’clock in the morning, shortly before the vote on skinny repeal would start, I stood with a group of Democrats, making small talk and a few wisecracks. We didn’t discuss the vote, although some observers assumed that’s what we were talking about. They already knew how I would vote, as did most of the Senate. Orrin Hatch came over and gave me a hug. Just before one-thirty, Mike Pence asked to talk to me again off the Senate floor. I left the chamber with him, and he handed me his phone. President Trump was on the other end. I listened quietly as he asked me to reconsider. I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but it was a polite rebuff. Then I walked back into the chamber to vote.

  Nearly every senator had already voted, and most of them knew what I was about to do. Mitch was standing in the well with his arms crossed. I was genuinely sorry to disappoint him. He had worked hard to find a way to keep a commitment Republicans had made to our voters. I disagreed with his top-down approach and the bare-bones measure it had produced, but I took no pleasure in rejecting it. I got the attention of the clerk, extended my right arm, and gave a thumbs-down. People made a big deal about the drama of the moment, but it didn’t feel that dramatic to me at the time. I didn’t feel everyone watching me. Many members signal their vote with a hand gesture, typically a thumbs-up or -down. That’s how I always vote. The clerk can’t always hear “yeas” and “nays,” so we accompany them with hand gestures to make sure our votes are recorded accurately. I heard a gasp when I voted from someone who must not have gotten the word, and a smattering of applause from the other side, which Chuck discouraged. I felt bad about that. I felt bad about disappointing my caucus. I didn’t want Democrats to celebrate in the moment. It was a natural reaction, but would be seen by some on my side as rubbing salt in the wound.

  I got a kick out of stories the next day that diagrammed my colleagues’ reactions to my vote, pointing out the look on that senator’s face and how this senator craned her neck to see better. I suspect you could take a photograph of the chamber during any routine vote and invest the tableau with conjectured excitement. There is always tension in the chamber when legislation of that magnitude is defeated or passed by a single-vote margin. And unlike more routine votes, senators won’t typically remain on the floor until the last of their colleagues has voted. Still, it was hardly as intense and shocking as it was made out to be. It was a hard vote that I didn’t make easily, but not one I would hesitate to make again. I went home that night hopeful that Senators Alexander and Murray would have renewed impetus to reach agreement on Obamacare reforms. And I looked forward to starting debate on the defense bill the next day.

  But Rand Paul decided we wouldn’t start debate on the defense bill that morning or any other morning before I went back to Arizona for treatment and the Senate recessed for the summer. We needed unanimous consent to bring up the bill, and he objected. I’m not sure why. Maybe he resented my vote the night before. Maybe he had another reason. It’s hard to tell. I would have liked to have gotten a vote on the bill and sent it to conference before I started chemotherapy and radiation. But it didn’t matter that much. I fooled them again. I came back in September and got the bill done then. After all these years, I’ve learned to have a little patience.

  I was thanked for my vote by Democratic friends more profusely than I should have been for helping save Obamacare. That had not been my goal. I had campaigned on repeal and replace. The bill we voted on would only have repealed it. I’m not sure we’ll ever agree on a replacement, and so perhaps all we can do is try to fix parts of Obamacare. I would prefer something more comprehensive, but that might not be attainable in the near future. As I’ve noted already, sweeping changes aren’t easily achieved in our system of government. Incremental reform is often all that is possible, and there’s value and honor in that.

  Among the people who called to thank me was President Obama. I appreciated his call, but, as I said, my purpose hadn’t been to preserve his signature accomplishment but to insist on a better alternative, and to give the Senate an opportunity to work together to find one. He hadn’t called to lobby me before the vote, which I had appreciated. He had last called me not long after the November election, during the transition to the Trump administration, to congratulate me on my reelection. He added that he was counting on me to be an outspoken and independent voice for the causes I believed in as I had been during his presidency. I thanked him, and said I would try to be.

  HIDDEN VALLEY

  I WAS ROOTLESS FOR MORE than half of my eighty-one years, beginning with my itinerant childhood. My father’s Navy career required us to move constantly, just as my grandfather’s service had disrupted his childhood. My father was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, not because his family resided there or had some connection to the town, but because his parents were moving to the West Coast at the time, and he arrived on the way. I lost track of how many places we lived, how many schools I attended. The actual moving, of course, was undertaken by my capable, adventurous mother, hauling three kids across the country, detouring here and there to visit some natural wonder or cultural attraction. Eventually, my parents sent me to a boarding school, Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, so that I could receive my secondary education and have the same circle of friends in one location for longer than a year. We didn’t see my father for long stretches during his deployments. He was gone almost all of World War II, and at sea for much of the Korean War, serving as
an executive officer on a cruiser. We spent time together when he had shore duty. Even then he was at work most of the time, including weekends and holidays.

  In the summers, when he was stateside, he would take us to the McCain family estate in the Mississippi Delta, a cotton plantation purchased in 1851 by my great-great-grandfather William Alexander McCain, and named for the local area, “Teoc.” My great-uncle Joe, my grandfather’s younger brother, ran Teoc back then. It was a big place, a couple thousand acres, with a comfortable but modest home that had replaced a more impressive manor house lost to a fire generations before, a company store with a gasoline pump, a cotton gin, and tenant farmers descended from the slaves, who had been held in bondage by my ancestors and taken the name McCain. I hunted, fished, and rode horses there, and enjoyed time with my father and my teasing, funny Uncle Joe. Those are cherished memories, but my connection to the place was fleeting, and many summers and years of my childhood were spent entirely without my father. We learned to live with and respect his absences.

  My own Navy career meant more of the same, frequent moves and extended absences from my family and country. I didn’t mind the life, really, at least not when I was single and could find fun and adventure in any temporary residence. But I knew how difficult my professional transience would be on my first wife, Carol, and our children. Until I remarried, left the Navy, and moved to Cindy’s home, Arizona, the only time I lived in the same place longer than a year was an unexpectedly lengthy stay in a foreign country that wouldn’t let me leave (and preferred I’d never come). Among the few advantages of my five and a half years in Hanoi was that Carol and the kids could live in one place, Orange Park, Florida, the entire time I was gone.

  I think the experience of my wandering youth is one of the reasons I’ve always been restless. As I noted in the previous chapter, my curiosity and eagerness for new sights and experiences I likely got from my indefatigable mother. I didn’t regret not having a hometown. Before I moved to Arizona, whenever I was asked where I was from, I just answered “all around” or “the States,” and I felt not the least bit sorry that I couldn’t be more specific. But something changed in the years after I left the Navy. I began to appreciate the comfort and solace that could be found in belonging to a place smaller and more intimate than an entire country.

  Cindy and I decided we would raise our family in Arizona, and I would commute to Washington. Given Congress’s short workweek, that usually meant I could leave Washington on Thursday night or Friday morning and return Monday afternoon, and regular recesses would allow me to spend weeks at home. Of course, there were weekends and recess periods when I couldn’t be in Arizona, when Congress had to work into the weekend or when I campaigned for Republican candidates in other states. My travel abroad as a member of the Armed Services Committee consumed many recess periods as well. But still, I’ve been able to spend more time with my family in the same home than I had ever thought would be possible.

  In my first year in Congress, I had a meeting with members of the Arizona Farm Bureau. After an hour spent discussing issues theretofore unfamiliar to me, I mentioned a matter Cindy and I had recently started discussing. We were living in a small house in Tempe we had just acquired so I would meet my district’s residency requirements. We didn’t have any children yet, but we were planning to, and contemplating finding a place in the northern part of the state where our family could spend time together on weekends and holidays. “Say, if any of you know of a place that’s for sale up north that’s on water,” I added as we were exchanging goodbyes, “let me know. My wife and I might be interested in it.”

  As everyone knows, water is scarce in Arizona, and finding property for a reasonable price that’s near any isn’t an easy assignment. But some months later, I received a call from the head of the Farm Bureau. He had heard of a place for sale near Cottonwood. “It’s on Oak Creek,” he informed me. “You might want to take a look at it.” I called Cindy and she drove the 120 miles from Mesa to the spot in Yavapai County, near Cornville, Arizona, where a winding, bumpy dirt road takes you down a steep hill to an oasis.

  Mormon pioneers were settled in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, not long after the U.S. claimed the Utah Territory after the war with Mexico. Brigham Young was declared president of the Mormon Church, and in that capacity he dispatched missionaries to other parts of the Southwest newly acquired from our defeated foe. Mormons founded communities in all parts of Arizona, including quite a few small towns in the high, beautiful, desolate country in the northern part of the state, towns like Eagar, St. Johns, and Snowflake. Many hardy souls staked claims in even more isolated locations if there were reliable water sources nearby, including land along a horseshoe bend of Oak Creek.

  Oak Creek is a Verde River tributary that carves a spectacularly beautiful gorge, Oak Creek Canyon, from Flagstaff down to Sedona, and continues on past Cornville to its confluence with the Verde south of Cottonwood. It is one of the few streams in the high desert of Northern Arizona that run all year. The creek bend that makes our valley verdant and fertile, and the stagecoach from Flagstaff to Prescott that passed nearby, attracted the first settlers to Hidden Valley in the 1870s. The previous residents, Yavapai and Apache peoples, had been forcibly relocated after a cruel march to the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona.

  It was a hard life for those early settlers, and a lonely one, I imagine. The valley is surrounded by steep hills, canyon walls, really. Getting in and out of here wouldn’t have been easy. It still isn’t. It was a life of ceaseless toil and hardship. The place is pretty far north and at a high elevation so it frequently suffers late freezes, a regularly recurring catastrophe for crops and the families and livestock that depended on them. Families worked this valley until the 1950s, when they began breaking up property and selling off parcels. One last ranching couple remained, a World War II veteran from Kansas and his wife, until they died, he in the late 1960s and she in the early 1970s.

  When Cindy first saw our property with its single, small, three-bedroom cabin, it was lovely and green. But much of the rest of the valley had been neglected, leaving it uncultivated, dusty, and rocky. The settlers had dug an irrigation system across the entire valley that remained in operation, having been grandfathered into recently passed laws that forbade the diversion of water resources. There were trees here then, and we would plant many more. Many cottonwoods grace the property, they’re fast growers, and we have fruit orchards, apple, peach, plum, and cherry trees. The cottonwoods whisper in the wind. And the fruit trees in blossom are a mesmerizing sight. But it’s the slow-growing sycamores, so resilient in harsh climates, that give the place its majesty. They are just magnificent.

  The courtyard of the old palace in Istanbul, the sultan’s residence from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, is lined by immense sycamores, some of which are believed to be five hundred years old. They are as splendid as the palace they guard. We have a sycamore standing near the north bend of the creek that’s close to two hundred years old. With its massive trunk, great height, and sprawling limbs, it commands your attention. And the birds love it.

  Cindy said she knew instantly we would love the place. She made an offer for it that day. That was in 1983. The property was about a quarter of the size that it is today. We only had the one little cabin then. We soon built a guest cottage across an irrigation ditch from our house. In the 1990s we bought the adjacent property to house our kids as they got older, and we added a deck to it, where I used to grill our meals. Our friends, the Harpers, have a home next to us. Not long after, we bought two small places near the south bend of the creek as guesthouses. We built a new main house in 2010 to replace the original cabin, and we just finished building a new place for our kids, who are starting families of their own now.

  But the improvements we made that matter most to me are not architectural but natural. We planted more cottonwoods and fruit trees, mimosas and mulberry bushes for the birds, flowers of all kinds, with rose vines clinging to t
he fences. We established rolling lawns of rich green grass, shaded by tree canopies, and shimmering in the light filtered through the foliage. We dug ponds and stocked them with fish. It was called Hidden Valley Ranch before we owned it. Now it’s practically invisible. From the tops of the surrounding hills you can barely make out the structures and roads below. It’s just a mass of green, wooded and lush, with a symphony of birdsong in the air, and the buzz of cicadas in summer.

  So many birds make their home here, sixty-eight different species the Audubon Society estimates, from hummingbirds darting around the mimosas to a pair of black hawks, a protected species, that return each spring to a nest in a sycamore. They teach their fledglings to fly and hunt, taking advantage of the fish in the creek and the trust that has come to exist between them and us, before flying back to Mexico for the winter. Several years ago, we bought land on the other side of the creek, the ghost ranch we call it, from the heirs of the self-sufficient old couple who had been the last to ranch here. We’re turning it into a wildlife sanctuary to attract even more birds, planting only what is native to the area, cactus and desert willow. When we’re finished the Audubon Society will designate it a special birding area, and the thought of that pleases me very much. There are Indian caves in the hills and waterfalls past the creek bends, and all kinds of wildlife: deer, javelina, coyote, fox, skunk, and rattlesnakes. We had a cougar one summer, but they’re transient animals, and he moved on after he had culled the deer population.

  We’ve spent all the time we could here. We celebrated holidays and birthdays. We swam in the creek, fished the ponds, hiked the hills, and barbequed. The place always teemed with kids, our own and the Harpers’, and their friends’. Until the mid-2000s, when I started spending the Fourth of July with the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, we always celebrated the holiday here with dozens of friends we invited for all manner of recreation, Wiffle ball games, forced marches up the hills to an Indian cave, swimming at the falls, lively dinners along the bank of the creek. We came here after elections to celebrate victories and for consolation after losses; the prescription for both included grilled ribs and a slowly sipped vodka on ice.