WASHINGTON – John McCain knows what hopelessness feels like.
He attempted suicide as a Vietnam prisoner of war. His young political career took a head-on blow in the Keating Five scandal. He’s gone three rounds with melanoma. His quest of the presidency has been pronounced dead more than once.
Hopelessness, McCain says on the campaign trail, is “an enemy who defeats your will.”
“I felt those things once before,” he says of his years in Vietnam. “I will never let them in again.”
And so it is that John McCain, at 72, fights on, a battle-scarred warrior.
His refusal to quit, his willingness to stand up against the tide, his ability to come back against seemingly insurmountable odds, are the hallmarks of a lifetime in war and politics.
But McCain knows all too well that a fighting spirit may not be enough this time.
Two weeks out from the election, his back against the wall, McCain allowed a moment of reflection about “a life that’s been blessed” when asked about the possibility that he could lose.
“Look, I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said. “I’m the most fortunate man on earth.”
So much of John McCain’s identity revolves around his history as a prisoner of war that it is easy to overlook all that came before.
And there was a lot – “a whole life,” in McCain’s own words.
By the time McCain was shot out of the sky over Vietnam at age 31, he’d already crashed a plane into Corpus Christi Bay, ejected from another jet that flamed out as he was flying solo, survived an explosion aboard the carrier Forrestal that left 134 dead, and generally lived large, as he once said of his grandfather.
He’d toyed with the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion. (That idea fizzled when he found out the legion required nine years of service.)
He’d been poised to fly into combat from the deck of the USS Enterprise during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He’d knocked down power lines flying too low over southern Spain.
He’d romanced a Brazilian fashion model in Rio.
He’d married a beautiful divorcee, adopted the former model’s two boys and had a daughter with her.
A predilection for what McCain describes as “quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform” was encoded in the family DNA. – AP