John McCain - An American Odyssey

John McCain was born into a family in which distinguished naval service was less a career choice than an inherited household expectation. His father and grandfather both became four-star admirals, leaving the younger McCain the modest task of maintaining the family tradition without appearing excessively conventional. He addressed this difficulty by graduating near the bottom of his class at the United States Naval Academy and accumulating a record of rebellion vigorous enough to demonstrate that obedience and military service need not always arrive together.

In John McCain: An American Odyssey, journalist Robert Timberg traces McCain’s journey from rambunctious naval cadet to combat pilot, prisoner of war, United States senator and prospective presidential candidate. It is a life conveniently structured for biography, containing family inheritance, youthful misbehaviour, extraordinary suffering, political ambition and repeated confrontations with authority—sometimes hostile, sometimes North Vietnamese and sometimes merely Republican.

McCain was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 and captured with severe injuries. He remained a prisoner for five and a half years, enduring isolation, inadequate medical treatment and torture. When his captors discovered that his father was a senior admiral, they offered him early release for propaganda purposes. McCain refused to leave ahead of prisoners captured before him, a decision that became central to his public identity and which involved rather more personal sacrifice than most later uses of the word “principle” in American political advertising.

Timberg follows McCain after Vietnam as he attempts to rebuild his life, leaves the Navy and enters politics in Arizona. Election to the House of Representatives is followed by the Senate, where McCain develops a reputation for bluntness, independence and occasional hostility towards the more choreographed habits of Washington. He becomes the celebrated “maverick,” a political designation suggesting that one sometimes disagrees with one’s party while remaining sufficiently attached to it to seek the presidency.

The book also examines the contradictions behind the heroic public image. McCain was impulsive, ambitious and capable of both considerable charm and considerable temper. His involvement in the Keating Five affair damaged his reputation and helped drive his interest in campaign-finance reform. Timberg does not present a polished commemorative statue but a restless and complicated man whose courage, flaws and appetite for public life were often inseparable.

Much of the material grew from Timberg’s acclaimed The Nightingale’s Song, which examined McCain and four other Naval Academy graduates shaped by Vietnam and its political aftermath. Timberg was himself an Annapolis graduate and a badly wounded Vietnam veteran, giving him an unusually intimate understanding of the military culture, generational loyalties and lasting injuries involved. He writes from close range, but not from the comfortable distance at which every awkward feature becomes statesmanship.

Published in 1999, John McCain: An American Odyssey captures its subject at a particularly interesting moment: established as a prominent senator and preparing his first campaign for the presidency, but before the later chapters for which he became internationally known. There is no 2008 nomination, Sarah Palin, contest with Barack Obama or final era of conflict with Donald Trump. The book therefore preserves McCain just before his political biography acquired several substantial appendices and the title “maverick” became a full-time media department.

This Touchstone edition is in As New condition, appearing remarkably fresh and possibly less weathered than its subject already was when it appeared. It is an excellent copy for readers interested in American politics, the Vietnam War, presidential biography or the complicated manufacture of public heroism.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where no family tradition, military record or exploratory committee is required before purchase. Presidential ambitions should nevertheless be declared at checkout.

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