Rolling Stone on McCain

Take half an hour and read Tim Dickinson's piece on McCain in Rolling Stone. We should be terrified that the man's gotten this close to the presidency; if he actually makes it into that office we should be whatever level fear ramps up to when "terrified" doesn't even come close any more. Country first? McCain first. Always and everywhere it has been McCain first, with utter contempt for rules or standards or people who get in the way of his massive ego and ambition.

It is difficult to pull three representative paragraphs from a ten-page story crammed with details. So I'm breaking fair-use rules and quoting four in an excerpt that probably illustrates the man better than anything else in the story. In July of '67, McCain was flying bombing missions off the carrier USS Forrestal. One morning, while waiting on the flight deck, a missile inadvertently launched from another plane hit McCain's fuel tank, causing a fire. McCain jumped out of his cockpit and was able to run to safety before one of his bombs fell off his plane and detonated, which in turn caused a chain reaction of explosions from the surrounding planes and a huge fire that blew open the ship, threatening to sink it, and killed 134 men.

These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then "gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."

McCain First. Remember that.