John McCain, who
shed a playboy image in his youth to become a fighter pilot, revered prisoner
of war and both an independent voice in the Republican Party and its 2008
presidential nominee, died on Saturday, little more than a year after he was
told he had brain cancer. He was 81.
McCain’s office said in a statement "Senator John
Sidney McCain III died at 4:28 p.m. on August 25, 2018." He announced on
July 19, 2017, that he had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma,
an aggressive type of brain tumor. On Friday his family announced he was discontinuing
treatment.
"With the Senator when he passed were his wife Cindy
and their family. At his death, he had served the United States of America
faithfully for sixty years," McCain's office said in the statement.
His daughter, Meghan McCain, said in a statement that
"I was with my father at his end, as he was with me at my beginning."
"All that I am is thanks to him. Now that he is gone,
the task of my lifetime is to live up to his example, his expectations, and his
love,” she said.
McCain’s wife, Cindy McCain, tweeted:
“My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this
incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms,
surrounded by the people he loved.” She said he died in "the place he
loved best."
In his 36 years in Congress, McCain became one of the
country's most respected and influential politicians, challenging his fellow
lawmakers to reach across the aisle for the good of the country, and often
sparring with reporters with a biting if self-deprecating wit.
On a variety of issues — torture, immigration, campaign
finance, the Iraq War — McCain was often known as the moral center of the
Senate and of the Republican Party.
Last year, in his last act of defiance, McCain returned to
the Capitol less than a week after his cancer was diagnosed to cast his vote on
the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act — the biggest
legislative achievement of President Barack Obama, the man who defeated him in
the 2008 election.
McCain first voted in
favor of debating the bill, giving his fellow Republicans hope that their
long-sought goal of repealing Obamacare was in sight. McCain then dashed those
hopes by casting the decisive vote against repeal.
Before the vote, McCain denounced the rise of partisanship
in a heartfelt speech from the Senate floor on July 25, 2017.
"Why don’t we try the old way of legislating in the
Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act?" McCain said.
"Merely preventing your political opponents from doing what they want
isn’t the most inspiring work."
But in recent months, the man who had been a mainstay on
Capitol Hill for more than three decades was noticeably absent.
He missed a White House ceremony on Dec. 12, 2017, in which
President Donald Trump signed the annual defense bill into law — one of
McCain's signature achievements.
A
statement issued the following day by the senator's office said he was
at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland receiving
treatment for the "normal side effects of his ongoing cancer therapy"
and looked forward to returning to work as soon as possible.
McCain's life was punctuated by wild highs and lows, from
the horrific conditions he endured for nearly 2,000 days as a prisoner of war
to subsequent professional successes that brought him to the forefront of
American politics.
Over the course of his career he rallied against
pork-barrel spending and went against his own party's president, George W.
Bush, on strategy for the Iraq war. He earned a reputation as a party maverick
by advocating campaign finance reform, lending his name to the bipartisan
McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, and supporting overhauling the nation's
immigration system over the years.
But the pinnacle of his political career came in 2008, when
he clinched the Republican nomination for president, only to lose to Obama amid
the global financial meltdown and dragged down by Bush's low approval ratings.
His contentious choice for a running mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska
at the time, was also believed to have contributed to the loss, and is still
seen by some as a tarnish on his reputation.
But long before then, McCain was a Navy brat who had little
interest in being studious.
John Sidney McCain III was born on Aug. 29, 1936, to a
prominent naval family steeped in patriotism. Both his father and grandfather
were four-star admirals, with his father, John McCain Jr., advancing to
commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam War.
While McCain followed in his family's military footsteps,
he did so with his own flair: When he graduated from the Naval Academy at
Annapolis in 1958, he was ranked 894th of 899 graduates.
In a speech to midshipmen at his alma mater in October
2017, McCain joked about his abysmal academic performance.
"My superiors didn’t hold me in very high esteem in
those days," he said. "To be honest, I wasn’t too thrilled to be here
back then, and I was as relieved to graduate — fifth from the bottom of my
class — as the Naval Academy was to see me go."
After graduation, McCain volunteered for combat duty in the
Vietnam War and, as a lieutenant commander, got orders to ship out in 1967. He
narrowly escaped death in July of that year, when, while preparing for a
routine bombing mission, an explosion on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal
engulfed his plane in flames, killing 134 men on board.
Only three months later, on Oct. 26, 1967, McCain's plane
was shot down over North Vietnam. Both of his arms and his knee were broken,
and McCain was knocked unconscious and taken as a prisoner of war.
That began a five-and-a-half-year nightmare inside a prison
where Vietnamese soldiers, upon learning that McCain was the son of an admiral,
set out to use him for propaganda purposes. They tortured and beat him, but
McCain refused an early release, denying communist North Vietnam a propaganda
victory, and followed a code of conduct that POWs must be released in the order
they were captured.
When the war ended in 1973, McCain finally returned to a
hero's welcome.
In 2008, he spoke passionately about the patriotism he maintained
while imprisoned in Hanoi.
This information appeared HERE this evening.
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