David Brooks Interview: The Honor and Complexity of John McCain's Journey

foreign covering McCain probably in the mid 1990s and of the times for friends and I bill Crystal and some others were trying to relaunch the Republican Party who maybe with a little more Progressive Direction and we had something called National greatness conservatism which was really descended from Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln and especially Teddy Roosevelt and we were looking for sort of a reforming conservative of that sort it was not libertarian but pretty conservative liked business liked immigration tough on foreign policy idealistic democracy promotion abroad and McCain fit the bill in every way and so it was really at first an intellectual attraction just the way he conducted himself with the senator and the things he stood for and I began to get to know some of the people on the staff and then I got to know him and we really saw him as the future of the Republican Party ideologically McCain has moved around he was he's primarily I think an honor driven person and so when I first got to know him he was driven by a sense that something dishonorable was going on whether it was a corruption at Boeing whether it was the campaign Finance system he was really a missile that aimed itself at anything dishonorable so I wouldn't say there was a broad overarching philosophy but he was always a reformer he always liked the idea we've got to reform this reform that and at that time I think he was he was trending more moderate uh more of a center-right uh more of a fusing government to do good things for but being for the market I think when he began running for president the second time and as he got closer to the nomination he became a more Orthodox Republican and that led to the selection of Sarah Palin and then I think in the last couple years he's trended back to what I think of as his true self and a lot of that might have been driven by politics a lot of that I think he got disillusioned with some of the people who were supporting him in before and liked the fact that he was getting supported by the the top of the of the Republican party and so he he drifted right for sure as the party drifted right as he wanted to lead it now in his uh in these later days he's drifted back to the honor-driven guy who was just disgusted by um by over ideologization and the libertarian free market tied that has taken over the party yeah well stubborn is the word uh you know none of us like to be unpopular in our workplace and I've seen McCain be unpopular time and time again sometimes for excellent reasons sometimes for not great reasons but he's a man who is driven by his own convictions and I would say he's one of the few politicians I've ever covered who has an authentic inner voice even when he does things that are not great embracing the Confederate flag while running for in South Carolina he knows he's not doing something great most politicians I cover they rationalize it to themselves and so there's no honest interior voice there but whether it was the pow experience or whatever or some other cause McCain has never been able to lie to himself very well and so even when he compromises for political reasons he knows he's compromising some piece of himself and I think there's some piece of himself that feels pretty bad about it I think it comes from his dad and from his granddad and from his mom they fiercely he grew up with a moral code uh and it was a code that preached honor and Glory sacrifice for country and the story she tells on the campaign Trail he tells more stories about other people's heroism than any other politician I've ever covered they're all about that kind of honor and glory and it's really a Roman and Greek moral system the idea is that we We should strive for Eternal Fame and be worthy of Fame not just Fame in the low sense but be worthy of honorable Fame because we did something big for the country and whether that's in the prison or whether that's uh in the realm of politics and for somebody with a Roman and Greek Honor Code public service is the highest calling and I think that's why he's devoted his life to that McCain had a style of politics which I think Was a Teddy Roosevelt style of politics if traditional liberals believe in big government to enhance equality and traditional conservatives Republicans believe in shrinking government to enhance Freedom McCain stood for this Roosevelt idea limited but energetic government to enhance social Mobility and so he was willing to use government to smash up the oligarchies that were keeping people down that would there were stifling people's ability to become capitalists and so he was he would capable of using government whether it was to combat global warming or something else so he was never a liberal but he was never a no government conservative and so pieces people saw pieces of him on both sides he's not always authentic but he's more authentic than everybody else and and you know he's personable when I would ride around him in the 2000 the 2000 presidential campaign was the most fun I've ever had as a political journalist we would get in the van and he would do events say in South Carolina you want to hit three media markets every day so we get in the van we'd ride with him in the morning to an event get back in the van ride across the state to another event get back in the van another state to an event and everything was transparent he had no money and so he needed us to broadcast everything and we were sitting there throughout the campaign right they were planning the ads they were writing the speeches they were talking about the strategy and some of us journalists were just sitting there so we got to see absolutely everything and he was completely honest and open and you know I figured in those rides the way to get McCain talking was to find somebody they didn't like and uh just remind him of it and so you get it like six in the morning in a van and he'd say we can't Senator do you see what Rick Santorum said and then he'd go off and his tooth his mouth would just go and he'd talk and talk and talk and who he didn't like who he did like uh and it was great we got to see absolutely everything and then later after he got real momentum some journalists came in who didn't know how to deal with McCain and so they were they were doing trying to do all these gotcha questions and they put him on the defensive and he would begin to close down but if you were just willing to ride the circus and have fun with him then he was the best show I've ever covered no I think McCain Easley could have won in 2000 uh he had this huge New Hampshire and then we got South Carolina and he had all the momentum on his side he was the fresh face uh he had all media on his side we were his base uh and then what happened in South Carolina which was the pivotal State there was that bush and some of his people did some dirty tricks and there were some some allegations about race and McCain and his people John Weaver and Mark Salter I think they took it too personally they decided something really disgraceful and dishonorable was being done and they had to hit back and they hit back too rashly and sometimes in a way that seemed to assault the entire Republican party and sometimes seem to insult a lot of the key especially some of the Evangelical figures and so I think their sense of honor and courage was riled up and I think they lost a little that control and of course that's always the problem if you're going to campaign like McCain very instinctual seat of the pants as somebody said McCain is not the guy driving the aircraft carrier he's the guy in the plane alone flying the plane off and onto the aircraft carrier and that's a that's just a lone wolf kind of operation and so it's all instinctual and I think they got their instincts a little out of whack In the Heat of battle and I think if they had kept on track I think he had the superior Vision he had all the momentum I think he could have um I think he could have won that nomination you know we all have the one virtue we aspire to most um for some of us believe it or not yeah for me I'm a pundit humility is the one I'd like to possess for McCain is courage uh courage is the essential trait it's what he's written books about uh and if you're going to be a soldier or a fighter or a pilot that's the courage you need and so he admires courage and others and he insists upon it on himself and courage comes in many forms the kind he displayed in Vietnam but also intellectual courage and moral courage and politics because the demands to compromise and to get along with everybody else are just insistent and to be able to stand up when the winds are blowing in your face and when it's going to cost you is a very um it's a seductive form of compromise and he fell for it in the heat of battle and when you're in a campaign it's not just yourself you're representing all these people are working for you a whole movement has arisen beneath you you don't want to let them down by losing and so I don't think he ever had what a lot of politicians have is the fear of failure but I think he had a sense of responsibility for the team and so he he went along against his best instincts and he had trouble living with himself after that and so going back and and correcting the mistakes he made about the conservative flag in South Carolina was an act of penance that uh I can't think of another example you know in 2000 I I got an invite somehow to it's to his birthday party and I thought great I'll uh it's great he's invited some journalists to his party and so I go to a restaurant on the Upper East Side of New York and I opened the door and I walk in and he hasn't invited a couple journalists to his party everybody in there was a journalist it was like Dan Rather William Sapphire like Charlie Rose Chris Matthews like every Big name journalist in America was in that room and that was the base and that was part politics uh and it was just part who we liked hanging around with a journalists can be Believe It or Not sort of fun to be around and there's some of the people who are hanging around that campaign on the journalistic side Michael Lewis I'm thinking of are just great to be around super fun and so I think he really I mean one of the secrets about McCain is pow or not pow he was always the most fun guy in the room he always wanted to take you places and just have an adventure every single day and so the campaign in 2000 was very much media based the campaign in 2008 was the opposite and to me the pivotal moment was my newspaper wrote a story that frankly was not adequately sourced and explored sort of making the allegations that he had had an affair but without really nailing it down and that particular story did not redound well on the New York Times but I think McCain took a very personally like I've been friends to all these people and now look how they're treating me and so we were we were out and so if the media was very much in McCain World in 2000 we were the Enemy by 2008. and so his attitude toward us had changed and so the campaign become much much more opaque and ideologically he became much more normal Republican and there are times when McCain was not completely recognizable in that campaign and then when I was with him in those days every question was about Barack Obama and I could see him he would get riled up that uh you know it's all about this other guy but you know what about me I'm the Maverick and so it was the whole tone was incredibly different from 2000 to 2008. yeah I I think the media fell in love with Barack Obama and you know myself included so uh but in some ways in 2008 the McCain story was even more dramatic because he really was dead in the water in the beginning of that primary campaign and he just worked his way through town hall after town hall and won the thing on the the back of a just sheer Hustle but B his ability to actually connect to people and he could be a a good speech maker that's for sure but he could be an amazing Town Hall performer and he would rally people in small groups and in some ways that was as impressive just a political feat of connecting to voters uh as you could imagine I think what happened in McCain in 2000 and Obama in 2008 were exceptional where the media really was Bewitched by a candidate and so I think what happened after that in both candidates cases actually is that our coverage returned to normal and it's annoying our coverage is annoying because we're trying to tell the truth as we see it it's never quite the truth as the candidate and the campaign sees it so it's just always going to be annoying and I think if you react to it with hostility you end up making it worse uh and that's a little what happened in 2008. the big moment for me in 2008 was the at the convention when he picked Palin and I still was buddies with a lot of people in McCain world and they split very quickly and some of the people were um deeply disillusioned immediately they knew exactly what he had done why he had done it and they were very disillusioned and you began to see feuds and a McCain campaign was never going to be an organized General Electric IBM operation it's always going to was going to be Controlled Chaos but I think in the pressure of that selection and then in the bigness of a campaign it got to be chaos cubed and some of the people there were in fighting with others people were getting fired and by the end of the campaign you know I think a lot of us looked at the chaos we're hearing about within the campaign thinking can this guy run a White House and so uh I think the the Bad Blood um within the campaign just got um just got pretty bad you know politics is about serving and uh you can't serve if you don't win and he was behind it was a it was a long shot and so he could justify the pick by saying I had that Hail Mary pass I had to try something I think and I don't think he could have known this at the time frankly the research wasn't thorough enough but in picking Sarah Palin he basically took a disease that was running through the Republican party not paling herself she's a normal human being but a disease that I'll call anti-intellectualism disrespect for facts and he put it right at the center of the party and so she was a chapter in the rise of a cheap kind of populism that has since borne fruit in Donald Trump but would we have Donald Trump without Sarah Palin I'm not sure she was certainly a step on the path to Donald Trump like every professional and more so politics has its own character challenges one of the character challenges is that people are sucking up to you all the time another character challenge is there are other people who have think differently than you and you've got to try to Cobble together 50 of them and you've got to try to do that every single day and so of course you may compromises but show me a profession where you don't make compromises that's what life is like and did McCain make some compromises to try to win the election of course but he thought he was going to be able to run a really good foreign policy and a much better domestic policy and you know I talk to politicians every day and they say you know you don't win you don't serve and so you do what you have to do and you try not to totally render yourself unrecognizable in that process and I would say McCain compromised in 2008 and see compromised in 2000 by the way and he never rendered himself unrecognizable he was still essentially true to his core values and with moments here there in the cold course of his campaign the banking scandal the South Carolina flag Sarah Palin he had their stains on his record but there are pretty few stains given a very long record and a long set of examples of times where he easily could have compromised and it was totally would have benefited him and he didn't go along yeah I I as I say um what are the where does the conscience come from I think it comes from sort of the witness of the Dead the people he served with his father I think those voices are still in his head saying No this is the right action here and he doesn't always listen to them but he never can quite silence them and he is a person he's a weird mixture of someone who is a bad boy who wants to have fun let's go gambling play craps but he's also a very Noble magnanimous man who wants to be a great public servant and that's that's pretty odd combination I think McCain has told the American story in a way that we needed to hear one of the things that's jarring about him when I think about him is it always shocks me that oh he fought in Vietnam I always think oh he fought in World War II right because he seems like a World War II Type and that's partly because he missed the 60s he was in prison but partly because he represents an ideal of soldier Statesman that we are more familiar with in World War II with the George Marshalls the Dwight Eisenhower's and we're familiar with those men who are very masculine men very strong men uh and who say hey I wasn't born Blank Slate into the world and what can the world do for me I was born very fortunate into a specific country i o I owe a specific institution the U.S Navy my service it defines the standards by which I will live I will try to serve and then I'll try to pass along to somebody in slightly better shape than I received it and that sort of institutional mindset the love of America the love of what America represents and the way patriotism can sometimes it can be a very tribal emotion but sometimes it can be a very uplifting emotion and the stories McCain tells about America are the uplifting Stories the Immigrant Stories the soldier Stories the pilot stories and they're meant to uplift it and tie us to one country and in a moment when we're bifurcating and splitting up six ways from Sunday by ethnic lines at political lines that was never part of him because the American identity was always going to be stronger than the any ethnic identity even in Arizona identity I he was a nationalist in the best way uh he's just the most fun person to be around uh I remember once he went somebody was making a movie about his time in prison and we went down to New Orleans and they set up a mock Hanoi Hilton and he toured it with uh one of his prisoner buddies a medal of honor with her name Bud day and we walk onto the set and there are all these Vietnamese guys dressed in prisoner uniforms or prison guard uniforms so suddenly you see McCain walking into it looks exactly like the annoy Hilton surrounded by Vietnamese guys looking like guards and Bud day was I'm back here and McCain was not phased he was like this is weird and and we walked through it he was like very nice to the guards signing all the autographs and all this kind of stuff and then he took me to a casino and he taught me how to shoot craps and because it was him picking all the um the numbers I won I won like 300 bucks and so I have these chips and we're walking out of the casino and there's a line where you cash in your chips and McCain is a very impatient man so he said let's go so I walked out of that casino with all my chips I never got my money and so that burst of like a nice life but really wanted to have fun all the time liking Sports liking gambling liking buddies telling stories uh just the most fun in the room every time I've been in the room with him yeah McCain was among those most vociferous in argument for going to war in Iraq and I think he did it um for the same reasons I did it I think he mostly did it because uh he thought the Middle East could not survive filled with fundamentalism and dictatorship and that the path to a peaceful world was to try to introduce democracy through that part of the world and you have to remember the moment we had just been through the Cold War and had emerged triumphant from that war and we'd seen democracy miraculously take off um in this former Soviet Union in South Africa across the world and this seemed like the final frontier of tyranny and so I when I would see him make the case for war and I was with him with a lot of his advisors who supported the war that was primarily the argument I I recall it being a high-minded argument and what I also recall is that he understood very quickly that some people in the Bush Administration notably Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did not share them rationale for war did not Envision democracy promotion and so he very early on even in the first sweep of supposed victory I think he understood that this need to be done in a different way and you began to see lobbying against Rumsfeld vision of just get in and get out and so you know you can Mark a debit in McCain's column for supporting the war it was a mistake but he gets the asterisk that I think he would afforded very differently and he would have really understood the burden of democracy building in another place more than the Bush Administration did campaign Finance reform made him very unpopular in the conservative movement George will a prominent one of the most prominent conservative columnists probably wrote 100 columns on why this was a terrible mistake and in part people thought you know money of speech and partly it was principled but partly they thought McCain was sucking up to the east coast Elites and I love campaign Finance reform and it was on that issue and on global warming and a few others that they thought McCain's not really on the team and that's sort of true McCain's not a just a team player in that way but I'm not sure he was for campaign Finance reform because it was beloved at the New York Times editorial page I really don't think he cared he was for it because he had a little Battle of corruption scandal in his own life and he was driven wherever he saw a stain uh he was driven to go after it and he loved going after stain it was it was he was why he would wake up in the morning there's some corruption here somebody's lying there his politics were not ideological a lot of the time they were more like a prosecutor a lot of the time I once almost wrote a book I wish I'd done it on the second floor of the Russell centered office building and on that floor Lindsey Graham had his office Chuck Cagle has his office Joe Biden had his office McCain had his office and these were Senators who sometimes fought with each other but had a great sense of camaraderie with each other a couple of them had fought Biden and McCain had been in the Senate forever and the sense of Love of the institution and the weird practices of the institution was something that I think all the people on that floor had that this is just a great body and that we've inherited this thing that goes back 200 years and it has weird peculiarities to it but um it's really what makes our democracy great and and what I saw McCain repelling again and again though it's been a losing battle is making the Senate more like the house the house is a more ideological place it's a more raucous place it's a more leadership driven place and everything goes a lot faster there and the Senate used to be very different and now it's very much the same with the same level of partisan fighting the shortage now of really bipartisan friendship and McCain loved came of age in the old Senate and I think has always loved the old Senate and is less happy in what the Senate has become one of the things I always loved seeing during the campaign was his treatment of immigrants and America had a story which was an exodus story which is that we were a people who escaped oppression across the Wilderness and are trying to build the promised land and that was the story the Puritans used to tell that was a story that every immigrant group could accept yeah that feels like my story that was the story that Martin Luther King told Exodus uh and I think that was the story he was raised with and what's happened over the last 15 years is we've lost that story either we're not proud of our country in the way we were we don't know Biblical history so we don't know the story so it's been replaced by a lot of different stories there's the libertarian story which is we're all rugged individualists if Government get away from us there's the the tech story which is that we're Global disruptors in a global economy and we love disruption there's the Multicultural story we're all in our own groups and there's the Donald Trump story which was that we're honors peasants in the Heartland who are being attacked by Outsiders and so the story that McCain told all his life is a story that's not known anymore and without a coherent National story like you know a coherent country in the country as diverse as ours I thought this was McCain's great moment in the Twilight of his career because the Steve bannons of the world and the Donald Trumps of the world know what they believe they have a belief that America is under assault from Muslims from immigrants from cultural Elites and they want to build walls to protect America from all those things and what bothered me about the rest of the Republican party is they didn't buy that story but they didn't have another story they didn't have the conviction to tell a different story or the courage to really be clear that they don't believe Trump's story and so McCain's constitutional Center speech was the first time somebody said no uh we're going to lay down a gauntlet here that were for openness that were for some sort of disciplined immigration we're going to promote the Democracy around the world and try to create a post-war order the way we always have in a new century and so to me that was the moment that other Republicans can say yeah that's actually what I believe and you've then saw George W Bush come out with a speech and I think Mitt Romney got a little emboldened Colin Powell and so it was somebody finally telling the opposite story and to me the big the big contrast between what John McCain believes and what the current Republican party is concerns the post-war International order he's primarily a foreign policy thinker and he grew up with NATO uh with the post-war order and this was the idea that America creates a global order within which all the nations can Thrive and we use international organizations as a way to leverage our power even more and Trump rejects that to tearing down that war post-war order as part of his project and so that's a pretty fundamental difference from the thing that John McCain has spent his whole life defending and building his public service has been so deeply in time with friendships and a lot of the friendships have been with Democrats Ted Kennedy Joe Biden he loved Morris Udall who was a democratic member of the House who ran for president back in the 70s and quotes you at all all the time and so out of that sense of friendship came a belief that party was not everything and out of that sense of his own past came a direct experience with crafting compromise legislation and sometimes it's done through committees and sometimes it was done through gangs the gang of AIDS and they were bipartisan and there was since the other half of the country exists you got to deal with them and so he would craft to compromise General bill on immigration reform and it wasn't filled with everything you loved but it was an act of politics and what he had seen was a group of people like Ted Cruz come in say we don't need to compromise it's gonna we're gonna get 100 what they want and we can blow up the institution in order to get it and I think that just was a insult to his whole life's work and so when he came back he insisted on you know maybe before we pass a peace legislation we should hold some hearings about it could seem like this is Nursery School level like you go to the doctor I'm going to operate and then I'll have a diagnosis no maybe she did the diagnosis first like this is not complicated stuff here but he stated the obvious uh and not only did he state it but when the health care thing came up for the vote it was a pretty there have been a lot of dramatic moments in McCain's career but doing the thumbs down on that vote he did it so quickly and so decisively and like it was not a big deal but it was heard around Washington and it made him a lot of enemies but I think it was a service to the country whatever you think of the bill you shouldn't pass major legislation the way they were doing it well Trump is uh has taken the Republican party and turn it on his head in its views of Foreign Affairs McCain is an internationalist Trump is a nationalist in its views of cultivating a leadership class McCain believes in that he went to you know that's the Naval Academy has is friends with a lot of people who are members of the leadership class and the quality of that class can rise and fall and it's been falling and Trump is against that and so Trump comes in at a time when the party is unrecognizable to the probably to the John McCain of 1985 or 1990. this was a guy who grew up with Reagan and what Trump signifies is the end of the Reagan Era yeah you know like classical Greeks used to argue that the way we teach how to behave is through example that we sort of published The Book Of Our Lives by all our actions every day and we the other people look at us and they approve or disapprove but they get a sense of yeah that's how I should behave and that's how I shouldn't behave and this is especially powerful among our public servants that if you're president you should try to tell the truth if you're Barack Obama try to show how good family life looks like even in a hard time and you know busy times if you're John McCain and you see corruption in your own party go after that corruption don't put party among come above country and so to me McCain more than anything else he was a good legislator but he is especially good teacher and he taught by example some of it he wrote books on courage and things like that but partly he just inspired people by behavior of his example and that was example uh in Vietnam but it was example after on the campaign Trail you know I talked to him a lot about Vietnam back in 2000 and I've got the sense he was a little bored by it he knew the what had happened there was a great political benefit to him but he was more interested in telling other people's stories and he was more interested in frankly immigrant stories and Rags to Riches stories and so those campaigns were not successful in 2000 but I think it was a great education to the country of what a certain side of Elita could look like well it's beyond one person to fix what's happened to our politics but if he stands up and tells the truth as he sees it I think that will encourage others because if they see the story that um say Donald Trump tells and then they see the story that John McCain tells they're going to be reminded of who they are it's very easy to abstract away from yourself in politics the climate is so strong the pressures are so strong you can lose your inner voice and if Pete McCain can remind a lot of the members of Congress who really believe in what he believes in fundamentally that yeah that is what I believe I forgot about that then I think he can have a powerful influence on the people around him even if it's not about passing legislation or not about you know taking down this or that presidency yeah I think McCain since his diagnosis has found his regular voice you know when you're in a PW camp for five years everything that comes after that is great you face death and you've probably assumed you were going to die and so everything that comes after that is not about me but about telling the truth and about country and so I think one of the reasons he was so candid through life is because he'd already had the death diagnosis and somehow he miraculously escaped it and that had to be why he had the solid solidity to be the kind of Senator he was and so now with another death diagnosis he just reminds me of himself more than ever he doesn't seem like a transformed person to me he just reminds me of oh yeah that was John McCain 2000. that's the same guy one of the things that I've always thought drives him is that core pow experience and being loyalty loyal to that experience when he learned in that experience so the first thing I remember we used to have there's all these pow Mia flags that are up and there used to be organizations that would tell the families of those missing in Vietnam oh they're still alive and he thought that was so cruel and I remember his disgust at some of the organizations that were claiming they were still there because he thought it was wrong for the families and then when in the middle of the Iraq War it turned out the CIA had loosened their standards what you could do to prisoners I think that brought him back to this kernel experience of his life and that torture was wrong it's always going to be wrong it was wrong when they did it I experienced it and it's doubly wrong when we do it and so those moments anything that ties back to that that really making of him experience in life that transformed him from being just a wild boy to a wild boy with sobriety and of purpose that will be and it'd be fitting frankly if a key experience of his life which happened in the 1960s was related to the crowning experience of his life which was getting a good torture policy and getting accountability on torture uh that happened you know four four decades later I remember being in New Hampshire and I remember the um I don't know if it was an image but it captured the moment it was a picture of McCain with a lightsaber from Star Wars and it was uh it was it was Han Solo on that night it was triumphant Warrior against the party establishment um and it was like it was the only thing I've seen like it is is Obama winning Iowa in 2008 those are the two moments of my political life where all idealism was justified and cynicism fell away from politics because somebody who truly believed on something somebody who could express what the country wanted to hear and the best elements of what the country wanted to hear that person had won and had won in the best possible way that does not happen every day in politics