Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT John McCain with Mark Salter, his speechwriter and co-author.
WASHINGTON — For 25 years after his release from a North Vietnamese prison, Senator John McCain tried to build a reputation as more than a famous former captive. “I never want to be a professional P.O.W.,” he often told friends. He refused to let his campaigns use pictures from his incarceration, and he never mentioned his torture.
The Long Run
Embracing a War StoryThis is part of a series of articles about the lives and careers of the Republican and Democratic candidates for president in 2008.
Previous Articles in the Series »Multimedia
In his memoirs, John McCain drew parallels between himself as a young aviator, left, and characters that inspired him, like those played by Marlon Brando, right.
NEW APPEAL Mr. McCain, signing his book in 1999, used his memoir’s story line to shape a campaign message.
“When somebody introduces me like, ‘Here is our great war hero,’ I don’t like it,” Mr. McCain complained in a 1998 interview with Esquire magazine. “Jesus,” he said, “it can make your skin crawl.”
Mr. McCain’s impatience with his war story soon changed, however, when he became not only its protagonist but also its author. His 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers,” for the first time put his prison camp ordeal at the center of his public persona. In its pages, he recalled the experience as much more than a trial: a turning point from glory-seeking flyboy to responsible patriot, the final resolution of a rebellion against his father’s expectations, and the origin of a drive “to serve a cause” larger than himself.
A descendant of Navy admirals who wrote unpublished novels and quoted Victorian poetry, Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, often surprises aides and friends with his literary musings and bibliophilic appetite. He cites characters from fiction and film as role models.
As he recounted his history to his speechwriter and co-author, Mark Salter, Mr. McCain echoed their stories; his memoir incorporated some of the defiance of Marlon Brando’s outlaws, the self-discovery of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” and the stoicism of Ernest Hemingway’s dying hero in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” (“You know he is a fictional character?” Mr. Salter said he once asked Mr. McCain, who replied, “I know, but he was influential!”)
Mr. Salter, taking a little literary license, assembled from Mr. McCain’s recollections a neat narrative that he had never before articulated. It became a best seller, a television movie and the first of five successful McCain-Salter volumes. And on the eve of Mr. McCain’s 2000 Republican primary run, its story line reshaped his political identity. In interviews and speeches, Mr. McCain has increasingly described his life in the book’s language and themes, and never more so than during his current campaign, which has turned back to the story of “Faith of My Fathers” for everything from its first television commercial to his speech at the Republican convention.
Politics was imitating art, said Stephen Wayne, a political scientist at Georgetown who has studied Mr. McCain’s career and memoir. “It is almost as if McCain had described himself as a literary character,” Professor Wayne said, “and then he tried to be that person in real life.”
Some friends say it is only natural that Mr. McCain would begin to sound like his autobiography. “If I have some thoughts in my mind and I take the time to write them down,” said Orson Swindle, a close friend from prison camp, “I find that I will be inclined to say them exactly that way over and over, too.”
Still, other friends say they marvel at how heavily the McCain campaign relies on the chastened-hero image created by “Faith of My Fathers,” for example, citing his prison experience to deflect questions on array of unwelcome questions about his campaign tactics, his personal wealth and his health insurance, among other matters.
Robert Timberg, a marine wounded in Vietnam who became Mr. McCain’s biographer and admired his memoir, said the John McCain he knew 15 years ago would never have suggested that he was more patriotic than a rival the way the senator has in attacking his Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama.
“Political campaigns have a way of distorting reality and turning political candidates into caricatures of themselves,” Mr. Timberg said, adding, “In some ways that has happened to him, and in some ways he may have contributed to that.”
Mr. Salter called that assertion “deeply offensive.”
“People who say that kind of thing — I know a lot of reporters who have said it — don’t have the faintest concept or grasp of what motivates John McCain and his personal conception of honor,” Mr. Salter said. “He earned the right to tell that story.”
Reluctant Memoirist
Mr. McCain’s career as an author began not long after the 1995 publication of Mr. Timberg’s book, “The Nightingale’s Song,” which explored the legacy of Vietnam through the lives of the senator and four other graduates of the Naval Academy. It drew critical praise but moderate sales. Mr. Timberg’s literary agent, Philippa Brophy, saw a whole book in Mr. McCain alone.
When she visited his office, however, Mr. McCain resisted. He had turned down plenty of other book offers, and he worried that the image of him as a prisoner could make him look weak, several advisers said. He preferred to rely on black humor in talking about the period — telling an anecdote about stealing a fellow prisoner’s wash rag, or falling out of a shower trying to catch a glimpse of a ponytailed Vietnamese laundress.
Until then, Mr. McCain had always campaigned as an uncomplicated go-getter, full of energy and ideas. A former Navy liaison to the Senate, he presented himself as a well-connected insider with “experience in Washington,” in the words of his first 1982 campaign commercial, who could get things done for Arizona, his newly adopted home. He brought up his five years in Hanoi mainly to rebut criticisms that he was a carpetbagger (prison had made him appreciate the Arizona sunset, he said in the advertisement, smiling behind the wheel of a sports car).
Mr. McCain told Ms. Brophy that the only book he wanted to write was a tribute to others, like John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” — just what every senator says, she recalled thinking to herself.
Whom might he profile? she said she asked, playing along. Mr. McCain started by naming his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals with storied careers.
“And you!” she interrupted. “That’s your book. You’re done.”
Conceiving of the project as a tribute to his family, Mr. McCain signed on, tapping Mr. Salter to help write it. Mr. Salter, now 53, had been writing speeches for Mr. McCain, 72, for nearly a decade. “Mark literally loves John McCain like a father,” Mr. Swindle said. “Like brothers,” Mr. McCain has said.
An admirer of William Trevor, the often-bleak Irish author — a taste Mr. McCain has picked up — Mr. Salter is known among colleagues for his gloomy view of human nature and the world. Mr. McCain has a similar streak. “It’s always darkest before it’s totally black,” he often says, a motto borrowed from the “Peanuts” character Charlie Brown that he jokingly misattributes to Mao.
The McCain-Salter collaboration imbued the memoir with its confessional, often foreboding tone, friends say. The combination “was like taking darkness and fatalism, then pulling down the shades and contemplating our dark fate,” said John Weaver, a friend and former adviser to Mr. McCain.
Mr. McCain grew up in a family full of aspiring writers, where “people talked about characters in books as though they were real people,” said Elizabeth Spencer, a novelist and a second cousin of Mr. McCain’s who spent much of World War II with him as a child at the family’s Mississippi plantation.
A beloved uncle, Bert Andrews, won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune in 1948. The senator’s grandfather, the first Adm. John S. McCain, had left behind a drawer full of unpublished fiction, including adventure stories under the pseudonym Casper Clubfoot. And the senator’s father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., loved to recite martial poems to his sons, especially “Ave Imperatrix,” Oscar Wilde’s eulogy for the waning British Empire.
As a student, Mr. McCain was always more enthusiastic about reading and writing than science or math. At the Naval Academy and then in flight school, he almost flunked out because of his indifference to technical subjects like fluid dynamics, Mr. Swindle said. “He would rather be reading ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.’ ”
Influential Heroes
Sitting down with Mr. Salter for more than 50 hours of recorded interviews that furnished the memoir’s raw material — many episodes were set in print almost as Mr. McCain described them, Mr. Salter said — the senator often brought up the stories and characters that influenced him and they in turn infused the book. “When he tells his story,” Mr. Salter said, “they come through.”
The John McCain of “Faith of My Fathers,” for example, bears more than a little resemblance to the fictional Robert Jordan of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the Hemingway hero Mr. McCain later celebrated in another book with Mr. Salter, “Worth the Fighting For,” which was named for a line of Jordan’s dying thoughts. He was “a man who would risk his life but never his honor,” Mr. McCain wrote with Mr. Salter, a model of “how a great man should style himself.”
Each book is heavy with premonitions of mortality. Robert Jordan and John McCain each confront great tests (the temptation to escape a doomed mission for one, the offer of early prison release for the other) in the service of a lost cause (the socialists in the Spanish Civil War, the Americans in Vietnam). And in accepting his fate, each makes peace with his father and grandfather.
Mr. McCain’s admirers, like Mr. Timberg, have often puzzled over what drew him to Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” It is a convoluted psychodrama about a young man with a club foot; he seethes with resentment over his disability and nearly ruins his life in the thrall of a waitress-turned-prostitute who rejects him. But the character’s final realization could fit almost as well near the conclusion of Mr. McCain’s memoir: “It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
“That explains it,” Mr. Salter said when he heard the line. “Perfect McCainism.”
The appeal of the young Marlon Brando, whose career was at its height during the senator’s adolescence in the 1950s, is easier to see. Both he and Mr. McCain were short (about 5-foot-9) tough guys with volatile tempers and surprisingly soft voices. (Friends say Mr. McCain likes to imitate Brando erupting in rage: “You scum-sucking pig!”)
Brando would have been well cast as the young John McCain of “Faith of My Fathers” — a thin-skinned troublemaker with an authority problem and a righteous streak.
Mr. McCain has often described the Brando film “Viva Zapata!” as the “greatest movie of all time.” It is the tale of a mercurial Mexican revolutionary who forms a new government, then fights against it. “I loved so much the idea of one man on a white horse, fighting for justice,” Mr. McCain wrote. “That was the essential truth of his life: he was a man who fought.”
Like “Faith of My Fathers,” Mr. McCain’s other Brando favorite, the Western “One-Eyed Jacks,” is a father-son story of sorts. Brando played an outlaw known as Kid who kills a former accomplice-turned-sheriff named Dad and runs off with his stepdaughter.
To Mr. Salter, Mr. McCain opened up about his feelings for his father — discomfort at his binge drinking, resentment of the presumption that the son would follow his father to the Naval Academy, and the unexpected emotions he experienced in midlife when his fame had at last exceeded his father’s.
“It is a wonderful narrative, spiced with psychological insights,” said Stanley Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York who has written about Mr. McCain and his book. “Almost like McCain’s version of psychoanalysis.”
Political Theme
But Mr. McCain was still reticent about his experience in Hanoi. “He kind of shorted me on the prison stuff,” Mr. Salter said.
To fill in the details, Mr. Salter consulted the McCain family, Navy archives and fellow former P.O.W.’s. “I would say 50 to 60 percent of it was from McCain,” Mr. Salter said.
Mr. Salter said he found a summary of what became the arc of the story in a quote tucked deep inside Mr. Timberg’s book, from a Senate aide and Korean War veteran who admired Mr. McCain. “I knew 200 John McCains,” said the aide, William Bader. “They’re vaguely paunchy, overgrown boys. If John McCain had not had this Vietnamese experience, of prison, of solitude, of brutality, he would have just been one more Navy jock.”
Retelling his captivity as a coming-of-age tale was partly a literary device, Mr. Salter acknowledged. By the time Mr. McCain, a Navy pilot, was shot down at age 31, he had already outgrown his extended adolescence, married and become a father, and gotten serious about his Navy career, he told Mr. Salter.
Still, Mr. McCain also said more vaguely that he had matured in prison, that he had learned to see that life was about more than his career and his reputation, Mr. Salter said. As Mr. McCain had put it in his first television commercial, “I have certainly become a better and enriched person for having had that experience, in a myriad of ways.”
In the memoir, Mr. Salter helped sharpen that point into what became the new refrain of his boss’s political ascent. Mr. McCain had thought “all glory was self-glory,” but prison taught him “there are greater pursuits than self-seeking,” Mr. Salter wrote for the senator. “Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles.”
In the Navy archives, Mr. Salter found an oral history in which the senator’s father recounted his last meeting with his own father, on an American ship in Tokyo Bay at the end of World War II.
“Son,” the first Admiral McCain had told the second, “there is no greater thing than to die for the principles — for the country and the principles that you believe in.”
Senator McCain might have heard the sentiment, but he had never seen the quotation. “He was pretty fascinated,” Mr. Salter said.
To tie together the three generations of Mr. McCain’s family memoir, Mr. Salter put the grandfather’s words into the mind of the young John McCain as he was returning home from Vietnam on the last page of “Faith of My Fathers”: “Down through the years, I had remembered a dying man’s legacy to his son,” Mr. Salter wrote in Mr. McCain’s voice, “and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.”
Critics praised the book as a much more gripping tale than the usual Washington fare. Some who knew the senator and Mr. Salter, though, rolled their eyes at the heavy emotion and tidy moral. “I thought, ‘Oh guys, come on!’ ” recalled Victoria Clarke, Mr. McCain’s friend and former press secretary. “In his early years,” Ms. Clarke said, “he tried so hard to make sure people didn’t see him as a P.O.W.”
But when 1,200 people crammed into a church near Kansas City for a book signing on a September night in 1999, Mr. McCain’s campaign managers realized they had found a potent new tool. They quickly expanded a two-week book tour into a major part of Mr. McCain’s 2000 Republican primary campaign. “Faith of My Fathers” sold more than 500,000 copies, easily exceeding the $500,000 advance. (Mr. McCain gave half the proceeds from his books to Mr. Salter, with the other half going to charity.)
When it came time to write Mr. McCain’s speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination this summer, Mr. Salter said, it was only natural to return to “Faith of My Fathers.” “To remind people who he is,” Mr. Salter said. “ ‘Here is who I am, here is why you can believe me.’ ”
Mr. McCain owes much to the book, said Mr. Weaver, who guided the senator’s 2000 campaign. “It made his persona much grander, much more cause-oriented,” Mr. Weaver recalled. “The book played a major role in creating the brand that has served McCain so well.”
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