By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.comÂ
INDIANAPOLIS – It was easy to disagree with the late John McCain, but even easier to admire him.
The longtime U.S. senator from Arizona and 2008 Republican nominee for president died Saturday after a hard battle with brain cancer. He was 81.
The temptation in death is to romanticize the departed. It is even stronger in cases such as McCain’s because he led such a crowded life and jousted in so many areas that matter. He was a legitimate war hero, a man of surpassing courage and a statesman capable of extraordinary grace.
But it does the man a disservice to strip him of his flaws and frailties, in part because it was his very humanity that made him so appealing.
He could make epic misjudgments.
His involvement as one of the so-called Keating Five in a financial regulatory scandal in the late 1980s very nearly ended his political career. He referred to that episode as his “asterisk,†the moment that forever would cloud an otherwise honorable career of public service.
His bellicosity also pushed him to continue urging escalation in the Iraq war long after the evidence made clear that our involvement there had been a tragic and regrettable blunder.
And he chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, an impulsive decision that undercut the seriousness of purpose he otherwise consistently demonstrated.
But the Palin pick also was a product of another McCain quality that will be missed and mourned, a generosity of spirit too often lacking in our public life. He chose an untested and untried governor from Alaska because he believed leaders and patriots could spring from any corner of the country.
That is the McCain trait too often overlooked.
Particularly now, in these hours and days following his passing, the tendency is to focus on his remarkable courage, the amazing tenacity and poise he showed during long years of captivity and torture. We know the physical wounds he bore from that ordeal. What we cannot grasp – what perhaps even those closest to him do not fully know – is the psychic cost imposed by that suffering, what demons and ghosts from those years of horror lurked in his mind and his heart during his most private and vulnerable moments.
If he was haunted, he faced his fear without seeming to flinch.
Courageous as he was, though, it was his tremendous capacity for friendship that made him such an endearing figure.
He was a man who fought hard but forgave easily.
A lesser man could have remained embittered by the nasty (and racist) attack George W. Bush’s attack dog Karl Rove unleashed on him in the 2000 Republican South Carolina presidential primary. The attacks were both vicious and underhanded, and they cost McCain his shot at the nomination that year, a year in which he very well could have won the general election.
But McCain put that aside.
He became one of Bush’s staunchest allies once W. ascended to the White House. The two men became more than allies. They became friends.
One of McCain’s deathbed wishes was that George W. Bush deliver one of the two eulogies at his memorial service.
The other man who defeated McCain for the presidency, Barack Obama, will deliver the second eulogy.
One of McCain’s finest moments came during that 2008 presidential campaign. At a rally, an angry woman stood before McCain. She attacked Obama as a Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer and a threat to both decency and this country.
McCain cut her off.
He said he had serious political differences with Barack Obama, but that Obama was a good man and a good American. McCain added that it gains us nothing as a country to demean each other as citizens or to turn differences of opinion into lasting sources of animosity and division.
Amen.
That is what makes John McCain’s passing so sad.
We have lost not just a flawed but fine man, but also a symbol of the courageous kindness that long has animated and represented what is best in the American character.
He was a warrior who fought to win, not to destroy. He fought out of duty, not hatred.
That generous spirit of his will be mourned.
And missed.
May the man – the American – who bore that spirit rest in peace.
Footnote: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits†WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
