Faith of My Fathers (13 page)

To a man, my father's officers shouted their preference for a fight.

When they surfaced, they sighted the destroyers at a considerable distance and steaming away from the
Gunnel.
They gave no indication that they spotted the sub. My father reversed course and hurried away. The batteries for two of his diesel engines were recharged, and fresh air filled the ship.

Ten days after my father's submarine eluded the destroyers, it reached Midway. I suspect the men of the USS
Gunnel
were never so happy to see that desolate, uninteresting island.

My father received the Silver Star for this action. The citation praised his “conspicuous gallantry,…bravery under fire and aggressive fighting spirit.”

After five combat patrols aboard the
Gunnel,
my father, now Commander McCain, took command of the USS
Dentuda,
which completed one patrol in the South China Sea before the war's end. During its only patrol, the
Dentuda
fought a gun battle with two Japanese patrol craft and an inconclusive submerged battle with a Japanese submarine.

It was as commander of the
Dentuda
that my father entered Tokyo Bay, exhausted from the strain of command in one of the more terrifying forms of combat, to enjoy his last reunion with the father whose example had led him to this life.

         
CHAPTER
8
         

Four Stars

In 1965, my father reported for duty in New York, to serve as vice chairman of the delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee and as Commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier and the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.

He had distinguished himself in other commands since the Second World War and had enjoyed a notably successful career. He had commanded two submarine divisions. During the Korean War, as a captain, he served as second in command on the destroyer USS
St. Paul.
He was well regarded by influential leaders in Washington and had been given several important commands, the last being command of the Atlantic Fleet's Amphibious Force, when he directed the American invasion of the Dominican Republic.

In 1965, violent clashes between warring factions, one of which was believed to be a Communist front, had brought the Dominican Republic to the verge of civil war. President Johnson ordered my father to command the amphibious assault of Operation Steel Pike 1, the invasion and military occupation of the Caribbean nation. The operation was controversial. Critics judged it, with good reason, to be an unlawful intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation. My father, typically, was undeterred by domestic opposition. “Some people condemned this as an unwarranted intervention,” he observed, “but the Communists were all set to move in and take over. People may not love you for being strong when you have to be, but they respect you for it and learn to behave themselves when you are.”

The operation was a success, and, at the time, it constituted the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken in peacetime. After its completion, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for attracting “worldwide attention to the highly mobile and devastating might” of the Navy and Marine Corps.

His subsequent assignment at the United Nations, however, was regarded by the Navy as a dead end and was expected to be his last. He was a three-star admiral, and the prospects for a fourth star were remote. But two years later he was ordered to London to assume command of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. A fourth star came with the job. He relieved the renowned Admiral John Thach, my grandfather's old operations officer and friend.

Within a year, he was given command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the largest operational military command in the world. The dominion of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC) is geographically immense, encompassing 85 million square miles, extending from the Aleutian Islands to the South Pole and from the west coast of North and South America to the Indian Ocean.

CINCPAC, Admiral Nimitz's wartime command, remains the U.S. Navy's second most prestigious office. Only the office of Chief of Naval Operations is a greater privilege, and, if truth be told, a good many officers would prefer running the Pacific Command to running the entire Navy. My father had achieved prominence in his beloved Navy that surpassed his father's storied career. The
Washington Post
reported his triumph under the headline
NAVY CHEERS APPOINTMENT OF MCCAIN.

Shortly after his new assignment was made public, my father received a letter from a retired sailor who had known my grandfather during the war. He wrote of how highly regarded my grandfather had been by the enlisted men under his command.

Dear Admiral,

Maybe I shouldn't be sending this to you, but I had to when I saw your name in this morning's paper.
Commander of United States Forces in the Pacific
. I am an ex–carrier man, 1943–1946. Was Admiral John S. McCain your dad? I was a plank owner on the
Wasp,
and Admiral McCain was at our commissioning…. We had admirals on board before and after but Admiral McCain was liked by all the ship's company. It was a privilege to have served under him. They all speak of Admirals Halsey, Nimitz, Sprague, Spruance, Mitscher, and Bogan. But Admiral John S. McCain was tops with us. Every night about 8
P.M.
he would walk around the flight deck with that salty-looking admiral's cap of his in his hands. He would stop and talk to us on our gun mount. Maybe you won't have time to read this. I don't send letters at all but when I heard of you and your command I just had to.

I imagine the old sailor's note, rejoicing in the professional triumph of the son of a Navy legend, must have moved my father very much. Though I was not privileged to witness his change-of-command ceremony, I have always believed that for that one moment, my father, so hard driven by his often oppressive desire to honor his father's name, looked on his career with tranquillity and satisfaction. He must have felt the old man's pride as he took his first salute as commander of the greatest military force in the world, with dominion over the waters where the answer “I've sent McCain” had once relieved an anxious predecessor.

Over a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen now answered to my father's orders. As CINCPAC, my father had command over the war in Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams, then commanding U.S. forces in Vietnam, was his subordinate; as was I, a lieutenant commander, held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

II

I heard the old, old men say,
‘All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'

—William Butler Yeats,

“The Old Men Admiring

Themselves in Water”

         
CHAPTER
9
         

Worst Rat

I was not quite two years old when my parents felt it necessary to instill in me a little self-restraint and my instruction in some of the colder realities of life began in earnest. During an otherwise tranquil early childhood, I had quite unexpectedly developed an outsized temper that I expressed in an unusual way. At the smallest provocation, I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious. Alarmed at this odd behavior and worried that I was suffering from a strange and possibly serious illness, my parents consulted a Navy physician for an explanation. The doctor assured them that the malady was not serious. It was self-induced. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.

The doctor prescribed a treatment that seems a little severe by modern standards of child care. He instructed my parents to fill a bathtub with cold water whenever I commenced a tantrum, and when I appeared to be holding my breath to drop me, fully clothed, into it.

I do not recall at all these traumatic early encounters with the harsh consequences of my misbehavior, buried, as they must be, deep in my subconscious. But my mother assures me that they occurred, and went on for some time until I was finally “cured.” Whenever I worked myself into a tiny rage, my mother shouted to my father, “Get the water!” Moments later I would find myself thrashing, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, in a tub of icy-cold water. Eventually, I achieved a satisfactory (if only temporary) control over my emotions. And as a side benefit, the treatment apparently instilled in me an early reverence for the principle of equal justice under the law. After my first few experiences with the dreaded immersion therapy, I would shout, “Get the water! Get the water!” whenever my older sister, Sandy, momentarily lost control of her temper.

My mother often despaired over the quality of our education. When asked today how her children were educated she is apt to respond that we were “raised to be completely ignorant.”

The frequent relocations imposed on Navy families were the chief obstacle to a decent education. As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order. I was often required in a new school to study things I had already learned. Other times, the curriculum assumed knowledge I had not yet acquired.

Many of the base schools I attended were substandard institutions. Sometimes the school building was nothing more than a converted aircraft hangar. The classes mixed children of varying ages. We might have one teacher on Monday and a different one on Tuesday. On other days, we lacked the services of any teacher at all. My first purpose during my brief stay in these schools was to impress upon my classmates that I was not a person to suffer slights lightly. My second purpose was to prove myself as an athlete. When I was disciplined by my teachers, which happened regularly, it was often for fighting.

My parents worried a great deal about our irregular schooling. Once, when we were transferred to Long Beach, California, my father resolved to improve upon the educational circumstances to which we had grown accustomed. He drove to the rectory of a Catholic parish and pleaded with the monsignor to allow us to attend the parish school. He even offered to convert to Catholicism if that was necessary. The good monsignor admitted us without obliging my parents to abandon their church.

My mother's complaint not withstanding, I enjoyed my early education. I enjoyed it for the very quality that caused my parents to despair—its informality. Until I was sent at fifteen to a boarding school, I relied on the members of my family to be my principal instructors. My mother assumed most of this responsibility, and she proved to be an imaginative and amusing educator.

Like wealthy parents who “finish” their children's education with a tour of the European continent, my mother saw our frequent cross-country trips to join my father as an opportunity to supplement our irregular schooling. She was forever routing our journeys through locations that offered a site of historical significance or a notable institute of the arts or sciences.

When we passed through cities we searched for whatever the locals considered their most prominent attraction—art galleries, museums, churches, buildings designed by celebrated architects, natural phenomena, and the homes of historical figures. I recall being greatly impressed with Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the high bluffs and Civil War history of Natchez, Mississippi, and the venerated shrines of American heroes, especially Washington's Mount Vernon and Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. They were all memorable events in my childhood, and I recall them today with gratitude.

We once spent a night in El Paso, Texas, so that my mother could take us across the border to Juárez, Mexico, the next day. She wanted us to see a cathedral that her father had taken her to see when she was a young girl; he had regaled her with stories of its difficult construction, how its enormous wooden beams had to be floated down the Colorado River. We arrived in Juárez to find the city much changed from my mother's recollection of it. She could not locate the cathedral, which she said had dominated the town when she saw it last. We became lost, and when we found ourselves in a rough neighborhood where the men were all dressed in zoot suits, she sensibly called off the search and beat a hasty retreat for the border.

My mother went about these tours with her usual direct, enthusiastic approach to life and her extraordinary self-confidence. The difficulties we encountered en route seldom proved superior to her problem-solving skills. And when her children posed a problem to her progress, we too proved inferior to her resolve.

I earned my reputation as a “hell-raiser”—my mother's term—in high school and at the Naval Academy. But, appropriately, it was in my mother's mobile classroom that I gave the first indication that I was headed in a troubling direction. On an exhausting trip from Washington to Coronado, my mother had become exasperated with Sandy and me. We had been quarreling for hours on end. Reaching back from the front seat to throw a banana at me for making a smart-aleck reply to her most recent rebuke, she accidentally hit Sandy. When I laughed at her for missing her target, my mother grabbed the first object in reach, an empty aluminum thermos, and flung it at me, hitting me on the brow, knocking me temporarily mute, and denting the thermos.

Having now reached the end of her maternal patience, she resolved to hasten our arrival in Coronado. We diverted from our course so that we could stop in College Station, Texas. Upon arriving there, my mother located the dean of students at Texas A&M and appealed to him to help her find a student who was in need of transportation to California and would agree to travel with us and share the driving. We checked into a hotel that evening, and my mother wrote to my father to inform him that for the first time in my life I had been “a real pain in the neck.” Apparently she had forgotten by this time my brief period of defiance as a two-year-old, which had ended in complete surrender to parental authority. After the cold-water treatment had subdued my incipient rebelliousness, I possessed for the next ten years a rather meek disposition.

The next morning two students arrived to take my mother up on her offer. As the trip progressed, my mother charmed our new companions. One of them remarked how fortunate we were to have such an attractive and clever mother. The compliment was too much for me, as I was still angry over the previous day's swift and unexpected punishment. Holding up the damaged thermos and pointing to my head, I replied, “Oh yeah, you think she's so great. Look what she did to me.” My denunciation prompted gales of laughter from my mother. She laughed about it intermittently for most of the remainder of the trip, as did our new traveling companions. And she still laughs when reminded of the incident today.

I became my mother's son. What I lacked of her charm and grace I made up for by emulating and exaggerating other of her characteristics. She was loquacious, and I was boisterous. Her exuberance became rowdiness in me. She taught me to find so much pleasure in life that misfortune could not rob me of the joy of living. She has an irrepressible spirit that yields to no adversity, and that part of her spirit she shared with us was as fine a gift as any mother ever gave her children. My father, as she will admit if asked, always came first with her. She loved him deeply, and made his life whole, mending as best she could the breaches in his life, the times when doubt and insecurity would cloud his sense of his destiny. Even today, many years after his death, my mother still keeps a card on which, after his passing, she wrote down a list of the things my father had found pleasure in, from his favorite meal to his favorite music, as well as a list of the things he had disliked. But although there was never any doubt about the primacy my father enjoyed in my mother's affections, her heart has always been large enough to encompass her children with as much love and care as any mother's child has ever enjoyed.

When I was young, similarities between my mother and me were more apparent than were those between my father and me. My father and I probably seemed in many respects, at least superficial ones, very different people. My keen-eyed brother in his observations on our family's domestic life often remarked on our father's and my contrasting dispositions in those long-ago days. We were, he thought, mirror opposites. My father was taciturn, while I was noisy. My father was shy, while I “loved working a crowd.” My father “was often quiet at the dinner table, while the rest of us raised hell, argued, until Dad would intervene—always on my mother's behalf. John was either fiercely immersed in the squabble or the root cause of it.”

My father was a more learned man than his grades at the Naval Academy indicated. He taught physics at the Academy for two years and was regarded as an able instructor. He had many intellectual interests, but he especially loved history and English literature. An “outstanding command of the English language,” he often remarked, “will stand you in good stead as time moves on.” He was an avid reader of Toynbee and Spengler. He could recite great lengths of poetry from memory. He loved Edgar Allan Poe, Kipling, Dante, Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll. But his favorite poem was Oscar Wilde's ode to the British Empire, “Ave Imperatrix,” which he quoted from at length in his lectures on seapower:

The fleet-foot Marri scout, who comes

To tell how he hath heard afar

The measured roll of English drums

Beat at the gates of Kandahar.

He was a great admirer of the British Empire, crediting it with keeping “a relative measure of peace” in the world for “someplace in the neighborhood of two centuries.”

He read and reread the biographies of historical figures whose lives, he felt, would always be an inspiration to others. “I heard some man make a statement one time not so long ago,” he once recalled of a popular futurist, “that reading the lives of great men was somewhat a waste of time because this was past history. Well, this is stupid on the face of it, because one of the real factors of life is what you learn from reading about the lives of great men, because there are certain fundamentals of human relationships that never change.”