Chapter One
ADMIRAL McCAIN
On September 5, 1945, during a peaceful and beautiful evening in the San Diego area, Vice Admiral John Sidney McCain settled into his home in Coronado, California. His wiry frame had become dangerously slim-he weighed just over 100 pounds-and his face was weather-beaten from his years at sea. McCain, nicknamed "Slew" by his fellow officers and "Popeye" by the sailors he commanded, was exhausted. Dragged down by a cold, he may have also suffered an undetected heart attack within the previous few months. The summer, which had finally brought the end of World War II, had been especially hard on him. He had commanded the Second Carrier Task Force, Pacific Fleet, since August 1944. In the final year of the war, operating in conjunction with the Third Fleet under the command of Admiral William F. Halsey, McCain's Task Force 38 "spearheaded the drive in the Philippines," to quote from his official naval biography, "supported the capture of Okinawa, and rode rampant through the Western Pacific from the Indo-China Coast to the Japanese home island. The force knew only one word-'Attack!'"
Task Force 38's motto certainly fit its commander. Slew McCain was gruff, hard-edged, quick-tempered, frequently profane, sometimes suspicious, always hardworking, and prone to sullenness. He also liked to slam down bourbon, play the horses, shoot craps, and roll his own Bull Durham cigarettes. He was unwaveringly patriotic, stubbornly ambitious, and brilliant. Most important, he was a leader. In the last six months of the war in the Pacific, McCain's Task Force 38 was cited for damaging or destroying 6,000 Japanese airplanes and either sinking or damaging an estimated 2,000,000 tons of Japanese warships. The task force's airplanes once sank 49 Japanese ships in a single day. Between July 10 and August 14, 1945, McCain's planes destroyed some 3,000 grounded Japanese planes. All in all, McCain's accomplishments were nothing short of phenomenal.
Indeed, Slew McCain, with his trademark ill-fitting sailor cap (hence the Popeye reference), had established a reputation that would become nearly mythic in naval lore. The legend centered around one fact: McCain was a fighter. He refused to back off-ever. Regarding the Japanese, he once proposed "killing them all-painfully." Even after the Allied forces had won the war, McCain was ready to keep going. At the signing of the peace accords on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945-a ceremony that Halsey insisted McCain had to attend, even though he was sick and anxious to go home-McCain glared at the deck, unable to bring himself even to look at his just-defeated enemy. "The Jap warlords are not half licked yet," he said after the ceremony, a comment that made headlines. "They're going to take a lot more killing in the future. I don't like the look in their eyes."
That same day, he also made his point with authentic "McCain" humor. "He went from group to group [on the Missouri]," one newspaper reported, "greeting old acquaintances, and announced he was at work on the concoction of three new drinks, the 'Judy,' the 'Grill,' and the 'Zeke,' each named after a Japanese plane. 'Each time you drink one you can say, "Splash one Judy" or "Splash one Zeke,"' he explained." His colorful commentary on the enemy was not new. During an earlier radio appearance, the interviewer asked him what should be done about a particular Japanese island that had not yet been attacked by the Allied forces. "Oh, let the little"-McCain mumbled what was surely an expletive-"stay there," he quipped. "They're the type that eat themselves."
The last year of the war had not been without tragedy for McCain. Besides fighting a formidable enemy in the Japanese, McCain and Halsey had to contend with the horrendous forces of nature and their profound effects on both admirals' careers. On December 17, 1944, Halsey and McCain's fleet of ships was hit by a typhoon. In the lead ship, Halsey-tired, and focused on fighting the Japanese, not the weather-had failed to anticipate the approaching storm. He was also given insufficient warning about meteorological conditions by the central command in Pearl Harbor. The result was catastrophic. The overwhelming waves capsized and sank three destroyers-the Hull, the Spence, and the Monahan-and damaged six other ships, killing 778 men in all. As more and more equipment-guns, radar facilities, and the like-had been added to the ships during the war, they had become top-heavy and were at risk in a powerful storm. In addition, 146 airplanes were destroyed when they were swept overboard.
Later in December, at a board of inquiry held in Hawaii, Halsey defended his decisions. Admiral Chester Nimitz, one of the navy's power brokers, personally lobbied Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to keep him from relieving Halsey of his command. It is believed that it took no less than Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King to prevent the board of inquiry from trying to make McCain the fall guy. With the war in the Pacific going so well, it made no sense, it was argued, to remove either Halsey or McCain from their commands. They were, after all, two main reasons for the navy's success.
Recommendations Halsey made as a result of the disaster were obvious enough. The navy, he said, should take steps to improve its weather-tracking methods; it should also beef up its communications links to Pearl Harbor. The navy failed to act on either recommendation. Six months later, on June 2, 1945, when Halsey and McCain again found themselves in severe weather conditions, they were unprepared for the second typhoon that hit their fleet. The storm damaged 33 ships, destroyed 76 airplanes, and killed six men. More questions were asked but the navy still took no action against Halsey or McCain. However, it was decided that McCain should come in from the sea and take a job in Washington-specifically, he was to become an assistant to General Omar Bradley in the Bureau of Veterans' Affairs-but the war ended before his orders were activated. McCain witnessed the historic surrender ceremony on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Then he began a well-deserved leave at his home in California.
He was born on August 9, 1884-not quite two full decades after the end of the Civil War-in Teoc, Mississippi, a tiny town in rural Carroll County. The son of John Sidney and Elizabeth-Ann Young McCain, he grew up on a plantation. The McCains of this era even owned slaves, as reporters would later reveal. McCain attended high school in Carrollton, then matriculated at the University of Mississippi. After his freshman year, he entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on September 25, 1902. When he graduated on February 12, 1906, The Lucky Bag, the academy's yearbook, listed his nicknames as "Mac," "Lentz," "Lintsey," and "Bucket Shop." His quotation of choice came from John Milton: "That power which erring men call chance." The yearbook described McCain this way: "The skeleton in the family closet of 1906. A living example of the beneficial course of physical training in the N.A. having gained 1 3/8 ounces since he entered. A man of exemplary habits which make him very popular, his 'den' having been a favorite resort for 'all hands' ever since the days of plebe rough-houses. Laughs with an open-face movement that reminds one of the Luray Cane. Furnishes all kinds of innocent amusement for the children. A Mississippi watermelon who would make a good floor manager at a hop. Out for the class banner."
Social, fun-loving, and often mischievous, he was as big of spirit as he was slight of build. In 1909, Ensign McCain served on the battleship Pennsylvania and the cruiser Washington. On August 9 of that year, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he married Katherine Daisy Vaulx, a beautiful and personable woman from Arkansas and a daughter of an Episcopalian minister. The couple had three children-Catherine Vaulx McCain, James Gordon McCain, and John Sidney McCain Jr., who was born on January 17, 1911, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Slew McCain's son-nicknamed "Junior" and "Mac" but most often called "Jack"-was born in Council Bluffs because his father, during an extended tour of duty on the San Diego, was sailing around the southern tip of South America, and Katherine had traveled to Iowa to stay with a sister who had moved there.
In 1918, the year World War I ended, McCain was still stationed on the San Diego, which was performing escort duty in the Atlantic Ocean. Between 1918 and 1927, he served in various capacities on a number of other ships-among them, the Maryland and the New Mexico. He traveled constantly, often to far destinations, but when he was stateside, he usually worked in Washington at the Department of the Navy. His family, for the most part, was raised in Washington, not far from the Capitol. "My mother was the real parental control," Jack McCain would say later, "because my father was gone part of the time that I was growing up. When my father was home ... he was there a big part of the time, too, but most of his time was spent down at the navy department."
Describing the pride he felt about his father, Jack was unequivocal. "My father," he would say, "was a great leader, first, and people loved him, and he knew how to lead. He also knew when the time came to be a strict disciplinarian, versus the time to be a more easygoing commanding officer. And he had an intense and keen sense of humor. My mother used to say about him that the blood of life flowed through his veins, he was so keenly interested in people.... [H]e was also, amongst other things, extraordinarily well read. Now, by that I mean as a boy he had read such things as Shakespeare and all the rest of these things that they try-or did at the time, anyway-to encourage young people to engage in. So this gave him an outstanding command of the English language, which will stand you in good stead, I can assure you, as time moves on. I don't have to tell you about the fact that he was a man of great moral and physical courage. The fact that he had the first carrier task force under Halsey bears witness to that."
In September 1927, as his father had before him, Jack McCain entered the Naval Academy, which was his goal "from the time that I was old enough to begin to realize there was such [a place]." He had attended, first, Central High School in Washington and, finally, Columbia Preparatory School, which featured a nine-month program that got boys ready for either West Point or Annapolis. Before he entered the academy, he spent two weeks with his father, who was the executive officer on the New Mexico, which was in the Bremerton Navy Yard for overhaul, as a "final and farewell gesture before I went into the Naval Academy." When he got to his father's alma mater, Jack, having just turned sixteen, discovered he was among the youngest students in his class-and one of the few to enter with a presidential appointment. "I went in there at the age of sixteen, and I weighed one hundred and five pounds," he would say, referring to another trait he shared with his father-a decidedly puny build. "I could hardly carry a Springfield rifle, which they used to drill us with extensively, and also particularly when it came time for cutter drill. Getting out there and holding an oar was another unique experience in my life. But the whole training system at the Naval Academy was good." Perhaps because he was so much smaller and physically weaker than his classmates, Jack seemed to go out of his way to break academy rules. He routinely got into scuffles and amassed a daunting number of demerits.
When he graduated on May 1, 1931, his yearbook citation avoided the behavior issue: "Mac was born with one weakness which he strives in vain to conquer: his liking for the fair sex. After each leave period he resorts to reading the philosophy of the ancients in order to calm his fluttering heart and always emerges after a short period of time with his old equilibrium.... 'An officer and a gentleman' is the title to which he pays absolute allegiance. Sooner could Gibraltar be loosed from its base than could Mac be loosed from the principles which he has adopted to govern his actions.... Beneath his external shell of fun and good fellowship is a big heart which has easily enveloped his classmates."
Upon graduation, Jack sought advice from his father, who told him simply, "The only thing I say to you is to make a good job of it"-whatever he chose to do. Jack decided to pursue a naval career that focused on submarines. Beginning in June 1931, as his first post-academy assignment, Jack served on the Oklahoma. At its home port-Long Beach, California-he met Roberta Wright, a daughter of Archibald Wright, a rich and strong-willed oil wildcatter. Originally from Mississippi, Wright had retired from his business in Oklahoma and Texas and moved his family to Los Angeles for a better life.
Roberta and her twin sister Rowena, born on February 7, 1912, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, were their father's darlings. Each summer, the family escaped the heat in Oklahoma by coming to the West Coast. Los Angeles became their permanent home in 1924, the year Archie had retired so he could spend all of his time with his daughters. Roberta's mother, Myrtle, was horrified that one of her daughters would take up with a sailor, so when Jack and Roberta decided to marry, over the objections of Roberta's parents, the couple eloped to Tijuana, Mexico. They were married on January 21, 1933, at Caesar's Bar. "Not exactly in the bar," Roberta would later say. "It was really sort of upstairs." Naturally, as Rowena would put it, their mother "had a cat fit." But there was little she could do. Jack and Roberta went about their lives-they survived the Long Beach earthquake that occurred not long after their return from Mexico-and Jack tried to find humor in their lives whenever he could. "Asked once how he could tell his beautiful wife from her identical twin," the Washington Post would one day write, "[Jack McCain] replied ...: 'That's their problem.'"
In July 1933, Jack reported to the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut, to follow his interests and study submarines. At about the same time, Rowena married John Luther Maddox-who later founded an airline that eventually became part of TWA-and settled down in Los Angeles. In December, Jack graduated and took up his first of numerous submarine assignments.
In June 1935, Slew McCain, now age 51, decided to return to school and reported to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, to study flight training and aviation. On August 19, 1936, having been designated a naval aviator, Slew was appointed Commander of Aircraft Squadrons and Attending Craft at the Coco Solo Air Base in the Panama Canal Zone.
Continues...
Excerpted from Man of the People by Paul Alexander Excerpted by permission.
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