Understanding John McCain

John McCain, according to one of his most perceptive and persistent critics, has struggled throughout his career to balance his principles and his ambitions, to reconcile the code of honor instilled in him as a boy with the insistent demands of political expedience. His worst moments in public office, this critic has charged, have come when he has failed to put his country first — opposing a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. to bolster his conservative credibility in Arizona, concealing his abhorrence of the Confederate flag to troll for votes in South Carolina. And before you judge, you should know that the critic in question is John McCain, who has explored and deplored his own flaws in remarkable detail in his books and speeches and has apologized for them with candor that is rare in a politician. In 2000, after sidestepping the flag issue during his first presidential campaign, he returned to South Carolina to flay himself for pandering. "I don't seek absolution," he said. "I can only try to resist future temptations to abandon principle for expediency."

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If it be a sin, as Shakespeare wrote, to covet honor, then McCain might be the most sinful politician alive. His 50 years of nearly continuous service to his country — in the Navy, as a POW and in Congress — have been a tumultuous and often inspiring saga of a man and his code. McCain languished in prison in Hanoi for years rather than accept a release he considered dishonorable, and he has made his mark in Washington as a kind of honor politician, a crusader who has chosen his battles on the basis of morality rather than ideology. Fighting to limit the influence of money in politics or performance-enhancing drugs in sports, attacking Democrats who opposed the surge in Iraq or Republican lobbyists who exploited Indian tribes, McCain tends to approach his pet issues not as arid policy disputes about which reasonable people can disagree but as emotionally pitched battles between good and evil, affairs of honor vs. the ignominy of disgrace. If it hasn't won him a lot of popularity contests with his colleagues, it has burnished his national reputation for being his own man.

To John McCain, honor means telling the truth, doing the right thing rather than the easy thing and putting America's needs ahead of your needs. But as he has reminded us so many times, McCain is not a saint. And he is now the Republican nominee for President, the anointed leader of the party establishment he has antagonized so often. He has a real chance to extend his public service to the Oval Office and an abiding conviction that these perilous times require his leadership. But getting there in a year when so much is stacked against the GOP may require him to play by rules that don't always conform to the code of honor to which he subscribes.

Honor Bound
These days, there is a new McCain on the campaign trail. He has forsworn his freewheeling sessions of straight talk with the press, sticking religiously to GOP talking points, bottled up by a campaign that is highly disciplined, curiously hostile to reporters and quick to launch negative and often misleading attacks. During a brief, weird and remarkably uninformative interview, TIME asked him about the abrupt shift in strategy. The candidate who used to spend hours kibitzing with reporters refused to acknowledge that anything has changed. "I don't know what you're talking about," McCain said, staring blankly at a press aide, without even a wink.

Acknowledged or not, the change in strategy has worked: as McCain heads to his convention, he is virtually tied in the polls. The theme of McCain's coronation in St. Paul, Minn., will be putting "country first," but his aides are not about to apologize for putting victory a close second. They say they would have loved to run a classic McCain campaign, with a series of high-minded town-hall debates and the usual open access, but Barack Obama refused the debates, and the Obama-smitten media decided that the campaign is all about their new darling. "The race is as we found it," says Mark Salter, a close adviser and the co-author of McCain's five books. "We're not going to do anything dishonorable. But we are going to try to win."

The candidate is, more than anything else, a born fighter. John Sidney McCain III grew up in the considerable shadow of the first two John Sidney McCains, both four-star admirals who were small of stature but large of presence, both true believers in the military code of Duty, Honor, Country. "They were my first heroes, and their respect for me has been the most lasting ambition of my life," the Senator said at a 1994 ceremony to commission the destroyer U.S.S. John S. McCain in their honor. His grandfather, known as Slew, was a Navy legend, an innovative strategist and a relentless warrior who dropped dead four days after attending the 1945 Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri. McCain's father Jack was a highly decorated World War II submarine skipper who rose to command U.S. naval forces in the Pacific and ordered the bombing of Hanoi despite the danger to his prisoner-of-war son. Jack was a workaholic and an alcoholic, and he wasn't home much, but he tried to instill in John his greatest-generation values and strict sense of honor.

At first, the lessons seemed wasted. The young John McCain was a constant breaker of rules, a brawler and a slob, an undersize punk with an oversize chip on his shoulder. He reluctantly followed his forebears to the Naval Academy, but he continued to flout authority there, leading a band of late-night miscreants known as the Bad Bunch, accumulating so many demerits that he finished 894th out of 899 in his class. And in flight school, a culture more accepting of go-it-alone bad boys, his womanizing and partying were considered impressive even by the standards of naval aviators. But he had his limits; McCain always sensed how far he could bend a system without breaking it — or being broken.

On Oct. 26, 1967, McCain's opportunities for high jinks were severely limited when he was shot out of the sky, beaten by a Vietnamese mob, then transported to a prison camp for 5 1/2 years of hell. The fact of his captivity is common knowledge, but the pain he endured and the defiance with which he endured it are not so well understood. "The first time I saw him, I thought he'd be dead by morning," recalls his cellmate, retired Air Force Colonel George (Bud) Day. "He'd been beaten, bayoneted and starved. He weighed maybe 95 lb. He just willed himself to live."

In the Hanoi Hilton, McCain's family tradition of honor and his own instinct for rebellion meshed into an inspiring example for his fellow prisoners. He was the camp troublemaker, cursing out guards despite the constant threat of torture, defying rules barring communication to tell his comrades vulgar jokes. He refused several offers of freedom because the military code of conduct requires all prisoners to be freed in order of capture and he knew that an admiral's son accepting early release would be a propaganda victory for North Vietnam as well as a devastating blow to camp morale. The one time his captors brutalized McCain into a sham confession, he considered suicide. "He could not avoid the conclusion that he had dishonored his country, his family and himself," wrote his biographer Robert Timberg.