The imperfect hero

On a humid summer morning, the Straight Talk Express is rolling along, en route from a town-hall meeting in Albuquerque to a private airstrip where a newly refurbished plane, also dubbed the Straight Talk Express, awaits.

Sen. John McCain sits stiffly in the back of the bus on a plush velvet U-shaped banquette. Eight journalists surround him, a scene reminiscent of the days when McCain would open a vein and bleed quotes to any reporter, any time.

Instead, the 20-minute ride is devoted to a dry recitation of why Sen. Barack Obama was wrong about the troop buildup in Iraq. McCain, reading from notes, says nothing new. He is tense, serious and, as a reporter later relayed to his longtime chief of staff, unwaveringly on message (buildup good, Obama bad).

“Was he?” asked a delighted Mark Salter, who is also the coauthor of McCain’s five bestsellers. “Well, God bless him, ‘cause it’s taken a lot of work to get him there.”

McCain has always been hard to predict -- witness his surprising choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Over the course of his 72 years, he has been called (and has called himself) many things: charming bad boy, wise-ass, underachiever, warrior, coward, maverick, apostate, straight talker, liar, war hero.

The contradictions give rise to questions about the essential McCain. Is he an opportunist with a conscience, or a man with so singular a moral compass that sometimes only he knows where it points?

In fact, McCain lives by a series of honor codes, instilled in him by his father (an admiral) and his father’s father (also an admiral). To boil them down to their simplest formulation: One must never lie, cheat or steal. McCain would be the first to admit that he has failed, sometimes spectacularly, at all three. But he also has perfected the familiar American ritual of coming clean and moving on.

“He is the best apologizer in politics,” said Dan Schnur, who was McCain’s campaign spokesman in 2000 and now directs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

The codes inform McCain’s reformist zeal and often set up clashes between his independent thinking and Republican orthodoxy.

His championing of a bipartisan campaign finance reform bill -- which passed in 2002, setting limits on corporate political donations -- infuriated many Republicans, who accused him of undercutting the party’s interests and attacking free speech. But the guts of the reforms have withstood court challenges.

He opposed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, saying it was an issue more properly decided by the states. He has voted to expand stem cell research and to raise fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, has pushed for criminal background checks of gun show customers and -- with Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a conservative’s bogyman if ever there was one -- has supported a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

He has alienated colleagues in both parties by waging war on congressional perks -- big things like pork-barrel spending (Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere”) and smaller things like close-in parking at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport for federal officials and gifts and meals from lobbyists.

And he has changed positions, sometimes blatantly. He voted twice against the Bush tax cuts, questioning their morality, but now says they should be made permanent. He was against offshore oil drilling; now he’s for it.

“From a political point of view, he is really very courageous,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who can be found so often on the campaign trail with McCain that he jokes he’s being held hostage.

Brutalized in the 2000 presidential race by pro-Bush forces who spread rumors that the Vietnam War had made him mentally unstable (untrue), that he’d fathered an illegitimate black child (he and his wife adopted a Bangladeshi orphan) and that his wife was a drug addict (a dependence on pain killers after back surgery sent her to rehab), McCain struck back at the Republican base and conservative evangelicals -- whom he called “the forces of evil” and “agents of intolerance.”

He was so alienated from the GOP that he allowed Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry to court him as a possible running mate in 2004. He and Kerry had worked together in the mid-1990s to resolve questions about Americans who remained missing in action in Vietnam, paving the way for the United States and Vietnam to establish diplomatic relations.

“I was approached by a McCain operative at my house and told ‘John McCain’s interested in talking about it,’ ” Kerry said during a recent interview in his Senate office. “So we talked about it.” Nothing ever came of it.

That same year, he began what many believe was a calculated move back to the fold, in order to position himself for this year’s race. A photograph of McCain embracing the president at a Bush reelection rally in Florida is often used by former fans as Exhibit A that he has sold out.

“Look,” said Salter, sounding exasperated, “Bush hugged him. What should McCain have done -- taken out a gun and shot him?”

Temper, temper

What can you learn about a man from his nicknames?

To his high school friends, McCain was “Punk,” “Nasty” and “McNasty.” At the Naval Academy, they called him “John Wayne McCain.” Washington magazine once dubbed him “Senator Hothead.”

In McCain’s own telling, he has a bad attitude that has followed him from infancy into old age. Sometimes it is a thing to be proud of, sometimes a thing to regret.

“My temper?” he has joked. “I was just exploding about it this morning.”

In his memoir, McCain said his parents recalled him developing “an outsized temper” at age 2: He would hold his breath till he crashed to the floor unconscious.

At 12, during one of many cross-country moves with his mother; older sister, Sandy; and younger brother, Joe; his mother became so exasperated that she cracked him on the head with an aluminum thermos, denting the thermos. “From that time on,” Roberta McCain told McCain biographer Robert Timberg, “he was a pain in the neck.”

Small and always the new kid at school, he picked fights. “I foolishly believed that fighting, as well as challenging school authorities and ignoring school regulations, was indispensable to my self-esteem and helped me form new friendships,” he wrote.

Stories abound about McCain’s temper. As recently as last year, he dropped the F-bomb on Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn during a Senate debate on immigration reform.

McCain’s aides say his temper is really passion -- and something he directs only at peers, never subordinates.

Also, as Salter pointed out, McCain gets mad, but he gets over it: “I mean, come on,” said Salter. “He normalized relations with Vietnam!”

In 2000, the governor of Arizona, Jane Dee Hull, infuriated McCain when she endorsed George W. Bush over her home state senator. She garnered headlines for saying she was weary of McCain’s angry outbursts and spoke of having to hold the phone away from her ear when he was on the line.

But after she left office, Hull was appointed to the United Nations as a public delegate, a position that requires Senate approval. She called McCain to ask for his support.

“Jane,” she said he replied, “you know I always support Arizona people.”

Naval legacy

McCain family history is entwined with the great military struggles of the 20th century, an epoch John McCain once called “my century.”

Unlike so many American presidents who are deeply identified with a certain place, John Sidney McCain III, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone on Aug. 29, 1936, didn’t have a hometown until he was well into middle age.

He was born to an institution: the United States Navy.

His father and grandfather, war heroes, are the nation’s only father-and-son four-star admirals.

His father deposited him at the door of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. -- “a place I belonged at but dreaded,” he wrote -- in 1954, when he was 17. He was a lackluster student prone to demerits and bad grades.

“I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman,” he wrote. “In short, I acted like a jerk.”

His friends adored him.

“Living with John was just a great adventure,” said Jack Dittrick, a roommate. “Especially in the confines of the Naval Academy.”

McCain, known from Day One at Annapolis for his family name, chafed at the enforced hierarchies.

As a sophomore, he angrily confronted his captain, an unheard-of act of insubordination, after the officer tore apart McCain’s sloppily made bed. “We were amazed and feared for John’s safety, but nothing happened,” said Frank Gamboa, who also roomed with McCain. “The officer was clearly out of line.”

Once, when McCain and Gamboa were in the mess hall, they sat near a first classman who berated a Philippine steward.

“John said, ‘Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?’ ” said Gamboa. “The first classman said, ‘What did you say?’ John said, ‘You’re picking on that steward, and he’s doing the best he can.’ ”

The first classman stormed off in embarrassment and anger. “This established John’s reputation in our class, a midshipman of unusual moral courage,” said Gamboa. “Out of the norm, but not crazy.”

The crazy times would happen after graduation in 1958, when McCain became a pilot, traveled the world and, by his own account, lived the life of a profligate flyboy.

He fell in love with a wealthy Brazilian fashion model; dated a stripper called Marie, the “Flame of Florida”; drove a Corvette; crashed two planes; and accidentally knocked out power lines -- “my daredevil clowning,” he called it -- while flying too low in southern Spain.

McCain’s grandfather, whose nickname was “Slew,” crashed five planes before getting his wings at the unheard-of age of 52. He was a beak-nosed, foul-mouthed old salt whose devoted men sometimes called him “Popeye” behind his back.

McCain’s father, Jack, was a deeply ambitious sailor. Nicknamed “Good Goddamn McCain,” he was a binge alcoholic who tried fitfully toward the end of his life to control his drinking. “When he was drunk,” wrote McCain, “I did not recognize him.”

Jack married a charming woman who would be indispensable to his rise in the Navy. Roberta Wright was one of two beautiful identical twins, rich young women whose father had retired at 40 after making a killing as an oil wildcatter. Jack and Roberta eloped to Tijuana and were married in a room above Caesar’s, the restaurant where, some say, the famous salad originated.

The day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor is one of John McCain’s earliest memories. “A black car passing our house slowed down, and the driver, a naval officer, rolled down the window and shouted, ‘Jack, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!’ My father left for the base immediately. I saw very little of him for the next four years.” McCain was 5.

‘The Crown Prince’

Many politicians claim to be survivors. Few mean it literally.

In July 1967, McCain was in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk on the aircraft carrier Forrestal, preparing to take off on a bombing run over Vietnam, when a stray electrical charge ignited a missile on a nearby plane. The missile exploded into McCain’s fuel tank. Grainy footage in a McCain campaign video shows him sliding down the refueling probe on his plane’s nose, dropping into a lake of burning fuel. “Small pieces of hot shrapnel from the exploded bomb tore into my legs and chest,” he wrote. “Body parts, pieces of the ship and scraps of planes were dropping onto the deck.” In all, 134 men died.

He transferred to another carrier, the Oriskany. In August 1967, the squadron he joined had destroyed a power plant in Hanoi. Two months later, the plant had been rebuilt and was back in the Navy’s sights.

McCain begged for the mission. “The earlier raid was the pride of the squadron,” he wrote. “I wanted to help destroy it again. I was feeling pretty cocky as well.”

On Oct. 26, 1967, in the air over Hanoi, an alarm signaled that a surface-to-air missile had locked onto his plane. He should have tried to evade the missile but decided to release his bombs first. The missile took off the plane’s right wing; McCain ejected.

He landed, with a broken leg and two broken arms, in a lake in the middle of Hanoi. After he was pulled from the water, he was bayoneted in the ankle and groin.

The North Vietnamese soon realized they’d captured the son of a famous American admiral. They called McCain “the Crown Prince” and sent him off to a hospital. In 1968, Jack McCain was promoted to commander in chief of the Pacific Command and charged with prosecuting the Vietnam War. His son was in solitary confinement in Hoa Lo prison, the “Hanoi Hilton.” His father’s standing probably saved McCain’s life but also caused him inestimable physical pain.

Jack McCain suffered in his own way. Each year he oversaw the war, he spent Christmas with troops near the border between North and South Vietnam.

One holiday, according to a letter McCain received after his father died in 1981, a helicopter landed on an airstrip, and an officer stepped out, walked to the end of the strip and stood for a while, looking north.

“Who is that?” asked an observer.

“That’s Adm. McCain,” replied another. “He has a son up north, and this is as close as he can get to him.”

Life lessons

Of all the misfortunes that befell McCain in prison, two changed him profoundly. One taught him the virtue of selflessness; the other brought him to the brink of suicide and taught him humility.

The first occurred in July 1968, nine months after he was shot down. Weak with dysentery and hobbled by his injuries, he was offered the chance to go home. The American military code of conduct, however, required that POWs go home in order of capture. Many men had been imprisoned longer than McCain.

Early release for an admiral’s son not only would have an incalculably depressing effect on his fellow prisoners but would be a PR stunt for North Vietnam to show the world its humanity. McCain declined, infuriating his captors. “Now, McCain,” he recalled being told, “it will be very bad for you.”

And it was. But it was also, he often says, the best decision he ever made. Opting to stay taught him about personal sacrifice in the service of something larger than himself. He has made this idea the theme of his presidential campaign, of his life.

The psychic victory McCain had scored was soon replaced by a profound moral defeat. In late August 1968, guards came for him. For days, he was beaten and bound with ropes that forced his head between his knees.

“I couldn’t fight anymore,” he wrote, “and I remember deciding that the last thing I could do to make them believe I was still resisting . . . was to attempt suicide.” He tried twice to hang himself with his shirt.

On the fourth day, he broke. He signed and taped a confession that was broadcast to his fellow prisoners: “I am a black criminal, and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life. The doctors gave me an operation that I did not deserve.”

He was put in a cell and left alone for two weeks. He was nearly feverish with despair. “I kept imagining they would release my confession to embarrass my father,” he wrote in his memoir. “All my pride was lost. . . . No one would ever look upon me again with anything but pity or contempt.”

In a 1973 essay in U.S. News & World Report written shortly after his release, he depicted the event with more bravado: “The ‘gooks’ made a serious mistake, because they let me go back and rest for a couple of weeks.”

That rest, he said, gave him renewed strength, and he was able, with prayer and the support of his fellow POWs -- with whom he communicated by tapping on cell walls -- to endure what would be another year and a half of solitary confinement.

In late 1969, with peace negotiations underway in Paris, conditions for American POWs improved. They were eventually housed together in large groups and were able to create diversions for themselves. McCain, a history buff, taught “The History of the World from the Beginning.” He was also in charge of movie nights, reenacting “Viva Zapata!” and “Stalag 17” from memory.

McCain has said that the thought of his confession still unnerves him but that he forgave himself years ago. Known for his black humor, he can even joke about it. Some years ago, a reporter for Esquire was with him when a staffer asked McCain for advice for her son, who was acting up in school.

“Tell him to confess,” replied McCain. “Say, ‘I am a black air pirate, and I have committed crimes against the peace-loving people at my school.’ It always worked for me.”

Cindy Lou Hensley

In April 1979, McCain met Cindy Lou Hensley at a cocktail party in Hawaii. He was 42, coming to the end of a four-year stint as director of the Navy’s Senate liaison office and casting around for a new life. Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy Phoenix beer distributor, was 25, with a master’s degree in special education from USC.

McCain has said he was separated from his wife, Carol, when he met Cindy, but his divorce petition asserts that he lived with Carol until January 1980. In any case, his eye began wandering long before he saw Cindy.

Both Carol and John McCain had been in terrible physical shape at their reunion in 1973. McCain’s original injuries had been compounded by years of torture and botched medical treatment in Hanoi. Unbeknown to him, on Christmas Eve 1969, while visiting friends in Philadelphia, Carol had had a catastrophic accident, her car skidding off an icy road into a telephone pole. She had been thrown from the car, breaking both legs and her pelvis and sustaining serious internal injuries. She had been a model once, and willowy. Her injuries, and the resulting surgeries, left her several inches shorter and heavier.

In his biography, “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” Timberg wrote that McCain began cheating on Carol while serving in a training squadron in Florida. “Off duty, usually on routine cross-country flights to Yuma and El Paso, John started carousing and running around with women,” he wrote. Carol McCain told Timberg, the only writer to have interviewed her extensively about the breakup, that McCain’s imprisonment had nothing to do with their divorce: “I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again.”

But there is no question she was devastated. And their three children, Doug and Andy -- Carol’s sons who McCain had adopted -- and Sidney, their daughter, were wounded as well. None attended their father’s wedding.

“I was certainly mad and disappointed at Dad,” Andy McCain told the New York Times in 2000. “I hold him responsible. I don’t hold Cindy responsible one bit.” Andy, 46, is chief financial officer of Cindy McCain’s beer distributorship. Sidney, 42, lives in Toronto, where she works as a record company executive. Doug, 48, is an American Airlines pilot. They have all reconciled with McCain, who is unabashed about shouldering the blame.

“My marriage’s collapse was attributable to my selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam,” he wrote in “Worth the Fighting For.” “The blame was entirely mine.”

John and Cindy McCain married in the spring of 1980, a little more than a year after they met. He moved to Arizona and reinvented himself, running successfully for Congress in 1982 and then, in 1986, winning Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat, which he has held for 21 years.

Cindy McCain frequently travels with her husband. But she limits herself to short introductions and gives few speeches. She is chairwoman of her family’s Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship, Hensley & Co., which has revenues of more than $300 million a year. In 2006, Cindy McCain, who files tax returns separately from her husband, had an adjusted gross income of more than $6 million.

At 54, she has had numerous physical problems, including two back surgeries, knee surgery and in 2004, a stroke, which she has said was the result of not taking her blood pressure medication. In 1989, she became addicted to Percocet and Vicodin after back surgery. Her husband, who has always commuted between Washington and Phoenix, didn’t notice. But her parents did, and in 1992 they confronted her. She relapsed in 1993 after a hysterectomy.

In 1994, she told reporters that she had been investigated by the Justice Department for stealing pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a now-defunct children’s charity she’d founded. In exchange for not facing criminal charges, she agreed to a diversion program, underwent drug treatment and performed community service in a soup kitchen.

“I should have detected this early on,” McCain told “Dateline NBC” in 1999, as he prepared for his first presidential race. “Maybe I was wrapped up too much in Washington and my ambitions to pay as much attention as I should have.”

The McCains have four children together: Bridget, 17, who was adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage; Jim, 20, who enlisted in the Marines and has served in Iraq; Jack, 22, a first classman at the U.S. Naval Academy; and Meghan, 23, who graduated last year from Columbia University in New York and writes a blog about her adventures on the campaign trail.

The Keating 5

McCain once said the worst thing that had ever happened to him, Vietnam included, was the so-called Keating 5 scandal. “The Vietnamese,” he said, “didn’t question my honor.”

Among McCain’s earliest benefactors in Arizona was Lincoln Savings and Loan chief Charles H. Keating Jr., who filled McCain’s campaign coffers with more than $100,000 and hosted the McCains many times at his vacation home in the Bahamas.

Keating expected his largesse to be rewarded, and when federal regulators began looking into Lincoln’s questionable lending practices and investments in the late 1980s, he turned to five senators whose coffers he’d lined: Alan Cranston of California, Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and both Arizona senators, Dennis DeConcini and McCain. McCain attended two meetings with regulators at Keating’s request. McCain’s view was that he was seeking information on behalf of a constituent who was an important employer in his state. The regulators’ view was that they were being pressured to act favorably toward Keating.

Lincoln’s collapse, the biggest of many savings and loan failures, cost taxpayers $2.6 billion. Keating would spend four years in jail before his sentence was overturned on a technicality, and the Keating 5, as the senators came to be known, would live under an ethical cloud for years.

During the investigation, McCain revealed that he and Cindy had not reimbursed Keating for thousands of dollars in flights on his company jet to the Bahamas. The McCains blamed each other, reported Timberg, causing the first rift in their marriage. Then the Arizona Republic published a report about an investment Cindy McCain had made with her father in a shopping mall project owned by a Keating company.

In 1991, McCain, along with his four Democratic colleagues, was found guilty by the Senate Ethics Committee of using “poor judgment” for attending the meetings with regulators on Keating’s behalf.

“I watched John just crumble,” Cindy McCain told Timberg. “I’ve seen the glow go out of him. This is a guy who could reach for the stars, and now he can’t -- or he won’t.”

McCain was redeemed by the 1991 Persian Gulf War. With his military background, he became the Senate’s de facto spokesman on the war, and the Keating 5 debacle began to fade. He was easily reelected to the Senate in 1992.

His brush with political death changed him. He determined that the only way to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the public was to open himself up. He would talk to any reporter, anywhere, any time, about anything.

And by 2000, in his first presidential campaign, that outsider’s impulse would be codified as the “Straight Talk Express.” The unrestricted access resulted in swooning profiles. His willingness to buck his party for a while lent him an irresistible aura.

But, as in every relationship, things change.

In his Arlington, Va., office, Salter mused about the tension in the campaign between “letting McCain be McCain” -- that is, letting him be the sarcastic, witty maverick who will do and say what he pleases -- and keeping him on a leash.

“Where am I in that camp?” asked Salter. “Let McCain be McCain . . . most of the time. I sense danger more than he senses it. He’s like, ‘Goddamn it, grow up! Why can’t you just be normal in politics?’ ”

You can’t be normal in politics, of course, especially if you’re running for president. Danger lurks where instinct trumps expediency, and McCain has struggled to find a balance between the two.

“His authenticity is his brand,” said Salter. “But he pays a price for it. He pays a price for everything he does to be himself.”

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robin.abcarian@latimes.com