John McCain and the Lost Art of Decency
He loomed as one of the last remaining larger than life figures in American politics, but it’s the small, human moments with John McCain that linger indelibly in memory now.
In his prime, before the compromises of his last presidential campaign shrunk him into a defensive crouch, his preferred method of controlling his image was to abandon all the modern methods of self-presentation, whether conducting a rollicking running seminar aboard his “Straight Talk Express” bus, or ruminating with a solitary journalist on a long flight in a small chartered plane.
“Most current fiction bores the shit out of me,” he once told me somewhere over New England, as I followed him around for weeks of stumping in the for , he once allowed, to a gathering of midwestern businessmen, “I want to keep health-care costs down until I get sick, and then I don’t give a goddamn.” To a group of Wisconsin college kids waiting to have their pictures taken with him, he mock-grumbled, “All right, you little jerks!” And on an executive jet high above Iowa, he read aloud a USA Today headline: “Actor [Wesley] Snipes Faces Indictment on Tax Fraud Charges” and muttered: “All our childhood heroes—shattered!”
