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            The most striking thing about John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers is how different it is from other political books, such as the works of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.  In fact, it is not really a political book at all.  There is no engagement with political issues.  There is no Orwellian talk or political speak.  The book appears to be quite candid.  McCain is not presented as a hero or even as an attractive figure.

            In a certain sense, it is not even really a book.  The better term might be a collection of military anecdotes with biographical observations about three men, all named John Sidney McCain.  It has only minimal unity, save that the anecdotes are all from the perspective of the youngest McCain, the senator from Arizona.  No particular research went into the book, as it appears.  Consequently the portrait of McCain’s grandfather is rather sketchy, limited for the most part to a few anecdotes McCain’s father knew and told his son.  The portrait of McCain’s father is fuller, but appears to be intentionally sparing about all except military details (you get little hints of more, that he drank perhaps a bit too much or wasn’t really all that happy, but a full biographical account is never pursued).  Most of the material is the autobiography of the senator from Arizona, but emphasizing only the military side of his life and not even going until the end of his military service.  The book ends, somewhat disappointingly, with the senator’s release after five years’ captivity in a Vietnamese prison.

            There are several reasons why this is disappointing.  First of all, the thing we most want to know about any great survived trauma is how it transforms normal life.  How does freedom feel after imprisonment?  How does an argument with a friend feel after knowing war and torture?  How do you deal with wife and children when there is so much of your life that they now do not know?  McCain divorced his wife not long after his return (and after she was in a disfiguring car accident); this is often interpreted as callous, but it is also a well-known fact that survivors of serious trauma often need to break with things which remind them of their earlier life.  Does this help explain it or not?  We never find out.  Secondly, we know two things about John McCain: that he was imprisoned in Vietnam and that he became a successful politician and candidate for president of the United States.  The most intriguing part of his life, as it seems to us, is how he went from that terrible low to that amazing high.  Do they have anything to do with one another?  Did he have special powers or insight that could not have been acquired any other way?  Was his life, like St. Paul’s, always divided into before and after? 

            As I say, these questions, unfortunately, are not answered.  But we get other things from Faith of My Fathers.

            Perhaps the most striking thing is how foreign and distant it is.  It is like a chronicle of a bygone civilization.  McCain was born in 1936, and much has happened in the world since then, but my father was born in 1933 and yet even my father would have shared very little with John McCain.  McCain’s life is more reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited than contemporary America.  The navy is, of course, the high-class branch of the American military, with its “officer and a gentleman” code, but it is astonishing how true that stereotype apparently was in the McCain household.  All the qualities of old genteel society are there: money, unquestioned acceptance of military service, emotional aloofness and even frigidity, a constant and sometimes desperate use of alcohol.  After describing the custom at the naval base at Pearl Harbor of calling on other officers’ households and leaving a card, he writes:

 

                        Though the exacting formality of this society seems pompous and

                        excessive today, few who lived within its rules then thought it anything

                        other than normal and appropriate.  Even when they dined alone at home,

                        my father dressed in black tie and my mother in a long evening gown (66).

 

Black tie and evening gown, in a 20^th century family, is impressively formal.  Interestingly, the time frame for this is the early 1930s, during the Depression (which is never mentioned in the book).  The impression received is that McCain grew up isolated from the mainstream currents of American existence.

            That is not to say it is not a beautiful life.  In fact, contemplating McCain’s portrait of it fills one with precisely the same wistful melancholy that Brideshead does.  With the high status the family held there was also real learning.  This is McCain’s father:

                        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.” (104-5)

 

“Somewhat of a waste of time,” “will stand you in good stead” – a gloriously aloof language.  And it is so wonderful to read about powerful men (both McCain’s father and grandfather were four-star admirals) whose lives are inspired and shaped by books:

 

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great naval historian, author of the seminal

work on the importance of naval expansion, The Influence of Sea Power

Upon History, was my father’s inspiration and his passion.  He quoted

from Mahan’s book often and at length, not only in his seapower lectures

but to almost anyone he thought could profit from Mahan’s wisdom. (105)

                       

This trait even was present in the women, who can be quite impressive.  Look at how he describes his paternal grandmother:

 

                        She had been an instructor of Latin and Greek at the University of

                        Mississippi, where she taught my grandfather.  Bookish and eight years

                        his senior, she won the devotion of the much coarser but widely read

                        naval officer.  Throughout their union, they indulged together their

                        shared love of literature, reading aloud to each other whenever time

                        allowed.  That my father was well versed in the classics is undoubtedly

                        a tribute to both his parents: his mother, the scholarly taskmaster;

                        his father, the rough adventurer who in glamour resembled the fictional

                        heroes who had enlivened the provincial world of his Mississippi

                        childhood (103).

 

                        I spent the summer of 1946 with my widowed grandmother and her

                        daughter, my Aunt Katherine, at their house in Coronado [never identified,

but presumably the one in California, near San Diego].  My grand-

                        mother was a composed, straight-laced woman who kept a formal house.

                        I still recall quite vividly their maid summoning me to tea and supper

                        every day, at precisely four and seven, by ringing a bell.  If I lingered

                        too long at whatever activity I was preoccupied with and arrived a minute

                        or two past the appointed hour, my grandmother would dismiss me very

                        politely from her presence.  She would observe that she had looked

                        forward to dinner with me, but as I had failed to arrive promptly, she

                        would have to forgo the pleasure of my company until the next meal.

                                                                                                                           (105-6)

But McCain’s world was not all formality, as his portrait of his adventurous grandfather indicates: the adventure part was supplied by the U.S. navy.  After the U.S. had taken the Philippines from the Spanish, McCain’s grandfather served on a gunboat voyage to establish American authority:

 

                        They cruised an immense expanse of the archipelago, putting in for fresh

                        water and supplies at various ports, arbitrating minor disputes among the

                        locals, and generally enjoying the exotic adventure that had come their

                        way so early in life.  Both [(later admiral) Chester] Nimitz and my

                        grandfather remembered the experience fondly for the rest of their lives.

                        Nimitz once said of it, “Those were great days.  We had no radio, no mail,

                        no fresh food.  We did a lot of hunting.  One of the seamen said one day

                        he ‘couldn’t look a duck in the beak again.’” (24)

 

The World War II battle stories, in which both McCain’s grandfather, as an admiral, and father, as a captain, commanded, are the best plotted narrative of the book.  They are tense and exciting.  It is easy to see why many men would consider such wartime experiences as among the most intense and important of their lives.  As stories, they have little bloodshed and horror – they focus much more on adventure.

            Another part of the adventure is the sheer glamour of travel, which, when combined with ready money (which Americans had, the McCains in particular), makes an intoxicating combination.  The U.S. navy truly was the governing arm of an empire which embraced the world.  McCain’s father and grandfather go from the Waikiki Beach Club to Casablanca and Midway and Guadalcanal to the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor. McCain himself emerges as a true navy playboy, having a fling with a Brazilian “supermodel” in Rio, “risking my wages in the casinos of Monte Carlo,” “spending holidays on Capri,” staying at an inn “on a lake in a small German village called Unterdeisen,” having “four days of fun in Montego Bay, Jamaica” – all while on navy duty.  Much of his travel is less glamorous (San Diego, Norfolk, Pensacola, New London, Corpus Christi, patrolling the waters of Cuba, and of course Vietnam).  It’s impossible to tell from the book where McCain is “from” – it’s a concept that has no place in his life.  He was born in Panama.  He seems to spend something of his childhood in Connecticut and California.  But most of the time appears to have been spent in Washington, D.C.:

 

                        My parents kept a house on Capitol Hill, where they entertained

                        leading political and military figures.  My mother’s charm proved

                        as effective with politicians as it was with naval officers.  The political

                        relationships my parents forged during this period contributed

                        significantly to my father’s future success.  Among their friends was

                        Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee.  At

                        my father’s invitation, he ate his breakfast, prepared by my mother,

                        at my parents’ home on many if not most mornings when Congress

                        was in session. (75)

 

As is intimated by the above passage, in this world power and command were the prime objects of desire.  McCain refers again and again to his father’s “ambition,” his “singleminded pursuit of four stars.”   It is not surprising, then, to see both father and son drawn to Washington.  When McCain’s father was Navy commander of the Atlantic, they lived in the capital, London, of an earlier great naval power.

            All this power and privilege came with the trappings.  McCain went to boarding school and then the Naval Academy (as so many generations of English aristocrats had gone to boarding school and then military academies).  There were light blue blazers and white pants for yacht excursions.  A navy destroyer was named the USS John S. McCain, after McCain’s grandfather.

            But there is a dark side to all this privilege, which McCain does not shy away from:

                        At a point early in my own naval career, I was stationed as a flight

                        instructor at McCain Field, an air station in Meridian, Mississippi,

                        named for my grandfather.  One day, as I made my approach to land,

                        I was waved off.  Radioing the tower, I demanded, “Let me land, or I’ll

                        take my field and go home,” earning a rebuke from the commanding

                        officer for disrespectfully invoking the family history. (21)

 

McCain never disavows his own immaturity and abuse of power.  They are for the most part discussed in the most general terms.

 

                        On Friday and Saturday nights, after happy hour at the officers’ club

                        had ended, almost every unmarried aviator in Pensacola headed for

                        Trader John’s.  It was a vast, cavernous place that was packed shoulder

                        to shoulder on weekends, as was the back room where local girls,

                        trained as exotic dancers, entertained rowdy crowds of aviators. 

                        Pensacola has since designated the place a historic landmark in

                        recognition of its former infamy when it was the scene of some of the

                        wildest revelry the state of Florida had ever experienced.  (153)

 

                        While I was stationed at Norfolk… a few pilots in my squadron and I

                        lived in Virginia Beach in a beach house known far and wide in the

                        Navy as the infamous “House on 37^th Street.”  We enjoyed a reputation

                        for hosting the most raucous and longest beach parties of any squadron

                        in the Navy. (159-160)

 

                        My reputation was certainly not enhanced when I knocked down

                        some power lines while flying too low over southern Spain.  My

                        daredevil clowning had cut off electricity to a great many Spanish

                        homes and created a small international incident. (159)

 

There is nothing truly terrible or even unusual about these kinds of things.  They fall into that category of actions which are usually called “excesses” and hence considered merely a personal matter.  But they do end up wounding people – the reason why almost every distant land with an American military base dislikes the Americans stationed there – and it would be interesting to see more confrontation with this reality.  McCain, for the most part, still seems to be largely in himself.  The one exception – the one time he seems to confront his own power to wound others – is perhaps the best part of the book.  While in prison in Vietnam, McCain lost his washrag, which was a prisoner’s most prized possession. 

 

                        I appreciate how difficult it must be for the reader to understand the

                        inflated value of such an unremarkable article.  But to a man who is

                        deprived of almost all material possessions, who lies day after day in

                        a dirty, oppressively hot cell, glazed in sweat and grime, a washcloth,

                        no matter how undistinguished, is an inestimable comfort. (296-7)

 

In order to remedy the situation, he furtively took a washrag off of a clothesline, only to discover later that it was his best friend’s.  The problem was never fully solved while in prison: McCain’s friend apparently did not forgive him, and apparently the basic problem continued, i.e. McCain had a washrag while his friend did not.  I do not know whether this can be called McCain’s fault or not.  Life is filled with these little injuries we never resolve.  That is why one of the most moving and human moments in the book is this:

           

                        I felt bad about the injury I had done Bob throughout the remainder of

                        our captivity, finally relieving my guilt on our first Christmas as free

                        men by sending Bob a carton of five hundred washrags as a Christmas

                        present. (299)

 

You can imagine Bob weeping to receive them.  And it makes Chapter 22, “The Washrag,” the best bit of storytelling in the whole book.

            But in general, we don’t get enough resolution in this book; the problems all remain unsolved.  Three generations of McCain men get into fights, trash clubs, cuss and womanize, and it is still not clear what they are fighting.

            It is interesting to theorize how much the genteel culture of that time necessitated this rough manhood, as light necessitates shadow, and how much the hard work and discipline necessitated immature outbursts, either in oneself or in the following generation. 

 

                        My father worked every day, without exception.  On Christmas

                        morning, after we had opened our presents in front of the Christmas

                        tree, he would excuse himself, change into his uniform, and

                        leave for his office.  I cannot recall a single instance when he

                        came home from work earlier than eight o’clock in the evening. (70)

 

This fine dedication comes with a cost.  McCain confesses to what is typically known as a “father wound,” the damage which comes when a child’s relationship with his father is more longing than fulfilment:

 

As any other child would, I resented my father’s absences,

interpreting them as a sign that he loved his work more than his

children. (70)

 

                        I had known less of my father’s attention than had many of my friends

                        whose fathers were not as deeply involved in their work or absent as

                        often as my father was.  My father could often be a distant, inscrutable

                        patriarch. (167)

 

These are powerful words.  But McCain does try to resolve this.  He admires his father:

 

But I always had the sense that he was special, a man who

                        had set his mind to accomplishing great things, and had ransomed

                        his life to the task.  I admired him, and wanted badly to be admired

                        by him, yet indications of his regard for me were more often found

                        in the things he didn’t say than in the things he did.

                          He wasn’t purposely sparing with praise or encouragement, but

                        neither did he lavish such generous attention on his children.  He set

                        an example for us, an example that took all his strength and courage

                        to live.  That, I believe, is how he expressed his devotion to us, as his

                        father had expressed his devotion to him. (167)

 

Somehow, however, this approach was not really satisfying to him or to McCain.  McCain is often left guessing at his father’s feelings:

 

                        There were times in my youth when I harbored a secret resentment

                        that my life’s course seemed so preordained.  I often wondered if

                        my father had ever felt the same way.  Neither of us ever misbehaved

                        by design, or purposely threw some insurmountable obstacle in the

                        path of our expected naval careers.  Our antics were much more

                        spontaneous than that.  But did he, like me, occasionally speculate

                        that his troublemaking might disrupt his family’s plans for him, and

                        was he as surprised as I was to discover that the thought did not

                        fill him with dread?  I do not know. (53)

 

These feelings are so normal to young men that it is impossible to judge McCain for them.  But it is hard not to see in them a larger significance.  Because, as with Brideshead, Faith of My Fathers seems to be a portrait of a declining civilization, one that is unable to form its young men to the same standard their elders were formed.  The simple facts are telling.  McCain’s grandfather was an admiral for the Allies in World War II, which may have been the most complicated and successful endeavor in history.  Besides a fine combat record, his contribution was simple but important: he was in charge of “naval aviation,” and personally saw to the increase of airplane production and the training of massive numbers of new pilots, so that every plane would have at least two crews.  The military record of McCain’s father, the supreme military commander for the war in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972, is much harder to be enthusiastic about.  McCain himself did not have a distinguished military record at all.

            This cultural decline is amply demonstrated by the intellectual gap separating McCain and his ancestors.  Despite his father’s averral of the importance of “an outstanding command of the English language,” McCain does not pretend to be able to write even this book, which is disorganized and often awkward (Mark Salter was the writer; he is even given credit on the cover).  It is hard to imagine the hero of the back room of Trader John’s curling up with a copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West.  Nor is it likely that Cindy McCain could ever get a job at Ole Miss as “instructor of Latin and Greek.”

            Current political events only emphasize the plausibility of this reading.  McCain is descended from the old Protestant minority which has supplied this country with all its presidents except one (Kennedy) up until now.  (Even for Obama, half of his family tree is of this lineage.)  But the Bush administration has radically called into question whether these families, and the institutions whose allegiance they can command, have any character or worth left.  The Yale and Harvard degrees possessed by George W. Bush, or the Princeton degree held by Donald Rumsfeld, do not mean that these men have a strong sense of history or can represent our society’s ideal of an educated man. 

            If Evelyn Waugh, or William Faulkner or anyone else, were to write the novel of the McCain family, he would not have to look far to find the symbol for all this.  The family home was the symbol of the gentleman, but also it was the root in the soil that prevented him from overestimating his power.  He was limited by it: he could not simply get rid of it and buy another.  To do so would be to lose all tradition, and have to start all over.  And thereby he learned powerlessness and the terrible hardship of creation: he would know that if he planted an oak he would never see it mature.  He would know that a bushel of wheat only made him a five or six percent profit.  He would know (to use a specific example) that the power lines that came to his house had to be set up carefully and carefully maintained.

 

                        My grandfather was born and raised on his father’s plantation in

                        Carroll County, Mississippi.  The property had been in our family

                        since 1848, when William Alexander McCain moved there from

                        the family estate in North Carolina.  My great-grandmother had

                        named the place Waverly, after Walter Scott’s Waverly [sic] novels,

                        but it was always called Teoc, after a Choctaw Indian name for the

                        surrounding area that meant “Tall Pines.”

                          I spent some time there as a boy and loved the place.  The house,

                        which had once belonged to a former slave, became the family’s

                        home after their first manor burned down, and was a more modest

                        structure than the white-columned antebellum mansions of

                        popular imagination.  But I spent many happy summer days in

                        outdoor recreation on the property in the congenial company of

                        my grandfather’s younger brother, Joe, who ran the plantation.  The

                        house still stands, I have been told, uninhabited and dilapidated,

                        with no McCain in residence since my Uncle Joe died in 1952. (21) 

 

You revere the memory of your grandfather, who has had air fields and navy ships named after him, and here is the place where he was born, on a plantation which has been in the family for a century and a half; and you are very rich, so much so that you do not know exactly how many homes you own – why would you not buy this house, or work with other members of the family to restore it?  You are a nationally known politician and travel all over the United States.  Why would you not stop there at least for a visit to see it, to see where it all began?  It is a strange symbol of the dying civilization McCain chronicles.  Much as the great English families memorialized in Brideshead, war, and power, and time, that destroyer of all things, ultimately consumed these families, rotting their traditions and blotting all their beauty.