Defining moments
And yet, somehow, it happened. Never in a million years did I ever think that the American people would be either so foolish or so unmindful of their own heritage and values as to put that man in the White House.
Well, in fairness, they didn't. Trump got somewhere around a third of the votes in the 2016 Republican primaries; he won the nomination because the opposition was so badly divided. He lost the popular vote in November and won the electoral vote by an accident of demographics and geography. But whenever I see the man standing at a podium with the presidential seal in front of it, I think of a classic, almost cliched line from a defeated Japanese officer in a movie about World War II: "How can we ever apologize to our ancestors?"
We as a nation will never live this man down. The Republican party, in particular, is soiled for all time by having allowed this man to lead it. And it has disgraced itself nearly to the point of being beyond redemption by selling out en masse to a boorish, authoritarian con man like Donald Trump.
No, I've known enough about this man all along that the idea of his being president was never anything but a bad joke. We owe the office he holds respect. And to a point, since he holds that office, we owe him respect for the office's sake.
But if there was a single moment when my personal disdain for Donald Trump turned to contempt, it was this one.
Donald Trump is not fit to carry the shovel they will use to bury John McCain. How dare he?
And this, in one brief soundbite, is who Donald John Trump is. He is a boor. He is a bully. He is a narcissistic ass. I know that I should respect him for the sake of the office, but I simply can't. And I can't for the life of me understand how any decent person can support him.
Yet some do. I know many of them. There were lots of people who dislike Trump but voted for him in November and somehow support him still. These people are not crazies. They are very, very misguided. Insofar as they are politicians and public officials, they have discredited themselves in my eyes for all time by doing so. But they are not crazies. I have no love for Hillary Clinton either. I differ from them only in that my disdain for the man capable of the statement above exceeds my disdain for her.
As much as I dislike Hillary and all she stands for, at least she has too much class ever to say something like that.
Yes, the people who supported Trump in the primaries in most cases were crazies. Or if not crazies, angry, clueless, and in many cases crude people whose manners were no better than his, and who recognized a kindred spirit in Donald Trump. They were the authoritarians, the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists who were drawn like iron filings to a magnet to one of their own, a man who insisted that Barack Obama was born in Kenya long after that absurd lie was conclusively exposed as such. They were Klansmen and Nazis and white nationalists. Hillary was right when she called them "deplorables," and John McCain was right when he called them "crazies."
The crazies are in power in the United States today. I don't know how so many sane people miss that point. In fact, it's incomprehensible to me. But they do.
The president had basically ignored Sen. McCain's terminal cancer. Characteristically, both the First Lady and Vice-President Pence released gracious and thoughtful statements gratefully acknowledging Sen. McCain's long and faithful service to our nation. Mr. Trump tweeted his "deepest sympathies and respect-" to Sen. McCain's family. No mention of the senator himself, or of his record of courage and selfless patriotism and service which stands in such stark contrast to the president's own.
We have an emotional child in the White House. We're reminded of that every day. Today, it's especially obvious.
Mr. Trump repeated his message on Instagram. Characteristically, it was accompanied by a picture, not of Sen. McCain, but of himself.
Sen. McCain, for his part, made no attempt to hide his own contempt for Donald Trump. He made it known that he did not want Mr. Trump to attend his funeral. That disappointed me. The approach of death is a time, insofar as it is possible, to heal broken relationships and to extend olive branches, however small they may be and no matter how tentatively they are offered. Sen. McCain seemed unable to do that. I can understand that, but I regret it.
I had the honor of meeting Sen. McCain the night before the 2008 Iowa Caucuses. Shaking his hand was one of the proudest moments of my life. I didn't agree with him about everything. Neither did many others there that night who nevertheless saw in him a man of vision and character who would have been what Donald Trump is not: a president we can look up to.
I remember Sen. John Thune, a fellow Navy veteran, joking that John McCain had tried to join the Marines, but failed to qualify "because his parents were married." I came late to the McCain camp; I initially supported Sen. Fred Thompson, whom I had long admired. But I was troubled by Sen. Thompson's position on end-of-life issues, and a brief conversation with him on the subject at a campaign stop left me even more uneasy. I briefly drifted into the camp of the eventual winner of the Caucuses that year, Gov. Mike Huckabee. But Gov. Huckabee's foreign policy seemed to me to be a fragmentary, incomplete, ad hoc mosaic of disjointed policies lacking an overarching and unifying vision and direction, and several bizarre gaffes within a short period deepened my concern about whether the governor was ready for prime-time.
But John McCain clearly was. I had questions about his positions on certain life issues, too. But the fact that so many leaders of the Iowa Right-to-Life movement were supported him anyway drove home to me the point that the man himself is also a major issue. John McCain's foreign policy credentials were flawless and our differences minor enough that on balance, I decided that he was the Republican party's best option if it wanted to retain the presidency and defeat Sen. Obama.
Last night, I unfriended and blocked a Facebook acquaintance- a combat veteran, by the way- who responded to my status acknowledging Sen. McCain's death by calling him "a garbage traitor." The man had already proven to be a rather unthoughtful Trump supporter, which is, of course, his right. I have many Trump supporters as Facebook friends, some more thoughtful than others. But to make a comment like that on the occasion of the death of a patriot who had served and suffered so much for America crossed a line in a manner a bit too Trump-like for me to tolerate.
The reference was to an incident that troubled Sen. McCain all his life. Mr. Trump's shameful statement about Sen. McCain during the primaries was a defining moment. So is this one. There was nothing shameful about it, though you would never have convinced John McCain of that.
McCain had already proven himself a hero, no matter what Donald Trump might later say, by being wounded in the act of rescuing a fellow pilot aboard the USS Forrestal after a missile from a plane on the deck was accidentally fired, setting McCain's plane and several others ablaze. Then, on October 26, 1967, on his 23rd bombing mission of the war, McCain was shot down over Hanoi. He broke both of his legs on ejecting and parachuted into a lake, where he nearly drowned. He was pulled out of the lake by North Vietnamese soldiers, who then bayonetted him and crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt.
He did not receive any medical treatment until the North Vietnamese learned that his father was an admiral. Instead, he was beaten and interrogated. The North Vietnamese demanded to know the names of the other pilots in his squadron. Instead, he gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line.
After receiving minimal medical treatment McCain was taken to a POW camp outside Hanoi. The two Americans who shared his cell didn't expect him to live. But he did. He was placed in solitary confinement in March of 1968. He would spend two years there.
He didn't have to. That summer his father was named commander of all American naval forces in the Vietnam theatre. The North Vietnamese offered to release him. But the American POW's were bound by military law to accept release only after all prisoners captured before they were had been released, and McCain honored that code.
In August, while he was suffering from dysentery, the torture began. McCain was tied up and beaten every two hours. Sustaining further injuries, McCain decided to attempt suicide but was prevented by his captors from carrying out his plan.
He finally gave in and signed a "confession" admitting to "war crimes." Virtually every American POW who was subjected to such torture did, and nobody anywhere took these "confessions" seriously, since they were understood to have been obtained by torture. It was to that that my graceless former Facebook friend referred when he accused the senator of having been a "garbage traitor," thereby proving himself as impudent and presumptuous a jerk as his hero in the Oval Office.
Whatever others might have done, McCain himself considered yielding a dishonorable act of which he was personally ashamed. Later he would write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine." But he continued to fight. He was beaten two or three times a week because he refused to sign further statements.
He refused to meet with visiting anti-war groups lest he give his captors a propaganda victory by being filmed with them. In late 1969, the brutal treatment of the prisoners improved somewhat. McCain continued to lead his fellow prisoners in resisting their captors in whatever ways might be possible.
McCain was released on March 14, 1973, after five and a half years as a POW. As a result of his injuries, he was never again able to raise his arms above his shoulders. He would eventually come to understand and form friendships with people who had been active in the anti-war movement and even with some of the North Vietnamese who had been his captors. John McCain was not a vindictive man. I have to wonder how much of his opposition to President Trump attending his funeral was based not on the president's pompous and outrageous statements about him personally, but rather on what Mr. Trump has done and continues to to to Sen. McCain's party and to his nation.
Just as Donald Trump's disgraceful statement was a kind of defining moment for him, John McCain's ordeal as a POW was also a defining moment. And whatever either Mr. Trump or that boorish Facebook commenter last night might say, and whatever S himself might have thought, it defined him as a true hero.
The night after I met John McCain, I had another honor. After my own precinct caucus adjourned, I joined other McCain supporters at a meeting room in downtown Des Moines. Sen. McCain was campaigning in New Hampshire that night and addressed us from there.
I heard what he had to say to us and watched the returns come in while sitting at the same table with Sen. Lindsey Graham and a group of Sen. McCain's fellow residents at the "Hanoi Hilton" and their wives. I was kept out of the draft, and therefore Vietnam, because of high blood pressure. I still regard it as an enormous honor to have shared that evening with a group of men who, captured though they were, were indeed heroes just as John McCain was a hero, and five times the men and five times the Americans as either our hapless president or my thankless former Facebook friend will ever be.
If there is anyone with the right to pass judgment on John McCain's moment of weakness at the Hanoi Hilton or his status as a hero, it is the heroes I spent the evening with on Caucus Night of 2008, most of whom probably had endured their own personal breaking points.
Let no one who has suffered less for his country even dare to comment about John McCain and his passing except in gratitude, respect, and admiration for him, and for his fellow heroes.
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