Learning from the life of John Sidney McCain

One remarkable feature of the life of Senator McCain that stands out from among thousands and thousands of heros and statesmen whose lives I've studied at one point or another is the tremendous ability to overcome or improve on previous shortcomings. Three examples come to mind.

As a young person, he was somewhat reckless and rebellious and it seems clear that if his father and grandfather had not been high-ranking officers, he would not have had the opportunity to go to Annapolis or become a pilot. In the course of events, he became a prisoner of war and underwent severe torture when the opportunity to use the ties of privilege could have saved him. Senator McCain wrote about this period quite a bit and I haven't read those books, but it is easy to imagine that being presented with real adversity actually changed him from playboy to the scion of a great tradition of service and sacrifice.

In the years after he came back from captivity, he had a wife and young children and it is well-known that they had significant marital difficulties and divorced. Now overcoming this kind of trauma would be understandably hard on any couple, but his first wife has described that time saying, "John was 40 but he wanted to act like he was 25 again." Normally I wouldn't want to go around talking about anyone else's personal lives, but the reason I bring all this up is to observe that not only did McCain remarry and raise a second family, the children from his first marriage seem to have a good relationship with him, his second wife and their children, and he and his wife adopted a Bangladeshi orphan with a cleft palate in 1991, which is just about the most loving thing that I think a person can do. His second wife and their children also had a husband and father who suffered great trauma, but what was different? One has to imagine that he found a way to change.

As a young senator, McCain was involved in a scandal about helping a wealthy donor in which he was cleared of wrongdoing, but it gave rise to the appearance of impropriety. He could have stuck by the line that he was cleared and been done with it, but instead he spent the next fifteen years with anyone and everyone to advance the cause of campaign finance reform. His collaborator Sen. Russ Feingold wrote a very fine remembrance of their work together, which I recommend reading.

"The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar."

Don't take what I'm writing here to be a support for or indictment of any position or person in common discussion. I'm aiming for something deeper. The things that matter most for the next 30 or 40 years are being born today, but are not apparent to any more than a few, so what really matters is not how we respond to what's in front of us today but how we prepare for what we can't really anticipate. This capacity to grow, to overcome and to change would be one thing we can all find to emulate in the life of Senator McCain.