Worth The Fighting For

Sunday 2 November 2008
2000

I just finished reading John McCain’s 2002 book “Worth The Fighting For”. As I mentioned earlier when I first started it, the subtitle is “The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him”. The book is a chronicle of his political career since leaving the Navy. The chapters are organized roughly chronologically, by events and periods in his career as well by the people who influenced or inspired him during that period.

I won’t even attempt a synopsis, but will make a few observations. First is that I now feel I know John McCain much better than I did before, and I now respect him immensely. I respected him before, of course, but it was more the sort of obligatory respect that you give to someone that you know has served honorably and been through a lot, but about whom you don’t know much more than that. Now that I’ve read his accounts of his own life, his values, his heroes, and the reasoning behind some of his decisions in politics, I feel a much deeper and more personal respect for his character and competence.

One thing that jumped out at me is his absolute willingness to admit his mistakes and take responsibility for them. He comes right out on many occasions in the book and suggests that he could have made better decisions on this or that issue. But when reading it I never doubted for a moment that his motives were good and his reasoning earnest, if flawed or clouded in hindsight. He is an interesting combination of proud and ambitious on the one hand, and humble and self-effacing on the other. His temperament strikes me as somewhat unusual for a politician. Funny, since he has such a reputation for a hot temper. His writing is thoughtful, clear, calm, and coherent, leading me to feel confident in his thinking and his judgment.

Another thing that struck me as unusual was his attention to bipartisan solutions to important issues. It seems that nearly as many of his heroes and mentors were Democrats as were Republicans. In this age of bitter partisan politics, mudslinging, and hyperventilated rhetoric, his commitment to finding reasonable ways to approach important problems and to work with whomever could help him to make progress on solutions was a breath of fresh air. He has very strong values and the courage to act on his convictions, even if it means going against his own party or the people in power. To an inveterate windmill-tilter like me, this seems like exactly what we need in a President.

The book is filled with anecdotes and quotes that I found interesting and enlightening. But my very favorite chapter was the one about Teddy Roosevelt, one of my own heroes. TR is perhaps my favorite President and is certainly one of the most inspiring historical figures I could imagine.

The chapter is entitled “A Happier Life In Every Way”, and is so full of interesting tidbits that I’d love to just reproduce it here in its entirety. It starts with the departure of the Great White Fleet in 1907, the first-ever world cruise by any nation’s Navy (I never knew that). Apparently Congress had balked at providing enough funds for the cruise. Teddy’s response was that as President he had sufficient funds to send the fleet to the Pacific, but Congress would have to appropriate the funds to bring it back. :-) Roosevelt was a Navy man, and as President he transformed the US Navy and brought America onto the world stage as a major power. By the time he left the Presidency, TR had engineered the beginnings of the two-ocean Navy that would serve to protect American interests through the 20th century and into the present.

Being a Navy man himself and coming from a Navy family, John McCain has an interesting connection to Teddy Roosevelt. On the deck of the flagship of the Great White Fleet as it returned to Hampton Roads after its 14-month cruise was a young ensign named John S. McCain, who saluted the President as he stood on his yacht (The Mayflower) watching the fleet pass in review. That John S. McCain was later an Admiral during WWII. His son was an Admiral during Vietnam, and his grandson was a Navy pilot in that war and is now running for President himself.

The chapter goes on to describe TR’s many other attributes – his incredible energy and productivity, his bedrock belief in America’s destiny as a great nation, and his admirable accomplishments in many fields. It made me want to read more of Roosevelt’s writings than I already have done. I could certainly stand to be more energetic and productive myself. “Black care,” wrote Roosevelt, “rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.”

It is the core of Roosevelt’s message that inspires John McCain and that also inspires me – the relationship between the individual and the nation. I will take the liberty here to quote several of McCain’s paragraphs in their entirety:

“In 1899, he (Roosevelt) lectured the members of Chicago’s Hamilton Club on the integration of individual and national morals. He had come to preach ‘not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life’. He urged his audience to a ‘life of toil and effort, of labor and strife’, a life of courage and duty and risk, in pursuit not only of personal glory, but of national greatness. “A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life’ for individuals or for nations. It corrupts governments as insidiously as it corrupts man and “ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.’ It was his personal code of conduct and his governing philosophy. The code that had driven a frail, asthmatic child to physically transform himself into the vigorous, athletic outdoorsman who exulted in physical hardship as a welcome trial of character and body was the same code that aroused his abhorrence of materialism that consumed all of a society’s dynamism. Base materialism, Roosevelt believed, tempted people to indolence and greed and tempted nations to ‘shrink like cowards’ from the duty of playing ‘a great part in the world’ and seek shelter in ‘the cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues of a nation, as it saps them in the individual.”

“’The strenuous life’ was Roosevelt’s definition of Americanism, a profession of faith in America’s pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our messianic belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. ‘We cannot sit huddled within our own borders’, he warned, ‘and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.’”

“In the Roosevelt code, the authentic meaning of freedom gave equal respect to self-interest and common purpose, to rights and duties. And it absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake. He understood the central fact of American history: that we are not just an association of disparate interests forced by law and custom to tolerate one another, but a kinship of ideals, worth living and dying for, and that deserves to have our ideals vigorously represented at home and abroad by our national government. He believed that people who are free to act in their own interests and who are served by a government that kindles the pride of every citizen would perceive their interests in an enlightened way. We would live as one nation, at the summit of human history, ‘the mightiest republic on which the sun ever shone’.”

There is much, much more in the chapter, but that’s enough to give a flavor of it, and to illustrate some of the values that are important to John McCain (and to me). He does relate one incident from Roosevelt’s career that I had not heard of before. It took place during the Presidential campaign of 1912. As TR was getting ready to make a speech in Milwaukee, a man stepped out of the crowd and shot him. Folded papers and an eyeglass case slowed the bullet down enough that it lodged in his chest but did not pierce his heart. Stepping to the podium, Roosevelt opened his vest and showed the crowd his blood-stained shirt. “I have just been shot”, he said, “but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” He told his audience that his public duty was more important than his life, and if it cost him his life it was no great concern to him. “For no man has had a happier life than I have led, a happier life in every way.”

Quite a role model – talk about having big shoes to fill!

McCain’s book goes on to chronicle his own campaign for the Presidency in 2000, and concludes with some thoughts about his idiosyncrasies as a politician and public figure. Considering that he is once again running for President, I can’ think of a better way to end this entry than simply to quote the closing paragraph of his book:

“I’m glad there is still a place for me in public life. It’s sort of a niche market, I admit. But I think it’s a good fit. If the people of Arizona let me I would like to stick around for awhile. As I noted, there are still things worth fighting for here, and I think I’m as ready for them as I’ve ever been. I won’t win them all. I won’t win most of them. But I’ll win a few. And as long as my conceit doesn’t convince me of my indispensability to America instead of my country’s indispensability to me, we should both do all right.”

Mood: Hopeful
Music: Darryl Worley – Have You Forgotten?


Have You Forgotten?