Faith of My Fathers

–– CHAPTER 1 –– In War and Victory

I have a picture I prize of my grandfather and father, John Sidney McCain Senior and Junior, taken on the bridge of a submarine tender, the USS Proteus, in Tokyo Bay a few hours after the Second World War had ended. They had just finished meeting privately in one of the ship’s small staterooms and were about to depart for separate destinations. They would never see each other again.

Despite the weariness that lined their faces, you can see they were relieved to be in each other’s company again. My grandfather loved his children. And my father admired my grandfather above all others. My mother, to whom my father was devoted, had once asked him if he loved his father more than he loved her. He replied simply, “Yes, I do.”

On the day of their reunion, my father, a thirty-four-year-old submarine commander, and his crew had just brought a surrendered Japanese submarine into Tokyo Bay. My grandfather, whom Admiral Halsey once referred to as “not much more than my right arm,” had just relinquished command of Halsey’s renowned fast carrier task force, and had attended the signing of the surrender aboard the USS Missouri that morning. He can be seen in a famous photograph of the occasion standing with his head bowed in the first rank of officers observing the ceremony.

My grandfather had not wanted to attend, and had requested permission to leave for home immediately upon learning of Japan’s intention to capitulate.

“I don’t give a damn about seeing the surrender,” my grandfather told Halsey. “I want to get the hell out of here.” To which Halsey replied, “Maybe you do, but you’re not going. You were commanding this task force when the war ended, and I’m making sure that history gets it straight.” In his memoir, Halsey described my grandfather “cursing and sputtering” as he returned to his flagship.

To most observers, my grandfather had been as elated to hear of Japan’s decision to surrender as had the next man. Upon hearing the announcement, he ordered the doctor on his flagship to break out the medicinal brandy and passed cups around to all takers. He was a jocular man, and his humor could at times be wicked. He told a friend, as they prepared for the surrender ceremony, “If you see MacArthur’s hands shaking as he reads the surrender documents it won’t be emotion. It will be from too many of those mestiza girls in the Philippines.”

In the days immediately following the announcement that Emperor Hirohito had agreed to surrender, a few of the emperor’s pilots had either not received or not believed the message. Occasionally, a few Japanese planes would mount attacks on the ships of my grandfather’s task force. He directed his fighter pilots to shoot down any approaching enemy planes. “But do it in a friendly sort of way,” he added.

Some of his closest aides sensed that there was something wrong with the old man. His operations officer, Commander John Thach, a very talented officer whom my grandfather relied on to an extraordinary extent, was concerned about his health. Thach went to my grandfather’s cabin and asked him if he was ill. In an account of the exchange he gave many years later, Thach recalled my grandfather’s answer: “Well, this surrender has come as kind of a shock to all of us. I feel lost. I don’t know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don’t know whether I know how to relax or not. I’m in an awful letdown.”

Once on board the Missouri, however, he was entirely at ease. Rushing about the deck of the battleship, hailing his friends and reveling in the moment, he was the most animated figure at the ceremony. He announced to Admiral Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, that he had invented three new cocktails, the July, the Gill, and the Zeke, each one named for a type of Japanese plane his task force had fought during the war’s last hard months. “Each time you drink one you can say ‘Splash one July’ or ‘Splash one Zeke,’” he explained.

After the surrender, Halsey reports, my grandfather was grateful for having been ordered to join the others on the Missouri. “Thank God you made me stay, Bill. You had better sense than I did.”

Immediately after father and son parted company that day, my grandfather left for his home in Coronado, California. Before he left, he issued his last dispatch to the men under his command.

He arrived home four days later. My grandmother, Katherine Vaulx McCain, arranged for a homecoming party the next day attended by neighbors and the families of Navy friends who had yet to return from the war. Standing in his crowded living room, my grandfather was pressed for details of the surrender ceremony, and some of the wives present whose husbands were POWs begged him for information about when they could expect their husbands’ return. He responded to their inquiries courteously, seemingly content, as always, to be the center of attention.

Some of the guests remembered having observed that my grandfather seemed something less than his normally ebullient self; a little tired from his journey, they had thought, and worn out from the rigors of the war.

In the middle of the celebration my grandfather turned to my grandmother, announced that he felt ill, and then collapsed. A physician attending the party knelt down to feel for the admiral’s pulse. Finding none, he looked up at my grandmother and said, “Kate, he’s dead.”

He was sixty-one years old. He had fought his war and died. His Navy physician attributed his fatal heart attack to “complete fatigue resulting from the strain of the last months of combat.” Halsey’s chief of staff, Admiral Robert Carney, believed he had suffered an earlier heart attack at sea and had managed to keep it hidden. According to Carney, the admiral “knew his number was up, but he wouldn’t lie down and die until he got home.”

My grandfather had made his way to the Proteus to join my father immediately after the surrender ceremony. During a luncheon aboard ship hosted by the commander of U.S. submarines in the Pacific, father and son retreated to a small stateroom for a private conversation. In an interview my father gave thirty years later for the Naval Institute’s Oral History Project, he briefly described their last moment together. Nothing in my grandfather’s manner gave my father reason to worry about the old man’s health. “I knew him as well as anybody in the world, with the possible exception of my mother. He looked in fine health to me,” my father recalled. “And God knows his conversation was anything but indicative of a man who was sick. And two days later he died of a heart attack.”

Little else is known about their last conversation. To the best of my knowledge, my father never talked about it to anyone except the Naval Institute interviewer. And the only detail he offered him, besides the description of my grandfather’s apparent well-being, was a remark my grandfather had made about how dying for your principles and country was a privilege.

His obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times as it did in many major metropolitan papers. My grandmother received condolences from the nation’s most senior military and civilian commanders, including President Truman, General MacArthur, and Admirals Nimitz and Halsey. Navy Secretary Forrestal wrote her that “the entire Navy mourned.”

In the Naval Academy yearbook for 1906, the year my grandfather graduated, the editors chose quotations from the classics to describe each member of the class. For my grandfather, the choice was prophetic, a line from Milton: “That power which erring men call chance.”

He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery following a Washington funeral attended by Forrestal and the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Ernie King. Among his pallbearers was General Alexander Vandergrift, who had commanded the Marines on Guadalcanal, and Vice Admiral Aubrey Fitch, the Superintendent of the United States Naval Academy. He was awarded a fourth star posthumously.

My father, who had left for the States immediately upon receiving word of the admiral’s death, arrived too late to pay his respects. My mother found him standing on the tarmac at San Diego when she returned from Washington. He was in the throes of deep grief, a grief that took years to subside. He told my mother he was relieved to have missed the funeral. “It would have killed me,” he explained.

There was, however, an event near the end of my grandfather’s life that no one discussed. In none of the published accounts of my grandfather’s death nor in any of the many tributes offered by his contemporaries was mention made of the incident that had cost my grandfather his command just one day before the war’s end.

Less than three months earlier, he had been ordered by Nimitz to resume command of Task Force 38, which at that time constituted almost the entire Third Fleet as it provided air support to the American invasion of Okinawa. One week after he resumed command, my grandfather and Halsey received the first reports from search planes of a tropical storm south of Okinawa that was fast becoming a typhoon.

When the first reports of the June typhoon were received, the fleet meteorologists advised Halsey not to move the fleet. But Halsey, fearing that the typhoon would drive him westward and in range of Japanese planes based in China, ordered his task groups to sail southeast in an attempt to get around the storm. My grandfather was aboard his flagship, the Shangri-La. Puzzled by his instructions, he turned to his friend, a war correspondent for the Associated Press, Dick O’Malley, and said, “What the hell is Halsey doing, trying to intercept another typhoon?” His observation was a reference to Halsey’s actions during a typhoon that had struck the fleet in December 1944, sinking two destroyers. According to John Thach, my grandfather had recommended a heading for the fleet that would have avoided the earlier storm, as had Admiral Nimitz. But Halsey had insisted on another course, a course that tragically failed to take his ships out of harm’s way.

A little less than six months later, at one o’clock on the morning of June 5, Halsey received a late report from an amphibious command ship that this latest storm was too far to the south for the fleet to get safely around it. Halsey attempted to get out of its way by reversing course from southeast to northwest, greatly surprising the commanders of his task groups, who were now in imminent peril.

At four o’clock, one of those commanders, Admiral J. J. Clark, signaled my grandfather (to whom Halsey had given tactical command of the fleet’s race to safer waters) that their present course would bring his task group directly into the storm. A few minutes later he signaled, “I can get clear of the center of the storm quickly by steering 120. Please advise.”

My grandfather consulted Halsey, who advised against a course change. He then signaled Clark for an updated report of the position and bearing of the storm’s eye before ordering Clark to use his best judgment. After communicating with Halsey and Clark, my grandfather could have spent only a few minutes considering the matter before deciding to reject Halsey’s advice. But it was a few minutes too long. His order came twenty minutes after Clark signaled for advice and too late for his task group to escape the worst of the storm.

Although none of Clark’s ships sank, many of them were damaged, including four carriers. One hundred and forty-two aircraft were lost. Six men from Clark’s task group and a nearby fueling group were swept overboard by the storm-tossed seas and drowned. Four others were seriously injured.

A few days after Task Force 38 resumed operations off Okinawa, my grandfather and Halsey were ordered to appear before a court of inquiry on June 15. In the court’s opinion, the fleet’s encounter with the typhoon was directly attributable to Halsey’s order to change course and my grandfather’s failure to instruct Clark for twenty minutes.

Upon receiving the court’s report, Secretary Forrestal was prepared to relieve both Halsey and my grandfather. But Admiral King persuaded Forrestal that Halsey’s relief would be too great a blow to the Navy’s and the country’s morale.

Two months later, my grandfather was ordered to relinquish his command.

Professional naval officers constitute a small community today. It was a much smaller one in the years when my father and grandfather made their living at sea. Yet I only learned of the episode that closed my grandfather’s career when, many years later, I read an account of the typhoon in E. B. Potter’s biography of Admiral Halsey.

My father never mentioned it to me.

–– CHAPTER 2 –– Slew

In his memoirs, Admiral Halsey makes brief mention of the typhoon, blaming his task group’s encounter with it on late warnings and erroneous predictions of the storm’s course, but he offers no description of my grandfather’s role in the disaster.

My grandfather’s request to return home rather than witness the drama of Japan’s surrender was a measure of his despair over losing his command. Halsey did write of his subordinate’s outrage at being relieved of his command, describing him as “thoroughly sore.”

I once suspected, as my father probably had, that the court’s findings had hastened my grandfather’s death. But as I grew older, it became easier to dismiss my suspicion as the dramatization of the end of a life that needed no embellishment from a sentimental namesake. My grandfather had not been banished into retirement after losing his command. President Truman had ordered him to Washington to serve under General Omar Bradley as the deputy director of the new Veterans Administration to help integrate back into civilian society the millions of returning American veterans, a prestigious and important appointment.

I doubt any assignment would have eased immediately the indignation he must have felt over losing his last wartime command. But by all accounts, my grandfather was a tough, willful, resilient man who, had he lived, would have resolved to serve with distinction in his new post as the surest way to put a great distance between himself and that fateful storm.

I was a few days shy of my ninth birthday when my grandfather died. I had seen very little of him during the war, and most of those occasions were hurried affairs. I remember being awakened in the dead of night on several occasions when he dropped in unannounced on his way from one assignment to another. My mother would assemble us on the parlor couch and then search the house for her camera, to record another brief reunion between her children and their famous grandfather. Even before the war, my father’s career often kept a continent or more between my grandparents and me. And the recollections I have of him have dimmed over the half century that has elapsed since I saw him last.

The image that remains is that of a rail-thin, gaunt, hawk-faced man whose slight build was disguised by a low-timbered voice and a lively, antic presence. It was fun to be in his company, and particularly so if you were the primary object of his attention, as I remember being when we were together.

He rolled his own cigarettes, which he smoked constantly, and his one-handed technique fascinated me. While the skill was anything but neat (Admiral Halsey once ordered a Navy steward to follow him around with a dustpan and broom whenever he was aboard the admiral’s flagship), that it could be accomplished at all struck me as praiseworthy. He would give me his empty bags of Bull Durham tobacco, which I valued highly, and which deepened my appreciation of the performance.

In today’s slang, he lived large. He was called Sid by his family and Slew by his fellow officers, for reasons I never learned. He liked to take his shoes off when he worked and walk around the office in his stocking feet. He smoked, swore, drank, and gambled at every opportunity he had. His profile in the 1943 Current Biography described him as “one of the Navy’s best plain and fancy cussers.”

Rear Admiral Howard Kuehl served on my grandfather’s staff as a young lieutenant during the campaign for the Solomon Islands, when my grandfather commanded all land-based aircraft in the South Pacific. In an article he wrote about his wartime experiences, he affectionately recounted an example of his boss’s colorful idiosyncrasies.

In addition to his other duties, Kuehl served as the wine mess treasurer, an assignment that obliged him to maintain a meager inventory of liquor for the officers’ recreational use and to obtain from my grandfather and his staff officers adequate funds for that purpose. When an officer received transfer orders, he was entitled to a refund of his wine mess share. In September 1942, after my grandfather had received orders reassigning him to Washington, Kuehl visited him on the afternoon before his scheduled departure. Dutifully attempting to return my grandfather’s share of the kitty, he was momentarily taken aback when my grandfather ordered that it be returned “in kind.” Summoning considerable courage, Kuehl informed his boss that because liquid spirits were a precious commodity aboard ship it was an unofficial but scrupulously observed custom that an officer returning to the States would not take any with him. Assuming no further admonishment was necessary, Kuehl then handed over to my disgruntled grandfather the money owed to him.

The next morning, my grandfather’s staff lined up at the gangway to shake his hand and bid him an affectionate farewell. When he reached his intrepid wine mess treasurer, he shot him a look of affected displeasure and said, “Kuehl, goddammit, you’re a crook.”

My mother often recounts the occasions when her father-in-law would order her to accompany him on a long night of carousing in his favorite gambling den of the moment. He seemed to have one in every place he was stationed. He also managed to spend considerable time at horse tracks, where his enthusiasm for the sport was evident in the sums of money he spent to make it interesting. As commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, he would order his yeoman into the first boat headed ashore whenever the Ranger came into home port, tasking him with the urgent business of placing his bets with the local bookie.

A young ensign, William Smedberg, fresh from the Naval Academy, reported for duty to the USS New Mexico, where my grandfather was serving as executive officer. An hour after he arrived he was summoned to my grandfather’s cabin. Apparently, the ship’s home port hosted a rowing regatta among the officers and enlisted men of the various ships stationed there, and my grandfather, being a sporting man who enjoyed a good wager, had taken a keen interest in the event. He had examined Ensign Smedberg’s record at the Academy and discovered he had been coxswain on an Academy crew. Smedberg recounted their exchange:

“Young man, I understand that you were a coxswain at the Naval Academy?”

“Yes, sir, I was coxswain of the hundred-and-fifty-pound crew.”

“Well, that’s good, because you’re going to be coxswain now of the officers’ crew and the enlisted crew. You’re to take them both out every morning we’re in port at five o’clock. And you’re to win both those races.”

They won both races, making my grandfather a happy and somewhat more prosperous man. (Ensign Smedberg would eventually reach flag rank, serve as Superintendent of the Naval Academy when I was a midshipman there, and retire a vice admiral.)

My grandmother once informed my grandfather of a new treatment for ulcers she had just read about in a magazine. Pounding his fist on a table, he shouted, “Not one penny of my money for doctors. I’m spending it all on riotous living.” My grandmother was reported to have given him an adequate allowance for that purpose while retaining unchallenged control over the rest of the family’s finances.

While serving as a pallbearer for one of his Naval Academy classmates on a cold, rainy day at Arlington National Cemetery, my grandfather listened to a young officer suggest that he button up his raincoat to protect himself from the elements. The old man, raincoat flapping in the wind, looked at his solicitous subordinate and said, “You don’t think I got where I am by taking care of my health, do you?”

My mother, who was enchanted by him, keeps in her living room a large oil portrait of the admiral, distinguished and starched in his navy whites. In reality he was a disheveled-looking man with a set of false teeth so ill-fitting that they made a constant clicking noise when he moved his jaw and caused him to whistle when he spoke.

Admiral Halsey and he were such good friends that even in the strain of war, when my grandfather was Halsey’s subordinate, theirs was a relaxed and open relationship marked by mutual respect and candor. They delighted in ribbing each other mercilessly and playing practical jokes on each other. On the evening before a trip to Guadalcanal together, my grandfather had spent the night in Halsey’s quarters. He had absentmindedly left his teeth sitting on a bureau in Halsey’s bathroom. Halsey saw the teeth sitting there and, delighted by an opportunity to discomfit his old friend, slipped them into his shirt pocket. One of my grandfather’s aides recalled the scene that followed as the party was departing for Guadalcanal, my grandfather frantically searching for his missing teeth while Halsey badgered him to hurry up.

“Can’t go, I can’t go. I’ve lost my teeth,” he implored. To which the much-amused Halsey responded, “How do you expect to run naval aviation if you can’t take care of your own teeth?”

After another fruitless search, and a few more minutes of Halsey poking fun at him, and my grandfather hurling insults right back, my grandfather resigned himself to going to Guadalcanal toothless. At the plane, a grinning Halsey handed the teeth back to him, and caught, I am sure, a torrent of abuse from my grandfather.

When in combat, he dispensed with all Navy regulations governing the attire of a flag officer. Disheveled, stooped, weighing only 140 pounds, and looking many years older than his age, he was, nevertheless, unmistakably Navy. Sailors who served under him called him, behind his back but affectionately, “Popeye the sailor man.” He wore a ratty, crushed green cap with its frame removed from the crown and an officer’s insignia sewn onto the visor. Halsey once described it as “unique in naval costume.” Like most sailors, my grandfather was a superstitious man, and he treasured his “combat cap” as a good luck talisman. So did everyone else on his flagship, fearing that any misfortune that befell the old man’s hat was a sign of approaching calamity. Whenever the wind blew the hat from its perch, men would dive to the deck and frantically scramble for it lest it be blown overboard. My grandfather, who was aware of the crew’s shared regard for the supernatural powers of his unorthodox headgear, watched in amused silence and grinned broadly when a relieved sailor handed it back to him.

The cap was a gift from the wife of a naval aviator. My grandfather was much admired by the aviators under his command and by their families, who knew how deeply he grieved over the loss of his pilots. I have heard from colleagues of my grandfather that he would cry routinely when he received casualty reports. “Whenever a pilot was lost,” John Thach said of him, “it was not just a sad thing, but it seemed like a personal loss to him and it took a lot out of him.” He loved life, and lived his as fully as anyone could. It is easy to understand how greatly it must have pained him to see any man, especially someone under his command, lose his life prematurely.

Commander Thach recalled how my grandfather liked to talk to the pilots just after they returned from a strike. Thach would select those pilots whose experiences he knew would most interest the old man and bring them immediately to the admiral’s cabin. My grandfather would give them a cup of coffee and listen intently as his young flyers described the details of their mission, always asking them at the end of the interview, “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

The pilots loved these exchanges, recognizing in my grandfather’s genuine interest in their views a regard for them that was not always apparent in the busy, distracted mien of other senior commanders. My grandfather valued the interviews as well. He believed an able commander profited from the insights of the men under his command and should always take care to see that his own decisions were informed by the assessments of those who were charged with executing them. “He never quit learning,” Thach observed. “He didn’t have complete and abiding faith in his own judgment, and I don’t think anyone should.”

Cecil King, a retired chief warrant officer, had served under my grandfather’s command at the naval air station in Panama in 1936. My grandfather had ferociously chewed him out once for writing false dispatches as a practical joke, one of which reported a Japanese attack on an American embassy. Although he gave the young sailor the tongue-lashing of his life, he didn’t have him court-martialed or even seriously discipline him. Eight years later, when my grandfather was commanding the fast carriers in the Pacific in the last year of the war, King happened to be standing in a crowd of sailors in New Guinea when my grandfather and several of his aides walked by. A few paces after he passed King and his buddies, my grandfather stopped and turned around. Pointing his finger at King, he said, “You’re the son of a bitch who almost started World War Two by yourself,” and laughed.

That he would remember so many years later, with his mind preoccupied with the demands of a wartime command, one of the tens of thousands of sailors he had commanded over his career is a remarkable testament not only to his memory, but to his devotion to his men. Certainly King thought so. “Every skipper’s a legend to his people. And he was a legend to us. The fact that he smoked Bull Durham cigarettes, rolled them himself; the fact that he didn’t wear shoes; the fact that he was just a giant of a guy. Everything he did was first-class.”

An aviator under my grandfather’s command was believed to have been drunk when he crashed his airplane and died. According to King, for the benefit of the dead man’s family, my grandfather kept the suspected cause of the accident from coming to light in an official inquiry. “I was so struck by his compassion and understanding,” King remarked. “The common conception was that he would go the last mile and some more too [for his men].”

James Michener knew my grandfather, and wrote briefly about him in the preface to his famous work Tales of the South Pacific: “I also knew Admiral McCain in a very minor way. He was an ugly old aviator. One day he flew over Santo and pointed down at the island wilderness and said, ‘That’s where we’ll build our base.’ And the base was built there, and millions of dollars were spent there, and everyone agrees that Santo was the best base the Navy ever built in the region. I was always mighty proud of McCain, for he was in aviation, too.”

My father believed him to be the most exemplary leader in the United States Navy. “My father,” he said, “was a very great leader, and people loved him…. My mother used to say about him that the blood of life flowed through his veins, he was so keenly interested in people…. He was a man of great moral and physical courage.”

In pictures of him from the war you sense his irreverent, eccentric individualism. He looked like a cartoonist’s rendering of an old salt. As a boy and a young man, I found the attitude his image conveyed irresistible. Perhaps not consciously, I spent much of my youth—and beyond—exaggerating that attitude, too much for my own good, and my family’s peace of mind.

Of more lasting duration, and of far greater consequence, was the military tradition he bequeathed to my father and me; the tradition he was born to, the latest in a long line of my ancestors who had worn the country’s uniform.

He was the first McCain to choose the Navy. Until he entered the Academy in 1902, the men of his family had served in the Army; his brother, William Alexander, a cavalry officer who was known in the Army as “Wild Bill,” was the last. Bill McCain had chased Pancho Villa with Pershing, served as an artillery officer in World War I, and later been a brigadier general in the Quartermaster Corps. He was the last McCain to graduate from West Point.

No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers. But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war, in the War for Independence, on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. One distinguished ancestor served on General Washington’s staff. Camp McCain in Grenada, Mississippi, is named for my grandfather’s uncle Major General Henry Pinckney McCain, a West Pointer, and reputedly a stern autocrat who was known as the father of the Selective Service for organizing the draft in World War I.

We trace our martial lineage through two families, the McCains and the Youngs. My great-grandfather, yet another John Sidney McCain, married Elizabeth Young in 1877. Both were descendants of Scots Presbyterians who, in the aftermath of Queen Mary’s death at the hands of her royal English cousin, suffered the privations that were the fate of those who had remained loyal to the Scottish crown.

The McCains, bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald, arrived in the New World shortly after America gained her independence, when Hugh McCain settled his wife and six children in Caswell County, North Carolina, and built his estate, Lenox Castle.

Hugh’s grandson, William Alexander McCain, died while serving in the Mississippi cavalry during the Civil War. William’s oldest son, Joseph Watt McCain, also fought for the Confederacy. In his first battle he passed out at the sight of blood and was mistakenly left for dead by his comrades. William’s third son, the aforementioned father of the Selective Service, Henry Pinckney McCain, was the first to serve the flag of the restored Union.

William McCain’s second son, my great-grandfather, barely fourteen years old at the end of the Civil War, offered to enlist as well, giving his age as eighteen. He was rejected, but later in his life would express his patriotism by serving as sheriff of Carroll County, Mississippi, and inspiring his sons, my grandfather and great uncle, to pursue careers as professional officers. His wife’s family, however, claimed a more distinguished and ancient military history.

The Youngs, of the Clan Lamont from the Firth Cumbrae Islands, arrived in America earlier than the McCains, having first fled to Ireland during England’s “Great Rebellion.” In 1646, Mary Young Lamont and her four sons crossed the Irish Sea in open boats after her husband and chief of the clan, Sir James Lamont, and his clansmen were defeated in battle by the forces of Archibald Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyle.

The long-feuding clans had fought on different sides in the civil war, the Campbells for Cromwell, and the Lamonts loyal to Charles I. After surrendering to the Campbells, two hundred Lamont men, women, and children had their throats cut by the villainous duke, and Sir James and his brothers spent five years in a dungeon.

Fearing further reprisals, Sir James’s wife and sons wisely fled their hostile native land, adopted Mary’s maiden name, Young, and settled quietly in County Antrim, Ireland. Two generations later, the family immigrated in the person of Hugh Young to Augusta County, Virginia.

In 1764, Hugh’s sons, John, a captain in the Augusta County militia, and Thomas, fought a brief skirmish with Indians in the Battle of Back Creek. Thomas was killed and scalped. Like his descendants, Captain Young was not one to suffer such an insult quietly. He tracked the killers for three days, fought them again, killed a number of them, and recovered his brother’s scalp, burying it with Thomas’s body.

It was John Young who, as a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, caught the attention of George Washington, joined the infantry, and was welcomed to the general’s staff. Valorous and exceedingly diligent about safeguarding his family’s honor, John Young set an example emulated by generations of Youngs and McCains who eagerly reinforced the family reputation for quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform.

John Young’s three elder sons all died in childhood. His fourth son, David Young, held the rank of captain in the United States Army and fought in the War of 1812. David’s son, Samuel Hart Young, moved the family to Mississippi, where Samuel’s eldest son, Dr. John William Young, fought for the Confederacy.

The fifth of Samuel Young’s eight children, Elizabeth Ann, united the McCain and Young families by her marriage to my great-grandfather, and their union gave life to two renowned fighters, my great-uncle Wild Bill and my grandfather Sid McCain.

Wild Bill joined the McCain name to an even more distinguished warrior family. His wife, Mary Louise Earle, was descended from royalty. She claimed as ancestors Scottish kings back to Robert the Bruce. But her family took their greatest pride in their direct descent from Emperor Charlemagne.

Although it was his brother’s children who extended the Charlemagne line, I suspect my grandfather felt justified in borrowing the distinction for the rest of the family. He took considerable pride in the McCains’ association with the distinguished conqueror, thinking it only fitting that his descendants share in the reflected glory.

As a boy and young man, I may have pretended not to be affected by the family history, but my studied indifference was a transparent mask to those who knew me well. As it was for my forebears, my family’s history was my pride. When I heard my father or one of my uncles refer to an honored ancestor or a notable event from our family’s past, my boy’s imagination would conjure up some future day of glory when I would add my own paragraph to the family’s legend. My father was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of direct descendants of General Washington’s officers. His evident pride in claiming such distinguished ancestry gave me the sense not only that I had a claim on my country’s history, but that it would fall to me to represent the family when the history of my generation was recorded. As a teenager, I would occasionally show my closest friends the picture of the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri and point with pride to the McCain who stood among the conquerors.

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.

It is a formidable history, not easily escaped even today by descendants who might wish to pursue some interest outside the family business.

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 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.

I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions. They never lamented the South’s fall, although they had been loyal to its flag, nor did they discuss the war much, even among themselves. Neither did they curse the decline in the family’s fortunes, the lot they shared with many plantation families in the defeated South. By all accounts, they were lively, proud, and happy in their world on the Mississippi Delta. Yet my uncle and grandfather left the comfort of the only world they knew, never to be rooted to one location again.

I am second cousin to the gifted writer Elizabeth Spencer. She is the daughter of my grandfather’s sister and was raised in Carrollton, Mississippi, near the family estate. In her graceful memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, she wrote affectionately of her two uncles and the first stirring of their lifelong romance with military adventures.

After two years at “Ole Miss,” my grandfather decided to follow his older brother to West Point. At his brother’s urging, my grandfather prepared for the exacting entrance exams by taking for practice the Naval Academy exams that were given some weeks earlier at the post office in the state capital. His scores were high enough to earn him an appointment to Annapolis, which, with little reflection, he accepted.

He was a popular midshipman but a less than serious student, graduating in the bottom quarter of his class. That rank, however, exceeded the grasp of his son and grandson, who graduated well beneath it and were lucky to receive their commissions at all.

In his third year at Annapolis, he failed his annual physical. In a report to the Academy Superintendent, the examining medical officer rejected him for further service “on account of defective hearing.” The superintendent responded by noting the “great need of officers at the present time, and the fact that this Midshipman has nearly completed his course at the Naval Academy at great expense to the Government,” and recommended to the Surgeon General that “this physical disability be waived until the physical examination, prior to graduation, next year.” The Surgeon General approved the waiver.

Whether or not his hearing recovered by the time he graduated is unknown. I can find no record of his last physical examination at the Academy. I can only assume that if the hearing defect persisted the following year, the examining physician overlooked it. In his quarterly fitness report of June 30, 1906, all that is noted on the single line describing the midshipman’s health is “very good.”

My grandfather’s undistinguished record at the Academy did not affect his subsequent career in the Navy. In those days, an Academy graduate was not immediately commissioned an ensign, but was required to serve for two years as a “passed midshipman.” Following graduation, he saw action on the Asiatic Station in the Philippines, serving first on the battleship Ohio and then on the cruiser Baltimore.

He caught the approving eye of his first commanding officer, Captain L. G. Logan, skipper of the Ohio, who filed laudatory quarterly fitness reports, remarking that “Midshipman McCain is a promising officer, and I commend him for favorable consideration of the Academic Board.” Six months later, a more skeptical CO, Commander J.M. Helms, skipper of the Baltimore, reserved judgment about the young officer, noting, “I have not been acquainted with this officer long enough to know much about him.”

By his next fitness report, my grandfather had apparently run afoul of his new skipper, who had by that time become acquainted enough with him to fault him as “not up to the average standard of midshipmen” and to advise that he “not be ordered to any ship as a regular watch officer until qualified.”

While giving him mostly good marks for handling the various duties of a junior officer, Commander Helms apparently found my grandfather’s discipline wanting. He noted that he had suspended him “from duty for three days for neglect of duty.” While standing as the officer of the watch, he had allowed officers who had attended a party in the navy yard to return to ship and continue to “get drunk.” The next quarter, Commander Helms again reported that my grandfather was “not up to the average standard of midshipmen.”

Shortly thereafter, my grandfather was spared further reproaches from the disapproving Commander Helms. He was ordered to serve on the destroyer Chauncey, where he was highly regarded by his new commanding officer. Six months later, he reported for duty as executive officer to the great Chester Nimitz, then a young ensign, on a gunboat captured from the Spanish, the USS Panay, and had, by all accounts, the time of his life sailing around the southern islands of the Philippine archipelago.

Their mission allowed them to sail virtually wherever they pleased, call on whatever ports they chose, showing the flag, in essence, to the Filipinos at a time when the United States feared a Japanese challenge for control of the Philippines. The Panay was less than a hundred feet long and had a crew of thirty, handpicked by Nimitz. 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 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.’”

His tour in Asia ended in late 1908, when, after being commissioned an ensign, he sailed for home on the battleship USS Connecticut, the flagship of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, then en route home from its famous world cruise.

In the First World War my grandfather served as an engineering officer on the armored cruiser San Diego, escorting wartime convoys across the Atlantic through schools of German U-boats and learning how to keep his composure in moments of great peril and stress.

In 1935, Captain McCain enrolled in flight training, complying with a new Navy regulation that required carrier skippers to learn to fly. Unlike many of his contemporaries, whose flight training was more verbal than practical, my grandfather genuinely believed that flight instruction would be indispensable to him if he was to command a carrier competently. Recognizing its potential importance, he had begun to study naval aviation as early as 1926. “I was stubborn about it,” he said. But that did not mean he felt it necessary to become a skilled pilot. Cecil King remarked that in Panama, “the base prayed for his safe return each time he flew.”

He would never enjoy the reputation of an accomplished pilot. According to the superintendent of training at the naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida (where I would learn to fly twenty-three years later), in the last two weeks of his training, my grandfather “cracked up five airplanes.” Reportedly, before he soloed for the first time, he told his instructor, “Son, the Bureau of Navigation sent me down here to learn to fly. Now, you do it.” Nevertheless, he did solo, and he completed a full course at the naval flight school. He was fifty-two years old when he earned his wings, among the oldest men ever to become Navy pilots.

If he never felt obliged to learn how to fly well, he did love the sensation of flying. He had interrupted his training to spend time on the carrier Ranger, to observe how the ships he longed to command worked. He told the skipper that he wanted to spend all his time flying in the backseat of the carrier’s planes. The pilot designated to fly him on these excursions recounted the experience many years later, admitting the Ranger’s skipper had mischievously told him to give the old man “the works.”

At fifteen thousand feet, the pilot began a simulated dive-bombing run on the Ranger. He threw the plane into a vertical dive, straight down and at full throttle, toward the pitching carrier. By the time the pilot pulled out of the dive they had approached the carrier so closely and at such a high speed that they “blew the hats off the people on the Ranger bridge.”

As they began their ascent, the pilot turned around to see how his passenger was doing. Instead of finding a frightened old man in his backseat, the pilot was pleased to see my grandfather with “a grin up around both ears and shaking his hands like a boxer.” Taking this as an indication that my grandfather wouldn’t object to a repeat performance, the pilot dove on the carrier again. This time, however, my grandfather’s ears failed to pop during their steep descent, and when the pilot turned to check on him after pulling out of the second dive he saw that my grandfather was suffering considerable pain from the pressure in his head. The pilot signaled that he wanted to come in, and landed the plane safely on the carrier deck. The ship’s doctor rushed to attend my grandfather and in short order managed to equalize the pressure in my grandfather’s ears.

The pilot didn’t know what kind of reception he would get from my grandfather after the doctor had finished treating him. He worried that the pleasure my grandfather had expressed in the thrill of their first dive might have been replaced by annoyance at having been put through the rigors of a second dive without giving his express consent. The concern was unnecessary. My grandfather simply thanked him “for a very swell ride.”

“I liked the old boy from then on. So did most of the rest of the gang. They weren’t worried about him. He could take it.”

–– CHAPTER 3 –– Gallant Command

For five months, early in the Second World War, my grandfather commanded all land-based aircraft operations in the South Pacific, and he was serving in that capacity during the first two months, August through September 1942, of the battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

Lasting from August 1942 to February 1943, the Guadalcanal campaign, in the words of historian Samuel Eliot Morison, was “the most bitterly contested in American history since the Campaign for Northern Virginia in the Civil War,” comprising “seven major naval engagements, at least ten pitched battles, and innumerable forays, bombardments and skirmishes.”

On August 7, in the first amphibious operation conducted by American forces since the Spanish-American War, the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal to prevent the Japanese from using a nearly completed airfield for their land-based bombers. Simultaneously, three thousand Marines landed on nearby Tulagi Island to seize its harbor and the Japanese seaplane base there. Despite being harried by Japanese bombers, the landings were astonishingly successful. The Marines, encountering ineffective opposition on the ground, had secured all beachheads on the two islands as well as the air base on Guadalcanal by the evening of August 8. They renamed the captured base Henderson Field.

Whatever relief American commanders may have felt over the initial success of the operation was soon forgotten in the disaster that occurred forty hours after the first Marines had waded ashore. Shortly after midnight on August 9, a task group from the Japanese Eighth Fleet surprised the divided Allied naval force protecting the landings. The ensuing Battle of Savo Island, named for a small volcanic island several miles off Guadalcanal, ended in what Morison accurately termed “the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Navy in a fair fight.” By the time the Japanese admiral in command of the enemy force called off the attack for fear of being counterattacked by American carrier planes, his ships had sunk four heavy cruisers and one destroyer, killing 1,270 men.

Fortunately, the Japanese, having gained by their victory command of the sea, failed to land adequate reinforcements on the islands. Thus the Allied defeat was not a decisive event in the battle for the Solomon Islands. It was, however, a bloody defeat, giving a name to the water between Savo and Guadalcanal islands—Ironbottom Sound. Worse, the surviving Allied ships that had been forced from the area had not completed off-loading the landing force’s food and arms. Sixteen thousand Marines were left stranded with only half their weapons and supplies on the densely forested, mountainous island. They were forced to live on reduced rations and whatever rice they could scrounge. Consideration was given to withdrawing them, but the value of the easily taken Henderson Field, with sufficient space and level ground for large bombers and poorly defended by a small Japanese garrison, motivated Allied commanders to continue the campaign.

On August 15, my grandfather ordered the first Marine Corps planes to land at Henderson. Supplies and reinforcements arrived the same day by sea. On August 18, the Japanese landed a small, inadequate force of a thousand men. The Marines destroyed them two days later. More Japanese reinforcements were under way, arriving almost nightly. By mid-September, six thousand Japanese were ashore, still not a sufficient number to dislodge the Marines, but battles raged daily throughout most of the month. In the Battle of Bloody Ridge a thousand Japanese were killed at a cost of forty Marines. Nevertheless, the Japanese managed to continue reinforcing their garrison, and the most serious land battles for Guadalcanal would not begin until October, after my grandfather had been ordered to Washington by President Roosevelt to serve as Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations.

In the early weeks of the campaign, Japanese planes and ships made up for lack of progress on the ground by pounding Guadalcanal daily with shells and bombs. My grandfather rushed planes, fuel, and ammunition to the island and organized air strikes against the enemy. Gasoline was in terribly short supply on the island, and extraordinary heroics were performed by the skippers and crews of seaplane tenders, their ships overloaded with drums of fuel, who sailed through exceedingly dangerous waters and under skies thick with enemy planes to carry gasoline to Guadalcanal. He spoke often and gratefully of the courage of the crews that brought gasoline to his dry planes at Henderson.

He also became emotional, often crying, when he recalled the faces and spirit of the Marines and pilots defending the airfield in those exhausting, dangerous early weeks of the campaign. He spoke of his young pilots who “took a beating unequaled in the annals of war. Without relief, they fought day after day, night after night, for weeks.”

In September he twice flew to Guadalcanal in a B-17, leading large contingents of fighter planes to Henderson, “slipping them in at dusk when the Japs couldn’t see us.” He stayed ashore, under fierce bombing from Japanese aircraft.

He later told one of his air commanders that the pilots he met there had resigned themselves to die for their country and had shaken his hand with the attitude of men “taking a last farewell.” For the rest of the war, the loss of a single pilot would distress him terribly. I suspect every casualty report he read must have summoned up the faces of those fatalistic pilots on Guadalcanal who were ready to die at his command.

There was one story from his experiences on Guadalcanal that he always delighted to tell. One night after he had gone to sleep, a wave of Zeros attacked, and a Marine lieutenant escorted him to a trench, where he took cover with a crowd of tired Marines. One sergeant, particularly weary of this nightly ritual, expressed his displeasure by shouting a string of profanities over the noise of the attacking planes. The lieutenant yelled at him, “Pipe down! We’ve got an admiral in here.” The offending Marine paused for a moment and then loudly sighed, “I’ll be good and almighty damned,” causing the admiral in question to laugh heartily, grateful to be so amused at a moment of peril.

My grandfather was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his leadership during the early days of the Solomon Islands campaign. The citation commended his “courageous initiative,” “judicious foresight,” and “inspiring devotion to duty.”

As Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics, he made one last visit to Guadalcanal in January 1943. Halsey, Nimitz, and my grandfather flew to Guadalcanal together to inspect the airfield and the condition of the men still fighting what remained of the enemy garrison.

Bull Halsey had assumed command of the South Pacific fleet in October. After a series of legendary sea battles during which Halsey had secured his reputation as a daring and determined commander, culminating in the Battle of Guadalcanal from November 12 to the 15th, Japanese hopes of retaking the island became futile. Over a period of six days beginning on October 20, significantly reinforced Japanese troops were defeated in fierce jungle fighting by the now battle-hardened Marine defenders. Their grim, bloody battles ensured Guadalcanal’s vaunted place in American military lore. By the middle of November, Japan’s defeats on land and sea had guaranteed that the island would remain in American hands. Yet they fought on for nearly three more months.

My grandfather, returning to the island in the last days of the campaign, was impressed by what he found, relieved to see fit, vigorous, well-supplied, and confident Marines mopping up the last of the enemy. The valiant 1st Marine Division had by this time been relieved by fresh reinforcements. And he went to sleep that night in a small hut near the airfield, happy and confident that the long, difficult struggle was nearly won.

Halsey’s biographer, E. B. Potter, wrote: “There were few wiser or more competent officers in the navy than Slew McCain, but whenever his name came up, somebody had a ridiculous story to tell about him—and many of the stories were true.” Potter was right. Even today, I receive letters from men who served with my grandfather and want to share an anecdote about him. Among my favorites is the story of his last night on Guadalcanal.

After he, Halsey, and Nimitz had retired for the night, at about ten-thirty, Japanese bombers attacked. The admirals had just survived an attack the day before, while they were conferring at the naval base on Espíritu Santo. With the evening attack at Henderson, it was clear that Japanese intelligence had learned of the presence of three admirals in the field, and that they were the target of the attack. Halsey and my grandfather left their huts as the first bombs struck, each diving for cover into a different trench. As legend has it, my grandfather’s trench was a latrine ditch—the latrine had been moved that morning, but the trench had not yet been filled in with dirt. My grandfather is said to have spent the rest of the raid there shivering in foul conditions and the mosquito-infested night air.

As the Chief of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics, he coordinated the design, procurement, and maintenance of naval aircraft. Coming late to naval aviation made him suspect in the eyes of career aviators, who would have preferred one of their own in command. But his success at Guadalcanal convinced Roosevelt and Forrestal that he was the right man for the job. He would rather have stayed in the Pacific. Administrative work did not suit his restless nature. A subordinate remarked that he was “an excellent fighter, but a poor planner and administrator.” Whenever he could, he avoided the interminable meetings of the various production boards he served on, Allied conferences, and other planning discussions, designating a subordinate to attend in his place. He was, it was said, a frequent figure at the Army-Navy Club, where he indulged his love of pinochle. But if deskwork and its attendant bureaucracies bored him, he was, nevertheless, a man who took pride in accomplishing the objective of his mission. He showed, if not great attention to detail, his usual abundant energy in pursuit of his chief objective, to procure the world’s greatest naval air force.

His experiences at Guadalcanal had taught him what the Navy needed in the Pacific. Too few planes and too few men to fly them had forced the pilots under his command to fly constantly, and they had been reduced to a state of near lifelessness by the strain. When he arrived in Washington, he declared, “I want enough planes for the United States Navy and enough pilots to fly them.” He wanted two crews for every plane in the Navy. And he charged ahead procuring aircraft and personnel at a lightning pace. One observer likened him to a “little fighter plane trying to get at the enemy, darting and sweeping through the rambling Navy building.”

He ordered the production of Wildcats and Avengers accelerated, confident of the planes’ value as indispensable new instruments of war. “[They] prevented the invasion of Australia. They stopped the enemy at Guadalcanal and destroyed his airplanes at a ratio of several to one. They helped to drive him off at Midway and thus prevented the invasion of the Hawaiian Islands.” My grandfather knew how to fight the Japanese, and he outfitted the Navy for the task.

An approving Roosevelt appointed him to a newly created post, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air. He was the Navy’s air boss, responsible for every aspect, human and material, of naval aviation (often catching hell from a quarrelsome Halsey for his personnel decisions). He served in that command until the pace of war in the Pacific accelerated as the war in Europe approached its end.

In August 1944, he returned to the Pacific to temporarily command Task Group 38.1, one of the fast carrier groups in the Third Fleet’s powerful Task Force 38, in preparation for assuming command of the entire task force a few months later. This was the command my grandfather had aspired to above all others; the moment, I suspect, he had waited for all his life. An obituary writer for the New York Herald Tribune wrote of my grandfather’s return to the Pacific, “In September, 1944, a minor newspaper item revealed that Admiral McCain was off to sea again. The assignment was undisclosed, but the Japanese, and then America, had not long to wait before they knew.”

He was a born leader, fit for command not because of an imposing physical presence, but because he possessed an easy, natural authority with his men, whom he seemed to understand as if he had known them all their lives. Dick O’Malley, a veteran war correspondent, considered him one of the finest, most effective leaders in the Pacific Theater. With his reporter’s practiced eye for character details, Dick was struck by the unaffected qualities that made my grandfather such a gifted commander. “Admiral John S. McCain was a very quiet-spoken man but when he gave an order in his soft, clear voice, there was never any doubt there was command in it. I always remember that Admiral McCain seemed to get his orders carried out more promptly than others and there was a puzzling feeling that those doing his bidding didn’t feel pushed by authority so much as persuaded by reason…. I remember a day when we had a hell of a time with both kamikazes and land-based fighter planes. We were on the bridge after it was over and he smiled at a young lieutenant. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I’m putting you in for a citation. It was a very busy day.’ That was his style: relaxed, muted and soft-voiced, but when you heard it, it made your heart beat a little faster.”

He had been in command of the task group for barely two months when the long-awaited campaign to liberate the Philippine Islands began, leading to the largest naval battle of World War II, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A week before the campaign began, my grandfather would prove himself as brave and resolute a fighter as any of his illustrious forebears had been. And although circumstances kept him away from most of the action during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, before the guns were silent he would demonstrate again that like his old friend Halsey, he was a daring and resourceful commander, and perhaps the better tactician of the two.

In preparation for the assault, my grandfather’s fast carriers launched strikes against Japanese airfields on Formosa on October 12. Their mission was to destroy the enemy’s airpower available to defend against an attack on the Philippines. This they accomplished quite successfully, although they met with stiff resistance. Over the next two days, 520 Japanese planes were destroyed and considerable damage was inflicted on Japanese installations ashore.

The Japanese did manage a counterstrike, fiercely attacking the ships of Task Group 38.1. On October 13, an enemy torpedo plane penetrated the task group’s defense screen of fighter planes and hit the cruiser Canberra. The torpedo hit flooded the Canberra’s engine rooms, rendering her dead in the water. Rather than sink the wounded cruiser, my grandfather ordered another cruiser, the Wichita, to take her in tow while two destroyers circled them. He then assembled a covering force composed of destroyers and cruisers from three task groups to protect the Canberra as she was towed to port.

The next day and night, Japanese planes attacked in large numbers. The cruiser Houston was torpedoed. Badly damaged, without power, and listing seven degrees to starboard, the cruiser was in dire straits. The Houston’s skipper believed she was breaking up, and many of her crew jumped overboard. My grandfather told him to abandon ship, and ordered several destroyers to help rescue her crew. He gave orders to sink the cruiser once her crew was safe, but when he received word that her skipper thought she could be salvaged he ordered the cruiser Boston to tow the crippled Houston to safety.

Admiral Mitscher commanded the task force at the time. He had ordered my grandfather to save the cruisers if he could. In Commander Thach’s words, “Mitscher took the other task groups and got the hell out of there, leaving McCain with Task Group 38.1 alone to do the job.”

Using most of the entire task group as a protective screen, my grandfather had his ships steam ahead of the “crippled division,” which included the two damaged cruisers and their cruiser and destroyer escorts. They endured repeated fierce attack from enemy sorties, but ships’ guns and fighters from two of the task group’s light carriers managed to destroy most of the attackers. My grandfather wrote in his battle action report that until seven o’clock that evening “there were almost always bandits overhead.” All the while, planes from his heavy carriers continued to strike their targets on Formosa.

On the 15th, enemy planes again attacked, and one managed to hit the Houston with another torpedo. My grandfather had risked much to salvage the cruisers. It had taken almost eight hours to get the two ships under tow, and once that was accomplished the task group had been able to make a top speed of only two or three knots as it ran a gauntlet of Japanese air attacks. Wave after wave of Japanese planes were determined to make my grandfather’s decision to save the ships cost him dearly. Had they succeeded in finishing off either of the two cruisers, or worse, had they sunk any of his other ships, the decision to save the ships would have been regarded as a terribly costly mistake.

Battle action reports, with their dry, matter-of-fact recitation of successive events, portray little of the intense anxiety my grandfather must have felt during those five October days. An action of this complexity requires the commander to make hundreds of instant decisions, anticipating the extent and location of enemy assaults, positioning his ships accordingly, evaluating reports from anxious subordinates, and answering their urgent requests for instructions. Whatever strain he felt throughout this arduous battle was not apparent in my grandfather’s report.

In one sentence he notes a second hit on the Houston and the damage it inflicted. In the sentence below he reports “little activity on 17 October, routine Combat Air and anti-submarine patrols being maintained.” In the next sentence he signals the success of his venture and the relief he must have experienced by reporting simply, “At the end of the day, Task Group 38.1 turned to course 250, and headed back toward the Philippines on a high speed run at 25 knots.”

The author of a book on the fast carrier battles in the Pacific disparaged my grandfather, dismissing him as nothing more than a deputy to Halsey who was never given tactical command of his task force. Furthermore, the author alleged that my grandfather had relied completely on John Thach for tactical innovations. My grandfather did give enormous responsibilities to his operations officer and had always taken care to credit Thach with many of the task force’s innovations. When he hired Thach for the job, having never met him prior to that, Thach had asked him why he had selected him. “I’ve heard you’re not a yes man,” my grandfather answered, “and I don’t want any yes man on my staff.”

Thach, who admired my grandfather greatly, strongly disputed the author’s harsh criticism and insisted that “he had command all the time.”

He was a brave man, and he commanded with courage. Dick O’Malley, who observed him closely in the last, strenuous days of his command, said, “There wasn’t anything that could put the wind up in him.” In a letter Dick wrote to me, he recalled my grandfather’s courage under fire. “One day a kamikaze came out of the sun heading either for us or the Essex, which was close behind. [McCain] just stood leaning on the rail, watching. ‘They’ll get him with those five-inchers,’ he said calmly. They did.”

A little over three months after my grandfather brought the crippled cruisers safely to port, Admiral Halsey decorated him with the Navy Cross. Had the enterprise turned out differently, my grandfather might have been relieved of his command.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf began on October 23, 1944, when two U.S. submarines patrolling waters off Palawan Island in the southeastern tip of the Philippine archipelago encountered elements of an enormous Japanese battleship force under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. Over the next three days, four separate battles would be fought pitting a Japanese carrier fleet and two battleship forces against elements of the U.S. Third and Seventh fleets. When the last battle ended, the Japanese Navy was finished as an effective fighting force for the remainder of the war, but not before the United States Navy had nearly suffered a defeat of catastrophic dimensions.

On October 20, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur, the Sixth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, had staged amphibious landings on the beaches of Leyte Island in the middle of the archipelago, escorted and protected by the Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid. The operation was hugely successful. By the end of the day, seventy to eighty thousand troops were ashore.

Halsey’s Third Fleet, under the overall command of Admiral Nimitz, was ordered to cover and support the Seventh Fleet. Nimitz had added a clause to Halsey’s orders instructing his subordinate to seize an opportunity to destroy a major portion of the Japanese fleet if one arose in the course of the battle, giving Halsey, who had dreamed all his life of commanding an epic battle at sea, leave to fulfill his lifelong ambition. Nimitz’s failure to place both U.S. fleets under one naval command inevitably led to poor communications between the two fleets. When Halsey perceived an opportunity to take offensive action against the enemy and seized it, the dual command structure nearly resulted in strategic disaster.

On October 22, Halsey ordered my grandfather’s task group, the strongest carrier force in his fleet, to detach from the fleet and sail 660 miles to Ulithi Island to refuel. Even after the two American submarines discovered Kurita’s force in the Palawan Passage and destroyed three of its heavy cruisers, Halsey still saw no reason to order my grandfather to return. It was a decision that both Halsey and my grandfather would soon regret.

The Japanese knew that the loss of the Philippines would destroy any hope that Japan could yet prevail against its vastly superior enemy. They devised a desperate gamble to destroy the invading American force, risking virtually all that remained of the Japanese Navy in the attempt. A Northern Force with four carriers serving as a decoy was ordered to entice the offensive-minded Halsey into giving chase, leaving the Seventh Fleet exposed in Leyte Gulf.

Meanwhile, two Japanese battleship forces, Kurita’s powerful Center Force and a Southern Force, sailed for the central Philippines. The Southern Force would enter south of Leyte through the Surigao Strait. If Halsey fell for the decoy and left his station off the San Bernardino Strait, Kurita’s Center Force would force the unprotected strait from the north, sail down the coast of Samar Island, converge with the Southern Force, and destroy the unsupported American invasion fleet.

On the 23rd, Third Fleet aircraft located the Center Force, and Halsey prepared to do battle. The next day, he recalled my grandfather, but it was too late for him to get within range of the enemy, and Halsey was deprived of 40 percent of his air strength as he fought what is known as the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea.

In Leyte Gulf, Admiral Kinkaid was readying his Seventh Fleet to do battle with the small Japanese Southern Force. Lacking the big carriers of the Third Fleet, the Seventh Fleet had only eighteen small, unarmored escort carriers to provide airpower with lightly armed planes and poorly trained pilots. Nevertheless, Kinkaid knew his fleet, 738 ships in all, was more than a match for the enemy force approaching from the south.

The Japanese Northern Force had gone undetected until seventy-six of its aircraft attacked one of Halsey’s carrier groups late in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. Now aware that Japanese carriers were in the area, Halsey’s blood was up; he believed that “an opportunity to destroy a major portion of the enemy fleet” was at hand. He broke off the attack on Kurita’s force and ordered all of his carrier groups north to seek and annihilate Ozawa’s carriers. The decoy had succeeded. Halsey left the Seventh Fleet unguarded, vulnerable to and unaware of the threat approaching from the north.

Halsey had not even bothered to inform Kinkaid that he had left the strait. Before he ordered his forces north, he had signaled Nimitz that he intended to form three groups of his fast battleships into a new, powerful surface task force, Task Force 34. Kinkaid had intercepted the signal and assumed that the “three groups” were carrier groups that would be left behind to guard the strait. In fact, Halsey’s decision to attack the decoy force had preempted the formation of Task Force 34, and all the ships that would have constituted it were now steaming away from the strait.

As Kinkaid had expected, the Seventh Fleet’s cruisers, destroyers, and battleships quickly and effectively destroyed the Japanese Southern Force. But a few minutes after the last shots were fired, at dawn on October 25, Kurita’s ships began shelling one of the Seventh Fleet’s three escort carrier groups operating just north of the entrance to Leyte Gulf. This group, known by its radio call sign, “Taffy Three,” was seriously overmatched by the powerful enemy force now descending upon it. Nevertheless, the unit fought valiantly, losing one carrier, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort in the ensuing Battle of Samar Island.

As he raced toward the Northern Force, Halsey finally formed Task Force 34, and ordered the battleships to steam ahead of the carriers. Third Fleet aircraft began attacking the Japanese carriers at eight o’clock on the morning of the 25th, and continued until evening.

When the second strike of the day was under way, Halsey received an urgent message from Kinkaid informing him that the Seventh Fleet’s small carriers were under attack off Samar Island by a superior enemy force and pleading for assistance from Halsey’s carriers. Halsey ignored the message and continued north. He received several successive messages from Kinkaid, the last warning that Kinkaid’s battleships were running out of ammunition. At nine-thirty, Halsey signaled back, informing Kinkaid that my grandfather’s task group was on the way.

At ten o’clock, Halsey received a message from Admiral Nimitz: WHERE IS, REPEAT, WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? THE WORLD WONDERS. The message infuriated Halsey, who interpreted the sentence “The world wonders” as an insulting rebuke. He threw his cap to the deck after reading it.

Clearly, Nimitz was alarmed about the Seventh Fleet’s precarious situation and wanted Halsey’s battleships to defend the battered escort carrier units off Samar Island and prevent the enemy from entering Leyte Gulf. The success of the invasion hung in the balance. But the message to Halsey had been a mistake. The last three words had been included as padding to confuse enemy decoders. The signal clerk who received the message before it was handed to Halsey should have deleted them. The irate Halsey considered his response for an hour before signaling Nimitz, I HAVE SENT MCCAIN.

My grandfather was already on the way before Halsey recalled him to the battle. He had intercepted Kinkaid’s messages to Halsey and had made the decision to render whatever assistance he could to the outgunned escort carriers without waiting for orders from the fleet commander. He turned his task group around and raced downwind at a speed of thirty knots toward the battle.

At the time, he had two squadrons of dive-bombers in the air that had not returned from scouting patrols. Carriers have to turn into the wind before aircraft can land on them. In order not to slow down the entire task group while the returning scouts landed, he ordered his carriers to race ahead of the rest of the task group at a top speed of thirty-three knots. When six or more of their planes returned they approached upwind to begin their landing patterns. The carriers whipped around into the wind and took them aboard. Once the planes landed, the carriers turned sharply downwind again and resumed their thirty-three knots until the next planes returned, and the maneuver was repeated. Thus, the carriers were able to take on their planes without impeding the forward movement of the entire task group, which maintained an overall speed of thirty knots. It was a very difficult maneuver that had never been attempted before, nor since to the best of my knowledge. It required split-second timing on the part of the carrier skippers and the returning pilots, and steel nerves on the part of the commander who ordered its execution.

Halsey had also dispatched his battleships and one of his carrier groups to join the fight. But Halsey’s response had come too late to inflict much additional damage on the main Japanese force.

My grandfather was now steaming toward the battle, but he was still nearly 350 miles to the east. He went to his cabin for a few minutes to consider the situation and decide what to do. A short time later, at ten-thirty, he emerged from his cabin, gave the order for his carriers to “turn into the wind,” and launched his aircraft. He knew that at such a distance from their targets, they would burn all their fuel reaching the battle and would have to land on other carriers or in the Philippines if they didn’t run out of fuel while striking the enemy force. It was a daring move, and one of the longest-range carrier strikes of the Pacific war.

By the time Task Force 34 and the accompanying carriers arrived off Samar Island, Kurita had broken off his attack and turned north, fearing that he faced a much larger fleet than the greatly outnumbered Taffy Three. At the time of his withdrawal, his ships were within forty miles of the invasion force. He initially intended to reassemble his disorganized force and resume the attack on Leyte Gulf. But the Japanese commander suddenly lost his nerve and made for the San Bernardino Strait. The commander of Taffy Three, Vice Admiral Clifton Sprague, who had commanded his ships with courage and resourcefulness during the fierce attack, credited the battle’s abrupt end to divine intervention.

John Thach credited Kurita’s unexpected retreat to intelligence the Japanese commander had received that warned him of the approaching strike from my grandfather’s planes. Thach had read an interview Kurita had given after the war. The old admiral explained his decision to withdraw from the battle by recalling information he had received of a large air strike coming from an unknown location. Kurita’s chief of staff gave the same explanation for the force’s withdrawal.

According to Thach, until Kurita received the intelligence that precipitated his decision to run, he “thought the whole task force was up there, and he didn’t know about McCain. As a matter of fact, neither did Halsey and Mitscher know what McCain was doing at the time.”

Kurita’s forces escaped through the strait, despite being harried by my grandfather’s planes. In several accounts of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, historians praised my grandfather for understanding the predicament confronting Kinkaid’s carriers and the stakes at risk in the battle better than had the other commanders of Task Force 38. They also judged him a much better tactician than his old friend and commander, Halsey.

Halsey had glimpsed the prospect of a moment of glory and hurried recklessly toward it. He had not fought at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, and he was hell-bent to seize this opportunity to destroy the last of the enemy’s once mighty carrier force. In fact, he managed to sink four carriers and one destroyer. But his disregard for the Seventh Fleet’s situation had jeopardized the entire invasion and had allowed the main Japanese battleship force to escape.

My grandfather, grasping the size of the threat that Halsey had so badly underestimated, had risked his planes in a desperate attempt to fill the gap left by Halsey’s run for glory.

A few days after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, my grandfather relieved Admiral Mitscher and assumed command of the entire Task Force 38. He directed its operations until the Philippine Islands were retaken, and then, after a four-month interval, until the war’s end. In that command he directed assaults against Japanese strongholds in Indochina, Formosa, China, and the Japanese home islands. By the war’s end, his ships were “steaming boldly within sight of the Japanese mainland.”

At his death, he was a leading figure in naval aviation, credited with devising some of the most successful innovations in the use of attack carriers. “Give me enough fast carriers,” he said, “and let me run them, and you can have your atom bomb.”

Near the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese introduced their last desperate offensive measure to prevent the inexorable Allied advance to the Japanese homeland—the kamikaze attack. Throughout the rest of the Philippines campaign, kamikaze assaults wreaked horrible damage on the Third and Seventh Fleets.

In December, my grandfather and John Thach devised an innovation to keep Japanese planes based on Luzon from attacking the invasion convoy or joining the terrifying suicide missions. He called it the “Big Blue Blanket.” He had his planes form an umbrella that flew over Luzon’s airfields twenty-four hours a day, destroying over two hundred Japanese planes in a few days. In a series of Japanese raids on ships participating in the invasion of Mindoro, not one plane had flown from Luzon. My grandfather’s pilots had kept them all grounded.

He increased the striking power of his carriers by reducing the number of dive-bombers by half and doubling the number of fighters, fitting them with bombs so that they could serve, as circumstances warranted, as both fighter and bomber.

He also concentrated his antiaircraft fire by reducing his four task groups to three. He dispatched “picket” destroyers to patrol waters sixty miles from the flanks of his force to warn him of an approaching strike. He assigned his pickets their own patrol aircraft. When his planes returned from a strike they were ordered to circle designated pickets so that the patrol aircraft could identify them as friendly and pick out any kamikazes that had attempted to slip past the force’s defenses in company with the returning planes.

In a strike on Saigon, his pilots attacked four Japanese convoys and destroyed or damaged sixty-nine enemy ships in a single day, a record that endures to this day. During a three-month period, in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, my grandfather’s task force sank or damaged 101 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts and 298 merchant ships. During that same period they destroyed or damaged 2,962 enemy planes. Japanese ships were no longer safe even in the waters off the Japanese mainland. Throughout this last campaign, which ended when atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my grandfather lost only one destroyer.

He was awarded his second Distinguished Service Medal for his “gallant command” of fast carriers from October 1944 through January 1945. The citation praised his “indomitable courage” as he “led his units aggressively and with brilliant tactical control in extremely hazardous attacks.” He received a third DSM, posthumously, for his service in the last three months of the war, when he “hurled the might of his aircraft against the remnants of the once vaunted Japanese Navy to destroy or cripple every remaining major hostile ship by July 28.”

Under my grandfather’s command, TF 38 was considered the most powerful naval task force ever assembled for combat. Following his death, Secretary Forrestal stated: “His conception of the aggressive use of fast carriers as the principle instrument for bringing about the quick reduction of Japanese defensive capabilities was one of the basic forces in the evolution of naval strategy in the Pacific War.”

An officer who served with him said it more succinctly: “When there isn’t anything to be done, he’s the kind of fellow who does it.”

The night after my grandfather died, Paul Shubert, a radio network commentator, talked about the controversial wartime decision allowing men of advanced years like Halsey and my grandfather to hold strenuous combat commands, while younger, fitter officers remained in subordinate roles. Shubert took no side in the dispute, but he spoke of my grandfather, of his age and “frail physique.” Despite his condition, my grandfather “had his will,” Shubert allowed. Whether younger officers could have accomplished what he had or not, “John Sidney McCain did what his country called on him to do—one of those intrepid seafarers who refused to accept the traditional devotion to the past… who learned to fly when he was past fifty, and went on to high rank in the Navy skies—one of the world’s greatest carrier task force commanders, an outstanding example of American manhood at sea.”

Eight years after my grandfather’s death, I watched Admiral Halsey deliver the main address at the commissioning of the Navy’s newest destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, in Bath, Maine. Halsey was an old man then. I remember he wore thick glasses and appeared very frail as he stood to make his remarks. As he began to talk about his friend of so many years, his eyes welled up with tears, and he began to sob. Barely a half minute had passed before he announced he was unable to talk anymore, and sat down.

Plainly, Halsey deeply mourned my grandfather’s loss. But the audience sensed that the old admiral was overcome that day by more than sadness at his friend’s passing. Many years had passed since my grandfather’s death, and surely Halsey had gotten over his grief by then. I suspect that the commissioning had prompted a great tide of memories that overwhelmed the admiral. As old men do, Halsey could not think of a departed friend without evoking the memory of all they had gone through together. For Halsey, the memory of my grandfather’s friendship conjured up all the grim trials and awful strain of combat, the losses they had endured, and the triumphs they had celebrated together as leading figures in a great war that had changed the world forever. The recollection had stunned the old man and left him mute.

I met Halsey that evening, at a reception after the ceremony. He asked me, “Do you drink, boy?”

I was seventeen years old, and had certainly experienced my share of teenage drinking by then. But my mother was standing next to me when the admiral made his inquiry, and I could do nothing but nervously stammer, “Well, no, I don’t.”

Halsey looked at me for a long moment before remarking, “Well, your grandfather drank bourbon and water.” Then he told a waiter, “Bring the boy a bourbon and water.”

I had a bourbon and water, and with his old commander watching, silently toasted the memory of my grandfather.

–– CHAPTER 4 –– An Exclusive Tradition

In 1936, while commanding the naval air station in Panama, my grandfather was introduced to me, his first grandson and namesake. My father was stationed in Panama at the same time, serving aboard a submarine as executive officer. He had brought his young, pregnant wife with him. I was born in the Canal Zone at the Coco Solo air base hospital shortly after my grandfather arrived there. My father was transferred to New London, Connecticut, less than three months later, so I have no memory of our time in Panama.

My mother has fond memories of the place despite the rough living conditions that junior officers and their families suffered in prewar Panama. Among those memories is an occasion when my parents left me in my grandfather’s care while they attended a dinner party. My mother, mindful of my father’s concerns about coddling infants, instructed my grandfather to put me to bed in my crib, and not to mind any protest I might make. When they returned they found me sleeping comfortably with my grandfather in his bed. Admonished by my mother for pampering me, he gamely insisted that the privilege was only fitting. “Dammit, Roberta, that boy has the stamp of nobility on his brow.” Had he lived longer, he might have puzzled over my adolescent misbehavior, lamenting the decline of his once noble grandson.

My parents were married in 1933 at Caesar’s Bar in Tijuana, Mexico. They had eloped. My mother’s parents, Archibald and Myrtle Wright, objected to the match. For months prior to their elopement, my grandmother had forbidden my father to call on my mother, believing him to be associated with a class of men—sailors—whose lifestyles were often an affront to decent people and whose wandering ways denied their wives the comforts of home and family.

My mother, Roberta Wright McCain, and her identical twin, Rowena, were the daughters of a successful oil wildcatter who had moved the family from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. Wealthy and a loving father, Archie Wright retired at the age of forty to devote his life to the raising of his children. The Wrights were very attentive parents. They provided their children a happy and comfortable childhood, but they took care not to spoil them. And in their care, my mother grew to be an extroverted and irrepressible woman.

My parents met when my father, a young ensign, served on the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was homeported at the time in Long Beach, California. Ensign Stewart McAvee, the brother of one of my Aunt Rowena’s boyfriends and an Academy classmate of my father’s, also served on the Oklahoma. At his brother’s urging, he had called on Rowena, and soon became a frequent visitor at the Wright home.

Eventually, Ensign McAvee developed a crush on my mother. He took her out on several occasions and often invited her to visit the Oklahoma. On one of those visits she met my father, who was dressed in his bathrobe when McAvee introduced them. My mother only remembers thinking how young my father looked, and small, with cheeks, she said, like two small apples. My father, however, was infatuated at once.

Until my parents’ courtship, my mother had, in her words, “never teamed up with any man.” She was, she confesses, immature and unsophisticated, possessing no serious aspirations, but cheerfully open to life’s varied experiences. Her mother frequently complained to her, “If a Japanese gardener crossed the street and asked you to go to Chinatown, you would go.” To which my mother always responded, “Why, sure I would.” When she met my father, she was a beautiful nineteen-year-old student at the University of Southern California. But unlike her twin sister, she had never fallen in love nor shown more than a casual interest in dating.

As my mother describes it, she would typically go out in large groups where the boys always outnumbered the girls. When a young man asked her for a date, she would reply by inquiring what he had in mind. If he proposed to escort her to the Friday-night dance at the Biltmore Hotel, or the Saturday-afternoon tea dance at the Ambassador Hotel, or the Saturday-evening dance at the Roosevelt Hotel, she consented, believing any other assignation to be a poor use of her time. But even obliging dates were rewarded with nothing more than my mother’s charming company and had to content themselves with membership in her wide circle of frustrated suitors.

A short time after being introduced to my mother, my father appeared on her doorstep and asked her to accompany him the following Saturday to the Roosevelt Hotel. She agreed, assuming he was acting on behalf of Ensign McAvee. But McAvee would not be among the young naval officers consorting with my mother’s crowd that evening. Instead, my mother found herself having “more fun than I had ever had in my life” with the diminutive, youthful Jack McCain.

Their romance progressed for over a year, despite my grandmother’s growing anxiety and the aggrieved McAvee’s angry reproaches. When my grandmother finally ordered an end to the relationship and banished my father from the Wright home, my mother prevailed on former suitors to call on her and take her surreptitiously to meet my father.

Until confronted with maternal opposition, my mother “had never planned on marrying anyone.” By her own admission, she was a willful, rebellious girl. Her attraction to my father was only strengthened by her mother’s disapproval, and when my father proposed marriage she consented. They eloped on a weekend when my grandmother was in San Francisco. Just before they departed for Tijuana, my mother informed her softhearted father of her intention. Despite his misgivings, he did not stand in her way.

My father had asked one of his shipmates to explain to the executive officer on the Oklahoma that he had gone off to get married, but the friend had thought my father was joking. That Saturday, during the ship’s inspection, the captain asked, “Where’s McCain?” My father’s friend responded, “He said he was going to get married or something.” When my father returned to the Oklahoma that Sunday, having dropped his new bride at home, he was confined to the ship for ten days with a stern censure from the captain for failing to ask leave to get married.

The bond between my mother and her parents was a strong one, and my grandparents’ alarm at losing their daughter to the itinerant life of a professional sailor was understandable. It took several years for them to grow accustomed to the idea. But, in due course, they accepted the marriage and shared with my father the deep affection that distinguished their family.

Captain John S. McCain, Sr., thought the match to be an excellent one from the start. He was as charmed and amused by his new daughter-in-law as she was by him. Six months after my parents married, my father was suspected by the ship’s physician of having contracted tuberculosis, and was admitted to a Navy hospital because he had suddenly lost a great deal of weight. When the doctors there asked if my father could explain his dramatic weight loss, he attributed it to his recent marriage.

Sometime later, my grandfather was in Washington, where he went to Navy Records and asked to see his son’s latest fitness report. There he read of my father’s condition and his response to the doctor’s inquiries: “My wife doesn’t know how to cook, and my meals are very irregular.” Much amused, my grandfather kept a copy of the report, and delighted in showing his friends how his “son couldn’t wait to get married, and within six months the girl had nearly killed him.”

Stationed in San Diego at the time of my parents’ elopement, my grandfather had traveled to Tijuana with them to attend the ceremony and stand at his son’s side. Theirs was also an exceptionally close relationship.

The relationship of a sailor and his children is, in large part, a metaphysical one. We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war. Our mothers run our households, pay the bills, and manage most of our upbringing. For long stretches of time they are required to be both mother and father. They move us from base to base. They see to our religious, educational, and emotional needs. They arbitrate our quarrels, discipline us, and keep us safe. It is no surprise then that the personalities of children who have grown up in the Navy often resemble those of their mothers more than those of their fathers.

But our fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long absences, can be a huge presence in our lives. You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other relatives, and the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance. When your father is away, the tradition remains, and embellishes a paternal image that is powerfully attractive to a small boy, even long after the boy becomes a man.

This is the life to which my older sister, Sandy, my younger brother, Joe, and I were born. It was the life my father was born to as well. And it was the life that adopted my mother, substituting its care for that of a loving and protective family.

–– CHAPTER 5 –– Small Man with the Big Heart

My father was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In several profiles and obituaries, he is described as a native of that Midwestern town, but he was no more a native of Council Bluffs than I am a native of Panama. My grandmother had gone into labor when visiting family in Council Bluffs while my grandfather was at sea.

His boyhood withstood the strain of the frequent interruptions, upheavals, travel, and separation that the Navy imposed on the lives of its officers’ families. He would never know any other life. From early childhood, he understood he would share his father’s vocation.

People who grow up without such expectations might think that anticipating so young the general course of your life would make a child self-assured. That may be the case for some. But I think for most of us our strong sense of predestination made us prematurely fatalistic. And while that condition gave us a kind of confidence, it was often a reckless confidence. We started with small rebellions against the conventions of our heritage. And as we grew older and coarser, our transgressions became more serious.

We often exceeded the limits of our parents’ patience and earned the displeasure of educators. 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 don’t know. But I do know that when both of us reached the end of our naval careers, we could not imagine finding a greater measure of satisfaction than we had found in a life at sea in our country’s service. Neither of us ever sinned so grievously that we altered our fate. The Navy did not banish us. And years later, we realized we had mistaken our reaction to the Navy’s forbearance for disappointment. In memory, it appears as relief.

My father was a slight boy, even smaller than his father. He never grew taller than five feet six, and near the end of his life he weighed no more than when he left the Naval Academy, 133 pounds. His irregular childhood, the constant disruptions occasioned by his father’s transfers, were a challenge to him, as, I suspect, was his small stature. It intensified an adolescent compulsion to prove his courage and daring to his peers in whatever new social circumstances he found himself in. The quickest way to do so was to exhibit a studied indifference to the established order, devise imaginative circumventions of the rules, take your punishment, show no remorse, and fight at the drop of a hat.

He was only sixteen years old when his father delivered him to the United States Naval Academy for his plebe summer in June 1927; by his own admission, he was too young for the challenges of such a rigid institution and the highly competitive nature of the place. He had been included on President Coolidge’s list of appointees that year, passed his preliminary physical in March, and completed the entrance exams in April.

His nervous father was at sea at the time, serving as executive officer aboard the USS New Mexico. When the ship made port in Panama on April 26, a fellow officer on the New Mexico sent a letter to a friend who was associated with the Naval Academy in some capacity and asked if he could find out if my father had passed the exams. “Our exec… is very anxious to know if the boy made it.” One month later, my grandfather’s helpful friend received a brief telegram from an officer on the Academy Academic Board: JOHN S MCCAIN JUNIOR PASSED APRIL EXAMINATION STANDING SEVENTH ON PRESIDENTIAL LIST.

Shortly before my father entered the Academy, my grandfather, whose ship was being overhauled in the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, invited him to spend two weeks aboard ship. They were two weeks my father treasured all his life. He referred to them as a “final and farewell gesture before I went into the Naval Academy” and began his own life at sea.

It is difficult to imagine my grandfather being too concerned with my father’s performance at the Academy, considering his own less than commendable record there. He was, however, a watchful father.

In April 1928 he was detailed as an instructor to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and upon arrival he cabled a request to the Academy Superintendent that all reports on Midshipman McCain be sent to him there. Those reports, sent at the end of every term, were not encouraging. Had the old man been more of a spit-and-polish type, he might have reconsidered the career choice he had made for his son. As it was, while he might have been uneasy about the difficulty his son had staying out of trouble at the Academy, he would have become really alarmed only if it appeared that my father’s shortcomings might result in his dismissal.

My father was constantly in trouble at the Academy. His grades were poor, his discipline worse. By the end of his first term his grades hovered barely above the lowest acceptable marks, where they would remain for four years. His class standing in his first term was 557 out of 601 midshipmen. That was his high-water mark for his first two troubled years at Annapolis. The next term, he stood 537 out of 549. The following year, he had dropped to 498 out of 504.

Unimpressive as they were, his grades seldom slipped below the minimum satisfactory level. The ever shrinking aggregate number of his classmates indicates the number of midshipmen whose performance was considered so deficient that they were expelled.

My father approached catastrophe on three occasions, in his first, third, and fourth years. On all three occasions he was warned that “the Superintendent notes with concern that you are unsatisfactory in your Academic work… and he wishes to take this opportunity to point out that unless you devote your entire effort to improve your scholastic work you are in grave danger of being found deficient at the end of the year.” “Copy to Parent” was written on the bottom left-hand corner of each notice.

The only consistently good marks my father received were for Seamanship and Flight Tactics, and Ordnance and Gunnery. These courses were taught only in the last three terms, and my father earned the equivalent of a B in both courses every term. In the first term of a midshipman’s last year, his personal hygiene is graded. Here again my father, whom my mother once called “the cleanest man I’ve ever known,” received an above-average mark. These were the only bright spots in an otherwise dismal academic performance.

My father was an intelligent man, and quite well read as a boy. His low grades as a student cannot be credited to a poor intellect. Rather, I assume they were attributable to his poor discipline, a failing that was almost certainly a result of his immaturity and the insecurity he must have felt as an undersized youth in a rough-and-tumble world that had humbled many older, bigger men.

“I went in there at the age of sixteen,” he once told an interviewer, “and I weighed one hundred and five pounds. I could barely carry a Springfield rifle.”

Even as an upperclassman, my father struggled to meet the robust physical standards imposed on midshipmen, who were expected to take athletics as seriously as their scholastic endeavors. In my father’s third year, the superintendent informed him that he was “deficient in physical training for the term thus far completed.” Consequently, my father’s Christmas leave was canceled that year, and he was “required to remain at the Naval Academy for extra instruction during that period.”

My father’s roommates, two of whom were linemen on the varsity football team, treated him like a little brother and went to great lengths to protect him. They helped him through the relentless hazing of his plebe year, took the blame when they could for his infractions of Academy regulations, and made it clear that they would deal with any midshipman who thought to abuse him. However, when they were plebes, despite their formidable size, they could not prevent upperclassmen from physically disciplining my father. My father hated the hazing he was subjected to—some of it quite severe, even by the standards of his day—and forever after questioned the custom’s usefulness to the task of making officers.

Even after my father graduated, he inspired almost paternal affection in many of his peers. A shipmate who occupied the bunk below my father on the Oklahoma, a huge man who had also played varsity football at Annapolis, would routinely wake up in the middle of the night to replace the blanket my father had kicked off in his sleep.

As hard as they tried, my father’s friends could not spare him the consequences of his own natural rebelliousness. His report cards for every term, save one, list a staggering number of demerits for bad conduct—114 in his first term, an astonishing 219 his second. Except for the first term of his last year, my father never accumulated fewer than a hundred demerits a term, and usually he was closer to two hundred.

I, too, was a notoriously undisciplined midshipman, and the demerits I received were almost enough to warrant my expulsion. But I never racked them up as prodigiously as my father had. And when I read the accounts of his “unmilitary conduct” today, and the scores of demerits it earned him, I am little short of astonished by the old man’s reckless disregard for rules. His offenses were various: talking in ranks; using obscenity; absent without leave; fighting; disrespect shown to an upperclassman. They ran the entire gamut of what the Academy considered serious offenses, and the punishments he received were onerous.

Typically, he found some value in his troublemaking and in the punishment he earned for it. “You get to know people that you don’t ordinarily know if you’re one of the good boys. And sometimes the world’s not always made up of all the good boys, either, not by a long shot,” he said.

“I was known as a ‘ratey’ plebe, and that’s the plebe who does not conform always to the specific rules and regulations of the upperclassmen,” my father explained in his interview for the Naval Institute. “Some of these upperclassmen would come up and make some of these statements to you, and required you to do such things which only incited rebellion and mutiny in me. And although I did them, the attitude was there, and they didn’t like that. But it was a fine institution.”

In his last year, my father was removed from the watchful care of his concerned roommates. He was expelled from the dormitory, where his rebelliousness might have infected good order and discipline in the ranks, and exiled to quarters and a hammock for a bed aboard the Reina Mercedes, a ship seized from the Spanish during the Spanish-American War and kept moored at the Academy.

First classmen in my father’s time were not allowed to exceed 150 demerits. During his final term, my father came perilously close to exceeding the number, and was informed by his battalion commander that his graduation from the Academy was anything but certain. “If we get one more demerit on you, McCain,” he warned, “we’re either going to turn you back into the next class, or you’ll be dropped from the muster roll. I can’t tell you which will happen. But you can rest assured one of the two will.”

From that moment on, my father remembered, “I shined my shoes and everything else and did everything right. When it came time for me to graduate, I took my diploma, and I went. I think that was the closest call I had.”

My father was reported to have suffered his punishments without complaint. He would have disgraced himself had he done otherwise. He was a principled young man. Strict obedience to institutional rules was not among his principles, but manfully accepting the consequences of his actions was.

Neither would my father have considered for a moment committing a violation of the Academy’s honor code. Honor codes were something he had been raised from birth to respect, and I truly believe he would have preferred any misfortune to having his honor called into question for an offense he committed. He was a small man with a big heart, and the affection in which he was held by his peers was attributable in part to his unquestioning allegiance to the principles of honorable conduct. His profile in the Class of 1931 yearbook commended his character with the following inscription: “Sooner could Gibraltar be loosed from its base than could Mac be loosed from the principles which he has adopted to govern his actions.”

The memory of his frequent clashes with its regulations and authorities never diminished my father’s abiding reverence for the Academy’s traditions and purpose, although he also never lost his realistic appreciation of a typical midshipman’s many shortcomings. He once served for two years as an instructor at the Academy, and he boasted that “the lads learned soon enough never to try to hoodwink an old hoodwinker.” And he looked back on his Academy days, as he looked back at most of his life, with a satisfaction that was remarkably free of nostalgia.

He remained until the end of his life one of the Academy’s most steadfast defenders. In 1964, when my father had attained the rank of vice admiral, he got in a public dispute with one of the Navy’s most prominent leaders, Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine. In testimony before Congress reported in the Annapolis newspaper, Rickover had “blasted the Academy for everything from the quality of its teaching to the hazing of plebes and the relative competence of ROTC and Academy officers.”

Rickover, an Academy graduate himself, had long complained to the Navy hierarchy that the Naval Academy was not turning out qualified officers for his nuclear submarines. This he attributed to the Academy’s antiquated curriculum and traditions, which he derided as nothing more than quaint and anachronistic customs of an institution focused on the past. He believed it neither grasped nor concerned itself with the imperatives of leadership in the modern, nuclear Navy that he had, with peerless tenacity, set about creating.

My father understood that technological advances and the nature of Cold War rivalry necessitated innovations and profound changes in his beloved submarine service. Although he and Rickover were not friends and Rickover’s cold, imperious personality made him difficult to like, my father admired Rickover’s ability, intelligence, and vision, and he supported Rickover’s efforts to revolutionize seapower.

Nevertheless, he strongly objected to Rickover’s assault on the Naval Academy and to his call for systemic change in the way the Navy trained its future leaders. He felt that Rickover’s remedies abandoned proven leadership principles. The primary mission of the Academy was to strengthen the character of its officers. Without good character, my father believed, all the advanced instruction in the world wouldn’t make an officer fit for service.

As long as human nature remained what it was, the Academy’s traditions were, by my father’s lights, more effective at imparting the cardinal virtues of leaders than the methods devised by any other human institution. Rickover, he argued, was more interested in turning out technicians than officers whose worth would ultimately be measured by how well they inspired their subordinates to risk everything for their country.

My father called a press conference aboard his flagship the day after Rickover’s testimony to rebuke his fellow admiral and reject the argument that naval officers were better trained in private institutions. “The Naval Academy is designed to make sure an officer is well founded in the sciences and liberal arts. But there’s something else,” he said. “In leadership there’s no such thing as a master’s degree. We’ve got to develop that type of officer who has the tools to develop his own leadership capabilities. I won’t talk about Rickover except to say he may have overlooked this aspect.”

This was not my father’s first dispute with the irascible and solitary genius. Rickover had made admiral before my father, but not before being passed over for promotion on several occasions. Rickover was Jewish, and some felt that he was the victim of the anti-Semitism harbored by many among the Navy’s leadership. Others believed that Rickover, who professed no concern for the affection of his brother officers, was repaid for his indifference with the active dislike of a good many admirals. Whatever the reason, the Navy Selection Board had for several years unfairly left him off its list of flag rank recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy, which, for all practical purposes, determined who would and would not wear an admiral’s star.

Rickover did have a number of supporters in the Navy, my father among them, who may have been as put off by Rickover’s personality as was the Selection Board, but who recognized his genius and devotion to the Navy. He also had considerable political support in both the legislative and executive branches of government.

After several flag lists failed to reward Rickover’s indisputable accomplishments, the Secretary of the Navy passed word to the Selection Board that he would refuse to accept any flag list that didn’t include Rickover’s name. Thus admonished, the Selection Board finally recommended that Rickover be made a rear admiral.

Shortly after Rickover’s promotion, my father, still a captain, called to congratulate his new superior. An embittered Rickover responded to my father’s courtesy by declaring curtly that he had made admiral without “the help of any damn officer in uniform.”

“That’s a damn lie, Admiral,” my offended father replied before hanging up on the surprised Rickover. My father could never tolerate officers whose resentment over personal disappointments made them contemptuous of the service. Rickover, he felt, had earned his promotion, had deserved his stars earlier than he received him. But that didn’t mean he had accomplished the feat entirely on his own. My father believed that the Navy, for all its faults, took care of its own, sometimes acting later than it should have, but eventually according all their due.

Their relationship didn’t improve much after that angry exchange, and their dispute over the Academy only exacerbated the tension between them. Yet, near the end of their lives, they had a reconciliation of sorts, although neither of them would have characterized it as such because neither was the type who would have accorded incidental professional rancor the status of a personal animosity.

After my father had retired, and very late in Rickover’s unusually long career, both men became quite ill and were admitted to the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. They were given rooms on the same floor. Both were expected to remain hospitalized for some time, and as there were no other Navy legends in residence at the time, they began spending a good part of every day together.

Perhaps they saw in each other qualities they had overlooked earlier. Perhaps they talked about the only thing they had in common, the Navy, the only thing either of them ever talked about. They may have simply enjoyed reminiscing, as old sailors are apt to reminisce, about their experiences and the vicissitudes of long Navy careers. Or perhaps, as old men, they recognized that they had each devoted every particle of their being to their shared cause, and were, for their devotion, more alike than not.

They left the hospital as friends, and remained so for the little time that remained to them.

My father suffered a serious disappointment his last year at Annapolis. In the same year that my grandfather was earning his naval aviator wings, my father was judged “not physically qualified” for aviation school. I suspect this was a hard blow to my father. His lifelong ambition was to emulate the man he most admired, and being deprived of this opportunity to follow in the old man’s footsteps must have shaken his resolve considerably.

After graduating, barely, standing eighteenth from the bottom, my father was assigned to the Oklahoma. Before he left, he requested permission to attend the naval optical school in Washington, D.C. Dejected after being denied pilot training, he temporarily wavered in his desire to immediately commence building a successful naval career, preferring to spend a pleasant year enjoying the attractions of the nation’s capital (where he had attended high school).

The request was routed through the Academy Superintendent, who offered his opinion that “young officers just graduated from the Naval Academy should join the ships of the Fleet as soon as possible.” Two weeks later my father received his answer from the Bureau of Navigation. He was ordered to consider himself released from his current occupation or any other duty that he may have received earlier orders for and report without further delay to the commanding officer of the USS Oklahoma.

As he would throughout his career, he made the most of his opportunity. His father’s career guidance to him had been limited to impressing on his son the importance of command. “It doesn’t make any difference where you go,” his father often said, “you’ve got to command.” With that in mind, my father entered the submarine service after his tour on the Oklahoma. His father approved of the decision and told him “to make a good job of it,” which my father did in his relentless pursuit of a command.

–– CHAPTER 6 –– Mr. Seapower

I hesitate to write that my father was insecure, but he was thrust into difficult circumstances at such a young age that it would have been very hard to resist some self-doubt. He was an aspiring man whose ambition to meet the standard of his famous father might have collided with his appreciation for the implausibility of the accomplishment. Nevertheless, he would succeed, and become the Navy’s first son of a four-star admiral to reach the same rank as his father.

The Navy consumed nearly his every thought. He had few aspirations for success outside its narrow confines. Whatever other interests engaged his mind were in some way associated with the Navy, including his preferences in literature, history, philosophy, and the study of military tactics and strategy. He attended every Army-Navy football game he could, not because he loved football, but because it involved the Navy. It could have been the Army-Navy tiddlywinks championship and he still would have wanted to attend it.

He did not fish or hunt or share his father’s fondness for gambling or my enthusiasm for sports. He played tennis often, and kept to a daily regimen of rope-jumping and sit-ups, not because he particularly enjoyed exercise, but because he intended to keep himself fit for combat command. During one of his tours in Washington, D.C., a local paper observed that he was “a familiar sight to Washington commuters who frequently see him stride across the 14th Street Bridge, walking the four miles between his Capitol Hill home and the Pentagon.”

He worked ceaselessly. Lacking the gregariousness and easy charm of his father, he was less comfortable in social situations, a failing that can be an obstacle to an officer’s advancement. He wasn’t withdrawn or unapproachable, and he didn’t shrink from social obligations. He just didn’t seem entirely at ease when his career required something more than strict, tireless dedication to the task at hand.

My mother was indispensable to my father. She had adapted to Navy life with few regrets, and acquired an abiding affection for the whole of the culture she had entered upon marriage, once remarking that she was “tailor-made” for the Navy. Her vivacious charm, beauty, and refinement assured her success in the social aspect of Navy life and more than compensated for my father’s weaker possession of those graces. Her complete devotion to my father and his career contributed more to his success than anything else save his own determination.

The Navy in the years before the Second World War, the Navy my mother married into, was a small, insular world where everyone knew everyone else. “We were all in the same boat,” my mother says of those days. “There wasn’t any point for anyone to put up a false front.” She means, of course, that few Navy families lived beyond their means. But they did live graciously, as graciously as circumstances allowed, assisting each other in a common effort to preserve the exacting social standards that were appropriate for an officer and his family in the small, prewar Navy.

Most families of naval officers lived on modest resources, a condition attributable to the meager salaries paid to officers in those days. Although my mother came from a wealthy family, our family lived, in accordance with my father’s wish, on his income alone. Yet we never wanted for anything, and we believed we lived within a privileged society where refined manners made the relative poverty that most families shared inconspicuous.

In 1934, my father, a young ensign, was ordered to Hawaii to serve as a junior officer on a submarine. He brought his new bride with him, to what my mother called “paradise.” Home to America’s Pacific Fleet, Hawaii in the 1930s was the heart of Navy culture, where singular standards of social etiquette and personal and professional ethics were rarely breached.

Newly arrived officers, dressed in white uniforms, took their wives, who were attired in white gloves and hats, to call on the families of fellow officers every Wednesday and Saturday between four and six o’clock. The husband laid two calling cards on the receiving tray, one for the officer in residence and the other for the lady of the house. His wife offered a single card for her hostess, as it was inappropriate for an officer’s wife to call on another officer. The visits never exceeded fifteen minutes. Within ten days, the officer and his wife who had been paid this homage returned the compliment by calling on the newly arrived couple at their home. The commanding officer was always called on first, followed by the executive officer. Their rank excused them from paying a return call.

When an officer had finished his tour he would complete another round of calls to bid good-bye, leaving his card with its upper left-hand corner turned down as a signal of his imminent departure.

Every Saturday night, my father and mother, dressed in formal attire, attended a party at the Pearl Harbor Submarine Club, after spending their afternoon at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel’s four o’clock tea dance. The Beach Club at Waikiki, with its five-dollar monthly dues, was another venue for stylish socializing among the officers and their families. 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.

One aspect of my parents’ social life was unique to my father’s branch of the service. The submarine service was a small component of the Navy and even more insular than the Navy at large. Small ships manned by small crews, submarines hosted a more intimate fraternity, less socially segregated by rank than those found aboard battleships and carriers. My parents were on familiar terms with the families of enlisted men on his submarine; officers and men attended parties at one another’s homes and celebrated weddings and christenings together.

Submarine officers, like all naval officers, faithfully observed the professional distinctions governing their relationship to enlisted men, upon which the good order and discipline of the service depended. But living aboard ship in such small quarters bred an off-duty informality among officers and their enlisted shipmates. They were friends, and my father, like his father, valued those friendships highly.

More than the manners of polite society distinguished the life of a naval officer. His character was expected to be above reproach, his life a full testament to the enduring virtues of an officer and a gentleman. Those virtues were not necessarily as many as those required of clergy. An officer’s honor could admit some vices, and many officers, my father and grandfather included, indulged more than a few. But honor would not permit even rare or small transgressions of the code of conduct that was expected to be as natural a part of an officer’s life as was his physical description.

An officer must not lie, steal, or cheat—ever. He keeps his word, whatever the cost. He must not shirk his duties no matter how difficult or dangerous they are. His life is ransomed to his duty. An officer must trust his fellow officers, and expect their trust in return. He must not expect others to bear what he will not.

An officer accepts the consequences of his actions. He must not hide his mistakes, nor transfer blame to others that is rightfully his. He admits his mistakes openly, and accepts whatever sanction is imposed upon him without complaint.

For the obedience he is owed by his subordinates, an officer accepts certain solemn obligations to them in return, and an officer’s obligations to enlisted men are the most solemn of all. An officer must not confer his responsibilities on the men under his command. They are his alone. He does not put his men in jeopardy for any purpose that their country has not required they serve. He does not risk their lives and welfare for his sake, but only to answer the shared duty they are called to answer. He will not harm their reputations by his conduct or cause them to suffer shame or any penalty that only he deserves. My father once said, “Some officers get it backwards. They don’t understand that we are responsible for our men, not the other way around. That’s what forges trust and loyalty.”

An officer accepts these and his many other responsibilities with gratitude. They are his honor. Any officer who stains his honor by violating these standards forfeits the respect of his fellow officers and no longer deserves to be included in their ranks. His presence among them is offensive and threatens the integrity of the service.

Even in the small Navy world that disappeared with the Second World War, some officers fell short of the demands of honor. If they did so grievously, or repeatedly, or without remorse and requital, they were, if not thrown out of the service, so completely ostracized, so bereft of respect, that they would usually leave of their own accord. If the Navy tolerated their conduct, it would shame everyone in the service.

My parents arrived in Hawaii in the aftermath of the infamous Massie scandal, which had deeply shaken prewar Hawaiian society and the entire Navy community there. A young lieutenant, Thomas Massie, who some time earlier had served on my father’s submarine, had committed an unpardonable breach of the code. He was, reportedly, an intemperate and unlikable man, and his petulant and difficult wife, Thalia Massie, one of three daughters of a Kentucky bluegrass family of aristocratic pretensions, was even less likable.

One evening, Massie and his wife drove with a few other officers and their wives to a nightclub in a rough part of Honolulu. There the officer and his wife became very drunk. What happened next and why has never been determined with certainty. What is known is that at some point the wife had left the nightclub without her husband. Her husband located her at home later that evening, bruised and frightened and claiming to have been abducted and raped by as many as six native Hawaiian boys. She identified five boys who had been arrested that same evening for a traffic altercation as her assailants, and they were subsequently put on trial for the crime.

The evidence against the boys was far from conclusive. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was pronounced. The accused were released on bail pending retrial. One month later, Lieutenant Massie persuaded two enlisted men from the submarine base to help him and his blue-blooded mother-in-law apprehend and murder one of the defendants. A short time later, Massie, his mother-in-law, and one of the enlisted men were stopped by police while racing through town in their car, curtains covering the windows, with the body of one of the boys wrapped in a tarp on the floor of the backseat.

The conduct of this officer shocked and outraged the rest of Hawaii’s naval community, but not because the man had exacted mortal vengeance for his wife’s rape. That showed poor judgment, perhaps, but given the nature of the alleged crime, the act was forgivable. What was unforgivable was that the officer had involved enlisted men in his crime, placing them in great jeopardy to help him avenge an offense that concerned only him and his wife. That was a grave breach of an officer’s duty to his men.

There was a trial, and Massie, his mother-in-law, and the two enlisted men were convicted of manslaughter even though the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow had defended them. They escaped justice, however. The Navy had intervened in the case to help in their defense, and, after their conviction, to help persuade the governor of Hawaii to commute their sentence from ten years to one hour. After the convicted vigilantes had served their hour in the governor’s office, the Navy quickly sent them and Thalia Massie back to the States.

Many of his fellow officers felt shamed by Massie’s conduct, and by the Navy’s intervention in the matter. Initially, most officers believed the allegation of rape and their fellow officer’s subsequent explanation of the killing as self-defense. They found it hard to believe an officer would lie. But most soon came to believe that he had indeed lied about the killing, and that he and his wife had probably lied about the rape as well. The discovery made the Navy’s intervention on his behalf as unpardonable as the officer’s use of enlisted men.

When my parents arrived, the scandal still dominated all conversation in every officer’s home. The entire community seemed distressed over this singular violation of the standards they had always accepted as an unquestioned, ennobling way of life. And it was a long time before they recovered from the shock of it all.

My mother said that on the ship that returned him to the States, the disgraced Massie was observed to be frequently drunk and “making a natural fool of himself.” She claims that some years later, he was incorrectly reported to have killed himself—an act that most of his fellow officers and their wives who had known of his crime and the damage it had done to the Navy’s honor thought appropriate.

This was the Navy in which my father and grandfather felt so at home. They had entered its ranks already imbued with the notions of honor that distinguished a good officer. They were the standards passed down from one generation to another in their family. As boys, no less than as men, they did not lie, steal, or cheat, and they never shirked their duty. My brother once said that our father’s word “had the constancy of Newtonian laws of physical motion.” He added, “I have never met a more honest man than my father. I literally cannot think of a single time he did not tell the truth about something, as best he knew it.”

My mother recalls playing gin rummy with my father once when she jokingly accused him of cheating. He reacted so strongly to the accusation, with such evident distress over the charge, admonishing her to “never say such a thing again,” that she never did. Not even in jest.

The Navy revered my father’s and grandfather’s shared ideals and offered them adventure. It promised them the perfect life, and they were grateful to their last breath for the privilege.

Happy in his profession, 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.

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. This was unfair of me, and I regret having felt that way. The most important relationship in my father’s life had been his bond with my grandfather. That cherished bond influenced every major decision my father made throughout his life. Yet my grandfather had been absent from his family at least as often as my father was away from us, probably more often. He had done his duty as his country had asked him to, and his family understood, and admired him for it.

My father felt no shame in attending just as diligently to the responsibilities of his office, nor should he have. I am certain that he wanted to share with me the warm affection that he and his father had shared. But he wanted me to know also that a man’s life should be big enough to encompass both duty to family and duty to country. That can be a hard lesson for a boy to learn. It was a hard lesson for me.

He worked hard to please his superiors and accepted every assignment as an opportunity to prove himself. Even when he viewed a new assignment as sidetracking him from his pursuit of important commands, he never betrayed the slightest hint of bitterness. “No matter what job you get,” he told my mother, “you can make a good one out of it.”

He once helped a friend get a prestigious position on an admiral’s staff. My father thought him to be a born leader and expected great things from him in the Navy. But the man didn’t like the long hours associated with the job. Nor did his wife, who openly resented the demands placed on young officers and their families.

Late one Sunday night, the admiral on whose staff my father’s friend served called him to get the combination for a safe that contained classified documents he wanted to review. The young officer started to give him the combination over the phone, and the admiral cut him off abruptly. “Don’t you dare give me that combination over the phone,” he admonished his aide. Both my parents were shocked at their friend’s careless regard for his professional responsibilities. My mother remarked, “Had it been Jack, he would have said, ‘Sir, I’m on my way.’” It would never have occurred to my father to respond in any other way.

My father was devout, although the demands of his profession sometimes made regular churchgoing difficult. His mother, Katherine, was the daughter of an Episcopal minister, and she had ably seen to her son’s religious instruction, no small feat in a home where the head of the household happily indulged a variety of vices.

My father didn’t talk about God or the importance of religious devotion. He didn’t proselytize. But he always kept with him a tattered, dog-eared prayerbook, from which he would pray aloud for an hour, on his knees, twice every day.

He drank too much, which did not become him. And I often felt that my father’s religious devotion was intended in part to help him control his drinking. In the Navy in which my father came of age, men relaxed by drinking. The greater the burdens a man bore, the more he drank to relieve himself of them.

During the Second World War, when exhausted submarine crews finished a combat patrol in the Pacific, which typically lasted from six weeks to two months, they would come into port at Midway Island or Freemantle, Australia, for a month’s “rest camp.” These remote locations offered few natural or cultural distractions from the terrors of war. Midway’s sole distinction was its claim to be home to a third of the world’s population of gooney birds, large, awkward, and odd-looking fowl. Visiting sailors named the island Gooneyville. There is little else memorable about the place. To compensate for barren landscapes and somber circumstances, the Navy would see to it that the men had someplace to drink when the pleasure of playing baseball and horseshoes wore thin. In Freemantle, the Navy rented houses for the men and stocked them with cases of beer and liquor. The men, most of them kids in their teens and twenties, lacking anything better to do, would drink themselves senseless until their next patrol.

During one typically intoxicated evening while on leave at Midway, the officers of a recently arrived submarine tore up the officers’ club when the bartender refused to serve them. For a time, they kept their destruction within reasonable limits. Then they discovered a plaque dedicated to the club that had been commissioned by the officers of another submarine in the days before submariners were banished from the place. Seeing this, and deeply aggrieved that the submariners’ courtesy had been repaid with such a gross discourtesy, they took the plaque and tore the cabinet that contained it from the wall.

A short time later, a young ensign from the shore patrol arrived to restore order. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to ascertain which officer was in charge of the marauders, the ensign left to call for help. As he was placing the call a group of the officers walked over to him. One of them announced, “I’m in charge. Jack McCain, skipper of the Gunnel.”

In a report the young ensign filed with the base commander the following day, he described how my father and his officers continued to ransack the officers’ club until they were eventually persuaded to leave by the duty officer, who had arrived on the scene carrying his side arm. They took the offending plaque and the cabinet that had housed it along with several other pieces of furniture and drove off in a jeep and a weapons carrier they had stolen earlier in the evening. My father drove the jeep back to the old, dilapidated “Gooneyville Hotel,” where he and his officers were quartered. He was accompanied by his executive officer, Joe Vasey, who recalled that when they arrived at their destination, my father “abruptly decided to drive through the main entrance into the lobby, overestimating by only an inch or so the width of the entrance.”

My father then retired to his room. When the rest of the Gunnel’s officers arrived in the stolen weapons carrier, Vasey instructed them to return the confiscated furniture to the officers’ club, which they did, heaving the large cabinet into a hallway and leaving it there in pieces.

The next morning, the Navy commodore in command at Midway called my father to his office and chewed him out for some time. Afterward, my father ordered his men to return the confiscated plaque to the officers’ club.

During another leave, this time in Freemantle, my father and some of the men under his command barely escaped death after one of them had drunk himself so thoroughly witless that he threw a box of bullets into the fireplace of the house where they were drinking. The rounds cooked off and fired into walls and furniture as my father and his friends dove for cover.

When spirits were in short supply, submariners often drank the alcohol that was used to fuel torpedoes. My father once served as engineering officer on a submarine. His first day on the job, he discovered that his predecessor had drunk nearly all the torpedo alcohol aboard. His submarine was scheduled to stand for inspection that day, and he had to borrow a quantity of the alcohol from other submarine commanders to cover up the embarrassing deficit.

There was one rule about drinking that most submariners, my father included, considered inviolate. A submariner never drank aboard ship. Submarine warfare is as treacherous and mentally exacting as any form of warfare can be. It requires the combatants to be in full possession of their faculties at all times while under way. Accordingly, no matter how excessive their binge drinking was when ashore, my father and his crew stayed sober at sea.

My father returned from war with a great appetite for drink, which he overindulged until the very last years of his life. He didn’t drink at work, and was never completely incapacitated by his weakness. But he would often ease his way into social settings by drinking too much. And, as with most people, drinking changed his personality in unattractive ways. When he was drunk, I did not recognize him.

On occasions, friends cautioned him that his drinking was harming his career, but he never let it get so out of hand that it ruined his fitness for command. His aspirations were dear to him, and his determination to achieve them more formidable than the allure of any vice.

Like his father, my father swore a lot, and subordinates often referred to him as “Good Goddam McCain.” Also like his father, he was a chain-smoker, although he preferred enormous cigars to my grandfather’s roll-your-own cigarettes.

As an ensign, he had served on a submarine commanded by Captain Herman Saul, whom my father regarded as an exemplary officer, and whose leadership style he tried to emulate. Saul taught my father the difficult technique of keeping a submerged submarine perfectly level, a skill my father mastered. Saul also introduced his protégé to the pleasure of smoking stogies, and my father, like his mentor, was seldom without one. The cigars performed an additional function later in his life, often serving as pointer and exclamation point for his well-regarded lectures on the history and importance of seapower.

As a submarine skipper, my father often let junior officers bring the ship into port so they could gain the experience necessary to operate a submarine competently. On one occasion, while my mother, sister, brother, and I watched from the pier, a young officer struggled to navigate my father’s submarine through the strong river current coming into port at Groton, Connecticut. My father was standing in the conning tower, a cigar in his mouth, talking to his executive officer. He was not paying sufficient attention to his ship’s progress.

It was clear to all of us watching onshore that the young ensign piloting the sub was going to drive her directly into the pier. When, at the last moment, my father finally recognized the approaching catastrophe, he turned excitedly to give the order “All engines stop.” Unfortunately, as he drew a breath to bark out the order he inhaled his cigar and choked. A moment later, the submarine crashed into the pier, knocking down a lamppost, which landed on our car. My father calmly ordered the ensign to back the ship out and bring it in again, which he did without incident.

With his ship safely in port, my father went home with us and began a long and difficult argument with his insurance company over the credibility of his insurance claim for a car destroyed by a submarine.

My father developed his seapower lecture in midcareer, when he served as the Navy’s first Chief of Information, and later as the Navy’s senior liaison officer to the United States Congress. Both posts helped to broaden his circle of acquaintances outside the Navy. He became a frequent witness before congressional committees, experiences that he used to improve his lecture and polish his delivery. He acquired some of the skills of an accomplished military historian who moonlighted as a stage actor. Appreciative audiences gave him the nickname “Mr. Seapower.”

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.

My father was not, however, a political admiral—a term of derision accorded to successful officers whose records lacked combat experiences comparable to those of the war fighters who disapproved of them. Moreover, my father, who surely valued the patronage of civilian commanders as necessary to his single-minded pursuit of four stars, nevertheless harbored a little of the professional military man’s dislike for the sail-trimming and obfuscation of politics.

He was, as his father had been, a man of strong views who spoke his mind bluntly. This is as risky a habit in Navy politics as it is in civilian politics, and it often caused him trouble. Both McCain Senior and Junior believed war to be a ruthless endeavor, the purpose of which was to annihilate your enemy. A wise combat commander keeps a wary respect for his enemy’s abilities, but neither my father nor my grandfather let his prudence temper his contempt for his country’s enemies.

My grandfather’s frequent insulting references to the personal qualities of the Japanese enemy were in accord with the conventions of the time, although when I read them today I wince at their racist overtones. I don’t believe they were intended as racist screeds. But war, which occasions much heroism and nobility, also has its corruptions. That’s what makes it so terrible, a thing worth avoiding if possible.

My grandfather, as combatants often do, needed to work up a powerful hate for his enemy. He once recommended of the Japanese “killing them all—painfully.” Hate is an understandable reaction to the losses and atrocities suffered at the hands of the enemy. But hate also sustains the fighter in his devotion to the complete destruction of his enemy and helps to overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what must be done by your hand.

My father rose to high command when communism had replaced fascism as the dominant threat to American security. He hated it fiercely and dedicated himself to its annihilation. He believed that we were locked inescapably in a life-and-death struggle with the Soviets. One side or the other would ultimately win total victory, and seapower would prove critical to the outcome. He was outspoken on the subject.

When he attained commands that required diplomatic skills, his candor occasionally lacked the rhetorical courtesies that attended the first attempts at détente. This often caused anxiety in the State Department, prompting complaints in cable traffic about Admiral McCain’s indiscretion. It concerned some of his civilian and military commanders in the Pentagon as well, but it won him both admirers and detractors, despite the prominent antiwar sentiment in 1960s America. I imagine it also fortified that sense of himself that, as a boy, he derived from flouting conventions. Addressing the Naval Academy Class of 1970, he commented on the popular antiwar slogan “Make love, not war” that naval officers “were men enough to do both.”

Few successful naval officers crest the heights of command without making enemies as well as friends along the way. My grandfather and father had their detractors in the Navy, some of whom may have disliked their highly personalized style of leadership, others their grasping ambition. But they were well respected by most of their fellow officers as resourceful, resilient, and brave commanders.

It was, however, the regard in which they were held by the enlisted men who served under them that gave them the greatest satisfaction. They both had great empathy for the ranks and went out of their way to show it.

An aide to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, once recounted many years later an incident that typified my father’s concern for his sailors. My father, who was Zumwalt’s boss at the time, was in Vietnam on one of his regular visits to the field. Zumwalt decided to host a dinner for my father and several other senior American officials and ordered his young aide to arrange it. During the dinner, a Navy steward who was serving my father tipped a platter of roast beef au jus, and the juice spilled onto my father’s head and shirt. “I got up in great embarrassment,” the aide remembered, “to try to help Admiral McCain.” But the admiral politely refused the young man’s assistance as well as his offer of a clean shirt. “If I use your shirt, you’ll just frame it,” my father joked, “and tell everybody that this is a four-star admiral’s shirt that you’ve been wearing. I can wear my own.”

The next morning, as my father was preparing to leave the country, he called Admiral Zumwalt to instruct him not to punish the steward. “That was an accident last night and absolutely no fault of his. I know you won’t let anything happen, but I just wanted to affirm my intent in the matter.” The aide, who monitored Zumwalt’s calls, never forgot the concern my father showed that morning for the welfare of a worried Navy steward. “It takes a very large man,” he observed, “to remember something that small at six-thirty the next morning and to make sure that people didn’t overreact. I was impressed.”

To some of his most senior subordinates, my father could be a difficult and demanding boss. He kept his own counsel and would sometimes leave his subordinates in the dark about matters that directly concerned them. A few of them felt, perhaps with cause, that he did not treat them fairly. But his closest aides, men who worked with him and for him more than once during his career, loved him. And he was almost universally revered by those whose rank was the farthest beneath his own. They knew he held them in high esteem, and they returned the compliment.

To this day, several times a year I receive letters from men who once served in the ranks under my father’s or grandfather’s command. Some are from aides, who closely observed them for long periods of time under conditions of great stress. Others are from men who write to tell me of an occasion when my father or grandfather had boarded a ship commanded by a subordinate, and had ignored the welcoming party of ship’s officers to walk immediately over to them and inquire after their welfare and that of their shipmates. I value these testimonials as much as my father and grandfather did. They are from men who at one time risked death at the order of the John McCain they wrote to praise.

–– CHAPTER 7 –– The Gunnel

The day the Japanese sank the fleet in Pearl Harbor is one of my earliest memories. I was five years old. We were living in New London at the time. It was a Sunday morning, and my entire family was—for reasons I cannot recall—standing in the front yard of our small house. A black car passing our house slowed down and the driver, a naval officer, rolled down his window and shouted, “Jack, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.” My father left for the base immediately. I saw very little of him for the next four years.

He commanded three submarines during the war. The first command he held just briefly before being ordered on his first combat patrol. The second, the USS Gunnel, served as a reconnaissance and beacon ship for Operation Torch, the American invasion of North Africa. The Gunnel was ordered to leave New London at midnight on October 18 and proceed to waters off Fedala, French Morocco, about fifteen miles north of Casablanca, arriving there five days in advance of the invasion. Under strict orders to remain undetected at all costs, the Gunnel was to make landfall submerged, a dangerous and exacting maneuver, and, once there, to reconnoiter and photograph the beaches to determine the best landing sites.

By means of infrared searchlights invisible to the unaided eye, the Gunnel served as a lighthouse for the invading armada, keeping the ships on course for the landing beaches. An hour before midnight on November 7, the Gunnel’s signalman sighted the huge fleet cresting the horizon exactly on schedule. The Gunnel began flashing its designated signal, and throughout the night American ships took up their positions off the Moroccan coast and lowered their landing craft.

At dawn, the Gunnel’s secret mission complete, my father was ordered to fly the American flag, illuminate it with a spotlight, and proceed on the surface at top speed out of the congested area to safer waters near the Canary Islands.

Friendly fire, a misfortune of war today, was a much more frequent occurrence in earlier wars. In their first combat patrol, the crew of the Gunnel had a number of close calls when friendly ships and planes, in the fog of war, mistook my father’s submarine for a German sub, as American submarines in war zones were an unfamiliar sight in 1942.

On their passage out of the invasion area, my father allowed his crew to stand topside in shifts to watch the naval barrage directed at the fortifications at Fedala and Casablanca. As my father and some of his crew stood mesmerized, watching the spectacular assault, the booming guns of American battleships firing one-ton shells toward the outgunned enemy, an American P-40 plane dropped out of the clouds and began strafing the Gunnel. My father ordered the sub to dive, and he and the other men on deck scrambled down the conning-tower hatch.

Fifteen minutes later, the Gunnel surfaced and was signaled by an American seaplane. “Good morning, sallow face, I am here to protect you.” The plane escorted the Gunnel to safety for some time until it broke off to chase an approaching French plane away from the sub.

A little after noon that same day, an American bomber was spotted approaching the Gunnel. When the plane ignored the sub’s signal, dipped a wing, and turned as if preparing for a dive-bombing, the executive officer, standing on the Gunnel’s bridge, ordered a crash dive. The sub descended at a dangerously steep angle as the bomb exploded so close that some of the crew were struck by flying paint chips knocked loose from inside the sub’s conning tower by the force of the blast.

When the Gunnel reached its assigned station and patrolled waters off the Canaries, it was hunted for four days by German subs. On November 13, my father was ordered to make for a British submarine base at Roseneath, Scotland. En route three days later, the Gunnel was spotted and chased by a U-boat. Later that same day, one of the Gunnel’s four main engines broke down. Over the next nine days, the three remaining main engines stopped working.

When the last of its four engines gave out, the Gunnel was still a thousand miles from Scotland and sailing in extremely hazardous waters infested with German subs and patrolled by German aircraft. My father ordered his engineers to convert the auxiliary engine, normally used to power the sub’s lights and air-conditioning, for propulsion.

Under full power, the Gunnel could make twenty knots on the surface and nine knots submerged. Powered by its auxiliary engine, the sub could make only five knots at best as it limped slowly toward Scotland, submerged by day and on the surface by night.

My father radioed his condition to naval authorities, and the Gunnel was redirected to a closer naval base, at Falmouth in southern England. The British offered to send an escort or a tug to tow the Gunnel to safety. According to the Gunnel’s torpedo officer, “Both offers were promptly and unequivocally declined by Captain McCain as he chomped down hard on his cigar.”

Were the overworked auxiliary engine to break down, the Gunnel would be dead in the water. Use of the sub’s lighting and fans was reduced to bare minimum. One of the machinist’s mates placed a small statue of Buddha in front of the small engine and ordered passing crewmen to bow respectfully.

On November 19, still a week’s voyage from Falmouth, my father sighted through the sub’s periscope several ships’ masts on the horizon. As three ships, antisubmarine escorts serving as a screen for an advancing convoy, drew closer, my father ordered battle stations. The Gunnel’s communications officer searched the ship recognition manuals but could find nothing that would identify the approaching ships as friendly.

At about three thousand yards, the three ships detected the Gunnel, and they advanced toward her. My father prepared his crew to fight. One of his officers recalls him declaring, “If those bastards drop depth charges we are going to give it to them.” But just before the fight commenced my father recognized a British ensign flying on the closest ship.

My father ordered a red smoke-signal rocket launched from an underwater tube. The lead British warship ordered my father to surface with the Gunnel’s torpedo tubes pointed away from the ships. When he did so, the Gunnel found itself in the center of a triangle with the guns of all three British ships pointing at it. One of the British commanding officers hailed my father through a megaphone and announced, “Good thing you fired that red smoke. We were about to blast you out of the water.”

Six days later, on Thanksgiving Day, the Gunnel reached Falmouth. After repairs, the sub proceeded to Roseneath. After further repairs, the Gunnel returned to the States, where it was outfitted in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for combat duty in the Pacific.

Upon completion of his first combat mission, the thirty-one-year-old submarine skipper was commended by the Atlantic Fleet Commander in Chief. “Commander John S. McCain, by extremely skillful and daring handling of his ship, performed special missions which contributed materially to the successful execution of an extremely difficult landing of a large expeditionary force on a strange and poorly charted coast.”

Although he had initially wanted to be an aviator, in later years my father would remark that his disqualification as a pilot had been a lucky twist of fate. He was proud to be a skipper in a service that was then and is now a select branch of the Navy. The submarine service places a high premium on the individual initiative of its commanders, especially in war. Long patrols, inconsistent communications with base command, battles often fought alone, fateful decisions left entirely to the skipper—the service suited my father’s personality completely. “It’s a unique life in submarines,” he gratefully recalled. “You’re on your own… completely detached from the world.”

He was a resourceful skipper, adept at devising imaginative improvements to his sub’s war-fighting capabilities. He worked out a formula for targeting torpedoes at unseen enemy ships while submerged. He did it by taking sound bearings of the other ship and comparing his sub’s course and speed to his estimate of the target’s speed, thereby deriving the enemy’s range and course. It was a remarkably accurate system, and my father credited a great many sunken enemy ships to its effectiveness.

He invented an electric firing device for the ship’s guns. Until he improved the firing mechanism, the firing pin of submarine guns was released by depressing a foot pedal on the gun mount. The gunner had to apply a considerable amount of pressure to the pedal to get it to release the pin and fire a shell. Often the exertion by the gunner threw his aim off. My father rigged up a handheld firing button. All the gunner had to do was press a button held in his right hand, enabling him to keep a steadier aim while firing.

The officers and crew of the Gunnel called him Captain Jack. In the words of his executive officer, and friend of many years, retired Rear Admiral Joe Vasey, the men of the USS Gunnel “would do anything for their skipper.”

My father made a point of knowing all about the personal lives of the men under his command. He daily wandered through the submarine’s compartments, greeting and joking with his subordinates. He paused here and there to have a cup of coffee with the men, and to have them bring him up to date on the details of their lives back home.

There were eight officers and seventy-two enlisted men on board the Gunnel. My father knew the first names of every one of them. He knew who was married and who was single; how many kids they had; whose wives were pregnant and whether they were hoping for a boy or a girl. He knew what sports they favored; what they had done for a living before the war; what they wanted to do when they returned home. He knew what scared them and what made them angry. After the war, when any one of them contacted him for assistance, he did all he could to provide it.

Admiral Vasey, who worked for my father again when he reached the pinnacle of his career as Commander in Chief, Pacific, calls him “the greatest leader of men I have ever known.”

My father and a few of his officers returned to the Gunnel one morning much the worse for wear after a long, raucous night ashore in Freemantle, Australia. The Gunnel was to leave on combat patrol that day. As they boarded the sub, my father turned to his exec and said, “Joe, muster the crew. I want to talk to these guys.”

My father paced in front of the assembled crew, an unlit cigar protruding from the corner of his mouth, and exhorted them to martial glory. “Fellows, we’re going off to fight the goddam Japanese. We’re gonna find ’em and fight ’em wherever the hell they are. We’re gonna fight these bastards, and we’re gonna lick ’em. We’re not gonna let these Japs hide from us. We’ll fight ’em even if we have to go into their harbors to find them, and they’re gonna be goddam sorry we did, I’ll tell you that. Now, every man who wants to go with me, take one step forward, and anyone who doesn’t, stay right where you are.”

Laughing and roaring approval, every man of the Gunnel stepped forward and signaled his pride in following Captain Jack wherever he chose to lead him.

Many years later, in a commencement address he gave at the Naval Academy, he spoke of the all-important relationship between a skipper and the enlisted men under his command, the bluejackets, who were, he often said, the “backbone of the Navy.” “When you step aboard ship and stand in front of your first division of bluejackets,” he said, “they will evaluate you accurately and without delay. In fact, there is no more exacting method of determining an officer’s worth. Furthermore, you can’t fool bluejackets. They are quick to recognize the phony. If you lose the respect of these men, you are finished. You can never get it back.”

My father never lost the respect of the men who sailed under his command. He taught them their duty, as they taught him his, and made them proud to carry it out. And he looked after them.

Heading for Fremantle, Australia, for fuel during one patrol, the Gunnel’s officer of the deck sighted a bomber overhead. Knowing it was either an American or Australian plane, the officer exchanged prescribed recognition signals with the bomber indicating they were friendly.

A few moments after the plane passed overhead, it turned and made a run on the Gunnel. My father was on the bridge. As the plane menacingly approached, my father gave the order to dive. As his ship submerged, the plane released two bombs, which fell close by, shaking the Gunnel violently.

A few hours later, the Gunnel reached port. After the Gunnel tied up to the dock, my father asked the officer of the deck if he was sure he had given the bomber the right recognition signal. The young officer replied that he had. Angrily, my father had Joe Vasey bring him the two largest ensigns on board, one of whom had been an intercollegiate heavyweight wrestling champion. “Men, I want you to go find the bastards who did this to us, and take care of them. You got that?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the two hulking ensigns shouted, and then took off at a brisk pace to execute their skipper’s order.

Some hours later, my father heard some kind of commotion on the dock and came up on deck to see what was happening. There he found the two ensigns he had ordered to avenge the Gunnel’s honor stumbling toward the ship, amid a crowd of Australian Army officers, all of whom were drunk, carrying beers in their hands and singing “Waltzing Matilda” loudly and off-key.

The two ensigns had apparently inquired of the Australians who were now escorting them back to ship where they might locate the offending bomber crew. Judging that the two men might come to more harm than good, the Australians pleaded ignorance about the crew’s whereabouts, but promised to look into the matter if the ensigns would join them for a drink. The ensigns decided they surely had enough time to suspend their search briefly for a quick beer, and a good many beers later they found themselves part of the roving, boisterous chorus that now stood in the gaze of the much-amused skipper of the Gunnel.

My father was never one to begrudge any man under his command a much-deserved respite from war, and he gladly wrote off the ensigns’ failure to carry out his orders to the greater good of improving Allied relations. No one laughed harder than he did at the drunken spectacle on the Fremantle dock. Long after the event, he would still joke with the wayward ensigns about how they had let their Australian brothers-in-arms get the better of them.

Patrolling the waters between Midway and Nagasaki on their second combat patrol, the crew of the Gunnel had their greatest success under my father’s command as well as their first encounter with Japanese depth charges, one of the most harrowing experiences in naval warfare.

In the early evening of June 18, while hunting on the surface in the East China Sea just south of the Korean peninsula, the Gunnel sighted the masks and smokestacks of seven large Japanese freighters and two smaller vessels. The smaller boats, one a fishing trawler and the other probably a small destroyer, were serving as escorts. The ships were making full speed and changing course by forty to sixty degrees every ten minutes. By plotting their base course, the Gunnel’s navigation officer determined that the convoy was heading for Shanghai.

Unable to close with the fast-moving convoy while his submarine was submerged and making a top speed of only nine knots, my father decided to surface and, traveling at seventeen knots, get ahead of the convoy during the night. Over the next several hours the Gunnel raced to cut off the Japanese ships. By midnight it had reached its intended patrol site but had lost sight of the convoy.

Around five-thirty the morning of the 19th, the sub’s radar picked up an enemy plane patrolling eight miles away. My father gave the order to submerge. When the Gunnel surfaced an hour later, the convoy was on the horizon, now steaming slowly. The Gunnel dove again and proceeded to close with the enemy at full speed, taking periscope observations every five minutes.

An hour and a half later, the Gunnel was within firing range of the freighters. My father fired three torpedoes from his bow tubes at the nearest ship, an old freighter of about eight thousand tons. A minute later, he fired three more from the bow at a second freighter. The first freighter was hit, and it sank within a few minutes while the Gunnel reached for the bottom.

At eighty feet the men of the Gunnel heard another torpedo explode. It had missed the second freighter but struck a third ship two thousand yards on the port side of the intended target. A moment later one of the convoy’s two escort ships dropped the first of seven depth charges, each one detonating closer than the preceding one.

Joe Vasey described what it was like to be depth-charged: “You usually first heard the click of the detonator through the hull. But the explosion was the worst. It was like being in a steel container with someone hitting a giant sledgehammer against it. It can shake the whole bloody sub.” Submarine crewmen prepared by bending their legs to absorb the impact. As Joe Vasey explained, many a submariner “had fractured legs from the shock of the deck plates and standing too rigidly.”

The Gunnel had submerged 150 feet when the last of the seven depth charges exploded. One of the escorts, probably the trawler, was directly overhead. It dropped a grapnel over the side to try to hook the sub, a favorite tactic of commercial fishing vessels that were pressed into war service. The grapnel’s chain dragged along the port side of the Gunnel, “rattling slowly and excruciatingly,” my father recorded in his log, adding that “the chains of Marley’s ghost sounded very much like that to old Scrooge.”

My father ordered the Gunnel to descend to a depth of three hundred feet. The sub ran at that depth for four hours. Twice my father heard the enemy escort pass directly overhead. After an hour had passed without hearing anything from the enemy ship that was searching, its depth charges ready, for the Gunnel, my father came up to periscope depth. He sighted a Japanese warship about three thousand yards to his starboard, and immediately submerged again to three hundred feet.

A large Japanese naval base was located at Sasebo, less than a hundred miles to the east of the Gunnel’s position. In response to the Gunnel’s attack on the convoy, three destroyers had been sent out of Sasebo to hunt down and destroy the American sub. The approaching ship was one of them.

During its deep dive, it was necessary for the Gunnel to allow some water to flood in, making the sub heavier and enabling it to remain submerged at such a great depth. The Gunnel ran in this heavy condition for several hours, while the three destroyers hunted the sub with their sonar. When they were close, my father and his crew could hear distinctly through the sub’s hull the destroyer’s sonar pinging incessantly. The air was growing foul and the crew’s nerves were strained to the breaking point. One of the Gunnel’s signalmen, Charles Napier, recalled fifty years later: “The Catholics were fingering their rosaries, other religious sailors were praying, and some were simply trying to figure how to get out of the situation.”

Around nine o’clock that night, the Gunnel, its batteries dangerously low and its air banks nearly depleted, surfaced. The weary and frightened crew gasped clean air for the first time in sixteen hours.

Water from a leak in the conning tower had flooded the pump room and grounded out an air compressor and the air-conditioning plant. Intending to run on the surface while the crew made repairs, my father took the sub close to the area where he had sunk the freighter.

It was a cloudless night with bright moonlight and calm seas. At nine-thirty, a lookout spotted one of the Japanese destroyers 5,800 yards away. My father put the destroyer astern of the sub and gave the order for battle stations. He ordered every man off the bridge except for the quartermaster and himself and told the crew to make ready two of the stern torpedo tubes. He ran the Gunnel at full speed, making eighteen knots, but the destroyer made thirty knots, and closed rapidly.

At a little less than three thousand yards, the destroyer’s guns opened up on the Gunnel, firing fused projectiles that passed over and on either side of the sub.

My father had ordered Joe Vasey, the Gunnel’s torpedo officer, to work out a firing solution for all four of the stern torpedo tubes. With shells fired from the destroyer’s guns “getting uncomfortably close,” exploding overhead and missing barely to the Gunnel’s port and starboard sides, my father yelled, “Goddammit, shoot, Joe, shoot.” Vasey fired the two operable torpedoes “down the throat” of the destroyer as my father sounded the diving alarm.

When the Gunnel reached thirty-five feet, the first torpedo hit the destroyer. A few seconds later, five depth charges detonated simultaneously off the Gunnel’s stern. My father recorded the moment in his log, breaking his usual habit of restricting his official record to a dry recitation of the facts and avoiding dramatic embellishment: “The awesome sounds of exploding depth charges and collapsing bulkheads as the warship rapidly sank close astern of Gunnel was an unforgettable experience for all hands.”

My father leveled the sub off at two hundred feet. When he picked up the two remaining destroyers on his sonar rapidly approaching, he took the Gunnel down to three hundred feet and commenced evasive tactics. The destroyers dropped eight more depth charges off the sub’s stern. After six hours, the Gunnel surfaced very briefly to charge its batteries and air banks. Spotting the destroyers, my father took it down again. He remained submerged for the next eighteen hours with all auxiliary engines turned off, keeping the sub’s noise at a minimum to avoid detection by sonar.

Running silent for such a long period was a perilous predicament for a submarine crew. You ran the risk of losing all power as the batteries, which could be charged only when the submarine was surfaced, ran down completely. The air grew unbreathable as the submarine’s carbon dioxide absorbent was used up. This was the situation my father and his crew faced on the evening of June 20.

The air became so foul that crew members not needed at battle stations were ordered to rest in their bunks, where they would consume less oxygen. Earlier, the crew had felt a sense of hopelessness when the grapnel chain had scraped against the Gunnel’s side, knowing that if the hook grabbed onto something, depth charges would immediately be dropped directly onto the sub. Most of the crew, terrified, soaked with perspiration, had managed to control their emotions, and they responded to their skipper’s orders. Some of the younger crew members had wept, facedown in their bunks. Fear and poor air made a few men delirious, and one of them had to be strapped down.

The anxiety of those who were still in possession of their faculties after many hours submerged was growing into frantic desperation. Over the last two days they had endured the excitement of the chase and attack on the convoy, a hair-raising close call in a surface battle with an enemy destroyer, and the terror of repeated depth charge attacks. Now they were sweating out endless hours fathoms down, exhausted, slowly suffocating while their sub faced the imminent prospect of lying dead in the water.

The temperature inside the sub had reached 120 degrees. The humidity was 100 percent. Above them, two destroyers constantly patrolled, determined to locate and destroy the American submarine that had sunk their sister ship.

At eight-thirty that night, my father called all his officers to the wardroom. There the chief of the boat and chief electrician’s mate informed them that the batteries would last only thirty to sixty minutes more, and that all the sub’s good air was gone. The Gunnel would have to surface as quickly as possible. After receiving this discouraging report, my father informed his officers of his intentions.

The sub would surface slowly to reduce the likelihood that the blowing of its ballast tanks would be detected by the enemy’s sonar. As soon as it surfaced, the ship’s guns would be immediately manned and readied for battle. If either of the destroyers was in range, the Gunnel would shoot it out, and charge its batteries and air banks on the run.

My father offered one other course of action to his officers, a course he strongly opposed. If his officers did not unanimously concur with his decision to fight, he would order all classified information and materials destroyed, surface the sub, and scuttle her. All hands would jump overboard and hope for rescue, a remote hope at best, given that the Japanese skippers whom they would rely on for rescue were undoubtedly bent on vengeance and unlikely to be sympathetic.

To a man, my father’s officers shouted their preference for a fight.

When they surfaced, they sighted the destroyers at a considerable distance and steaming away from the Gunnel. They gave no indication that they spotted the sub. My father reversed course and hurried away. The batteries for two of his diesel engines were recharged, and fresh air filled the ship.

Ten days after my father’s submarine eluded the destroyers, it reached Midway. I suspect the men of the USS Gunnel were never so happy to see that desolate, uninteresting island.

My father received the Silver Star for this action. The citation praised his “conspicuous gallantry, …bravery under fire and aggressive fighting spirit.”

After five combat patrols aboard the Gunnel, my father, now Commander McCain, took command of the USS Dentuda, which completed one patrol in the South China Sea before the war’s end. During its only patrol, the Dentuda fought a gun battle with two Japanese patrol craft and an inconclusive submerged battle with a Japanese submarine.

It was as commander of the Dentuda that my father entered Tokyo Bay, exhausted from the strain of command in one of the more terrifying forms of combat, to enjoy his last reunion with the father whose example had led him to this life.

–– CHAPTER 8 –– Four Stars

In 1965, my father reported for duty in New York, to serve as vice chairman of the delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee and as Commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier and the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.

He had distinguished himself in other commands since the Second World War and had enjoyed a notably successful career. He had commanded two submarine divisions. During the Korean War, as a captain, he served as second in command on the destroyer USS St. Paul. He was well regarded by influential leaders in Washington and had been given several important commands, the last being command of the Atlantic Fleet’s Amphibious Force, when he directed the American invasion of the Dominican Republic.

In 1965, violent clashes between warring factions, one of which was believed to be a Communist front, had brought the Dominican Republic to the verge of civil war. President Johnson ordered my father to command the amphibious assault of Operation Steel Pike 1, the invasion and military occupation of the Caribbean nation. The operation was controversial. Critics judged it, with good reason, to be an unlawful intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation. My father, typically, was undeterred by domestic opposition. “Some people condemned this as an unwarranted intervention,” he observed, “but the Communists were all set to move in and take over. People may not love you for being strong when you have to be, but they respect you for it and learn to behave themselves when you are.”

The operation was a success, and, at the time, it constituted the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken in peacetime. After its completion, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for attracting “worldwide attention to the highly mobile and devastating might” of the Navy and Marine Corps.

His subsequent assignment at the United Nations, however, was regarded by the Navy as a dead end and was expected to be his last. He was a three-star admiral, and the prospects for a fourth star were remote. But two years later he was ordered to London to assume command of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. A fourth star came with the job. He relieved the renowned Admiral John Thach, my grandfather’s old operations officer and friend.

Within a year, he was given command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the largest operational military command in the world. The dominion of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC) is geographically immense, encompassing 85 million square miles, extending from the Aleutian Islands to the South Pole and from the west coast of North and South America to the Indian Ocean.

CINCPAC, Admiral Nimitz’s wartime command, remains the U.S. Navy’s second most prestigious office. Only the office of Chief of Naval Operations is a greater privilege, and, if truth be told, a good many officers would prefer running the Pacific Command to running the entire Navy. My father had achieved prominence in his beloved Navy that surpassed his father’s storied career. The Washington Post reported his triumph under the headline NAVY CHEERS APPOINTMENT OF MCCAIN.

Shortly after his new assignment was made public, my father received a letter from a retired sailor who had known my grandfather during the war. He wrote of how highly regarded my grandfather had been by the enlisted men under his command.

I imagine the old sailor’s note, rejoicing in the professional triumph of the son of a Navy legend, must have moved my father very much. Though I was not privileged to witness his change-of-command ceremony, I have always believed that for that one moment, my father, so hard driven by his often oppressive desire to honor his father’s name, looked on his career with tranquillity and satisfaction. He must have felt the old man’s pride as he took his first salute as commander of the greatest military force in the world, with dominion over the waters where the answer “I’ve sent McCain” had once relieved an anxious predecessor.

Over a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen now answered to my father’s orders. As CINCPAC, my father had command over the war in Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams, then commanding U.S. forces in Vietnam, was his subordinate; as was I, a lieutenant commander, held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.