Mark Salter - The Luckiest Man: Life with John McCain

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by Mark Salter

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2020

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Jacket Photographs: (Front) by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images; (Spine) by Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2093-1

ISBN 978-1-9821-2095-5 (ebook)

For Diane, Molly, and Elizabeth

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, not falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

I n my memory of that warm July day in 1989, there are half a dozen staffers milling around his subterranean office in the Russell Building, including an intern who was shadowing him for the day. It was casual. The men were in shirtsleeves, ties loosened. Everyone called him John, not sir or Senator. Those formalities were reserved for responses when he was angry with you or with a colleague or with himself. There were two or three conversations happening at the same time. He introduced me to the intern, whom I sat next to on the leather sofa. It was a little hard to hear him over the hum of multiple conversations. Many years have passed, and I have an old mans memory, but I recall his instruction to me going something like this:

Look, Lorne is leaving. I want you to fill in. Most of the job will be Central America and Southeast Asia, but I want you to do a lot of the writing around here. Go talk to Chris about the money.

Lorne was Lorne Craner, his foreign affairs aide, son of air force colonel Bob Craner, who had occupied the cell next to the senators when they were held in solitary confinement in Hanoi. Lorne had accepted a job in George H. W. Bushs State Department. Chris was Chris Koch, McCains administrative assistant, which is what head staffers in Senate offices used to call ourselves before we inflated our title to chief of staff.

I hadnt expected him to offer me a position on his staff, and I asked him for a little time to consider it. I thought I would appear overeager to jump at it, even though I knew instantly I wanted the job. He looked puzzled and a little put out by my response, and he paused for a second before asking, Whaddya need, a couple hours? I mumbled something noncommittal in reply, and he dismissed me with, Yeah, okay, think about it. But not too long. Well have fun. Talk to Chris about the money.

I talked to Chris about the money. Then I walked back to my office wondering how long an interval I should let lapse before I accepted. I didnt want to risk offending him, but having asked for time, I thought it would look silly if I got back to him that day. And I first had to break the news to my employer, former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was vacationing in France at the time. I decided to call Kirkpatrick in the morning and then call Chris to accept the senators offer precisely twenty-four hours after he had extended it. The recollection of my overthought, dorky propriety makes me laugh now, which is appropriate. Derisive laughter was the typical response to most examples of formality in the notoriously informal McCain world.

Twenty-eight years to the month later, I found myself in his officea more spacious one, a floor above his first suite of rooms, with a fine view of the Capitolsearching again for the right reaction to another unexpected and, in this instance, unwanted turn of events. It was just the two of us, a few days after McCain had returned to the Senate, and less than two weeks since he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. We talked about his priorities for the time that remained to him. There was urgency in his attitude, but not a great deal more than the urgency he usually brought to new predicaments. He lightened the conversation with wisecracks and irony, his trademark response to adversity. His response to success, too. His response to everything, to fate, to human folly, to the physical laws of the universe: Its always darkest before its totally black. I tried to behave likewise, kidding that I expected him to outlive me. Youre giving the eulogy at my funeral, I insisted. Ive already written it for you. Its very moving.

I suddenly felt myself losing composure. Nothing had seemed to precipitate it. One moment we were joking around, and then, as if I had been startled by something, I asked him, What are we going to do about this? He held up his hand to stop me from going further and said, Were going to man up, you and me. Thats what were going to do about it.

The nearly three decades that had passed between my introduction to the life of John McCain and his declaration of how he intended to face its end were purposeful, exhilarating, and, as he had promised, fun. I was exposed to people and events that shaped the course of history, to national politics at the highest level, to world affairs as conducted in corridors of power, and to the struggles of human beings for security, autonomy, and respect. I went to work for him when I was thirty-four years old. Before then, I had not traveled outside the continental U.S. except for a brief trip to Canada. My exposure to national politics was limited to conversations with friends who worked for politicians. McCain was a man with causes. They were causes I was obligated to serve by my responsibilities to him, for which my previous experiences had not prepared me, and they gave my life greater purpose than I had expected it to have. My life likely would have been a lot less interesting and rewarding had I not worked for him. A lot less fun, too.

In the course of our long association, we became friends, and I am obligated, too, by bonds of friendship to defend his reputation, as I did in one capacity or another while he was alive. I wont present a false portrait of the man, puffing up his virtues and denying his defects. He was not someone who was particularly guarded about his reputation. I dont mean his reputation didnt matter to him. It certainly did. But he didnt think his reputationor anyones, for that mattershould be so delicate a thing that it couldnt admit to failings, rough edges, and contradictions. What mattered was that you acted honorably in service of something more important than yourself, and you treated people fairly. He didnt believe politicians had to adhere to strict rules of decorum that put their personalities in a straitjacket. He believed if you maintained your honor, which could be a demanding commitment, you didnt have to sweat the sillier stuff of politics, the conventions on how to act and speak in public, the cautious image-making that made you appear as though you had been born middle-aged or the affected folksy modesty of the phony populist. He thought most voters could see through that stuff. You could be yourself, he believedmostly, anyway.