McCain John - Character is destiny: inspiring stories we should all remember

CHARACTER Is DESTINY

Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember

JOHN McCAIN

with MARK SALTER

RANDOM HOUSE | NEW YORK

CONTENTS

FOR SHEPP AND CAROLINE MCCAIN,

ANDREW AND MARGARET MCCAIN,

AND MOLLY AND ELIZABETH SALTER,

with love

INTRODUCTION

I DONT BELIEVE IN DESTINY. WE ARE NOT BORN TO BECOME ONE THING OR another, left to follow helplessly a course that was charted for us by some unseen hand, a mysterious alignment of the stars that pulls us in a certain direction, bestowing happiness on some and misfortune on others. The only fate we cannot escape is our mortality. Even a long life is a brief experience, hard as that is to believe when we are young. God has given us that life, shown us how to use it, but left it to us to dispose of as we choose. Our character will determine how well or how poorly we choose.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy. That is all that really passes for destiny. And you choose it. No one else can give it to you or deny it to you. No rival can steal it from you. And no friend can give it to you. Others can encourage you to make the right choices or discourage you. But you choose.

Your happiness is at stake in every difficult decision you must make about what kind of person you will be: honest or deceitful; responsible or unreliable; brave or cowardly; kind or cruel. Your talents have little to do with it. Your looks dont matter at all. You dont need to be good at sports. You dont need to be popular with other kids. You need not be smarter than others. Those things are nice and useful and pleasing. But they wont by themselves make you happy. Looks change. People for no good reason can sometimes treat us unfairly, and friends come and go as our lives take us to new schools, different jobs, and faraway places. Our strength and speed and agility grow for a few years, and then, for most of our lives, we get weaker, slower, and clumsier. However smart we are, there are always other people who know more than us.

The stories in this book, those that are well known and those that are not, are the stories of remarkable people who chose well. Most are people of exceptionally good character. All, no doubt, had flaws. Everyone does. But they all exemplify one or more essential attributes of good character.

I would be proud to be among their number. But were I to use my own character as an example of how to build yours, I would lack one of the most important qualities of good characterhonesty. My own children, who have suffered, as they often remind me, considerable embarrassment already from their fathers public and unconvincing attempts at proving himself a role model for the young, have taught me just enough humility to avoid that conceit. Rather than cause them any further discomfort, I have relied instead on the example of people who have no need to prove themselves worthy of admiration. They have earned much more than public acclaim.

The best I can claim for my own character is that it is still, even at this late date, a work in progress. The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book, is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have chosen a course that has risked it for some selfish reason. As I am blessed with a naturally optimistic disposition, Im still working on my character, although I am sixty-eight years old as we write this.

Thus, I can profit as much as any reader from the examples of character we celebrate in the following pages. We have intended this work to be of interest not only to young readers but to parents and readers of any age. However numerous our achievements and experiences, most of us can still stand a little improvement. Even the most crowded, accomplished life can still suffer a sense of incompleteness. Our character is a lifelong project, and perhaps the older we are, and the more fixed our shortcomings are, the more we can use inspiration to encourage our escape from the restraints of our deficiencies.

The greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare, wrote plays and poems that taught such important lessons about human nature and the qualities of good and bad people, few things written before or after have explained them better. His plays, written more than four hundred years ago, were a little hard for me to understand when I was young. But I had a teacher who loved them, and he taught me to love them. Thanks to him, those plays are for me more moving than anything we have for entertainment today.

I imagine you know some of his plays and remember some of their most famous lines. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood for me shall be my brother. Those two lines are from my favorite play, Henry V. They are spoken by a king as encouragement to his soldiers who are about to fight a battle in which they are greatly outnumbered. It is a soldiers play, and I have never tired of it.

One of the most often quoted passages in English literature and the theme for countless graduation speeches and self-help essays comes from Hamlet. A character named Polonius tells his son, Laertes: This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cannot then be false to any man.

Many people remember only the first part of the line, to thine ownself be true, and they interpret it to mean we should do whatever we want to do, whatever feels good to us. But Ive always interpreted it to mean we must be true to our conscience, and to do that, you cannot be false to any man. In other words, being true to our conscience, being honest with ourselves, will determine the character of our relations with others. That is a concise definition of integrity.

The individuals whose stories we tell were chosen because they had a special quality, a particular strength of character that made their lives and their world better. They chose to live their lives in ways that we admire because they believed their principles were their most important possessions. Not their looks or their abilities, not their comfort or pleasure, not their job or house or car or toys or how many friends they had or how much money they made. They were true to themselves, and were not false to anyone.

I hope their stories will, in some small way, help you prepare for the important choices in your own life. Not because you will face the same choices they faced. Few of us will. But they began their lives as we began ours, creatures of their appetites and entirely dependent on others, some with more advantages than you have, many with considerably fewer. We are born with one nature. We want what we want, and we want it now. But as we grow, we develop our second nature, our character. These stories are about that second nature. And if the character of these heroes, what they sacrificed for it, and what they accomplished with it, inspire you as much as they inspire me, you will find their lives to be excellent teachers.

Your best teachers, of course, are your parents. From their example, even more than their instruction, you will first learn to love virtue. Their responsibility to you is much more than to feed, clothe, and house you. You are or should be the great work of their lives. Parents are not the all-knowing, ideal people we would like you to think we are. Weve made wrong choices before, and will again, like everyone else. But our mistakes are not the measure of our love for you. You are that measure, and how well you are prepared to make better choices than we have made.