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.”