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.