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.