‘Patriot,’ ‘hero,’ ‘American original’: Politicians remember John McCain

Updated at 11:25 a.m. Sunday

Sen. John McCain died Saturday, a day after his office announced his decision to discontinue medical treatment for brain cancer. Before his death, McCain’s wife Cindy said in a tweet that the McCain family was “overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support from around the world.”

That outpouring swelled after the news of his death broke on Saturday.

One of the most personal tributes came from McCain’s close friend and colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham.

America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions.

….And I’ve lost one of my dearest friends and mentor.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) August 26, 2018

“America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions. ….And I’ve lost one of my dearest friends and mentor,” Graham wrote.

“I will need some time to absorb this, but I want Cindy –and the entire McCain family — to know they are in my prayers,” Graham added.

President Trump offered his “deepest sympathies and respect” to the McCain family. “Our hearts and prayers are with you!” he added. McCain had been a frequent critic of Trump, whose “America First” ideology McCain believed parted from the country’s values. As a presidential candidate, Trump had belittled the former prisoner of war’s years spent in captivity.

“Few of us have been tested the way John once was,” former president and McCain’s 2008 election opponent Barack Obama said in a statement. Despite political divisions, Obama said he and McCain shared the privilege of serving a higher obligation — “the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants have fought, marched, and sacrificed.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said, “McCain will cast a long shadow,” with his impact cemented in America’s future.

Sarah Palin, who joined the McCain ticket as the potential vice president in the 2008 campaign, mourned her one-time running mate, calling him a friend, maverick and and an “American original.” “John never took the easy path in life – and through sacrifice and suffering he inspired others to serve something greater than self,” she tweeted.

Today we lost an American original. Sen. John McCain was a maverick and a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs. John never took the easy path in life – and through sacrifice and suffering he inspired others to serve something greater than self.

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) August 26, 2018

George W. Bush, the 43rd president who beat out McCain in a tense primary for Republican presidential nominee in 2000, praised the senator as “a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order.”

Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, remembered McCain as a courageous public servant. “Few sacrificed more for, or contributed more to, the welfare of his fellow citizens — and indeed freedom-loving peoples around the world,” he said in a statement.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described McCain as a skilled politician who “frequently put partisanship aside to do what he thought was best for the country.”

“The world has lost a hero and a statesman,” said Jeff Flake, Arizona’s other representative in the Senate. “Cindy and the McCain family have lost a loving husband and father. I have lost a wonderful friend.”

Words cannot express the sorrow I feel at John McCain’s passing. The world has lost a hero and a statesman. Cindy and the McCain family have lost a loving husband and father. I have lost a wonderful friend.

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) August 26, 2018

“It’s an understatement to say the Senate will not be the same without our friend John,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who broke the news to a room of gasps at the Republican Party’s annual Lincoln dinner in Kentucky.

In a comment to WHYY News, former Delaware senator and Biden aide Ted Kaufman said he first met McCain in 1978 when they both were Senate staffers.

“One of the highlights of my Senate term was serving with him on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” Kaufman said. “He was a wonderful person to have as a  friend. He will be missed.”

In a press release, Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, said he rarely met someone who cared as deeply about the U.S. as McCain. He recounted visits to a refugee camp in Jordan, a military base in Afghanistan and the prison in Vietnam where McCain was tortured as educational moments during his career.

“I’ve seen John represent our country in ways few are able to — delivering tough, principled messages to foreign leaders who didn’t always want to hear them, commanding immediate respect at international gatherings, and even showing the grace to extend a hand of friendship in a country where he endured the unthinkable,” Coons said. “In every one of those instances, John not only spoke for the United States, he embodied the principles and traditions that make this country exceptional.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who lauded his colleague as a “truth teller,” says he wants to rename one of the Senate office buildings after McCain “so that generations remember him.”

Elsewhere on Twitter, McCain’s trying years in the military were noted among commemorators as a defining feature of the Vietnam War veteran’s life. McCain was a prisoner of war for more than five years.

John Kerry, a former secretary of state and senator, who like McCain served in the war, said McCain “was an American original — guts, grit, and ultimately grace personified.”

Kerry recounted the two of them visiting the cell in Vietnam where McCain was once imprisoned:

“I stood with John, the two of us alone, in the very cell in the Hanoi Hilton where years of his life were lived out in pain but always in honor. If you ever needed to take the measure of John McCain, just count the days and years he spent in that tiny dank place and ask yourself whether you could make it through an hour.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the late Arizona senator as “an American patriot and hero whose sacrifices for his country, and lifetime of public service, were an inspiration to millions.”

In addition to local politicians, McCain has several personal connections to Philadelphia as well. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer story from 2008, McCain’s first wife Carol Shepp McCain grew up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania and lived in Philadelphia while dating him in the 1960s.

Shepp McCain has been good friends with Connie Cunningham Bookbinder of former seafood restaurant Old original Bookbinder’s for years. Shepp and McCain were married in 1965 in Bookbinder’s living room at 21st and Pine streets.

The last public speech McCain made before his death was in Philadelphia on October 16 of last year. He gave the address as he accepted the Liberty Medal, presented by his longtime colleague Joe Biden.

The 80-minute Liberty Medal ceremony on the front lawn of the National Constitution Center honored McCain, chiefly by remembering two incidents of his life almost exactly 50 years apart.

In 1967, as a Navy pilot, he was shot down in Vietnam, subsequently beaten and tortured as a prisoner of war for six years. At one point, he refused freedom in order to uphold a military code dictating that prisoners be released in the order they were captured.

This summer, just days after learning he has brain cancer, McCain took to the Senate floor as a senior statesman and excoriated his fellow lawmakers for their staunchly partisan behavior.

At the Liberty Medal ceremony, McCain was praised as both a war hero and a hero of bipartisanship.

“Today, new populist forces and social media technologies are Balkanizing citizens into filter bubbles and echo chambers,” said Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the National Constitution Center. “The result is polarizing our media and elected officials and threatening values of thoughtful deliberation and public reason in precisely the way the framers feared.”

To drive home the merits of crossing the aisle, the Constitution Center bestowed its Liberty Medal on the Republican senator and asked Biden, a Democrat, to present it.

In a 20-minute speech, by far the evening’s longest, Biden described the lengthy and close relationship he and McCain have enjoyed for more than two decades, most of that time when Biden served in the Senate.

“John and I used to — during debates in the ’90s — go over and sit with one another,” recalled Biden. “We both were chastised by the leadership in both our caucuses: Why were we talking with one another and showing such friendship in the middle of debates? This was after the [former Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich revolution in the ’90s. They didn’t want us sitting together.”

McCain and Biden hugged, then Biden handed McCain the Liberty Medal.

In his speech that followed, McCain was self-effacing.

“I’m the luckiest guy on earth,” he said. “I have served America’s cause, the cause of security and freedom and justice, all of my adult life. I haven’t always served it well. I haven’t even always appreciated what I was serving.

“Among the compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight,” continued McCain, 81. “I see now that I was part of something important that drew me along in its wake. I was — knowingly or no — along for the ride as America made the future better than the past.”

Beneath his humility and good-natured jabs at Biden, McCain kept his powder dry for a veiled attack on the current White House.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of Earth, for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” said McCain.

“We live in a land of ideals, not blood and soil.”

NPR’s James Doubek and WHYY News staff contributed to this story.

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