Over the course of American history, a handful of U.S. senators have been so consequential that they are remembered better than some presidents. Among them are Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert La Follette, Everett Dirksen and Ted Kennedy. John McCain, who died Saturday, deserves to be the most recent addition to this exclusive company.
McCain graduated near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, where he was infamous for his large number of demerits. As a Navy pilot, he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. There he spent more than five years enduring torture and solitary confinement but refusing offers to be released before fellow POWs who had been held longer. During a 2007 Republican presidential debate, he mentioned that Hillary Clinton had earmarked $1 million in the Senate for a cultural museum in Woodstock, in upstate New York. McCain hadn't attended the festival in 1969: "I was tied up at the time."
His signature legislative achievement, a campaign finance reform package known as McCain-Feingold, became law in 2002, but a provision restricting corporations and unions from spending money on electioneering communications was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010.
Unlike many of his GOP colleagues, he didn't shrink from criticizing Trump. The president's July news conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, McCain charged, was "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory." He took Trump's many fulminations against him as a badge of honor.
He will be remembered in many ways--as a war hero, a political maverick, a reformer and a staunch advocate for an assertive American role in world affairs. But he will be remembered most as a patriot.
Editorial on 08/28/2018