"Not Clinical, Cynical"

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25 Aug 2008 10:27 am

A reader writes on McCain's POW refrain:

This morning you noted that McCain’s constant POW self-references have assumed clinical proportions; I don’t know if he’s clinical, but he’s certainly cynical. Real heroes don’t go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about their own heroism – particularly in order to satisfy personal ambition like this:
"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time." – John McCain, "Worth the Fighting For”, 2002.
The heroes I knew in my youth – the guys who came back from WWII and Korea – never said a word about it. Our family friend Ernie, who had been a German POW for three years after being shot down; the only way I ever learned about that is that someone else told me – not Ernie. My dad – 100 missions over North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, three confirmed kills and the Distinguished Flying Cross - never a word about the war; no, I take that back: on his deathbed, when we were alone, he struggled up out of his delirium for a moment and looked at me and said “War is the stupidest thing human beings do.” Almost the last thing he ever said.

We’ve all spent years psychoanalyzing Bush and his oedipal drama, his need to out-do his old man – what about McCain and his 4-star admiral father and 4-star admiral grandfather: think there might be any oedipal ambition there? Do we need four more years of this?

("He is a striver and a combatant, often at war with himself", who has conducted a lifelong struggle "to prove to myself that I was the man I had always wanted to be," as he has written.)

McCain is obviously a decent man, and a strong one. He would hardly make the worst President in US history (that spot is already reserved). But let’s put the “hero” business in perspective: he is not a saint, and he is using – constantly using – his hero status to leverage himself past criticism that any other man would have to confront on the merits, and, if his ambition is fulfilled, into the Oval Office. I don’t buy it.

The heroes I remember were every bit the hero John McCain is – but they didn’t spend all their time for years afterward tooting their own horns and trying to trade on their status for personal political gain. In fact, that kind of immodesty used to be seen as inappropriate and unseemly, if not ridiculous.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

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