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September 10, 2008

getting to know McCain the man

Read this from Worldnet

Why haven't we heard these very personal and very telling stories about McCain. I hope every American gets to know the McCain I know.

There's another factor we need to consider seriously in picking a president, as Karl Rove insightfully noted in a Wall Street Journal column.

Rove tells of a recent dinner date with Col. Bud Day and his wife. A congressional medal of honor recipient and former fighter pilot and Vietnam POW, Day was John McCain's superior officer and roommate at the "Hanoi Hilton" prison.

"When it comes to choosing a president," said Rove, "the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal."

In pursuit of this goal, Rove related a few of the stories Day told him, including one about what happened to Day after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war:

When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."

The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.

But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint.

Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place. …

Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.

Another story the Days told him over dinner, said Rove, involved McCain's role as one of three de facto chaplains for his fellow POWs. Day, the senior officer at the Hanoi prison, appointed McCain to help administer religious services to the other prisoners. As Rove explained it:

Today, Mr. Day, a very active 83, still vividly recalls Mr. McCain's sermons. "He remembered the Episcopal liturgy," Mr. Day says, "and sounded like a bona fide preacher." One of Mr. McCain's first sermons took as its text Luke 20:25 and Matthew 22:21, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." Mr. McCain said he and his fellow prisoners shouldn't ask God to free them, but to help them become the best people they could be while serving as POWs. It was Caesar who put them in prison and Caesar who would get them out. Their task was to act with honor.

Already well-known is the fact that McCain refused early release from the Hanoi Hilton, due to his father's position as a U.S. Navy admiral. Comments Rove:

Mr. Day recalls with pride Mr. McCain stubbornly refusing to accept special treatment or curry favor to be released early, even when gravely ill. Mr. McCain knew the Vietnamese wanted the propaganda victory of the son and grandson of Navy admirals accepting special treatment. "He wasn't corruptible then," Mr. Day says, "and he's not corruptible today."

However, the stories the Days told Rove went beyond the Vietnam War era. In 1991, for instance, "Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands," Rove writes. When it became clear the orphanage couldn't provide the medical care necessary to save the child's life, Cindy McCain brought the child back to America with her, where she was met at the airport by her husband.

When Mrs. McCain explained that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation, and said to John, "I hope she can stay with us," McCain agreed. "Today that child is their teenage daughter, Bridget," writes Rove.

While Rove says he was aware of this story, what he didn't know previously was that Mrs. McCain had brought back a second infant – a little girl that ended up being adopted by young McCain aide Wes Gullet and his wife.

"We were called at midnight by Cindy," Gullett later told Rove, and "five days later we met our new daughter, Nicki, at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport." Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. And, Gullett told Rove, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care.

Rove, who calls McCain "one of the most private individuals to run for president in history," described these details of the candidate's private life not only "deeply moving," but "politically troubling" – troubling because, in Rove's words, "if Mr. McCain is to win the election this fall, he has to open up."

To be sure, explains Rove, Americans need to know about McCain's vision for America's future, including "his policy positions and domestic reforms." But, he stresses, "they also need to learn about the moments in his life that shaped him. Mr. McCain cannot make this a biography-only campaign – but he can't afford to make it a biography-free campaign either. Unless he opens up more, many voters will never know the experiences of his life that show his character, integrity and essential decency."

Although John McCain is far from a perfect person or candidate, he has demonstrated both the strong character and the core American values we want and need in a president. Barack Obama, whose entire campaign is based on dazzling as many people as possible with beguiling words while concealing at all costs his breathtakingly destructive, far-left agenda, has not demonstrated the character needed to be president.

Friends, please don't bother e-mailing me about all the wrong things McCain has done over the years. I've been a newsman for most of the past 25-plus years. I've heard it all, and then some. Our nation has never had a perfect chief executive, and we frankly don't require one. What we absolutely do need, as Rove put it, is one with "character, integrity and essential decency."

Posted by Martin at September 10, 2008 10:58 PM

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