EDITOR’S NOTE | By Bret Bradigan

Thank You, John McCain

The death of a maverick, the birth of a legend

John McCain once held a fundraiser in Ojai where his friend Duke Tully lived.

Of all the tributes pouring in for John McCain, who died Saturday, this one is probably from the person who knew him the least. All told, I’ve probably spent fewer than five or six hours in his company. However, the fact that I feel compelled to write these few hundred words you can regard as a measure of the man.

When I was a young reporter and city editor of the Sierra Vista Daily Herald, we would host McCain one or twice a year as he made visits to local newsrooms around Arizona. They were old-fashioned courtesy visits, to check in on areas of local concern and pressing issues that should be brought to his attention. We’d get some choice quotes and pithy headlines and he’d get some usually positive exposure as a man who cared about the communities in the state he served.

They used to call it “constituent service,” and it is a practice sorely missed. You could tell he wasn’t particularly enamored of that sort of glad-handing, but he was a man of duty and after what he had endured during his five-and-a-half years in the Hanoi Hilton, it was a small price to pay.

He was rounding out his first term in the Senate then, and had just endured the humiliation of being one of the “Keating Five,” the senators who pressed regulators to back off on the behest of Charles Keating, who treated his Lincoln Savings and Loan as a personal piggy bank, losing $3 billion and leaving 23,000 investors holding the bag.

In the conference room with him and the other reporters and editors on staff, it felt like they were being unnecessarily deferential. After all, we had one of the principals of the scandal of the day in our sights and we were lobbing him softballs? I’m not sure exactly what question was asked, something about transparency rules proposed by a Senate subcommittee and whether it would have prevented these corrupt practices. He bristled a bit, but a light went on in his eyes. He was famous for being irascible, and he suffered fools without gladness, but he gave us an apology. What he did was wrong, he acknowledged, but it came from good intent. It was his job to address the concerns of the residents of his state; Charles Keating was a constituent; and regardless of the poor “optics” of intervening on behalf of a major donor, Keating deserves to be heard as much as anyone else. What happened is that he gave Keating too much access and privilege and it wasn’t right or fair.

It wasn’t a fully satisfying answer — Keating wasn’t asking to be merely heard, he was asking these politicians to neuter the regulatory bulldogs — but it was a damn sight better than the weasely non-denial denials we’d heard from our other senator, Dennis DeConcini. It was not coincidental that he went to work with Russ Feingold, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, to pass a bipartisan campaign finance reform. He was quite capable of learning from his mistakes.

At the time, the northern border of Sonora was bristling with construction of “maquiladora” plants, usually light assembly factories where Mexican workers were building the electronics and mechanical gear that U.S. firms were outsourcing in the leadup to NAFTA. I was trying without any luck to get an interview with Jorge Larrea Ortega, the mining company entrepreneur who was behind many of the projects. I asked McCain if he would help, he asked his staff person, and I got a call back from her the next day with Larrea’s phone number. I still didn’t get the interview, but I appreciated the courtesy and the followup.

He was funny, too. Another visit the topic came up about the sewage treatment plant being built in nearby Nogales, on the border with Mexico that shared a lot of infrastructure with its Sonoran counterpart, and where the Nogales River was basically an open sewer. The headline on the newspaper read, “Scarsdale, N.Y. Tops List of Most Affluent Cities.” He quipped, “I’ll bet Nogales is the most effluent.”

Another time when I was the editor of the Douglas Daily Dispatch, I had the pleasure of interviewing him from the passenger seat as he sat in the back with his briefcase as he was being driven from Douglas to Tucson. I quickly ran out of questions, and I mentioned that I’d served in the Air Force for six years and that my boss (actually, my boss’ boss’ boss) was Maj. Gen. William P. Acker, a former U2 pilot who retired as Commander, Third Air Force at RAF Mildenhall, England.

Despite Acker’s legendary work ethic and sterling reputation, he never got his third star, and we staffers suspected some political chicanery back in the Pentagon. McCain confirmed that, informing me that Acker was the Kennedys’ inside source during the Cuban Missile Crisis, helping avert the nuclear showdown that Air Force General Curtis LeMay was pushing for. Because of Acker’s cooperation with the Kennedys, which was seen as leaping over the chain of command, some of his enemies waited patiently more than 20 years to scuttle his career.

I didn’t know any of this information, and was impressed that he was so well informed about the bureaucratic infighting in the puzzle palace that was (and is) the Pentagon.

Even though over the years I would often disagree with his political stances, I always felt like he was a man who put the best interests of his country first. He was not a reflexive party politician, and his final vote, coming off his hospital bed, to rescue Obamacare is much appreciated by many millions. It’s telling that he specifically requested both former presidents Bush and Obama deliver eulogies at his memorial, and requested the present holder of the office not be invited.

Another reason I write this is that McCain had a connection, however slim, to Ojai (see “Two Degrees of Ojai” in the Winter 2017 OQ. He was friends with Darrow J. “Duke” Tully, who after losing his post as publisher of the Arizona Republic to a stolen valor scandal, spent time in Ojai as publisher of the Ojai Valley News. That McCain was still a staunch friend of Tully after his public humiliation also speaks well to his character. After all, it was Tully who helped launch his political career.

McCain had a lot to live up to. His father and grandfather were both Navy flag officers. In fact, during the height of World War II, Admiral Bull Halsey once said he’d rather have another Jack McCain than another aircraft carrier.

It feels like our John McCains – men who value integrity and honor and service – are being lost and not replaced. I knew he hated all that “last great man” stuff as his speechwriter Mark Salter called it. But it’s hard to not think that way. The “Cadet Bone Spurs” types who proudly and loudly proclaim their contempt for the institutions that defend America’s honor and integrity seem to be winning the day. But I am optimistic that the courage and tenacity that defined McCain will live long past the present moment. What America was in the past, it still is, and will continue to be.

Thank you, John McCain. My condolences to your family. You will be missed.