McCain The Spokesman-Review. A Roche aide said the secretary was traveling and unavailable for comment. A Boeing spokesman said the company is cooperating with ongoing investigations. McCain said he would continue to push for reform in the way the Air Force procures equipment. The Spokesman-Review Newspaper Local journalism is essential. Sign up. Most read stories 'Eternals' post-credits scenes, explained: What's Harry Styles doing here? He knew you had to fund those troops! But he voted against it for political expediency.
Several people close to McCain told me that he believed that Kerry was too indecisive to be President. I asked if that was true. But then he got back on message. Not that one was bad, but the other was better. After it became clear that McCain would not accept an offer to be the Vice-Presidential nominee on the Kerry ticket, the Bush White House made its overture.
Afterward, I went over to see him. They had been working together on campaigns in Texas, but after a severe falling out had been estranged ever since. After the campaign, moreover, the Bush Administration punished those who had worked for McCain. When I asked him whether, in their meeting, Rove had apologized for what happened in South Carolina, he hesitated. I said it was water under the bridge. Was it an easy decision for McCain? Weaver paused. Whatever ambivalence McCain may have felt was not in evidence as he set out on the campaign trail with Bush.
McCain declared that the war in Iraq was a conflict between good and evil which threatened the security of the United States. His daughter Meghan, a student at Columbia, who voted for Kerry, called McCain and chastised him when she saw him on television making statements she considered baseless.
But many friends point out that once McCain agreed to join the Bush campaign team he would not hold back. But Kerry had believed that they were bound by a special friendship, first forged in the nineteen-nineties, when they worked together to normalize U. And when McCain moved into his political mode—praising President Bush so extravagantly that Kerry seemed diminished by the comparison—Kerry felt betrayed. But McCain has a history of fighting hard and eventually getting over it.
Having suffered years of abuse as a P. For years, he refused to deal with Fred Wertheimer, then the head of Common Cause, who filed the complaint that led to the Keating Five investigation; then, in the late nineties, he and Wertheimer began working with each other on campaign-finance reform, and today they are close allies.
Senator Trent Lott is said to have told reporters during the campaign that McCain was unstable, as a result of his captivity; they did not speak for several years, but are now quite friendly. I am the most sought-after of all Republicans. In this last campaign, I was the one asked by the President to travel and campaign with him.
But it is a little hard for them to do that now, because of my strong support for Bush. Donoghue nodded vigorously. I was surprised he did as well as he did. She went further. It is easy to see why. When I arrived at her apartment in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, she threw open the door: a beautiful white-haired woman, in a Chanel-style jacket, pleated skirt, and high-heeled shoes.
She was standing in a foyer with red silk billowing slightly from the ceiling, the walls painted with a gorgeous mural. She told me with a laugh that she had just redone the apartment, even though she is ninety-three. She was leaving shortly for a three-month trip through Europe, travelling some of the time with her identical twin sister, to France and England, then going on to India; she rents a car on these excursions, and enjoys driving everywhere she goes.
She did not mention that not long ago she was stopped for speeding, going over m. I think the Navy has more know-how, more sophistication, more integrity, more honesty than any other facet of the world. There are people who are made for the Navy, and I was one. I liked everything about it—even the lousy pay! And paid taxes on it! They had attended the dinner and not said anything to the other guests about the news.
It just never crossed my mind. I asked whether she was surprised that her son had run as a pro-life candidate. Without answering the question, she gave her own view. It made me so mad, the minute Colin Powell resigned they started sniping, making cracks. And about a year ago Cindy suffered a stroke, which caused speech difficulty at first, and memory loss.
I interviewed her in the lovely, sprawling house in Phoenix where she grew up, and which she recently redesigned in a more distinctly Southwestern, adobe style. A pretty woman, with long, well-coiffed blond hair and large violet-colored eyes, she was dressed in jeans, a cashmere sweater, and red sandals. She is very thin, slightly fragile-looking, and this day seemed somewhat on edge. During the campaign, she said, she had been afraid of making some mistake that would hurt her husband; the experience was trying, but the good part was that she got to see so much of him.
Let me explain that. He was very confused in the beginning. The celebrity that McCain has enjoyed since the campaign is qualitatively different from what it was before. He used to come home most weekends, but now he is away a great deal of the time. And, when they go out together, strangers clamor for his attention. But he is always nice, generous, always takes time with people. I get frustrated sometimes, but not John. A month before, he had attended the World Economic Forum, in Davos; two weekends later, he had co-led the U.
Then, in the interview, he made the kinds of tough statements that have long been his hallmark in the area of foreign policy. He attacked the signing of an agreement whereby Russia would supply Iran with fuel for its first nuclear power plant. But when Wallace asked him whether he thought that President Bush should have been tougher in his press conference with Putin at a meeting in Slovakia a few days earlier, McCain suddenly became judicious.
At the end of the interview, Wallace commented that Republicans tend to be orderly people, always choosing the next one up—Bob Dole in , George W. Bush in Who will be the next one up in ? McCain set out for the local Starbucks to pick up coffee and newspapers to bring back to the house.
He was in high spirits about his rejoinder to Wallace. Tell her I was here, looking for her. Tell her I was disappointed. Hidden Valley is the one place where McCain does, in a manner of speaking, relax. He bounded out of the car and led me on the mandatory tour. He showed off dozens of fruit trees, about to blossom. Last year, he told me, Cindy looked toward a nearby hilltop and saw a mountain lion, surrounded by her cubs, gazing down at her.
There are also foxes, bobcats, javelinas, and coyotes. McCain loves to mix things up. Sharon and Oliver Harper were there, and Lorene and Aaron Lueck, who manage the property, and live there as well. Before preparing breakfast, McCain, who likes to cook, summoned the group to the TV room to watch the Fox News interview. We all sat quietly, focussed on his image as though we were in church—no one more so than McCain. At the end, he laughed again, loudly, about the Jeb Bush line. He said that Mark Salter would be mad at him for that one.
McCain returned to the kitchen and, while cooking bacon and sausage, amused himself, as he often does, by ribbing one of his companions.
After breakfast, I asked McCain about the speech he had delivered in Munich two weeks earlier. McCain always enjoys setting off fireworks at the annual conference, but his speech this year was especially incendiary. In the Republican foreign-policy divide between idealists and realists, McCain unequivocally identifies himself as an idealist. First, he established his premise: September 11th made plain that the security of Europe and North America is dependent upon the promotion of democracy in the Middle East—and, ultimately, in the world.
Did he not worry that a cutoff of aid might be destabilizing? I asked. You gotta be more careful to maintain the balance. McCain cannot be termed a neo-conservative, since he has no apostasy in his past, but neoconservatives are happy to call him theirs. But his views on foreign policy are neoconservative: American strength, but also American principles; for nation-building, as well as for removing dictators.
If you go back to the mid-nineties, you see he was more that way than people realize. Careers have been destroyed in the process. And he has often damaged the fortunes of the Republican Party.
Reformers have rarely ascended to the White House, analysts say, because their passions are often too narrow to galvanize voters. A former Navy pilot and war prisoner in North Vietnam for six years, the son and grandson of admirals, he was first elected to the House in and the Senate in in Arizona. He built a reputation as a straight shooter and staunch conservative, but one who was fiercely independent of party lines.
Some say this triggered his crusade against government corruption. Through his positions on three Senate committees, McCain has gone after a wide range of targets: the Air Force, a powerful Republican lobbyist, members of Congress, NASA officials, Firestone tires, Boeing aircraft, campaign fundraising and much more. In the process, he has helped topple Cabinet secretaries, top military officers, a once-influential Christian conservative, Republican leaders in Congress, defense industry executives, congressional staffers and others.
Others are more severe, accusing McCain of being vindictive and manipulative in his investigations. On the other hand, many government watchdog groups credit McCain with saving taxpayers billions of dollars, improving public safety, stopping illegal influence-peddling and protecting Indian tribes. But it does make enemies. Reform is complicated, obscure and transitory. They come to a head and then go away. That would be true of McCain too. Estes Kefauver D-Tenn. McCain has ranged far and wide.
Along with attacks on corruption and government waste, he has taken aim at many traditional Republican interests. In , McCain attacked fellow Republican Sen. Pete V. In recent years, Domenici has avoided McCain. McCain declined to be interviewed. But in books he has written, he acknowledges his rough edges. McGovern, a close friend, fundraiser and former Air Force secretary. Although the defense industry holds little power in presidential politics, most of its executives are stalwart Republicans.
Proponents said the existing fleet of tankers were rust buckets and that a lease deal was the only way the Air Force could afford a new fleet.
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