Word: mccain
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...early years as a politician, McCain was mostly a party-line Reaganite; his cleanest and most difficult break with the President was his 1983 call to withdraw the Marines from Lebanon because he didn't see a clear mission for them. He turned out to have been tragically right. He was otherwise notable mostly for his bursts of temper, especially when he perceived an affront to his honor. In his first House race, he threatened to beat up an opponent who had called his ex-wife to look for dirt. In his initial Senate run, he exploded after his opponent...
...incomprehensible as it sounds, McCain has told friends his involvement in the Keating Five scandal of the late 1980s caused him more pain than his imprisonment in Hanoi. Again his honor was on the line, and the scandal seemed to drain his mojo; he went through the motions of his job, but he was visibly depressed. Salter, his speechwriter, ghostwriter and alter ego, remembers walking back to the Capitol with his boss in uncharacteristic silence after a press conference. McCain's mind was clearly elsewhere, perhaps wondering how he ever got so close to the savings and loan crook Charles...
...common myth is that McCain was caught pressuring federal regulators to ease up on a political benefactor, then sought penance for his sins by leading a crusade to limit the influence of money in politics. But the real story is more complex. Despite all that Keating gave to McCain - $112,000 in campaign contributions, several junkets to his Bahamas estate - McCain never did anything official for Keating. He did attend two meetings with regulators along with the rest of the Keating Five, but he told the regulators that Keating's banks should receive no special treatment. After a long...
...McCain has acknowledged misjudging Keating, but the dishonor and especially the casual allegations of corruption left him more outraged than ashamed. The episode soured him on partisanship - and in some ways on the Senate. "He got screwed, and he took it personally," says Slade Gorton, a former Republican Senator from Washington State. "That's what led to the whole McCain-Feingold thing." Says New Hampshire's Bob Smith, a former Republican Senator who tangled with McCain: "He did get shafted, and he never really got over it. I think he said, I'm on my own now." The Keating ordeal...
...television presence, but the Sunday shows wouldn't have invited him so often if he hadn't become so interesting - and so candid. "He's fascinating: basically a doctrinaire Reagan conservative, but when something offends him, he breaks from the orthodoxy," says Ivan Schlager, the top Democratic counsel to McCain's Commerce Committee during the 1990s. "It's not ideological. It's good guys and bad guys...