Word: mccains
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parades and the praise just made McCain more impatient to live up to the expectations that had been set for him practically at birth. He didn't have time to lash out at the political system that had abandoned him or the counterculture that called his comrades baby killers. His cause was more immediate and personal. "The years he was in prison were like cutting out the fillet of a T-bone steak," says Nancy Reynolds, a longtime Reagan aide who befriended McCain during those years. "After that, John was always playing catch...
...place where McCain could not make up lost time, the one arena where his story in a strange way carried the least weight, was in the military. When he came back from Vietnam, he toyed briefly with "alternative plans in civilian life in politics," according to doctors who debriefed him. But McCain only toyed with the idea, choosing instead to study at the War College, become a Navy flight instructor in 1974, and then, in 1977, to take a job his father had held 20 years before, as the Navy's liaison to the Senate. In this last role...
...Capitol Hill, and Senators were asking to have their picture taken with him. They came to his tiny office for a drink at the end of the day and often wound up talking long into the night. "Youthfulness, combat experience...and as unmilitary a manner as possible," is how McCain once explained the requirements...
...just so damn engaging and fun to be with," said former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who would be a groomsman at McCain's second marriage in 1980. "I was amazed at his total experience and his emotional management." The admiration and familiarity not only made McCain a very effective advocate for the Navy; it also got him thinking about himself as the Distinguished Gentleman from Somewhere. "He looked at those guys," says Jay Smith, McCain's early political guru, "and said, I can do this...
...there came a warm, cloudy spring day in 1981 when John McCain buried his father in Arlington National cemetery, next to his grandfather's grave, the latest McCain, in a line dating back to the Revolutionary War, to march from training to combat to valor and into the ground at Arlington. It would be a day of two ceremonies. That afternoon McCain signed his final discharge papers, turned in his identification card and wore his uniform for the last time. "It seemed to me that I was disconnected from my previous life," he says of that day. "I was concerned...