Word: timberg
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...propaganda victory for North Vietnam as well as a devastating blow to camp morale. The one time his captors brutalized McCain into a sham confession, he considered suicide. "He could not avoid the conclusion that he had dishonored his country, his family and himself," wrote his biographer Robert Timberg...
...What distinguishes McCain's redemption tale is its elaborate detail. Two books, Faith of My Fathers, which McCain co-wrote with his speechwriter and adviser Mark Salter, and The Nightingale's Song, by Robert Timberg, flesh out in intimate detail the misbehavior of McCain's youth, as the set-up for a hero's narrative...
...wrong," McCain told TIME. "All my life I have been offended by hypocrisy." His approach to many legislative issues can sometimes resemble the way he boxed while at the Naval Academy. "McCain would charge to the center of the ring and throw punches until someone went down," writes Robert Timberg in his account of McCain and four other notable academy grads of the Vietnam era. McCain's Manichaean take on the world may be effective in war, but it doesn't always work well on subtle issues like health care or tax cuts. "If you are against him, he sees...
...Nightingale's Song cannily differentiates its five main characters, whose portraits have a novelistic fascination. North, for example: an authentic battlefield hero (brave, focused, cool under fire) who is also a hot dog and, suggests Timberg, perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a dangerous mix of self-dramatization and stupidity. McCain: a raunchy screw-up and party boy who graduated near the bottom of his Annapolis class but magnificently rose to the occasion later. Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane...
These questions hum in the background of Timberg's text: Does America need a warrior class? When? How trained? How protected from their own politicians? Should they be kept belowdecks like Ahab's harpooners and brought up only when there is a white whale to be killed? Vietnam was the white whale, sure enough...