- Senator John McCain "acted with a sense of purpose," even before he was diagnosed with cancer, according to Thomas G. Mahnken.
- Daniel Twining never stopped working for McCain and served as a foreign policy advisor on his Senate staff.
- He says McCain was passionate about foreign and domestic causes both in the public eye and those without media attention, such as a coup in Fiji and the fate of tiny Baltic nations most Americans could not find on a map.
- Phil Levy says McCain"believed in doing what was right, even if there was a significant political cost."
SEE ALSO: 10 of John McCain's best quotes on courage, happiness, and character
Will Inboden, executive director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft at the University of Texas-Austin:
"There were giants in the earth in those days…" Genesis 6:4
A giant has departed from among us. With Sen. John McCain's death on Saturday, our nation has lost a war hero, a statesman, and a patriot.
As an Arizonan, I grew up under the long shadow cast over our state by McCain. He may not have been a native son, but on moving there in 1981 he quickly embraced Arizona and we embraced him in return. The state and the man were made for each other: proud, independent, stubborn, free, and on occasion as prickly as the countless saguaro cacti that adorn Arizona's southern landscape.
His first run for the House of Representatives in 1982 remains the stuff of Arizona political lore. Criticized during a primary debate for being a carpetbagger, McCain responded defiantly: "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."
Even as a young conservative congressman in the vanguard of Ronald Reagan's revolution, McCain built a close friendship with fellow Arizona Rep. Mo Udall, a liberal Democrat and senior House member who graciously mentored McCain despite their political differences. Displaying the loyalty and honor that were his lifelong traits, McCain in turn never forgot Udall, to the point of visiting him regularly in the veteran's hospital even when the dying Udall was barely conscious and had been forgotten by the rest of his former colleagues.
McCain won election in 1986 to the Senate seat previously held by the iconic Barry Goldwater. McCain and Goldwater combined served 61 years in the Senate, each a pillar of the institution and each a pillar of Arizona. In particular, they wielded enormous influence on defense policy as both became chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee and both designed landmark defense reform measures while working tirelessly to strengthen and equip our military.
Part of McCain's greatness came from his sense of history. He venerated the past and felt a special duty to be worthy of the legacies he inherited. Whether in his own family Navy lineage as the son and grandson of admirals, in Arizona as the successor to the Goldwater Senate seat, and especially as an American who loved his country with abiding and unrelenting passion, the past captivated McCain. (Because of his devotion to history and national security leadership, we were honored to have McCain serve on the Statecraft Board of Reference for the Clements Center for National Security that I oversee at the University of Texas at Austin.)
McCain also carried forward the Reagan legacy on national security policy more than almost any other US political leader. Like Reagan, McCain was a stalwart advocate for human rights and democracy, exemplified by his longtime chairmanship of the International Republican Institute. Like Reagan, McCain stood for a strong military, free trade, loyalty to our allies, and US international leadership.
Like all giants, this treasure in an earthen vessel had his flaws. McCain could too often let political differences become personal, had a combustible temper, and was rarely guilty of excessive humility. Few Republicans, myself included, agreed with him on every policy stand he embraced. Almost all of us who served in national security roles in the George W. Bush administration found ourselves crosswise with McCain on some occasion or another.
But those past feuds and frailties now fade and give way to our mourning of his loss and our celebration of his life. Death has a way of concentrating the mind and causing us to reflect on those things that really matter. Those include the ancient virtues of duty, honor, and country that lived on in the life of McCain. To those, I would add truth. McCain's Senate colleague Ben Sasse put it well: "Our nation aches for truth-tellers. This man will be greatly missed."
A great country produces great men, and John McCain was a great one indeed. May he rest in peace but may his legacy rest not.
Daniel Twining, president of the International Republican Institute:
I started working for John McCain in 1995. I never really stopped working for him. I served on his Senate staff, including as his foreign policy advisor, a role that took me to some 40 countries with him and allowed me to witness the great man in action during some of the most consequential moments of modern American history, including the campaign for NATO enlargement, the 9/11 attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I volunteered for both his presidential campaigns, doing everything from driving him to events to penning parts of his foreign policy platform. I now run an organization, the International Republican Institute, that he chaired for 25 years until reluctantly handing over its leadership in the weeks before his death. The John McCain I know is not the one in the glare of the media spotlight. The private John McCain is in fact more impressive than the public one.
The media narrative always had McCain in the center of the great public policy cause of the day: from campaign finance reform to North Korean nuclear proliferation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Russian aggression against its neighbors. He was a leader in these and other causes, foreign and domestic. But the causes that animated him equally passionately were those with no media bandwidth whatsoever: a coup in Fiji that subverted democracy; the cause of human rights defenders in Belarus; persecution against online dissidents in Vietnam; the fate of Cambodia's opposition in the face of repeated government crackdowns; the prospects for Zimbabwe's democratic opposition; the future of Iraq's Kurds; the fate of tiny Baltic nations most Americans could not find on a map; prospects for peace in the Balkans; ethnic cleansing in Burma by the powerful against the powerless.
Sen. McCain was not selective in his belief that advancing universal values of democracy and human rights served American interests in a more peaceful, stable world. He raged against tyranny in countries such as the Maldives, population 400,000, as virulently as he fulminated against the strongmen in control of authoritarian great powers who had turned their nations into prisons for their people. He took repression personally: How did Putin get away with conning Russians into believing he was protecting their country from American encirclement even as Moscow invaded neighbors in Georgia and Ukraine in an effort to build a new empire? How did successive North Korean despots charm American presidents into negotiating closer ties when large segments of the North Korean population lived in gulags?
Sen. McCain believed deeply that America must lead internationally — and that while our country did so imperfectly and at times intemperately, it was vacuums left by the absence of American leadership that ultimately made the world more dangerous and insecure. America was a different kind of great power, he understood — one whose universalist aspirations were not simply a cloak for the covetous pursuit of territory and resources but a reflection of the belief that our founding ideals were the prerogatives not only of Americans but of all people. If Americans were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should that not be true for everyone else too? Those authoritarians who stood in the way of their people's natural rights to freedom and dignity were the targets of his greatest wrath.
It takes courage and commitment to care so much about the liberty of those who did not have a voice, or who could not pay Washington lobbyists to push their case. Sen. McCain could have made an equally successful career leading on popular causes that made the front pages of the newspapers and led the storylines on cable television. But he was haunted by an insight he had learned in solitary confinement in Vietnam, where he saw the best and worst of humanity.
Honor is not defined by fame and fortune; it's not determined by the choices you make when everyone is watching. "Honor is who you are in the dark," he would say, when you are alone — and when no one but yourself will know whether you did the right thing or whether you accommodated, yielding your principles in the pursuit of a narrower self-interest.
John McCain never yielded. America and the world are better for it.
Michael Green, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
More than any other public figure I have had the opportunity to meet, John McCain is the one I tell my own children to exemplify as they seek a life made meaningful by patriotism, integrity and service. My son was very young when I worked on the foreign policy team of the 2008 McCain campaign. At the time my wife bought him the book My Dad John McCain written by Meghan McCain to introduce the candidate to young readers. My son's collection of books has changed several times since then, but he still keeps My Dad John McCain front and center.
As Max Boot notes, John McCain was an easy Presidential candidate to support as a foreign policy advisor. In 2008 I represented the campaign in a series of proxy debates organized by think tanks and the press. The Obama team would always come armed with thick books looking like litigators in a complex anti-trust case. While I had a lot of respect and admiration for the guys on the other side of the table, it was clear that their talking points were designed to avoid alienating key Democratic constituencies as much as they were to articulate a clear foreign policy strategy. Team McCain came armed only with an understanding of our candidates' vision, principles and record. Our counterparts later joked that our clarity on human rights, alliances or trade probably didn't move any voters in swing states like Florida, but there was no doubt we had much more fun.
Like others, I have also been under the glare of Sen. McCain. As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain authorized an external review of US basing strategy for the Pacific that I co-chaired in 2010. Always focused on the taxpayers' money and the readiness and welfare of our forces, McCain was cranky about the cost of new housing for Marines on Guam and the Rube Goldberg-like airfield the Pentagon was constructing in Okinawa to satisfy local complaints about noise and safety. After six months of intense work, our outside panel concluded that the new dispersed laydown of bases and access arrangements made good operational and strategic sense given China's growing missile arsenal and reach into the South China Sea, but that the plan would need adjustments. When I first briefed McCain, he grimaced. When I testified, he called me up afterwards and told me I would need "a bigger piece of lipstick" for this particular pig. He was not going to be convinced by ideology, party, or talking points. In the end, he supported the plan, but only after Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work personally squeezed the Navy to bring costs down almost 50% and only after we could explain with precise citation of history, geography and operations how the plan could be implemented in a way that would make our service personnel, our country and our allies safer.
John McCain was a constant reminder of American power and principle for our allies in Asia. Secretaries of defense were grateful when he led bipartisan delegations to the Shangri-La security summit every year to reinforce the administration's message of commitment and staying power in the region. In 2016, when Beijing began bullying the new government of Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei, McCain added a stop in Taiwan on his way back from Singapore to buck her up and push back against the PRC. When Japan was hearing mixed messages about Chinese incursions around the Senkaku Islands, McCain pressed the Obama administration to clarify its support for Tokyo. As many tributes to this great man have emphasized, he relished nothing more than channeling his outrage to plug the gaps in our national security and the shortcomings in our sense of national purpose.
I have been asked in Tokyo, Canberra, Seoul and Taipei on recent trips who will now fill this enormous space in the Senate. I tell our friends that McCain nurtured a strong cohort of principled internationalists on the Senate Armed Services Committee, including Sentors Dan Sullivan and Joni Ernst. John McCain has left them — and all of us — a charge to keep.
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