“To fear the world we have organized and led the
three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the
globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to
remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious
nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve
problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past
that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”—John McCain (1936-2018),
U.S. Senator (R-AZ), Presidential nominee, and Vietnam veteran and POW—and American
hero, speech accepting the Liberty Medal, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 2017
If someone were to update John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage today, John McCain
would be among the half-dozen U.S. Senators selected for this new pantheon. He
was not perfect, any more than the figures JFK picked to honor in his Pulitzer
Prize-winner were. But like them, he also found a point beyond which he could
not be pushed.
In the last three years, that has come in his
relationship with Donald Trump. It had to bother the President that the senior
Senator from Arizona could not be bullied. Trump may have scoffed at McCain’s
captivity in Vietnam, but that period of anguish and torture left him
singularly unmoved by any sarcasm or threats Trump could hurl.
I am not surprised that one of McCain’s favorite
books was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the
Bell Tolls. There were so many quotes about freedom, the preciousness of
life, and the brotherhood of men in arms that must have appealed to him.
But I think that another quote from that novel must
have struck him with full force as he witnessed the threat that Donald Trump
posed to the cooperative style of legislating and the international security
arrangements to which McCain dedicated his adult life: “There are many who do
not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
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