As crisis lifts his visibility, McCain rejects hero label

By Jill Zuckman, Globe Staff, April 9, 1999

MANCHESTER, N. H. -- This is John McCain's moment. His amiable face, firm jaw, bone china hair, and hawkish views are on view almost everywhere as the Kosovo crisis deepens.

And, almost everywhere he goes, the Arizona Republican is introduced as a hero for his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict.

Yet he shuns the label.

McCain would rather joke that it doesn't take much talent to get shot down, leaving it to others to recount the torture, the solitary confinement, the broken arms, the shattered knee, and the bayonet wounds that almost killed him.

He was not a hero, he insisted, "because I did not perform up to the standards I expected of myself, and I saw others able to perform to higher standards than I was."

But as the 62-year-old McCain makes his first run for president, it is his life story that propels him. It is a story that, his advisers say, will convince voters that he is a man of integrity who can be trusted to do as he says, consequences be damned.

His 13 years in the Senate also reinforce McCain's image as a conservative with a maverick streak. Repeatedly, he has taken positions and pushed causes that irritated and angered his colleagues in the Republican Party, as well as key conservative constituencies such as the National Right to Life Committee and the National Rifle Association.

McCain is the Senate leader on overhauling the campaign finance system by banning unregulated contributions and political action committee donations. He was out front on forcing the tobacco industry to ante up to the states, raising the price of cigarettes along the way. And he is a strong opponent of pork-barrel spending, often singling out and killing other senators' pet projects that have been slipped into legislation.

"There's been an attempt to punish him on the right for showing some courage on this issue," Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and McCain's friend and partner in pushing campaign-finance changes, said of the legislation. "In the long run it will be unsuccessful because his credentials as a conservative are pretty solid."

Senator John F. Kerry, another friend, worked with McCain to get the United States to normalize relations with Vietnam, a controversial decision among GOP members.

"He challenges the orthodoxy of his party," said Kerry, a fellow Vietnam veteran. "That makes them uncomfortable when he doesn't toe the line, and that's what makes him interesting."

McCain, who has not yet announced, also stands out from the presidential field as a leader on military and foreign affairs matters, keeping close tabs on the unstable situation in Kosovo. On a recent morning at the Center of New Hampshire Holiday Inn, McCain, a graduate of the US Naval Academy and the son and grandson of naval commanders, touched base with his buddies at the Pentagon for the latest update on the Balkans crisis.

For the rest of the day, as he met with voters in Manchester and Concord, he was asked first for his opinion on the crisis in Kosovo. McCain minced no words, warning callers to the Dan Pierce show on WGIR radio that his views might be unpopular.

"I know many of our listeners are going to go berserk when I say this," said McCain, signaling the possibility that ground forces may need to be used. "We cannot rule out any option because now we have to win. Look, in Pyongyang and Baghdad and Tehran and in Tripoli they're paying attention, and if we lose to this Balkan thug, they're going to be on the march, my friend, and we're going to pay a very heavy price. We must win, we must keep our nerve."

McCain also took issue with the fear about losing American lives.

"This is another terrible thing to say, but the primary purpose cannot be the security of your forces," he said. "Your primary priority has to be the accomplishment of the mission, and if that means putting young people in harm's way, that has to be done, or don't go in."

Despite his tough words, McCain peppers his conversation with humor, charm, and sarcastic asides. When Pierce introduced him after a commercial, McCain began humming "Hail to the Chief." When a caller referred to him as a former naval aviator, McCain interjected "albeit a bad one," a reference to his being shot down in 1967. And he answered a caller who identified himself as a former Army enlisted man, with: "You are absolutely right, even for a dumb enlisted Army guy."

Although McCain has never run for president before, he had a bird's eye view of two Republican campaigns in 1996. He first endorsed Texas Senator Phil Gramm, helping him until Gramm dropped out of the race just before the New Hampshire primary. Then McCain threw his support to Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader from Kansas, becoming a frequent travel companion of Dole's.

Over coffee, McCain said he has learned a few things about what not to do when running for president. From Gramm, McCain said, he learned that it is not important just to raise money, it is also important to take care on how it is spent. Gramm spent $19 million in 1995, running out of cash by the time he got to Iowa.

Dole, too, did a poor job of controlling his campaign money. "I saw people get on the campaign plane with Dole, who he was paying $20,000 a month to, that he had never even met," McCain said.

He was impressed by President Clinton's tight circle of advisers, and their rapid responses to campaign attacks in both 1992 and 1996, which is something he hopes to emulate.

He was unimpressed by Dole's message.

"The other thing I learned is if you take a position on an issue that you really don't believe in, the voters aren't going to believe it either," McCain said. "Somehow, they convinced Bob late in the campaign to say he wanted a 15 percent across the board tax cut. We all know that Bob didn't really believe in it."

The last point is clearly the most important to McCain.

"You've got to be yourself. One thing I'm sure of, in fact I know, I'll say something in this campaign that's stupid, that's inappropriate, and . . . may be harmful because it will be an offhand remark like 'maybe we should just nuke Bosnia' -- because that's my nature to be glib and humorous and all that," he said.

"But I'd rather have that problem than . . . playing it safe," McCain said. "Life's too short for me to do that."

In many ways, however, there are similarities between McCain's and Dole's candidacies. Both men have substantial war stories that tested them to extremes and later gave them credibility. And like Dole, McCain will be using his story to run for president -- though he doesn't plan on talking about it himself.

McCain is realistic about the odds his effort faces. His advisers acknowledge that two likely candidates now leading in opinion polls, George W. Bush, the Texas governor, and Elizabeth Hanford Dole, former Red Cross director, will have to stumble for him to win the nomination.

And there are other obstacles. He has a reputation for having a nasty temper, which he says he has tried to control in recent years. He was tarred by the Keating Five scandal, though he was later cleared of any wrongdoing. And his personal story is not without its unflattering chapters -- he was a carouser during his student years, graduating near the bottom of his Annapolis class -- and he has said that his unfaithfulness to his first wife led to the breakup of their marriage.

McCain is also likely to face tough going for his views in Iowa, site of the first primary caucuses in 2000. Christian right activists make up about one-third of the caucus-goers, and they are upset with McCain for pushing campaign-finance legislation. Both antiabortion groups and the National Rifle Association say his proposals would prevent them from advocating for their causes. Despite his own antiabortion stance, he would tone down the Republican platform to acknowledge that not all party members share that position. And he is not too popular with farmers for opposing ethanol subsidies.

So McCain, who postponed his formal announcement after the Kosovo bombing began, is concentrating his efforts in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He has cut back in Iowa, but he is not about to curb his controversial views.

"This campaign is very, very important to me," he said at a forum sponsored by WMUR-TV and Citizens' Bank. "It's not so important that I betray any principle or standard or anything I believe in. After this is over, the one thing I'll be able to do is look at myself in the mirror and say, 'I didn't do anything that I would do differently or I'm embarrassed or ashamed of.' "