WASHINGTON -- Stooped in his cell, ravaged by dysentery and whisper-close to confessing to his Hanoi captors, John McCain heard Dooley Wilson singing "As Time Goes By" and Humphrey Bogart telling Ingrid Bergman, "We'll always have Paris."

John McCain is greeted by President Richard Nixon in Washington during the spring of 1973 after spending more than five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. (AP Photo)

The young Navy lieutenant commander pretty much gave up during all of the torture, solitary confinement and other punishments he endured for displaying what his captors called a "bad attitude."

"Tried to hang himself twice," his medical records note.

But his memory of books and movies ultimately gave him what attempted suicide did not -- a way out of his harrowing circumstances -- and a route that kept alive his chances of seeing his wife and three children again after the Vietnam War.

He delved often into his silent reveries, visiting worlds painted by history books and movies, imagining other battles, mighty warriors and forbidden loves far from his cell and the pain he suffered there.

"I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me permanently to a place in my mind from which I might fail to return," McCain wrote in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers." McCain was imprisoned after being shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967. He was 31.

If he wasn't replaying "Casablanca" in his mind, then it was books such as "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" or the Civil War history, "Lee's Lieutenants."

"The important thing in those conditions is to keep the mind stimulated," McCain, 63, says now. "That's what I was doing."

Beyond the dingy walls, McCain also picked up the sounds of real life -- footsteps of the guards coming to interrogate him or bring him a meal of rice, sometimes ruined with pebbles. If he was lucky, they offered pumpkin soup.

McCain would greet them with streams of profanity.

"He strongly resented their coming around and bringing him back to reality by intruding," say his medical records. "He was enjoying his fantasies so much."

McCain says his more than five years as a prisoner of war taught him confidence, humility and the ambition to pursue larger dreams, namely his 18 years in Congress -- he now represents Arizona in the Senate -- and his Republican run for president.

"I gained a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect."

The suicide attempts were his darkest moments, when his captors tried to beat a confession out of him and succeeded in breaking his arm again, his teeth, and finally his will. Once, McCain threaded his shirt through the window shutter of a torture cell and around his neck, but was caught and beaten. He tried again, with the same result. Finally, he said he was ready to talk.

"I couldn't control my despair. I shook, as if my disgrace were a fever," McCain writes. "All my pride was lost, and I doubted I would ever stand up to any man again. Nothing could save me."

He was thrown in solitary three times -- for two straight years beginning in March 1968, later for nine months, and finally for three months.

The solitary cell was 5 feet by 6 feet. "A dim and spooky place," recalled retired Vice Adm. James Stockdale, who occupied one of those cells before McCain moved in and went on to a brief encounter with politics as Reform Party founder Ross Perot's running mate in the 1996 presidential election; now he's an enthusiastic campaigner for McCain in California. "Maybe a little light crept in under the eaves," Stockdale added.

Replaying books and movies to pass the time was part of the culture of the American POWs imprisoned in the "Hanoi Hilton."

Designated as the recreation officer when he was in a big cell with 30 others, McCain would organize plays and skits or simply talk about the plots of films.

"I used to tell movies," he said in an interview. "I told many, many movies. You have, literally, a captive audience."

The prisoners acted out an irreverent version of "A Christmas Carol." They were going to do "Stalag 17," the prison-camp film that later inspired "Hogan's Heroes" on television, but he said the Vietnamese came in and removed the men slated to be the lead actors.

Freedom came in March 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords, and McCain went home a hero for refusing an offer to be released ahead of his fellow prisoners.

An issue lingering from his youth still needed to be dealt with -- the towering presence of his father, Adm. John Sidney McCain.

"He has been preoccupied with escaping being in the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others," says his post-release psychological records. "He feels his experiences and performance as POW (have) finally permitted this to happen."

Indeed, at a public dinner in his honor, McCain heard the admiral introduced as "Commander McCain's father." The young man smiled and winked at his dad. "He had arrived," say his records.

These days McCain is rarely asked by voters other than veterans about the most trying time in his life.

Politics, unlike prison, does not offer a captive audience.

"When you're running for public office, people will respect you for what you've done," McCain said recently as his bus rolled through New Hampshire. "But they want to know what you're going to do for them."