Is McCain the Hero He Claims to Be?
By Paul M. Weyrich
CNS Commentary from the Free Congress Foundation
04 January, 2000

John McCain, the media's candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, is a threat to frontrunner George W. Bush at least in New Hampshire. And if he wins there and goes on to take South Carolina, who knows, he might go the distance.

McCain, when seen from a distance, is a very attractive candidate. He is distinguished looking. He has actually been elected and re-elected to something. He is, in marked contrast to some of his primary opponents, very articulate when challenged. Yet, no candidate since Barry Goldwater stirs up anger the way McCain does.

For Republican Party professionals, his McCain-Feingold campaign "reform" bill amounts to surrender to the enemy. These party people were not surprised to see him jump in bed with former Senator Bill Bradley in New Hampshire to promise if elected he would do everything in his power to pass his version of campaign reform. "Unilateral disarmament for the Republican Party" is the way Texas Governor and presidential rival George W. Bush sees McCain-Feingold.

Various lobby groups that follow legislation and report on the same to their members contend that McCain-Feingold would shut them down. The National Right to Life Committee feels so strongly about that issue that it has begun to rate the vote senators cast on campaign reform as a life issue.

That is the first time in National Right to Life's twenty-five year history that they have ever rated a bill outside of the strict life issue cluster. "This is life or death to us," says Darla St. Martin, a veteran right to life official.

Then there is the tobacco tax hike. Just as his Republican colleagues voted to kill McCain-Feingold, it was Republican votes which also killed the tobacco bill which was simply a huge tax hike disguised as a health bill. Normally placid Washington reps for leading companies, who are prepared to accept anything, get red faced when McCain's name is even mentioned.

Now, the Manchester Union Leader, in a blistering editorial by Bernadette Malone Connolly, accuses McCain of supporting an education bill that is "befitting a Communist dictator, not an American president." The McCain bill would give a 25% federal tax credit to teachers who are proclaimed to be "excellent" by state education officials.

The Union Leader cannot imagine why teachers should be singled out when firefighters, police, nurses, health care professionals and a host of other professions also have people who do excellent work but are underpaid for doing so. But, the Union Leader concludes, McCain is willing to tax people he doesn't like (smokers, for example) while giving tax breaks to those he does like.

Says the editorial, "this dangerous philosophy shunts the Constitution and the free economy aside for the sake of a noble whim -- teachers are worth it. This is a political philosophy in which the seeds of dictatorship are easily sown," the editorial concludes.

Just who is John McCain, the man so admired by the national media because he doesn't hesitate to stick it in the eye of his own political base?

He is a man who is running for president in part, he says, out of patriotism. He did, after all, serve as a POW for several years in Vietnam. He has written a book about his experiences. That service, at least, ought to be non-controversial. Other former POWs such as Jerry Denton, Sam Johnson and Leo Thorsness all ran for office and while issue positions they took were in contention, no one questioned their military service.

That is not true about McCain. There are families of POWs and MIAs who are working against McCain day and night who outright accuse him of being a traitor. Earl Hopper of Glendale, Arizona, whose son has been missing since 1968, says McCain "never turned a finger to help any of the [POW-MIA] families."

Hopper contends that at a minimum, 66 men were left behind when McCain and the others were released in 1973. Others put the number as high as 300. Hopper says that McCain undermined every effort to get the federal government to acknowledge that men were left behind.

He and a host of others, now labeled by Newsweek magazine's Michael Isikoff as extremists, are out to see to it that John McCain does not become president. One of the most prolific of the 5,000 or so in that community is Ted Sampley of North Carolina who brands McCain "The Manchurian candidate," a reference to a 1962 movie about a presidential candidate who was under the control of the Chinese Communists.

Sampley even has a website detailing charges against McCain: www.usvetdsp.com/main.shtml . He says he fears that the Vietnamese have something on McCain. He and Hopper both point to a 1993 meeting between McCain, Pete Peterson, who was to become ambassador to Vietnam, and Vietnamese officials. McCain and Peterson, according to Sampley, begged the Vietnamese never to make their files on the POWs public.

Hopper fervently believes that McCain's forgiving attitude toward his captors (he has led the fight for normalization of relations with Vietnam) is traceable to whatever is in those files. The Cambodian Khmer Rouge has claimed that "McCain is a Vietnamese agent" for whatever that is worth.

The charges against McCain seem to center around the question of whether or not McCain violated his oath of office while a prisoner. McCain himself vaguely suggests that he wishes that he had been stronger in his service over there.

Hopper contends that McCain gave information to the Vietnamese in exchange for being in a hospital for six weeks. Hopper and a number of the families associated with the POW effort want McCain to explain his absence of nearly two years. McCain says he was in solitary confinement during that time, but POW families cite information from the North Vietnamese and our own U.S. intelligence service to the contrary.

Paul E. Rifenberg, writing in the Niles, Michigan Daily Star, says that the "the person in Washington who has done more to bury the POW/MIA issue than any other elected official is none other than US Senator John McCain from Arizona, himself a former POW." Indeed, the POW/MIA families will readily supply file folders three inches thick of correspondence related to McCain.

The level of emotion generated by this correspondence is quite striking. Their unsubstantiated claims against McCain range from his driving one of their witnesses to tears at a hearing, to his angrily pushing and shoving constituents, to sexual harassment. And they claim he is a traitor to his country besides. In a way, the charges are reminiscent of those against Bill Clinton in 1992.

It is hard to know who is telling the truth in all of this. McCain and his allies vigorously deny the charges. It is odd, however, that someone who is running for president on the basis of service to his country would generate that level of hatred. There must be some basis for the emotions expressed by otherwise rational people.

I can contribute little to this dialogue except this: when I worked for the late Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado, a couple of nice young ladies kept the issue of the POWs squarely in front of every Senator.

One of those who worked tirelessly was Carol McCain, the Senator's first wife. She worked her heart out for that husband of hers who was in captivity. Everyone who encountered Mrs. McCain and the others were moved to action by their tenacity and fervor. John McCain's way to repay this unyielding devotion was to almost immediately, to put it in Clintonesque terms, "cause pain in my marriage."

If you had met the first Mrs. McCain, just the thought of this produces anger. Again, just as McCain admits that he did not completely follow the military's code of conduct while he was a prisoner, so also does he now admit that he caused the break-up of his first marriage. Somehow, after Clinton, glib apologies for such things are harder to take.

One thing I also believe is true. I know of no other POW who has been branded a traitor by his own base of supporters. It may not always be true that where there is smoke there is fire, but many times it is true. It just seems to me that voters need to know a great deal more about John McCain before they say thumbs up or thumbs down. In that respect, the clock is surely ticking.

Paul Weyrich is president of the Free Congress Foundation.