In his youth, John McCain performed an act of unimaginable heroism.  His plane had been shot down over Viet Nam.  His Vietnamese captors tortured him, in violation of the laws of war and standards of human decency.  At a time when his captors were hoping to score a public relations victory, they offered him a chance to go home.  He turned them down rather than leave his follow prisoners behind.

It was the high moment of his public life.  The iron will that kept him in the company of his tormenters was often on display in a long life of public service but never again engaged in a cause of equal merit.

After two terms in the House, he won election to the Senate in 1986 and was re-elected five times, most recently in 2016.  His party held the majority for roughly half of his Senate tenure, but he seemed more comfortable as an outsider.  When he worked with Senators from the other party, it was to help them enact their agenda.  His help to his own party was less frequent and seemed less enthusiastic.

His name is associated with three bills, only one of which became law.  McCain-Kennedy would have enacted comprehensive immigration reform.  Its opponents feared that it would have led to open borders.  Senator McCain did not dispel that impression.  McCain Lieberman would have combatted global warming – the name of the object of fear had not yet become “climate change” – through cap-and-trade.

He achieved success with McCain-Feingold, his version of campaign finance reform.  His depth of feeling on this issue arose from his membership in the notorious group of senators known as the “Keating Five”.  A financier named Charles Keating had ensnared four Democratic senators in corrupt schemes to help his banks.  The powers-that-be thought it unseemly for all of the accused to come from the same political party.  They looked for a Republican who could be sacrificed.  McCain had enough of a connection to Keating to support rounding the number of the Keating Four up to Five, although there never was a reason outside of politics to justify including Senator McCain among the accused.

It rankled him.  Enacting McCain-Feingold became a personal mission.  That iron will once again had its way.  President Bush (43) had a constitutional duty to veto the act but decided to punt to the Supreme Court.  The court upheld it.  Sandra Day O’Connor thought that Congress had the power to balance its desire to protect its reputation for honesty against First Amendment considerations.

The court’s opinion could have been as short as this: “The First Amendment states that ‘Congress shall make no law . . .abridging the freedom of speech . . ..’  Political speech is more critical to the protection of liberty than any other kind of expression.  This Act abridges freedom of political speech.  Therefore, the Act violates the Constitution of the United States and is without further effect.  So ordered.”

Instead, they kept it on the books.  The same court struck down a federal statute that attempted to regulate the distribution near schools of certain types of salacious material.  I hope to live long enough to understand how those two decisions can be reconciled.

A gentleman who had testified against McCain-Feingold on the ground that it is unconstitutional found himself alone with Senator McCain in a lobby waiting for an elevator.  McCain refused to shake his hand, telling the fellow that he would not shake the hand of the corrupt lackey of special interests.  (I paraphrase.)  The iron will, again.  He found it difficult to accept that the opposition had its reasons beyond venal self-interest.

His opposition to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques tells a similar story.  It takes study and evaluation to realize that the term “enhanced interrogation” is not a euphemism for “torture”.  The Senator made a snap judgment without the benefit of careful thought.  His lack of depth on the issue is demonstrated by his view that a torturer can get a victim to say anything, although he agreed that torture could be used if we were ever faced with a proverbial “ticking time bomb”.  His position revealed multiple layers of confusion that could have been avoided with more thought, more research.

He did something similar after he had secured the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.  When the financial system was under massive strain in September 2008, he suspended his campaign and returned to the Senate to take action.  That action amounted to looking for someone to blame for the crisis.  He settled on Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The thought that the crisis was systemic didn’t seem to occur to the senator.

His actions at that moment probably doomed his presidential campaign.  Mr. McCain appeared mercurial, excitable, while Mr. Obama was calm and reasonable.  I doubt that Mr. Obama had any better understanding of what was happening than anyone else did, but the voters preferred the man who seemed steadier.

Senator McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, once he decided to take it up again, was lackluster.  The vigor that was on display when he did battle with his own party was nowhere to be found.  He primly refused to attack his opponent.  He selected a vice-presidential nominee who made people nervous and then failed to intervene when his staff undermined her.  It would have been tough for any Republican to win in 2008, but Senator McCain didn’t make the most of the chances he had.

When he ran for re-election in 2010, voters in his state were actively opposed to his position on immigration.  He ran ads where he stood in the desert and said “Let’s build the dang fence!”  (Note, incidentally “fence” and not “wall”.)  He never supported the idea, before or after that election.

In his 2016 re-election campaign, he vowed that he would vote to repeal Obamacare.  Yet when he had the deciding vote to keep a bill alive that might have accomplished repeal eventually, he famously marched to the well of the Senate and pointed his thumb down.  After that, some who had contributed to his campaign considered filing a lawsuit to get their money back.  They had a good moral case, but saved on legal fees by dropping the idea.

Why this emotional reaction from a man who could just as easily have voted the other way, particularly since his sense of honor might have led him to keep a campaign promise?  I think we can look to the man who in 2016 got the job that Senator McCain sought in 2008.

During the campaign, candidate Trump criticized McCain in an interview.  When the interviewer pointed out that McCain had a heroic record as a prisoner of war, candidate Trump said, “He was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured.”  In Trump speak (I am a Trump Whisperer) that means, “There are heroes who charge the enemy on the battlefield.  There are heroes who run into burning buildings.  This guy was a hero in a prison camp.  Not the same thing.”

The comment had to burn right into Senator McCain’s soul.  His shining moment had been questioned, belittled by someone who had not made a comparable sacrifice.  He would never forgive it nor forget it.  He revenged it.  I wager he would have done more if cancer had not taken away his capacity to do it.

Whatever one thinks of his public career, that moment at the beginning of it stands out.  How many of us could have passed that test and voluntarily remained the prisoner of torturers?  The best answer is to be grateful that the question was not put to us.  In time, he will be remembered for that one transcendent heroic act and the rest will find its way into footnotes.