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Navy kids are as much acquainted with the idea of their fathers as with the reality of them. And when they get a taste of the reality, even it can seem unreal: as McCain recalls his parents, when they were stationed in Hawaii, eating dinner at home on Saturday night, his father dressed in black tie, his mother in an evening gown. On Christmas mornings, after the presents were opened, Dad would change into his uniform and go to the office. McCain was five years old and living in New London, Conn., when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His father left home immediately and headed for the base. McCain saw very little of him for the next four years. "I became my mother's son," he says.
As a child, McCain resented his father's absence, thinking his father loved his work more than his children. Today he calls this judgment unfair. "I am certain that he wanted to share with me the warm affection that he and his father had shared. But he wanted me to know also that a man's life should be big enough to encompass both duty to family and duty to country. That can be a hard lesson for a boy to learn. It was a hard lesson for me," he writes. And yet it is a lesson he is teaching his own children, who have lived in Phoenix, Ariz., while he has served in Washington, and who live there now as he takes his long bus ride.
McCain says his father did not order him to go to the naval academy; he does not even remember talking with him about it. Once there, he endured all the normal humiliations and a second set as well, from the regulars who thought the admirals' son and grandson got in on genes rather than merit. "When I was a younger officer, I did something good, and someone would say: 'Good job, Ensign McCain,' I wondered if it was for ears other than mine," McCain says. "When I was punished, I wondered if I was being picked out of a crowd because of my last name." Some cracked under the pressure of paternal expectations. McCain tells the story of a flight instructor who had flown his T-28 to the town where his mother and father lived in retirement. As he flew in front of his parents' house, he tried a risky maneuver and crashed his plane; the parents watched him die. "I assumed his death had been caused by an impulse to impress his father," he writes. "It was an impulse a great many other midshipmen and I understood."
So what was the legend he had to live up to? It was not of great academic prowess. McCain often jokes about his dismal performance at the naval academy, but neither his father nor his grandfather had done much better. Jack McCain was notorious for breaking rules, picking fights and racking up demerits even faster than his son ever did. And yet, McCain writes, "my father was reported to have suffered his punishments without complaint. He would have disgraced himself had he done otherwise."