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When it was his turn, McCain was not likely to impress his father by his rank or discipline or talent as a pilot. The stories of the rules he broke and the planes he crashed are now legendary. McCain had flown only 23 combat missions when he was shot down in October 1967. It was at this point that his father saved his life--and changed it. McCain was so close to death, with broken arms, knee and shoulder, plus growing fever and delirium, that his captors refused him medical care, thinking he probably would not survive the week. When he pleaded with a medic to take him to a hospital, the medic said, "No. It's too late." It was only later that day, when his captors rushed in and announced, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital," that surviving seemed possible.
His fellow prisoners argued that his health was still so precarious that McCain could accept his captors' offer of an early release without dishonor. But McCain had grown up putting duty above everything and couldn't imagine facing his comrades--or his family--if he did otherwise. When the Vietnamese offered to send him home early, he refused. He writes that he was not going to let his captors torment past and future prisoners with the story of the admiral's son who waltzed out of captivity, leaving his comrades behind. And so he stayed, and there was worse to come, for 5 1/2 years.
When McCain finally came home, his father was not there to greet him. Duty demanded that he stay away: when the admiral had asked if the parents of other returning POWs had been invited to attend, he was told they had not. So he did not take the special privilege. "That meant more to John than if he'd been there," says Mark Salter, who co-wrote McCain's book.
Navy psychiatrists probed the private scar tissue of that experience and learned that prison had set him free. As the son of a famous soldier, "he has been preoccupied with escaping being in the shadow of his father," one shrink wrote. "He feels that his experiences and performance as a pow have finally permitted this to happen." It was with a smile of relief and a wink at his dad that he enjoyed hearing the old man being introduced at a public dinner as "Commander McCain's father." John Sidney McCain III had finally arrived.
Even now, at 63, McCain writes of his forebears that he still aspires to "live my life according to the terms of their approval." This may explain one of the more amazing feats of this race: turning a campaign that is almost entirely about him into something that resonates with so many other people.