Namesake:
By: Joseph McCain, July 1994
There is something about the
naval service that the civilian simply doesn't understand. That
the men who go down to the sea in ships man the far distant
pickets during peace-watching, listening for those perturbations
in the political environment that may mean a future threat to
the homeland. They are the first to hear the crackling of peace.
And when the clouds of war roll out of the horizon, it is they
in their iron watch towers who bear and blunt the first shocks
of malevolence. In the meantime, they watch and wait, peering
into the distance-usually unnoticed, often unappreciated in the
times of peace. Not until the drums of war roll throughout the
land do they get their due. But these men and women care less
about this, because their reward is not the accolades, but the
service itself. This great, gray, sleek ship... the men who bend
back and mind to serve her...and the spirits of the two men for
whom it is named...will be the newest spike in the floating
steel veil that protects the land. And as we look at the
pristine vessel it looks rather like some great predatory cat,
doesn't it? Crouched down, ears laid back in stalk- we know that
its presence and its implied menace will more likely mean peace
than war. But some day this ship may have to be in a fight.
There will be the loud clang of "BATTLE STATIONS!!! ALL
HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!!!", and smoke, and missiles, and
noise and that fierce coordinated focus that only comes to men
in a battle.
\ The two McCains- John Sidney, Sr., and John Sidney, Jr.,
served both in the clamor of battle and the long days of keeping
the peace. They sacrificed just as the crews of this ship will
sacrifice, in peace and war. For that is the lot, and the
privilege of the sailor. To serve. Who these two men are is
often obscured by the stars that studded their shoulder boards,
and by the lofty commands they held at the ends of their
careers. And this too short treatise is to present them not as
Admirals and military luminaries, but rather I think how they
would be remembered-as human beings. Leaders who were made, not
born. They were men who worked hard, studied their fellow man,
made mistakes, learned, and tried again. Most importantly, these
two men always told the truth - especially to themselves-because
they knew that's the only thing you can count on. As far as I
can find out, they never quit, and they never laid down a
responsibility, or tried to transfer blame to another pair of
shoulders. Doing this was no easier for those two men than they
are for the rest of us. They just learned and accepted the
reality that there is no way around doing you job. No magic, no
special internal muses...just hard work and keeping an eye on
those twin saboteurs of doing a job right- fear and
irresponsibility.
It is an accident that the McCains even went to sea.
Because in their Mississippi family, the eldest son always took
over the family land, "Teoc", and the second son went
into the army. In fact, a McCain served on George Washington's
staff. Another served in the Civil War, was badly wounded, and
came home to Teoc to die. Yet another was a three-star general
in World War I- the Adjutant General of the Army. Still another
was one of the last battle cavalry officers and served with "Black
Jack" Pershing on his raid into Mexico trying to catch the
elusive "Cucaracha", Pancho Villa, and also became a
general. Trouble was, John Sidney McCain, Sr. was the third son.
The second, Bill, was already at West Point, so "Sidney",
as most of his friends called him, went to "Ole Miss",
presumably to become a doctor, or lawyer or something useful.
Still, he itched to put on the West Point gray. Bill approved
and suggested he go up to the big city, Jackson, to take some
entrance exams they were offering for the U.S. Naval Academy as
practice for the rigorous West Point tests. He did so well on
the tests he got an appointment to Annapolis, and decided to go
to the sea in ships. It changed McCain history. Since then, at
least five McCains and blood kin have gone to Annapolis, and
several others have joined the enlisted ranks. Nary an Army man
in all that time.
John Sidney McCain, Sr. graduated in 1906 and joined a
different Navy. A service of iron dreadnoughts belching black
coal smoke, of swinging hammocks, and of underslung bows still
evolving away from the ancient tactic of stabbing other ships
beneath the waterline. He was ordered out to the old Asiatic
Station of song and legend, to serve on many classic ships now
long gone to scrap yard and history- the battleship OHIO, the
cruiser BALTIMORE, the destroyer CHAUNCEY, and the gunboat
PANAY, whose "accidental" sinking by Japanese aircraft
two decades later was to be one of the malevolent tidal events
that inexorably pulled the United States towards the maelstrom
of the Second World War.
Young McCain served on the battleship CONNECTICUT in Teddy
Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, 16 battleships sent around the
globe in 1907 to show the world the power of this muscular new
nation in the Western Hemisphere. He escorted convoys through
the teeth of the German "Unterwasserboots" in The
Great War. More battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and gunboats-
learning the ways of the sea, and the men who sail on it in
ships of iron. Almost unnoticeable in this formidable list of
men-of-war assignments is a duty which became instrumental in
forming his ideas of leadership. That duty was as Director of
Machinist Mates School in Charleston, South Carolina, in
1912-1914. It is likely that it was here, as well as on those
hard steel decks, that he understood that the career enlisted
man is the heart of any Navy. A fact that must never be
forgotten if an officer is to truly "lead". His son,
John S. McCain Jr.-second part of this story- was later to put
that into a phrase that has become a One Commandment Bible of
naval leadership.
In the 1930's with the rapid expansion of the naval
arm-the marriage of ship and warplane-the Navy had a bit of a
dilemma. Plenty of naval officers were trained as pilots, but
few trained for sea command. The Navy Department decided to look
for experienced commanders who might be willing to go to the
naval flight school in Pensacola. One of those asked was Sidney
McCain, now a Captain- a more serious rank in the small and
parochial Navy before World War II. So Captain McCain went down
to Florida with a bunch of kids to learn how to strafe and dive
bomb, and land on a pitching carrier deck- at the age of 50.
Still a record. And in September, 1936, at the age of 52, some
admiral or captain pinned the golden wings above his left breast
pocket, 52!
Now an aviator, he commanded two naval air stations and
the carrier RANGER, and in February 1941- the Second World War
already mauling Europe- he was made Rear Admiral and put in
command of the new combined scouting forces and fleet wings on
the West Coast. When the Japanese made their terrible
miscalculation in attacking Pearl Harbor, his command was the
umbrella against the expected attack on the mainland.
May 1942, he took over command of all land-based naval
aircraft in the South Pacific. His planes fought the battle of
Guadalcanal and helped dent the Japanese effort to "finish
off" the Americans in the Pacific. After a stint back in
Washington as Chief of Naval Aeronautics, where he got a third
star, it was back to the war in later summer, 1944, as Commander
of the Second Fast Carrier Force Pacific and Task Group 38.1.
Three months later, he took over Task Force 38, Halsey's
cavalry.
McCain, say the various accounts, became a sort of Jeb
Stuart/George Patton of the ocean, dashing from flash point to
flash point, attacking, attacking, and attacking. He was awarded
the Navy Cross for putting his forces between the battered
cruisers HOUSTON and CANBERRA, and a hornet's nest of Japanese
fighters trying to finish off the crippled ships.
In October, he was ordered to take his worn down men and
planes for a rest, when a Japanese armada launched a thrust at
the American invasion force in the Philippines. Halsey had been
drawn Northward by a feint, and the landing troops were
protected by only a light force under Admiral Sprague. McCain
raced back to help, but his carriers were too far away for his
beloved pilots to make it back to the carriers after the strike.
He pressed onward, hoping for another hundred miles, but the
reports from the beach told of increasing peril and cries for
help. Admiral McCain went down to his cabin to think a few
moments. Then came up and said, "Turn into the wind".
The order that precedes an aircraft launch. His aircraft and
Sprague's heroic actions caught the Japanese force flatfooted,
and the invasion was saved. Most of his planes either landed
safely ashore or on other carriers. But, it's one of those
decisions that take life from a man. Before final notes, it is
important to say that Sidney McCain was a colorful man. For
reasons undetermined, he wore his officer's hat without the
grommet-the plastic frame that keeps the cap a taut disk. Hence
photos show him with a shapeless khaki lump on his head. He
never smoked factory-made cigarettes. He always carried rolling
papers and a bag of Bull Durham in his breast pocket. It is said
he could roll a cigarette with one hand. He was also a man of
intense loyalty and honor. Once, someone came up to him and said
a friend had called McCain an S.O.B. He said simply: "I
don't believe it", and left it at that.
Photos of him show a calm, nearly gaunt, somewhat
stern-looking man, but with very, very warm eyes With a touch of
basset sadness, as if they had been on watch too long, seen too
many things. By pure chance, when I was a newspaper reporter in
San Diego, I once ran into a pilot who had flown under him.
After some jovial small talk, I asked about my grandfather, the
man. He paused, trying to distill his thoughts. Finally, he said
"I think he was the finest man I ever met. We would have
done anything for him." Admiral McCain stood on the deck of
the USS MISSOURI as Douglas MacArthur signed the instruments of
surrender with Japan. In that famous photo, he is the one in the
front row, looking slightly down. I have seen it in a hundred
books.
Then he got special permission to fly straight home for a
rest, and made the day-and-a-half island hopping flight in the
back of a Navy pursuit plane. My grandmother met him at the
Coronado air station, and at the welcome home party, he sat down
and quietly died. He had been home for the war for less than
half a day.
Under John Sidney McCain's 1906 Naval Academy yearbook
photo is a quote from Milton that ascribes to him "That
power that erring men call chance". His classmates were
later to write after his death in a book about the class of this
taking of chances: "It cost him his life later, but his
work was done, and victory, which he lived to see, had come to
his country."
His son, the second Navy McCain, was made of the same
stuff. But his story is also clear proof that regardless of how
simple it looks in terms of "blood lines" and "pedigree,"
leaders are made, not born. Known throughout his life as "Jack"-
he disliked the nickname "Junior"-he was born far away
from the sea he was to spend so many years on. His mother was
traveling across country while the senior McCain was at sea, and
stopped to visit her sister in Council Bluffs, Iowa. There, in a
frigid January, 1911, was born the second half of the first Four
Star father-and-son set in naval history.
Moving around as military families do, Jack McCain
remembered being assigned to shovel coal into the family furnace
at 5 a.m. He remembers getting in trouble at school for telling
his little friends he saw a bear on the way to class, but being
defended by my grandmother who said, "All little boys must
have an imagination. Don't worry, he'll know about honesty and
the truth."
Her prescience was lathe-accurate. For anyone will tell
you that John Sidney McCain, Jr., like his father, was the most
honest man you will ever meet. His word had the constancy on
Newtonian laws of physical motion. In fact, in his Naval Academy
yearbook notation, after referring to his "weakness for the
fairer sex" and a penchant for being in trouble, it notes
of the 20-year-old, new Ensign: 'An officer and a gentleman' is
the title to which he pays absolute allegiance. Sooner could
Gibraltar be loosed from its base than could "Mac" be
loosed from the principles which he has adopted to govern his
actions.
He went to Annapolis very young-too young, he was later to
say. At 16, in 1927, he entered the harsh world of the Plebe. It
gave him a dislike of hazing he carried with him the rest of his
career. He thought it a poor substitute for leadership. Loaded
with demerits and mediocre grades, he staggered through four
years and became an ensign in 1931, in a country in deep
depression. As proof of the made-not-born postulate, his first
steps were anything but omens of stellar things to come. His
first official entry in his service records is the Navy
Department denying his request to go to the Naval Optical School
in Washington after graduation. It seems he and a classmate pal
knew there were a lot more pretty girls in Washington than on a
battleship and tried a rather pitiful finesse with the
application to lens-making school. The sages in the Navy gave
the request no serious thought, because less than ten days later
he was ordered to the battleship OKLAHOMA. Learning to command
rather than to grind glass.
Unable to get into flight school because of a heart
murmur, which is now medically understood to be benign, Jack
McCain applied to submarine school. The sub school doctors had
more generous stethoscopes, apparently, and after two formative
years on the massive OKLAHOMA, he went off to New London to
learn about the still-evolving theories of warfare under the
sea...of sonar pings and "bearing- mark" and "Fire
One!"... and how to crash dive without sinking your boat.
He served upon a couple of wheezing old World War I subs- the
peacetime, depression Navy was cut to the bone- then taught math
and physics to bored midshipmen at the Naval Academy. He was
later to say the experience was very important to his future
role as one of the Navy's foremost speechmakers. "If you
can keep a bone-weary plebe awake, it's easy to get you message
across to anyone who's had a night's sleep."
After the Japanese Zeroes crossed the Pali that terrible
Sunday, Jack McCain went to war under the seas, commanding three
different submarines, and sank several Japanese ships, including
the submarine's most dangerous foe, a destroyer. On rare
occasions, he spoke of the time, early in the war, of firing
four torpedoes at a sleepy Japanese battleship, unaware of the
menace below, and hitting her three times without a single
explosion. Then having to dive and stand against prolonged
depth-charging, while cursing an unknown pre-war torpedo
contractor. For these and other exploits, he was awarded the
Silver Star and the Bronze Star and a small pile of
commendations.
After the surrender, he sailed his sub into Tokyo Harbor.
There is a photograph of him and his father, in khakis, on the
bridge of a submarine tender. Leaning on the gray railing are
the young, wiry, dark-haired sub skipper and the older, also
wiry, but terribly weary, carrier admiral. A few hours later,
Admiral McCain was to leave for the United States and his quiet
death, his son never to see him again. So the nearly chance
meeting was a blessing Jack McCain was always grateful for.
In the post-war, Jack McCain went through a series of
duties- submarine division commander, executive officer of a
heavy cruiser in Korea, and a variety of other commands. He rose
from Commander to Four-Star Admiral. At flag rank, his commands
included Commander Amphibious Forces Atlantic, Military
Representative to the United Nations, Commander Naval Forces
Europe. Finally, from 1968 to 1972, his last post, as Commander
of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific at the height of the
Vietnam War- CINCPAC.
More important than the litany of commands and promotions
was Jack McCain the thinker, the speaker, and the naval leader.
For from the time he had so frivolously asked to be a naval
lens-maker, he had slowly matured, thinking about
responsibility, about leadership, and about seapower. He began
writing and talking about it. He learned the power of the image
and the metaphor. "What is Seapower?" he wrote, early
on, "in primitive times when two tribes inhabited opposite
sides of a large lake and took to barter by canoe, they were
exercising elementary seapower." A bit later: "A
ballistic missile submarine is a missile silo that moves!"
He became philosophical: "Life is run by poker players, not
the systems analysts." And this: "It's one of the most
forgotten, then relearned foreign policy axioms in history. If
you keep backing away because you're afraid of what might happen
to you- and you keep backing away and backing away- what you
were afraid of in the first place is going to happen to you, as
certain as I am standing here saying it."
He became one of the best-known military speakers in the
country, then the world, on the subject of Seapower. And more.
On the basic, simple axioms of command and strategy and
leadership that seem to elude so many. At the end of every
speech after he had shown dozens of slides of U.S. Military
technology- sleek aircraft, festooned detection systems,
angry-looking missiles-there appeared a picture of a lone
American soldier slogging purposefully through a rice paddy, his
eyes dead ahead of an unseen objective. He would point at this
soldier.
"In the final analysis, it's that boy with the gun on
his shoulder who wins the war. He sits on a piece of territory
and says to the enemy- 'this is mine!' " Throughout any
speech I ever heard him make to officers or men, he make a
simple, direct fundamental statement. "The 20-year-old
bluejacket is the backbone of the navy." And he advised the
1970 graduating class at the Naval Academy: "When you step
aboard ship and stand in front of your first division of
bluejackets, they will evaluate you accurately and without
delay. In fact, there is no more exacting method of determining
an officer's worth. "Furthermore, you can't fool
bluejackets. They are quick to recognize the phony. If you lose
the respect of these men, you are finished. You can never make
it back."
McCain, as was even observed of him back at the Naval
Academy, had a counterpoint to his fun-loving side. It was to
sit and read. Poe, Kipling, Mahan, Wilde, Durant, Carlyle,
Sandburg, Dante. And he often cited poetry to make a point.
Especially from Lewis Carroll. This about the nature of
fair-weather sailors: When the tide's out, he is gay as a lark
And speaks in contemptuous tones of the shark But when the
tide's in, and the harks are around, His voice has a timid and
tremulous sound. Then he would laugh. A laugh all who heard
instantly recognized. It was a warm and generous. It rang with
the vagaries and realities of life, and a touch of humility.
For Dad- as paradoxical as it may seem for a man who
attained four-stars and great respect and recognition- was at
heart a very humble man. He knew nothing came easy, and he knew
you had to work every day- not to keep a job or honors- but to
keep your common sense and perspective on life. At the same
time, he had no patience for men who hedged the truth or who
wouldn't accept responsibility for makes. He once told me: "Some
officers get it backwards. They don't understand that we are
responsible for our men, not the other way around. That's what
forges trust and loyalty." That code was not lost on his
men.
About two years before he died in 1981, he received a
letter from a Mr. Dennis Radigan of New York. Mr. Radigan
reminded the admiral that he had served under him as an enlisted
man 21 years before on the heavy cruiser ALBANY and the Petty
Officer Radigan had stolen some food while drunk one night and
was subsequently brought up to Captain's Mast. The Executive
Officer, says Radigan, recommended he be broken in rate.
Dad chewed the man out, asked him some questions, and
apparently saw something, because he gave him only 14 days
restriction- this, during a 15 day cruise. Mr. Radigan writes:
"At that critical time in my life, you made a
judgment and put your faith in me. While you chewed me out good,
you gave me your understanding and wisdom. I cannot convey how
important that event was."
Mr. Radigan goes on to say that he finished his tour, went
to college, and was a telephone company executive with 600 men
under him, and a wife and children. "You taught me to have
some faith in human nature, to at least try to understand a man
and give them a chance if they deserve it."
Now it's important to know that Lieutenant and Commander
and Captain and Admiral Jack McCain could be a severe
disciplinarian. When a man deserved it he went to the brig for
what Dad called his "Special Naval Orientation Course"
- 3 days bread-and-water. And he would tell him:
"What you make of yourself from now on is your
choice, son. This is a chance to take a serious look at your
future. Take advantage of it." But he could see something
in men and bring out the best in them.
That's why he became one of the great speech makers. He
was always completely sincere, and he rarely read a speech,
except to glance at his notes. Most important, he talked
directly to each of his listeners- whether anxious young seamen
just reporting aboard, muddy soldiers formed up in a Vietnamese
rice paddy, or a convention hall of newspaper editors.
It is here that both McCains, Senior and Junior, meet so
absolutely. Their love and respect for their men. An not "for
the men who serve under them", for I truly think they
rather thought the opposite- that it was they who served their
men. If the two warriors could gaze upon this great new
man-of-war - and perhaps they can- they would be honored.
Honored, but humbled. For they were always not a little
embarrassed at honors given to them. They just wanted to get the
job done.
A final thing... in the week after my Father died in 1981,
I was terribly busy with the funeral arrangements. And one day
an image appeared to me. Not a dream, because I was driving from
one appointment to another. I recall it now, as I think of how
best to try to let you 'see' and 'hear' these men, rather than
just as a dry list of commands, promotions, jobs, awards. There
was a soldier-a warrior, I should say. He was lying on his side
in the mist of some ancient battlefield- whether Roman, or
Greek, or Carthaginian, I cannot say. But he was propping
himself up on a scarred sword and raising a battered shield. and
he was saying: "Come home, Admiral... come home..."
It was very comforting, this image of Dad being called
home to be with his comrades through the millennia. But now- if
you'll forgive what may seem overly dramatic- perhaps he and his
father have been called back "to serve" a bit longer.
For I think the men who serve in USS JOHN S. McCAIN can be
absolutely certain of one thing. The spirits of "Sidney"
and "Jack" McCain will always sail with you- on the
lonely watches in the night, and in the din of battle. If you
listen, you may even hear them. They'll be aboard. They are now.
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