For reasons that were as obvious then as they are today, John McCain was known as "John Wayne McCain" while he attended the U.S. Naval Academy during the mid-1950s. His favorite sobriquet of "maverick" is, and always has been, a cover for his inability to follow the rules and his penchant for knee-jerk, black-and-white decisions, both of which are amply evident in his largely unvetted choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. McCain's proclivity to shoot from the hip is a life-long trait, stemming from a pronounced tendency toward rebellion against his naval-officer father and a distaste for following prescribed courses of studies when in school. The following transcript from a CNN program called "McCain Revealed" shows how these characteristics almost got McCain killed during a training flight while attending a naval-air training school in Texas:
JOHN KING: His next proving ground was one chosen for him--Annapolis. Duty eclipsed desire. The military legacy of his father and grandfather trumped McCain's huge love of literature and his dream of a liberal arts education at Princeton or the University of Virginia.
MCCAIN: I think I knew I was going to go to the Naval Academy, and I'm sure that part of my excuse for being rebellious was that I wanted to go to one of those schools. By the way, it's by no means certain that I could have gotten in.
CHUCK LARSON: He accepted it, although he rebelled occasionally.
KING: Chuck Larson met fellow midshipman John McCain in 1955. Everyone knew both McCain's family lineage and his bad boy reputation. Larson and McCain hit it off. The "Bad Bunch" was formed.
LARSON: A group that liked to have fun, and, of course, we were always looking for dates. Women were very attracted to John.
FRANK AMBOA: Socially, it was very wise to hang out with John because you'd get invited to a lot of parties.
KING: Frank Amboa was John McCain's roommate at Annapolis. Amboa remembers his first encounter with his roommate's father, a highly decorated naval captain, the fall of 1955.
AMBOA: John had gotten up and gone over to the sink and got a glass of water and threw it on us, so that deteriorated into melee and water fight, and in the midst of this there came two knocks on the door. So we come to attention and I see John say, "Dad!"
MCCAIN: That was my dad who walked into the room. It was a ... it was a shocking moment for him.
AMBOA: And then I hear this gruff voice behind me, "This is a gross room. Carry on, gentlemen."
MCCAIN: My father was amazingly tolerant of some of my wild antics while at the Naval Academy.
AMBOA: And the captain said, "Goddammit, Johnny. No wonder you're flunking!"
KING: It was 1958. John McCain graduated Annapolis in the bottom five of his class [894 out of 899, in the .556 percentile], yet at the top of his game.
MCCAIN: I was going to be a naval aviator, and that's what I always wanted to do, and I wanted to fly airplanes by myself off of aircraft carriers. You know, I thought that was the height of glamor and excitement.
KING: Aviator training was rigorous, yet McCain loved happy hour and night life. His old Annapolis pal, now flight school roommate, Chuck Larson says McCain still preferred literature to required reading.
LARSON: John spent a lot of time reading, and he read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
KING: At the expense of maybe ...
MCCAIN: Yes.
KING: ... learning how to eject?
MCCAIN: Yes, at the expense of maybe learning my flight procedures, which I probably should have given a higher priority to.
KING: Both men were on a training mission in 1958 when McCain nearly paid the ultimate price ... for doing things his way.
LARSON: He took off one plane ahead of me, and he had an engine failure and crashed into the [Corpus Christi] bay, and he sunk to the bottom. He was sitting on the bottom of the aircraft, and he said, "You know, I remember there's some kind of a switch here somewhere that blows the canopy off the airplane, but I didn't read that book, and I don't know where the switch is, so I guess I'm dead."
KING: McCain managed to wrench the canopy open and barely survived.
KING: A near death experience. How do you think that changed him, if at all?
LARSON: I don't think it changed him at all. John went back to the room, went to bed for about two hours, got up and said, "Let's go over to the club."
The record shows that McCain lost five planes in all, only two of which were lost in wartime due to circumstances beyond his control, to wit: one was lost when a rocket accidentally slammed into his plane on the deck of the U.S.S. Forestall Aircraft Carrier and another was shot down by the enemy in North Vietnam while he was piloting it. As for the other three, we have already noted the crash in Corpus Christi Bay while attempting to land after an alleged engine failure. While stationed in the Mediterranean, McCain hit power lines and crashed while flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula. Finally, while flying to an Army-Navy football game in a navy training aircraft, he radioed ahead that he had experienced a "flameout," and ejected from the plane before it crashed.
The crash last described was termed "unavoidable" by the Navy (possibly on account of extreme indulgence of his highly erratic behavior due to the fact that his father and grandfather concluded their naval careers as four-star admirals); but was it really unavoidable? According to Wikipedia, a "flameout" simply refers to "the failure of a jet engine caused by the extinction of the flame in the combustion chamber. It can be caused by a number of factors, including fuel exhaustion...." Obviously, "fuel exhaustion" is a euphemism for running out of fuel. You will recall what McCain said about doing extraneous things "at the expense of maybe learning my flight procedures, which I probably should have given a higher priority to." Could it be that McCain ignored safety procedures and simply hopped in a jet without making sure it had enough fuel to reach his destination?
This is what scares me so badly about John McCain. He has flown by the seat of his pants all his life, and continues to do so. If McCain is elected President, I hope he does not makes a fatal miscalculation after failing to give sufficiently careful deliberation to a critical decision. If that were to happen, he could wind up at the bottom of the bay (so to speak) with the whole country riding with him as his co-pilot. In that case, "Whoops, I guess we're dead," will be a very sad commentary, indeed, on this country's inability to select Presidents who think deeply before they react.
