No one was more central to that blazingly controversial effort than John McCain. It was a truly bipartisan outcome, one of those increasingly infrequent moments in which facts vanquished ideology on Capitol Hill. The group’s difficult finding-that there was no evidence that any Americans had been held back in Vietnamese prisons-was agreed to unanimously by all members, across the political divide, from far right to far left. Affairs, chaired by John Kerry, to lay the myth to rest, in 1993. It took the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. flag, with the silhouette of a man beneath a guard tower. Thousands of bereft family members were encouraged to anticipate the eventual return of loved ones who were, in fact, long dead. camps in the jungles of Southeast Asia-a grim fiction that was promoted by the “Rambo” films, jingoists such as Ross Perot, and politicians including Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole. Justifying this vengeful spirit and exacerbating it was the false belief that dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of Americans were still being held in secret P.O.W. The United States, nursing its trauma, imagined itself as the war’s victim, and punished the victorious but impoverished Vietnamese with a crippling economic embargo. The memory of the Vietnam War, that self-inflicted American wound, festered for decades after the nominal end of hostilities, in 1975. What McCain did in refusing release from the Hanoi Hilton ennobled him, but his survival of the moral collapse that his captors forced on him was, arguably, the precondition of the further heroic work he accomplished years later. This misery outweighed any possible sense of valor he might have derived from the stalwart resistance that actually defined his time in captivity, and that others would simplistically see as grand heroism. Returned to his cell guilt-ridden and despondent, he came close to suicide. He abjectly signed a “confession” declaring him a “black criminal” and an “air pirate.” To himself, after that, McCain was a traitor to his nation and his family. As he experienced it, he grotesquely betrayed that honor when, under the pressures of torture, he broke. A son and grandson of Navy admirals, he was raised with a steely sense of martial honor. More than twenty years ago, I interviewed him for the magazine, and I remember as if it were yesterday the anguish that came into his face when he described the worst part of his imprisonment. In fact, the future President was partly correct in Iowa, though not in the way he supposed McCain never considered himself a war hero. One of the peculiarities of Trump’s constant outrages is the way in which, every now and then, they accidentally bring to the surface deep matters of meaning and morality. He could have avoided it all, but out of loyalty and-one has to name it-love for his comrades, he chose not to. The abuse, combined with the after-effects of his injuries, left him physically marked. His guard told him, “Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you.” He was tortured for his defiance, and ultimately spent more than two years in solitary confinement. code of honor and refused to be repatriated ahead of American prisoners who had been in captivity longer than he. McCain was still badly crippled from his crash and the poor medical treatment that followed, yet he adhered to the P.O.W. In 1968, less than a year after his Navy bomber was shot down, the imprisoned McCain was abruptly offered unconditional release by the North Vietnamese, perhaps because his father had just been named the commander of U.S. The reason for the universal, if brief, repugnance was obvious: McCain’s conduct during nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison, the infamous Hanoi Hilton, had become the stuff of legend. The initial indignation, however, did not last in hindsight, it seems one of the final instances of a broad cultural unity that now seems lost to this country forever. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump’s insult to Senator John McCain-and, by extension, to every American P.O.W.-drew a gasp of rebuke from across the political spectrum. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. “He’s not a war hero,” Donald Trump said two years ago, speaking at a Republican Party candidates’ forum in Iowa.
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