‘He’s dying anyway”: that was a White House aide’s vile excuse for dismissing recent criticism from John McCain, the doughty senator who has become the conscience of the Republican party. McCain does indeed have brain cancer, and he has chosen to go out like a rancorous prophet, deploring the paranoid, anti-historical hysteria to which Trump panders.
McCain’s impending death gives this book’s résumé of “great fights” its urgency and, yes, its gravity. Its mood is grim, not just because of his medical prognosis. McCain comes from a military clan – he is the son and grandson of admirals and the father of a Marine; a naval pilot in the Vietnam war, he was imprisoned and intermittently tortured for six years in a Hanoi prison after his plane was shot down – and he venerates the hero of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who, wounded and in agony, stoically remains at his post in the hope of eliminating another enemy before he dies.
Service, for McCain, entails the likelihood of sacrifice. Almost morbidly, The Restless Wave recurs to the spectacle of valiant, altruistic death. It begins with a commemoration honouring the 2,000 sailors killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. McCain later visits D-day cemeteries in Europe, and in Iraq he attends a naturalisation ceremony in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, where two pairs of boots on empty chairs deputise for GIs who were awaiting citizenship when they died for “a country that was not yet theirs”.
McCain entered politics immediately after leaving the navy – a logical transition in the US, given the country’s origins in a revolutionary war. On missions to the Middle East, he expected freedom fighters to follow the same route, laying down their arms in order to construct a “civil society”. Why, he wonders, won’t Islamist militants heed the example of the US, which is self-evidently “the most wondrous land on Earth” and an unmitigated “blessing to humanity”?
This faith in American exceptionalism blinds McCain to his country’s current decline. He calls Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires”, and on his travels he can’t help noticing the crumbling mementoes of defunct global powers, like an arch in Tripoli that celebrates a long-forgotten Roman victory. A British colonel in Basra, schooled in pessimism by the disintegration of another empire, warns McCain that American policies will never subdue Iraq. He initially rejoices in the collapse of the Soviet empire, then repines as he watches Vladimir Putin consolidate his authority by bribing his oligarchical cronies with a monopoly of the country’s spoils; he misses the analogy with Donald Trump’s vaunted tax cuts, and his patriotic zeal leaves him unable to recognise that the US empire – or, as he puts it, “the world order we helped build” – is succumbing to the same corruption.
Taken to the site of the detonated Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, McCain denounces the Taliban as “annihilating fanatics” but again seems not to realise that Trump’s niggling erosion of democratic norms is slowly achieving the same result as that bombardment. He is amused when an Egyptian official tells Jeff Sessions – Trump’s terrorised, whimpering attorney-general – that there is little difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and the US’s rabid evangelical Christians. McCain considers this a cynical attempt at “cultural appropriation”: shouldn’t it have worried him that the land of the free was being likened to a bigoted theocracy?
“All wars are awful,” says McCain; even so, he enjoys fighting them, whether on the battlefield or the legislature. Nostalgic for combat, he remains fond of lethal gestures. Last year, entering the Senate at midnight, he doomed the Republican proposal to repeal Obamacare by giving it the thumbs-down, like a Roman emperor curtly condemning a gladiator. It was not enough to vote against the bill; he had to symbolically kill it. At his most ghoulish, he regards himself as a burnt offering, or mere carrion. When his first presidential campaign faltered, he says that reporters gathered “like crows on a wire, watching the unfortunate roadkill breathe its last before they descended to scavenge the remains”.
In a more peaceable epilogue, McCain tries to shake off “the weary fatalism that can overcome even the happiest warrior”. He serenely contemplates the world in his own absence, like a ghost haunting his ranch in northern Arizona. He surveys the ponds he stocked with fish, the sycamores he planted and a protected “birding area” in the valley. Then, in a balefully bloody afterthought, he remembers a cougar that recently passed through this sanctuary. “They’re transient animals,” he shrugs, “and he moved on after he culled the local deer population.” McCain expects such killing to continue: war is the hygiene of the world and slaughter maintains nature’s balance. Unreconciled to fate, this old warrior cheers himself up at the end by happily imagining scenes of fatality.
• The Restless Wave by John McCain and Mark Salter is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
