At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman told Capt. John S. McCain III that he was about to attain his life ambition: becoming an admiral.
When Mr. McCain returned from Vietnam in March 1973, he was determined to continue as a Navy pilot. But he eventually headed off to Capitol Hill to serve four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate.
But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs.
He had found a sense of purpose in an apprenticeship to some of the Senate’s fiercest cold warriors. And in Senator John G. Tower, a hawkish Texas Republican, he had found a new mentor, beginning a relationship that many compared to the bond between a father and son.
Is this really the narrative that McCain wants to start getting out there? Is going to be hard to paint himself as the regular guy against Obama once people realize that his father and grandfather were admirals, that he was going to be an admiral (although he has often said the contrary), and that he wanted to be a politician because ...
Mr. McCain was captivated, recalled Jeffrey Record, then an aide to former Senator Sam Nunn, the hawkish Georgia Democrat. “He thrives on competition, and he thrives on political combat,” Mr. Record said. “He saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”
But he is just a regular guy and Obama is the over-reaching elitest ... cough choke
