It became known in Navy lore as the night John McCain turned off the lights in Spain.
It was moderately big news in Hampton Roads, where the afternoon Ledger-Star carried this headline on Aug. 15, 1962: "McCain Has Brush With Power Lines."
The 25-year-old lieutenant, flying a prop-driven AD-6 Skyraider from Attack Squadron 65, based at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, was one of 60 pilots making a dawn training run over Spain.
En route back to the carrier Enterprise, McCain told a reporter, his plane lost power and went into a dive. He said he was only 30 feet above a river when he managed to restart his engine and pull the plane up, in the process slicing through a set of power lines and cutting off electricity to the surrounding countryside.
The story illustrates several intersecting themes in the remarkable history of the Republican presidential candidate - a history with deep roots in the Navy and Hampton Roads.
One theme is his blue-blooded Navy pedigree. In a Navy town such as Norfolk, newspaper stories about aviation mishaps are a dime a dozen, but seldom does the pilot's name make it into the headline. What made this flying mishap noteworthy was who the pilot was: a McCain.
John McCain III's grandfather, Adm. John "Slew" McCain, sailed with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet in 1908 and stood alongside storied Adms. Chester Nimitz and "Bull" Halsey aboard the battleship Missouri when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. His last war finished, he died of a heart attack four days later at 61.
Lt. McCain's father, Adm. John "Jack" McCain Jr., held three flag commands in Hampton Roads in the 1960s en route to becoming commander in chief of all Pacific forces at the height of the Vietnam War.
They were the first father-son duo of four-star admirals in Navy history. Their long shadow was both an inspiration and a burden to their namesake and rendered him a prize prisoner during his 5-1/2 years as a POW in Vietnam.
McCain's lights-out sortie over Spain also illuminates a personality trait that was in full flower by his arrival in Hampton Roads as a young pilot: He was a rebel, a rogue, a daredevil who lived to flout the rules and push the envelope.
His initial account of that 1962 incident - that it was caused by engine failure - didn't stand the test of time. Almost four decades later, in his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," he confessed that he snagged the power lines while flying too low.
"My daredevil clowning had cut off electricity to a great many Spanish homes and created a small international incident," he wrote.
The incident was one of four mishaps McCain had as a Navy aviator before the shoot-down of his A-4 attack jet over Vietnam in 1967 that led to his capture and imprisonment. In some cases, official Navy investigations faulted his flying skills and judgment. In every case until his shoot-down, he had a harrowing brush with death and walked away with scarcely a scratch.
It all made him wonder whether he had been spared for a reason, author Robert Timberg wrote of McCain in his 1995 book "The Nightingale's Song." God, Timberg wrote, "seemed reluctant to kill him, in fact, appeared to have plans for him."
As a child, McCain lived the peripatetic life familiar to all military families. "Our family lived on the move," he wrote in his autobiography, "rooted not in a location, but in the culture of the Navy."
His pugnacious streak was evident at an early age. At the smallest provocation, he would hold his breath until he blacked out and crashed to the floor unconscious. His parents countered the tantrums by dropping him into a bathtub of cold water.
As the family moved with each new Navy assignment, the young McCain bounced from school to school and often was disciplined for fighting. "At each new school I became an unrepentant pain in the neck," he wrote.
Finally, in an effort to introduce some stability into his education, his parents enrolled him in Episcopal High School, an exclusive prep school in Alexandria attended by generations of Virginia gentry.
One of his classmates at EHS was Joshua Darden Jr., who went on to become a prominent Norfolk businessman.
"He was a maverick, even then," Darden said. "He was a risk-taker. He would constantly get in trouble with demerits - never anything bad enough to get thrown out of school.
"He looked like the Fonz. He wore his collar pulled up. We had to wear a tie to class, and he wore the same one all year. He never changed it."
New students at EHS were referred to as "rats" and underwent some mild hazing by upperclassmen.
"They had a poll at the end of the year, and he was voted Worst Rat," Darden said.
When he finished prep school, it was understood that McCain would attend the Naval Academy, just as his father and grandfather did. There, he wrote, he "embarked on a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion."
He was no academic standout, either. He finished fifth from the bottom of his class.
Even so, however, he had "an extraordinarily keen mind," said Jack Dittrick of Virginia Beach, a retired Navy captain who roomed with McCain at the academy.
"He was a voracious reader - of biographies and history especially. That always impressed me," Dittrick said.
"I was also very impressed with his sense of humor. We had all these restrictions, and living with a guy like John took a lot of the sting out of it. John always had a humorous take on things. I think that's what's carried him through, to be honest."
After the academy came flight school, first in Pensacola, Fla., then in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the first of McCain's flying mishaps occurred.
The engine of his Skyraider quit while he was practicing landings, McCain wrote in his autobiography, and the plane plummeted into Corpus Christi Bay. McCain clambered out of the canopy and swam to the surface, suffering only a minor backache.
Contrary to McCain's account, the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that a Navy investigation found no evidence of engine failure. Investigators determined that McCain was preoccupied watching instruments in his cockpit showing the position of his landing gear and lost track of his altitude and speed. They also found that he used a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn.
In any event, McCain wrote, after a few hours' rest he was "out carousing, injured back and all, later that evening."
By the time McCain landed in Hampton Roads, his family's Navy fame preceded him.
As commanding officer at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, his father was known as a salty, gregarious, cigar-chomping salesman for the Navy who gave frequent speeches on the value of sea power.
"Probably no more popular or better known Navy flag officer ever served in Tidewater," one Ledger-Star writer enthused.
Even Jack McCain's wife, Roberta, was an object of media adulation, as was her twin sister, Rowena, a frequent guest at the Little Creek admiral's quarters.
"It's hard to believe," one women's page story gushed, "that such charm and personality can be possessed in equal measure by two identically attractive women."
Earl "Buddy" Yates of Virginia Beach, a retired rear admiral, worked for both McCain's father and grandfather over the course of his career and got to know the younger McCain early on.
"I thought he was a little bit of a smart-ass kid," Yates said. "But he was never disrespectful, and he had great charm. He was impish.
"Nobody that has known him well has ever disliked John that I know of or thought that he had exceeded the rules of being an officer and a gentleman. He's always been that. But he had a lot of fun."
To that end, McCain and some fellow pilots set up housekeeping in a house on 37th Street near the Oceanfront which - according to his autobiography - became known far and wide for "the most raucous and longest beach parties of any squadron in the Navy."
Shane Kaufman remembers those bashes. Kaufman joined McCain's squadron in 1961 as an enlisted plane captain, whose job it was to fuel and service the aircraft.
"He would take guys from his line crew to his house and let them kick back and relax," Kaufman said. "In the living room, he had a parachute hung up like a big sultan's tent with throw pillows all around. That was his furniture.
"He was the rogue of the squadron."
Today Kaufman is facilities manager at the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach. One of the aircraft on display there is an AD-4 Skyraider, a close cousin of the ones McCain flew.
In addition to the single-seat AD-6, McCain also flew the three-seat AD-5. Kaufman was a crewman on many of those flights.
"He was a hot shot pilot," Kaufman said. "He was damn good. Very self-assured, very confident. He was known to fly a little low when he was by himself."
In 1965, three years after his close encounter with power lines in Spain, McCain made the local papers again. By then he was married to his first wife, Carol, and was stationed at McCain Field - named for his grandfather - in Meridian, Miss.
Today Carol McCain and the McCains' oldest son, Doug, live in Virginia Beach.
McCain had flown a T2-A Buckeye trainer jet to Philadelphia to join his parents for the annual Army-Navy football game. On the return flight, carrying a load of Christmas presents for the family, he ran into trouble en route to Norfolk for refueling and ditched the plane over the Eastern Shore. The jet crashed into the woods near Cape Charles as McCain parachuted onto the beach.
"Lt. McCain Ejects Safely," read the headline in The Virginian-Pilot.
McCain said his engine flamed out. But according to the Los Angeles Times, Navy investigators were unable to corroborate his account and cited several pilot errors in the crash.
"And I had to replace all those presents!" his mother told a reporter later.
By mid-1967 McCain was flying combat missions over Vietnam. But his most serious brush with death yet involved no enemy fire.
He was in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk on the flight deck of the Norfolk-based carrier Forrestal, waiting to take off, when an electrical malfunction on a nearby F-4 Phantom ignited a Zuni missile, which streaked across the deck and slammed into McCain's belly fuel tank. The ensuing inferno engulfed the ship, killing 134 men in one of the Navy's worst accidental disasters.
McCain scrambled out of his cockpit, jumped to the deck and rolled through the wall of flames to safety, escaping serious injury.
It was three months later that McCain, having transferred to the carrier Oriskany, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi, breaking both arms and a knee as he ejected.
Captured by the North Vietnamese, he wrote later that he received only minimal medical care and suffered repeated beatings over his 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war.
His father, as commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, directed some of the heaviest bombing of the war against North Vietnam during that period. Stoic to the end, he never discussed his son's capture publicly until his release on March 14, 1973.
Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com
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Noon
Once again your "sarcasm meter" lit off for no reason. I truly mean that Obama is a gentleman. I know he has said a few snarky things about JMC lately, as JMC has done in return, but he largely ran a gentleman's campaign. I wish I believed in his platform enough to vote for him, because he is really a very nice guy!
Someone once taught me that when I think someone else is being sarcastic, it might be that that is just what *I* would be doing under the circumstances. Not everybody gets into sarcasm as much as the pundits lead us to believe . . . Cheers, MGM
Mary, Mary
The good old boy network giving out "crash airplanes for free cards" do not equate to the hot dog who crashed the planes is beyond reproach. I'm amazed that you make such a suggestion and I could care less that all the hot dogs were doing it. That is a child's response. And I only wish McCain and Palin were as gracious as Obama (Yes, I understood your snark but I'm ignoring it), but it is difficult to run a fear and smear campiagn and be civil, decent and honest and the same time.
Glad Obama is a gentleman . . .
Because some of the trash talk by his followers about John McCain's past is really beyond the pale.
In case some of you don't know, hotdogging by pilots was pretty prevalent in McCain's era. How do I know? Because that was the Navy I joined. Often no one outside of the flyer community was ever given the real reason for the aircraft crashes. I am actually just surprised that John McCain admitted he was at fault for his crashes, as other pilots never did. Cheers, MGM
More to it
I think there was more to his divorce than that. A lot happened to him from the time he was married until he returned. Did you not realize he was a POW for 5 years? It seemed like the seperation was mutual. I am sure both of them had become very different in those 5 years.
The cut powerlines story
McCain's training run over Spain story is interesting. He lies to a reporter about what happened. He then admits in his autobiography 40 years later that his original story was a lie. Instead he was playing the daredevil and flew too low, resulting in the cut powerlines. I wonder if he had a discussion with Naval investigators at the time. If so, I wonder if he went with the false story he told reporters at the time. Granted, a 40-year old incident does have much bearing on the election, but imagine the uproar if a Dem candidate misled naval investigators and admitted lying about it years later. Maybe a reporter can ask him if and what he said to the Navy at the time.
Red Chinese pumping money to McCain:
Who is this guy? What does he want. Why are foreigners so interested in McCain. I wonder what went on during the five years McCain was a POW. Maybe he got some special treatment and psychological work in Red China?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-donorsoct29,0,1269595.story
"Before September 2007, Hao's name had never appeared in the 15-year-old federal database of campaign contributors. Since then, however, his donations have topped $120,000 — including $70,100 on a single June day to Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Over the same time frame, a network of Hao relatives has kicked in more. The take from this group over the last 13 months exceeds $269,000, a small amount to Democrats but most of it to McCain and the Republican National Committee, records show.
Hao didn't register to vote at the northwest suburban address attached to his donations until October 2007, a month after he wrote his first political check, $25,000 to the RNC..."
"I was disappointed when I
"I was disappointed when I read that, in the guise of reporting the news, the Pilot is smearing an honorable man."...An "honorable man"
does not dump the mother of his children for a woman young enough to be his daughter just because the mother becomes crippled and the girl has a hundred million dollars.
there is one word to describe McCain/Palin
arrogance!
Once again, red herrings from Gertz
Will all respect, Gertz, no one, including anyone from the McCain campaign, has disputed any of the facts of this story. The story's relevance is above question. And it makes it clear that the Senator, for all the honor he indeed deserves for his service to this country, has lied and continues to lie about his personal history.
Servant or Mercenary?
What is the definition of the term, "serving your country?" Do you have to actually be in a military uniform to be considered serving your country? Is everyone in uniform actually serving their country? Did McCain go into the Navy out of an altruistic desire to serve his country? McCain had his motives for everything he did and we can only speculate as to his actual standing in the Navy at the time this married family man volunteered to go on his fateful Vietnam deployment. Is it unreasonable to suspect that he was on a fast track to being passed over for commander? Or that POW camp would be a career salvation for a washed out pilot and womanizer? If so, it worked for McCain, but I am not saying it's so. I have no problem with McCain, except as president, but I cannot figure out the zeal with which his followers adore him.
yellow journalism????
jo7258 on Tue, 10/28/2008 at 3:03 pm.
is alive and well in Hampton Roads. I was disappointed when I read that, in the guise of reporting the news, the Pilot is smearing an honorable man. This is pathetic."
I don't think you know the meaning of those words.
Not a Win-Win
Sadly, the morality of our country suffers because of the depravity of the Democrats and our economy suffers because of the greed of the Republicans. It's sad that many of us no longer vote for the best qualified candidate, but for the least offensive.
Yellow journalism
is alive and well in Hampton Roads. I was disappointed when I read that, in the guise of reporting the news, the Pilot is smearing an honorable man. This is pathetic.
So which part was ill informed.
I see that you disputed none of the information I provided. McCain retired from the Military in 1981. Fact is that while McCain was in the Navy serving his country for which you find so much fault....Obama was committing a felony. Posessing and abusing Cocaine. His own words. By the way, you forgot to tell us what John was doing that you find so offensive while Obama was attending that private Muslim school in Jakarta. You also failed to tell us what John was doing while Obama was representing ACORN in the early 90's. Do tell.
Love Reading These Raves from Ill Informed People
What was Obama doing when McCain was, "serving his country?" (Ahem) Well, for starters, Obama was born three years after McCain's first heroic escape: graduating the USNA instead of flunking out or being dismissed for insubordination. When Obama was about three McCain was using military aircraft to make cross country flights to court his first wife. When Obama was six, McCain violated procedure by continuing his mission towards a non-essential target knowing a SAM was taking his bearings. Get the idea? Not Fit To Be President of the United States! (Nice guy, otherwise. So is my brother-in-law... lots of fun).
Love reading these raves from hypocrites
Yeah, slam his service and try to berate it. What was Obama doing while McCain was serving in the Navy? Don't know the answer?..read his book. He states he was shoving COCAINE up his nose. So which is more admirable? Getting high snorting coke or serving in the military? He was committing a felony by his own admission. Only shame is he was not caught. Convicted felons can't be president and by his own admission of having committed a felony, does not deserve to have the opportunity to run.
McCain is a spoiled military commanders kid? Really? Why did McCain not take advantage of that name and status when offered release from the Hanoi Hilton because of it? Why not? That doesn't sound like the actions of a child of privelege. I guess he just was enjoying it so much he decided to be beaten and starved a few years longer.
McCain has more honor, dignity, and sense of service to this nation in his little finger than Obama has or ever will have. End of story.
Re: Orion
"Let's see two highly ineffective years and a 17% approval rating (Bush's is 23%), man you democrats have got the corner on brains..."
Once a filibuster proof democratic senate is elected this too shall change. I also look forward to seeing who Obama will appoint to the supreme court - it could be up to three appointees. If you are offended
by my comments regarding gop juggernaut sarah palin you are free to go back to listening to rush limbaugh and fox news.
You didn't vote for baby bush twice did you?
third from last paragraph:
Slightly different version of events related by others: http://www.truthout.org/100508A ..."McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television.
As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal." McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them."
We owe what to McCain?
I agree the nation surely owes Senator McCain our gratitude for the service he provided in Vietnam, but about as much as a Russian citizen owes a long term debt of gratitude to the bomber pilots that bombed targets in Afghanistan. In both cases the war was bogus--OK then, so WHY were we there? You tell me. To fight Communism? That's why we are now mortgaged to Mao's minions by the uber-patriots? In both cases, the invaders got their butts kicked by "lesser" beings. So why are we grateful for his getting shot down? Unfortunately, the nation cannot afford to continue the programs instituted by the Republican party. By most any measure - the economy, healthcare, running the wars (Haliburton profiteering, abu garib, torture, etc.), deregulation, ethics (Abramoff, Lilly, DeLay, Ney, Ted Stevens, etc.) and emergency preparedness (Katrina) - just to name a few, the Republican party has been a failure to the citizens who entrusted them. Change is not just a slogan. This nation truly needs a dramatic change from the poor governing of the Republicans which has become the Party That Wrecked America in the last eight years.
Hero or Fool?
Fools rush in where heroes fear to go? Mr. McCain knew about the SAM locking onto him and disregarded training orders to get out, determined to win the trophy, the power plant. What pilot is not taught to get the hell out when a SAM is getting ready to be fired at you?
What makes McCain a hero? McCain did not save anybody's life the day he was shot down. He didn't get killed and brought home in a body bag and dumped on his parents' doorstep. He got every conceivable pay and benefit, all tax free, including special POW pay, as well as any promotions that were due, and then given special assignments when he got home, eventually retiring on a Captain’s pension. Sure he was injured: how many crippled soldiers in the VA hospitals got the classy pay and treatment McCain received when he got home? McCain learned nothing in POW camp that would make him a good president.