Another Dead Canary

So which John McCain story line do you believe? The carefully crafted legend about the hero whose character and convictions were forged in the fires of hell, a tale perpetuated in today’s Washington Post story by Michael Dobbs? Or the narrative spun in Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone piece that questions McCain’s bravery, his honesty and paints him as a lothario whose life has been about putting his own ambitions above everything else?

The stories are a study in contrast. Both reporters talked to former P.O.W.s who spent time in camps with McCain. Among those Dickinson spoke to was John Dramesi who, according to RS “went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command.”

Though Dramesi and McCain share a common bond, Dramesi is not an admirer of the Arizona senator.

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

In the WaPo, Dobbs writes:

His resistance of his captors — especially his refusal to accept an offer that would have freed him before his comrades — forged his character, taught him the meaning of honor and, eventually, launched him on a meteoric political career.

Before his final, fateful bombing mission, McCain had been a gregarious flyboy “whose ambitions did not go much beyond being a commander of a squadron,” according to Joe McCain, his younger brother. The decision to reject early release, Joe McCain believes, was “the most important single moment of his entire life” and turned him into a potential commander in chief. “It showed,” his brother said, “that he can make tough decisions in tough times.”