Book Basics - Other McCain Books - Other Information - Discuss the Book - Buy the Book
John McCain’s journey toward presidential run began generations ago
Of the six titles that list John McCain as an author, the book that gives us the largest window into McCain’s soul and personality is Faith Of My Fathers. Written with longtime staffer Mark Salter and published in 1999, this memoir chronicles the larger-than-life lineage of a family tree whose roots reach back to Scot Presbyterian warriors.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee explains his military ancestors this way: “The McCains, bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald, arrived in the New World shortly after American gained her independence, when Hugh McCain settled his wife and six children in Caswell County, North Carolina, and built his estate, Lenox Castle.”
Hugh’s great-grandson added more firepower to the McCain legacy by marrying into the Youngs, a prestigious military family in which one descendant served on Gen. George Washington’s staff. “No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers,” McCain writes. “But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war…”
Military pedigree
McCain’s military pedigree was the defining identity of his childhood. His grandfather and father, John Sidney McCain Sr. and Jr., were top Naval officers who commanded, respectively, a carrier task force and a submarine in the Pacific during the Second World War. “When I heard my father or one of my uncles refer to an honored ancestor or a notable event from our family’s past, my boy’s imagination would conjure up some future day of glory when I would add my own paragraph to the family’s legend.”
As it turned out, John McCain would add far more than a paragraph to his family’s military legend. Yet this is not the memoir of an overachieving stuffed shirt. McCain seems to take an almost perverse pride in his grandfather, father and his own less-than-stellar track record as students of the Naval Academy. He readily admits all three graduated at the bottom quarter of their classes. McCain is equally candid when reporting his grandfather’s fitness report from a disapproving skipper for being “not up to the average standard of midshipmen.”
In fact, McCain seems to relish each blemish on the service record of his grandfather and father — and eventually his own — as evidence that a true leader can navigate the military’s lockstep mentality and still maintain the integrity of his own identity.
It also makes for great reading. For example, in 1935, his grandfather enrolled in flight training, earning his wings at the age of 52. As in most instances, John Sidney McCain Sr. did it his way. According to the superintendent of training at the naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida (where John McCain learned to fly 23 years later), McCain Sr. wrecked five airplanes in his last two weeks of training.
In the same year his grandfather was earning his pilot wings, McCain’s father was judged “not physically qualified” for aviation school. But in typical persevering fashion, Sidney McCain Jr. put aside his disappointment and entered the submarine service in pursuit of a command. In time, he became the Navy’s first son of a four-star admiral to reach the same rank as his father.
When John McCain chose to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, he also adopted their enthusiasm for living large, McCain’s own term for extreme drinking and partying that was common for unmarried pilots. But by the mid-1960s, he had gotten married and wanted a career-building assignment in combat.
Hard time in Hanoi
On his 23rd bombing run over North Vietnam, McCain was shot down and captured. It is his description as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese that is the most compelling reading in the book. Seriously wounded when his plane was shot down, McCain endured repeated torture and miserable conditions. His account of his survival, fellow prisoners and his captors tell an almost unfathomable journey into a hell that lasted almost six years.
Those years shaped McCain’s identity as a survivor and as an individual. His subsequent career in the House of Representatives and the Senate has further defined him as someone who can forge alliances with members of the opposite political party to turn important legislation into law. Faith of My Fathers is the story of how a young rebellious son of Navy brass proved himself more than worthy of his illustrious military legacy.
— Nancy Peacock
Faith of My Fathers (1999)
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Random House, 349 pages.
ISBN 0-375-50191-6
