What John McCain Learned From His Democratic Mentor Henry "Scoop" Jackson

What John McCain learned from his Democratic mentor

5 times McCain was a maverick   BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve THE BIG IDEA: Glossed over in the torrent of tributes to John McCain since his death Saturday are the five years he spent as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate. His tour of duty as a uniformed officer on Capitol Hill in the late 1970s and early 1980s was nearly as long as his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton. The experience taught McCain valuable lessons and forged relationships that made him an effective lawmaker over 36 years. He made fast friends with young senators like Joe Biden, Gary Hart and Bill Cohen. He ingratiated himself with John Tower by smuggling liquor into Middle Eastern countries where alcohol was banned during CODELs. He even met the woman who would become his second wife, Cindy, while shepherding a congressional delegation through Honolulu on the way to China. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.) became a key mentor during this period, indelibly shaping McCain’s worldview and approach to governing. First elected to Congress in 1940, he was a bridge to an era very different from our own. John F. Kennedy considered picking him as his running mate in 1960 before settling on Lyndon Johnson to shore up support in the South. Jackson’s consolation prize was chairing the Democratic National Committee. Like McCain would decades later, Jackson twice sought the presidency – in 1972 and 1976. He was stridently anti-communist, but he was liberal on domestic issues: an environmentalist who championed labor unions and civil rights. McCain, who died at 81, was in his early 40s when he was the Navy’s point man on the Hill. The two struck up a close bond during long flights to faraway places. Jackson died at 71 in 1983, the year McCain joined the House. He replaced Barry Goldwater and became a senator in his own right in 1987. Even as he battled brain cancer, McCain still spoke fondly of Jackson as “the model of what an American statesman should be,” invoking him with reverence during impromptu hallway interviews and in speeches. He strived to emulate him as a globe-trotting avatar of American values, willing to take on his own party leaders and go toe-to-toe with presidents. In “Worth the Fighting For,” McCain identified half a dozen people who inspired him to get into politics. He devoted a full chapter to Jackson. “Although many in his party and mine would fault him for being too stubborn in a world that required subtlety and cunning, he was a hero for our time,” McCain wrote in the 2002 book, which came out halfway through his Senate tenure. “Few presidents can claim to have served the Republic as ably, as faithfully as Scoop Jackson did.” Jackson taught McCain the impact that a single senator, if he’s savvy and determined, can have on American foreign policy. He emphasized that the Founders intended Congress to be a coequal branch of the government to the executive – a lesson many lawmakers could stand to learn in this age of going along to get along. McCain, who loved the “maverick” moniker, proved willing to take on party leaders on everything from earmarks to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” from campaign finance reform to cigarettes and from health care to immigration. He did it as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee. The old bull also learned from the young captain, who regaled him with now-well-known tales from his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, was not unaccustomed to such rarefied air. But he saw firsthand how Jackson gave hope to the downtrodden by championing human rights as a central aim of American foreign policy. President Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger, left, after his 1977 swearing-in. Applauding in the Rose Garden is Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash.), who was then chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. (Bob Daugherty/AP) McCain described Jackson as “the Senate’s great apostle of freedom” in his final book, “The Restless Wave,” which came out in May. He said his mentor rejected the kind of false moral equivalency that was then popular in the Democratic Party but that has recently come into vogue in the GOP thanks to President Trump. McCain believed that the United States won the Cold War by supporting freedom, equal justice and the rule of law. “We kept the faith, and we prevailed. No one of my acquaintance ever believed in that faith more sincerely, more ardently than Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson,” McCain wrote. “He was a champion for the world’s oppressed and an enemy to those who gained power for themselves by disregarding the humanity of others.” McCain praised Jackson for complicating the Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger policy of detente with the Soviet Union by insisting that it not come at the expense of America’s commitment to human rights. “Over their objections, he passed legislation that conditioned trade with the Soviets and other autocratic regimes on the relaxion of emigration policies,” McCain wrote. “He was a hero to Soviet Jews wishing to immigrate to Israel.” In the late 1970s, he escorted Jackson to Israel and could still recall how nearly a thousand refuseniks gathered to welcome them at the airport in Tel Aviv. “They mobbed us, slowing the bus’s progress to a crawl,” McCain recalled in his book. “Scoop and his beloved wife, Helen, were genuinely moved by the outpouring of affection. So was I, recognizing it, as Scoop surely did, as an outpouring of affection for America and our ideals. We don’t always appreciate as we should the value others place on the public statements of American officials. It matters what we say and what we don’t say. The U.S. remains the world’s leading power, and when our leaders speak, government and people take notice.” He applauded Jackson for being “as much of an irritant to Jimmy Carter’s administration as he had been to Nixon and Gerald Ford.” “Scoop had his convictions, he believed in America’s mission, and when it came to acting on his beliefs, he didn’t particularly give a damn which party was in power,” McCain wrote. “America’s ideals came before party loyalty for him.” When McCain joined Congress, he thought of Jackson’s example when he voted to override Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid government. He also presciently opposed Reagan’s deployment of Marines to Beirut before the 1983 barracks bombing. Sen. John McCain dies at 81 Like Jackson, McCain could also admit when he was wrong – as he did after the Keating Five scandal that nearly destroyed his political career. He later expressed regret for endorsing the Confederate flag ahead of the South Carolina primary in 2000 for political expediency and apologized for voting against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. He also admitted that the Iraq war “can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake” and accepted his “share of the blame for it.” In his book this spring, McCain expressed regret that he did not pick Joe Lieberman, who could rightfully be described as the last Scoop Jackson Democrat to serve in the Senate, as his running mate when he was the Republican nominee in 2008. Instead, he tapped Sarah Palin – who lacked any meaningful foreign policy experience. McCain said Jackson taught him the importance of cross-party relationships. McCain believed the Senate should live up to its goal of being the world’s greatest deliberative body, and he was sad to watch his cherished institution become more like the House, which has historically been both rowdier and more reflexively partisan. In this year’s book, McCain recounted how a House member from Tennessee, whom he did not name, embarrassed an American delegation he was part of during a 2005 meeting with the prime minister of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek: “Like an Army scout trying to communicate with an Indian chief in a 1950s Western, he spoke slowly and loudly, using his hands to illustrate his message. ‘I come from a state with biiiig mountains,’ he offered. … ‘Kyrgyzstan very beautiful. My state very beautiful.’ To which the prime minister responded nonchalantly and in very good English, ‘Yes, I know. I have a daughter at Vanderbilt.’” Jackson was a strong believer that supporting human rights meant having uncomfortable conversations even with U.S. allies, and McCain took that to heart when he visited places like Kyrgyzstan. “Our interests will often necessitate dealing with some pretty bad actors, but we shouldn’t pay for the privilege by declining to criticize how they mistreat their people,” McCain wrote. “All these trips, all these speeches, op-eds, press statements, interviews, professing support for Ukrainians and Georgians and Estonians and Montenegrins, condemning [Vladimir] Putin, criticizing my own government. Did it change anything, improve anything? I hope so. But I know for certain it meant something to the people I meant to help because they’ve told me it has. It meant that there were Americans on their side, that we hear them, we acknowledge the justice of their cause, they aren’t forgotten. … It matters. Scoop Jackson taught me that.”