matter but also his voice—that his leg-
acy would dissipate. And the comment
was made in the context of a fight that,
for McCain, is closely tied to that legacy.
McCain, a Navy pilot, was shot down
over Hanoi in 1967. He ejected from his
plane, breaking both of his arms and a
leg, and the North Vietnamese took him
prisoner. After several months, an inter-
rogator began pressuring him to accept
a chance to go home, ahead of other
Americans—his father was a high-rank-
ing admiral. McCain later recalled that
the third and final time he refused, the
interrogator broke a pen that he was hold-
ing “in two,” as if to say that nothing more
would be written in the book of McCain’s
life. McCain was detained for almost five
more years, and was systematically tor-
tured until he signed a confession say-
ing that he was a war criminal.
Yet that snapping of the pen marked
the juncture at which McCain becameCOMMENT
THE LONG FIGHTA
mong the many matters on which
congressional Republicans have
failed to press President Donald Trump,
a joke told by a communications aide
may not rank particularly high, but it
should have been among the easiest to
address. This joke came during a White
House meeting, after Senator John Mc-
Cain announced that he could not vote
for Gina Haspel, Trump’s nominee for
C.I.A. director, because, at her hearing,
she would not concede that the agen-
cy’s past practice of torture was immoral.
“It doesn’t matter,” the aide said. “He’s
dying anyway.” Instead of apologizing,
the White House launched a hunt for
the person who had leaked the remark.
Some Republicans expressed outrage,
but when G.O.P. senators attended a
private lunch with Trump, on Tuesday,
the incident wasn’t even mentioned.
Erin Burnett, of CNN, asked Mike
Rounds, of South Dakota, whether the
senators had been “intimidated.” Not
at all, he said. They just “ran out of time.”
The dispute comes at a moment when
McCain is grappling, publicly and poi-
gnantly, with what it means to come up
against the limits of time in the Trump
era. He is eighty-one and in a decisive
battle with brain cancer, as he acknowl-
edges frankly in a new book, “The Rest-
less Wave,” written with Mark Salter,
and in an HBO documentary, “John Mc-
Cain: For Whom the Bell Tolls.” (It will
air on Memorial Day.) The worst part of
the aide’s remark was the suggestion that
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELLit wasn’t only McCain’s vote that doesn’t
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
someone about whom Secretary of De-
fense James Mattis could say—as he
did last week, in an implicit reproach
of his boss—“Everything I love about
America is resident in this man.” Mc-
Cain, in his new book, says that he knows
that torture can break people, and make
them say anything—even tell lies, pro-
ducing bad intelligence—and that it
can rob a person of everything except
“the belief that were the positions re-
versed you wouldn’t treat them as they
have treated you.” The decision of
George W. Bush’s Administration to
engage in torture in the years follow-
ing 9/11 shook and angered McCain
because it threatened his sense of the
nation’s moral identity, and he worked
hard for the repudiation of the practice.
It was the companion to his eforts, with
Senator John Kerry, to bring about some
reconciliation with Vietnam.
Trump has now embraced the idea of
torture, declaring, “I’d bring back a hell
of a lot worse than waterboarding.” That
view, coupled with the Senate’s confir-
mation of Haspel last week, is not only
a loss for McCain but a measure of the
larger distortions of the Trump Presi-
dency. McCain himself has not been en-
tirely immune to these distortions. He
endorsed Trump in the 2016 campaign,
even though Trump had said of him, “I
like people who weren’t captured,” and
even though Trump’s birtherism and his
call for a Muslim ban were a renuncia-
tion of the finest moment in McCain’s
2008 Presidential campaign. At a town
hall, when a supporter told him that she
didn’t trust Barack Obama because he
was “an Arab,” McCain interrupted her,