Several were West Point graduates, including his grandfather’s uncle, Major General Henry Pinckney McCain-sometimes called the “father of the Selective Service” for his role in organizing the World War I draft.ġ936-1954: Peripatetic life of a ‘navy brat’ Prior McCains had opted for the Army rather than the Navy and fought in every American conflict since the Revolutionary War. “They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life,” McCain would later write in a 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers. McCain, Sr., also an admiral, would come to command the Navy’s Fast Carrier Task Force in the Pacific during World War II. forces in the Pacific during much of the Vietnam War. McCain, Jr., is a submarine officer who will later rise to the rank of admiral and become commander in chief of U.S.

John Sidney McCain III is born on August 29 at a U.S. “A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed,” he declared in his 2018 memoir The Restless Wave, written with his longtime collaborator Mark Salter, and published after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that took his life on August 25, 2018. In both his military and political careers, McCain earned a reputation for being feisty and combative. He followed into the family business, becoming a decorated, if at times reckless, fighter pilot who conducted nearly two dozen bombing runs in Vietnam before being shot down, captured and tortured. While he ultimately made his name on the national political stage, the scion of two four-star admirals was, at his core, a lifelong military man. But even after four decades in public life, McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam continued to define him in the minds of many Americans, admirers and detractors alike. McCain won the election, launching a political career that earned him two terms in the House, six in the Senate, and his party’s presidential nomination in 2008. Then, after explaining that career military people tend to move a lot, he delivered a retort that made the attacks against him seem ridiculously petty: “As a matter of fact… the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”

“Listen, pal, I spent 22 years in the Navy,” the exasperated candidate reportedly shot back at one event. When John McCain made his first bid for public office in 1982, running for a House seat in Arizona, critics blasted him as a carpetbagger, pointing out that he’d only lived in the state for 18 months. Senator John Sidney McCain III, circa 1964. American Navy Lieutenant, and future U.S.

War thunder navy down?