A Letter From John McCain

NOTE! You must left-click the letter to resize it; otherwise it'll be too small for you to read.--Vermont


John McCain's plane was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. He was able to eject safely, but he struck the side of his plane when he did so, breaking both arms and his kneecap and temporarily losing consciousness. He landed safely in a lake and was promptly dragged ashore, stripped of his clothes by a mob of several hundred angry North Vietnamese, and beaten by his rescuers, then rushed to Hoa Lo, the prison POW's referred to as "the Hanoi Hilton". His bones were set without anesthesia in the prison hospital. McCain was very near death, but somehow survived.

When the North Vietnamese in Hanoi learned later that McCain's father was a Navy admiral and head of the Pacific Fleet, whose jurisdiction included Vietnam, McCain's medical care improved; but he was still ill with dysentery and rapidly losing weight. And, like the other POW's, he was regularly beaten.

In June of 1968 his captors determined that McCain's release could provide them with a unique public relations opportunity: if McCain would sign a simple statement condemning the war, they would release him early. Accepting their surprising offer was tempting for McCain; but the military Code of Conduct forbade a POW from accepting release when other POW's have been imprisoned longer. McCain told his captors he'd think about it.

McCain, discussing his decision with the Harvard Mentoring Project, had this to say:

"...[D]uring the time I was imprisoned in Vietnam, I thought about Mr. Ravenel a lot. He was the one who reinforced in me the standards of honorable behavior. I was faced with several decisions and one in particular: would I accept an offer of the Vietnamese to go home early? I thought about the fact that Mr. Ravenel had been in combat in World War II and thus had a feel for what I was involved in. And I really believed, as I thought about it and considered it, that Mr. Ravenel wouldn't look favorably upon such a decision, because it was not an honorable one. So, I refused the offer...I knew that Mr. Ravenel had a great impact on me. But I don't think I really understood how deeply he impacted me until I was in prison, because it was his example I looked to when I was tempted to do something which was less than honorable."

My mother, who had married a very good man from Charleston a year after my father's death, wrote McCain after his release. She received from McCain the following hand-written letter, several copies of which she sent to me to distribute to my friends during the 2000 presidential primaries. I found the original letter at her home in Charleston after her death in 2004; it and letters to her from my stepfather and wartime letters to her from my father were subsequently buried with her, as she had stipulated:


McCain's letter to my mom

It's too bad the A&E movie about McCain ended up sucking as much as it did. The brief flashback to McCain in high school showed him wearing an "Episcopal" shirt and winning a wrestling match in an ersatz version of Stewart Gym. The film showed his father briefly looking in on McCain at the match, then speaking with a school official, presumably Mr. Thomsen, the headmaster. It was a pretty lame flashback in a pretty lame film. McCain's story deserves better treatment.