Faith of My Fathers
A Family Memoir
By John McCain with Mark Salter
(Random House, 349 pages, $25.)

Review by Gregory Bresiger

H.L Mencken, in reviewing a biography of Grover Cleveland, entitled his essay "A Good Man in a Bad Trade." That's what I thought of as I read this family history of presidential hopeful John McCain.

Senator McCain, who on the presidential campaign trial has actually had some criticism of our runaway, lawless federal government, is depicted on the tube these days as a media darling. He certainly looks impressive compared to the frontrunner. But, then again, people with two-digit IQs look superior compared to the moronic George W. and his cockamamie "compassionate conservatism" claptrap.

It is difficult not to be impressed with Senator McCain, a navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam in 1967. He was captured, in part, because he didn't abort a mission at the first sign of trouble, but insisted on following through and dropping his bombs. His courage in the face of his brutal Communist captors was remarkable. Few human beings could have survived his ordeal. A broken arm, a broken leg, inadequate medical care, little food and frequent torture. His weight dropped down to about 100 lbs. Still, McCain wouldn't break. It is an interesting story. This book captivated me. I kept turning the pages once I began it.

The book tells the story of the McCain family military tradition: The grandfather who was the right-hand man to Admiral Bull Halsey in World War II and McCain's father, an accomplished submarine commander, who seemed to sink half the Japanese merchant fleet despite formidable odds. Finally, there is the son who also goes to Annapolis, who also receives egregious grades just as his father and grandfather did (No one would mistake this family for a group of scholars. One doesn't use mistake career military men for philosopher kings). McCain, the same as his father and grandfather, is also a relatively small man physically. But he shows great courage in time of war just as his father and grandfather had in World War II. So what is wrong with this picture?

Why am I not cheering every word in this book? Answer: It is the same reason why I don't want to watch Cagney's "Yankee Doodle Dandy" or George C. Scott "Patton." It is the same reason why I am enraged by commercials for the military services that romanticize war (" I am hero. I help people," one boob tube ad blabs. Really? I thought soldiers killed people. Then the ad ends up with still more deception. "Paid for by the U.S. Army." Is that so? Well where would the U.S. Army be without the taxpayers. Suggested tagline: "Paid for by the sucker U.S taxpayers, a nation of rubes.")

These military commercials and popular entertainments – often they are very well written, acted and slickly performed – are selling something that no man or woman who loves liberty should want. They rationalize and, at times, glorify war. A person without a historical understanding of the periods depicted in these movies and memoirs – that would be the average historically illiterate Americano – will be easily seduced by the heroic stories of the McCains of this world.

How can I say these things about such a courageous man as John McCain? Because McCain is an unconscious cog in a military-industrial complex that is destroying our nation; that is providing a coup de grace for the last remnants of a great American anti-military tradition. This later philosophy once was the centerpiece of a nation that believed in limited government and classical liberalism. This was a nation that was suspicious of military constabularies; that had a tradition – until about the 1930s and the discovery by FDR that a kind of military Keynesianism was great politics – of keeping very small militaries in peacetime. Americans at the beginning of our republic inherited a prejudice against great peacetime armies because of the Whig victories of 1688 in England, the Glorious Revolution.

The American Revolution was a Whig Revolution, a revolution that among other things, contained a revolutionary settlement that virtually abolished standing armies in England. Stuart kings had used military establishments to intimidate opponents. Then Cromwell, after the English Civil war, actually divided up the nation into military districts. Americans inherited that prejudice, that suspicion of the military, although few Americans seem to understand this precious element in our birthrate of freedom.

This American libertarian tradition has been reversed by men like the McCains. They didn't invent the military-industrial complex. They merely served it. They were to the FDRs and LBJs what von Roon was to Bismarck. General Von Roon of the Prussian Army of the 1860s and 70s never argued with Bismarck about the morality of his strategy of running roughshod over German liberals, trampling German law and wagging aggressive wars against Denmark, the Hapsburg Empire and France. The methods of achieving Prussia's goals were the only debatable item.

In McCain's book there is some criticism of the way the Vietnam War is waged. "We thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn't have the least notion of what it took to win the war," he writes. There is never a hint of an argument over whether the war was right or legal. McCain serves without any question, which is the role of the soldier. That is a reason why the republic of a limited government should have few soldiers.

McCain makes a point of saying that every precaution was taken only to hit military targets. Yet he must know that innocent civilians are hit in these bombing missions no matter what the government says as we learned this year in the Allies obscene bombing in the Balkans that destroyed a diplomatic compound, a hospital and God knows what else. We can't be sure exactly how much was bombed because in wartime it is truth that is the first casualty and the nation seems perpetually on war footing. Surgical bombing is, of course, a prevarication; tantamount to Mencken's honest politician. "As unthinkable," said the sage of Baltimore, "as an honest burglar."

In his Vietnam War chapters, one never sees the Vietnamese children running from the villages after an American napalming. One never comes across the famous American officer who explains that "we had to burn this village" in order to save it." What did McCain think of the Vietnamese people his bombs killed? They couldn't all be Communist devils. One never sees Lyndon Johnson, the man who stole his way into the U.S Senate in 1948, lie his way into the Vietnam War by campaigning as the peace candidate in 1964. Again, McCain questions Johnson's restricting the bombing, but there is no discussion of the morality of bombing.

Why not?

Because these things never seem very important or relevant in McCain's fascinating tale. He is a military man. Military people, most of them it seems, have very narrow educations. If they study philosophy, it's Clausewitz's theories of war – not Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, with its plea for nations to renounce subverting their neighbors – that are studied. If McCain ever heard of Randolph Bourne ("War is the health of the state"), he certainly isn't letting on. If he ever read Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School – who believed in free trade to unite peoples, who wanted to use arbitration to settle disputes among nations and who admired the America of the 1840s and 50s because of its small military--I would be very surprised.

McCain, whose admiral father became head of Pacific operations around the time of his capture, only occasionally questions the tactics of the Vietnam War. He favorably mentions that his father argued in favor of an expansion of the war, implying that, if the U.S. had only had the belly to invade North Vietnam, then the war would have been won. At this point, I think of Napoleon capturing Moscow in the winter of 1812. The Russian army impolitely declining battle at that point. It withdrew to the vast hinterlands of Russia and waited until the high point of the winter to press home its strategic advantages. Finally, it destroyed the rearguard of the Le Grand Armee as it limped home to defeat.

If the U.S had captured North Vietnam in the 1960s – or part of it, since no amount of force could have controlled the entire country – one wonders what would have happened then? Does McCain actually think this war in the jungles of Southeast Asia was winnable?

Still, no matter how wasteful, horrific and evil the war was, McCain believes that he was true to his country. And I think he was. His glory was achieved by making incredible sacrifices when his nation-state ordered him to fight an illegal war in Southeast Asia.

"Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater to yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return. No misfortune, no injury, no humiliation can destroy it."

I don't disagree with that. The problem is McCain swore fidelity to a nation state swerving from one ill-moral war to another, a nation drunk on glory and that is becoming contemptuous of liberty.

One rises from this book feeling sorry for McCain. He is a courageous and decent man who served an, at best, wrongheaded cause. Others might say he served an evil cause. But serve it well he did (He still has recurring injuries because of the brutalities of his jailers). And, one thing this book proves to me is that if he ends up sleeping in the bed that Clinton rented out for big money, President McCain will have no reluctance in using military force – overwhelming military force.

That would please the ghosts of Nixon and Johnson. That should win the admiration of the Bill Moyers of the world as well the New York Timesmen who call today for a Pax Americana. These Iagos can be counted on to bring out the worst in any president, especially without the intellectual foundations to favor liberty, tolerance and peace.

But one feels sorrier for Americans unacquainted with a nation they never knew; a country that rejected the principles of a once great nation, a nation of Jeffersons, Gallatins and John Taylors of Caroline. They have thrown away so much of their liberties in admiring and obeying the McCains. They seem to find nothing wrong with the bombing carried out by their government so frequently, provided, of course, it doesn't interrupt their favorite idiot box show and provided their sons aren't conscripted to do the dirty work of the empire. They find nothing wrong in the continuance of the American military-industrial complex. They will get more and more of what Robert Taft in the 1940s predicted that an American Empire would have: Perpetual war.

December 29, 1999

Gregory Bresiger is a business writer and editor living in New York. He works for Financial Planning and Traders magazines among others.