John McCain’s Book Club

John McCain loves For Whom the Bell Tolls. He talks about
Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel and its hero Robert Jordan
with a passionate adoration he’s never even displayed for his own wife. “My number-one hero of all time!” McCain
said on the campaign trail in 2007. “I am an incurable idealist and
romantic. Robert Jordan is everything I ever wanted to be.”

According to a recent New York Times story, McCain tried to
be Robert Jordan, imposing the narrative of Tolls onto
his own autobiography, leading to fights with his cowriter Mark Salter.
“You know he is a fictional character?” Salter said he asked McCain,
who replied, “I know, but he was influential!”

Jordan is especially influential for McCain, a man who models
real-life actions on fictional events. Viva Zapata!, McCain’s
favorite film, closes with a stirring scene wherein villagers dress
like Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata to show solidarity. The
scene, which was written by John Steinbeck, is clearly an inspiration
for one of McCain’s latest ads, wherein a rainbow coalition of men and
women stare into the camera and proudly announce, one after the other,
“I am Joe the Plumber.”

What can we learn about McCain by reading For Whom the Bell
Tolls? We almost immediately learn there is one thing that even
tough-as-nails military man and demolitions expert Robert Jordan (and
his name—simple and repetitive, like the pounding of a war drum:
RAW-bert JOR-dan—is nearly almost always said in full by both
Hemingway and the characters in the novel), and every other decent man,
fears. A gypsy named Pablo talks about a mutual friend named Kashkin
with Jordan:

“He was captured and he killed himself.”

“How did that happen?”

“He was wounded and he did not wish to be a prisoner.”

“What were the details?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. He knew the details very well and he knew
they would not make good talking now.

“He made us promise to shoot him in case he were wounded at the
business of the train and should be unable to get away,” Pablo said.
“He spoke in a very rare manner.”

He must have been jumpy even then, Robert Jordan thought. Poor old
Kashkin.

“He had a prejudice against killing himself,” Pablo said. “He told
me that. Also he had a great fear of being tortured.”

This early discussion sets up much of Jordan’s struggle for the rest
of the book and leads directly to the climactic scene where he has to
decide between death or capture. It must mean much to McCain that even
his perfect idea of a soldier fears, and ultimately confronts, torture
and suicide, which are two crucibles McCain has faced and survived. In
his own mind, McCain’s life is most probably the continuation of Robert
Jordan’s life, an ongoing and unlicensed sequel to what many consider
Hemingway’s greatest novel.

Recently, on Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog for the Atlantic, Salter
claimed, “I never even read For Whom the Bell Tolls… I didn’t
pattern McCain’s life on For Whom the Bell Tolls. [The
NYT article] pissed me off. It’s McCain’s fucking story.” In a
May interview with Goldberg on Jewish-American issues, McCain talked
about other books he admires, contradicting his own, oft-recorded
preference for Hemingway: “War and Remembrance and Winds of
War are my two absolute favorite books… War and
Remembrance for me, it’s the whole thing.” Goldberg asks, “Not a
big Philip Roth fan?” And McCain curtly responds, “No, I’m not. Leon
Uris I enjoyed.”

Despite being over two thousand pages, Herman Wouk’s War books are remarkable only in that they are completely unremarkable.
They certainly don’t function well as narratives—it’s impossible
to picture the characters as anything more than cardboard cutouts on
Popsicle sticks, bobbing around a chintzy stage for the entertainment
of the simple-minded. A reader interested in World War II has a flood
of excellent histories to choose from; only the most desperate war
wonks or die-hard soap-opera aficionados would find something of value
here.

But there’s one particularly relevant Leon Uris book: his twelfth
novel, titled A God in Ruins. Published in 1999, just as
McCain’s presidential ambitions were made public for the first time,
Ruins tells the story of a presidential race in 2008. The hero
is Quinn Patrick O’Connell, an ex-military man from Colorado who is
running for president but has discovered a shameful secret: He is
actually Jewish. Like all speculative fiction that’s reached the date
it imagines, the idea of a candidate’s Jewishness being a problem is
almost laughable now, but even without the central engine of the plot
to concern us, there’s still much to learn.

Certainly Uris’s writing—”She smiled, and her eyes were big
brown muffins”—can’t compare to Hemingway’s lean introspection.
But superficially, many of the elements are the same: The men are manly
and a woman’s character is judged by the size of her breasts. Uris
writes of Dan, Quinn’s father: “It took time for Daniel Timothy
O’Connell to transform from Brooklyn cop to rugged Coloradan. All of
about a week. His attitude was a force, a force that wakened him every
morning, led him to his knees to thank God for bringing them to this
place.” And he falls in love with Quinn’s mother the old-fashioned way:
“Siobhan pulled off her blouse and unhooked her bra. ‘Kiss them,
Dan.'”

But Dan talks to his priest about a problem he can’t seem to
overcome, the kind of problem McCain’s fictional men always have:

“No doubts, Sean. I love Siobhan fiercely.”

“Almost as much as you love the Marine Corps,” the priest
retorted.

“It’s so damned hard to let go!” Dan cried.

“I’m counseling veterans a good part of the day. Lots of lads are
stumbling around. It was for most of you the first taste of life beyond
Brooklyn, and no matter what happens, the war will always remain the
big event of your life.”

Unfortunately, by the time 2008 actually, finally came to pass, John
McCain stopped resembling the rugged men who populate the work of
Hemingway, of Wouk, of Uris. Instead, he resembles more closely the
campaign advisers of A God in Ruins‘ morally questionable
incumbent, President Thornton Tomtree, here discussing their
scorched-earth negative campaign against Quinn O’Connell:

“I said, do you know what we’ve got here?”

“What?”

“A shithole, and we’ve just poured six hundred thousand dollars down
it. Your stupid campaign is only making people flock to him.”

“This stupid campaign has worked time and time again,” King
argued.

“Can’t you even understand a man who can’t be intimidated!”

“You go with what works,” he answered reactively.

It’s appropriate that, with the exception of the Goldberg interview,
McCain has only publicly talked about the beginning of his reading
life. Behind one of the most classic tough guys in 20th-century
literature is a string of caricatures. What shame to have transformed
in four decades from the flawed but admirable hero of a classic novel
to the mud-slinging villain of a poorly written drugstore potboiler.