It’s not news that the people who run for president are far more
driven than the rest of us. Nor is it news that the emotional
propellant required to reach such political heights often traces back
to early experiences—and not, generally, good experiences. Take
the best recent example of this, Bill Clinton. His father died in a car
accident between Clinton’s conception and birth. Later, Clinton’s
stepfather proved to be an abusive alcoholic. No surprise, then, that
Clinton early on developed an ability to read people’s moods (a defense
against his stepfather’s unpredictability), became host to a tremendous
empathy (borne of his proximity to loss, addiction, and violence), and
honed a talent for putting on a good face (a result of his feeling that
he needed to hide his family’s private shame in public).
Of such stuff are great politicians made. Or, to put it another way:
If you thought you had issues with the man who brought you into this
world, try being the man who grows up to believe he has what it takes
to be leader of the free world.
Over the next two weeks, we will be introduced—at the
Democratic and Republican nominating conventions—to two men who
have come to believe just this and who, naturally, have had plenty of
issues with their fathers. They’ve even put out similarly titled books
on the subject: Dreams from My Father, in the case of Barack
Obama, and Faith of My Fathers, in the case of John McCain. As
the summer winds up and the dash toward November 4 begins, it’s worth
reexamining how each of these men, one of whom will inevitably emerge
as the national paterfamilias, responded to and learned from his own
paterfamilias. After all, if we’ve taken any lessons from the
presidency of George W. Bush, whose issues with his “wimpy” father
caused him to rely on hawkish advisers and adopt a compensatory
belligerence, it is that a candidate’s relationship with his dad should
concern us all.
Obama’s book is the greater achievement of the two. He wrote this
searching, unguarded memoir by himself at a relatively young age, and
published it in 1995, before he’d ever run for any political office.
(Unlike McCain, who cowrote his book with a longtime Senate aide and
then published it, in 1999, right before his first presidential run.)
It would be naive to think that Obama, as he was writing his memoir,
didn’t sense that great things were expected of him. He had just
graduated from Harvard Law School, had been handed (without asking for
it) a book contract based on newspaper accounts of his accomplishments
as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and then
had been offered (again, without asking for it) a fellowship to
essentially do whatever he wanted at the University of Chicago. When
Obama told the professor who gave him the fellowship that he wanted to
work on a book, he was set up in an office near the law library where
he could meditate on his upbringing and turn his self-analysis into
sentences.
For all the assumptions of future greatness that were heaped upon
Obama at the time, the resulting book, released to relatively little
notice, shows almost no evidence of grand ambition or political
calculation. It is, instead, an unabashed exploration of the interior
struggles and insecurities of a biracial young man trying to locate
himself in the world absent a paternal anchor. It is emotionally
intricate in a way that reveals a powerful mind hard at work digesting
knotty questions of identity and race. It is a moving affirmation of
the value of self-
exploration. And, not least, it is
literary—a shocking accomplishment, as almost every recent
reviewer has noted, since it is the product of a man who went on to
become a politician.
Generally speaking, politically minded people lack the freedom (or
the ability) to convey the subtleties and paradoxes of life as it is
actually lived, which tends to make them terrible writers. Barack
Obama, in Dreams from My Father, turns out to be all about the
subtleties and paradoxes and weird private moments of life, and on top
of that he is a talented writer, naturally skilled at constructing the
interlocking narratives and interesting characters (many of them
composites) that he relies on to tell his story. This is not his only
literary effort. He is said to have written short stories (never
published) for his own enjoyment during his community organizing days,
and the fact that he went on to try to write, in a literal and
metaphorical sense, one of the greatest stories ever told—that of
a black man becoming president of the United States—begins to
make a deeper sort of sense knowing this. Obama is a man who can, with
a far greater range of linguistic tools than most top-level
politicians, write his own ticket. (Is it any wonder, then, that many
political journalists—who are often themselves frustrated or
failed writers of literature—seem to admire him?)
In the book, Obama exhibits the easy cadence and knack for vivid
depiction in plain language that has endeared him to Americans on the
campaign trail. “I flew out of Heathrow Airport under stormy skies,” he
writes in a typical chapter opening. “A group of young British men
dressed in ill-fitting blazers filled the back of the plane, and one of
them—a pale, gangly youth, still troubled with acne—took
the seat beside me. He read over the emergency instructions twice with
great concentration, and once we were airborne, he turned to ask where
I was headed. I told him I was traveling to Nairobi to visit my
family.”
The reader isn’t left breathless at the power of the sentence
construction in this paragraph, but neither is he putting the book
down. More powerful is the personal journey: the frisson of lanky and
erudite Barack Obama plopped down on a plane next to some nervous,
gangly white guy from the UK, and the intrigue of riding along with him
as he untangles the meaning of his African father, also named Barack
Obama, who made him different, welcomed him into the world, quickly
left him alone with his white mother to figure out what it all meant,
and then died in a car accident before Obama could ask him.
What’s most remarkable about the way Obama comes to terms with his
heritage is the manner in which he goes about it—sometimes
blindly reactive but never for very long, and always highly self-aware
and reflective. Of his mindset during that visit to Kenya, which was an
attempt to get a feel for the truth of his father’s side of the family,
Obama writes: “What if the truth only disappointed, and my father’s
death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the
only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name, a blood type,
or white people’s scorn?”
Here, then, is a man who exemplifies the liberal ideal, operating on
the belief that difficulty will be overcome through honest interaction
between interior pain and outside realities, and committed to serious
intellectual inquiry but ready for the possibility that it will only
disappoint.
His book is imperfect—the section on his community organizing
days is far too long for the substance contained within, the use of
composite characters raises inevitable questions about what is real and
what is pure fiction, and in the foreword to the new edition Obama
himself confesses to wincing at some of his word choice and emotional
descriptions. But it is a great achievement and now serves as a
powerful antidote to the conservative meme about Obama being a shallow
changeling with no fixed core. At Obama’s core, the book convincingly
shows, is a deep yearning to have had a father to teach him what it
meant to be Barack Obama, and a deep pride at having learned to be that
father to himself.
John McCain, by contrast, offers a familiar tale: the wayward son,
at once loudly chafing against and quietly wanting to live up to the
legacy of his military forefathers, redeemed and set on a political
path by difficult service to country.
There is little to glean about candidate McCain from the way he
writes, since the words in Faith of My Fathers are not his own.
But in tone, the book does seem to be going for that same mix of
serious and self-mocking, patriotic and realistic, educated but not
effete, that McCain cultivates in his public appearances. It also is
filled with a particularly stilted sort of military humor, heavy on
jokes about revered authority figures doing unexpected things that
aren’t quite that funny. (Here, for example, is the punch line to a
joke about an admiral playing a trick on McCain’s grandfather: “How do
you expect to run naval aviation if you can’t take care of your own
teeth?”)
What can be seen very clearly, however, is how different McCain’s
father issues are than Obama’s.
When McCain recounts his family lineage, it recalls that scene in
Forrest Gump in which Forrest says about his superior,
Lieutenant Dan, “Somebody in his family had fought and died in every
single American war!” (while on the screen, a series of Lieutenant Dan
look-alikes fall dead in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and
World War II).
The more recent military history in the McCain family includes
McCain’s father, John S. McCain Jr., who commanded a submarine during
World War II and served as commander in chief of the Pacific region
during the Vietnam War, and McCain’s grandfather, John S.
McCain
Sr., who commanded U.S. land-based bombers during World War II and
became deputy chief of naval operations after the war. (And yes, an
even earlier McCain was a member of the Confederate States Army.)
John McCain, then, had a lot to live up to. He shares with Obama the
experience of being named after his father and growing up with long
periods of fatherly absence, but for McCain the absences were of a
different quality. First, they were temporary, and second, they were
part of a grand tradition, supported by the military culture in which
McCain was raised—a tradition that says this is what fathers do:
They go off and fight wars.
“[Navy] fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long
absences, can be a huge presence in our lives,” McCain and his Senate
aide, Mark Salter, write in Faith of My Fathers. “You are taught
to consider their absences not as a deprivation but as an honor. By
your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition.
Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater
than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other
relatives, the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well. Your
father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are
asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a
little of the same stoic acceptance.”
It’s so common as to be almost uninteresting that McCain rebelled
against the strictures of military culture, partying and ranking fifth
from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. What’s more
interesting is that, by and large, he did exactly what his father
expected of him as an adult. By the time McCain was a naval aviator in
the Vietnam War, he was so intent on proving himself worthy of his name
that he “pleaded” to be included, despite his relative inexperience, on
the bombing run that led to his being shot down and captured by the
North Vietnamese. It was 1967, and over Hanoi, in the cockpit of his
fighter plane, McCain heard a tone telling him an antiaircraft missile
had locked on his plane. “I knew I should roll out and fly evasive
maneuvers, ‘jinking’ in fliers’ parlance,” he and Salter writer in the
book. “But I was just about to release my bombs when the tone sounded,
and had I started jinking I would never have had the time, nor,
probably, the nerve to go back in.” He released his bombs. A moment
later the incoming missile destroyed the right wing of his plane.
McCain ejected, breaking both arms and his right knee in the
process, landed in a lake, and was captured. He then spent five and a
half years as a prisoner of war, a good chunk of that time at the
infamous Hanoi Hilton, and withstood severe physical and psychological
torture. At one point, he refused release out of loyalty to his fellow
prisoners of war, an unquestionably admirable decision that is
recounted in the book with a compelling humility. But, as the book also
makes clear, McCain knew he was getting less severe torture at the
Hanoi Hilton than other prisoners because his father was the commander
of U.S. forces in the Pacific. The North Vietnamese wanted McCain to
look reasonably healthy in any propaganda film they could force him to
make, and they wanted him alive as a bargaining chip.
If McCain had his father to thank for his somewhat above-average
conditions, he also had him to thank for the B-52s that were sent late
in the war to “rain destruction on the city where I was held a
prisoner.” The lesson, evocative of Abraham’s Old Testament willingness
to sacrifice his son for God’s will, was that McCain’s father would
risk killing him to win a war.
McCain admired that devotion to duty. And he was ashamed to find
out, after his release, that his father had already learned that at one
point in captivity McCain had been “broken” and agreed to make a taped
confession. After the war, Faith of My Fathers recounts, McCain
tried to explain his failure to his father. “He listened impassively
until I finished, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘You did the
best you could, John. That’s all that’s expected of any of us.'”
Here, then, is the classic prodigal son, returning in the end to his
need for his father’s approval. Here, too, is the classic American
conservative, eager for revered codes—
religious, military,
paternal, and others—that organize one’s life and lessen the need
for all that endless searching and self-questioning.
The books, taken together, do a surprisingly better job of providing
one with a feel for the candidates than the current blizzard of news
coverage. They also suggest a clear choice of daddy issues in this
election.
On one side is a man who sought to understand his father, move on,
and become his own person—a man who in his early 30s looked
inside himself and found a voice, and a memoir, that were both ahead of
their time.
On the other side is a man who sought his father’s approval, failed
in moments to live up to his father’s ideals, and continues to this day
to want to be a man cut from the family mold—a man who late in
life got a friend to help him write a book that sounds like just about
every other made-to-order political biography of a once-wayward
military hero.
Or, as the political shorthand puts it: change versus more of the
same. 
