How long was mccain a senator

As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi. He would win more than double the votes of his Democratic opponent in the November general election. In his memoir, McCain said that he thought his debate performance won the election - although it wasn't part of a grand campaign strategy. McCain arrived as a freshman congressman in Washington with strong connections already in place.

Prior to leaving the armed forces, he had served as Navy liaison to Congress and had forged ties with politicians and staffers in the Capitol. It was the same position McCain's father held when McCain was a teenager.

But McCain "was always different," says biographer Elizabeth Drew. While his record in the House was fairly conventional, "he was never just one of the boys," Drew says. McCain was elected president of his congressional class. On one of his first high-profile votes, he broke with his party and president, Ronald Reagan, in opposing a US military deployment to Lebanon - a position that would be vindicated just a month later, when US Marines and 58 French soldiers were killed in a suicide attack on their military compound.

In his second term, he landed a plum position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In he would return to Vietnam with legendary CBS television presenter Walter Cronkite, where he posed for photographs by a monument to the anti-aircraft battery that shot down his plane.

A US political magazine labelled him a "Republican on the rise". A year later, he would run for, and win, a seat in the US Senate from Arizona. He replaced Barry Goldwater, the godfather of the US conservative movement and the Republican presidential nominee in It was an office he held for the remaining 31 years of his life.

One of the realities of American politics is that candidates and officeholders have to engage in a nearly endless effort to raise the funds necessary to run for office and win re-election.

It was a lesson McCain learned as he was courting Phoenix-area businessmen and wealthy donors prior to his first run for Congress.

And it was one of those businessmen, banker and real-estate developer Charles Keating, who nearly destroyed McCain's political career. The scandal that engulfed him grew out of the savings and loan crisis of the late s, when a combination of lax financial regulation and business corruption led to the collapse of more than a thousand financial institutions.

Keating feared his firm, Lincoln Savings and Loan, was being targeted for increased scrutiny from government regulators and in danger of failing. He urged his friends in the US Senate - men whose campaigns he had supported - to convince federal officials to go easy on Lincoln.

One of those men was McCain, who in addition to taking campaign contributions from Keating, had gone on several vacations to the Bahamas courtesy of the businessman. McCain sat in on two meetings between senators and regulators to review the matter. The five senators, simply by their presence, showed regulators that Keating had powerful friends. McCain said he only wanted to make sure Lincoln was being treated fairly. In the second gathering, McCain learned that Lincoln was being referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution.

At that point, the Arizona senator dropped the matter - but he had held his hand close to the flame. It wasn't long before the whole matter went public, and McCain felt the heat.

McCain and the other four senators in the meetings became the face of corrupt political influence and the corrosive effects of campaign contributions.

They were given a nickname, the Keating Five, and the Senate Ethics Committee opened an investigation into the matter. After originally bristling at the scrutiny - snapping at reporters who questioned his actions - McCain changed tactics, holding press conferences and openly admitting he acted improperly.

In the end, the Senate investigation largely exonerated McCain, finding only that he had shown "poor judgement" in the matter. McCain would later call the Keating scandal a "hell of a mess" and an "asterisk" that would haunt his political career. The senator would go on to make campaign finance reform one of his central legislative goals.

His work would eventually lead to passage of a landmark bill in that curtailed the influence of unregulated donations to political party committees as well as limited political speech by independent groups. The latter provision would eventually be struck down by the Supreme Court. Brooke Buchanan, who worked on McCain's presidential campaign and later served as communications director in his Senate office, says fund-raising was the part of politics McCain found particularly distasteful.

I was killed. He landed in Truc Bach Lake in the center of Hanoi and, weighed down with 50 pounds of gear, quickly sank. McCain went down again and, with his teeth, pulled the toggle and inflated his vest. Twenty angry North Vietnamese yanked him ashore, stripped him to his underwear, kicked him and spat on him. Someone smashed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and a bayonet was jabbed into his groin and ankle. Soldiers then heaved his body onto a truck.

Hubbell in his book P. Guards gave him minimal food and water. For days, the year-old pilot drifted in and out of consciousness. When questioned, he just told his captors his name, rank and serial number.

Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? McCain, a military hawk, forever remained a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War, during which 58, Americans and nearly 3 million Vietnamese were killed. But he worked closely with John Kerry, a Democrat and fellow Vietnam veteran who advocated against the war, to normalize relations between the US and Vietnam in the s, bringing the devastating conflict to a close.

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