Head Strong: Two memoirs tell similar tales

3.30.08

 

By Michael Smerconish

Inquirer Currents Columnist

 

The similarities are superficially stunning: The two politicians now poised to capture their respective parties' nomination for president have each told the story of their first three decades in books with remarkably similar names, Dreams From My Father and Faith of My Fathers.

 

Conventional wisdom is that the commonalities end there. After all, one is of mixed race and traces his paternal pedigree to Kenya's Luo tribe on the shores of Lake Victoria. The other is white and is the descendant of multiple generations of American soldiers. One is a liberal, urban Democrat, the other a middle-of-the-road Republican who resides in the Southwest. One is 46 years young, the other a septuagenarian.

 

Yet the respective memoirs of Barack Obama and John McCain reveal a number of traits they have in common.

 

Each is the product of a fine education - one graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law, the other the United States Naval Academy. However, where one is proud to have been president of the Harvard Law Review, the other is no less celebratory about having graduated fifth from the bottom of his Naval Academy class. McCain laments only that he was not dead last, the so-called "anchorman," which would have entitled him to receive personal congratulations from President Eisenhower at commencement.

 

Each had an eccentric grandfather. As I wrote here two weeks ago when reviewing Obama's Dreams, his was a Kenyan tribesman and herbalist, reportedly the first in his village to wear western clothing. McCain's was a hard-charging, four-star Navy admiral, known for both his leadership attributes and his ability to roll cigarettes one-handed. Typical of his depiction in his grandson's book is a vignette recounting what he told his wife when she informed him of a new treatment for ulcers: "Not one penny of my money for doctors, I'm spending it all on riotous living."

 

Both fess up to youthful indiscretions. One writes of having smoked pot and maybe done a little blow. The other is equally candid with recollections of his fondness for drink.

 

In fact, one of the more uproarious stories told by John McCain in Faith concerns a young woman from the Main Line; he dated her during his second year at the Naval Academy. Next summer, while he was on leave, she invited him to her family home. McCain took the train from Union Station in Washington to 30th Street Station, where he stopped at the bar while waiting for "the next commuter train for her town," presumably the R5 or its precursor.

 

In his white midshipman's uniform, he became the focus of some brotherly love from bar patrons who bought him several rounds. By the time he boarded the train and arrived at his date's home, he was plastered, and promptly fell through the screen door in front of her parents.

 

(McCain has several Philly connections. His first wife, Carol Shepp, was from our area. She sustained a devastating car injury in Gulph Mills while he was a POW.)

 

More central to McCain's story in Faith, of course, is his account of his 23d bombing mission in Vietnam, which began aboard the carrier USS Oriskany on Oct. 26, 1967, and ended when he took enemy fire, had his wing shot off, and ejected from his A-4 Skyhawk while traveling at 550 miles per hour. The force of the ejection smashed McCain into his aircraft, breaking both his arms (the right in three places) and his right knee. He was briefly knocked unconscious.

 

"I landed in the middle of the lake, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day," he writes.

 

When he came to, he was being hauled ashore on bamboo poles by a group of angry Vietnamese. Someone smashed a rifle butt into his shoulder, breaking it, and another stuck his ankle and groin with a bayonet.

 

Offered early release, McCain deferred to the Code of Conduct that obliged him to refuse release before those who had been captured earlier than he. When asked to identify the members of his squadron, McCain dutifully obliged by reciting the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. When instructed to diagram an aircraft carrier, his sketch included a swimming pool on the fantail. He also painfully recounts submitting to a confession on the fourth straight day of a particularly horrific series of beatings. Heroic doesn't begin to describe his ordeal.

 

Each man once had a penchant for smoking. Both are accustomed to profanity. And neither seems politically correct.

 

Guess which one once dated an exotic dancer known as Marie (the "Flame of Florida"), who fancied cleaning her fingernails with a switchblade? Here's a clue: It was not the one who found it necessary to add a new preface to reprints of his book acknowledging that some of what he had originally written was not politically expedient.

 

One more similarity: Each has written a worthy book offering more insights into what makes him tick than can be gleaned from the evening news and cable gabfests that follow.

 

Michael Smerconish's column appears on Thursdays in The Daily News and on Sundays in Currents. He can be heard from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210). Contact him via the Web at http://www.mastalk.com.