Senator John McCain, who confronted his captors in a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam and then maintained his rebellious spirit in a 35-year political career that took him to Congress and the Republican presidential nomination, died today after suffering from brain cancer for more than a year.
He was 81 years old.
McCain was an intrepid and frank voice to the end, unwavering in the defense of democratic values and without hesitation in his criticism of President Donald Trump, his fellow Republican. He was elected to six-time senator from Arizona, but failed in his two attempts to reach the White House.
- In 1967, his plane was shot down while carrying out a bombing mission in North Vietnam. Seriously wounded, he spent more than five years as a prisoner of war.
- He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986.He pushed for reforms to campaign finance and efforts to discover the fate of the disappeared in Vietnam.
- A search for the Republican candidacy in 2000 was short-lived. Eight years later, he won it, but it would be surpassed before the Democrat Barack Obama.
- Defeated by a large margin, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to allow him to define it as a failed campaign in which his rebel laurels wilted. He always fought energetically for his ideas and replied strongly to his detractors, Trump among the first.
- When asked about how he wanted to be remembered, McCain responded: “as someone who made a great contribution to the defense of the nation.”
- A vote of his ideology towards the end of his career, in 2017, will go down in history: With his decisive “no” to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, McCain was the unlikely savior of Obama’s greatest legislative feat.
- It was the crowning of his career, since by then he had been diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer. Soon after, he returned to Arizona to receive treatment.
- Far from spending his last months in silence, from his home in Hidden Valley he attacked Trump frequently.
- He opposed his appointed director of the CIA because she had supervised the use of torture
- He also lambasted the president for his performance at an international summit in which he maligned himself with the allies
- He called his “zero-tolerance immigration policy” “affront to the decency of the American people” and denounced the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki as a “tragic mistake” and “one of the most embarrassing performances of a US president to be remembered. “
- In October of 2017, McCain fiercely criticized the foreign policy of “the United States first” – although without naming Trump – calling it “mediocre and spurious nationalism hatched by people who prefer to find scapegoats instead of solving problems.”
