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Give war a chance
American leftists could learn something from their European counterparts -- war is the only way to stop Milosevic.
By Ian Williams
[05/14/99]

Wall Street lovefest
Outgoing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is hailed as a friend of the rich and the poor, as the markets shrug off his departure.
By Anthony York
[05/12/99]

Giuliani flunks school-voucher test
Instead of helping the poor, he aims to dynamite public education.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[05/12/99]

Why the Chinese embassy was bombed
A senior intelligence official says the CIA team in charge of choosing targets has no recent Belgrade experience.
By Jeff Stein
[05/12/99]

Refugees protest treatment by Macedonians
Kosovar Albanians are clashing with police as refugee camps reach their saturation point.
By Rob Mank
[05/12/99]

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One senator, a friend, tells the story of an acrimonious meeting toward the end of 1992, when the 12 members of the Senate Special Committee on POW/MIA Affairs were finishing up their report. It featured a hot debate over how to deal with former U.S. Marine Bobby Garwood, a former POW who'd been an accused defector.

The question was whether Garwood should be included in the report along with all the other POWs and MIAs, or if he had diminished his status and therefore only merited inclusion in the report's attachments. Half the room thought he was a traitor, a deserter who knew about POWs held after the war but didn't do anything about it, and McCain fell into that camp. The other half -- which included Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa -- thought that Garwood had been unfairly blamed.

"Bobby Garwood is a traitor, and I and a whole bunch of other POWs got beat because of him," the hot-headed McCain argued, according to a senator present during the debate.

Then Grassley started screaming. "Chuck has a temper, too," the senator relates. "So McCain started shouting back."

Grassley got in McCain's face, and the two pit bulls started barking at each other while the other senators in the room sat back and watched. The pair got so close to one another that the senator who tells me the story -- aware that because of war injuries, McCain's arms don't fully extend -- was convinced McCain "was going to drive the top of his head into Grassley's nose. I was convinced that bone fragments were going to go into Chuck's brain, and I was sitting there and was about to witness a murder."

McCain suddenly stood up. But instead of a head-butting homicide, he delivered a crushing blow of words.

"You know, senator," McCain said, seething, "I thought your problem was that you don't listen. But that's not it at all. Your problem is that you're a fucking jerk."

"He is a combatant," allows Sen. Smith of Oregon, who has yet to endorse any GOP presidential hopeful. "But I think people appreciate that he's a man of principle; he fights for what he believes in. John is not lukewarm. He makes friends and enemies with his mode of operations. His style is both a strength and a weakness."

He has a temper, and he can hold a grudge. "No question," Rudman says, "John isn't too popular up in the Senate. But all that means come the New Hampshire primary is that he may lose two votes."

McCain is fully capable of freezing out someone who has disappointed him. After the Arizona Republic, for instance, published a harsh editorial cartoon making light of a scandal involving painkillers his wife stole from a charity she founded, McCain refused to talk to the newspaper for more than a year. He regularly yells at or ignores fellow senators when he thinks they've done him wrong. One Arizona reporter reports that numerous subjects he's contacted have refused to speak about McCain with him since they're terrified of the repercussions.

The storm usually subsides almost immediately. The day after the one fight he and Feingold ever had in their four years of partnership on various government reform issues, McCain apologized, Feingold says. "He said, 'I didn't sleep all night, thinking about our fight.'"

It's a common refrain. And, to hear his allies tell it, they wouldn't want it any other way. "He's unafraid of getting into the ring and getting into battle," says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. "That's a characteristic I admire in anybody. And no matter how much he gets bloodied, he'll stay till the very end. You may lose the battle, but you'll have fun doing it."

McCain loses his high-profile battles quite often. His bills on tobacco and campaign finance reform keeled over by the side of the road, coughing up blood. Critics say his support for these issues is political opportunism, but that makes little sense. "I think anyone who would say that campaign finance reform is a way for John McCain to ride to the White House has a unique perspective on the popularity of the issue in Washington and in the Republican Party," says Meredith McGehee, vice president and legislative director for Common Cause. "It's been a very tough issue for him."

Indeed, GOP strategists wrinkle their noses at the mere mention of McCain, arguing he's not a team player, he's an in-your-face screamer, he's got demons. He and Senate leader Trent Lott enjoy a tumultuous relationship, one symbolic of the love/hate he has with both the Senate and the GOP -- they're enemies, then they're best buds. The trends last not days or weeks, but hours.

The idea that McCain embraces issues that put him at odds with his leader for his own political ends flies in the face of logic. Campaign finance reform is not a big vote-getter. Though it may enable McCain to wear an attractive chapeau that says "maverick," the issue is too complex to truly resonate with voters, and it wins him far more enemies among his Senate colleagues and the big-money PAC culture then it garners him brownie points. Same with tobacco.

And same with Kosovo. By pressing President Clinton to do whatever is necessary to win the NATO mission -- an order that he says includes ground troops -- McCain is hardly embracing a stance popular with either the public or his colleagues. The Senate voted on May 4 to table his resolution authorizing the president whatever he needed to win the war. "We have allowed American pilots ... to risk their lives for a cause that we will not risk our careers for," McCain said on May 3 in a speech that hardly endeared him to his colleagues.

But he admits there's no McCain doctrine that will determine when future intervention is required. "We always search for this magic formula," he says. "I'd love to have a McCain doctrine. But this is such a complex world we live in, with such varying situations, with varying threats, that I'm not sure you could ever develop an overall doctrine into one size fits all."

For the U.S. to use force, he says, "Our interests and our values have to be threatened. But the corollary to that is that you have to be able to beneficially be able to affect the situation." That's why, he says, he opposed sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1983 as a freshman congressman, and why he wouldn't have sent troops to Rwanda or the Sudan.

According to his supporters, McCain's courage on Kosovo will resonate with a public starving for leadership. "It tells people, here's a guy who doesn't need consultants to tell him what he believes in," says Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., another McCain 2000 co-chairman. "Contrast that with who's been leading this country for the last seven years."

"He's surged in New Hampshire," brags Rudman. "He went from 3 percent to 15 percent in just a month."

As Smith puts it, "He's won the Kosovo primary."

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