McCAIN, John Sidney, Jr.

(b. 17 January 1911 in Council Bluffs, Indiana; d. 22 March 1981 over the Atlantic Ocean), U.S. Navy admiral who served as Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the final phases of the Vietnam War.

McCain was the youngest of three children born to Admiral John Sidney McCain, Sr., and Katherine Vaulx, a homemaker. He graduated from Central High School in Washington, D.C., in 1927 and entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which he graduated with a B.S. degree in 1931. From 1931 to 1933 he served as an ensign on the battleship Oklahoma, and on 21 January 1933, he married Roberta Wright. They had three children, one of whom, John Sidney McCain III, became a U.S. Navy pilot and later a senator from Arizona.

After attending the U.S. Navy Submarine School in New London, Connecticut, in 1933, McCain served on three submarines before returning to Annapolis in 1938 to teach electrical engineering and physics. In 1940 he returned to submarine service as a commanding officer on various submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during World War II. His achievements during the war earned him a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for distinguished service.

Following the war McCain spent three years at the Pentagon, as director of records in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and then served as commander of two submarine divisions and a heavy cruiser. By 1950 he was back at the Pentagon, directing undersea warfare research development for the chief of naval operations during the Korean War. For the remainder of the 1950s McCain alternated between naval commands and service at the Pentagon. Promoted to rear admiral in 1959, McCain became the chief congressional liaison for the navy. From 1960 to 1962 he directed amphibious warfare training for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), after which he returned to the Pentagon as chief of information. Another promotion followed in 1963, when McCain became a vice admiral and was appointed commander of the Atlantic fleet amphibious forces.

The most significant events during this period occurred in April and May of 1965, when U.S. forces invaded the Dominican Republic. The country had seen several changes of government following the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, and when a group of army officers attempted to reinstate Juan Bosch—earlier overthrown, with U.S. support, for his willingness to permit Communist participation in government—Washington sent in the marines. McCain, as operational commander of the invading force, earned the Legion of Merit. Members of the Organization of American States opposed the invasion, which sowed lasting rancor between the United States and various Latin American countries. McCain, however, maintained that the invasion was necessary to prevent Communist aggression directed by Cuba's leader Fidel Castro.

By late 1965 McCain had been appointed military adviser to Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He served in this capacity for nearly two years; then, in May 1967, he was designated a full admiral and became commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe. A year later on 11 April 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed McCain as Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), to replace Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp. Meanwhile, on 26 October 1967, McCain's son John McCain III was shot down and captured during a bombing raid over North Vietnam. When the North Vietnamese learned of the younger McCain's prominent father, they quickly recognized the propaganda value of their new captive. During the years that followed, as they held him prisoner in various locations—including the infamous "Hanoi Hilton"—the Vietnamese made much of the younger McCain's status, broadcasting news about him on their English-language Voice of Vietnam. They even offered him an early release from prison, but he followed the code of conduct for U.S. prisoners of war, which states that prisoners should accept release only in the order of their capture. In part because of this act of defiance toward his captors, the younger McCain suffered repeated tortures, along with the other deprivations of a North Vietnamese prison: dysentery, malnutrition, and a mixture of terror, loneliness, and boredom. As for the elder McCain, he bore his son's imprisonment stoically, sending terse but gracious notes of thanks back to friends who inquired after his son or expressed their sympathies.

In early 1969 McCain said in a Reader's Digest interview that the Vietnam War was the "testing ground" of a Communist plan "to extend their domination over the world's peoples through wars of national liberation." Despite the defeat of U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet offensive, a series of battles launched by the Vietnamese Communists to capture cities in South Vietnam, he asserted, "We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten." The U.S. State Department, however, cautious against sounding a strident tone, disavowed McCain's comments.

McCain supported and recommended President Richard M. Nixon's plan to enlarge the war through a joint U.S. and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970. Unfortunately, the invasion failed to achieve its military objectives and instead produced a number of negative, unintended consequences—at home, extensive rioting on college campuses, and in Southeast Asia, a coup that toppled Cambodia's hereditary ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in favor of Lon Nol's unstable dictatorship. Attempting to salvage a bad situation, McCain set about aiding and supporting Lon Nol militarily. He proceeded with this effort in spite of the Cooper-Church Amendment, whereby Congress had prohibited the use of traditional military advisory groups in Cambodia. When General Theodore Mataxis, chief of the U.S. military aid team in Cambodia, disregarded the advice of the U.S. ambassador to that country (his nominal superior) McCain supported Mataxis.

On 1 November 1972 McCain retired and was succeeded as CINCPAC by Admiral Noel Gaylor. McCain moved with his wife to Washington, D.C., where he embarked on a second career as president of the U.S. Strategic Institute, a think tank focusing on issues of national security. He also served as publisher of the journal Strategic Review and chaired the Monuments and Cemeteries Commission of the U.S. Veterans Administration.

During his time in Vietnam, McCain had arranged to spend each Christmas at the demilitarized zone bordering North Vietnam as a way of honoring his imprisoned son. He did so once more at Christmas 1972; then, on 17 March 1973, following the signing of the Paris peace accords that ended U.S. involvement in the war, John McCain III and the other prisoners of war were released. The younger McCain returned to a hero's welcome and numerous military decorations, but five and a half years in Vietnamese prison camps had reduced his weight by sixty pounds and rendered his hair permanently white.

Even as he celebrated the release of his son, McCain was the target of a congressional investigation. A few months later, a report from Congress revealed that the admiral and General Creighton W. Abrams (who had replaced William Westmoreland as chief of ground forces in Vietnam at the same time that McCain took over as CINCPAC) had violated the Geneva Convention. Specifically, the two military leaders, acting under authorization from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had ordered nighttime bombing raids against hospitals in North Vietnam and Cambodia.

Despite the reprimand he received from Congress, McCain remained active in public life. In particular, he was an outspoken opponent of President Jimmy Carter's plan to turn the Panama Canal over to Panamanian control. In 1981 McCain was returning from a vacation in Europe aboard a military transport from London to Loring Air Force Base in Maine when he died of a heart attack. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1989 the U.S. Navy commissioned the destroyer USS John S. McCain, named after McCain and his father.

Members of a distinguished military family, McCain and his father became the first father and son admirals in U.S. Navy history. They are depicted on the cover of the 1999 book Faith of My Fathers, by John S. McCain III, who was destined to eclipse both of his namesakes in fame and influence. Like his father, McCain, Jr., represented an old order, an order dedicated to discipline, obedience, self-sacrifice, and commitment—values that, by the end of the 1960s, were in retreat across the American landscape. One may question many of McCain's actions during the Vietnam War, including some that many would label as unethical or even immoral, yet one cannot doubt the sincerity of his belief in the rightness of his cause. He made difficult decisions in defending the country he loved during a time of profound change and moral ambiguity.

McCain's memoirs are contained in Reminiscences of Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired), a document housed at the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis. Other naval records and some correspondence are at the Naval Historical Center in Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C., while correspondence with Abrams is in the Abrams Collection, Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. A great deal of information about McCain, his father, and his son is in John S. McCain III, Faith of My Fathers (1999). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 24 Mar. 1981).

Judson Knight