John McCain, and the Psychology of War and Trauma

Saturday night, I was having dinner with my friend, the shrink, when the subject of the presidential election came up. We talked about Obama, Clinton…and then McCain. My friend noted that McCain seems like a likable man with an interesting and complicated wife who is clearly a bright woman.

“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why no one has done a psychological analysis of John McCain—in particular how his Vietnam experience has affected his present day foreign policy outlook. No one even talks about it,” she said. “And not to talk about the connection is….well….ridiculous.”

Good news. As of Sunday, someone is talking about it. Sunday’s must read is in the New York Times Magazine—specifically the article titled The McCain Doctrines by Matt Bai.

I don’t know that I agree with all Bai’s conclusions, nor do I know if my friend would. (We haven’t talked since we both read the Sunday papers.) But the article is an opening salvo in the conversation that we must have—-about McCain and about all others who would serve in high public office: Who are they and how have their experiences shaped them?

The older I get, the more I believe that psychology is everything. And to fail to apprehend that fact is foolish at best, dangerous at worst. (Iraq is a catastrophe because of a failure of psychological analysis of a culture. Those in charge of American policy projected their own thoughts and desires on the Iraqi people and were shocked, shocked when the on the ground reality failed to conform with the projection.)

In any case, read the article and tell me what you think. Here is the opening:

Whatever their disagreements on policy, United States senators, even in today’s hyperpolitical climate, are reluctant to impugn one another’s motives or integrity.

That’s doubly true among those who experienced combat in the Vietnam War, a group that now includes four sitting senators — the Republicans John McCain and Chuck Hagel and the Democrats John Kerry and Jim Webb — as well as former colleagues like Bob Kerrey, Max Cleland and Chuck Robb. These men share an obvious bond, and over the years they have more readily crossed partisan lines than other senators, constituting, in some ways, a party unto themselves. To outsiders, they give the impression of having seen things in their youth that confer a different kind of perspective on mere politics; they seem to know that there are worse things in life than losing an election and having to go home. In contrast to the insecurities of the many boomer politicians who avoided service in Vietnam or marched against it, the Senate’s former soldiers exude a confidence that goes beyond military matters.

The war in Iraq has tested some of these friendships, however. Last year, after House Democrats voted to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, McCain and Webb — both of whom were featured heroes in a classic book on the era, Robert Timberg’s “Nightingale’s Song” — became embroiled in an unusually public disagreement. After McCain pointedly said the enemy in Iraq was celebrating along with Democrats, Webb accused him of unfairly questioning other people’s patriotism. When Webb and Hagel (a close personal friend of McCain’s) proposed a bill to give troops leaving Iraq and Afghanistan more time at home before redeploying, McCain, whose 19-year-old son has served with the Marines in Iraq, forcefully opposed them, saying the troops were needed in the theater. More recently, McCain has found himself on the opposite side of Webb and Hagel again, this time over their “G.I. bill” that would offer education money to every returning veteran. McCain and others want a more limited bill that would encourage rank-and-file soldiers to re-enlist rather than return to civilian life.

In these skirmishes, McCain is the outlier. Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq….

[SNIP]


….There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington….

Bai doesn’t stop there. By the article’s end, he suggests that McCain’s views may have much to do with”…..the lessons that he learned not in combat or in the Hanoi Hilton but in the pages of the books he read at the National War College in the 1970s.”

By the way, there are all the predictable right wing criticisms of the article. But, most of those ranting appear not to have actually taken the trouble to read the thing all the way through,