John McCain: Why Joe Biden will eulogize his longtime friend. 'If he needed my personal help, I’d go'
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Joe Biden once said it caused him “some consternation” in 2008 to find himself on opposing presidential tickets with his longtime friend and Senate colleague John McCain, then the GOP nominee.
Chosen as the running mate to Democrat Barack Obama, Biden was expected to fulfill the traditional role of a vice presidential candidate – serving as an attack dog.
He did just that, slamming McCain as “profoundly out of touch” on the economy in a speech in Michigan in September 2008. But in the same speech, Biden also talked about his friendship with McCain, saying, “If he needed my personal help, I’d go.”
Nearly a decade later, Biden kept that promise. As McCain began battling a deadly brain cancer last year, he and his family turned to the former vice president for comfort. In a touching, on-camera moment on ABC’s “The View” that went viral, Biden comforted McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain.
On Thursday, Biden is scheduled to speak in Phoenix about McCain, his friend of four decades who died Saturday at 81. The Phoenix event is among several days of memorials that will include tributes on Saturday from two of McCain’s other former political rivals, former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, before McCain’s burial on Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.
Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, who is close to Biden, likened the former vice president and the Arizona senator to two football players who would play hard for opposing teams and then leave all of that on the field and go out together after the game.
“He and John had a number of issues on which they flat out didn’t agree, but they didn’t personalize it,†Kaufman told USA TODAY.
“They really liked each other,” Kaufman said.
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reach a compromise on veterans’ health care. And he even drank vodka shots with Hillary Clinton in Estonia when she represented New York as a Democratic senator in 2004.
Biden and McCain met in the 1970s, when Biden was a young senator and McCain was a Navy Senate liaison. Biden traveled widely as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee member and would pick McCain to accompany him. Biden had wanted to meet McCain, ever since seeing the footage of his return from Vietnam, where he was held as a prisoner of war for five and a half years.
“He was clearly, kind of, our hero†because of the way he handled his captivity, said Kaufman, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time.
McCain was in demand for details accompanying senators overseas because he was fun to be around, wrote the late journalist Robert Timberg in The Nightingale’s Song.
“In an Athens taverna, he danced on a table with Senator Joseph Biden’s wife, Jill, a red bandanna clenched in his teeth,†Timberg wrote.
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2017 Liberty Medal on McCain in October, honoring his courage, loyalty and “incredible heroism.â€Â
Biden said he sought McCain’s advice before his discussions with foreign leaders. “He not only became a friend, he became an adviser,†Biden said.
McCain joked that he carried Biden’s luggage on those trips – and “resented it ever since.” Biden griped that McCain was supposed to, but “the son-of-a-gun never did.â€
“They were always cutting up,†Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said of the two. “Great senses of humor. They were a little bit mischievous.â€
McCain died after suffering from a deadly form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, the same disease that led to the death of Biden’s son Beau more than three years ago. Biden also lost his first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter in a car accident in 1972.
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In this image from Senate Television, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., pauses as he speaks on the Senate floor at the Capitol in Washington, on Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2018, next to the desk of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., draped in black with a bowl of white roses sitting on it. McCain died on Aug. 25, after battling brain cancer. Graham was McCain’s best friend in the Senate.
People are reflected as they look at the front page of the Arizona Republic featuring a picture of late Sen. John McCain at the Newseum in Washington, DC, on Aug. 27, 2018. He was a hero, a statesman who cut a towering figure in Washington. But for many in the increasingly angry world of American politics, John McCain will be missed for a far humbler virtue,simple civility. As Americans and others paid tribute to the late Republican senator, who died August 25, 2018 of cancer aged 81, some cited a 2008 interaction with a voter as symbolizing his famous insistence on fair and civil discourse.
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who launched a “Moonshot” anti-cancer initiative as vice president, now chairs the independent nonprofit Biden Cancer Initiative to build on the goal of a comprehensive and cohesive approach to cancer prevention. Through those efforts, Kaufman said, he has learned a great deal about cancer, and specifically, McCain’s form of cancer.
“He went through it all with Beau,†Kaufman said.
In his last book, “The Restless Wave,” McCain recalled his long conversation about his diagnosis with Biden.
“Our conversation was equal parts practical and encouraging, an old friend helping another through a rough patch he had prior experience with,” McCain wrote in his book with co-author Mark Salter. “Joe and I have argued a lot over the years, but he is a first-class human being, and it’s a lucky thing to be his friend.”
More: John McCain: ‘If you were loved by him, you knew it.’ Senators pay tribute to a friend and colleague
More: ‘Risk-taker, daredevil’: John McCain joked about his Navy flight record. He crashed three times
More: Vice President Mike Pence once said John McCain was ‘deep in bed’ with Democrats
More: What I learned about John McCain during 20 years covering him
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In this July 14, 1961, file photo, Lt. John S. McCain III (left) and his parents, Adm. John S. McCain Jr. (right) and Roberta Wright McCain (center) take part in the ceremony to commission McCain Field, the U.S. Navy training base in Meridian, Mississippi, named in honor of Adm. John S. McCain (pictured in photo at top), respectively grandfather and father to the two McCains. A predilection for what McCain III describes as “quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform” was encoded in the family DNA.
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