'My father is gone': Read Meghan McCain's full eulogy to her father
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Meghan McCain’s full eulogy of her father, Senator John S. McCain
USA TODAY
Meghan McCain gave a fiery speech at her father’s memorial service in Washington DC on Saturday. The full text of that speech was provided by Sen. John McCain’s office.Â
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.” When Ernest Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, at the close For Whom the Bell Tolls lies wounded and waiting for his last fight, these are among his final thoughts.
My father had every reason to think the world was an awful place. My father had every reason to think the world was not worth fighting for. My father had every reason to think the world was worth leaving. He did not think any of those things. Like the hero of his favorite book, John McCain took the opposite view: You had to have a lot of luck to have had such a good life.
I am here before you today saying the words I have never wanted to say. Giving the speech I have never wanted to give. Feeling the loss I have never wanted to feel.
My father is gone, John Sidney McCain III was many things. He was a sailor, he was an aviator, he was a husband, he was a warrior, he was a prisoner, he was a hero, he was a congressman, he was a senator, he was a nominee for President of the United States. These are all of the titles and roles of a life that’s been well lived. They’re not the greatest of his titles nor the most important of his roles.
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The family of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., including from left, Andrew, Doug, second from left, Meghan, from front row left, Bridget, widow Cindy, Jimmy and Jack McCain, watch as the casket is carried down the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Sept. 1, 2018, in Washington, for a departure to the Washington National Cathedral for a memorial service.
Sen. John McCain’s family, from left, Jimmy McCain, Meghan McCain, Jack McCain, Cindy McCain, Bridget McCain and Sidney McCain, stand together before a memorial service at the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix, Aug. 30, 2018.
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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 Obama says McCain was ‘a warrior, a statesman, a patriot’
More: Cindy McCain weeps during powerful rendition of ‘Danny Boy’
My father was a great man. He was a great warrior. He was a great American. I admired him for all of these things. But I love him because he was a great father. My father knew what it was like to grow up in the shadow of greatness, he did just as his father had done before him. He was the son of a great admiral who was also the son of a great admiral. When it came time for the third John Sidney McCain to be a man, he had no choice but in his own eyes to walk in those exact same paths. He had to become a sailor. He had to go to war. He had to have his shot at becoming a great admiral as they also had done. The past of his father and grandfather led my father directly to the harrowing halls of the Hanoi Hilton.
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This is the public legend that is John McCain. This is where all of the biography, campaign literature say he showed his character, his patriotism, his faith, his endurance in the worst of possible circumstances. This is where we learned who John McCain truly was. And all is very true except for the last part.
Today I want to share with you where I found out who John McCain truly was and wasn’t in the Hanoi Hilton. It wasn’t in the cockpit of a fast and lethal fighter jet. It wasn’t on the high seas or on the campaign trail. John McCain was in all those places, but the best of him was somewhere else. The best of John McCain, the greatest of his titles and the most important of his roles, was as a father.
Imagine the warrior the night of the skies gently carrying his little girl to bed. Imagine the dashing aviator who took his aircraft, hurdling off pitching decks in the South China Seas, kissing the hurt when I fell and skinned my knee. Imagine the distinguished statesman who counseled presidents and the powerful singing with his girl in Oak Creek during a rainstorm to singing in the rain.
Imagine the senator fierce conscience of the nation’s best self taking his 14-year-old daughter out of school because he believed I would learn more about America at the town halls he held across the country. Imagine the elderly veteran of war and government whose wisdom and courage were sought by the most distinguished men of our time his eyes shining with happiness as he gave blessing for his grown daughter’s marriage.
You all have to imagine that. I don’t have to because I lived it all. I know who he was. I know what defined him. I got to see it every single day of my blessed life.
John McCain was not defined by prison, by the Navy, by the Senate, by the Republican party or by any single one of the deeds in his absolutely extraordinary life. John McCain was defined by love.
Several of you out there in the pews who crossed swords with him or found yourselves on the receiving end of his famous temper or were at a cross purpose to him on anything are right at this moment doing your best to stay stone-faced. Don’t. You know full well if John McCain were in your shoes today, he would be using some salty word that he learned in the Navy while my mother jabbed him in the arm in embarrassment. He would look back at her and grumble and maybe stop talking, but he would keep grinning. She was the only one who could do that.
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On their first date when he still did not know what sort of woman he was, he recited a Robert Service poem called “The Cremation of Sam McGee” about an Alaskan prospector who welcomed his cremation as the only way to get warm in the icy north. “Strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.”
He had learned it in Hanoi. A prisoner in the next cell had rapped it out in code over and over again during the long years of captivity. My father figured that if Cindy Lou Hensley would sit through that, appreciate the dark humor that had seen him through so many years of imprisonment, she just might sit through a lifetime with him as well, and she did.
John McCain was defined by love. This love of my father for my mother was the most fierce and lasting of them all, mom. Let me tell you what love meant to John McCain and to me.
His love was the love of a father who mentors as much as he comforts. He was endlessly present for us, and though we did not always understand it, he was always teaching. He didn’t expect us to be like him. His ambitions for us unward from worldly achievement was to be better than him. Armed with his wisdom, informed by his experiences, long before we were old enough to assemble our own.
As a girl I didn’t appreciate what I most fully appreciate now; how he suffered and how he bore it with a stoic silence that was once the mark of an American man. I came to appreciate it first when he demanded it of me.
I was a small girl, thrown from a horse and crying from a busted collarbone. My dad picked me up. He took me to the doctor, he got me all fixed up. Then he immediately took me back home and made me get back on the same horse. I was furious at him as a child, but how I love him for it now.
My father knew pain and suffering with an intimacy and immediacy most of us are blessed never to have endured. He was shot down, he was crippled, he was beaten, starved, tortured and humiliated. That pain never left him. The cruelty of his communist captors ensured he would never raise his arms above his head for the rest of his life. Yet he survived. Yet he endured. Yet he triumphed. And there was this man who had been through all that with a little girl that didn’t want to get back on her horse.
He could have sat me down and told me that and made me feel small because my complaint and fear was nothing next to his pain and memory. Instead, he made me feel loved. “Meghan,” he said in his quiet voice that spoke with authority and meant you had best obey. “Get back on the horse.” I did. And because I was a little girl, I resented it. Now that I am a woman, I look back across that time and see the expression on his face when I climbed back up and rode again, and see the pride and love in his eyes as he said “Nothing is going to break you.”
For the rest of my life, whenever I fall down, I get back up. Whenever I am hurt, I drive on. Whenever I am brought low, I rise. That is not because I am uniquely virtuous, or strong, or resilient. It is simply because my father, John McCain, was.
When my father got sick, when I asked him what he wanted me to do with this eulogy, he said “Show them how tough you are.” That is what love meant to John McCain.
Love for my father also meant caring for the nation entrusted to him. My father, the true son of his father and grandfather was born into an enduring sense of the hard-won character of American greatness, was convinced of the need to defend it with ferocity and faith. John McCain was born in a distant now vanquished outpost of American power, and he understood America as a sacred trust. He understood our Republic demands responsibilities, even before it defends its rights. He knew navigating the line between good and evil was often difficult but always simple. He grasped that our purpose and meaning was rooted in a missionary responsibility, stretching back centuries.
Just as the first Americans looked upon a new world full of potential for a grand experiment in freedom and self-government, so their descendants have a responsibility to defend the old world from its worst self.
The America of John McCain is the America of the revolution. Fighters with no stomach for the summer soldier and sunshine patriot, making the world anew with bells of liberty. The America of John McCain is the America of Abraham Lincoln. Fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and suffering greatly to see it through.
The America of John McCain is the America of the boys who rushed the colors in every war across three centuries, knowing in them is the life of the Republic, and particularly those by their daring as Ronald Reagan said, gave up their chance as being husbands and fathers and grandfathers and gave up their chance to be revered old men.
The America of John McCain is, yes, the America of Vietnam, fighting the fight, even in the most forlorn cause, even in the grim circumstances, even in the most distant and hostile corner of the world. Standing for the life and liberty of other peoples in other lands.
The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She is resourceful, confident, and secure. She meets her responsibilities. She speaks quietly because she’s strong. America does not boast because she has no need to. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.
That fervent faith, that proven devotion, that abiding love, that is what drove my father from the fiery skies above the Red River delta to the brink of the presidency itself.
Love defined my father. As a young man he wondered if he would measure up to his distinguished lineage. I miss him so badly. I want to tell him that he did. But I take small comfort in this. Somewhere in the great beyond where the warriors go, there are two admirals of the United States meeting their much-loved son. They are telling him he is the greatest among them.
Dad, I love you, I always have. All that I am, all that I hope, all that I dream is grounded in what you taught me. You loved me and you showed me what love must be. An ancient Greek historian wrote “The image of great men is woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.”
Dad, your greatness is woven into my life, it is woven into my mother’s life, into my sister’s life, and it is woven into my brothers’ lives. It is woven into the life and liberty of the country you sacrificed so much to defend.
Dad, I know you were not perfect. We live in an era where we knock down old American heroes for all their imperfections when no leader wants to admit to fault or failure. You were an exception and you gave us an ideal to strive for.
Look, I know you can see this gathering in this cathedral. The nation is here to remember you. Like so many other heroes, you leave us draped in the flag you loved. You defended it, you sacrificed it, you have always honored it. It is good to remember we are Americans. We don’t put our heroes on pedestals just to remember them. We raise them up because we want to emulate their virtues. This is how we honor them and this is how we will honor you.
My father is gone. My father is gone and my sorrow is immense, but I know his life, and I know it was great because it was good. And as much as I hate to see him go, I do know how it ended. I know that on the afternoon of August 25th in front of Oak Creek in Arizona, surrounded by the family he loved so much, an old man shook off the scars of battle one last time and arose a new man to pilot one last flight up and up and up, busting clouds left and right, straight on through to the kingdom of heaven. And he slipped the earthly bonds, put out his hand, and touched the face of God.
I love you, dad.
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