Veteran US Senator John McCain enters his final days after halting treatment for brain cancer
Following Donald Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, McCain caustically described the US leader’s behaviour as ‘one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory’
Veteran US senator and war hero John McCain – a towering figure in American politics for decades – has stopped treatment for brain cancer, his family announced Friday, one year after the Republican went public with his diagnosis.
The announcement signals the beginning of the end of a tough battle with an aggressive form of cancer – and of a storied life that took the Naval Academy graduate from a Hanoi prison to the doorstep of the White House.
“The progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict,” the 81-year-old senator’s loved ones said in a statement. “With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment.”
McCain has spent more than three decades in the upper chamber of Congress, looming large in debates over war and peace and the moral direction of the nation.
The Navy fighter pilot spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after being shot down while on a bombing mission over Hanoi.