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Associated Press

John McCain lived most of his life in the public eye, surviving war, torture, scandal, political stardom and failure, the enmity of some colleagues and the election of US President Donald Trump.
Even brain cancer did not seem to scare McCain so much as it sobered and saddened him.
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it,” McCain wrote in his memoir, referencing a line from his favourite book, the Ernest Hemingway war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“I hate to leave.”
Here’s a look at the public moments that made McCain:

Prisoner of war, celebrity
McCain became a public figure at age 31 when his bed-bound image was broadcast from North Vietnam in 1967.
The North Vietnamese had figured out that he was the son and grandson of famous American military men – a “crown prince”, they called him.
He was offered an early release, but refused. McCain’s captors beat him until he confessed, an episode that first led to shame – and then discovery.
McCain has written that that’s when he learned to trust not just his legacy but his own judgment – and his resilience.
Less than a decade after his March 1973 release, McCain was elected to the House as a Republican from Arizona. In 1986, voters there sent him to the Senate.
The ‘Keating Five’
He called it “my asterisk” and the worst mistake of his life.
At issue was a pair of 1987 meetings between McCain, four other senators and regulators to get the government to back off a key campaign donor.
Charles Keating Jnr. wanted McCain and Democratic senators Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Alan Cranston of California, John Glenn of Ohio and Don Riegle of Michigan to get government auditors to stop pressing Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. All five denied improper conduct. McCain was cleared of all charges but found to have exercised “poor judgment”.
“His honour was being questioned and that’s nothing that he takes lightly,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s biographer and co-author of his new memoir, The Restless Wave.

The Senate
McCain became his party’s leading voice on matters of war, national security and veterans – and eventually became chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He worked with a Democrat to rewrite the nation’s campaign finance laws.
He voted for the Iraq War and supported the 2007 surge of forces there even as his own sons served or prepared to serve. But there was one thing that wasn’t as widely known about him: McCain, owner of a ranch in Arizona that is in the flight path of 500 species of migratory birds, became concerned about the environment.
“People associate John with defence and national security, as well they should. But he also had a great concern for and love of the environment,” said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who travelled to the ends of the earth with McCain – to the Arctic Circle in 2004 and Antarctica two years later – on fact-finding missions related to climate change. Back on McCain’s Arizona ranch, the senator gave Collins an extensive nature tour of the property.
“I particularly remember his love for the birds,” Collins said.
“He loved the birds.”

Town halls, straight talk
McCain in the 2000 election did something new: He toured New Hampshire on a bus laden with doughnuts and reporters that stopped at “town hall” meetings where voters were invited to exchange views with the candidate.
The bus was called the “Straight Talk Express” and that’s what he promised to deliver at the town halls. The whole thing was messy, unscripted and often hilarious.
And ultimately the events reintroduced McCain to voters as a candid and authentic, just a year after President Bill Clinton was acquitted of lying to Congress and obstruction.
In New Hampshire that year, McCain defeated George W. Bush in an 18-point blowout, only to be pushed out of the race in South Carolina.
But the town halls remained a fond McCain memory.
“The town halls were festivals of politics,” Salter said.
“They were so authentic and open and honest.”


‘No ma’am’
McCain, in 2008 making his second run for president, quickly intervened when a woman in Lakeville, Minnesota, stood at a town hall event and began to make disparaging remarks about Democratic presidential nominee and then-Senator Barack Obama.
“He’s an Arab,” she said, implying he was not an American.
“No ma’am,” McCain said, taking the microphone from her.
“He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not.”
It was a defining moment for McCain as a leader, a reflection of his thinking that partisans should disagree without demonising each other. But it reflected McCain’s reckoning with the fear pervading his party of Obama, who would go on to become the nation’s first black president.

Cancer
McCain last year was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same aggressive cancer that had felled his friend, Senator Edward Kennedy, in 2009.
Friends and family say he understood the gravity of the diagnosis – but quickly turned to the speech he wanted to give on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to shed the partisanship that had produced gridlock. Face scarred and bruised from surgery, he pounded the lectern. Some of the sternest members of the Senate hugged him, tears in their eyes.
“Of all of the things that have happened in this man’s life, of all of the times that his life could have ended in the ways it could have ended, this (cancer) is by far one of the least threats to him and that’s kind of how he views it,” his son, Jack McCain, told the Arizona Republic in January.
Health care vote
Republicans, driven by Trump, were one vote away from advancing a repeal of Obama’s health care law. Then McCain, scarred from brain surgery, swooped into the Senate chamber and, facing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, dramatically held up his hand.
The thumb flicked down. Gasps could be heard throughout the staid chamber. McConnell stood motionless, arms crossed.
Trump’s campaign promise – and the premiere item on his agenda – was dead.


Trump
McCain tangled with Trump, who never served in the military, for years.
As a candidate, Trump in 2016 claimed the decorated McCain is only considered a war hero because he had been captured.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at an event in Iowa.
“I like people who weren’t captured.”
Soon before Election Day in 2016, McCain said he’s rather cast his vote for another Republican, someone who’s “qualified to be president.”
Trump fumed, without using McCain’s name, that the senator is the only reason the Affordable Care Act stands.
McCain responded: “I have faced tougher adversaries.”


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Explainers: Politics

Eight key moments in the incredible life of John McCain

John McCain, an American war hero and towering figure in politics, died on Saturday following a battle with brain cancer. He was 81

(180826) -- WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2018 (Xinhua) -- File photo taken on July 25, 2017 shows U.S. Senator John McCain exiting the Capitol in Washington D.C., the United States. U.S. Senator John McCain, a two-time contender for the U.S. presidency, died at his home in the state of Arizona on Saturday, his office said in a statement. He was 81. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)(yk)

FILE PHOTO: John McCain is pulled out of a Hanoi lake by a mix of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Vietnamese citizens in this October 26, 1967 file photo. Handout via REUTERS/File Photo ATTENTION EDITORS - NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. IT IS DISTRIBUTED, EXACTLY AS RECEIVED BY REUTERS, AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS.

epa06973014 (FILE) - Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain leaves in a wheelchair after an Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 30 November 2017 (reissued 26 August 2018). According to news reports, Republican Senator John McCain has passed away on 25 August 2018 at the age of 81. John McCain - a former naval aviator shot down on a mission over Hanoi in October 1967, captured and made a prisoner of war until 1973 - was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama. EPA-EFE/MICHAEL REYNOLDS *** Local Caption *** 53928593

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush embraces former primary oppenent Sen. John McCain at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. during a stop on his bus tour through Central Florida, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2000. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

John McCain (lower right) poses with his US Navy squadron during flight training in 1965. File photo: EPA

Tributes for John McCain, US war hero and political maverick, dead at 81

Outpouring grew on social media and in Washington after McCain died at his Arizona home on Saturday following a long battle with brain cancer

(FILES) In this file photo taken on October 14, 2008 Democrat Barack Obama (R) and Republican John McCain greet each other at Hofstra University at the end of their third and final presidential debate in Hempstead, New York. - US senator John McCain, a celebrated war hero known for reaching across the aisle in an increasingly divided America, died Saturday after losing a battle to brain cancer, his office said. He was 81. "Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4:28pm on August 25, 2018. With the senator when he passed were his wife Cindy and their family," his office said in a statement. "At his death, he had served the United States of America faithfully for 60 years." (Photo by Paul J. RICHARDS / AFP)

FILE - In this Oct. 18, 2008, file photo, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., waves to the crowd at a campaign rally in Woodbridge, Va. Aide says senator, war hero and GOP presidential candidate McCain died Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. He was 81. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Senator John McCain’s allies and political foes rallied in a rare show of unity in offering condolences on the death of the Vietnam war hero. File photo: AP

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United States & Canada

John McCain, an American war hero and towering figure in politics, died on Saturday following a battle with brain cancer. He was 81


John McCain lived most of his life in the public eye, surviving war, torture, scandal, political stardom and failure, the enmity of some colleagues and the election of US President Donald Trump.


US Politics

Eight key moments in the incredible life of John McCain

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}John McCain, an American war hero and towering figure in politics, died on Saturday following a battle with brain cancer. He was 81

Prisoner of war, celebrity

John McCain, an American war hero and towering figure in politics, died on Saturday following a battle with brain cancer. He was 81