New York: Influential US Senator John McCain, a Vietnam war hero and a towering figure in the American political scene, who turned out to be a prominent critic of President Donald Trump has died following a battle with an aggressive form of brain cancer; he was 81.
McCain, a six-term senator from Arizona, who was a friend of India, had been suffering from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017.
According to a statement from his office, McCain died yesterday at 4:28 pm local time. His family announced on Friday that he was discontinuing medical treatment.
The son and grandson of four-star admirals, McCain endured more than five years of imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese as a young naval officer.
“My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best,” McCain’s wife Cindy McCain said in a post on Twitter.
In an editorial he wrote for CNN ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington in 2016, had said that it was remarkable how much bipartisan support the US-India relationship enjoys on Capitol Hill, an upsurge of interest and respect that is normally reserved only for close partners and allies.
“In all my years in Congress, I recall only a select few countries that rose so quickly to such an exalted esteem,” McCain wrote two years ago.
Condolence messages poured in from across party lines on McCain’s passing. US President Donald Trump tweeted, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”
However, with Trump’s election as the nation’s 45th president in 2016, McCain was one of the few powerful Republican voices in Congress to push back against Trump’s often harsh, provocative statements.
McCain had frequently sparred with Trump and had been planning his funeral services over the last year and his family made clear that Trump is not invited, a position that has not changed, two family friends were quoted as saying by the CNN.
In his end-of-life memoir, McCain scorned Trump’s seeming admiration for autocrats and disdain for refugees.
“He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” he wrote of the president.
“The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”
Former US president Barack Obama said in a statement that while McCain and he came from completely different backgrounds and competed at the highest level of politics, “we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher – the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed.”
“Few of us have been tested the way McCain once was, or required to show the kind of courage that he did. But all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above,” Obama said.
McCain, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made two unsuccessful attempts for the presidency. He lost a bitter primary campaign to George W Bush and the Republican establishment in 2000.
He won the nomination in 2008, only to be defeated in the general election by Obama. Bush called his one-time political rival “man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order” and a “friend whom I’ll deeply miss.”
Former vice president Al Gore said he always admired how the senator “would work to find common ground, no matter how hard.”
McCain was close friends with Senator Lindsey Graham and former senator Joe Lieberman – a trio dubbed the “Three Amigos.”
Graham wrote that “America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions. And I’ve lost one of my dearest friends and mentor.”
Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer hailed him as a “truth-teller” with “unsurpassed” dedication to the US and its military. He said he would seek to rename a Senate building in McCain’s honour. McCain was also a persistent critic of Obama’s foreign policy.
“The demand for our leadership in the world has never been greater. People don’t want less of America – they want more,” McCain said in 2012.
“Everywhere I go in the world, people tell me that they still have faith in America. What they want to know is whether we still have faith in ourselves.”
Despite his serious health condition, McCain had appeared in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party’s drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
John Sidney McCain III was born 29 August 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone and into a family whose military lineage included an ancestor who served as anaide to Gen George Washington during the Revolutionary War.