I just finished John McCain’s newest memoir The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations as part of my summer reading list.

During the past year Senator McCain has intrigued me. He is one of the very few republicans to call out the President. As a dying man with terminal brain cancer, McCain wants to “talk to his fellow Americans a little more” in this book. I wanted to pay respect to him by reading it.

I believe that regardless of political affiliations, someone who has served his country, as a soldier, a POW, and in Congress for decades, and even running for President of this country has valuable insight. And I was not disappointed. Although the book is HEAVY on military details I found much to like. Here are my most memorable moments:

  • His numerous trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit the troops, including his annual tradition to spend July 4 there watching a reenlistment and naturalization ceremony. The first ceremony he mentions includes 600 soldiers reenlisting and 161 being naturalized, “mostly Hispanic immigrants, who had risked life and limb for the United States while they waited to become citizens.” Two of the to-be-naturalized citizens were represented by boots because they had died in action two days before.

“I wasn’t the only person there with a lump in his throat and eyes brimming with tears. I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country’s resources or a threat to our ‘culture’ could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.”

  • Lots more calling the Right out on their scapegoating of immigrants.
  • His friendships with fellow Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Kennedy. He tells funny stories about both. And how he loved to argue with Ted Kennedy (who died of the same type of cancer). He said he initially tried to stay away from Ted Kennedy because he was so charming that he didn’t want to end up agreeing to something. But then they got in this huge procedural fight on the Senate floor and afterwards on the way out they ran into each other and started hysterically laughing about it. After that, they were true friends. Kennedy would even call McCain on the campaign trail as he was running against Obama “to gossip.”
  • He does not really bash anyone in this book, not his running mate (Palin – though he sees now how this went wrong – “She was a skilled amateur performer asked to appear on Broadway twice a day,” he says,) or his opponents including Obama, and there are only minor negative mentions of the current administration. The only person he really has extremely harsh words for is Putin!
  • His thoughts on torture. As a POW himself, he says the stories of Americans being inhumane to their own captives made him sick to his stomach. The American ideals, he says, are to be better than this.
  • He talked about being the one to give the dossier to Comey. He regrets none of this. RELATED POST: A Higher Loyalty, James Comey

“I had an obligation to bring to the attention of appropriate officials unproven accusations I could not assess myself, and which, were any of them true, would create a vulnerability to the designs of a hostile foreign power. I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”

  • The “thumbs down” late night vote on the repeal of Obamacare, which he reaffirms was not because he is for Obamacare but because he is for repeal and replace, and there was no plan to replace. He says the thumbs down was not meant to be dramatic; that’s actually how they often vote because you can’t always hear the yay or nay. But that time it was nationally televised and was inferred as something more dramatic than it was. (I don’t care – I still am going to forever remember and laugh about this moment!!) 

All in all, the main message I took away from the book and what he would want me to take away is one of cross-party friendships as his legacy. He is proud of encouraging and leading diverse delegations overseas, to get to know people as more than those who were voting differently than him.

And maybe what I will remember most about this book is at the end of the book when he talked about his property in Arizona, which he has stewarded into a sort of wildlife refuge and will be designated a special birding area by the Audubon Society. Sixty-eight different bird species are present! What he has done to his property, albeit on a larger scale, is the same thing that my dad has done to our family property. It is funny for me to think of my dad and John McCain having much in common, but they do! And this was the ultimate theme of this book. I closed the book thinking of John McCain as a friend, and I will always say, “He served honorably,” which I once read somewhere else, not in this book, as how he wanted to be remembered.

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