Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate who was a veteran and had an incident like the following in his past. That’s right, you can’t, because he would never have been nominated, at least not in this century. (Amy Greenberg reminds us in the current issue of Common-Place that pro-slavery Democrat Franklin Pierce was haunted by charges of military cowardice, and poor horsemanship, but still managed to survive politically, perhaps because southern honor-baiters liked PIerce’s doughface attitude toward the South.) Poor John Kerry just threw his medals back and testified about war experiences, but McCain “talked” to the enemy, and pretty avidly, it seems.

Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone
There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain’s broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain’s mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they “give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades.” Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no “statements disloyal to my country.”

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the “crown prince,” they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. “It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son,” he writes, “and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

You can see why McCain is sensitive on topic of publicly suggesting that a war is not going well: one of his first-ever public quotes came from a North Vietnamese press release!

Actually what the double-standard regarding military valor shows is that “symbolic politics” in these cases is often not symbolic at all. The real issue is support of a military-based U.S. foreign policy, not anybody’s actual military service. Any service record that is used to cut against that policy is going to be ignored or trashed, as John Kerry discovered. Still, the extent of the whitewash that McCain’s military service has been given is pretty amazing.