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JOHN MCCAIN

John McCain cannot be still. He tries sitting, but is on his feet again in seconds. He rubs his hands, pulls his fingers, drums his desktop. Finally, he shoves his hands into his pockets to still them and listens as the clerk of the U.S. Senate calls his colleagues’ names.

The public gallery above the Senate chamber is packed. The moment is tense, even though the outcome of this vote on McCain’s bill has been known for some time. The bill would eliminate six- and seven-figure “soft money” contributions to political parties, and McCain’s fellow Republicans oppose it.

He is rocking on his feet as the tally is announced. He gets 53 votes, a majority, but seven shy of the 60 required by Senate rules to end a filibuster and advance his bill. McCain, who has spent four years pushing to change the way campaigns are funded, has lost again.

After the vote, McCain, the senior U.S. senator from Arizona and a candidate for president, stands alone on the Republican side of the chamber. His face is red. His thinning white hair is mussed. His suit coat is slightly rumpled. He is exasperated, fuming.

Finally, he speaks. “We will take our case to the people,” he says loudly. “And eventually–eventually–we will prevail.”

It is a familiar McCain moment, one in which the hero is down but undaunted. McCain, who so often emerges proclaiming moral victory, loses most of the time on Capitol Hill. And the bigger the issue–tobacco regulation or campaign-finance reform, for instance–the worse his record of success.

McCain’s friends say such losses are inevitable when one takes on deeply rooted interests. What’s important, they add, is that he continues to stand tall, a man whose mettle was tested in North Vietnamese prison camps, a man who learned in a way few have how necessary it is sometimes for the individual to stand against authority.

“There is absolutely nothing you can do that would intimidate him, not with the background he has,” said Mike Hellon, who has known McCain since he first ran for Congress in 1982. “He won’t go along to get along.”

McCain’s detractors bow to the war record of this third-generation Navy man who spent 5 1/2 years as a POW rather than accept an early release that could have embarrassed America.

But from his earliest days in politics, they have viewed McCain as a grandstander and a political opportunist. McCain, they say, is a showman who tackles sexy issues such as tobacco or pork-barrel spending not in hopes of winning, but because such fights draw bigger crowds and greater attention.

On the issue of campaign finance, critics note, McCain has benefited handsomely for the last 17 years from a system he now vigorously assails. And they scoff at McCain’s attempt to transform campaign-finance reform and attacks on special interests into the twin battering rams of his insurgent presidential campaign.

“The campaign-finance bill is a total sham,” said Sam Steiger, a former Arizona congressman who once worked for McCain. “It’s duplicitous.”

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott suggested that it “rings a little hollow” for McCain to bash the campaign-finance system even as he milks it to fuel his own presidential ambitions. Moreover, conservative leaders, including Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the National Right to Life Committee, fearful that McCain would undermine their political clout, have lined up against him.

Yet, John McCain, war hero and political maverick, has emerged in a thinning field of Republican presidential contenders as the top threat to the front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 1.

McCain still has only about a third of the money raised by Bush, the GOP establishment’s choice, and still trails Bush in most other key states. He also has decided to skip the Iowa caucus on Jan. 24.

But his irrepressible candor and his ability to link campaign-finance abuses to other issues, including education reforms, tax cuts and better health care, appears to be catching on.

McCain’s campaign continues to fuel the image of a fearless reformer astride a white horse, though McCain himself is a much more complex, even contradictory, figure.

McCain’s conviction that big-bucks contributors are corrupting politics, for instance, was born of his own political scandal.

He was a member of a group of senators whose collective nickname, The Keating Five, became synonymous with the corrupting influence of money in politics. The group, in the midst of the nation’s 1987 savings and loan scandal, urged federal banking regulators to go easier on Charles Keating, an Arizona savings and loan operator who steered about $1.4 million in campaign contributions and gifts to them.

McCain hammers away at the influence of special interests. Yet he takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very industries he oversees as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, including utilities, telecommunications and transportation.

Just this week it was disclosed that McCain had written twice to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency he oversees as committee chairman, demanding that it act on a pending television deal that ultimately benefited one of McCain’s campaign contributors, Paxson Communications. McCain’s letters were sent in November and December, just after his aides met with Paxson executives and he received a $20,000 contribution from the company and its executives.

McCain said he was seeking only speedy action, and not approval for Paxson.

In Virginia recently, McCain lunched on crab cakes with executives of a railroad company, CSX Corp., collected $20,000, then took the company’s jet to Michigan. “I reimburse them and report it,” he said.

One of McCain’s earliest campaign-finance proposals was a 1990 measure that would have prevented incumbents from using leftover campaign funds on a future race. Yet in 1998 McCain raised $4.4 million for a Senate race in which he had only token opposition, then used about $2 million of that money to kick-start his presidential bid.

A self-styled maverick

McCain has cast himself as a maverick, yet votes the GOP party line 80 percent of the time. He is the avowed protector of Arizona wilderness yet voted against the Clean Air Act and gets dismal grades every year from national environmental groups.

McCain is dynamic, accessible and passionate about many issues. But he has been described as a bully too. Nicknamed “McNasty” by high school peers and “Sen. Hothead” by a Washington magazine, he once dressed down a fellow senator in an elevator. In 1995, he got into a scuffle with Sen. Strom Thurmond, then 92, after Thurmond tried to block McCain from speaking on a defense bill.

McCain’s temper is legendary on Capitol Hill, and it became an issue for a time in the campaign. During the candidate debates McCain had to assure the public that he was temperamentally suited to lead the nation. He ably deflected many questions with humor–“My temper? I was just exploding about that this morning”–while recasting his indignation as a virtue: Injustice, he said, is what makes him mad.

What seems to gall McCain’s critics most is that he pays little or no political price for all his contradictions and apparent flaws.

They contend that McCain is protected by a hero myth that he carefully nurtures. His story–surviving more than five years as a POW in Vietnam despite grievous wounds and torture–is so compelling that it gives him a pass on issues that trip up many others, critics contend. In an era when character counts for a presidential candidate, McCain has essentially tested out of the issue.

McCain has long used the hero card to his advantage. He played it to deflect carpetbagging charges when he first moved to Arizona and ran for office. He used it to face down Keating, who called McCain a “wimp” for not doing more to help Keating.

From his first campaign slogan in 1982, “Ready to Serve Again,” to the title of his most recent ad in South Carolina, “Duty, Country, Honor,” McCain never has shied from reminding voters about his military service.

Yet he downplays the influence of his POW status. His vision for the future, not his past, is propelling him in opinion polls, he says.

“John Glenn (the astronaut, U.S. senator and failed presidential candidate) was a hero. But John Glenn was not the nominee because he was unable to articulate a view of the future,” McCain said. “The only thing (the POW experience) does is it qualifies me for a look. That’s all it does, all it should do.”

McCain’s supporters say they are not unaware of his faults. “We’re not electing a saint,” said Orson Swindle, who was a POW with McCain. But they said they can look beyond McCain’s faults because he, unlike many other politicians, readily admits mistakes, accepts responsibility and, most important, the consequences.

Melissa Ihlefield, 34, of Newport News, Va., echoed many others along the campaign trail in describing why McCain is worthy of forgiveness and support.

“(President) Clinton lied . . .,” Ihlefield said. “Don’t lie to me. Just don’t lie to me. I can handle honesty. I can handle faults and being human. Just don’t lie to me.”

When McCain got into trouble for illegally taping a political ad in Arlington National Cemetery, an aide told reporters that McCain was just visiting the graves of his father and grandfather with a film crew in tow. From the back of a campaign van, McCain quashed the excuses.

“No one should ever have said such a thing,” he told aides via cell phone. “It was a mistake, a mistake that happened because they–we–because we didn’t ask permission. It was a very serious mistake.”

McCain is ferociously loyal.

When John Tower was nominated by President George Bush to be defense secretary in 1989, most of the former senator’s ex-colleagues turned on Tower, savaging him for his reported heavy drinking and womanizing. But McCain castigated his fellow senators for spreading “scurrilous, unfounded accusations” against Tower.

Staunch ally, strong enemy

When then-Arizona Gov. Fife Symington III was being investigated for financial improprieties, McCain remained a staunch ally, pressuring the state’s attorney general to drop one probe. Symington’s conviction on bank-fraud charges was overturned last year, but McCain’s pressuring of other Republicans on Symington’s behalf has helped create some of the political ill will toward him in his adopted home state.

If McCain’s friendships are intense, so are his adversarial relationships, and McCain has made enemies among his fellow Republican senators. Their dislike of McCain not only led a majority of them to pass him by in favor of Bush, but many of them reportedly went so far as to start a whisper campaign suggesting that McCain’s treatment at the hands of his Vietnamese captors might have impaired him mentally.

McCain countered by releasing 1,500 pages of medical reports, along with statements from his doctors, declaring him physically and mentally fit.

Military heritage

John Sidney McCain III, born on a Naval base commanded by his grandfather, traces his family’s military roots back to George Washington’s officer corps. He is the son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals, men he recalls as imperfect but courageous. “I still aspire to live my life according to the terms of their approval,” he wrote in his autobiography.

His grandfather, Slew McCain, was a task force commander during World War II, fighting at the side of legends such as Chester Nimitz and William “Bull” Halsey. His father, Jack McCain, became the Navy’s commander-in-chief in the Pacific, and, in that role, oversaw the Vietnam War. He once ordered the bombing of Hanoi even though his son was a prisoner there.

Slew and Jack McCain, though they went on to great things, were poor students at the U.S. Naval Academy. Slew graduated 79th out of 116 in 1906; Jack finished 423rd out of 441 in 1931. Upholding the tradition, John McCain finished fifth from the bottom in the class of 1958. McCain did well in subjects such as literature and history, but not many others. Instead, he said he took great satisfaction in breaking the rules.

`Fighting the machine’

Chuck Larson, a highly ranked classmate who became the academy’s superintendent, remembers McCain taunting him into going “over the wall” to get drunk in town, a major offense.

“I was fighting the machine,” McCain said recently with a wink.

McCain racked up 100-plus demerits every year and in his senior year came close to being expelled. Most were minor infractions such as an untidy room or unpolished shoes, but part of it, roommate Frank Gamboa said, was that McCain was wrestling “with the heavy weight of the (family) legacy.

“He struggled with that. He was rebelling within himself against that,” Gamboa said. “By the time he was a senior, though, he had accepted his fate.”

Thirty-five years after his graduation, McCain told a graduating class at the academy: “By my reckoning, at the end of my second class year, I had marched enough extra duty to take me to Baltimore and back 17 times, which, if not a record, certainly ranks somewhere very near the top.”

McCain went on to establish a reputation among naval aviators as a hard-drinking ladies’ man during his first years in the service. His dates included women like Marie, the Flame of Florida, a stripper who cleaned her fingernails with a switchblade during a party she attended with McCain.

“I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties, and generally misused my good health and youth,” McCain wrote of that time in his autobiography.

In 1964, McCain met Carol Shepp. Within three years, they married, he adopted her two sons, they had a daughter, and he left for Vietnam.

Carrier explosion

His first assignment was the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. On the morning of July 29, 1967, McCain was going through his preflight ritual in an A-4 Skyhawk when the plane shook violently. Thick black smoke enveloped him. A Zuni missile from another plane had fired accidentally and hit the 200-gallon gas tank under his plane.

McCain escaped his cockpit, but all around him 500- and 1,000-pound bombs exploded. Shrapnel cut McCain’s thigh and chest. Crewmen started pushing planes and bombs overboard. So intense was the fire that it cut a hole through the 3-inch steel deck and ignited fires below.

By the next night, the Forrestal was barely afloat, 134 men were dead and hundreds were injured.

When McCain was able to return to duty three months later, he signed on to the USS Oriskany, a carrier that already had lost many of its pilots in the war.

On Oct. 26, 1967, McCain flew his 23rd mission. The target was a power plant in heavily fortified Hanoi. Enemy surface-to-air missiles, McCain said, looked to him like flying telephone poles. McCain dropped his bombs on the plant and was pulling away when a missile ripped the right wing from his plane. He ejected, shattering his right knee and breaking both arms.

McCain awakened in a lake in the middle of Hanoi. The Vietnamese pulled him ashore, stripped him and began to beat him. Someone smashed his shoulder with the butt of a rifle. A bayonet pierced his ankle, then his groin. McCain was taken to North Vietnam’s most notorious prison, dubbed the Hanoi Hilton.

He remained in prison for 5 1/2 years, including nearly three years in solitary confinement.

McCain’s captors refused him medical care until they found out his father was a top admiral. The treatment he finally got, however, was botched so badly that today he walks with a limp and holds his right arm at an angle. On cold, damp days, he says, the wounds still ache.

Breaking point reached

McCain’s captors, dubbing him the “Crown Prince,” offered to release him early in hopes of embarrassing his father. McCain refused to go until, as the military honor code required, those captured before him were released.

McCain was hauled away and tortured ceaselessly for the next several days until, finally, he says, he broke and signed a confession. It said, in part, “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate.”

McCain later wrote in a 1973 first-person account in U.S. News & World Report: “Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine.”

Unlike so many of those who served in Vietnam, McCain and his fellow POWs came home to a hero’s welcome. McCain also came home to the news that his wife, Carol, had been in a car accident while he was in prison. She had needed 23 operations over two years and was now four inches shorter than when he had left.

The McCains’ marriage didn’t last long after he returned. McCain told biographer Robert Timberg: “I had changed, she had changed. People who have been apart that much change.”

Carol McCain told Timberg: “The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don’t know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attributed it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else.”

McCain had been seeing Cindy Hensley, whose father had made a fortune as a beer distributor in Phoenix, for nearly a year before he finally filed for divorce from Carol McCain in February 1980. He called their marriage “irretrievably broken.”

The divorce was granted in April 1980. In May, he married Hensley.

With his new wife’s money and roots in Phoenix, McCain was able to move to Arizona and, in 1982, run for Congress. He traveled the state meeting Republican Party activists, and when Rep. John Rhodes announced that he was retiring from Arizona’s 1st District, McCain raced to Mesa to buy a house.

When an opponent charged in a debate that McCain was a carpetbagger, McCain shot back, “The place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi.” The issue was buried.

McCain wore out three pairs of shoes working that district–his wife bronzed the third pair–and won 66 percent of the vote in the general election.

In 1986, Arizona legend Barry Goldwater quit the U.S. Senate. McCain jumped into the race, outspent his Democratic foe 4 to 1 and captured 60 percent of the vote.

His darkest political days were ahead.

By that time, the nation’s savings and loans, taking advantage of reduced federal regulation and increased federal insurance on their accounts, were on a binge of bad land deals, high-risk loans and junk bonds. Then they began to collapse, saddling taxpayers with a bailout bill that eventually ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

In the midst of this, on April 2, 1987, McCain went to the office of fellow Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini for a meeting. Three other senators and a top federal bank regulator were there to talk about helping a man DeConcini referred to as “our friend”: Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan.

McCain had taken $112,000 in contributions from Keating, but during a second meeting a week later, McCain told the bank regulators, “I wouldn’t want any special favors for them.”

The regulators said they were filing criminal charges against Keating. When the meetings became public a year later, McCain and the other senators were dubbed The Keating Five.

Settling the affairs of Lincoln ended up costing taxpayers $3.4 billion. Keating went to jail on fraud charges. And the Senate Ethics Committee chastised the lawmakers for their efforts on Keating’s behalf, though it went lightly on McCain, saying he was guilty only of “poor judgment.”

The scandal loomed over McCain even as he prepared for a re-election campaign in 1992. But as McCain was bracing to fight for his seat, war broke out in the Persian Gulf and American soldiers were taken prisoner. Suddenly the POW-turned-senator was on television screens around the world offering his insights. It helped turn his fortunes. McCain not only won re-election but established himself as an authority on defense and foreign policy.

Following the Keating episode, Cindy McCain revealed that she had become addicted to painkillers. She had back surgery, and the pain combined with the emotional stress drove her to drugs, she told reporters.

To defuse the story, a McCain aide summoned a handful of Arizona reporters to interview a distraught Cindy McCain. The senator told them he had been too busy to notice her personal difficulties. A series of sympathetic stories followed.

But it quickly became clear that the McCains had not been completely truthful. Cindy McCain had stolen drugs from a volunteer medical organization she had founded, and federal drug agents were investigating, according to law enforcement reports. As a first offender, she escaped jail time and was sentenced to a drug-treatment program.

Before and after the Keating affair, McCain has been a reliable conservative in the House and Senate. He opposes abortion and most gun controls. He also opposes subsidies for ethanol, oil and sugar. He voted in 1983 against making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. He was among the first to call for an investigation into the Navy’s Tailhook sexual harassment scandal in 1991.

His 1996 bill creating a line-item veto passed, but was shot down by the courts. He also succeeded that year, with Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), in passing a ban on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers.

Known for his setbacks

McCain is better known for his legislative defeats. In addition to the repeated losses on campaign-finance reform, his high-profile 1998 anti-tobacco measure, which would have raised cigarette taxes by $1.10 a pack and used the additional money to help states pay for smoking-related illnesses, went up in smoke. And, despite his unrelenting complaints about pork-barrel spending, he has had little success in removing any of it from the federal budget.

McCain said the influence of special interests on Capitol Hill prevents him from excising pork from the budget. But others contend that the projects McCain targets survive because they truly are worthy of funding. McCain, they said, oversimplifies the issues when he criticizes various programs.

One of McCain’s top targets in the presidential race is a “$350 million aircraft carrier” that Lott, the Senate majority leader, secured for Ingalls Shipbuilding in his home state of Mississippi even though the ship was not in the Navy’s budget request.

It’s true that the Navy had not requested the ship, which is a helicopter-carrying amphibious assault ship, not an aircraft carrier. But the Marine Corps had endorsed buying the ship, and it was in the Navy’s five-year budget plan; Lott simply speeded up the funding.

McCain’s analysis also overlooks the fact that the Navy would have had to spend a similar amount of money this year to repair an older amphibious assault ship that would have lasted only a fraction of the time as the new ship, said Randy Belote, a spokesman for Litton Industries, the shipyard’s parent. And by moving up the construction schedule, Belote said, the Navy would save millions on the $1 billion ship.

As a pork-buster, McCain occasionally walks a fine line.

The Apache helicopter, built at a plant in Mesa, Ariz., has been criticized by Capitol Hill investigators as unreliable and too expensive to fly and maintain. McCain has steadfastly defended the aircraft on the Senate floor.

McCain’s trademark candor and humor have served him well, helping him to deflect criticism or win forgiveness. But they have hurt him too.

He once offended elderly voters by referring to their Leisure World community as “Seizure World.” And he once told a joke about Chelsea Clinton for which he formally apologized to the First Family. But even with extra cautioning from campaign aides, McCain is unwilling, or unable, to turn it off.

“I can’t not be me,” he said one day.

It was Veterans Day in New Hampshire, and McCain, as usual, was riding in the back of his bus, “The Straight Talk Express,” surrounded by reporters. With him was singer Connie Stevens, who had entertained U.S. troops in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.

As the day wound down, McCain told reporters, “I first met Connie at a USO dinner.” Then he shouted so she could hear him, “But I was with her vicariously several times.”

Everyone laughed. McCain’s aides cringed. McCain was only encouraged. “I hate Eddie Fisher,” he yelled, referring to Stevens’ former husband. More laughter.

Stevens laughed too. She earlier said of McCain, “Though I’ve made a few mistakes in my life, I know a good man when I see one.”

McCain slouched a bit in his seat, sipping Gatorade.

“If I had it all to do over again, I would change some things,” he said. “But not many.”