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A world where you cannot leave your house unarmed for constant fear of being shot is not a free world.

In The News

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Once upon a time, John McCain called me a great American. I was flattered, but not fooled. This was the kind of thing that got him a political lifetime of glorious press coverage. In my life among the political fauna, I have been schmoozed by experts. (In Massachusetts, there always is a knife somewhere in the folds of the flummery.) I had come to a TV studio outside of Boston to interview McCain for a profile I was doing of Senator Ted Kennedy on the occasion of the latter's 30th anniversary in the Senate. I met him and he called me a great American. But that wasn't the thing I remember best. What I remember best is that, when he called me a great American, he was talking to my son. That made all the difference. And now he has passed at 81, nine years to the day that Kennedy passed, and a victim of the same vicious form of a vicious disease. This is history rhyming in deep, mournful harmony. Two flawed men, sons of difficult fathers, each badly broken in different ways, who came to be friends, and who believed in serving their country, albeit from different angles and with different English on the way they came through its life. But two politicians, most of all. For John McCain was as much a politician as any Kennedy ever was. It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the "maverick" thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan's adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party's slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.

In The News