McCain's temper: a problem or an asset?

WASHINGTON — John McCain made a quick stop at the Capitol last spring to sit in on Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn was not pleased.

Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to pursue a path to citizenship.

McCain called the claim "chicken-s — ," according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that Cornyn was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to show up suddenly and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.

"F — you," McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.

As POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka described the Republican presidential candidate's temper: "It's his way or no way."

There's a lengthy list of similar outbursts: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to have an Arizona Republican aide fired from three jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of McCain's 1986 Senate election and many more.

McCain observers say the incidents have been blown out of proportion.

"I've never seen anything in the way of an outburst of temper that struck me as anything out of the ordinary," McCain biographer Robert Timberg said.

"Those reports are overstated," said Rives Richey, who attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., with McCain in the early 1950s.

Historians note that it's not unusual for a president to have a fierce temper, but most kept it under control.

"Harry Truman wrote scathing letters, but he almost never sent them," author Robert Dallek said.

"George Washington spent a lifetime trying to control his temper," historian Richard Norton Smith added.

But Washington didn't have YouTube replaying videos of his tantrums, nor did he have to make decisions about nuclear weapons.

Independent experts have some concerns about McCain's irascibility.

"In the nuclear age, you don't want someone flying off the handle, so it's a critical question: Can McCain control his temper?" asked Thomas De Luca, professor of political science at Fordham University in New York.

A tough guy

At age 2, McCain's tantrums were so intense that he'd hold his breath until he passed out. His parents would dunk him in cold water to "cure" him, he wrote in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers."

"I have spent much of my life choosing my own attitude, often carelessly, often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit," he wrote. He conceded that some of his actions have been embarrassing, and "others I deeply regret."

He was a tough little guy. At Episcopal High, he was a 114-pound wrestler classmates called "Punk" and "McNasty."

McCain entered the Naval Academy in 1954, and he was popular, the leader of a group that Timberg described as the Bad Bunch, known largely for its ability to have a good time.

Malcolm Matheson, who knew McCain at Episcopal High and stayed friendly with him in college, said his buddy had no trouble controlling his temper in those days.

"He was a little guy, but he was tough, and no bully ever got in his face," Matheson said.

But as McCain ascended in politics, he began to acquire a reputation for hotheadedness. On election night 1986, then-Arizona Republican Party executive director Jon Hinz recalled, McCain was unhappy, even angry, even though he'd won a U.S. Senate seat and his party had made a virtually unprecedented sweep of state offices.

When the 5-foot-9 senator-elect spoke at the Phoenix victory party, the podium was too tall.

"You couldn't see his mouth," Hinz said.

McCain sought out Robert Wexler, the Young Republican head in charge of arrangements.

"McCain kept pointing his finger in Wexler's chest, berating him," Hinz recalled. The 6-foot-6 Hinz stepped between them and told McCain to stop. "I told him I'll make sure there's an egg crate around next time," Hinz said. McCain walked away angrily.

McCain reportedly erupted again about a year later, this time at a meeting with Arizona's then-Gov. Evan Mecham, who was about to be impeached after indictments on felony charges.

Karen Johnson, then Mecham's secretary and now an Arizona state senator, recalled how McCain told Mecham that he was "causing the party a lot of problems" and was an embarrassment to the party.

"Sen. McCain got very angry," Johnson recalled, "and I said, 'Why are you talking to the governor like this? You're causing problems yourself. You're an embarrassment.' "

Johnson would go on to work at three other jobs over five years, and she said that McCain each time would contact her boss and try to have her removed.

The McCain campaign didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

Confrontation, collaboration

When McCain came to the Senate in 1987, he quickly got two reputations: a Republican who would do business with Democrats on tough issues and an impatient senator who often was gruff and temperamental.

In January, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told The Boston Globe that "the thought of [McCain] being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me." (Cochran since has endorsed McCain.)

Added Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., who has a long list of vociferous, sometimes personal disagreements with McCain, "His charm takes a little getting used to." (Bond also supports him.)

Democrats are less guarded.

"There have been times when he's just exploded, " said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

"Look, around here, people lose their tempers once in a while," Harkin said. "But it doesn't happen very often, and it usually happens in some contextual framework. A lot of times there's just not much of a contextual framework for his blowing up."

John Raidt worked for McCain more than 15 years. "Yeah, he could get prickly," he said. "Sometimes that's exactly what's needed to move an issue or get attention. I think he uses it as a tool."

Stories abound on Capitol Hill: how McCain told Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., how "only an a-hole" would craft a budget like he did. Or the time in 1989 when McCain confronted Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, then a Democrat and now a Republican, because Shelby had promised to vote for McCain friend John Tower as secretary of defense, then voted against Tower.

McCain later wrote how he approached Shelby "to bring my nose within an inch of his as I screamed out my intense displeasure over his deceit. ... The incident is one of the occasions when my temper lived up to its exaggerated legend."

Cochran this summer recalled that he saw McCain manhandle a Sandinista official during a 1987 diplomatic mission in Nicaragua.

Cochran told the Biloxi Sun Herald that McCain was talking, and, "I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever."

McCain said the incident never took place. "I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much," he said at a news conference. "But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn't happen."

Former Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who led the mission, couldn't be reached to comment.

Families of POW-MIAs said they have seen McCain's wrath repeatedly. Some families charged that McCain hadn't been aggressive enough about pursuing their lost relatives and has been reluctant to release relevant documents. McCain himself was a prisoner of war for 5 ½ years during the Vietnam War.

In 1992, McCain sparred with Dolores Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen and Women, at a Senate hearing. McCain's prosecutorlike questioning of Alfond — available on YouTube — left her in tears.

Four years later, about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.

Six people present have written statements describing what they saw that day. According to accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.

As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.

"McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him," according to Eleanor Apodaca, sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967 and one of the six witnesses.

McCain's staff wouldn't respond to requests for comment about specific incidents.

Judging the risk

There's no easy way to judge whether McCain's temper would make him a risky president.

"Yeah, he has a temper," said Democratic vice-presidential nominee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden of Delaware. "It's obvious. You've seen it.

"But is John whatever his opposition painted him to be, this unstable guy who came out of a prisoner-of-war camp not capable of [acting rationally]? I don't buy that at all."