John McCain, war hero, political maverick and GOP standard-bearer, dies at 81
Arizona Sen. John McCain, who survived 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to become one of the highest-profile, most confounding and pugnacious personalities in American politics - a one-time Republican presidential standard-bearer who alternately trampled and embraced GOP orthodoxy - has died. He was 81.
McCain, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in July 2017, died at 4:28 p.m. Saturday, his office confirmed in a statement.
Although he spent more than three decades in Congress representing his adopted home state, McCain was hardly a stamped-from-the-mold politician. At a time when the country grew increasingly tribal and partisan, he drew admiration and antagonism from both parties.
"Warts and all, he was an iconic figure," said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst who followed McCain's political career from the lawmaker's arrival in Washington in the early 1980s. "As irascible and curmudgeonly as he could be, he was real. There was an authenticity."
With a volcanic temper and almost demonically willful streak - "one who doesn't mind getting up on the high wire and doesn't mind fighting," McCain once said of himself - his career as a hell-raiser in the Navy and iconoclast in the Senate often read more like a picaresque novel than the shelf load of books inspired by his harrowing life story.
In addition to his confinement as a prisoner of war, marked by years of torture and solitary confinement, McCain survived near-banishment from the Naval Academy, three plane crashes, a divorce caused by his philandering, a career-threatening Senate scandal, two unsuccessful tries for the White House and
