Three Jacks
(Vermont Royster in The Wall Street Journal, 6 September 1972)
At Pearl Harbor the other day, the Navy turned out for a bit of ceremony—the usual sort of thing, bands playing, flags being hauled up and down. Admiral John Sidney McCain, Jr., was turning over his command as Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Armed Forces in the Pacific, on his way to retirement after 40 years in the Navy.
It was all pretty much routine. Somewhere some general or admiral or old time sergeant is always being mustered out. He gets his day's pomp, his name in his home-town paper perhaps, but nobody else notices or cares very much. The military is not much thought of these days.
Besides, Pearl Harbor is not what it used to be. No battleships now around Ford Island, no destroyers crowding West Loch, only an occasional carrier shuttling through between home and Vietnam. Only a few hands at the ceremony could even remember when it was otherwise.
There's not much reason to notice this ceremony either, except to add a little footnote to the announcement. For it happens that Admiral Jack is the son of Admiral Jack—he of Task Force 38—and the father of Lieutenant Commander Jack-he presently a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Together, they span this century of the U. S. Navy.
The elder Jack McCain was commissioned as an ensign in 1906. It was not a propitious year for a Mississippi boy to begin a naval career. The forces that would soon plunge Europe into a war were already gathering and President Theodore Roosevelt was trying to revive the Navy. But the American public was little interested.
The brief war with Spain was over, the quarrels of Europe were none of our business, and if our relations with Japan were strained there was still the wide Pacific as a moat between us and that emerging naval power. President Roosevelt, in fact, had just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Work on the Panama Canal had been suspended. There was no base at all at Pearl Harbor. Taxpayers were grumbling about the Navy budget. Promotions were slow.
Yet in his time, Jack McCain was called on to fight two world wars, the first as a junior officer, the second as an admiral. In that series of engagements, known as the Battle for Leyte Gulf, he commanded the carriers of Task Force 38. On 2 September 1945, he was present in the USS Missouri (BB-63) to witness the Japanese surrender. Four days later he was dead.
His son, the second Jack, was commissioned in 1931, an even more inauspicious year for launching a naval career. The euphoria of the disarmament conferences of the 1920s had cut back on both ships and personnel. During the Hoover administration, for the first time since Washington's, no naval combat ship was launched. The depression was on, and the Navy could not even commission all its Academy graduates.
It was a time, too, when all the military was in public disfavor. We had won the war to end wars, and the cry was "Never Again!" In England, young men were vowing never to fight for king and country. In campuses across this country, the students were militantly antimilitary; everywhere there sprang up leagues against war-any war.
In Europe, to be sure, Hitler and Mussolini were flexing their muscles and in the Far East, Japan was openly defying the naval limitations. But another President Roosevelt was signing Neutrality Acts and promising never to send American boys to fight overseas. The few young men who made careers of the Army or the Navy weren't highly regarded by their peers.
Pearl Harbor, as everyone knows, changed all that. The young men went off to war, after all, and many of them died. For a time the military men who had borne the burden when there was no glory in it were heroes: Eisenhower, Patton, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance. We gave them honors and medals.
While the elder Jack McCain, who had become an aviator, was rising at last to admiral, the younger Jack was learning about submarines. He learned in those old World War I Rand S boats and finally, in 1942, he got command of the USS Gunnel.
He had her off Morocco a few days before D-day in North Africa, photographing the intended beachhead. Later, he took her to the Pacific, where he sank a Japanese destroyer and some merchant ships. He completed his last war patrol just a few days before his father stepped on the deck of the Missouri.
The war over, back to the service routine in a shrunken Navy. A tour at the Pentagon. Some sea duty, first as executive officer and then commanding officer of a cruiser. In time, his flag, and in midsummer of 1968, he was assigned as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific.
But by this time, once more, a military man was no public hero. His country was involved in the most controversial war in its history. Two presidents together had sent more than half-a-million men to fight in Vietnam, and his was the unenviable assignment of over-all command of a war nobody wanted, nobody knew how to end.
That war was a personal agony for him, too. For, by now, there was another John Sidney McCain in the Navy, and in 1967, Lieutenant Commander Jack, flying from a carrier, had been shot down over North Vietnam and was a wounded prisoner of war.
This was no easier for him to bear—nor for his wife, Roberta—than for others whose sons are in those far-off prison camps.
Yet the father, like the son, did what his country asked him to do, whatever he may have thought of what was asked. He tried to serve it as well as his father had before him.
None of this is very fashionable these days. Yet, let the footnote stand; 12 presidents, years of peace, four wars for the three Jacks. Perhaps one day, we will again find such men useful.