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They lived alongside one of America’s most beloved senators and mavericks. Now they are the keepers of his legacy. This week on Firing Line.
SOT MCCAIN CONCESSION: Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.
To the country, John McCain was an American hero. A man who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and then three and a half decades in the United States Congress.
SOT MCCAIN IN CONGRESS: We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. // We’re getting anything done my friends. We’re getting nothing done.
For this week’s guests, widow Cindy and daughter Meghan, he was so much more.
SOT MEGHAN + JOHN ON THE VIEW: I love you so much.
His daughter Meghan is now a public figure in her own right, a conservative voice at the view, defending her politics even as the President attacks her father’s legacy.
SOT TRUMP: I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be. [MARCH 2019]
With Senator McCain’s brand of statesmanship increasingly feeling like something from a bygone era, what do the McCains say now?
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HOOVER: Meghan McCain and Cindy McCain welcome to Firing Line.
C.MCCAIN: Thank you.
M.MCCAIN: Thank you. But, you know, candidly, I always want to say, like, we are personal friends as well. And I’m a huge fan of Firing Line and grew up watching it. So I think it’s important to, you know,
HOOVER: To disclose the fact that…
M.MCCAIN: …that we’re friends. And come on this show. But you know, it’s such an iconic brand.
HOOVER: Well, I’m grateful to have both of you here because it has now been slightly more than a year since the country lost Senator McCain. And he was a stalwart defender of democratic values around the world in the United States Senate, a candidate for the presidency of the United States and a war hero. And, I think about John McCain’s legacy every day. And I wonder just in the year since his passing, Mrs. McCain, what you feel the public has gotten right about your husband’s legacy?
C.MCCAIN: I think they’ve gotten most of it right. I mean people tell me every day there’s not a day that passes that someone doesn’t say to me, we miss him, we miss his, his dignity, his respect. We miss his, his ability to bring people together. There is a wide divide right now and he really…He was the one that really kept a lot of this together during the years he was in the Senate.
M.MCCAIN: For me, I miss humor and bipartisanship as well. Which I know it’s something everyone always brings to it but he was really funny and he didn’t take himself seriously. There’s a picture of him giving Manu Raju, who is a Capitol Hill reporter, the devil ears behind his head. He always found levity and friendship in politics. Ted Kennedy was one of his closest friends obviously. Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham. I miss, I miss that he was collegial. That politics was collegial when he was still there.
HOOVER: So I mean, I’m glad you mentioned Ted Kennedy because you know he had, you know many pieces of legislation but two of his trademark pieces of legislation were these really historic moments where he reach across the aisle one with Russ Feingold and then the other with Ted Kennedy. One on immigration reform the other on campaign finance reform. And it feels like a bygone era when that kind of legislative collaboration and cooperation can happen. And you remember I remember seeing the pictures of them I mean clearly these lions of very different world views sitting together intently trying to find a way forward.
C.MCCAIN: *I truly believe we’ve seen the last of that. It’s so divisive now and I think, I know for a fact even though he’s not here, my husband would be very disappointed in what it is now. What it’s descended into.
HOOVER: What’s happened structurally or systemically that you think has made it impossible to go back to?
C.MCCAIN: Well in my opinion, the social media has made it very difficult for members of Congress or members of the Senate to, to work in an efficient manner. In my opinion. I think that when people are so divisive on Twitter towards you or with you or whatever it may be it doesn’t help anything. And I think all too often our members are responding to Twitter rather than doing what’s right.
HOOVER: So another thing that John McCain was known for is being a maverick. I’d like you to take a look at one of those maverick moments, perhaps his last, where he turned his thumbs down and voted against overturning the Affordable Care Act.
CLIP OF MCCAIN VOTING NO
HOOVER: Now there’s a backstory to that moment. He risked his life to come back to the capital to take that vote.
M.MCCAIN: Biggest fight ever got in with him in our life, ever. And I was, as you remember, I was screaming at him in the hospital because he had just had surgery on his tumor for his brain cancer and it was dangerous to fly. *And I just remember that flight from Phoenix to D.C. is one of the worst moments and experiences of my entire life because I was watching him the entire time, worried looking for what’s going to happen. Yeah.
HOOVER: Did you know how he would vote?
C.MCCAIN: I didn’t. I knew that he, there were a lot of people pressuring him. I also knew that he, he never agreed with the bill. It was, the bill was not written correctly.
HOOVER: He stated very clearly that he had problems with the process and the way the system had broken down and behind closed doors, that Republicans had campaigned on it for years, and they weren’t able to deliver what they had promised the American people. I want you to also listen to what he said about what was going on in Congress in that time.
CLIP J.MCCAIN: Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. We’re getting nothing done, my friends, we’re getting nothing done.
HOOVER: Do you think it will never, regular order can never return? Or is it also about leadership?
C.MCCAIN: Well it is about—It’s a great deal about leadership. But I also know, because I’ve been around a long time, that Washington is a pendulum. You see it swing one way and then you see it swing another way. I think we’re probably going to have to get through 2020. To be honest with you, in my opinion. It’s, it’s just, we’re too too separated right now. Not only as parties but as a country.
HOOVER: Why 2020?
C.MCCAIN: Well, I think that that’s it’s either make it or break it. Either Trump wins or doesn’t, or Biden wins or doesn’t. And that’s a hurdle that I think a lot of people see we have to jump over before we can fix this one way or another.
HOOVER: One of the things the McCain Institute focuses on is character driven leadership. What does character driven leadership mean to you?
C.MCCAIN: Well what it, what it means and what he wanted it, you know with regard to the institute is about teaching young professionals mid career professionals from around the world bringing them here into the United States and spending a year. We’re not talking party politics, we’re talking about making really good decisions for your country or for your community, whatever it may be. Making decisions that, that maybe aren’t always the easiest to make, you know. Some of the hardest things John ever did were making the right decisions on things.
HOOVER: Mrs. McCain you said that you have never been prouder of him than when you heard his concession speech after the election on November 4th in 2008. I want to watch a moment of what he said.
MCCAIN CONCESSION SPEECH: A century ago. President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T Washington to desert, to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this. And the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this—the greatest nation on earth.
HOOVER: He then went on to say, he would do everything he could to help the incoming president Barack Obama. And, he even had the privilege of having Barack Obama eulogize him at his passing. How was that relationship?
C.MCCAIN: You know, it was, it had its moments, you know, because they disagreed on things. But John believed in the spirit of the debate and believed in the righteousness of the debate. *That speech to me, when I read it, because he previewed it for me, I had never heard, and probably will never hear a speech as good as that ever again, because it was the right thing to say. And it was what the country needed to hear. Especially with that election. So, I was very proud of him. I was always proud of him, but very proud of him that night.
HOOVER: You may not know this, but in 1998 John McCain appeared on the original Firing Line with William F. Buckley junior and he was speaking about teen smoking and he brought Meghan up. Let’s take a look.
BUCKLEY: I read somewhere that in the last two, three years, the number of leading men who are seen smoking has increased by four/five hundred percent over against 7, 8 years ago. Is there something we can do about it?
J.MCCAIN: Leonardo DiCaprio is an object of my 13-year-old daughter’s affection, to the degree which I have never experienced in my own life—
BUCKLEY: So if he smokes, she’ll smoke.
J.MCCAIN: I mean, I mean this young man has captured the hearts of every 13-year-old girl in America. And what does he do throughout the movie? They’re continuously smoking. Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies. He smokes continuously throughout those. And I’m not picking on him or Leonardo — I have other problems with Leonardo — but the fact is—
BUCKLEY: That he seduced your daughter.
J.MCCAIN: To distraction. You know he has a website? Anyway. Well, that’s not surprising.
BUCKLEY: I didn’t know that.
J.MCCAIN: They have a chatroom website, my daughter and her friends, so that they can chat about Leonardo. It’s remarkable.
M.MCCAIN: That’s what he talks about with William F. Buckley? [laughter]
M.MCCAIN: By the way, I do not smoke cigarettes and never have, so. I was more scared of my dad than…But I did have a huge crush on him
HOOVER: …Which means it starts in the home. Listen to how seriously he took you. He was super tapped in to where you are and what you thought and what you were taking seriously.
M.MCCAIN: Yeah, I mean almost like, sometimes I wish he would have pulled me back a little bit but he was, you know, he was wild when he was younger and *we’re so much alike in so many ways and to the point that sometimes it’s the good and the bad. Like, I think people see me on The View sometimes, and my executive producer is like, ‘you’re always shooting from the hip, and you just react and you’re intense and you believe what you believe,’ and I’m like, ‘where do you think I got that one from?
HOOVER: So John McCain seems to have a new fan base today and it’s in the Democratic Party. There’s a campaign going on and what’s really interesting to me is how many Democrats are invoking his name and his memory for some of their own purposes. I want to show you, look.
HARRIS: And then the late great John McCain at that moment at about 2 o’ clock in the morning, killed his attempt to take health care from millions of people in this country.
WARREN: I was in Afghanistan with John McCain two years ago this past summer. I think it may have been Senator McCain’s last trip before he was sick.
HOOVER: Mrs. McCain, what do you think about all these candidates invoking your husband’s memory?
C.MCCAIN: I think my husband would have a real chuckle over it. I really do.
M.MCCAIN: Yeah.
C.MCCAIN: You know, I respect them, and it’s very nice that they would use him, you know, and relay their experiences that they had with him. You know, he has a legacy like nobody else. And I think we’ve seen the last of that too.
HOOVER: You haven’t always loved it, Meghan.
M.MCCAIN: I remember when he was ‘George Wallace.’ He was accused of being racist for even attempting to run against the first African-American candidate. And again, my mom is much more forgiving than I am. And I remember people taking real low blows and low shots at him. And I also appreciate people respecting and bringing him up. But I also think that maybe if you hadn’t demonized him so much and demonized Mitt Romney so much, maybe it wouldn’t have bred the feeding ground for Trump. Because Trump didn’t just come, it took a long time to get there so — People now show these clips and that he was always looking to reach across the aisle to work aside. He was a truly decent, wonderful man. I’m not just saying that because he’s my father. And *now we have someone who has, I believe, no character, no discipline, has no interest in working with the other side. And I think that it was the beginning of it, if we look back now in the past 10 years.
HOOVER: Donald Trump has raised your dad’s legacy negatively seven times since his passing. What is it, that experience personally, when the president…
M.MCCAIN: I go crazy. I turn into the She-Hulk. It makes me… I get very emotional and very angry and normally have to call you. Or my husband.
C.MCCAIN: For me, I just, it makes me sad. *It makes me sad for the president in that way because he never really knew John. He never really knew the kind of man that he is and was. And so that makes me sad because I think he would have learned and probably liked him a great deal. But I also think that, you know, politics is politics, you know as John says,
‘we’re fair game, the kids aren’t’ kind of thing.
M.MCCAIN: I’m fair game now.
C.MCCAIN: Yeah. So I understand. He taught me great lessons about how to be controlled and not let him get to you.
M.MCCAIN: I always call my dad President Trump’s kryptonite because he’s like the one man that will always be loved and revered in history and looked upon by so many politicians as an icon, and I can sit here with 100 percent certainty President Trump will be an extremely polarizing controversial figure who I believe has pulled us into darkness in our country and I think my dad was attempting to pull us into light.
HOOVER: Mrs. McCain, you just said, you know, you guys are fair game, the kids aren’t, and Meghan said well, now I am fair game. You know, you’re fair game now because you’re a co-host of The View, a daily political television show that has been called the most important TV show in America. What is your experience, because you really are the only Republican on that set—
M.MCCAIN: I say conservative because there are other women that define themselves as Republican.
HOOVER: And you’re a conservative, and you defend conservative credentials and values everyday from that seat.
M.MCCAIN: I do.
HOOVER: I want to look at one thing you’ve also said about it.
CLIP FROM THE VIEW
M.MCCAIN: I was trying to explain because one of my producers this morning was saying, ‘why do people love him so much?’ I was like, sometimes it’s not just that they love Trump so much, it’s that they hate the same things Trump hates.That’s what’s going on—
BEHAR: Who, black people, you mean? And immigrants?
M.MCCAIN: No, I mean—
BEHAR: Who do they hate? Who do they hate?
M.MCCAIN: You know what, Joy, I really come here everyday, open-minded, just trying to explain it. It’s not a fun job for me everyday.
BEHAR: But who do they hate?
M.MCCAIN: I know you’re angry. I get it. I get that you’re angry that Trump’s president, like a lot people are—
BEHAR: I’m angry at every single thing he’s doing.
M.MCCAIN: But I don’t think yelling at me is gonna fix the problem.
M.MCCAIN: Being the sacrificial Republican everyday, I’m just trying to—
GOLDBERG: Here’s the thing, here’s the thing—
M.MCCAIN: Don’t feel bad for me, bitch. I’m paid to do this, OK. Don’t feel bad for me.
M.MCCAIN: Well, my finest moment, in all of TV.
HOOVER: I mean I think it must feel like you’re a sacrificial conservative every day, right, I mean, you have to… The country is evenly divided—pretty evenly divided ideologically, right. But you’re the only one of those four or five that are espousing a view that a much larger percentage of the country holds.
M.MCCAIN: Well, I think it’s why you and I became friends originally, is there just aren’t that many conservative women—real ones—in mainstream media. For me, it’s interesting that the media always will allow one conservative on a giant panel—across all networks, unless you’re at Fox—you’re allowed one, and then there’s a sea of a one myopic opinion. And I think that’s disingenuous to what’s going on and I think, for me, I can’t stand President Trump personally, I will not be voting for him, I did not vote for him. And even for me, I’m sort of like not socially acceptable enough and I do have times where—
HOOVER: You have to defend that you are explaining why Trump voters support him.
M.MCCAIN: But I take great pride in the fact that I sort of—I did not want to join The View, at all, I was not interested, and my dad told me to do it, and anything he told me to do, I would do. And so now, I take pride in the fact that I’ve lasted longer than any conservative since Elizabeth. And I was called a mushy RINO for most of my career and all of a sudden I’m like the queen conservative, and no one’s more surprised about it than I am.
HOOVER: Do you worry about the future of the party in a post-Trump world?
M.MCCAIN: 100 percent.
HOOVER: Do you, I mean do you think the party is going to resonate with young people—people your age and younger?
M.MCCAIN: I really worry about it because—and the numbers show this by the way—whatever you want to say about the left, there are people like AOC that do a really good job of speaking to young people. And I think, for us, and I always laugh, like, young Republican groups start at 40. And I think post-Trump America for the party is going to be a very, very dark place to rebuild.
HOOVER: I mean how—I don’t know how we rebuild—but, Cindy, you shook your head. As you think about your children, your grandchildren, and having a Republican Party appeal, this concerns you?
C.MCCAIN: It concerns me very much. And I’ll speak for my own home state where the party has simply left normal—what we would consider normal—Republicans behind. Until our party goes back to what we were best at — and that was an open system, an open tent, we invited everybody in—those are the days that I grew up in Republican politics and it was—those were good years. President Trump has done some things, you know, that all of us—as Meghan said, they’ve been controversial, they’ve been different from what any other president has done, and not in good ways. And yet, nobody says anything. Nobody scolds him for what really was bad manners, or whatever you want to call, whatever issue it was of the day.
HOOVER: I mean, we know Senator McCain would’ve if he were alive.
C.MCCAIN: —Yeah, oh yeah
HOOVER: But why not anybody else?
C.MCCAIN: I don’t know. I don’t understand.
M.MCCAIN: I think, fear of not being in office or in power—
C.MCCAIN: Well, they’re terrified of him, politically, I believe.
M.MCCAIN: Yeah.
HOOVER: Do you think, if your husband were alive, and he were standing up to the President, it would give courage to others to do the same?
C.MCCAIN: Yeah, he gave cover to a lot of people.
HOOVER: I want to ask you about another thing that the McCain Institute focuses on, and that’s sex trafficking.
C.MCCAIN: Oh yeah.
HOOVER: I mean this is one of the pillars and priorities of the McCain Institute which is associated with Arizona State University and is a think tank. What ignited your passion for this issue?
C.MCCAIN: Well, really a very long time ago, when I brought Meghan’s sister home from Bangladesh, she was from Mother Teresa’s orphanage. And so, several years later, I had an opportunity to go meet Mother Teresa in Calcutta and I did just that. And, after I met her and had, you know we had pictures taken all that kind of stuff, I was on my way out to leave the country but I stopped to buy some sari material for my daughter Bridget. And while I was buying it, there was this kind of rumbling through the floor of the kiosk I was in, and so I asked the guy behind the counter and he said, ‘Oh no, it’s just my family, they live down there.’ And I look down, you could kind of see between the slats, and I could see all these little eyes looking up at me. There were clearly children being kept down there. And it wasn’t, you know, they weren’t his. It was just, it was one of those things, it was the moment, I didn’t know what I was looking at, I had no idea what this was, or whether or not anyone can can fix it, kind of is where I was coming from. So it took me years to really figure out not only what it was, but what I could do.
HOOVER: How big a deal is this, in the United States?
C.MCCAIN: It’s epidemic. It’s absolutely epidemic.
HOOVER: What’s it going to take to really make a difference, to really make an impact in this fight?
C.MCCAIN: Yeah, a change of attitude. Number one, certainly more awareness, which is what we’re doing. But more importantly, the understanding that this is a simple human rights issue—not simple, but — this is a basic human rights issue. These people are being deprived of their freedom.
HOOVER: John McCain was an ardent defender of human rights and democratic values. And you started, on the one year anniversary of his passing, a movement online called Acts of Civility.
C.MCCAIN: I did.
HOOVER: What was that?
C.MCCAIN: That was about just what we’ve been talking about here. Moving back to civil behavior between, not just our government officials, but between people—your neighbors, your friends.
HOOVER: I want to ask you one more question about Joe Biden, who was a longtime friend of your dad’s, and your husband’s. He, of course, is running. You earlier said we have to get past 2020 because it’ll either be President Trump or Joe Biden.
M.MCCAIN: And I get a little, like, when you said that, I was like [knocks wood] Joe Biden— Because it could be—I mean, not to be superstitious, but Elizabeth Warren’s coming up fast and hard right now.
HOOVER: Right, so what’s it what’s it going to take? I mean, do you—in a way that
you say it’s a bygone era, in some ways, to sort of reach across the aisle and to do the kind of jockeying that Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold did with John McCain… Joe Biden was part of that era. Has the era bypassed Joe Biden?
C.MCCAIN: I don’t think so. I mean, it’s still in there.
M.MCCAIN: I hope not.
C.MCCAIN: I mean, Joe’s a lovely—not only a lovely person, but he was always a good legislator, in terms of how we worked across the aisle, how he—You have to remember Joe was there before John was, and John learned a great deal from Joe.
HOOVER: If you could be helpful to Joe Biden, would you in the race?
C.MCCAIN: I’m trying to—I’m going to try to stay out of it, just because I’m not the politician in the family. It’s really Megan and her father that were. So I’m going to try to stay out of it, but I do like Joe Biden, he’s a very good friend. He helped us through a very dark time.
HOOVER: So if you could be helpful, would you, at the right time?
M.MCCAIN: It depends. I mean, I struggle with—it will turn out…what kind of candidate he ends up being. You know, I still hope for the moderate, bipartisan Joe. I think the question he will have to answer is, will he be pulled to the hard progressive left, I have my limitations with this as well, and I can’t vote for—well, I mean I would never… I’m not voting for a Democrat, anyway, I’ll probably end up writing in Paul Ryan or something.
HOOVER: You wouldn’t vote for Joe Biden if he were running against Trump?
M.MCCAIN: It depends. It depends how he runs. You know, it depends who he chooses, it depends what his policies are. I want to like, get there when I get there, but—
HOOVER: You don’t rule it out though.
M.MCCAIN: I always tell people, one man is actively on television berating my beloved father who has passed, and another man eulogized him. What would you do?
HOOVER: Vote for him?
M.MCCAIN: I don’t know. Again, I have to see. But, my love for him and his family… and my heart always beats out my brain, for better or for worse in politics… Always
C.MCCAIN: It was Joe’s wife who introduced John and I.
M.MCCAIN: Yes.
HOOVER: Jill? I didn’t know that.
M.MCCAIN: And it’s just, they’re just so intertwined in our life, and that’s sometimes what makes me a bad analyst right now, I think, because I’m so emotionally involved. The pain of grief is—there’s… You can’t explain until you’ve experienced it. I never could have understood it. Joe Biden is the is the most incredible—I call him the grief whisperer, –the way he interprets pain and grief and loss. I’ve never—I’ve met no therapist, analyst, guidance counselor, nothing, that possibly compares to him on it, and I think the country’s in a lot of pain. Honestly, I don’t know what I would be like without him. I think I would be in an even darker place.
HOOVER: Has it gotten easier after the year mark?
M.MCCAIN: I thought so, but you just—I just miss him so much. I miss his sense of humor. I miss watching you guys together in Sedona. I’m not trying to make you emotional.
C.MCCAIN: No, you’re okay.
M.MCCAIN: But it’s just, it never, it doesn’t get easier and I don’t want people to think it gets easier because I think there’s a lot of stigma about, ‘well, you’ve been through a year, so it should stop being so painful,’ and it’s not true, for me. For me, it’s not true.
C.MCCAIN: You just learn how to live with it.
M.MCCAIN: Yes.
HOOVER: It is an honor to have both of you in my life, to have both of you here at Firing Line and to have you carry the torch and to continue to carry the torch forward for your father’s legacy and for your husband’s legacy. Thank you for being on Firing Line.
C.MCCAIN: Thank you.
M.MCCAIN: Thank you, Margaret.
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