As if scolding the Vietnamese wasn’t enough, McCain also stoked his feud with George W. Bush. McCain’s meeting with Bush, scheduled for Pittsburgh next week, is still on, but only after McCain threatened to cancel it over the agenda. Bush wants to ask permission to put McCain on a list of vice-presidential contenders. The senator doesn’t want to be asked, and hopes to keep his distance from Bush. Navigating Hanoi in a Land Cruiser, McCain came closer than ever to declaring that he would never join the ticket. “I hate to say that, because it sounds like I’m saying I wouldn’t want to aid my party or my country. But I guess I’m giving a ’no’ answer. I’m giving a ’no’.”
McCain is genuinely not interested. He sees himself as the leader of a crusade whose supporters will back Bush only if the two agree on a sweeping reform agenda. That must include a ban on “soft money” contributions, a measure Bush has ruled out. McCain at least wants Bush to agree to make campaign-finance reform the centerpiece of their Pittsburgh summit. Bush, through intermediaries, agreed last week to do so.
There are more personal reasons for McCain’s reluctance to be a team member. In 1996 he allowed GOP nominee Bob Dole to consider him for vice president. That led to a painstaking examination of the family spreadsheets, including those of his wife, Cindy, and her wealthy Phoenix parents. McCain said he won’t go through that again. Cindy, sitting beside him in the car, agreed. “I’m not willing to do that,” she said.
The antagonism between Bush and McCain began long before Campaign 2000. They had their first real encounter in 1992, at the convention in Houston. Bill Clinton had been nominated by the Democrats, and Bush asked McCain to use his standing as a war hero to trash Clinton for failing to serve. McCain was outraged and refused, viewing the mission as a cynical task suggested by a clan that specializes in using others to do their dirty work.
Last week McCain was looking far beyond Campaign 2000. At dinner in a leafy Hanoi courtyard, he talked about the movie version of his memoirs, “Faith of My Fathers.” McCain has had the screenwriter out to Arizona. Edward Norton, one of Hollywood’s hottest actors, has, McCain said, been penciled in to play him. And Random House wants a second book from him and his collaborator, staff director Mark Salter. McCain said he wants to write about unsung heroes who defied repressive regimes. “They want it to come out in 2003,” he said with a sly smilejust in time for Campaign 2004.
If he runs again, he will not go easy on Vietnam. In Hanoi and Saigon, he seemed genuinely taken aback by the lack of progress toward economic and political reforms. Foreign Ministry officials waved off his insistence that they sign a new trade agreement, answering that they’d first like some help in dealing with the aftermath of Agent Orange. At the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison, he ridiculed a plaque that claimed the American POWs had received humane treatment. As he watched workers on Nguyen Hue Street erect red decorations for the celebration, McCain was annoyed by the symbolism. “I see the hammer and sickle out there on the banners,” he complained. The communists won, after all, but John McCain didn’t have to like it.
