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    In October, he was ordered to take his worn down men and planes for a rest, when a Japanese armada launched a thrust at the American invasion force in the Philippines. Halsey had been drawn Northward by a feint, and the landing troops were protected by only a light force under Admiral Sprague. McCain raced back to help, but his carriers were too far away for his beloved pilots to make it back to the carriers after the strike. He pressed onward, hoping for another hundred miles, but the reports from the beach told of increasing peril and cries for help.

   Admiral McCain went down to his cabin to think a few moments. Then came up and said, "Turn into the wind." That order precedes an aircraft launch. His aircraft and Sprague's heroic actions caught the Japanese force flatfooted, and the invasion was saved. Most of his planes either landed safely ashore or on other carriers. But it's one of those decisions that take life from a man. Before final notes, it is important to say that Sidney McCain was a colorful man. For reasons undetermined, he wore his officer's hat without the grommet  —  the plastic frame that keeps the cap a taut disk. Hence photos show him with a shapeless khaki lump on his head. He never smoked factory-made cigarettes. He always carried rolling papers and a bag of Bull Durham in his breast pocket. It is said he could roll a cigarette with one hand. He was also a man of intense loyalty and honor. Someone once came up to him and said a friend had called McCain an S.O.B. McCain replied simply, "I don't believe it," and left it at that.

       Photos of him show a calm, nearly gaunt, somewhat stern-looking man, but with remarkably warm eyes, with a touch of basset sadness, as if they had been on watch too long, had seen too many things.

      By pure chance, when I was a newspaper reporter in San Diego, I once ran into a pilot who had flown under him. After some jovial small talk, I asked about my grandfather, the man. He paused, trying to distill his thoughts. Finally, he said "I think he was the finest man I ever met. We would have done anything for him."

     Admiral McCain stood on the deck of the USS MISSOURI as Douglas MacArthur signed the instruments of surrender with Japan. In that famous photo, he is the one in the front row, looking slightly down. I have seen it in a hundred books.

     Then he got special permission to fly straight home for a rest, and made the day-and-a-half island hopping flight in the back of a Navy pursuit plane. My grandmother met him at the Coronado air station, and at the welcome home party, he sat down and quietly died. He had been home for the war for less than half a day.

     Under John Sidney McCain's 1906 Naval Academy yearbook photo is a quote from Milton that ascribes to him "That power that erring men call chance." His classmates were later to write after his death in a book about the class of this taking of chances:

     "It cost him his life later, but his work was done, and victory, which he lived to see, had come to his country."

     His son, the second Navy McCain, was made of the same stuff. But his story is also clear proof that regardless of how simple it looks in terms of "blood lines" and "pedigree," leaders are made, not born.

     Known throughout his life as "Jack"  —  he disliked the nickname "Junior"  —  he was born far away from the sea upon which he would sail so many years. His mother was traveling across country while the senior McCain was at sea, and stopped to visit her sister in Council Bluffs, Iowa. There, in a frigid January, 1911, was born the second half of the first Four Star father-and-son set in naval history.

     Moving around as military families do, Jack McCain remembered being assigned to shovel coal into the family furnace at 5 a.m. He remembers getting in trouble at school for telling his little friends he saw a bear on the way to class, but being defended by my grandmother who said, "All little boys must have an imagination. Don't worry, he'll know about honesty and the truth."

     Her prescience was lathe-accurate. For anyone will tell you that John Sidney McCain, Jr., like his father, was the most honest man you will ever meet. His word had the constancy of Newtonian laws of physical motion.