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    In fact, in his Naval Academy yearbook notation, after referring to his "weakness for the fairer sex" and a penchant for getting into trouble, it notes of the newly-commissioned, 20-year-old Ensign:

     "An officer and a gentleman" is the title to which he pays absolute allegiance. Sooner could Gibraltar be loosed from its base than could "Mac" be loosed from the principles which he has adopted to govern his actions.

    He went to Annapolis very young  —  too young, he was later to say. At 16, in 1927, he entered the harsh world of the Plebe. It gave him an opposition to hazing he carried with him the rest of his career. He thought it a poor substitute for leadership. Loaded with demerits and mediocre grades, he staggered through four years and became an ensign in 1931, in a country in deep depression.

    As proof of the made-not-born postulate, his first steps were anything but omens of stellar things to come. His first official entry in his service records is the Navy Department denying his request to go to the Naval Optical School in Washington after graduation. It seems he and a classmate pal knew there were a lot more pretty girls in Washington than on a battleship and tried a rather pitiful finesse with the application to lens-making school.

     The sages in the Navy gave the request no serious thought, because less than ten days later he was ordered to the battleship OKLAHOMA. He learned to command instead of grinding of glass.

     Unable to get into flight school because of a heart murmur, which is now medically regarded as benign, Jack McCain applied to submarine school. The sub school doctors had less sensitive stethoscopes, apparently, and after two formative years on the massive OKLAHOMA, he went off to New London to learn about the still-evolving theories of warfare under the sea...of sonar pings and "bearing . . . Mark!" and "Fire One!"... and how to crash dive without permanently sinking your boat. He served upon a couple of wheezing old World War I subs  —  the peacetime, depression Navy had been cut to the bone  —  then taught bored midshipmen math and physics at the Naval Academy. He was later to say the experience was important to his future role as one of the Navy's foremost speechmakers. "If you can keep a bone-weary plebe awake, it's easy to get your message across to anyone who's had a night's sleep."

     After the Japanese Zeroes crossed the Pali that terrible Sunday, Jack McCain went to war under the seas, commanding three different submarines, and sank several Japanese ships, including the submarine's most dangerous foe, a destroyer.

     On rare occasions, he spoke of the time, early in the war, of firing four torpedoes at a sleepy Japanese battleship, unaware of the menace below, and hitting her three times without a single explosion. Then having to dive and stand against prolonged depth-charging, while cursing an unknown pre-war torpedo contractor.

     For these and other exploits, he was awarded the Silver Star and the Bronze Star and a small pile of commendations.

     After the surrender, he sailed his sub into Tokyo Harbor. There is a photograph of him and his father, in khakis, on the bridge of a submarine tender. Leaning on the gray railing are the young, wiry, dark-haired sub skipper and the older, also wiry, but terribly weary, carrier admiral. A few hours later, Admiral McCain was to leave for the United States and his quiet death, his son never to see him again. So the nearly chance meeting was a blessing for which Jack McCain was always grateful.

     After the war, Jack McCain went through a series of duties  —  submarine division commander, executive officer of a heavy cruiser in Korea, and a variety of other commands. He rose from Commander to Four-Star Admiral. At flag rank, his commands included Commander Amphibious Forces Atlantic, Military Representative to the United Nations, Commander Naval Forces Europe. Finally, from 1968 to 1972, his last post, as Commander of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific at the height of the Vietnam War  —  CINCPAC.

    More important than the litany of commands and promotions was Jack McCain the thinker, the speaker, and the naval leader.

     For from the time he had so frivolously asked to be a naval lens-maker, he had slowly matured, thinking about responsibility, about leadership, and about seapower. He began writing and talking about it. He learned the power of the image and the metaphor.

     "What is Seapower?" he wrote, early on. "In primitive times when two tribes inhabited opposite sides of a large lake and took to barter by canoe, they were exercising elementary seapower."

     A bit later: "A ballistic missile submarine is a missile silo that moves!" He became philosophical:

    "Life is run by poker players, not the systems analysts."

     And this: "It's one of the most forgotten, then relearned foreign policy axioms in history. If you keep backing away because you're afraid of what might happen to you  —  and you keep backing away and backing away  —  what you were afraid of in the first place is going to happen to you, as certain as I am standing here saying it."