She was 108 years old. Well done!

The Washington Post

Obituaries

Roberta W. McCain, maverick mother of Sen. John McCain, dies

By Emma Brown

October 12, 2020

Roberta McCain, an independent-minded oil heiress who was married to one of the Navy’s highest-ranking officers and who displayed characteristic pluck when she took to the presidential campaign trail at age 96 on behalf of her son, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has died. She was 108.

Her daughter-in-law Cindy McCain announced the death in a tweet on Monday but did not provide further details. Cindy’s husband, John, died in August 2018 of brain cancer.

Mrs. McCain was the gregarious and stylish center of gravity for her family, which was near the center of American military and political power for more than a half-century. Her father-in-law, John S. McCain Sr., a four-star Navy admiral, commanded forces in the Pacific during World War II; her husband, John S. McCain Jr., another four-star Navy admiral, led the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and commanded U.S. forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.

She raised three children and turned her home on Capitol Hill into a cocktail-hour salon for prominent lawmakers, aiding her husband’s climb through the Navy ranks. She was known to make breakfast for politicians who were key to her husband’s success. Her friends included the British military leader and statesman Louis Mountbatten, the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, and American writer and ambassador Clare Boothe Luce.

In 1967, she and her husband were in London preparing for a dinner party at the home of the Iranian ambassador when they learned that their son John, a Navy pilot in the Vietnam War, had been shot down over Hanoi. The McCains went on with the dinner, sharing the news with no one.

A week later, Mrs. McCain sent a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“As the parent of a son who was shot down in Hanoi last week and is now a prisoner of war, I wonder if you are interested to know that both my husband and I back you and your policies 100 percent in Vietnam,” she wrote. “One reads so much of other opinions, that I just hope that you and the people really making the sacrifice believe in our country and in you. May God bless you and keep you strong in your courage and convictions.”

John McCain III endured isolation and torture for the next 51/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Mrs. McCain, who could only wonder about her son’s mental and physical condition, remained stoic.

“When Johnny was in prison, that woman never made a peep,” Rowena Willis, Mrs. McCain’s identical twin, told Vogue magazine in 2008.

Mrs. McCain did not emerge as a public figure until her son sought the Republican nomination for president in 2000, the first of his two unsuccessful bids for the White House. She largely ignored that campaign, later saying with typical frankness that she “never expected him to get elected, and didn’t care if he was. I didn’t think he had enough money, enough expertise, enough anything.”

Eight years later, she had changed her mind about her son’s prospects and was much more involved as he won the Republican nomination for president.

She was, to the dismay of some of her son’s handlers, the straightest-talking member of candidate McCain’s “Straight Talk Express.”

In a widely publicized 2008 interview, she said Republicans unhappy with her son’s independent streak would have to “hold their noses” and vote for him. What about her son’s support from his party’s conservative base? “I don’t think he has any,” she said.

Campaign operatives kept Mrs. McCain away from reporters during the remaining months of the presidential race, lest she say something else inconveniently honest. She continued to appear at campaign rallies, however, drawing crowds with her snow-white hair, two-inch heels and brassy reputation.

When John McCain’s critics questioned whether he was too old to serve as president — he was 72 on Election Day 2008 — he simply introduced them to his mother.

'Defies family'

Roberta Wright was born Feb. 7, 1912, in Muskogee, Okla., where her father, Archibald, bought vast tracts of land just before the oil boom. Awash in wealth, he retired young and moved his family to Los Angeles when Roberta was 12.

She got her taste for travel from her dad, who took his brood on automobile journeys for weeks on end, from the Great Lakes to the Mojave Desert.

“He took us somewhere every summer for the month of August,” she told the New York Times in 2007. “We’d go to a lake in Minnesota, and once he took us to see the source of the Mississippi. It was the littlest trickle you ever saw.”

When Roberta was a freshman at the University of Southern California, she met Jack McCain, a young Navy officer who was serving aboard a battleship with its home port at Long Beach. Against the wishes of her mother, who disapproved of the match, the pair eloped to Tijuana, Mexico. They were married above a bar named Caesar’s.

“Society Coed Elopes With Naval Officer: Roberta Wright Defies Family,” read the headline in the San Francisco Examiner.

“I realize now I was so immature. I just took life as it came — still do,” she told Vogue in 2008.

After 48 years of marriage, her husband had a heart attack on a transatlantic flight home to Washington and died. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

A spin in the Benz

After the death of her husband in 1981, she and her twin (who died in 2011) spent months each year traveling the world. When they could not find a car-rental agency willing to rent to a pair of women in their late 80s, they bought one — a Mercedes “baby Benz” that they drove from Munich to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

“I wanted to see Samarkand,” Mrs. McCain said by way of explanation.

She kept the car in Europe until 2006, when she shipped it home to Washington. Then she drove solo across the country to deliver the car to a great-nephew in San Francisco. Along the way, she picked up a speeding ticket for driving 112 miles an hour in northern Arizona.

“She was a willful, rebellious girl,” John McCain wrote in his 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.”

In her 90s, Mrs. McCain spent three hours each Tuesday morning at the National Gallery of Art or the Freer Gallery of Art, whose collection of Chinese porcelain she particularly admired. Asked by Vogue to explain her longevity, good health and general fearlessness, she shrugged.

“I don’t do anything I’m supposed to do. I don’t exercise and today, I’ve already eaten a half a box of caramel popcorn,” she told the magazine. “Honey, I’ve had a dream life, and it was all luck.”

Emma Brown

Emma Brown is a reporter on the investigative team who joined The Washington Post in 2009. Previously, she wrote obituaries and covered local and national education. Follow

Fucktard Trump has repeatedly said stupid things and then denied everything. Trump is fucking retard and he's a liar.

Wall Street Journal

POLITICS

Trump Denies Report He Disparaged Military

President and his aides push back on report by the Atlantic that he called Americans who died in war ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’

By Rebecca Ballhaus and Gordon Lubold

September 4, 2020

WASHINGTON—President Trump and his aides rejected allegations in a news report that the president had called Americans who died in war “losers” and “suckers,” as Democrats and some veterans’ groups denounced the president over his alleged comments.

The article published in the Atlantic, which attributed the allegations to four anonymous people who said they had firsthand knowledge of the conversations, said the president had canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he was concerned about his hair and didn’t believe it was important to honor Americans who died in the war.

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the Atlantic article quotes the president as saying. In a separate conversation, according to the Atlantic article, the president described 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood during World War I as “suckers” for getting killed.

The Wall Street Journal hasn’t independently confirmed the details of the Atlantic article. Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic, said in a statement: “We stand behind our reporting.”

Mr. Trump on Friday called the article a hoax and a disgrace and said, “There is nobody who feels more strongly about our soldiers, our wounded warriors, our soldiers who died in war.” On Thursday, Mr. Trump said the helicopter couldn’t fly to the cemetery that day because it was “raining about as hard as I’ve ever seen.” The White House attributed the cancellation to bad weather at the time.

Several current and former White House officials said they had never heard the president use such language about fallen soldiers. A former spokesman for John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who was Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff and accompanied him on the trip, declined to comment on the article.

Mr. Trump suggested it was possible Mr. Kelly had been a source for the Atlantic and criticized his former chief of staff, saying he “got eaten up in this world, he was unable to function.”

The president has made support for the military a central theme of his presidency and his re-election campaign. But he has also clashed with top military leaders in his administration, including over his consideration of deploying active-duty troops to impose order amid racial-justice protests earlier in the summer, which drew objections from Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Esper in a statement Friday said the president has the “highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families,” while not directly disputing the allegations in the Atlantic article. A defense official said Mr. Esper recalls the flight to the American cemetery being canceled for weather reasons and “never heard any other such allegation as those in the Atlantic until today.”

The article also alleged that when Sen. John McCain, who endured beatings and solitary confinement as a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam, died in 2018, Mr. Trump said: “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.”

On Thursday, Mr. Trump said he disagreed with Mr. McCain on several issues and that “I was never a fan.” But, he said, “I still respected him. And I had to approve his funeral as president…I approved it without hesitation, without complaint. And I felt he deserved it.”

On Friday, asked if he regretted his past comments criticizing Mr. McCain, Mr. Trump said: “I say what I say.”

Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, in a tweet Friday morning disputed the president’s assertion that he had agreed to lower the flags after Mr. McCain’s death “without hesitation or complaint.”

“Mr. President, this is not true,” tweeted Mr. Taylor, who has been a vocal Trump critic since leaving the administration. “You were angry that DHS notified federal buildings to lower the flags for Sen. McCain. I would know because your staff called and told me.”

It took until 4 p.m., two days after Mr. McCain’s death, for the White House to issue a statement from the president announcing the flag would be flown at half-staff.

In 2015, during his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said of Mr. McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” He also described Mr. McCain as a loser for losing the 2008 election to Barack Obama.

In 2019, the White House wanted the U.S. Navy to move “out of sight” the warship USS John S. McCain, named for the senator’s father and grandfather, ahead of the president’s visit to Japan, the Journal reported.

Since Mr. McCain’s death in 2018, Mr. Trump has continued to attack the senator. The president complained that he wasn’t thanked for giving Mr. McCain “the kind of funeral that he wanted” and saying at an event in Lima, Ohio: “I have to be honest, I’ve never liked him much.”

Mr. Trump has said he didn’t serve in Vietnam because he received student deferments and a medical deferment related to a bone spur in a foot.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called the reported remarks disgusting and said that if the Atlantic report is true, Mr. Trump should apologize. “It affirms what most of us believe to be true: That Donald Trump is not fit to be commander-in-chief,” Mr. Biden said in his hometown of Wilmington, Del.

The former vice president grew visibly angry during his remarks, and said of his late son Beau, who served in the military: “He wasn’t a sucker.”

Will Goodwin, director of government relations for VoteVets, a liberal group that supports veterans, said the alleged comments in the article were “not surprising” but “egregious.”

“Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform. He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans. And worse, he has matched his vile language with action,” Mr. Goodwin said.

The Trump campaign on Friday published a list of statements from current and former White House aides rebutting the Atlantic article. Former press secretary Sarah Sanders called it “total BS.” Dan Scavino, deputy chief of staff for communications, said he was with the president in France and called the article “complete lies.”

Appeared in the September 5, 2020, print edition as 'Trump Denies Report He Disparaged Military.'

John McCain (who is now dead, nobody cares) was a god-soaked fucktard. I wrote a comment at the Wall Street Journal about the moron for Jeebus.

Google:

"March 29, 1973. Over nearly a decade, as the U.S. fought the North Vietnamese on land, air, and sea, more than 700 American prisoners of war were held captive by enemy forces. For those locked inside the Hanoi Hilton, this meant years of daily torture and abuse."

At the god-soaked Wall Street Journal I found this bullshit:

"John McCain said there were no atheists in the Hanoi Hilton."

McCain thinks all 700 prisoners were cowards who couldn't exist without the ridiculous god fantasy.

In 2008 Mr. Obama won the election thanks to me because I voted for him. Thank goodness he won because the Republican candidate was a fucking idiot, almost as stupid as his running mate, aka airhead.

Two things. The idiot Republican candidate for President in 2008 and the even more idiotic fucktards who didn't win the nomination.

The Republican who lost the 2008 election was John McCain. McCain's most moronic mistake was choosing a know-nothing airhead for his running mate. Her name is Sara Palin. She was not qualified for the job. Her problem was extreme stupidity. She is, of course, an evolution denier.

Republicans are famous for their cowardly fear of science, especially evolution. For example, virtually everyone in President Fucktard Trump's administration is an anti-science creationist. Evolution makes them cry.

Is Trump an evolution denier? He probably doesn't know what evolution is.

The idiotic Republican fucktards who didn't win the 2008 nomination:

During a debate in New Hamshire, the Republican candidates for the nomination were asked: "Do you believe in evolution?" (Evolution is not a belief but that's another subject.)

In response, 3 of the Republican candidates for president of the United States said that they did not believe in evolution. These stupid fucking assholes for Jeebus, who wanted to be the leader of the free world, were science deniers.

I found this in a book I'm reading (Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free):

"And the people in the hall cheered."

This is Idiot America, the most idiotic country on this planet.