Faith of My Fathers (4 page)

That he would remember so many years later, with his mind preoccupied with the demands of a wartime command, one of the tens of thousands of sailors he had commanded over his career is a remarkable testament not only to his memory, but to his devotion to his men. Certainly King thought so. “Every skipper's a legend to his people. And he was a legend to us. The fact that he smoked Bull Durham cigarettes, rolled them himself; the fact that he didn't wear shoes; the fact that he was just a giant of a guy. Everything he did was first-class.”

An aviator under my grandfather's command was believed to have been drunk when he crashed his airplane and died. According to King, for the benefit of the dead man's family, my grandfather kept the suspected cause of the accident from coming to light in an official inquiry. “I was so struck by his compassion and understanding,” King remarked. “The common conception was that he would go the last mile and some more too [for his men].”

James Michener knew my grandfather, and wrote briefly about him in the preface to his famous work
Tales of the South Pacific:
“I also knew Admiral McCain in a very minor way. He was an ugly old aviator. One day he flew over Santo and pointed down at the island wilderness and said, ‘That's where we'll build our base.' And the base was built there, and millions of dollars were spent there, and everyone agrees that Santo was the best base the Navy ever built in the region. I was always mighty proud of McCain, for he was in aviation, too.”

My father believed him to be the most exemplary leader in the United States Navy. “My father,” he said, “was a very great leader, and people loved him…. My mother used to say about him that the blood of life flowed through his veins, he was so keenly interested in people…. He was a man of great moral and physical courage.”

In pictures of him from the war you sense his irreverent, eccentric individualism. He looked like a cartoonist's rendering of an old salt. As a boy and a young man, I found the attitude his image conveyed irresistible. Perhaps not consciously, I spent much of my youth—and beyond—exaggerating that attitude, too much for my own good, and my family's peace of mind.

Of more lasting duration, and of far greater consequence, was the military tradition he bequeathed to my father and me; the tradition he was born to, the latest in a long line of my ancestors who had worn the country's uniform.

He was the first McCain to choose the Navy. Until he entered the Academy in 1902, the men of his family had served in the Army; his brother, William Alexander, a cavalry officer who was known in the Army as “Wild Bill,” was the last. Bill McCain had chased Pancho Villa with Pershing, served as an artillery officer in World War I, and later been a brigadier general in the Quartermaster Corps. He was the last McCain to graduate from West Point.

No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers. But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war, in the War for Independence, on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. One distinguished ancestor served on General Washington's staff. Camp McCain in Grenada, Mississippi, is named for my grandfather's uncle Major General Henry Pinckney McCain, a West Pointer, and reputedly a stern autocrat who was known as the father of the Selective Service for organizing the draft in World War I.

We trace our martial lineage through two families, the McCains and the Youngs. My great-grandfather, yet another John Sidney McCain, married Elizabeth Young in 1877. Both were descendants of Scots Presbyterians who, in the aftermath of Queen Mary's death at the hands of her royal English cousin, suffered the privations that were the fate of those who had remained loyal to the Scottish crown.

The McCains, bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald, arrived in the New World shortly after America gained her independence, when Hugh McCain settled his wife and six children in Caswell County, North Carolina, and built his estate, Lenox Castle.

Hugh's grandson, William Alexander McCain, died while serving in the Mississippi cavalry during the Civil War. William's oldest son, Joseph Watt McCain, also fought for the Confederacy. In his first battle he passed out at the sight of blood and was mistakenly left for dead by his comrades. William's third son, the aforementioned father of the Selective Service, Henry Pinckney McCain, was the first to serve the flag of the restored Union.

William McCain's second son, my great-grandfather, barely fourteen years old at the end of the Civil War, offered to enlist as well, giving his age as eighteen. He was rejected, but later in his life would express his patriotism by serving as sheriff of Carroll County, Mississippi, and inspiring his sons, my grandfather and great uncle, to pursue careers as professional officers. His wife's family, however, claimed a more distinguished and ancient military history.

The Youngs, of the Clan Lamont from the Firth Cumbrae Islands, arrived in America earlier than the McCains, having first fled to Ireland during England's “Great Rebellion.” In 1646, Mary Young Lamont and her four sons crossed the Irish Sea in open boats after her husband and chief of the clan, Sir James Lamont, and his clansmen were defeated in battle by the forces of Archibald Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyle.

The long-feuding clans had fought on different sides in the civil war, the Campbells for Cromwell, and the Lamonts loyal to Charles I. After surrendering to the Campbells, two hundred Lamont men, women, and children had their throats cut by the villainous duke, and Sir James and his brothers spent five years in a dungeon.

Fearing further reprisals, Sir James's wife and sons wisely fled their hostile native land, adopted Mary's maiden name, Young, and settled quietly in County Antrim, Ireland. Two generations later, the family immigrated in the person of Hugh Young to Augusta County, Virginia.

In 1764, Hugh's sons, John, a captain in the Augusta County militia, and Thomas, fought a brief skirmish with Indians in the Battle of Back Creek. Thomas was killed and scalped. Like his descendants, Captain Young was not one to suffer such an insult quietly. He tracked the killers for three days, fought them again, killed a number of them, and recovered his brother's scalp, burying it with Thomas's body.

It was John Young who, as a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, caught the attention of George Washington, joined the infantry, and was welcomed to the general's staff. Valorous and exceedingly diligent about safeguarding his family's honor, John Young set an example emulated by generations of Youngs and McCains who eagerly reinforced the family reputation for quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country's uniform.

John Young's three elder sons all died in childhood. His fourth son, David Young, held the rank of captain in the United States Army and fought in the War of 1812. David's son, Samuel Hart Young, moved the family to Mississippi, where Samuel's eldest son, Dr. John William Young, fought for the Confederacy.

The fifth of Samuel Young's eight children, Elizabeth Ann, united the McCain and Young families by her marriage to my great-grandfather, and their union gave life to two renowned fighters, my great-uncle Wild Bill and my grandfather Sid McCain.

Wild Bill joined the McCain name to an even more distinguished warrior family. His wife, Mary Louise Earle, was descended from royalty. She claimed as ancestors Scottish kings back to Robert the Bruce. But her family took their greatest pride in their direct descent from Emperor Charlemagne.

Although it was his brother's children who extended the Charlemagne line, I suspect my grandfather felt justified in borrowing the distinction for the rest of the family. He took considerable pride in the McCains' association with the distinguished conqueror, thinking it only fitting that his descendants share in the reflected glory.

As a boy and young man, I may have pretended not to be affected by the family history, but my studied indifference was a transparent mask to those who knew me well. As it was for my forebears, my family's history was my pride. When I heard my father or one of my uncles refer to an honored ancestor or a notable event from our family's past, my boy's imagination would conjure up some future day of glory when I would add my own paragraph to the family's legend. My father was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of direct descendants of General Washington's officers. His evident pride in claiming such distinguished ancestry gave me the sense not only that I had a claim on my country's history, but that it would fall to me to represent the family when the history of my generation was recorded. As a teenager, I would occasionally show my closest friends the picture of the surrender ceremony aboard the USS
Missouri
and point with pride to the McCain who stood among the conquerors.

At a point early in my own naval career, I was stationed as a flight instructor at McCain Field, an air station in Meridian, Mississippi, named for my grandfather. One day, as I made my approach to land, I was waved off. Radioing the tower, I demanded, “Let me land, or I'll take my field and go home,” earning a rebuke from the commanding officer for disrespectfully invoking the family history.

It is a formidable history, not easily escaped even today by descendants who might wish to pursue some interest outside the family business.

My grandfather was born and raised on his father's plantation in Carroll County, Mississippi. The property had been in our family since 1848, when William Alexander McCain moved there from the family estate in North Carolina. My great-grandmother had named the place Waverly, after Walter Scott's Waverly novels, but it was always called Teoc, after a Choctaw Indian name for the surrounding area that meant “Tall Pines.”

I spent some time there as a boy and loved the place. The house, which had once belonged to a former slave, became the family's home after their first manor burned down, and was a more modest structure than the white-columned antebellum mansions of popular imagination. But I spent many happy summer days in outdoor recreation on the property in the congenial company of my grandfather's younger brother, Joe, who ran the plantation. The house still stands, I have been told, uninhabited and dilapidated, with no McCain in residence since my Uncle Joe died in 1952.

I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions. They never lamented the South's fall, although they had been loyal to its flag, nor did they discuss the war much, even among themselves. Neither did they curse the decline in the family's fortunes, the lot they shared with many plantation families in the defeated South. By all accounts, they were lively, proud, and happy in their world on the Mississippi Delta. Yet my uncle and grandfather left the comfort of the only world they knew, never to be rooted to one location again.

I am second cousin to the gifted writer Elizabeth Spencer. She is the daughter of my grandfather's sister and was raised in Carrollton, Mississippi, near the family estate. In her graceful memoir,
Landscapes of the Heart,
she wrote affectionately of her two uncles and the first stirring of their lifelong romance with military adventures.

What could they do around farms and small towns in an impoverished area, not yet healed from a civil war? The law? The church? Nothing there seemed to challenge them.

I wonder if their dreams were fed by their reading. They favored bold adventure stories and poems—Kipling, Scott, Stevenson, Henty, Macaulay, Browning. Stuck away in trunks in the attic in Carrollton, school notebooks I came across when exploring were full not only of class notes but also of original verses that spoke of heroism and daring deeds. Their Latin texts with Caesar's
Gallic Wars
were in our bookshelves. They were cavalier….

I thought of my uncles years later, when I read in Henry James'
The Bostonians
how Basil Ransom of Mississippi had gone to Boston in the post–Civil War years because he was bored sitting around a plantation.

After two years at “Ole Miss,” my grandfather decided to follow his older brother to West Point. At his brother's urging, my grandfather prepared for the exacting entrance exams by taking for practice the Naval Academy exams that were given some weeks earlier at the post office in the state capital. His scores were high enough to earn him an appointment to Annapolis, which, with little reflection, he accepted.

He was a popular midshipman but a less than serious student, graduating in the bottom quarter of his class. That rank, however, exceeded the grasp of his son and grandson, who graduated well beneath it and were lucky to receive their commissions at all.

In his third year at Annapolis, he failed his annual physical. In a report to the Academy Superintendent, the examining medical officer rejected him for further service “on account of defective hearing.” The superintendent responded by noting the “great need of officers at the present time, and the fact that this Midshipman has nearly completed his course at the Naval Academy at great expense to the Government,” and recommended to the Surgeon General that “this physical disability be waived until the physical examination, prior to graduation, next year.” The Surgeon General approved the waiver.

Whether or not his hearing recovered by the time he graduated is unknown. I can find no record of his last physical examination at the Academy. I can only assume that if the hearing defect persisted the following year, the examining physician overlooked it. In his quarterly fitness report of June 30, 1906, all that is noted on the single line describing the midshipman's health is “very good.”

My grandfather's undistinguished record at the Academy did not affect his subsequent career in the Navy. In those days, an Academy graduate was not immediately commissioned an ensign, but was required to serve for two years as a “passed midshipman.” Following graduation, he saw action on the Asiatic Station in the Philippines, serving first on the battleship
Ohio
and then on the cruiser
Baltimore.