Posted on Sun, Jan. 20, 2008

For John McCain, everything goes back to a book he picked up in his father's study nearly 60 years ago.

Before his 2000 presidential run made the Arizona Republican senator a political phenomenon. Before his campaign-finance crusade cemented his reformer bona fides. Before the Keating Five scandal nearly cost him what he holds most dear -- his reputation. Before his now-legendary U.S. Navy career and the brutal years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Helping guide McCain through it all was a novel: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and its protagonist, Robert Jordan, who dies serving a noble but doomed cause in the Spanish Civil War. It was devoured by a precocious 13-year-old who was searching for a way to reconcile his emerging iconoclasm with the rigors of the naval career his Navy family expected him to pursue.

Young McCain finished the book ''aspiring to Jordan's courage and nobility and certain I would possess it someday,'' McCain wrote in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For, a title taken from a line in the novel.

''My No. 1 hero of all time!'' McCain reiterated earlier this year. ``I am an incurable idealist and romantic. Robert Jordan is everything I ever wanted to be. I read that book at age 13 and now at age 70. Nothing's changed.''

DRIVEN BY ROMANTIC NOTIONS

Nothing's changed, but much has transpired. More than any other candidate for president in 2008, McCain has publicly unwrapped and examined his life in interviews, speeches and memoirs -- all while gauging whether he has met the standard that his fictional hero set.

''I think it's important to McCain that he believes what he's doing is right,'' said Mark Salter, McCain's longtime aide and writing partner. ``It's more important than success, which is important -- he's an ambitious guy. But he has to believe he's acting honorably.''

Frequently he's succeeded, most famously in his heroic survival of five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the searing, defining drama of his life.

In Congress, he followed his heart -- if not political expediency -- by opposing the deployment of Marines to Beirut in 1982, defying the wishes of President Ronald Reagan and his Republican elders, and supporting U.S. forces in the Balkans in 1995, against the wishes of most Republicans, including Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, whose presidential campaign McCain then chaired.

At other times, McCain has faltered. There have been private failures, such as the breakup of his first marriage. And public ones: McCain's involvement in meeting with federal savings and loan regulators in 1987 on behalf of a banker who later was revealed to be corrupt tarred the Arizona senator as one of the ''Keating Five.'' That led to a lengthy Senate ethics inquiry, which ultimately absolved McCain of misconduct.

McCain called it ''one of the worst experiences of my life.'' He feared for years that he had earned a reputation as ``a man whose favor could be bought.''

Redemption came via reform, as McCain worked to sever the relationship between campaign fundraising and governing. After years of effort against the vigorous opposition of much of his own party and deep-pocketed special interests, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill became law in 2002.

It all led to a rollicking, but failed, 2000 presidential bid in which McCain revealed his full self to an unsuspecting electorate: funny, engaging and relentlessly -- indeed, almost pathologically -- honest. Until he wasn't -- when he tried to finesse whether the Confederate Stars and Bars should fly over the South Carolina state capitol. He pleased no one, including himself.

McCain started the 2008 campaign as a favorite for the Republican nomination. Yet last year he faded in polls and fundraising, victimized in many ways by his penchant for independent thinking, his determination to live as he thought Jordan would.

STANDING APART FROM PEERS

McCain's desire for the presidency occasionally collides with his work for what he considers right.

First, there are his apostasies from Republican dogma. To campaign-finance reform and the distrust of his party's religious wing -- some of whose leaders he has gone out of his way to alienate -- add the tinderbox issue of immigration. His support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, rather than the conservatives' preferred enforcement-only approach, has earned him the nickname ''Juan McCain'' from the talk-radio right.

Then there's what McCain's admirers on the center and left consider his inexplicable embrace of the Iraq War.

McCain considers the Iraq War not simply the defining issue of the campaign, but of a generation; he believes himself the best prepared by dint of experience and temperament to lead what he considers a necessary fight; and he hopes that Republican voters will favor a man of steady conviction over the likes of Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, whom he considers chameleons and latecomers.

As McCain -- whose moribund campaign was revived after his victory in New Hampshire -- put it in a speech last summer in New Hampshire, at a low point of his campaign: ``I will stand where I stand today and trust you to give me a fair hearing. There is too much at stake in this election for any candidate to do less.''