The imperfect hero

"Look," said Salter, sounding exasperated, "Bush hugged him. What should McCain have done -- taken out a gun and shot him?"

Temper, temper

What can you learn about a man from his nicknames?

To his high school friends, McCain was "Punk," "Nasty" and "McNasty." At the Naval Academy, they called him "John Wayne McCain." Washington magazine once dubbed him "Senator Hothead."

In McCain's own telling, he has a bad attitude that has followed him from infancy into old age. Sometimes it is a thing to be proud of, sometimes a thing to regret.

"My temper?" he has joked. "I was just exploding about it this morning."

In his memoir, McCain said his parents recalled him developing "an outsized temper" at age 2: He would hold his breath till he crashed to the floor unconscious.

At 12, during one of many cross-country moves with his mother; older sister, Sandy; and younger brother, Joe; his mother became so exasperated that she cracked him on the head with an aluminum thermos, denting the thermos. "From that time on," Roberta McCain told McCain biographer Robert Timberg, "he was a pain in the neck."

Small and always the new kid at school, he picked fights. "I foolishly believed that fighting, as well as challenging school authorities and ignoring school regulations, was indispensable to my self-esteem and helped me form new friendships," he wrote.

Stories abound about McCain's temper. As recently as last year, he dropped the F-bomb on Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn during a Senate debate on immigration reform.

McCain's aides say his temper is really passion -- and something he directs only at peers, never subordinates.

Also, as Salter pointed out, McCain gets mad, but he gets over it: "I mean, come on," said Salter. "He normalized relations with Vietnam!"

In 2000, the governor of Arizona, Jane Dee Hull, infuriated McCain when she endorsed George W. Bush over her home state senator. She garnered headlines for saying she was weary of McCain's angry outbursts and spoke of having to hold the phone away from her ear when he was on the line.

But after she left office, Hull was appointed to the United Nations as a public delegate, a position that requires Senate approval. She called McCain to ask for his support.

"Jane," she said he replied, "you know I always support Arizona people."

Naval legacy

McCain family history is entwined with the great military struggles of the 20th century, an epoch John McCain once called "my century."