The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

The subject was causing consternation among the governments, military, and intelligentsia of the West, including ours. I spent most of my time in Halifax reassuring friends that the United States government consists of more than the White House. Congress and, I hoped, the people the new President would appoint to senior national security positions would provide continuity in U.S. foreign policy, compensate for the lack of experience in the Oval Office, and restrain the occupant from impulsively

I’m of the opinion that unless Putin is made to regret his decision he will return to the scene of the crime again and again.

He will not stop until the political and personal price he’s made to pay for his sabotage is greater than the advantages it has provided him. He never was, he is not now, and he never will be our partner.

trust the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, an experienced, skilled prosecutor, and a man of exceptional probity and character, to separate fact from fiction, and get to the bottom of the so-called dossier.

Putin and I have history, you could say, each of us having regularly made known our low opinion of the other. Yet we have never actually met.

my old friend and road trip buddy Lindsey Graham. He’s the second-funniest man I’ve met in this business, after the late Mo Udall, my Arizona congressional colleague and mentor. With an eye for the absurd, he can brighten up the dreariest day and make any journey, even the most exhausting slog, fun.

I’m grateful to all of them. I had a long talk with an old friend, Joe Biden, whom I first got to know when I was the Navy’s liaison to the Senate and he was a first-term senator, way back in the Jurassic era. His son Beau had succumbed to the same kind of brain cancer.

Joe and I have argued a lot over the years, but he is a first-class human being, and it’s a lucky thing to be his friend.

We need each other. We need friends in the world, and they need us. The bell tolls for us, my friends. Humanity counts on us, and we ought to take measured pride in that. We have not been an island. We were “involved in mankind.”

would like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different.

want to urge Americans, for as long as I can, to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it,” spoke my hero, Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I do, too. I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one.

What an ingrate I would be to curse the fate that concludes the blessed life I’ve led. I prefer to give thanks for those blessings, and my love to the people who blessed me with theirs. The bell tolls for me. I knew it would. So I tried, as best I could, to stay a “part of the main.” I hope those who mourn my passing, and even those who don’t, will celebrate as I celebrate a happy life lived in imperfect service to a country made of ideals, whose continued success is the hope of the world. And I wish all of you great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine.