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Joe Biden on John McCain: ‘We’re Part of Something Much Bigger Than Ourselves’ At McCain’s Memorial, Tears, Laughs and Allusions to the Man Not Invited
(about 2 hours later)
PHOENIX — Thousands of Arizonans gathered Thursday morning for a memorial service here honoring Senator John McCain, with tributes from sports stars, family members and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to an adopted son of this state who became one of its most iconic figures. PHOENIX — Senator John McCain was remembered Thursday at a memorial service that evoked the one-time prisoner of war’s unbreakable will, the Arizona senator’s devotion to his adopted state and the maverick Republican’s willingness to break with his party to defend what he believed were his country’s founding principles.
One day after his family, friends and fellow lawmakers paid their respects to Mr. McCain as he lay in state inside the rotunda of Arizona’s Capitol, the late senator was remembered for his 35-year-career in Congress, in a service suffused with the culture of the Southwest. While none of the friends, family members and fellow lawmakers who paid him tribute between song and scripture invoked the name of President Trump, who was not invited, they held up the political values of the man they honored to draw an unmistakable contrast.
A Navajo flutist, Jonah Littlesunday, played a hymn, recalling Mr. McCain’s relationship with his state’s native tribes; Tommy Espinoza, a leader in Arizona’s Hispanic community offered remarks; and the Arizona Cardinals great Larry Fitzgerald also spoke from the pulpit of the sprawling North Phoenix Baptist Church that Mr. McCain once attended. “John understood that America was first and foremost an idea, audacious and risky, organized around not tribe but ideals,” said former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., speaking at a Baptist church here that included thousands of mourners and nearly a quarter of the Senate.
Grant Woods, Mr. McCain’s first congressional chief of staff and a former Arizona attorney general, was even blunter.
“He would not stand by as people try to trample the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment,” said Mr. Woods, a Republican.
But the hour-and-a-half service honoring Mr. McCain, who would have turned 82 Wednesday, included more tears — and far more laughter — than it did high-minded political lectures.
Mr. Biden recalled that he once found his wife, Jill, dancing on a cafe table in Greece after Mr. McCain took her to dinner when they were traveling overseas together; the Arizona Cardinals great Larry Fitzgerald Jr. said Mr. McCain would jokingly text him, “You need to pick it up this Sunday”; and Mr. Woods remembered one of the sardonic senator’s recurring jokes: calling the senior-citizen community Leisure World “Seizure World.”
And in a nod to Mr. McCain’s affection for the rites of tradition and his penchant for the irreverent, the ceremony got underway with a choir’s rendition of “Amazing Grace,” but his flag-draped coffin was taken out of the sanctuary by a military honor guard to the piped-in voice of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”
Mr. McCain’s body lay in state in Arizona’s Capitol Wednesday, and his sons spent much of the evening greeting thousands of mourners who braved triple-digit heat to pay their last respects. Arizonans lined the street leading up the church, many holding small American flags or bearing “McCain” signs that resembled his 2008 presidential campaign logo.
The Thursday memorial was part of a weeklong tribute to Mr. McCain, who succumbed last week to brain cancer. Following the service, the coffin carrying Mr. McCain was taken by motorcade to the Phoenix airport and transferred to military aircraft for one final trip to the nation’s capital. In Washington, Mr. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol on Friday before a memorial service on Saturday at the National Cathedral. He will be buried near his alma mater, the Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., on Sunday.
[See the full schedule of memorial events planned for Mr. McCain.][See the full schedule of memorial events planned for Mr. McCain.]
Mr. Biden spoke emotionally of his own losses — including the death of his son Beau from the same type of brain tumor that killed Mr. McCain — and of the long path through grief, at times directly addressing Mr. McCain’s family in the front row. But it was this state that Mr. McCain represented for 35 years in Congress. On Thursday, as a giant video screen above the stage displayed the red-and-green hues of Sedona, he was hailed as an Arizona icon in a ceremony suffused with the culture of the Southwest.
Then, in forceful tones, he eulogized Mr. McCain in terms that seemed intended to paint a contrast with President Trump, who was not in attendance. He recalled Mr. McCain’s devotion to a country and a politics “organized not around tribe but around ideals.” He spoke of the values of “fairness, honesty, dignity, respect, giving hate no safe harbor, leaving no one behind and understanding that as Americans, we’re part of something much bigger than ourselves.” A Navajo flutist performed a hymn, recalling Mr. McCain’s relationship with his state’s native tribes; a choir of children sang the song “Arizona”; and Mr. Fitzgerald invoked the senator’s passion for the state’s sports teams.
“With John,” Mr. Biden said, “it was a value set that was neither selfish nor self-serving.” “He loved this place,” said Mr. Woods, “and if John McCain fell in love with Arizona, Arizona fell in love with John McCain.”
Following the service, the coffin carrying Mr. McCain was taken by motorcade to the Air National Guard base at the Phoenix airport, to be transferred to military aircraft for one final trip to the nation’s capital. In Washington, Mr. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol on Friday before a memorial service on Saturday at the National Cathedral. He will be buried near his alma mater, the Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., on Sunday. Before he married his wife, Cindy, and moved here in 1981, Mr. McCain had lived longer in a Hanoi prisoner-of-war camp than he had any other place, a point he made with devastating effect when questioned about his ties to the state in his first House campaign. Arizona voters elected him the following year and supported him every time he was on the ballot, including in two failed presidential bids, up through his re-election to the Senate two years ago.
Saturday’s events in Washington will include eulogies by the two former presidents who extinguished his own White House ambitions, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But first, Mr. McCain was being remembered in the state he served and the place he spent his final months. With his Vietnam heroism and celebrity preceding him, the rootless son and grandson of admirals would eventually become as identified with this state as the political giants he succeeded, Representative John Rhodes in the House and Barry Goldwater in the Senate.
Before he married his wife, Cindy, and moved to Arizona in 1981, Mr. McCain had lived longer in a Hanoi prisoner of war camp than he had any other place, a point he made with devastating effect when questioned about his ties to the state in his first House campaign. But Arizona voters elected him the following year and supported him every time he was on the ballot, including in two failed presidential bids, up through his re-election to the Senate two years ago. Mr. McCain also embraced the diversity of his state, as the speakers recalled, working closely with the tribes and the Hispanic community.
With his Vietnam heroism and celebrity preceding him, the rootless son and grandson of admirals would eventually become as identified with this state as the political giants he succeeded, Representative John Rhodes in the House and Barry Goldwater in the Senate, before ultimately eclipsing both. Tommy Espinoza, a Mexican-American leader here and one of two Democrats who spoke, noted that even though he was a liberal working with the group Chicanos Por La Causa, Mr. McCain still asked him to help lead his first Senate campaign.
“When all of us here traveled and told people we were from Arizona, people knew two big things about it: John McCain and the Grand Canyon,” Gov. Doug Ducey recalled Wednesday in remarks at a private ceremony in the state Capitol. “Imagining Arizona without John McCain is like picturing an Arizona without the Grand Canyon — it’s just not natural.” And Mr. Espinoza recalled Mr. McCain’s fruitless efforts to overhaul the country’s immigration laws.
[Read the New York Times obituary for Mr. McCain.] “He would say, ‘You know what, I can’t believe these families that come from another country, from Mexico, from Central America, to work — cutting our grass, feeding us, bringing in the labor force that we need — and now we turn on them?’” Mr. Espinoza recounted.
While the service on Thursday was expected to focus on Mr. McCain’s legacy in his adopted state, Mr. Biden was expected to use his eulogy to remember his former colleague and close friend, a relationship that evoked an earlier era of bipartisan comity in Washington. “He understood all of us — whether it was white, black, brown, Asian, to him it didn’t make any difference — what he knew is that we all make America great,” he said, repeating the phrase as silence enveloped the interior of the church.
The two served together for over two decades in the Senate, often sparring over policy disagreements, and faced each other from opposing presidential tickets in 2008. But the garrulous Delaware Democrat and the sardonic Arizona Republican forged a deep friendship that was cemented when Mr. Biden’s eldest son, Beau, learned he had brain cancer. He eventually died from the disease, the same one that Mr. McCain succumbed to on Saturday. Kim Secakuku, a member of Arizona’s Hopi tribe who also attended the service, said she was moved by the tributes. “John McCain was someone who showed respect for people regardless of their background, their wealth or lack thereof, what language they grew up speaking,” she said.
Visiting Mr. McCain at his ranch near Sedona, Ariz., this past spring for what they both knew was a moment to say goodbye, Mr. Biden recalled that his former colleague encouraged him to consider another presidential bid. And that he told Mr. McCain what he had meant to him. [Read the Times obituary for Mr. McCain.]
“I wanted to let him know how much I love him and how much he matters to me and how much I admire his integrity and his courage,” Mr. Biden said in an interview earlier this year. Mr. Biden, a Democrat who served for over two decades with Mr. McCain in the Senate, said his former colleague offered “hate no safe harbor” and was willing to work with anybody who shared his moral code.
The service on Thursday began with an honor guard meeting Mr. McCain’s family and his coffin. Hundreds of the late senator’s constituents were invited, and another thousand seats were made available for the public. “He’d part company with you if you lacked the basic values of decency, respect, knowing that this project is bigger than yourself,” said Mr. Biden.
The schedule included readings from Scripture by two of his seven children; a tribute from a close confidant and former chief of staff, Grant Woods; a bagpiper; and a singing of “Arizona” by an ensemble from the school two of his sons attended. And in his 30-minute eulogy, the former vice president lamented how bitter politics has become, recalling how he and Mr. McCain used to sit with another on the Senate floor until the leaders of their parties reproached them for the show of bipartisanship in the 1990s.
And in a nod to Mr. McCain’s affection for both tradition and rebellion, the service started with the singing of “Amazing Grace” and ended with a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The garrulous Mr. Biden, unsurprisingly, veered off his prepared remarks at times. But he did not offer the gathering’s most awkward moment: that belonged to Mr. Espinoza, who invoked Sarah Palin, Mr. McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Ms. Palin was not invited to any of the memorial services, and Mr. McCain, in his final book and in an HBO documentary, said he wished he had defied his advisers and picked his friend, former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, for vice president.
Mr. McCain asked Mr. Espinoza’s wife, he recalled, what she would think about selecting a woman as his running mate.
“’Well, I really don’t care if it’s a man or a woman — if something happens to you, I want to make sure that person can run the country,’” Mr. Espinoza recounted his wife saying, prompting fleeting and muffled laughs in the church.
There was more poignancy than politics, though, and Mr. Biden did little to hide how saddened he was by the death of his friend. Mr. McCain died of the same type of brain cancer that had felled former Senator Edward M. Kennedy nine years to the day before, and three years after Mr. Biden’s eldest son, Beau, also died of the disease.
“I have had the dubious honor of giving some eulogies for fine women and men I’ve admired,” Mr. Biden said, before calling out to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mr. McCain’s best friend. “But Lindsey, this one’s hard.”
It was Mr. Woods, though, who brought tears to many as he recalled that when Mr. McCain was held captive in Vietnam, one of the guards indicated he was a Christian by drawing the sign of the cross in the dirt of the prison courtyard. It was the Christmas season, Mr. Woods explained, and the guard wanted to demonstrate their shared faith.
The holidays were difficult in the five-and-a-half years Mr. McCain spent in captivity, Mr. Woods said, but prisoners of war endured in part by singing Christmas songs to one another. Mr. McCain’s favorite was “Silent Night.”
As Mr. Woods concluded his remarks, he saluted the naval aviator who refused an early release from prison camp and would go on to be a towering figure in American politics.
“He served his country with honor,” he said. “He fought the good fight. He finished the race. He kept the faith.” And then Mr. Woods stepped from the lectern and drew a cross with his foot on the stage.
“Sleep in heavenly peace,” he said. “Sleep in heavenly peace.”