Seeds of McCain’s war views in ’74 thesis

Americans captured after 1968 had proven to be more susceptible to North Vietnamese pressure, he argued, because they “had been exposed to the divisive forces, which had come into focus as a result of the anti-war movement in the US”.

To insulate against such doubts, he recommended that the military should teach its recruits not only how to fight but also the reasons for American foreign policies like the containment of Southeast Asian communism — even though, McCain acknowledged, “a programme of this nature could be construed as “brainwashing” or “thought control” and could come in for a great deal of criticism”.

Now a senator, McCain often points to his nine months at the War College as the time that crystallized his views toward foreign conflicts like the war in Iraq. He has talked about his studies as a tutorial in the hows-and-whys of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. But the 40-page final paper he produced was limited to an evaluation of the military code of conduct through the prism of his “narrow, but personal, viewpoint”.

It was in many ways a first draft of his political autobiography, recounting the ennobling stories of resistance that he and his co-author, Mark Salter, would later retell in his 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers.

McCain’s thesis also revealed a welter of other emotions about his years as a prisoner of war, including a deep anger at those he considered collaborators, a tough-minded disdain for public hand-wringing about captives like himself, and a sharp impatience with the American government for failing to “explain to its people, young and old, some basic facts of its foreign policy”. But at the same time, McCain also urged that any military survival training should include lessons in what he called “the necessity to forgive.”

McCain’s paper — obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Times by Matt Welch, an author of a book about McCain — sheds new light on the experience that first brought him national attention and remains a staple of his campaign commercials.

His conclusions hint at themes of his career, like his habit of making peace with enemies. And his arguments that the government and the military should have done more to convince the voters and troops about the case for the war in Vietnam echo in current debates about Iraq as well.

Asked if he still had those views, McCain said in an e-mail that he still believed the anti-war movement had hurt the morale of some prisoners, although he added the vast majority “performed their duty with courage and resolve irrespective of how controversy about the war influenced their view of it”.

Historians, though, say his assertion that the anti-war movement weakened the resistance of Americans captured late in the war is misleading, in part because almost all the most cooperative prisoners were captured early and in part because many other cultural shifts contributed to differences in the later war captives. And some of his fellow prisoners also question the connection between the war protests and the camp collaborators.

“Don’t connect those guys with the anti-war movement,” said Orson Swindle, a prisoner who became a friend of McCain. “It was the guy in the next cell who was the reason we were trying so hard to uphold the code and our honour, and those guys just betrayed everything we stood for.”

But others say it is easy to see how McCain’s dismay at prisoners’ propaganda statements could feed his current impatience with calls for a withdrawal from Iraq. In the crucible of the camps, it was easy to see the collaborators — broadcasting anti-war statements over prison loudspeakers, smiling for Jane Fonda and visiting peace activists, enjoying the rewards of better food and less torture — as embodiments of the war protesters that the North Vietnamese counted on to wear down the American war effort.