We will hear much, in the next four months, about the differences between John
McCain, the 71-year-old white Republican candidate for the presidency of the
United States, and Barack Obama, the 46-year-old black Democrat. But for all
their contrasts, they have this in common: both have written books about
their absent fathers, revealing autobiographies that follow a remarkably
similar narrative structure. Even the titles echo one another: Faith of My
Fathers, written by McCain in 1999, and Dreams from my Father, by Obama,
published in 1995.
Each book tells the story of a troubled youth, and a revered but distant
patriarch; each was written before its author had plunged into presidential
politics; each describes a painful voyage of self-discovery; and each is
written with a compelling honesty very different from the vast majority of
political memoirs.
At one level, the presidential race is a battle between sharply contrasting
personalities; at another, it is a race involving the two fathers - both
long-dead, both missing for much of their sons' childhoods - who shaped them.
The fathers might have come from different planets. John S. McCain Sr was a
four-star admiral, the hard-bitten scion of a warrior clan; Barack Obama Sr
was a Kenyan goatherd from the Luo tribe, a wandering soul who tried, and
failed, to make his mark in post-colonial Africa. Yet both fathers are
defining figures in their sons' lives, paternal templates against which they
measure themselves.
Obama describes Barack Hussein Obama Sr as “the father I had never truly
known”: a charming, intelligent, feckless figure who came to Hawaii from
Kenya on a scholarship, married Obama's mother and produced the future
presidential candidate, then vanished back to Africa soon afterwards.
For years, brought up by a single mother and her parents, the young Obama
could only imagine his father through legend, stories told and retold. “My
father was missing,” he writes. “And nothing that my mother or grandparents
told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.” The father became a
fantasy figure: “The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding
leader. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that
I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” The two Baracks met again
only once: a brief, strained reunion when Obama was 10. A decade later, an
aunt called from Kenya to say that Obama Sr had died in car accident: “I
felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”
In the intervening years, Barack Obama had struggled to find a meaning to his
life as a half-black, half-white misfit in a racially charged America. He
moved, with his remarried mother, to Indonesia, and then back again; he
stopped referring to his white blood, concerned that this might be
“ingratiating”. The search for identity is raw: “I was trying to raise
myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance,
no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Obama tried to
blunt the frustration by artificial means. “Pot had helped, and booze, and
maybe a little blow when you could afford it...something that could push
questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the
landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”
Cut to the same point in John McCain's life story and - although his start in
life and family circumstances could hardly have been more different - one
finds a comparable character, another quest for identity. Hell-raiser,
drinker, a fighter with a short attention span and a shorter temper, the
young McCain seemed, by his own account, to be heading for a life of
meaningless self-indulgence. “I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my
free hours at bars and beach parties, and generally misused my good health
and youth.” Martial valour is the central motif of McCain's memoir. His
father, a wartime submarine commander, would rise to the very summit of the
US Navy; his grandfather had been a hellfire four-star admiral. The warrior
clan traced its lineage back to “the distinguished conqueror” Charlemagne.
“For two centuries,” he writes, “the men of my family were raised to go to
war”.
Like Obama, McCain's self-definition revolves around his father, the
inscrutable patriarch, gruff, hard-drinking, idolised, and seldom present.
McCain writes that, in naval families, “you are taught to consider their
absence not as a deprivation, but as an honour”. Growing up, McCain longed
for his father's approval, but “indications of his regard for me were more
often found in the things he didn't say than the things he did”. As with
Obama, there was a father-shaped hole in McCain's life, although he
expresses it in less emotional terms. “I resented my father's absences,
interpreting them as a sign that he loved his work more than his children.
This was unfair of me, and I regret having felt that way.”
Obama's moment of self-discovery came with a trip to Africa in 1988, at the
age of 27. In Kenya he found numerous half-brothers and half-sisters, and
his father's wives squabbling over a pitiful inheritance. He found out the
truth about his father and, as he tells it, he found himself. Obama Sr, the
inspiring leader of men imagined by his American son, had fallen from favour
long before his death, winding up sad, drunken and embittered, with a string
of failed marriages and children he could not afford. “All my life,” Obama
reflects, “I'd been wrestling with nothing but a ghost.” His anger
resonates. “The king is overthrown, I thought...I can do as I damn well
please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me
otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than he did.”
And yet, the dead father led him home. In mud huts, Obama sat with his African
kin and explored a shared past, rituals, disputes and hopes, discovering a
“joy of human warmth” absent in cold America. At his father's grave, he
wept: “I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a
matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw
that my life in America - the black life, the white life, the sense of
abandonment that I'd felt as a boy - was all connected with this small plot
of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the
colour of my skin.”
McCain was almost the same age when he, too, found catharsis and meaning,
though in a very different place. In 1967, the young navy pilot was shot
down over Hanoi. Suffering horrific injuries and almost murdered by a
Vietnamese mob, McCain spent the next five and a half years as a PoW,
repeatedly tortured, abused and clamped in solitary confinement.
Admiral John McCain was now commander of all US forces in Vietnam. Because of
his status, the young PoW was offered early release, which he refused. He
did, however, sign a confession under torture, a source of lingering guilt,
behind which lurks, once again, the shadow of the hard-driving father: “I
was ashamed. I felt faithless...I still wince when I recall wondering if my
father had heard of my disgrace.”
The faith of his fathers - an amalgam of courage, belief and, above all,
honour - is what kept McCain sane and alive. “The sanctity of personal
honour was the only lesson my father felt necessary to impart to me...all
else, he reasoned, would be satisfactorily managed were I to accept,
gratefully, the demands of honour.” Permanently in pain, frequently in
solitary, McCain resolved to make something of his life. “In prison, I fell
in love with my country...I was no longer the boy to whom liberty meant
simply that I could do as I pleased,” he writes. “I resolved that when I
regained my freedom, I would seize opportunities to spend what remained of
my life in more important pursuits.” Compared with the subtlety and nuance
of Obama's self-revelation, this redemptive patriotism has the ring of
Hollywood, yet reading McCain's spare and often grimly amusing account of
his captivity, it is impossible not to admire his sheer, bloody-minded grit.
At the end of Obama's book, one likes his absent father more; McCain's memoir
leaves one admiring his father a little less, in spite of the son's
protestations. There is something inhuman about the insistent drum-beat of
sacrifice, courage and duty. When Admiral McCain first hears of his son's
capture, he goes on to a formal dinner and does not mention the fact to
anyone; he replies to letters of condolence with a clipped formula; he
orders the B52s to bomb Hanoi, knowing his son is imprisoned there. “Few
close observers of my father ever detected that my captivity caused him
great suffering. He never let his concern affect his attention to duty or
restrain him from prosecuting the war to the greatest extent,” McCain
writes. This may be the mark of an effective military commander, but a
willingness to bomb your own son is not the mark of a great dad. In McCain's
world, it seems, duty trumps feeling.
Barack Obama's father, by contrast, emerges as an attractively flawed human,
generous to the end with money he did not have, clinging to a frayed
dignity. This is a man whom a son could have loved, had he only been there,
or able to “outlive a mocking fate”. McCain's book is a work of raw realism,
but Obama's is a work of art.
Written long before politics beckoned, it contains passages of prose that
suggest Obama is a writer who happened to take up politics, rather than
another politician obliged to feed public curiosity. His experience as a
child brought up by a single mother is central to his controversial
insistence that black fathers realise “responsibility does not end at
conception”. Some critics, including civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, have
accused him of “talking down to blacks”, but the lack of a father seems to
lie at the core of his personality and his politics: “There's some who've
been saying I've been talking too tough, talking about responsibility,” he
said this week. “I'm here to report: I'm not going to stop talking about it.”
Both candidates have since written more conventional campaign books, rotund
with policy prescriptions and self-inflating anecdote. It is pure
coincidence that both have also written parallel journeys, voyages around
two contrasting, missing fathers, far more revealing than any speech or
interview could ever be. One or other of these two extraordinary life
stories will propel the next president to the White House: and whichever man
is eventually sworn into office, the ghost of his father will be standing
alongside.
