Opinion: War hero John McCain hosts war hero movie marathon Memorial Day
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Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, perhaps this country’s most famous living war hero, is also known for his love of movies. Over Memorial Day weekend, McCain has agreed to host the AMC cable network’s movie marathon celebrating war heroes.
The lineup is includes “Midway,” “Patton,” “The Longest Day,” “Hamburger Hill,” “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and “Battle of the Bulge.”
None of those movies, as it happens, is McCain’s favorite. He told Katie Couric last year during the presidential campaign that his favorite movie of all time is Elia Kazan’s ‘Viva Zapata,’ starring Marlon Brando. ‘It’s a heroic tale of a person who sacrificed everything for what he believed in,’ McCain told Couric.
As most people know, McCain spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of Hanoi during the Vietnam War. He endured unspeakable acts of cruelty that left him permanently injured.
Less known are his credentials as a movie maven, which turned out to be a great advantage for his fellow prisoners, who had so little they were reduced to playing bridge with cards made of toilet paper.
In prison, McCain and his mates created an ad hoc university -- men with expertise in a certain subject taught what they knew to their fellow inmates. In typically understated fashion, McCain taught a course called ‘The History of the World from the Beginning.’
But he also instituted ‘movie nights,’ during which he would recount movies scene by scene (sometimes he’d make up whole plots, but no one cared).
During the presidential campaign, one of McCain’s POW buddies told a reporter that McCain’s powers of recall were so tremendous that when he was finally home from Vietnam and took his wife to see ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ he felt like he’d already seen it.
Memorial Day won’t be McCain’s first brush with cable movie stardom. In 2004, in the run-up to the presidential election, Turner Classic Movie channel asked McCain and a few other pols to pick movies that had influenced them politically, and then introduce them.
McCain picked 1957’s ‘Paths of Glory.’ (Then-Sen. Joseph Biden picked ‘Dead Poets Society.’ Sen. Orrin Hatch chose ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ That year’s Democratic vice presidential nominee, John Edwards, who has returned to the headlines this week with the disclosure that his wife threw up when she learned of his extramarital affair, chose ‘Dr. Strangelove.’)
-- Robin Abcarian
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Associated Press
