LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/us/politics/29mccain.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

WASHINGTON — At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman told Captain John S. McCain III that he was about to attain his life ambition: selection for admiral.

Navy Captain John McCain served as assistant director, Office of Legislative Affairs, Senate Navy Liaison Office, from July 1977 to March 1981. Pictured from left to right at a Senate reception: Senator John Glenn, Navy Captain John McCain, Senator William S. Cohen and Senator Barry Goldwater.

This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

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John S. McCain with his first wife, Carol, and son Doug, arriving in Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida in March 1973.

But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the Sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs.

He had found a sense of purpose in an apprenticeship to some of the Senate’s fiercest cold warriors. And in Senator John G. Tower, a hawkish Texas Republican, he had found a new mentor, beginning a relationship that many compared to the bond between a father and son.

With Mr. Tower’s encouragement, Mr. McCain declined the prospect of his first admiral’s star to make a run for Congress, saying that he could “do more good there,” Mr. Lehman recalled. But he knew duty to country was only part of the reason.

“He just loved it up there,” Mr. Lehman recalled. “Like very few military people, John heard the music up there, and he really wanted to do it.”

From prisoner of war to politician in a hurry, it was the turning point that started Mr. McCain on the trajectory toward this year’s Republican presidential nomination.

After five and a half years of listening to senators’ antiwar speeches over prison camp loudspeakers, Mr. McCain came home in 1973 contemptuous of America’s elected officials, convinced Congress had betrayed the country’s fighting men by hamstringing the war effort. But in the halls of the Senate, Mr. McCain discovered a new calling, at once high-minded and glamorous.

One of several senate military liaisons assigned as advocates for their services and escorts for official travel, Mr. McCain quickly emerged as the senators’ favorite. He had a thick head of hair as white as his dress uniform and he showed a natural politician’s gift for winning over an audience. He excelled at leavening official business with a spirit of fun — telling deadpan stories about his years “in the cooler,” playing marathon poker games on flights overseas, or surprising senators at a refueling stop in Ireland with a sidetrip to Durty Nelly’s, a 17th century pub. He was the epitome of cool, one senator’s son recalled, with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and Theodore H. White’s memoir “In Search of History” in the other.

He relished the push-and-pull of legislative battles, eventually even plunging into defense budget fights with a personal agenda that was sometimes at odds with the Carter administration’s secretary of the Navy. He built personal friendships and professional collaborations across ideological divides, a hallmark of his later Senate career. And he applauded the Senate’s leading hawks as they waged what they considered an epic struggle with the Carter administration over America’s place in the post-Vietnam world.

Under Mr. Tower’s tutelage, Mr. McCain turned his anger over the management of the Vietnam war into an all-or-nothing view of international conflict that became one of the few guiding principles in his otherwise unpredictable political career — from his opposition to sending Marine peacekeepers into Lebanon in 1983 to his current staunch support for the Iraq war. And when prominent conservative Christians later protested Mr. Tower’s nomination as defense secretary over allegations of drinking and womanizing, Mr. McCain’s furious counterattack opened the hostilities with that wing of his party that still dog his presidential campaign.

Mr. McCain has often said that he decided to run for office because he felt his war injuries would make attaining the same rank as his father and grandfather “impossible.” But Mr. Lehman, now an adviser to the McCain campaign, and two other top Navy officers familiar with Mr. McCain’s file insist that was not the case.