Fathers Day & John McCain

Those of us who are fathers, those of us who grew up without fathers, have had to learn what makes a father’s worth in making us a man.

John McCain’s lessons about honor, fortitude, forthrightness, forgiveness, country came from his father, but also from the crucible of his captivity. The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick reviews a 1974 writing by John McCain on the military’s Code of Honor among POWs.

As expected from the NYTs, anonymous “historians” are trotted out to belittle McCain’s own firsthand observations. McCain emailed Kirkpatrick, and is quoted, but one is curious what is left out by Kirkpatrick.

I’m sure this wasn’t in McCain’s email, but I’m also sure it well could have been. It’s what makes us fathers of worth, what McCain learned, and what we strive to bring to our sons and nation. And, one can search throughout Barack Obama’s autobiography “Dreams From My Father” and find none of it. There’s the difference that merits much thought on Fathers Day.

If

Rudyard Kipling (1910)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!