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"FacebookPinterest\n\nPrologue, December 2006\n\n From The Top\n\nIf you were a Republican living in Washington one month after the mighty midterm defeat of '06, there was one place in town where you could go for reassurance that this, too, would pass. That place was the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where on Monday, December 4, Senator and Mrs. John McCain threw a lavish bash to celebrate both Christmas and, implicitly, McCain's status as undisputed front-runner for the '08 GOP nomination.\n\nIt was an event well suited to the man who had been the party's top fund-raising attraction through the 2006 election cycle and who, in some recent polls, was poised to defeat Hillary Clinton by a double-digit margin. Coat-check girls welcomed the 800 guests at the entrance to the dramatically dimmed beaux arts venue; inside, waiters ladled out dainties and proffered trays of carefully chosen wines. The dapper, white-haired senator from Arizona himself held court at the west end of the hall, surrounded by such a mob of well-wishers that he spent nearly an hour pinned down in the same spot.\n\nAt the other end of the room stood a compact and expressionless 51-year-old man, shaking hands and conversing in a raspy undertone. He looked just as he had back in 1988, when McCain's then press secretary, Torie Clarke, saw him drinking alone at a bar and mistook him for a security guard. Since that chance encounter, Mark Salter had become the senator's coauthor, speechwriter, and closest adviser\u2014the person McCain would say he trusts \"more than anyone else in the world.\" Still, Salter clung to obscurity. He never went on TV and seldom spoke for the record. Neither of which stopped plugged-in Washingtonians from recognizing him and shaking the hand of the man who had done more than anyone to etch the heroic persona of John McCain, maverick, into the American consciousness.\n\nOf course, that maverick ethos was nowhere in evidence that night, a fact of which Salter was well aware. \"It's difficult,\" he'd said earlier, ruminating on the unlikely notion of John McCain as the establishment's candidate. \"We talk about that challenge. I probably don't have an answer for it\u2014other than saying, as long as you're the front-runner, you might as well get the advantages out of it. Get the money. Get the people.\"\n\nThe campaign had certainly gotten the people, buying up the key talent from Bush's fabled 2004 operation, chief among them Bush's national political director, Terry Nelson\u2014who was there working the room, a lanky, bespectacled man known for being the reelect's bad cop. The idea was to pair Nelson's Bushworld savvy with the loyalty and intimate understanding of the senator held by Salter and longtime strategist John Weaver, a lean and dour Texan whom McCain had, of course, nicknamed Sunny and who shared with Salter an emotional, almost fraternal allegiance to McCain. The money would be the province of McCain's third insider, campaign CEO Rick Davis, a smooth acolyte of legendary South Carolina political slasher Lee Atwater. Davis had vowed to haul in a Bushian $154 million, including $48 million in the first quarter alone.\n\nIt all seemed invincible on paper: Bush had had Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman; McCain would have Weaver and Nelson. Bush had Pioneers and Rangers as big donors and bundlers; McCain would have Admirals and Lieutenants. But Salter knew otherwise. That night it was already beginning to dawn on him and others in the campaign that Davis's fund-raising boasts had been ridiculously optimistic. The contribution-gathering operation had barely begun; as late as mid-December, Davis's finance director still hadn't booked a single event for January, and Nelson and Weaver were pleading with the senator to strip Davis of his title of CEO. Meanwhile, Weaver had locked in the GOP's top campaign talents with lucrative contracts\u2014to the point where, as one adviser later put it, \"we'd joke that we're turning into the Yankees.\" In other words, McCain was spending like Bush but collecting checks like Ron Paul.\n\nAs the band launched into \"Celebration,\" Salter's inert expression held back all these worries. At the Corcoran, impending disaster was nowhere in evidence. The Iraq war, unpopular though it was, hadn't yet undercut McCain's national-security bona fides; immigration reform was months from emerging as a conservative deal-breaker; and judging from appearances, McCain was still the surest bet in town. As the evening wore on, one could stand outside the museum and monitor the approach of men in tus and elegantly coiffed women. They were Bush staffers, furtively abandoning the staid White House Christmas party to celebrate 2008's Republican savior. As one party-hopper would recall, \"I thought the event was perfect. That's where McCain was at the time. He was the darling.\"\n\nSeven months later, the toast of the town was merely toast.\n\nAct I, May 2006\n\n A Falwell Moment\n\n\"McCain's job is just to be himself,\" Salter told me as the two of us sped through Virginia, heading toward the Beltway. \"And my job is to draw people to him for the same reasons I'm attracted to him.\"\n\nIt was May 13, and Salter sat in the passenger seat of my car, lighting one cigarette after another and appraising the political horizon with only the barest hint of anxiety. An hour earlier, he had watched McCain deliver a commencement address at Liberty University, whose founder, Jerry Falwell, had been called out by McCain in 2000 as one of the religious right's \"agents of intolerance.\" At the time, the appearance was a strategic no-brainer for the campaign: \"The group McCain attracted in 2000 wasn't big enough to win: He had to attract more conservative Republican voters,\" said one adviser. To critics of the campaign, however, the pilgrimage to Liberty seemed nothing less than a calculated effort to shore up votes from religious conservatives.\n\nSalter thought differently: \"We knew this was going to get some people's attention, but it's just a commencement address.\" After all, Falwell had approached McCain, not the other way around. \"The call came to our scheduler, and he just told her sure. We wouldn't have said no. I've written dozens of commencement speeches.\"\n\nThe notion of John-McCain-as-spineless-panderer ran thoroughly counter to the image Salter had spent the past decade creating. It was Salter's work on McCain's 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers, that had in large part propelled the senator's 2000 presidential bid from obscurity to center stage by casting him as a reluctant, bullshit-free war hero. \"He and I are so close and so alike,\" the senator would say, \"that he writes the way I think.\"\n\nSalter channeled McCain so effortlessly because he loved the man so unabashedly. Throughout their long association, he'd maintained a powerful belief in something he called \"McCain Moments,\" those times wherein a seemingly random occurrence would crystallize his guy as a model of honor and integrity. Even leaving out his five-and-a-half-year stint as a guest of the North Vietnamese government, McCain had a million such moments. There was that time back in 1989, two months into Salter's job as the Arizona senator's speechwriter, that McCain, suddenly engulfed in the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, turned to his young aide on the Senate floor and, out of the blue, assured him, \"It's not always going to be like this.\" And there was Salter's second overseas trip with McCain, to El Salvador, where the senior command offered to og a confession out of some men believed to have killed six Jesuit priests. \"Where I come from,\" McCain informed the officer, \"there's no honor from beating your adversary. It's from not becoming your adversary.\"\n\nSalter also loved the little quirks of the man: his horrendous donut-and-Coke diet; his pockets bulging with feathers and other superstitious totems; the way he stood at attention while on the telephone with Bush because dammit he's our commander in chief. These eccentricities added texture to McCain's authenticity, a quality Salter especially revered having spent his early adulthood in Davenport, Iowa, hammering railroad spikes for $4.25 an hour and hanging out in a local bar called the Jolly Roger with gentlemen who had their girlfriends' names tattooed on their guts. As Salter would confess, \"John McCain is the kind of man I would've liked to have been if I'd made the right choices in life.\"\n\nBut along with the goofiness and proud moments came other, less golden McCain Moments, ones in which the senator showed his short fuse, his sanctimony, his ability to lose his shit and self-immolate while his staffers obligingly poured on the kerosene. Salter had been party to that behavior during the 2000 South Carolina primary and had certainly wanted to avoid a reprise at Liberty. And so the speech he penned for McCain was a bland discourse on civility: \"By all means, let us argue.\u2026 But let us remember, we are not enemies.\"\n\nIt worked. The Liberty students had responded politely; the press corps had disbanded with little to write about; the speech was even described as \"Lincolnesque.\" It was just as McCain had prophesied, Salter observed that afternoon: \"He said, 'I'm coming down to say good luck to a bunch of nice kids.' \"\n\nAnd that was all, or so it seemed.\n\nAct II, Spring 2007\n\n The War Hits Home\n\nBy early 2007, it was a very different story.\n\n\"It all begins with Liberty University,\" Salter fumed one January evening at a restaurant near the White House. \"Whatever one says of Jerry Falwell, what did you ever see of John McCain in 1999 and 2000 that led you to believe that he wouldn't go anywhere and talk to anybody So what's your [the media's] obligation What's the message That's your obligation! What's his message Not his corporeal presence in Liberty University!\"\n\nWhat Salter hadn't realized back in May was that his prior success at casting McCain as a man of inviolable principles could also be an open invitation to prove otherwise. Post Liberty, McCain was suddenly being characterized in the press as a hypocrite and Bush-administration apologist. In February, two months after the lavish Corcoran gala, McCain was attacked in the Washington Post for supposedly compromising his hard stance on campaign-finance reform. And then things got even worse.\n\nIt started on March 26, when the senator told conservative critic Bill Bennett that \"there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk today.\" Later that day, CNN's Michael Ware openly mocked McCain's assertion as being \"beyond ludicrous\" and further charged that \"McCain's credibility on Iraq, which has been so solid to this point, has now been left out hanging to dry.\"\n\nA week later, on April 1, McCain described his visit to Baghdad's Shorja market as an unfettered stroll, when in fact he'd been escorted by twenty-two soldiers, ten armored Hummvies, and two Apache attack helicopters. This time the media blowback was even fiercer: \"I thought he was talking nonsense,\" CBS foreign correspondent Allen Pizzey declared that day. McCain called Salter from Baghdad, his voice expressing bewilderment: \"It's like the press is invested in losing this war!\"\n\nAs public support for the war waned throughout the winter, McCain's boosterism began exacting a huge political toll. He'd certainly delivered his share of jabs to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld over the war's handling, but he always stopped short of criticizing President Bush himself, raising to moderates the question, How different would a McCain administration really be from the Bush White House\n\nIn any event, to the extent that McCain was pandering to conservatives, he appeared to be doing one hell of a lousy job at it. The campaign wasn't attracting new donors, and all the negative press was hitting him in the pocketbook. According to one senior staffer, the big donors, being \"high-level consumers of information and tending to be more moderate,\" were closely following McCain's utterances on Iraq throughout the first quarter and \"weren't coming onboard.\" Additionally, says another top adviser, \"we sure heard a lot about the Falwell thing.\"\n\nThe fund-raising woes were compounded by the fact that, incredibly, no one at the campaign's Arlington headquarters was monitoring the discrepancy between dollars in and dollars out. \"And really,\" says campaign manager Rick Davis now, in his own defense, \"it's pretty typical of a campaign, especially a national campaign, where you're in essence running two campaigns: one that worries about the money coming in and has its own organization and paid staff, and then the spend side. Even the most successful campaigns don't necessarily mingle the two.\"\n\nBut the McCain campaign's chosen model, Bush '04, did precisely that. Ken Mehlman had developed daily, weekly, and monthly budgets for every campaign division, reviewed bank-draft statements daily, and readjusted the budgets accordingly. Without such readjustments, Weaver and Nelson were continuing to spend as if they had $150 million to burn.\n\nAs Salter fought to push back against all the bad press, half of McCain's 150,000 loyal donors vanished. Davis's finance director quietly revised the campaign's publicly stated first-quarter target of $48 million, \"chiseling the number down till she came up with $17 million or $18 million,\" according to one senior staffer. Instead, come April, McCain had brought in a paltry $12.5 million, third behind new front-runner\u2014and America's other \"hero\"\u2014Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. A riot of finger-pointing ensued. To Rick Davis, the fault lay with the way former Bushie Terry Nelson was running the ship. \"We fell in love with a lie,\" he says. \"We thought that all we had to do was build a Bush model, and we were patting ourselves on the back for hiring this Bush guy [Nelson] who could implement the model.\"\n\nNelson disagreed. As he had in December, he again petitioned McCain to diminish Davis's role. Nelson also wanted the finance director, Carla Eudy, replaced with his fellow Bushworld veteran Mary Kate Johnson. McCain assented to both, but instead of announcing the changes himself, the Straight Talker left it to a campaign operative, former senator Phil Gramm, to inform the staff.\n\nThe McCain camp was now officially split into two factions: Davis on one side and Weaver and Nelson on the other. In early April, McCain's remaining senior advisers convened to discuss how to get back on-message. Change the subject, it was decided. A big speech on energy reform. A serious Iraq address at the Virginia Military Institute\u2014remind everyone that McCain's been right on this issue since day one. The recently demoted Rick Davis wasn't invited, and it was somewhere in the middle of an otherwise upbeat meeting that Salter wondered aloud whether his exclusion might not come back to bite them: \"It's not like we can just put Rick in a corner and give him a fucking banana.\"\n\nAct III, June 2007\n\n Where There Are Town Halls, There Is Hope\n\nOn the morning of June 5, in a Gilford, New Hampshire, fire station, McCain was conducting one of his beloved town-hall meetings and really letting the nostalgia flow. \"This time in 1999,\" he quipped, \"I was 3 percent in the polls, with a 5 percent margin of error.\u2026\"\n\nSalter stood on the periphery with Weaver, sharing a bad feeling about today. Tonight in Manchester would be the third GOP debate, and Salter knew that the other candidates would lay into McCain about the Bush-McCain-Kennedy immigration bill now wheezing on the senatorial operating table. There seemed no escape from it, no way to win. And McCain really needed to win, because the bad news was continuing everywhere: The anemic first-quarter showing had forced the senator to lay off nearly fifty staffers, and he had spent the previous two months scrambling from one fund-raiser to the next and so far had little to show for it. Giuliani still led, and Romney, that gleaming haircut of a man who explained that he never owned a hunting license because he'd hunted only \"small varmints, if you will\"\u2014Salter loved that: \"That's him, that's Romney, in one sentence\"\u2014seemed able to pull a million dollars out of his ass whenever it suited.\n\nStill, McCain emerged from the town hall feeling charged up. \"We just need to do more of them,\" he said an hour later, as he sat in a diner in Manchester with the rest of his staff and studied the menu. \"I've spent so much time fund-raising.\u2026\" He pursed his lips in distaste. Salter sat across the table, watching McCain but saying nothing. He knew what was on the calendar all that month. Fund-raisers. Gobs of fund-raisers.\n\nMidway through lunch, the diner's owner appeared, bearing a platter of gooey matter. \"Your rival sent over some nachos!\" he announced.\n\nSalter was the first to make the calculation: Tom Tancredo, the immigration demagogue from Colorado, was somewhere in the diner. \"Get the joke\" Salter said to McCain.\n\nThe senator stared momentarily at the platter and said, \"Ha ha. I hope he didn't spend all his campaign war chest on it.\"\n\nAs everyone stood to leave, McCain walked over to the table where Tancredo sat grinning with his aides. McCain shook his hand, then did the same with everyone else at the table.\n\n\"Bunch of jerks,\" he said to them, cheerfully.\n\nA few hours later, Salter was pacing in the debate holding room, watching the TV monitor. Things began okay. Only okay. McCain admitted he hadn't read the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate expressing doubt about Saddam's WMD. On the second round of questions, McCain got in a crack about Hillary\u2014and first applause of the night, okay we'll take that.\u2026 Then the slog of immigration, and as forecast, they all came after McCain, but they're not laying a glove on him, he's gonna get out of this ne.\u2026\n\nStill, McCain didn't get to play the front-runner's game. He needed to score points. His moment came after the halfway mark, when it was the audience's turn to ask questions. Town hall\u2014this is it, this is John McCain's format.\u2026 A lovely and poised young woman named Erin Flanagan took the microphone. Her little brother had been killed in Iraq. \"As a member of an American family who has suffered so greatly at the choices made by the current administration,\" Ms. Flanagan asked the ten candidates, \"I desperately would like to know what you, as commander in chief, would do\u2026to bring this conflict to a point at which we can safely bring our troops home.\"\n\nDuncan Hunter responded first, followed by Sam Brownback. Throughout, Salter was watching McCain sitting in his chair\u2014locked in on her, leaning into the question\u2014and Salter could feel it coming, this is it this is it this is it\u2026\n\nMcCain then stood and walked to the edge of the stage. \"Ma'am\"\u2014and like that, it was as if there were only two people in the auditorium now, the senator with his halting voice and the young woman with her sad brown eyes\u2014\"I want to tell you thank you for your brother's service and sacrifice to our country. We are proud of you and your endurance, and we're proud of your sacrifice. This war\u2014I'm going to give you a little straight talk. This war was very badly mismanaged for a long time, and Americans have made great sacrifices, some of which were unnecessary. \u2026 I believe we have a strategy which can succeed, so that the sacrifice of your brother would not be in vain. \u2026\"\n\nSalter was teary-eyed even before the applause. There it was, like the tolling of a bell. A McCain Moment! And Salter turned to Weaver, saw his lean face go ecstatic, and he thought: That's the McCain that posted a nineteen-point victory over George W. Bush in New Hampshire. That's the guy they love.\u2026 He is the president on that stage.\n\nAct IV, Early July 2007\n\n The Other Kind of Moment\n\n\"Good meeting, good meeting,\" McCain said on the first day of July as he walked out of his office, having just signed off on another list of staff layoffs. The senator then flew to Baghdad, leaving it to Terry Nelson to announce the cuts at the general staff meeting. Nelson himself had nearly quit the day before, and when Salter had learned of this, he had reported it to McCain and had then come back to Nelson later in the day, saying, \"He doesn't want you to resign.\" Nelson told Salter that he'd take off a few days to think it all through. Salter was grateful. \"McCain's gotta come back from Iraq with his head on straight about the way forward,\" he told Nelson.\n\nApparently, behind all this confusion lurked the unseen hand of Rick Davis. Though he had not set foot in the Arlington office once throughout the second quarter, Davis had been traveling with McCain's wife, Cindy, who earlier in the year had introduced Davis to a well-known member of the press as \"our best friend.\" That reporter had never before met Rick Davis; it wasn't Davis's style to work on background with the media in the manner of Salter and Weaver. Instead, Davis communicated with whom it mattered most: the boss and his wife.\n\nIn meetings with the rest of the McCain senior team, Davis had been quick to assent to everything (\"Pushing Rick was like pushing an open door,\" says one campaign insider). But just as quickly, he would air his dissent behind their backs to McCain. Not slashing senior-staff salaries, not preparing for the backlash from the right on immigration or the fallout from the middle on Liberty University\u2014there were plenty of things for which Nelson and Weaver deserved criticism. But Davis chose not to say it to their faces.\n\nAnd so as Salter, Nelson, and Weaver had charged ahead with the campaign, someone, perhaps Davis, had suggested to Cindy McCain that she take a look at what they were spending. She asked to see the numbers and was apparently refused. Then someone, perhaps Davis, arranged for the campaign treasurer to hand over the spreadsheets to the candidate's wife, who shared them with her husband. As a woman of means, Cindy McCain was unaccustomed to such nitty-gritty; she and her husband, as one top adviser puts it, \"have a hard time reading a grocery list.\" But, observes an outside adviser, \"Rick obviously got under McCain's skin by saying, 'You're a man who's championed fiscal discipline your whole career. And here your campaign's doing what you railed against.' \"\n\nOn Friday the sixth of July, McCain returned from Iraq. He was impressed with the surge's progress, depressed by the Maliki government's shiftlessness\u2014but most of all, pissed off at his senior campaign staff. The second-quarter results were in. And after all assurances to the contrary, the campaign hadn't exceeded, or even met, the paltry receipts of the first quarter. They'd brought in $11 million but spent $13 million. There was almost nothing in the bank. From his summer home in Castine, Maine, Salter placed several calls to McCain that day, but the senator didn't return them. On Saturday they spoke, but only briefly: McCain was cranky about the stack of 150 photographs that had been left at his home for him to autograph. They didn't speak on Sunday, and Salter knew something was up. Monday morning, he took the earliest flight from Bangor back to Washington. It wasn't early enough.\n\nBy eight that morning, McCain was already ripping Nelson and Weaver a couple of new ones. As Nelson recalls, \"He wanted to talk about spending and to re-litigate what had already been discussed before.\" But the subtext was a greater malaise. \"He was in a bad place emotionally,\" says Weaver, \"about the war, about immigration\u2014both that the legislation had failed and that it had damaged him politically; angry about the campaign; angry about his previous trip to Iraq and the treatment he received from the press. And he was just unhappy.\u2026 So it wasn't a specific complaint. It was a rant.\"\n\nA McCain Moment, of the demonic variety. When it was over, Nelson told the senator that he intended to resign. Weaver stormed out and wrote to Salter on his BlackBerry: \"Worst meeting ever.\"\n\nSalter didn't get an audience with McCain until seven the following morning, in the Russell Senate Office Building. McCain was still livid. He recycled his monologue about the campaign's rampant excesses. Salter believed that bringing Davis back into the office would lead to a staff upheaval and deal a death blow to an already listing campaign. And though Salter will not spell out what McCain told him, it seems apparent that the senator wanted to know this: Was Mark Salter loyal to John McCain or to McCain's campaign organization\n\nAccording to two senior staffers, Salter told McCain something like: When I met you, I was 34 and didn't know what the hell to do with myself. Through you I met my wife. Through you I became a published author. Because of you, I've got two daughters and two houses. Jesus, John. I'm a McCain guy.\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Weaver and Nelson resigned, and Davis was named campaign manager. The next day, Wednesday the eleventh, McCain called Salter. He sounded somewhat contrite. The news accounts had been awful. \"They're gonna write your obituary,\" Salter replied. \"Good. Let 'em write you off. They've been nothing but a pain in the ass anyway. Don't get down about it. And don't get drawn into the process questions. Answer it once, refuse to change your answer, and they'll stop asking.\"\n\nMcCain knew that Salter was intending to exile himself to Maine, at least temporarily. Did he really have to Yes, John. I really have to. I'm on the side that lost. Well, but couldn't he just tell the press that it didn't mean anything\u2014that he always spent summers in Castine They won't buy it, John. Not during a presidential campaign.\u2026 But okay, look. You're going to New Hampshire tomorrow I'll go with you. They'll see us together. They'll see I'm still involved.\n\nBut it seemed that Thursday evening's flight to Manchester would never come. Because Thursday morning came first, and with it, two horrific stories. The first, a Bob Novak column on how the McCain candidacy might yet survive, relied on unnamed sources to denounce Weaver and Nelson. One of the remaining Nelson prot\u00E9g\u00E9s, communications director Brian Jones, e-mailed Salter: \"This makes me want to puke.\" Jones and others intended to resign on the spot. Salter talked them down.\n\nIn the Times, there was a McCain story wholly unrelated to the shake-up. It seemed that the candidate had placed a call to some of his donors while in the Senate cloakroom\u2014which, if it involved soliciting donations, violated federal law. But it didn't: McCain was just assuring them that the campaign was healthy despite the staff changes. Such calls to financial benefactors take place tens of thousands of times a year in the Capitol. \"Why are they putting this in The New York Times\" McCain moaned to Salter. As Salter later confided to a top adviser, McCain was ready to quit the campaign then and there. Salter talked him down as well.\n\nThat afternoon, McCain crossed the river and visited the Arlington offices to give a pep talk to those who remained. He shared their sadness. He knew they'd lost good friends. The fight, however, would go on.\n\n\"I can outcampaign these other guys,\" he pledged.\n\nAct V, Mid-July 2007\n\n Let Us Continue\n\nMcCain would ultimately \"take responsibility\" for the campaign's implosion\u2014a rhetorical device that Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes had all employed in moments of political crisis that always seemed to fall well short of sincere contrition. And yet there could be little doubt that the McCain campaign's bungles led all the way to the top. Despite his universal name recognition, his more extensive experience as a high-stakes campaigner, and his superior national organization, McCain couldn't outraise Giuliani or Romney. He could not commit himself to a management structure\u2014preferring, as Salter euphemistically terms it, the \"organic\" over the organized. For all his overt admiration of the impervious \"Bush model,\" his had become the least Bushlike of the three leading Republican candidacies.\n\n\"I think he panicked,\" says an outside adviser. \"After all the challenges he's faced, it's almost like he expected the presidency to be a coronation.\" Confronted with hard calls, the Straight Talker proved not to be a straight thinker. Though he'd sidelined Rick Davis and Carla Eudy, McCain continued to consult actively with them both\u2014subverting both Nelson and Eudy's replacement, Mary Kate Jackson. \"The problem is, they weren't ever really pushed out,\" one of few neutral senior advisers says of Davis and Eudy. \"McCain made a mistake in not being more decisive and clear.\"\n\nIn the end, McCain decided passive-aggressively. The subtext of his hissy fit at Weaver and Nelson was, says Salter, that \"he desired a sense of control. And he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he didn't have it.\"\n\nBut now that McCain was back in control, he could think of only one move\u2014the tried-and-true move: New Hampshire. And so, late on the evening of July 13, Salter, McCain, and McCain's son Jimmy arrived at their hotel in Concord to a lobby full of national reporters boozing it up in anticipation of a good old-fashioned political deathwatch. McCain shook a few hands, then left Salter and Jimmy with the reporters and retired to his hotel room. The press bought Salter drinks and watched him and the kid chain-smoke. Salter talked about the book he'd like to write\u2014perhaps soon\u2014on his beloved Georgetown basketball team. Jimmy, an enlisted Marine, discussed his imminent deployment to Iraq. They stayed up until three in the morning.\n\nMcCain had a full docket the next day: a meeting with the New Hampshire organization, radio interviews, a face-off with the Union Leader editorial board, and finally a sit-down with Erin Flanagan, the young woman whose brother had been killed in Iraq. But Salter had pushed for one addition to the agenda. Brian Jones and his two press deputies, Matt David and Danny Diaz, were likely to leave the campaign but had held off this week so as not to worsen the hemorrhage. Would the senator be willing to hang out with them He would.\n\nAnd so it developed that on Friday night, the thirteenth of July, McCain, Jimmy, Salter, Jones, David, Diaz, and three reporters sat in a basement tavern in Springfield, Vermont. While slurping a Coke, McCain led the dialogue. He talked about Erin Flanagan's mom, who that evening had tearfully pleaded, \"Bring the troops home. Bring them all home now.\" He spoke, with shaking head and helpless eyes, about immigration\u2014\"the most emotional issue I've ever seen. Far worse than Iraq. There's such fear out there.\"\n\nHe then began discussing literature\u2014beginning, of course, with Hemingway and that depiction, in A Farewell to Arms, of the siege at Caporetto, to McCain's mind the most searing literary scene ever. He mentioned a recent visit to Oord, Mississippi, where at Faulkner's old mansion, Rowan Oak, he fell into a two-hour conversation with the curator, who seemed to know Faulkner's every drunken antic in that town. And from there he segued effortlessly into other memorable characters with whom he'd had glancing contact. Lucky Luciano buttonholing McCain in a Rome bar, presumably trying to recruit the young ensign as a drug mule. Seeing the Paris paparazzi hound Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at a Paris restaurant\u2014and many years later, hanging with a more rotund Taylor and her then husband, Senator John Warner, somewhere in New Orleans. And not least, the former Miss Brazil, all elegance to the younger McCain's crass overtures, nonetheless succumbing to a tryst in Rio\u2014they'd never seen each other again. McCain squeezed his son on the shoulder. He grinned at the reporters.\n\nSalter sat back, saying nothing. The smile he wore\u2014a little wistful, maybe This was the McCain he knew. This was the McCain he wanted us to know. A man brave enough to lose it all. The kind of man who never seems to win anymore.\n\nRobert Draper is a GQ correspondent. His latest book is called Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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