John McCain: film portrait of an 'American hero' skirts hard questions

05-24-2018 • https://www.theguardian.com

In John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, the senator is given a heroic send-off but questionable decisions cloud his legacy

John McCain was being filmed on the porch of his home in Sedona, Arizona, looking happy and relaxed despite the mortal battle he is waging with brain cancer, when he uttered the words that are certain to go down in the annals of American political history. "I should have said: 'Look, Joe Lieberman is my best friend, we should take him. But I was persuaded by my political advisers it would be harmful, and that was another mistake that I made."

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Peter Kunhardt, an Emmy-winning director, was inside the house at that precise moment sitting with McCain's wife Cindy and daughter Meghan, who were watching the taping as it was being relayed live on a TV monitor. "They actually gasped when he said he wished he had picked Lieberman," Kunhardt said. "After the filming, Cindy came up to us and said that was the first time he'd ever said that."

It's not so much that McCain had finally admitted regret over his decision to forgo choosing Lieberman to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential election. It was, after all, an unlikely pairing – McCain was the Republican nominee and Lieberman was at that time a Democrat.

It was what flowed from that fateful decision that made the comment so riveting: the rise of Sarah Palin. To choose the gun-totin' mama grizzly from Alaska as his alternative vice-presidential pick arguably did more than anything to let the populist genie out of the bottle, unleashing the terrifying consequences that we are still wrestling with today.

The on-camera confession is the most electrifying part of John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, the upcoming HBO documentary that Kunhardt has directed with his sons George and Teddy. The family trio spent six hours interviewing the US senator from Arizona – three in Sedona, three on Capitol Hill – and with the footage have put together a retrospective of his life on the verge of death.