A Hero's Life

Much has been written about John McCain's presidential campaign, about his conservative ideology (or insufficient supply thereof), about his age, his military service, and his remarkable life story. Most of what's been written, however, proceeds from the assumption that McCain, for all his maverick tendencies, is at heart a politician like any other, prey to the same ambitions, vanities, temptations, and weaknesses endemic to all presidential hopefuls.

That's not the case. He's a very different animal, and not just because of his Naval warrior forebears, his indomitable 96-year-old mother, or his experiences as a POW in Vietnam--though all those obviously influenced him profoundly. A major reason he's different is a remarkable teacher we both shared in school, an incalculable shaper of mind and character named William Bee Ravenel III.

McCain has spoken often of Ravenel, and keeps a photograph of him hanging on the wall of his Senate office. In Faith of My Fathers he says the teacher's "influence over my life .  .  . was more important and more benevolent than that of any other person save members of my family." Last month, during the "biography tour" of his campaign, he returned to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, the once all-male boarding school we both attended in the 1950s. He used most of his speech there to praise Ravenel as "one of the best men I have ever known," who "enriched my life at EHS beyond measure."

It was not simply Ravenel's academic influence that was so profound, McCain told his audience: "He helped teach me to be a man, and to believe in the possibility that we are not captive to the worst parts of our nature."

Any cynic tempted to dismiss this as campaign boilerplate should think again. In 1973, less than a year after his release from prison in Hanoi, a withdrawn McCain stood quietly in a corner at a party on Capitol Hill and told me he had returned from Vietnam desperate to see Ravenel: "He was the only person I felt I could talk to about my imprisonment," he said. "I wanted to tell him I finally understood there in Hanoi all the things he'd been trying to tell me about life. I wanted to apologize for being so stupid and to thank him for trying to reach me. But I discovered he had died"--in 1968, at the age of only 53--"and that was the hardest thing I've had to face since I got back."

Who was Bill Ravenel, and how did he so shape a possible future president?

To answer that question, it's necessary to summon up the ghost of Episcopal High School in the 1950s: a then-bare-bones, near-military boarding school where boys, many from wealthy families in the South, were sent to be taken down a peg from the country club indulgences at home and toughened into manhood with academic rigor, compulsory team sports, and cold fried eggs for breakfast. It was a bizarre kind of boot camp of the mind and soul. We slept in curtained alcoves on sagging pipe-frame bunks in aging dormitories light years from the preppy privileges of popular myth. Blackford Hall, where John McCain lived during his junior year, had been a Union hospital during the Civil War and appeared little changed since. The roaches there marched almost nightly, as numerous and aggressive as the Army of Northern Virginia.

With all that, the teachers--known as masters--were a decidedly mixed lot. One creaky and much vaunted history teacher had never even been to college. He joined the faculty immediately upon graduating from EHS in 1902 and droned away the next 53 years of his life while carefully positioning his classroom pointer in a timeless indentation in the toe of his shoe. But Episcopal did whip most of its charges into shape. Each year it sent graduates off to the most competitive colleges--including Yale, Princeton, Williams, and its major outlet, the University of Virginia.

One of the main reasons it did was Bill Ravenel. As head of the English department, he set such rigorous standards for grammar and writing that they rule his former students to this day. He was a stocky, muscular man who carried, with his rugged good looks, a sense of coiled, but self-possessed, authority. He was one of the Charleston Ravenels of South Carolina, and was deeply and sentimentally attached to his hometown. After spring vacations there with his family he would invariably return with a wisp of Spanish moss which he would -poignantly (and always futilely) attempt to transplant in a front-yard tree.

Ravenel had been a star running back at Davidson in the 1930s and held a master's degree in English from Duke. But he had also rolled across Europe less than a decade before in the 6th Armored Division of Gen. George Patton's Third Army, had received the Silver Star, and was still a lieutenant colonel in the reserve. This, together with his commanding demeanor and sharp intelligence, inspired universal respect among the boys, even those who felt victimized by the severity of his grading.

For Ravenel's passion for literature and for the ordered structure of the English language was--almost--his religion. He had never wanted to do anything but teach, had joined the Episcopal faculty before going off to war, and never looked back. He revolutionized (and greatly upgraded) the English curriculum, authored a seminal textbook on spelling and grammar known as "The Gray Gospel," and gave standardized tests so often that the College Board exams were almost familiar to his pupils when they finally came around. He instituted a writing program so ambitious that students in every English class--even freshmen--produced a serious and lengthy research paper at least three times a year, complete with scholarly footnotes and bibliography. Research at the Library of Congress was encouraged and sometimes required. All this, mind you, in high school.

Yet there was never anything of the martinet or pedant about him. Those literary terms we had to learn--simile and metaphor, dactyl and penta-meter--were more than abstractions in his hands. They were analytical tools for unlocking the secrets of language and, therefore, of communication and meaning. Hamlet and Macbeth in his classes were not just plays; they were intensely human narratives with profound implications. The struggles of their characters, we came to understand, were in some sense the potential maps of our very own lives. This was serious and compelling stuff.

But as seriously as he persuaded us to take learning--or football, baseball, or any of the athletic endeavors he coached--it was always a seriousness tinged with joy. There was a kind of alchemy in the English language for him, and he wanted us to discover and share the wonder of making gold.

Indelibly etched on my memory is a day Ravenel opened a major window for me on this score. We were studying Emily Dickinson at the time. For an all-boys school, he saw to it that we studied an unusual number of women writers--Dickinson, Jane Austen, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay--not because they were women but because they were good. The Dickinson poem I can recite to this day.

I had not minded walls Were Universe one Rock And far I heard his silver Call The other side the Block-- I'd tunnel till my Groove Pushed sudden thro' to his-- Then my face take Recompense-- The looking in his eyes-- But 'tis a single Hair-- A filament--a law-- A Cobweb wove in Adamant-- A Battlement of Straw-- A limit like the Veil Unto the Lady's face-- But every Mesh a Citadel-- And Dragons in the Crease.

Ravenel distributed it to the dozen of us in the class, informing us only that Dickinson had been in love at the time with a married minister. Then he asked us what it meant.

Slowly and painfully, we wracked our underbooked brains and teased out the notion that she would do anything to get to her lover if the obstacle between them was merely physical. Horny 17-year-olds that we were, we didn't have to know Freud to thrill to her "groove" pushing "sudden thro to his," and he drew us to appreciate the splendid, multilayered image comparing the legal wall between them to both "a cobweb wove in adamant" and the veil (bridal? mourning?) on a lady's hat. But there we stopped. We thought we were done.

"What about the other nouns, Mr. Ringle," he said, jolting me from some daydream. "Words like 'battlement' and 'citadel'-why does she use them?"

"I guess she's just being poetic," I mumbled. "A battlement could be part of a citadel."

"You can do better than that, Mr. Ringle. Think! What do 'citadel,' 'battlement,' and 'dragons' have in common?"

Fairy tales? King Arthur? Mythology? I didn't have a clue. The rest of the class was similarly stumped. But Ravenel wouldn't tell us. He just stood over me, relentlessly prodding, coaxing, encouraging, nagging. He must have worked on me for 10 minutes. The entire class had stopped.

"Wait! They're all sort of antique words--"

"Right!" said Ravenel, as if he'd just mined a diamond. "And why is she using antique words?"

Suddenly, the sun came up: "I get it! The barrier between them, that law! She's saying it's old-fashioned!"

"Welcome to the writer's world, Mr. Ringle," Ravenel said as the bell rang ending class. "You're finally starting to use your head."

If we're lucky, most of us can remember a moment in high school or college when we stopped looking for mental handouts and began thinking for ourselves. That was mine. It was just a beginning, but it was meaningful beyond telling. I had been shown how Emily Dickinson could give us her entire life in 16 lines, but we had to meet her halfway to decode it. Literary analysis wasn't just a dry exercise; it could have human drama in it. It was an adventure in discovery.

Ravenel taught lessons like that with everything he did, from puzzling over Polonius to helping a young pitcher throw a curve ball. He believed in precision born of discipline and effort. He wanted us to understand that meaningful things rarely come easily, and that knowledge born of the liberal arts can soften life's horrors and heighten its riches. He didn't talk much, as other masters did, about pious abstractions like honor and character. He simply lived them, and did so with a unique kind of life-affirming ferocity that inspired awe as well as affection.

But Ravenel was also imbued with a particular and transcendent kind of joy, a joy born of past sadness. He was married to a coquettish Southern beauty, adored her and their four children (and a spaniel named Shakespeare), and managed to maintain a commanding sense of family even as he shared them with the 240 boys in the student body at meals in the dining room. He had a delicious wit and would needle us good-naturedly--but always, it seems in retrospect, with some sort of larger purpose. He seemed to revel in the vitality of all the young lives around him and feel a more than ordinary teacher's duty to awaken us from our green and glandular adolescent pre-occupations both to the wonder and majesty of life and to the crushing weight of what it might require.

The doctor who delivered my youngest daughter, decades later, told me he decided to specialize in obstetrics after service as a surgeon in Vietnam. He'd seen so many die under his hands in the war, he said, that afterward he felt a powerful need to help life begin. It was a kind of atonement. I've often thought since that something similar must have been working on Ravenel, after all the young men he'd so recently seen die in World War II.

Masters at Episcopal were paid something appalling, like $1,000 a year, in those days; but that included a house and all meals for the entire family. It also included a certain amount of slave labor. Boys charged with "demerits" for assorted misbehaviors could "walk them off" mindlessly by doing laps around the school. A preferred alternative, however, was to work them off doing chores for one of the masters, 15 minutes for each demerit.

John McCain's scrappy rebelliousness inevitably garnered him even more demerits than I earned, and he usually accepted the opportunity to work them off doing yard work for Ravenel.

"Perhaps the school authorities knew .  .  . that Mr. Ravenel was best able to repair the all too evident flaws in my character," McCain writes in Faith of My Fathers. He himself never figured out how Ravenel glimpsed in him "something that few others did. But that he did take an interest .  .  . was apparent to all. And as he personified the ideal of every student, Mr. Ravenel's regard signaled my classmates that I had some merit despite the fact that they and I had to strain to see it."

McCain also writes, of Episcopal's students, that "none but me were sons of professional officers in the armed services." This is a rather surprising error, which speaks far more about McCain's sense of isolation in those days than it does about the school. At least six EHS students at the time were the sons of professional officers, including two in his class of 1954. Three classes below him was a grandson of General Patton.

But even though most of those boys would go on, like McCain, to the service academies, none carried near the same weight of college and career inevitability. Everybody knew McCain's father and grandfather were both admirals, and everybody knew he was headed for the Naval Academy. It was also clear to everyone, from his distaste for authority, that McCain wasn't necessarily thrilled about that. He remembers that Ravenel was "one of the few people at school to whom I .  .  . confessed my reservations about my destiny," and while working in Ravenel's yard, "I discussed all manner of subjects with him, from sports to the stories of Somerset Maugham, from his combat experiences to my future."

Ravenel was always reaching out, always trying not so much to instill as to bring out the qualities McCain would need in the future. He did that with all the boys, to some extent; but, former warrior that he was, he did that most of all with future warrior McCain.

Decades later, in the 1970s, after he'd recovered from his imprisonment, McCain was appointed the Navy's liaison with the Senate. One day I ran into him and asked him how he liked the work. He found it rewarding, he said, but he'd run into an infuriating obstacle. Though the Vietnam war was scarcely over, Congress was already planning to dispatch a mission to Hanoi to discuss the possibility of normalizing relations with Vietnam. The Navy wanted McCain to go along. He was shocked by that, and angry, and bitter beyond telling.

"Can you believe they are asking me to do that?" he said. "It took me six years to get out of Hanoi. I sure as hell don't want to go back. I'll never forgive those [North Vietnamese] bastards."

I don't remember what happened to the mission, but McCain didn't go and I heard no more about it. Until two decades later when President Clinton sought to normalize relations with Vietnam. Who was his major partner in the ultimately successful effort? Senator John Sidney McCain, R-Ariz.

I was stunned. Much of the Republican party was against the effort, as were McCain's conservative constituents in Arizona. Some accused him of treachery. Though our paths rarely crossed anymore, I called to congratulate him on what I considered a truly selfless act in the national interest, one of rare political courage. He thanked me and said that he remembered our conversation years before: "But you have to put stuff like that behind you or bitterness will eat a hole in your soul,'' he said. "We all have to put Vietnam behind us. All of us in this country have to become part of something larger than our own self-interest."

Where, I wondered, had he found the capacity to rise above all those years of physical and mental torture as a prisoner of war? Whose example had he followed to reach beyond a painful barrier and put an imprisoning past behind him? Now I think I know.

On May 17, 1954, less than a month before McCain graduated from Episcopal, the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring unconstitutional the segregation of public schools. I was so young and naive I didn't think it was a big deal, but almost everyone else in our lily-white and very southern school did, particularly Ravenel. I remember his expression of cold fury at the decision. It would never stand, he said: Segregation was what we'd all grown up with, and that's the way things would remain.

I remember being surprised by his reaction. He was certainly no bigot (we had a few of those among the masters) and I had never seen him treat any of the blacks on the school staff--cooks and maintenance workers though they were--with anything other than the same warmth and humanity he showed for the boys. But he was from South Carolina, and I noticed that the boys from South Carolina and Alabama appeared even more hostile to the decision than those from Missi-ssippi. When he talked of the "problem" of Episcopal playing football against soon-to-be integrated teams from District of Columbia schools, I just wrote it off to a racial blind spot born of background. I knew plenty of otherwise praiseworthy southerners with such racial blind spots, including members of my own family. Somehow, however, I had expected more from Ravenel.

Nearly a half-century later I spoke about Ravenel's blind spot with his daughter Ruthie. I had known her as a child, and she knew how much I loved her father. I told her I had always thought of him as a near-perfect man, and never could entirely reconcile that with his intransigence in the face of integration.

"You know," she said, "that was hard for him. He was a product of South Carolina in the first half of the 20th century, a product of his times. But he struggled with that as the years went by. He fought himself constantly to do the right thing, and he grew as a result. It was he who drew up the first minority recruitment program for Episcopal in the 1960s. The school is nearly 25 percent minority these days. I think William Bee Ravenel would be really proud of that."

Ken Ringle, longtime reporter and cultural critic for the Washington Post , writes from retirement.