[S]en. Patrick Leahy says that the last time he saw Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican told the Vermont Democrat how much he valued their friendship. The two men had stepped into a side room off the Senate chamber to say goodbye.
“We all die sometime,” McCain told Leahy. “I’m happy with my life.”
They embraced. “We both knew he’d never be back,” Leahy said this week.
McCain, who died of brain cancer on Saturday, will be honored at multiple memorial services in Washington, D.C., this weekend.
Leahy was one of McCain’s closest colleagues during the decades the two served together in the U.S. Senate. But their positions were often far apart. Leahy, for example, steadfastly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002, while McCain supported the war until only recently, stating in his 2018 memoir that it was a “mistake.”
“Were we ideological soulmates? Of course not,” Leahy said. “Were we senators who could work together, and cared about each other? Yes.”
Leahy remembers McCain as a conscientious lawmaker who would decide his positions regardless of politics. “He would not listen to the lobbyists or party leaders. He made up his own mind.”
The two worked together on initiatives, like the Leahy War Victims Fund and the cleanup of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, that helped to restore diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Leahy said McCain’s support for these projects — despite his being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly six years — was key to their success.
“We got the credibility to do it because here’s a man who nearly died in Vietnam, who should be so bitter towards the Vietnamese, and said, ‘Enough.’”
The two became deft at finding common ground. “We’ve known each other well enough, we would almost talk in shorthand,” he said. They would hash out agreements without naming specific policies. “Everybody’s (thinking), what the heck are they talking about?”
He hopes that spirit of bipartisanship doesn’t fade away.
“If we could get back to that, instead of things having to be all Democrats or all Republicans,” Leahy said, “the country’s better off.”
