John McCain credited to her his will to survive as a prisoner of war. She later campaigned for him in his 2008 bid for the presidency.
Roberta McCain, whose son, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said she had inspired his will to survive as a prisoner of war in Vietnam — and who at 96 campaigned spiritedly in his losing bid for the presidency against Barack Obama in 2008 — has died. She was 108. Her death was announced on Twitter by her daughter-in-law, Cindy McCain, who did not provide any details. An adventurous world traveler who took frequent home dislocations in stride and wartime family perils with outward calm, Mrs. McCain was Navy through and through — the wife and daughter-in-law of admirals and the mother of the naval aviator who was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and who, for five and a half years, was America’s most famous prisoner of the Vietnam War. For Mrs. McCain and her husband, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., the commander of all United States forces in the Pacific and in the Vietnam War theater, their son’s captivity in North Vietnam was painfully endured with prayer, and with near silence in public. They knew that Hanoi tortured prisoners, and that Lt. Cmdr. McCain, as a propaganda prize, could hardly be exempted. He was not. He came home a war hero and, with his mother’s encouragement, began a political career as a Republican stalwart. He won two terms in the House of Representatives and six terms in the Senate, and he ran twice for the White House. In 2000, he lost the nomination to Mr. Bush, who went on to win the presidency; eight years later he won the nomination, but lost the election to Mr. Obama. He died in 2018. “From both my parents, I learned to persevere,” Senator McCain wrote in a memoir, “Faith of My Fathers” (1999, with Mark Salter). “But my mother’s extraordinary resilience made her the stronger of the two. I acquired some of her resilience and her felicity, and that inheritance made an enormous difference in my life. “Our family,” he continued, “lived on the move, rooted not in location but in the culture of the Navy. I learned from my mother not just to take the constant disruptions in stride, but to welcome them as elements of an interesting life.” The rebellious daughter of a wealthy Oklahoma oil wildcatter who settled his family in Los Angeles, Mrs. McCain eloped and became a Navy wife in 1933. As her husband rose to global military prominence, she lived in capitals and naval bases in Europe, Asia and the Americas for nearly four decades.
