Whatever It Takes - 16 April 1999

"Because we're at war will there be no more cakes and ale?"

I can well understand a listener who begins to feel that way and of course life, a more or less peaceful life, goes on across this continent as it does in most of Europe and Australasia and Asia and Africa. But I have to say that it seems awfully early in the game for anybody on the Nato side to begin to question the sense or rightness of the allied cause.

I should prefer to tell you about the campaign of New York City's mayor to instruct all the taxi drivers of the city in good manners and, more seriously, to note the beginning of a new, recognisably national student protest movement on the campuses of America against giant corporations that make clothing mostly in the Far East, which to more Americans than the young base their immense success, not only in this country, on what the students, making no bones about it, call 'slave labour'.

Of course there are other serious and funny and sad and delightful things happening all around us. But before we begin to take the war for granted there is a point - I think the main point - which lots of public men and women weave and dance around but don't seize and advertise. At least there's one voice and I shall name him.

I've listened in the past week to, I suppose, a hundred voices from secretaries of state to foreign ministers to military briefings to rafts of commentators but strangely to very few prominent American politicians. Most of them were waiting to see if the aerial campaign truly works as Nato and the Pentagon assure us it will.

As the week wore on more of them came out of the woodwork and were prepared to take a stand, or at least to grow more bold. There are now about half a dozen who have something positive to say and say it.

Even so, an old journalist who goes - as I do - back to Roosevelt, said he could not remember a time when, on any issue, there was no plainly visible leadership in either party in Congress. It's true. Until he said it I hadn't realised it either.

There is of course a senator here and there, a congressman who strongly backs the president, and a voice here and there in each of the two Houses, that's suddenly full of ominous threats and warnings - that we may be in too deep or are we really prepared to send in ground forces?

But the point about leadership is that most of these advocates are fairly unknown, they're not the party leaders or party whips in either the Senate or the House.

There is, however, one figure that, without in the least meaning to, has assumed the position of leadership and how the president wishes he was a Democrat. He's not, he's a Republican and he's one of the gathering troop already off and running for president.

His name, which you're going to hear a lot of in the weeks and months - perhaps the years - to come, is John McCain - Senator John McCain, 62 years old. A small, compact man with a smooth, oval face, slit quizzical eyes, a candid look. A modest man. HIs entry in Who's Who in America runs to nine tiny lines.

Now he is, to be fair, the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee and therefore in time of war, or threat of war, a potentially powerful voice in Washington. But we've not heard anything ringing from his counterpart in the House or the other members of the military committees.

Senator McCain was at first in two minds about America's obligation to go into Kosovo.

"But," he said, "once the commander in chief made the decision, then," he said, like a true old soldier, "we are in it and we must see it through with whatever it takes."

He was immediately asked: "Should we send in ground troops?"

He repeated just as promptly: "With whatever it takes." He was the first to say so.

Now, some other senator could have acted and talked in this way and we would have paid attention to him for a night and a day. We pay attention to Senator McCain for a special reason: he's an old war hero and one with a run of frightful experiences. Every time I see him, especially moving anywhere - anytime on foot - I marvel that he doesn't seem to hobble and marvel again that this once-ramshackle frame of bones and paper-thin flesh ever re-emerged into his native land as a mobile, healthy young man.

He was a navy man from the beginning. Graduated at 22 from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Twenty years later he was a captain.

The next line of his entry packs a five and a half year nightmare into one line: prisoner of war, Vietnam, 1967-73.

He had before that miraculously survived the bombardment and subsequent furnace of an exploding aircraft carrier. Of over a hundred men killed somehow he came free.

When the North Vietnamese got hold of him he had his legs broken and was tortured in other ways many times, thrown for months into solitary confinement, tortured again till he broke and signed the usual pitiful statement that yes, he was a war criminal.

He was let out in the last year of the dreadful war, a bag of bones and lapping skin. And somehow has come back a living, sentient human being. He doesn't go on about his nightmare, as lesser heroes tend to.

Before Kosovo developed from another Balkan nuisance into a diplomatic crisis and then a war, Senator McCain had said that he was going to run for president next year. Of the half dozen men and one woman already in the running, Senator McCain was the only one who pursued with positively missionary zeal one issue that just about everybody in the Congress had mentioned at one time or another - mentioned, deplored, shuddered and quickly moved on - it's the issue of campaign financing. Of what it takes to run for any elective office.

What it takes is money. It's generally calculated that to run for the United States Senate you need to raise, from supporters somewhere, everywhere, about $20m. For Congress half as much at least. For the presidency - pie in the sky is the limit.

It used to be a much more modest requirement to spend on buttons and bows and posters and banners and hiring auditoriums and radio spots, in which the candidate would chant a slogan or a brief message - those were very naïve times. Life and campaigning suffered a revolution when television came in.

Today, electioneering means the amount of money you can spend on television spots - a spot is never longer than 30 seconds. The most effective are usually about 10 seconds, and usually what their creators call "sophisticated". What a neutral onlooker might rather call "crude and outrageous".

The most effective ones in the past few elections have been just short of monstrous libels on your opponent. There are old and sober Republicans who will tell you that George Bush was elected by the film shot of a black man coming through a revolving door and out onto the street - that's all - while a menacing voice said: "Vote Dukakis".

It was a broad, appalling hint that since Massachusetts had a law - so did other states not mentioned - that under some strict circumstances a convicted murderer could, after a long time, be paroled for one weekend and vote for the Governor of Massachusetts and see the streets of all our cities flooded with murderers at large.

Just as outrageous - perhaps worse - was a Democrats television spot that went far to guarantee Lyndon Johnson his landslide win over Barry Goldwater.

It showed a little girl, presumably in a Goldwater America, taking petals off a flower - one, two, three, four. She reaches for the fifth and there's a huge explosion and a mushroom cloud. "Vote Goldwater." The implication here was that if Goldwater got in, an atomic war was a practical certainty.

Well not to sicken you further I will simply say that these 15-second messages cost the Earth. Even fair, intelligent ads cost the Earth. So the first requirement of any candidate for Congress, for the Senate, for the presidency, is millions and millions of dollars.

For the past two years Senator McCain has been saying out loud and in the Congress: "It is a stinking system, a corrupt system, and it must be changed."

Last year he came into public prominence for the first time by introducing a Bill to reform the system. His own party filibustered it and killed it. Two Democrats will try again this year and so will Senator McCain.

So you'll see there's a strong popular prejudice in his favour. Not because he's a Republican swimming against the tide, not because he happens to be the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, but because he's a man of admirable, enviable character.

I don't wish to be coy or devious about this but after the general lamentations in the past two years about the character of public men - perhaps only because we've now developed the habit of digging into their private lives, which for a century or so we didn't do - today it's obvious that a lot of Americans have flocked to Senator McCain simply because he's a man of strong character.

However, in the beginning I said that during the past week only one voice I'd heard made the main - the vital - point. I should have said two.

One was the voice of the prime minister of Turkey, who in clear pungent English - so much better than the gobbledegook American and British statesmen politicians talk - said in an interview: "This is not an American war, though America is paying for it disproportionately, it is not a war of 19 nations who somehow got together, it is a war of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

"It is a Nato war - it is the first - it is vital for all of us that Nato should succeed. If it fails the consequences for the rest of Europe and its protection could be devastating."

And when Senator McCain was asked a third question: "How about the prospect of negotiation at this stage?" he said in his quick brisk way: "This is a test of the survival of Nato. If it's beaten it could be as bad as the collapse of the League of Nations."

Nato, may I remind you, is a regional alliance for collective self-defence, specially sanctioned by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.