McCain And MLK: Uncommon Valor

So why did John McCain vote against making Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday in 1983?

Earlier this month, McCain was heckled at an event in Memphis honoring the fortieth anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. At the event, McCain acknowledged that he voted against making Dr. King’s birthday a holiday, saying that he was wrong to do so. The crowed didn’t appreciate his politically incorrect vote, and refused to hide their feelings.

McCain does not have a history of intentional prejudice, or a track record of the unconscious prejudice exhibited by the likes of Trent Lott in 2002. So we can set aside old-school racial bias as an explanation for his failure to support a King holiday.

Thus, one has to wonder if McCain’s one-time animus towards King has more to do with combat and less to do with color.

Unlike John Kerry, McCain does not have a history of speaking out against the Vietnam War; during his captivity in Hanoi, McCain chose not to meet with antiwar activists because he feared such a meeting would be used as propaganda for the antiwar side.  It’s reasonable to conclude that McCain always believed that the initial decision to go into Vietnam was morally right, that it was a just cause for the United States to attempt to check communism by aiding South Vietnam.

If McCain always believed that the Vietnam War was just, he must have also believed that Dr. King was wrong to vociferously oppose it. King angered many Americans with his fierce denunciation of the war in April 1967;  his declaration that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” actually generated the same negative heat that Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks about US foreign policy now generate.  Even MLK’s mainstream-media supporters began to turn on him, accusing him of foolishly playing into the hands of those on the far right who believed that he was in league with pro-Communist forces.

Fifteen years after he was murdered, King’s opposition to the Vietnam War was still controversial. Jesse Helms and Patrick Buchanan were strongly opposed to the concept of an MLK holiday, forcefully arguing that the US should not honor a man who once seemingly damned his own country for trying to contain the spread of Communism. Although President Reagan ultimately signed MLK’s holiday into law, he was also initially opposed to the honor, presumably for the same reasons.

As a Vietnam veteran—a man who suffered for five and a half years at the hands of Communists—McCain was, in all likelihood, not terribly happy about the prospect of honoring a man who claimed that America had no business in Vietnam. McCain clearly held a grudge against King for opposing the war, and acted upon that grudge by refusing to endorse the creation of a King holiday.

Based on his remarks earlier this month (“We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans”), it’s also clear that McCain has gotten over his grudge. While King’s language about the Vietnam War was excessively harsh, the positive aspects of his legacy outweigh the negative nature of his antiwar rhetoric. King deserved to be honored with a holiday, and McCain now recognizes that his 1983 view of King was shortsighted.

The mainstream press will certainly make an issue of McCain’s vote against the King holiday; if he defeats Barack Obama, particularly by a significant margin, the press will point to McCain’s ’83 vote as “proof” that his Presidential victory was delivered by extremist reactionaries who loathe both King and Obama. Intelligent Americans will reject this explanation as obvious nonsense, but the blue states will forever regard McCain as a beneficiary of bigotry.

McCain and King are more alike than different. Both men made critical mistakes: the latter was much too harsh in his remarks about America’s effort in Vietnam, and the former was blinded by anger towards those remarks, and lashed out by refusing to vote for an honor the latter richly deserved.  Yet McCain and King are both American heroes, men of character and courage, men who passed life’s most difficult tests, men whose actions helped keep the country great, strong and free. From a certain perspective, it will be very strange if McCain becomes President twenty-five years to the month after the MLK holiday was signed into law. From another perspective, it will be a traditionally American event: one freedom fighter achieving victory twenty-five years after another freedom fighter achieved honor.