Roberta McCain, mother of John McCain and matriarch of the McCain family, dies at 108
Roberta McCain, world traveler and the mother of the late Sen. John McCain, died Monday.
The matriarch of the McCain family was 108 years old, outliving her son “Johnny,” the six-term U.S. senator from Arizona and two-time presidential candidate, by more than two years. Her son died on Aug. 25, 2018, at age 81.
Cindy McCain, her daughter-in-law, announced the news Monday via Twitter.
"It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my wonderful Mother In-law, Roberta McCain," Cindy McCain tweeted. "I couldn’t have asked for a better role model or a better friend. She joins her husband Jack, her son John and daughter Sandy."
Siblings Meghan and Jack McCain, Roberta McCain's grandchildren, subsequently tweeted tributes.
"I love you Nana. You’re everything I ever aspired to be," tweeted Meghan McCain, a TV commentator who last month gave birth to her first child, Liberty Sage McCain Domenech. "Thank you for teaching us all about living life on your own terms with grit, conviction, intensity and love. There will never be another one like you, you will be missed every day. I wish my daughter had gotten to meet you."
Jack McCain added: "Roberta McCain was the foundation upon which four generations of McCains were built. Her 108 years of life was a blessing, as is her memory."
Roberta McCain traveled around the country with her son John McCain during his second presidential run in 2008 and she held the hand of his daughter and her granddaughter, Meghan McCain, at his funeral. In a wheelchair, she poignantly made the sign of the cross before the flag-draped coffin as her son lay in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
But long before that, McCain took an urgent call about a matter that would thrust her son, and her, onto the national stage.
McCain had never answered the ringing phone before. It was a special phone with a direct line to Washington, D.C., meant for her husband, John S. “Jack” McCain Jr., an admiral in the U.S. Navy and commander in chief of U.S. Naval forces in Europe. But Jack was in the shower readying for a dinner party at the Iranian embassy in London, so McCain picked up the receiver.
It was 1967, the height of the Vietnam War, and her son, a Navy pilot on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Oriskany, was flying bombing missions in an A-4 Skyhawk.
The naval aviator on the other end of the line told McCain that two planes had been shot down over North Vietnam. One was her son’s. It didn’t appear as if the pilots had ejected before the crash.
McCain, the ever-pragmatic pillar of the family, immediately thought of John McCain’s then-wife, Carol. McCain wanted to prepare her for the worst.
“We talked on the telephone and I said to her, I said, ‘Carol, I think Johnny is dead, don’t you?’” McCain remembered in 2008. “I said, ‘I think we should accept that.’ The reason I had that attitude is I had seen these POW wives, who obviously knew their husbands were dead, but they wouldn’t let go. To me, it’s fish or cut bait. If reality is a reality, just accept it.”
The following day, McCain learned John McCain had survived and been taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese.
“Can you believe that’s the best news that I ever had in my life?” she remembered. “See, it depends on where you’re standing how things affect you.”
John McCain would spend a brutal 5½ years as a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973.
JOHN MCCAIN: Biography of Arizona's senator and political maverick
Family on the road
Roberta Wright McCain was born on Feb. 7, 1912, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to mother Myrtle Fletcher and father Archibald Wright, who retired early and moved the family to Los Angeles after earning his fortune scouting for oil as a wildcatter.
McCain, her parents and her siblings, including her identical twin sister Rowena, with whom she was especially close, spent the sweltering August months of her youth travelling to lakes in Minnesota, to the Mississippi River and to the frigid water of Lake Superior in the family car, sometimes taking a train east to New York or Washington, D.C., according to the New York Times.
The weeks-long vacations prepared McCain for a roving life with her husband, John Sidney McCain Jr., a decorated admiral in the Navy. McCain married Jack, as her husband was known, in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1933 when he was a Navy ensign against the wishes of her mother, who never accepted the marriage.
“We eloped,” McCain said in a 2008 C-SPAN interview. “It was a real love affair. It really was.”
Roberta and Jack McCain had three children: Jean Alexandra "Sandy," Joseph and middle-child John, who she lovingly called “Johnny” throughout his life. McCain was the children’s primary caregiver, as Jack McCain was often at sea, but McCain stressed that she cherished her life as a Navy wife and mother.
“To me, the Navy epitomizes everything that’s good in America,” she said. “I loved everybody I ever met in the Navy. It was a wonderful life.”
The family’s experience of being repeatedly uprooted, always in the middle of a school term, McCain joked, gave her children a valuable resilience.
“I’ve seen very indulged children that have never had a problem or stubbed a toe, and then when things didn’t go well, say when they’re 25 or 28, they didn’t know how to handle it,” McCain said. “I think my children took the bad and the hard things when they were young, and I think they’re better people for it.”
The family’s history of service was a point of pride for McCain, who spoke of the family’s patriotism with a characteristic humbleness in a 2008 interview.
“The McCain family has tried to serve God and our country the best we can for over 100 years, and I hope our family continues,” McCain said. “We just love our country and we want to do anything we can. We’re just middle-level people who try to be good Americans.”
A storyteller with a sense of humor
McCain was known for a keen storytelling sense and a self-deprecating humor that her son Joe said rubbed off on him and his siblings.
"She was voluble, and funny and acerbic,” McCain’s youngest son, Joe McCain, said in 2018.
McCain, who usually shunned the spotlight, once declined to participate in a television interview for a biography of her son, saying, “Most of the time, a picture of me looks like somebody they dug up who’d been down in the grave for seven days.”
“The worst of it is, it looks exactly like me,” she laughed.
John McCain enjoyed telling an anecdote about how his mother once telephoned him to scold him after reading an account of his POW captivity in a magazine. McCain had recalled shouting obscenities at his North Vietnamese captors.
"She said, 'I'm coming over there to wash your mouth out with soap,' " John McCain recalled on the presidential campaign trail in 2007. "She said, 'I've never been so embarrassed.' I said, 'Mom, these were really bad guys. They were really evil people.' She said, 'That is no excuse. I never taught you to use language like that under any circumstances.' "
In 2005, McCain was told by workers at a rental car agency in France that she was too old to rent a car. She bought one instead, shipped it home to the East Coast, then drove the vehicle across the country to give as a gift to her great-nephew in San Francisco.
After Roberta McCain celebrated her 107th birthday, granddaughter Meghan McCain shared her tips on living with the audience of ABC’s “The View.”
“She said: adventure, closeness with family, being politically active,” Meghan McCain said on the show that she co-hosts. “She used to be friends with (famous aviator) Amelia Earhart, which is something I just found out recently.”
McCain was a dependable presence during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. John McCain brought her along in hopes that his mother’s vitality — she turned 96 in 2008 — would deflate criticism that he was too old to be president. The younger McCain turned 72 that year.
However, Roberta McCain largely left the spotlight after making an ill-received remark blaming Mormons for issues related to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She was trying to defend her son against his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney.
“As far as the Salt Lake City thing,” McCain told MSNBC in November 2007. “He’s a Mormon and the Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal.”
Her son cut in, saying, “The views of my mother are not necessarily the views of mine.”
McCain apologized as the pair stepped away from the cameras.
“I didn’t mean to say it,” she said.
Despite the flap, John McCain cited his mother’s character as the root of his success in his 2008 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president.
“Roberta McCain gave us her love of life, her deep interest in the world, her strength and her belief that we’re all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country,” he said.
Roberta McCain was preceded in death by her husband, who died in 1981, her son John McCain and her daughter Sandy Morgan, who died in 2019. McCain is survived by her son Joseph McCain II, grandchildren including John McCain's daughter Meghan McCain, and several great-grandchildren.