john mccain mother age
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Roberta McCain
Roberta Wright McCain (February 7, 1912 – October 12, 2020) was an American socialite and oil heiress. She was the wife of Admiral John S. McCain Jr., with whom she had three children including U.S. Senator John S. McCain III and stage actor and journalist Joe McCain. McCain was active in the Navy Wives Clubs and her Capitol Hill home was a popular salon for lawmakers and politicians. In 2007 and 2008, she actively campaigned in support of her son John during his presidential bid.
Roberta Wright McCain, the mother of Senator John McCain who used her feisty spirit to help convince voters during his 2008 presidential campaign, has died. She was 108.
A spokesperson for daughter-in-law Cindy McCain says Roberta McCain died Monday. A cause of death was not immediately released.
At 96, Roberta McCain became the Republican senator’s secret weapon at campaign stops as evidence that voters need not worry about her son’s age past 70 as he sought the presidency.
2008
She remained energetic and active into her 90s, traveling often with her identical twin sister, Rowena, who died at age 99. She attended the 2008 Republican national convention, where her son credited “her love of life, her deep interest in the world, her strength, and her belief we are all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country. I wouldn’t be here tonight but for the strength of her character.”
It was 1933 when a 20-year-old Roberta Wright defied her family and eloped with John McCain Jr. Documents released in 2008 showed that as a young ensign, John Jr got into trouble when the couple decided to marry and he left his ship without permission.
“I got married young,” she told the Muskogee Phoenix in her native Oklahoma in 2008. “I was 20 years old, and it was the best decision I ever made.”
She married into a storied military family. Her husband retired in 1972 with the rank of four-star admiral, the same rank held by his father, John S “Slew” McCain Sr. Her son was later held as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam even as his father was commander in chief of Pacific forces by the late 1960s.
Oklahoma
Roberta McCain also was a young mother when her three children were born, later telling the Oklahoma paper that she was “too young and irresponsible to know you were supposed to worry about them. I just let them go. I got a kick out of watching them.”
The senator, who died in 2018, said in 2008 that his “father was often at sea, and the job of raising my brother, sister and me would fall to my mother alone”.
Her other son, Joe, told the Associated Press in 2007 that the family had endless dinner-table discussions about history, politics and legislation led by their mother.
“We were all basically on the same side of the fence,” Joe McCain said. “But it was like Talmudic scholars arguing about a single word or an adjective in the Testament.”
When John McCain wrote a memoir about his experience as a POW for nearly six years in a north Vietnamese prison, he described times when he swore in English at his Vietnamese guards, who didn’t understand.
His mother later told him: “Johnny, I’m going to come over there and wash your mouth out with soap.”
2012
Her granddaughter Meghan McCain recalled her strong will and sense of duty in a 2012 column for the Daily Beast, writing that Roberta McCain did not have “a lot of patience for excuses, especially from my father when he was growing up and acting out”.
“She once hit him over the head with a Thermos in the back of a car because he was acting up so badly on a road trip,” wrote Meghan McCain.
The McCain matriarch’s spunky personality became the stuff of stories for the family and among those in their circle of Washington society.
ELOPING WITH THE ENSIGN
Roberta had been a student at the University of Southern California when she met John McCain Jr., then an ensign stationed nearby. Her family did not approve of their relationship, so they eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, in 1933.
As John Jr., who commanded submarines during World War Two, rose in rank, the Navy sent them around the world, including postings in London, Honolulu, Connecticut, Washington and Panama, where their son John was born.
McCain and her husband were preparing to attend a dinner party in London in 1967 when they got a phone call saying John III’s fighter jet had been shot down in North Vietnam. It was assumed he had been killed, but the couple decided to go to the dinner and say nothing.
A few days later, they learned their son had survived but been captured.
“Can you believe that’s the best news I ever heard in my life?” Roberta said in a 2008 interview with C-SPAN.
John III was beaten and tortured by the North Vietnamese during his 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war.
1999
“From both my parents I learned to persevere,” McCain wrote in his 1999 book “Faith of My Fathers.” “But my mother’s extraordinary resilience made her the stronger of the two.”
During his years in Congress, John McCain developed a reputation as a maverick who did not always follow Republican gospel and was willing to work across the aisle with his Democratic colleagues.
“I’ve inherited modest measures of her qualities, sufficient to give me the energy for a busy life and the enthusiasm for it. I’m the son and grandson of admirals,” he wrote in “The Restless Wave,” which was published a few months before his death. “But I am my mother’s son. I always have been. Thank you, mother, thank you.”
Motherhood was a role to which Roberta McCain clung. After reading an excerpt of his book in which he used a string of profanities on his Vietnamese captors, she told her son she was going to wash his mouth out with soap.
“He better never speak like that again or I’ll smack him bald-headed,” she told Time magazine. “Of course, he almost already is.”
50th anniversary
The Washington Post reported that McCain flew a Taiwanese flag outside her Washington apartment, which was located near the Chinese Embassy, on the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party’s takeover in China.
McCain was survived by her son Joseph. Her husband died in 1981 after 48 years of marriage, and her daughter, Jean Alexandra “Sandy” McCain Morgan, died in 2019.
In the early 1960s, the family lived in New York when Admiral McCain was attached to the United Nations, and in London when he commanded American naval forces in Europe. During the admiral’s Pacific and Vietnam theater commands, from 1968 to 1972, Mrs. McCain often accompanied him to Saigon, where he conferred with Gen. Creighton Abrams, the Vietnam military commander. She also joined him on missions to Thailand, Japan and the Philippines.
“My mother always traveled with my father,” Senator McCain wrote. “Had the Navy allowed it, I am sure she would have accompanied him on sea duty, and found in the alternately exciting and dull world of men at sea some useful and interesting way to occupy her time.”
1981
After her husband’s death in 1981, Mrs. McCain and her identical twin sister, Rowena, took long driving trips through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Once, when she was denied a rental car in Paris because of her age, she went out and bought a car. On road trips in the United States, she accumulated numerous speeding tickets and was once clocked at over 100 miles an hour, her son said.
In her later years, she encouraged her son’s political career. Retired from the Navy in 1981, he was elected in 1982 to the House of Representatives, where he served four years, and then to the Senate in 1986, winning re-election five times, most recently in 2016. She had no role in his run for president in 2000.
But she joined Senator McCain’s 2008 “Straight Talk Express” campaign. She occasionally stole the show with acerbic comments on her son’s political foes, and she once mistakenly accused one rival, Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, of involvement in a scandal that rocked the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She and her son both apologized.
Her death
Roberta McCain, mother of the late Sen. John McCain, has passed away at the age of 108.
The announcement was made Monday by John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain.
John McCain’s daughter and co-host of “The View” Meghan McCain remembered her grandmother via Twitter.
In 2018, John McCain, the six-term Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee, died at the age of 81, more than a year after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
The son and grandson of Navy admirals, McCain was a former Navy pilot and was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years. He was elected to Congress in the early 1980s and elected to the Senate in 1986, replacing retiring Barry Goldwater. McCain gained a reputation as a lawmaker who was willing to stick to his convictions rather than go along with party leaders, a streak that drew a mix of respect and ire.
McCain underwent surgery in July 2017 to remove a blood clot in his brain after being diagnosed with an aggressive tumor called a glioblastoma, the same type of tumor that killed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at age 77 in 2009.
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