Faith of My Fathers by John McCain Page A

certainty. What is known is that at some point the wife had left the nightclub without her husband. Her husband located her at home later that evening, bruised and frightened and claiming to have been abducted and raped by as many as six native Hawaiian boys. She identified five boys who had been arrested that same evening for a traffic altercation as her assailants, and they were subsequently put on trial for the crime.
    The evidence against the boys was far from conclusive. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was pronounced. The accused were released on bail pending retrial. One month later, Lieutenant Massie persuaded two enlisted men from the submarine base to help him and his blue-blooded mother-in-law apprehend and murder one of the defendants. A short time later, Massie, his mother-in-law, and one of the enlisted men were stopped by police while racing through town in their car, curtains covering the windows, with the body of one of the boys wrapped in a tarp on the floor of the backseat.
    The conduct of this officer shocked and outraged the rest of Hawaii’s naval community, but not because the man had exacted mortal vengeance for his wife’s rape. That showed poor judgment, perhaps, but given the nature of the alleged crime, the act was forgivable. What was unforgivable was that the officer had involved enlisted men in his crime, placing them in great jeopardy to help him avenge an offense that concerned only him and his wife. That was a grave breach of an officer’s duty to his men.
    There was a trial, and Massie, his mother-in-law, and the two enlisted men were convicted of manslaughter even though the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow had defended them. They escaped justice, however. The Navy had intervened in the case to help in their defense, and, after their conviction, to help persuade the governor of Hawaii to commute their sentence from ten years to one hour. After the convicted vigilantes had served their hour in the governor’s office, the Navy quickly sent them and Thalia Massie back to the States.
    Many of his fellow officers felt shamed by Massie’s conduct, and by the Navy’s intervention in the matter. Initially, most officers believed the allegation of rape and their fellow officer’s subsequent explanation of the killing as self-defense. They found it hard to believe an officer would lie. But most soon came to believe that he had indeed lied about the killing, and that he and his wife had probably lied about the rape as well. The discovery made the Navy’s intervention on his behalf as unpardonable as the officer’s use of enlisted men.
    When my parents arrived, the scandal still dominated all conversation in every officer’s home. The entire community seemed distressed over this singular violation of the standards they had always accepted as an unquestioned, ennobling way of life. And it was a long time before they recovered from the shock of it all.
    My mother said that on the ship that returned him to the States, the disgraced Massie was observed to be frequently drunk and “making a natural fool of himself.” She claims that some years later, he was incorrectly reported to have killed himself—an act that most of his fellow officers and their wives who had known of his crime and the damage it had done to the Navy’s honor thought appropriate.
    This was the Navy in which my father and grandfather felt so at home. They had entered its ranks already imbued with the notions of honor that distinguished a good officer. They were the standards passed down from one generation to another in their family. As boys, no less than as men, they did not lie, steal, or cheat, and they never shirked their duty. My brother once said that our father’s word “had the constancy of Newtonian laws of physical motion.” He added, “I have never met a more honest man than my father. I literally cannot think of a single time