Totally Unglued

Alone with Al Gore and George W. for the rest of the year? If it means waving goodbye to John McCain and Bill Bradley, we can't say we're sorry. McCain was a dangerous fraud and Bradley raised tedium to the level of an art form, up there with Spenser's Faerie Queen and the novels of Herman Broch, an author much loved by Mrs. Bradley. We can understand why the press corps boosted McCain. It's inevitable that journalists traveling with a candidate will become his eager accomplices, since they have a natural stake in his challenge, and an equally natural hope that he will take them into the White House. But there should be limits to this indulgence. If a candidate represents a serious threat to national security it is incumbent upon reporters covering the man to bring this threat to public attention. But when McCain's demented temper did briefly become an in issue, McCain's entourage of hacks tried to bury the issue.

There are plenty of examples of McCain's irrational and hysterical outbursts. Here's one. It concerned a very hot issue in Arizona at one point--namely the siting of some telescopes on top of Mount Graham. This was a mad scheme of the University of Arizona to erect seven deep space telescopes on national forest lands at the summit of Mt. Graham, which is not only an ecological marvel, but also a sacred mountain to the San Carlos Apache.

Neither of these factors carried weight with McCain, who was hell bent on doing favors for the University. He duly introduced legislation exempting the $520 million project from compliance with the Endangered Species Act, the Antiquities Act, and the Native American Religious Freedom Act.

In the spring of 1989, the Forest Service began to raise questions about the project. Worried about the impacts on the endangered Mt. Graham red squirrel, Jim Abbott, the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, ordered a halt to road construction at the site. The delay infuriated McCain. On May 17, 1989, Abbott got a call from Mike Jimenez, McCain's chief of staff. Jimenez told Abbott that McCain was angry and wanted to meet with him the next day. He told Abbott to expect "some ass-chewing." At the meeting, McCain raged, threatening Abbott that "if you do not cooperate on this project [bypassing the Endangered Species Act], you'll be the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service." Unfortunately for McCain, there was a witness to this encounter, a ranking Forest Service employee named Richard Flannelly, who recorded the encounter in his notebook. This notebook was later turned over to investigators at the General Accounting Office.

A few days later, McCain called Abbott to apologize. But the call sounded more like an attempt to bribe the forest supervisor to go along with the project. According to a 1990 GAO report on the affair, McCain "held out a carrot that with better cooperation, he would see about getting funding for Mr. Abbott's desired recreation projects."

Environmentalists attempted to bring an ethics complaint against McCain, citing a federal law that prohibits anyone (including members of Congress) from browbeating federal agency personnel. The Senate ethics committee never pursued the matter. When the GAO report, condemning McCain, surfaced publicly, McCain lied about the encounter, calling the allegations "groundless" and "silly."

In 1992, Robin Silver and Bob Weissman went to meet with McCain at his office in Phoenix to discuss Mt. Graham. Silver and Weissman are both physicians. Weissman is now retired and Silver works in the emergency room at a Phoenix hospital. The doctors say that at the mention of the words "Mt. Graham" McCain erupted into a violent fit. "He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room," Silver tells us. "He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation."

Weissman left the meeting stunned, and recently told us: "I'm a lifelong environmentalist, but what really scares me about McCain is not his environmental policies, which are horrid, but his violent, irrational temper. I think McCain is so unbalanced that if Vladimir Putin told him something he didn't like, he'd lose it, start beating his chest about having his finger on the nuclear trigger. Who knows where it would stop? To my mind, McCain's the most likely candidate to start a nuclear war."