[2] His father, John S. McCain Sr., was a junior officer on the armored cruiser USS Washington and was away at sea at the time and his mother, the former Catherine Davey Vaulx, was traveling cross-country to visit with her sister.

[2][4] As one biographer wrote, McCain "was given to taking unauthorized midnight leave and spent much of his four ... years in contention with authority and working off massive doses of extra duty.

[9] After Roberta's mother objected to her daughter associating with a sailor,[10] the couple eloped to Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, marrying in Caesar's Bar on January 21, 1933.

[13] The family was frequently uprooted as they followed McCain from New London to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and other stations in the Pacific Ocean;[14] Roberta took on the lead role in raising the children.

[4] In 1934, McCain was praised for loyalty and for performing his duties very well, but his fitness report said he suffered from nervousness, and he was treated for weight loss at Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital.

[19][20] The convoy's escorts then staged a prolonged counter-attack on Gunnel, dropping depth charges that shook and damaged the boat and grappling hooks that rattled along its hull.

[19] Despite the reduced time, the freighter tonnage Gunnel sunk was the second-largest total for any of the sixteen U.S. submarines deployed into operational areas in the Pacific that month.

[19][22] McCain was awarded the Silver Star for this patrol, for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action, as Commanding Officer of a submarine in enemy Japanese-controlled waters ... [and] bravery under fire and aggressive fighting spirit.

Many of the U.S. submarine commanders trained in peacetime had focused excessively on conformance to regulations and adherence to official tactical doctrine; they lacked the aggressiveness and ability to improvise that the conflict in the Pacific demanded, and by the end of the first year of the war, almost a third of them had been relieved as inadequate.

[8] McCain published a January 1949 article in United States Naval Institute Proceedings examining the training challenges the Navy faced in the nuclear era.

From February through November 1950, McCain was executive officer of the heavy cruiser Saint Paul, and from June 1950 was involved in the early stages of the Korean War, joining Task Force 77 to patrol the Formosa Strait.

[4] As one biographical profile stated, "Few fathers and sons could have been more alike as adolescents than Jack McCain and John Sidney III: Youthful rebellion seemed encoded in their DNA.

[5] His wife Roberta, viewed as "charming" and "wonderful" by McCain's superiors,[7] also aided the social success, which featured as house guests powerful Congressional figures such as Carl Vinson, Richard Russell Jr., and Everett Dirksen.

[41]) During this stint, Rear Admiral McCain became an effective advocate for the Navy in congressional hearings and behind-the-scenes dealmaking,[4] and helped persuade Congress to restore budget allocations it had earlier cut from construction programs for aircraft carriers.

[1] Following the April 1963 loss of the nuclear submarine Thresher, he explained to the public why the search for the wreckage would be lengthy and difficult, and defended the Navy against charges that it had been tardy in disclosing details of the disaster.

[38][45][46] He came up with the idea for Operation Sea Orbit, the voyage around the world without refuelling of three nuclear-powered Navy ships; it was reminiscent of the Great White Fleet circumnavigation that his father had been part of over half a century earlier.

[50] In April 1965, McCain led the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic as commander of Task Force 124,[38] which maintained a military occupation until civil unrest had ended.

"[4] He was often asked how he told his wife Roberta and her identical twin sister Rowena apart, to which he famously responded by puffing his cigar, flashing a grin, and saying, "That's their problem.

[5] He developed a problem with alcoholism during his career, and cut back on his drinking so that it did not interfere with his ability to command or show up on fitness reports, although he occasionally suffered lapses.

[1][56] At the change of command ceremony for the Eastern Sea Frontier post, held on his father's old flagship USS Wasp, McCain was awarded a gold star in lieu of a third Legion of Merit for his work during the U.N.

[57][58] As the Vietnam War escalated, McCain was a strong advocate for bringing Iowa-class battleships out of the United States Navy reserve fleets in order to support shore bombardment missions.

[59] He ordered a Naval Court of Inquiry to be convened following the June 1967 USS Liberty incident,[60] and chose his colleague, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr., to head it.

[61] McCain limited the scope of the Inquiry and gave Kidd only a week to investigate and come up with a report on the matter, factors that led to doubts persisting for decades about what actually took place in the Liberty attack.

[75] McCain's views, which had the support of his subordinate, MACV commander General Creighton Abrams, helped persuade Nixon to go ahead with the Cambodian Incursion later that month.

"[4] By late 1970, McCain worried that Kissinger's plan for extensive commitment of South Vietnamese troops to preserve the Cambodian regime would endanger the progress of Vietnamization.

McCain gained control of this effort (instead of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), and to support a conflict that he proprietarily spoke of as "my war",[80] made constant requests to the Pentagon for more arms and staff.

[81] He sided with Kissinger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as they prevailed over the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia and U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird in adopting a militarization of American policy with regard to that country.

He told Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that an offensive against the Ho Chi Minh Trail might compel Prince Souvanna Phouma, prime minister of Laos, "to abandon the guise of neutrality and enter the war openly.

Each year while Jack McCain was CINCPAC, he paid a Christmastime visit to the American troops in South Vietnam serving closest to the DMZ; he would stand alone and look north, to be as close to his son as he could get.

"[89] In early 1973, with the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords, his son was released from confinement as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and repatriated to the United States.