The prime-time acceptance speech to be delivered tonight by Republican presidential nominee John McCain has been crafted by a man described as the candidate’s best friend, as well as his Boswell.
For two decades, Mark Salter has made channeling McCain’s voice his life’s work. He co-authored five books with the Arizona senator (and split the proceeds 50-50), including the best-selling memoir, Faith of Our Fathers. He has also been McCain’s speechwriter, adviser and closest confidante, surviving countless campaign shake-ups.
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“The only person closer to McCain is his wife,” said former senator Warren Rudman, a longtime friend to both men.
From the very start, McCain’s history as a former prisoner of war was part of his political brief. He was first elected to Congress as a war hero beneath the slogan “a name Arizonans are talking about.”
But it was Salter who distilled and refined the narrative.
“Salter has transformed his boss into a character worthy of literature, enlivening his inner conflicts and drawing out his motivations,” wrote Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe. “Salter has given the blunt McCain a new voice as a reflective narrator of his own actions – made evident in the “imperfect servant” line, in which our protagonist earns our trust by acknowledging his flaw.”
In Faith of My Fathers, published in 1999 during his first presidential campaign, McCain’s release from prison became a revelatory moment:
“I had remembered a dying man’s legacy to his son,” McCain wrote, “and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.”
That theme – of discovering individual purpose through a “cause greater than self-interest” – became central to McCain’s narrative.
Besides getting McCain better than anyone, Salter has also demonstrated “a one-of-a-kind instinct for how to craft McCain’s public image,” wrote Michael Crowley of the New Republic.
“Over the years, he has taken the raw material of McCain’s biography and temperament and turned it into a compelling narrative that supersedes politics–one about an independent-minded war hero who celebrates courage and humility, demands individual sacrifice, and excoriates vanity.”
A burly, chain-smoker, Salter met McCain for the first time in the mid-1980s and immediately hit it off with him.
He had grown up in Davenport, Iowa, the son of a Korean War veteran, who apparently shared McCain’s gruff modesty. “People write about how McCain is unnecessarily modest,” Salter told Salon in 1999. “But it’s perfectly consistent with the way my father talked about his war experience.”
Salter’s unusual life story also appealed to McCain. After a long rebellious streak working on railroads and singing in a rock band, Salter had gone to night school, ultimately graduating from Georgetown University.
Drawn to politics, he got a job writing speeches for UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and got to know McCain’s press secretary who invited him to do some freelance work for the senator.
The two men immediately struck up a friendship. Within four years, Salter had been elevated to McCain’s chief of staff. Salter also eventually married McCain’s former scheduler, Diane, with whom he has two daughters.
By all accounts, Salter is fiercely loyal. He once wrestled a critic of the senator to the floor outside his office and held him until the police came.
And last summer, with McCain’s campaign sinking in the polls and running out of money, the senator let go his top managers. The day after the shake-up, he talked to Salter about the future. Salter assured the senator that he was “a McCain guy,” and that he would do whatever the senator wanted, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now, in a hotly contested election, Salter faces his greatest challenge to date – to sell his candidate as the real agent of change. The speech he reportedly labored over all summer will purportedly spotlight McCain’s moments of self-sacrifice, including his refusal of early release from captivity in Vietnam, and his decision to challenge his own party over campaign-finance reform.
The contrast, he says, will be the “selfishness” of “self-interested” political partisans who, he argues, have risked nothing of substance in their lives.
“Obviously I’ve got to get this one right,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
