McCain’s casket was escorted from the Capitol shortly after 8:30 a.m.
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“When John McCain called on us to serve a goal greater than one’s own self-interest, it wasn’t a talking point created to win the next election”.
Biden, 75, first met McCain in the 1970s when McCain was a Navy Senate liaison.
“We shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher – the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed”. “It was this approach to humanity that made Senator John McCain so respected by countless people around the world, including me”. (Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call) Members of the different services were bearers of McCain’s casket into the Capitol.
Bridget McCain is mourning the loss of her father, Senator John McCain, with her mom, Cindy, and her siblings. The senator praised Fitzgerald when he introduced him at a McCain Institute forum in 2015 and McCain would often show up at Arizona Cardinals games.
Vice President Pence spoke next, and hailed the man his boss relished denigrating.
President Donald Trump ― who was not invited to McCain’s memorial ― said in a statement Monday that he asked Vice President Mike Pence to give an address at the ceremony.
“He held fast to his faith in America through six decades of service”. It was, in part, because McCain believed in the necessity of reaching across the aisle to get big things done. Republican and Democratic leaders stood side by side as they laid them just the way McCain wanted it.
Personal in their connection but never personal in politics, the friendship between McCain and Biden may seem unusual, given the polarization that grips Washington.
People holding US flags and campaign style placards with the word “McCain” lined part of the 8-mile (13-kilometer) route that the motorcade with McCain’s casket will take from the Arizona State Capitol to the church.
People watch the motorcade carrying the casket of U.S. Sen. Trump today was expected to leave Washington in early afternoon, to head to North Carolina for an event on retirement security about the same time the public will start filing past McCain’s casket.
Fitzgerald was so moved by McCain’s interest in him that he decided in 2013 to visit Vietnam to see where McCain was held as a prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years. “After times when life can be so cruel, pain so blinding”.
In 2017, shortly after his brain cancer diagnosis, McCain returned to Washington DC, where he cast a crucial vote against a Republican-led effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act – one of Obama’s signature policy achievements.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, told reporters of McCain “We need people with his values here”.
In a fitting testimonial, the skies erupted in a downpour as McCain’s flag-draped casket was carried up the marble steps of the Capitol by members of the US armed forces Inside, tears welled up among mourners as it was placed on the simple pine catafalque hastily constructed in 1865 to hold the body of Abraham Lincoln. Lindsey Graham. While in the chamber, Cindy McCain sat in her husband’s chair. McCain was a member of the Academy’s Class of 1958.
Other speakers there will include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former senator Joe Lieberman and Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter. Proudest years of my life were being a United States senator. Her dad goes after me, hammer and tong. “We both lamented, watching it change”.
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The former vice president recalled that McCain spent his final day on the Senate floor trying to restore order. Ted Kennedy, the MA liberal, who died of the same brain cancer nine years earlier and with whom he had worked on comprehensive immigration reform.
