!=

Andrew Sullivan points to “new McCain POW footage,” but the film is a longer cut (and much better ‘print’) of the footage included here. The longer cut shows much more clearly the degree of mobility in McCain’s neck, shoulder, and left arm (for example, when he tips his ash at 3:17). At 1:07, the interviewer asks “Want some light?” and relights McCain’s cigarette.

See ”Marlboro Man” for more on how consistently the North Vietnamese stressed his smoking in their propaganda. A correction to that article:

Even without relying on Scott’s criticism of McCain, the evidence suggests that McCain received rewards (cigarettes, medical treatment) and punishments (starvation, severe beatings or worse) in the several weeks between when he was shot down and when he arrived at the POW camp; and that, in that same period, his captors learned at least his significance, and more. His subsequent career has been viewed through the lens of the abuses he suffered, but it seems likely that the favors he received—in particular, his weakness for cigarettes—played an equally or maybe even more important role in his experiences as a POW. The North Vietnamese certainly seem to have thought so.

In this longer cut, McCain states his status, and apparently not for the first time:

What is your name?

Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain.

So you have a famous name.

[Nods] Yes.

May I know who is your father? Can you[?] name him and tell me who he is?

Yes, his name is Admiral John McCain [garbled] London, England [garbled] he is the Commander in Chief of the naval force for all of[?] Europe.

This exchange isn’t impromptu: the interviewer has been told who McCain’s father is and homes in on it immediately.

The film is quite moving; toward the end, the journalist‘s open question inviting McCain to speak to his family seems like a gambit to get him to break down—and, indeed, McCain bites his lip and fights back tears. I don’t think anyone can watch it without sympathizing with his pain, loss, and terror. But if the contemporaneous accounts of McCain’s terrible condition when he arrived at the POW camp are accurate (one supportive fellow POW described him as “a survivor of Dachau”), then McCain sustained terrible injuries after this film was made. This sequence—shot down, good treatment (privileged medical treatment, favors), and then bad treatment (brutal beatings, starvation)—sheds light on how McCain’s captors tried to break him with carrots and then sticks.

This film shows that they broke him with the carrots.