Npr We Shall Not See His Like Again

Joe Biden, speaking at a memorial service for John McCain, noted that he had given a lot of eulogies over the years. But "this one's hard," he said. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hibernate caption

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Joe Biden, speaking at a memorial service for John McCain, noted that he had given a lot of eulogies over the years. Only "this one's hard," he said.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Updated at iii:52 p.thou. ET

Joe Biden walked up to the microphone on the altar in the church at his friend John McCain's funeral and sounded like a human being with something to confess.

"My name'southward Joe Biden," he said. "I'm a Democrat. And I loved John McCain."

Then he paused. Biden noted that he had given a lot of eulogies over the years. Merely "this 1's hard," he said.

He choked up, wiped abroad a tear at the ceremony at North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona, and continued. "I always idea of John equally a brother," Biden said. "We had a hell of a lot of family fights."

McCain requested that the former Democratic vice president eulogize him at his funeral. And through the lens of today's era of partisanship, their friendship makes lilliputian sense. Biden is cut from a incomparably liberal cloth; McCain was bourgeois. And they securely disagreed on policy. But they were friends for xl years, built-in out of a mutual respect for each other and beloved of country.

Both men were forged in the fires of deep hurting — Biden lost his wife and girl in a car accident; McCain had only gotten out of Vietnam, where he was tortured at the easily of his captors for v 1/2 years.

Biden said at the anniversary Th that when they became friends, they didn't talk about those two things that had shaped each other'southward lives. Merely they both clearly meant something deeply important to each other.

"I trusted John with my life," Biden said. And, he added, "The affair that's understated the most was his optimism. That's what made John special, fabricated him a giant amidst us."

Biden, as he has washed repeatedly over the years at funerals, played a pastoral role.

"The disease that took John's life — that took our friend Ted Kennedy's life. That took my son Boyfriend's life — is savage, relentless, unforgiving," Biden said. "It takes so much from those we love — and from the families who love them — that in order to survive we have to remember how they lived — not how they died."

The image he carries with him of Boyfriend, he said, is one of him starting a boat, smiling and waving. "Not the terminal days," he said.

To McCain's family unit, Biden said, "You will all observe your ain images." Maybe it's a smile, a express mirth, a rub on the shoulder, a touch on the cheek.

Or, he added, "The sheer joy that crossed his face when he was virtually to take the stage on the floor of the Senate and start a fight. God, he loved it."

Biden, a homo who has seen and felt great pain, promised those closest to McCain that there will come a day when the mention of McCain's name volition bring a smiling to their faces before a tear to their cheeks, and that'southward when they volition know they will make it.

Biden ended his speech, paraphrasing Shakespeare earlier banging the lectern: "Nosotros shall not see his like once more."

Rick Davis, who was McCain's campaign manager, said before this calendar week of their friendship, per NBC News: "If there's a meliorate of exemplification of debating and throwing a few punches, only at the end of the twenty-four hour period beingness able to maintain a relationship with the people you lot are at battle with, equally the model of governance John McCain adhered to, that human relationship with Biden was in the category."

McCain's friendship with Biden was one in a long line of Democrats he reached out to and befriended over the years. It was, in part, because McCain believed in the necessity of reaching across the aisle to get big things done. But it was too because he just liked some of them, and he wasn't going to let politics get in the way.

Biden lamented the pass up of bipartisanship in the Senate. He pinned the turn down back to a moment in 1996. Upwardly until then, he said, he and McCain would frequently sit down next to each other during floor fights while issues were debated, either Biden going over to the Republican side or McCain venturing over to him.

I day, though, Biden said, McCain and Biden were each approached separately by leaders of their respective caucuses, who told them to terminate sitting with each other because "it didn't look good."

Biden said that kind of mental attitude makes it "impossible to reach consensus." He added that today, people in both parties are decorated attacking each other'south motives rather than the substance of their arguments.

McCain was also skillful friends with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts liberal, who died of the same brain cancer nine years earlier and with whom he had worked on comprehensive immigration reform.

"Some of the biggest fights I'd ever had was one with Ted Kennedy," McCain joked on CBS's sixty Minutes final year. And yet, he added, "We were the closest of friends. ... Whether you liked him, whether you disliked him, whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, he was always prepare to do battle, but he wasn't ready to get personal. And that's what matters."

McCain also invited another Democrat to eulogize him at his funeral: Barack Obama, the man who defeated him for the presidency in 2008. Obama is set up to speak Saturday at the National Cathedral. Former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent/Democrat, will also speak that solar day. McCain wrote in his book The Restless Wave that he wished he had picked Lieberman to be his vice presidential running mate in 2008.

Obama volition follow former President George W. Bush, with whom McCain also sparred. Bush defeated McCain for the Republican nomination for president in 2000 in a bitter battle. Non invited to speak: Sarah Palin, McCain's vice presidential pick in 2008, or President Trump.

Trump and McCain both had charmed upbringings, simply they couldn't accept made more dissimilar choices with their lives. McCain wasn't i for conspiracy theories; he was generally courteous and respectful of the printing — and, by and large, he truly believed in the system of governance the Founders ready.

During the 2022 presidential campaign, McCain said Trump was "firing upward the crazies"; Trump hit back, proverb he likes people who weren't captured; and and then McCain thwarted the Republicans' health care repeal effort.

McCain'southward funeral, which he had a great say in planning, was total of diversity — along with Biden were a one-time Republican master of staff, a Latino pastor, a Mexican-American Democrat who chaired his early on Senate campaign, a Navajo flutist, and Larry Fitzgerald, a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, who is black.

Grant Woods, McCain'southward former chief of staff, delivered what sounded like a veiled shot at Trump, noting that McCain "wouldn't stand by" when people tried to postage stamp on the Neb of Rights, "including the First Amendment."

Biden, quoting the Declaration of Independence, said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with sure unalienable rights ..."

Then he thundered, "To John, those words had meaning."

He added, "Y'all could come up to a unlike conclusion, simply where he'd office company with you — if you lacked the basic values of decency, respect, knowing that this project is bigger than yourself."

Trump and McCain never patched things upwards. And McCain, whose catafalque exited the church to Frank Sinatra'southward My Way, got the last word.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/30/643272114/joe-biden-to-honor-john-mccain-his-friend-of-4-decades

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