A Hero's Life

...But there we stopped...

...Words like ‘battlement’ and ‘citadel’–why does she use them...

...Three classes below him was a grandson of General Patton...

...Hamlet and Macbeth in his classes were not just plays...

...The entire class had stopped...

...But Ravenel was also imbued with a particular and transcendent kind of joy, a joy born of past sadness...

...And why is she using antique words...

...This is a rather surprising error, which speaks far more about McCain’s sense of isolation in those days than it does about the school...

...I sure as hell don’t want to go back...

...He seemed to revel in the vitality of all the young lives around him and feel a more than ordinary teacher’s duty to awaken us from our green and glandular adolescent pre occupations both to the wonder and majesty of life and to the crushing weight of what it might require...

...To answer that question, it’s necessary to summon up the ghost of Episcopal High School in the 1950s: a then-bare-bones, nearmilitary boarding school where boys, many from wealthy families in the South, were sent to be taken down a peg from the country club indulgences at home and toughened into manhood with academic rigor, compulsory team sports, and cold fried eggs for breakfast...

...The barrier between them, that law...

...The Dickinson poem I can recite to this day...

...Horny 17year-olds that we were, we didn’t have to know Freud to thrill to her “groove” pushing “sudden thro to his,” and he drew us to appreciate the splendid, multilayered image comparing the legal wall between them to both “a cobweb wove in adamant” and the veil (bridal...

...Research at the Library of Congress was encouraged and sometimes required...

...Ringle,” he said, jolting me from some daydream...

...He remembers that Ravenel was “one of the few people at school to whom I . . . confessed my reservations about my destiny,” and while working in Ravenel’s yard, “I discussed all manner of subjects with him, from sports to the stories of Somerset Maugham, from his combat experiences to my future...

...He himself never fi gured out how Ravenel glimpsed in him “something that few others did...

...Who was his major partner in the ultimately successful effort...

...One day I ran into him and asked him how he liked the work...

...It was not simply Ravenel’s academic infl uence that was so profound, McCain told his audience: “He helped teach me to be a man, and to believe in the possibility that we are not captive to the worst parts of our nature...

...Wait...

...he said...

...Ravenel was always reaching out, always trying not so much to instill as to bring out the qualities McCain would need in the future...

...When he talked of the “problem” of Episcopal playing football against soon-to-be integrated teams from District of Columbia schools, I just wrote it off to a racial blind spot born of background...

...I had been shown how Emily Dickinson could give us her entire life in 16 lines, but we had to meet her halfway to decode it...

...But he struggled with that as the years went by...

...And as he personifi ed the ideal of every student, Mr...

...It would never stand, he said: Segregation was what we’d all grown up with, and that’s the way things would remain...

...Mythology...

...He was shocked by that, and angry, and bitter beyond telling...

...Think...

...A major reason he’s different is a remarkable teacher we both shared in school, an incalculable shaper of mind and character named William Bee Ravenel III...

...Though the Vietnam war was scarcely over, Congress was already planning to dispatch a mission to Hanoi to discuss the possibility of normalizing relations with Vietnam...

...Last month, during the “biography tour” of his campaign, he returned to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, the once all-male boarding school we both attended in the 1950s...

...He believed in precision born of discipline and effort...

...Then he asked us what it meant...

...They’re all sort of antique words—” “Right...

...they were intensely human narratives with profound implications...

...We all have to put Vietnam behind us...

...The school is nearly 25 percent minority these days...

...I knew plenty of otherwise praiseworthy southerners with such racial blind spots, including members of my own family...

...Ravenel’s regard signaled my classmates that I had some merit despite the fact that they and I had to strain to see it...

...I remember being surprised by his reaction...

...The Navy wanted McCain to go along...

...He was a product of South Carolina in the fi rst half of the 20th century, a product of his times...

...I had not minded walls Were Universe one Rock And far I heard his silver Call The other side the Block— I’d tunnel till my Groove Pushed sudden thro’ to his— Then my face take Recompense— The looking in his eyes— But ’tis a single Hair— A fi lament—a law— A Cobweb wove in Adamant— A Battlement of Straw— A limit like the Veil Unto the Lady’s face— But every Mesh a Citadel— And Dragons in the Crease...

...Slowly and painfully, we wracked our underbooked brains and teased out the notion that she would do anything to get to her lover if the obstacle between them was merely physical...

...In Faith of My Fathers he says the teacher’s “infl uence over my life . . . was more important and more benevolent than that of any other person save members of my family...

...Though our paths rarely crossed anymore, I called to congratulate him on what I considered a truly selfl ess act in the national interest, one of rare political courage...

...But I discovered he had died”—in 1968, at the age of only 53—“and that was the hardest thing I’ve had to face since I got back...

...But he was from South Carolina, and I noticed that the boys from South Carolina and Alabama appeared even more hostile to the decision than those from Missi ssippi...

...I wanted to tell him I fi nally understood there in Hanoi all the things he’d been trying to tell me about life...

...but, former warrior that he was, he did that most of all with future warrior McCain...

...One creaky and much vaunted history teacher had never even been to college...

...They were analytical tools for unlocking the secrets of language and, therefore, of communication and meaning...

...With all that, the teachers—known as masters—were a decidedly mixed lot...

...I’ll never forgive those [North Vietnamese] bastards...

...He must have worked on me for 10 minutes...

...But even though most of those boys would go on, like McCain, to the service academies, none carried near the same weight of college and career inevitability...

...He was certainly no bigot (we had a few of those among the masters) and I had never seen him treat any of the blacks on the school staff—cooks and maintenance workers though they were—with anything other than the same warmth and humanity he showed for the boys...

...For Ravenel’s passion for literature and for the ordered structure of the English language was—almost—his religion...

...Nearly a half-century later I spoke about Ravenel’s blind spot with his daughter Ruthie...

...It was he who drew up the fi rst minority recruitment program for Episcopal in the 1960s...

...It was just a beginning, but it was meaningful beyond telling...

...A preferred alternative, however, was to work them off doing chores for one of the masters, 15 minutes for each demerit...

...The struggles of their characters, we came to understand, were in some sense the potential maps of our very own lives...

...If we’re lucky, most of us can remember a moment in high school or college when we stopped looking for mental handouts and began thinking for ourselves...

...But as seriously as he persuaded us to take learning—or football, baseball, or any of the athletic endeavors he coached—it was always a seriousness tinged with joy...

...Ravenel distributed it to the dozen of us in the class, informing us only that Dickinson had been in love at the time with a married minister...

...It was a kind of atonement...

...I’ve often thought since that something similar must have been working on Ravenel, after all the young men he’d so recently seen die in World War II...

...It was a bizarre kind of boot camp of the mind and soul...

...All of us in this country have to become part of something larger than our own self-interest...

...I told her I had always thought of him as a near-perfect man, and never could entirely reconcile that with his intransigence in the face of integration...

...Ravenel was best able to repair the all too evident fl aws in my character,” McCain writes in Faith of My Fathers...

...Welcome to the writer’s world, Mr...

...But Ravenel wouldn’t tell us...

...It was also clear to everyone, from his distaste for authority, that McCain wasn’t necessarily thrilled about that...

...What about the other nouns, Mr...

...He joined the faculty immediately upon graduating from EHS in 1902 and droned away the next 53 years of his life while carefully positioning his classroom pointer in a timeless indentation in the toe of his shoe...

...He found it rewarding, he said, but he’d run into an infuriating obstacle...

...We were studying Emily Dickinson at the time...

...Boys charged with “demerits” for assorted misbehaviors could “walk them off ” mindlessly by doing laps around the school...

...I think William Bee Ravenel would be really proud of that...

...He simply lived them, and did so with a unique kind of life-affi rming ferocity that inspired awe as well as affection...

...He did that with all the boys, to some extent...

...After spring vacations there with his family he would invariably return with a wisp of Spanish moss which he would poignantly (and always futilely) attempt to transplant in a frontyard tree...

...You know,” she said, “that was hard for him...

...mourning...

...She’s saying it’s old-fashioned...

...Whose example had he followed to reach beyond a painful barrier and put an imprisoning past behind him...

...I remember his expression of cold fury at the decision...

...Those literary terms we had to learn—simile and metaphor, dactyl and penta meter— were more than abstractions in his hands...

...on a lady’s hat...

...Where, I wondered, had he found the capacity to rise above all those years of physical and mental torture as a prisoner of war...

...George Patton’s Third Army, had received the Silver Star, and was still a lieutenant colonel in the reserve...

...As head of the English department, he set such rigorous standards for grammar and writing that they rule his former students to this day...

...It also included a certain amount of slave labor...

...Blackford Hall, where John McCain lived during his junior year, had been a Union hospital during the Civil War and appeared little changed since...

...He just stood over me, relentlessly prodding, coaxing, encouraging, nagging...

...He was married to a coquettish Southern beauty, adored her and their four children (and a spaniel named Shakespeare), and managed to maintain a commanding sense of family even as he shared them with the 240 boys in the student body at meals in the dining room...

...I was stunned...

...Literary analysis wasn’t just a dry exercise...

...I wanted to apologize for being so stupid and to thank him for trying to reach me...

...Yet there was never anything of the martinet or pedant about him...

...Who was Bill Ravenel, and how did he so shape a possible future president...

...but that included a house and all meals for the entire family...

...Ken Ringle, longtime reporter and cultural critic for the Washington Post, writes from retirement...

...You’re fi nally starting to use your head...

...Decades later, in the 1970s, after he’d recovered from his imprisonment, McCain was appointed the Navy’s liaison with the Senate...

...Masters at Episcopal were paid something appalling, like $1,000 a year, in those days...

...Everybody knew McCain’s father and grandfather were both admirals, and everybody knew he was headed for the Naval Academy...

...He wanted us to understand that meaningful things rarely come easily, and that knowledge born of the liberal arts can soften life’s horrors and heighten its riches...

...At least six EHS students at the time were the sons of professional offi cers, including two in his class of 1954...

...That was mine...

...Ringle...

...Most of what’s been written, however, proceeds from the assumption that McCain, for all his maverick tendencies, is at heart a politician like any other, prey to the same ambitions, vanities, temptations, and weaknesses endemic to all presidential hopefuls...

...It took me six years to get out of Hanoi...

...This was serious and compelling stuff...

...What do ‘citadel,’ ‘battlement,’ and ‘dragons’ have in common...

...There was a kind of alchemy in the English language for him, and he wanted us to discover and share the wonder of making gold...

...it could have human drama in it...

...John McCain’s scrappy rebelliousness inevitably garnered him even more demerits than I earned, and he usually accepted the opportunity to work them off doing yard work for Ravenel...

...One of the main reasons it did was Bill Ravenel...

...All this, mind you, in high school...

...I guess she’s just being poetic,” I mumbled...

...He instituted a writing program so ambitious that students in every English class— even freshmen—produced a serious and lengthy research paper at least three times a year, complete with scholarly footnotes and bibliography...

...Vincent Millay—not because they were women but because they were good...

...I was so young and naive I didn’t think it was a big deal, but almost everyone else in our lily-white and very southern school did, particularly Ravenel...

...He’s a very different animal, and not just because of his Naval warrior forebears, his indomitable 96-year-old mother, or his experiences as a POW in Vietnam—though all those obviously infl uenced him profoundly...

...Until two decades later when President Clinton sought to normalize relations with Vietnam...

...He had a delicious wit and would needle us good-naturedly— but always, it seems in retrospect, with some sort of larger purpose...

...I didn’t have a clue...

...But he had also rolled across Europe less than a decade before in the 6th Armored Division of Gen...

...He revolutionized (and greatly upgraded) the English curriculum, authored a seminal textbook on spelling and grammar known as “The Gray Gospel,” and gave standardized tests so often that the College Board exams were almost familiar to his pupils when they fi nally came around...

...A battlement could be part of a citadel...

...In 1973, less than a year after his release from prison in Hanoi, a withdrawn McCain stood quietly in a corner at a party on Capitol Hill and told me he had returned from Vietnam desperate to see Ravenel: “He was the only person I felt I could talk to about my imprisonment,” he said...

...He was one of the Charleston Ravenels of South Carolina, and was deeply and sentimentally attached to his hometown...

...He’d seen so many die under his hands in the war, he said, that afterward he felt a powerful need to help life begin...

...This, together with his commanding demeanor and sharp intelligence, inspired universal respect among the boys, even those who felt victimized by the severity of his grading...

...He fought himself constantly to do the right thing, and he grew as a result...

...We thought we were done...

...Some accused him of treachery...

...It was an adventure in discovery...

...He thanked me and said that he remembered our conversation years before: “But you have to put stuff like that behind you or bitterness will eat a hole in your soul,’’ he said...

...King Arthur...

...The roaches there marched almost nightly, as numerous and aggressive as the Army of Northern Virginia...

...Indelibly etched on my memory is a day Ravenel opened a major window for me on this score...

...Perhaps the school authorities knew . . . that Mr...

...But Episcopal did whip most of its charges into shape...

...That’s not the case...

...Much of the Republican party was against the effort, as were McCain’s conservative constituents in Arizona...

...A Hero’s Life Remembering John McCain’s teacher BY KEN RINGLE Much has been written about John McCain’s presidential campaign, about his conservative ideology (or insuffi cient supply thereof), about his age, his military service, and his remarkable life story...

...Ravenel had been a star running back at Davidson in the 1930s and held a master’s degree in English from Duke...

...Somehow, however, I had expected more from Ravenel...

...He didn’t talk much, as other masters did, about pious abstractions like honor and character...

...The doctor who delivered my youngest daughter, decades later, told me he decided to specialize in obstetrics after service as a surgeon in Vietnam...

...Each year it sent graduates off to the most competitive colleges—including Yale, Princeton, Williams, and its major outlet, the University of Virginia...

...Fairy tales...

...Senator John Sidney McCain, R-Ariz...

...You can do better than that, Mr...

...I had known her as a child, and she knew how much I loved her father...

...Ringle,” Ravenel said as the bell rang ending class...

...On May 17, 1954, less than a month before McCain graduated from Episcopal, the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring unconstitutional the segregation of public schools...

...Can you believe they are asking me to do that...

...For an all-boys school, he saw to it that we studied an unusual number of women writers—Dickinson, Jane Austen, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Edna St...

...He had never wanted to do anything but teach, had joined the Episcopal faculty before going off to war, and never looked back...

...Ravenel taught lessons like that with everything he did, from puzzling over Polonius to helping a young pitcher throw a curve ball...

...Suddenly, the sun came up: “I get it...

...said Ravenel, as if he’d just mined a diamond...

...McCain has spoken often of Ravenel, and keeps a photograph of him hanging on the wall of his Senate offi ce...

...Any cynic tempted to dismiss this as campaign boilerplate should think again...

...But that he did take an interest . . . was apparent to all...

...We slept in curtained alcoves on sagging pipe-frame bunks in aging dormitories light years from the preppy privileges of popular myth...

...I don’t remember what happened to the mission, but McCain didn’t go and I heard no more about it...

...McCain also writes, of Episcopal’s students, that “none but me were sons of professional offi cers in the armed services...

...He was a stocky, muscular man who carried, with his rugged good looks, a sense of coiled, but self-possessed, authority...

...The rest of the class was similarly stumped...

...Now I think I know...

...He used most of his speech there to praise Ravenel as “one of the best men I have ever known,” who “enriched my life at EHS beyond measure...