John McCain dead: The war hero Republican whose last stand was against his party's own president

Mr McCain was a principled conservative in the Senate, and once survived five years as a war prisoner

Senator John McCain, the maverick of the Senate perhaps best known for his principled commitment to conservative principles and his home state of Arizona, has died, a year after a deadly brain cancer diagnosis. He was 81.

Mr McCain had chosen to continue on working following his diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer last summer, after which he returned to the Senate chambers to deliver an impassioned plea for a return to normal order and respect in the legislative body amid an increasingly fractured political landscape in the United States.

The Senator from Arizona was a well known figure on Capitol Hill, where he would commonly stop to chat with reporters as he made his way to and from his office for votes and on business. Throughout his three decades long tenure, Mr McCain fostered an image as a unique presence in the Senate, as an individual set apart form his colleagues even in a chamber known for larger-than-life personalities.

A two-time US presidential candidate, Mr McCain became a household name as the 2008 Republican nominee, when he challenged the ascendant Barack Obama for the White House, but ultimately came up short in what became one of the most polarising and contentious contests in American electoral history.

Born in Panama, Mr McCain grew up in family of high ranking military officers, and attended as many as 20 schools growing up as his father was assigned and reassigned to different locations.

Mr McCain later joined the Navy himself, where he became an aviator after completing flight school in 1960. While in training in Pensacola, Florida, Mr McCain reportedly developed a reputation as a man who liked to party, driving a Corvette and dating a woman known as “Marie the Flame of Florida”, a dancer with a habit of cleaning her fingernails with switchblades.

After marrying his first wife, Carol Shepp, Mr McCain was eventually deployed to fight in the war in Vietnam. In October of 1967, he was on his 23rd bombing mission when he was shot down, forcing him to eject from his plane, losing consciousness before waking up to find himself in Hanoi Lake with broken arms and legs.

Once ashore, Mr McCain was stabbed with bayonets by a mob and taken to a prison that prisoners of war dubbed Hanoi Hilton where he defied his captors and their attempts to exploit the son of an admiral for propaganda by shrieking curses at them. All told, Mr McCain spent five years in confinement, including three years in solitary – a time in which he endured repeated beatings and attempted suicide twice.

After divorcing his first wife, Mr McCain remarried to Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a Phoenix beer magnate, and relocated to Arizona. It was there that he began to get engaged in politics, winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 1982, and moving up to the Senate five years later.

After losing a long-shot attempt to defeat George W Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, Mr McCain returned to his service in the Senate, where he became a vocal critic of the way in which Mr Bush conducted the Iraq War, and, at the same time, a staunch supporter of continued American operations in the Middle East.

He ran for president a second time in 2008, and won his party’s nomination. As the Republican candidate, Mr McCain ultimately made the contentious decision to name former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, a pick that fuelled the divisions in the race, leading to an attack campaign atmosphere in which it became impossibly shocking when, during a town hall event, Mr McCain defended Mr Obama after a member of the audience called him an untrustworthy “Arab”.

In the years that followed, Mr McCain returned to the Senate, where he pushed back against the agenda of Mr Obama alongside his fellow Republicans, and began to recreate his image as the Republican outsider that he had before.

During the Republican presidential primary in 2016, Mr McCain avoided the national spotlight as Donald Trump rose to win his party’s primary, in spite of attacks Mr Trump launched at Mr McCain in which the now president implied that he was somehow cowardly for being caught during the Vietnam War.

Mr McCain, in a dramatic return to the Senate from surgery for his brain cancer last summer, played a crucial role in the defeat of Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, and called on his fellow members of Congress to return to working, respectful order in an impassioned floor speech.

“I have been a member of the United States Senate for 30 years. I had another long, if not as long, career before I arrived here, another profession that was profoundly rewarding, and in which I had experiences and friendships that I revere,” he said then. “But make no mistake, my service here is the most important job I have had in my life. And I am so grateful to the people of Arizona for the privilege – for the honour – of serving here and the opportunities it gives me to play a small role in the history of the country I love.”