By Jacob Weisberg
This article is adapted from Jacob Weisberg’s introduction to McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope by David Foster Wallace, published by Back Bay Books.
In August 2007, John McCain came through New York to promote his latest book, Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions. McCain’s editor, Jonathan Karp, was kind enough to offer me one of the hourlong slots set aside for back-to-back interviews in his office. The new book, written with (all right, by) McCain’s literary alter ego, Mark Salter, was evidently meant to serve as a kind of Profiles in Courage for the Arizona Republican’s presidential campaign. It recounted moments in which wise leaders made brave choices: Lincoln’s issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Branch Rickey’s hiring of Jackie Robinson to break baseball’s color barrier, etc. I sampled a few of these vignettes just before our meeting and found them characteristically well-done.
But the book, at that moment, seemed rather beside the point. While Salter was hard at work on Hard Call, McCain’s presidential campaign had fallen apart. Instead of breaking away from the Republican pack, McCain was loping after it from a considerable distance. At that point, McCain was trailing Rancorous Rudy, Mutable Mitt, and possibly even droopy-eyed Fred Thompson in the polls. McCain had raised a pitiful amount of money and quickly run through it. He’d just fired his longtime campaign manager and laid off three-quarters of his feuding and divided staff. Esquire reported that he was personally scrutinizing the campaign’s daily doughnut order as a cost center. Unlike his first book, Faith of My Fathers, the Salter-abetted autobiography that had launched his 2000 bid, Hard Call, was looking like a tough sell.
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