‘Rebellious’ Navy spouse, mother Roberta McCain dies at 108
Roberta McCain meets with the U.S. Navy Band before they take the stage at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington in 2018. (Senior Chief Musician Stephen Hassay/Navy)
Her Naval aviator son was held and tortured as a prisoner of war for five and a half years after being shot down while flying a bombing mission in Vietnam.
At the time he was America’s “most famous prisoner of war,” according to The New York Times.
That son — the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and late Senator John McCain III — credited his mother as his fighting reason to survive.
Roberta McCain died Monday at her home in Washington at age 108, according to a tweet by her daughter-in-law, Cindy. No cause of death has been given.
Roberta Wright was born Feb. 7, 1912, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She was an oil heiress and also an identical twin.
While she was a freshman at the University of Southern California in 1933, she eloped in Tijuana, Mexico, against her parents’ wishes and became a Navy wife to a submarine officer. For the elopement, which happened at a bar, her husband, Ensign John "Jack" McCain Jr., was “punished for being absent without leave,” Time magazine reported.
He eventually became a four-star Navy admiral.
The San Francisco Examiner headline at the time read, “Society Coed Elopes With Naval Officer: Roberta Wright Defies Family.”
They had three children together — with the oldest two born on a military installation in the Panama Canal Zone where the family was stationed.
Her husband’s father, also a four-star admiral, John S. “Slew” McCain, commanded forces in the Pacific during World War II.
He “sailed with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet in 1908 and stood alongside storied Adms. Chester Nimitz and ‘Bull’ Halsey aboard the battleship Missouri when the Japanese surrendered in 1945,” The Virginian-Pilot reported.
Her husband led the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. He later commanded in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.
As a Navy wife, Roberta McCain said she supported her husband’s busy career.
"You know you're proud of your husband," she told Time magazine. "If you chose the Navy, you do what it requires. A lot of wives didn't like that, and thankfully they left."
As a Navy family, they moved around a lot.
Sen. John McCain attended some 20 schools by the age of 18, according to the Times.
“Our family lived on the move," he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, "rooted not in a location, but in the culture of the Navy."
Later, at their home in Washington, “representatives and military brass were often guests,” the Times reported, with Roberta McCain hosting.
Their Washington home later became the D.C. haunt the Capitol Hill Club.
Like his father and grandfather, Sen. John McCain attended the United States Naval Academy (where he is now buried after losing a fight to brain cancer in 2018. Roberta McCain attended a D.C. memorial service for her son in a wheelchair at age 106), and then became a Navy pilot.
It was in 1967 that his A-4 Skyhawk was shot over Hanoi, Vietnam, by a surface-to-air missile.
“As the parent of a son who was shot down in Hanoi last week and is now a prisoner of war, I wonder if you are interested to know that both my husband and I back you and your policies 100 percent in Vietnam,” Roberta McCain had written to President Lyndon B. Johnson at the time.
Roberta McCain is said to have inspired her son’s political career — from the House of Representatives, to the Senate to becoming a presidential contender.
Shy to talk to the press and a lover of art, she also was an avid traveler.
“I just bring a little pair of boots, a raincoat, an umbrella and my binoculars and set out,” she told Time magazine in 2000.
She once bought a a Mercedes “baby Benz” with her sister while they were in their 80s, and on a U.S. road trip “accumulated numerous speeding tickets and was once clocked at over 100 miles an hour,” The New York Times reported.
“She was a willful, rebellious girl,” Sen. John McCain wrote in his 1999 memoir.
“From both my parents, I learned to persevere. But my mother’s extraordinary resilience made her the stronger of the two. I acquired some of her resilience and her felicity, and that inheritance made an enormous difference in my life.”