The Hemingway Story That John McCain Read Aloud to Me

John McCain was 11 or 12 when he found a four-leaf clover in the yard of his family’s home in northern Virginia, rushed into his father’s library to press it in a book, and pulled the Hemingway novel set during the Spanish Civil War, , off a shelf. The book fell open to an account of a war atrocity, and it grabbed his attention. He started reading and didn’t stop until he’d finished. He would read it again many times over his life. When I asked him once for a list of his childhood heroes, Robert Jordan, the novel’s protagonist, who gives his life to save the lives of his comrades, was one of the first names he mentioned. “He’s fictional,”