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Phil Butler, a former fellow POW and Naval Academy classmate, on the myth of McCain as a hero:

“John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals,” says Butler. “John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW.”

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On McCain’s spoiled-brat reputation at the U.S. Naval Academy, as recalled by classmate and former fellow POW Phil Butler:

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis…”He was a huge screw-off,” recalls Butler. “He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn’t exactly get rid of him.” McCain’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination” ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899.

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Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, on McCain’s role in the 1980s Keating Five banking scandal, involving McCain’s close friend and donor Charles Keating:

In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain’s Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five. Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure — until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out. “McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators,” recalls Black. “He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing.”

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On McCain’s anti-regulation philosophy and the role of deregulation champion Phil Gramm in his campaign:

Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn’t affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. “He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs,” says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in — with McCain’s fervent support — a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street’s catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” relies on Gramm to guide him.

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