It happened again last week: More top Democrats urged Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, to join John Kerry’s campaign as Democratic candidate for vice president. McCain insists he’s not interested. But the drumbeat continues. Why? Consider his latest book.

In the aftermath of 9/11, an astute editor asked McCain to write a book on courage. It was a time when many Americans were afraid to fly or enter tall buildings. Yet it was a time when television showed vivid images of firefighters and police officers rushing into burning buildings as the public rushed out. Clearly the question of courage was in the air. And who better to write about it than a decorated Vietnam hero who had spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war?

So with his longtime administrative assistant Mark Salter (with whom the senator already has written two books), McCain got down to work. But the wheels of the New York publishing gods grind slowly. Only last month did the book finally appear. Now, I suspect, most readers of Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life won’t be thinking about the Twin Towers. They’ll be thinking about Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, about Washington’s response to it, and about the need for courageous leadership in public affairs.

This book is silent on Iraq. But it sends out some telling signals that remind us why McCain remains such a popular figure in the nation’s political pantheon.

First, it’s a humble book. No model of personal meekness, McCain can be brusque and irascible. But he never claims any special privilege in the realm of courage. This isn’t a book about his own wartime experiences, but about the courage of others. Like other books of its sort — John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956) and the Scottish novelist Compton McKenzie’s On Moral Courage (1962) — this text is studded with engaging set-piece stories of noteworthy heroes. Some are public figures, like longtime political activist Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and former Alabama freedom marcher John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia. Others earned fame in their day, like Hungarian Zionist and World War II resistance fighter Hannah Senesh and the nineteenth-century Navajo tribal leader Chief Manuelito. Not surprisingly, given McCain’s background, several of his examples feature decorated military heroes. Before all of these, McCain professes unqualified admiration. And while he puzzles at times over the line between bravery and foolhardiness, he searches honestly for the key to courage.

Second, this is not a scholastic book. Neither footnoted nor indexed, and divided into chapters without numbers or titles, it claims simply to be, as he says, “a manual of courage” designed to “encourage people to find the fortitude to get on with their lives.” Readable and probing, it’s the kind of book you’d expect from an intelligent non-specialist mind fulfilling the congressional mandate to raise questions about policy and practice. McCain does, however, have a point of view. He worries that courage is in danger of being “defined down” by including under its rubric all sorts of attributes (like fortitude and discipline) that he feels don’t quite rise to that height. While the point is a good one — what term will we reserve for the 9/11 rescuers if we use “courage” for everyday experiences? — the events at Abu Ghraib ought to make us wonder whether courage needs a more rather than less expansive ambit. How else can we instill courage in military personnel, even when all they’re doing is routine, boring work like looking after prisoners? How do we train them to say no, to disobey bad orders, to blow the whistle? Don’t we start by saying, “This, too, takes genuine courage”?

Third, unlike so many books emanating from the Beltway, there is no subtext here of a defense of McCain’s own profession as a politician. Having surveyed the courage displayed under enemy fire and in times of intense fear, he writes that by contrast “I don’t really need much courage for the challenges most frequently encountered in a political career. Political courage in our consensual political system is seldom all that courageous.” Sadly enough, he may simply be recording an observable phenomenon — leading the reader to wonder whether politics does need to become more courageous.

This last point cuts to the core of an unresolved challenge McCain faces in writing this book. Throughout, he returns to words rich with ethical resonance — like conscience, moral, honor, and duty — to explain how courage works. On several occasions, he explicitly considers the topic of moral courage. Yet he never quite sorts out its relation to physical courage. At times he notes that moral courage trumps physical courage — that it is “the enforcing virtue, the one that makes all the others possible.” Elsewhere, however, he insists that the two are really much the same.

But then, this book never set out to carry a lot of conceptual freight. It is, in his own description, “a small book.” Inspirational, sensible, candid, it makes its largest point simply by appearing. That a sitting senator in 2004 should take the trouble to publish a book on a classical virtue — and that the market should receive it with such interest — reminds us how much the public longs for leaders who think about, and lead with, moral values. No wonder Democrats want him on their ticket.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics