Jack McCain learned his most important life lessons from Slew, the key to which had come long before World War II, when he consulted his father while poised to make a career decision that would place him on a different naval path from the patriarch. Jack said he was going to be a submariner rather than pursue a career in his father's beloved naval air.

Slew's response was immediate. "It doesn't make any difference where you go," Jack McCain recalled his father saying. Then he got to his real point, revealing what he thought was the key to a naval officer's fulfillment. "You've got to command."

Achieving high command was the McCain ethos, as Jack McCain emphasized in an oral history he gave to the Naval Institute in 1975. "I learned from (my father) the importance of command," he said. "I don't think my father cared too much whether I went into naval air or submarines, as long as I made a good job out of the thing, see."

Half a century later, John Sidney McCain III, by then a U.S. senator representing Arizona, reflected on the importance of the moment. He noted his grandfather's advice, writing that his father faithfully followed it "in his relentless pursuit of a command."

His pursuit took Jack McCain all over the world. He was a submarine commander during World War II, before coming back, in 1950, for a decadelong stint in Washington, D.C., the city of his youth. He went to work in the office of the chief of naval operations, known as the CNO, before becoming the Navy's chief of the legislative affairs office.

The post meant serving as the Navy's top liaison to Congress, a job for which Jack McCain was ideally suited, having established connections with congressmen and senators who determined the size and shape of the Navy's budget.

With his wife and their three children, he lived on Capitol Hill, kitty-corner from the Cannon House Office Building. The McCains' home quickly became a political salon for key lawmakers, who had standing invitations on most workdays to drop by, make themselves at home, have a drink, and chat with their colleagues.

MOTHER'S INFLUENCE

Roberta McCain, who regularly mingled with legislators and their spouses in the House and Senate galleries, came to be recognized as Jack McCain's charming political partner, a garrulous ally who entertained frequently and sometimes cooked breakfast for politicos crucial to her husband's success, including Rep. Carl Vinson of Georgia, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Georgia's influential Sen. Richard Russell Jr. was an occasional visitor, as was Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who, a friend remembers, had sometimes given his attention to the eldest McCain boy, whom he'd enjoyed bouncing on his knee years before, during then-Capt. McCain's days in the CNO office.

Jack McCain was by then a veteran Washington insider, a player in an insular world where politics was an around-the-clock exercise, and a young liaison's political friendships were his lifeblood. But his profession never left much time for his children during the 1950s. Long before he ever became the official liaison to Capitol Hill, Jack's long hours at the CNO, coupled with his service away from home for lengthy periods, meant that, like his own father, John McCain was reared almost entirely by his mother.

Roberta McCain, whose well-to-do Southern California family had made a fortune in the oil business, possessed a fierce determination and defiant nature that rivaled her husband's and presaged her eldest son's.

"She was a willful, rebellious girl," wrote John McCain, who believed, as he grew older, that he had acquired much of her personality — particularly her gregariousness.

He remembered long family trips with her at the steering wheel, his father busy on the job or off in another part of the world. "As any other child would, I resented my father's absences, interpreting them as a sign that he loved his work more than his children," he wrote in his book, "Faith of My Fathers."

Eventually, McCain came to embrace his father's life, rejecting his old resentments.

"I regret having felt that way," he wrote in "Faith of My Fathers." "My father wanted me to know also that a man's life should be big enough to encompass both duty to family and duty to country. That can be a hard lesson for a boy to learn. It was a hard lesson for me."

A REBELLIOUS STUDENT

In 1951, McCain was sent to board at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va. He already had attended about 20 schools by then. For John McCain — "Johnny" to most people who knew him then — his educational career mirrored his nomadic existence: No sooner would he feel like a part of one school than he would be uprooted and left to fend for himself at a new one.

Bereft of established friends, he developed a habit of fighting to get respect — fighting "at the drop of a hat," as he later put it.

At Episcopal, a small school whose ranks included the tightly knit scions of well-heeled Southern families, his alienation was immediate and acute. Episcopal embraced the hazing of first-year students, who were referred to as "rats."

Rather than enduring the upperclassmen's insults and enthusiastically opening doors for them, McCain fast became known as the odd boy who responded with insolence. He earned the sobriquet of "worst rat" in a vote of the student body. Even among his fellow rats, he was widely regarded as a slouching, swaggering figure who, as one former classmate put it, "acted like he had a chip on his shoulder."

But McCain, nicknamed "Punk" by upperclassmen, behaved as though he didn't care at all about his reputation.

"A boarding school can be a pretty unforgiving environment," said Rives Richey, a McCain friend and fellow member of the wrestling team. "There's a lot of teasing, sarcasm; you have to fend for yourself socially. John wasn't at ease at repelling people in verbal situations. Instead of throwing off people with a smile and a quick comeback, he would get testy. Some people thought it was feistiness. I thought it was more awkwardness. He'd insult somebody terribly and afterward you'd say, 'Oh, Mac, why did you say that?' "

McCain was closer to Richey than any other Episcopal student, and during a summer night after McCain's sophomore year, the two were cruising in a car, with Richey behind the wheel. As Richey remembers, he and McCain spotted a couple of older girls near Arlington, Va., and called out to them, asking if they wanted company. The girls laughed. Insulted, McCain leaned across the driver's side window and shouted an expletive at them.

"Our feelings were hurt. They unveiled our masks and revealed us for the boys we were," Richey said.

Shortly after, police ticketed McCain and Richey for what Richey remembers as public nuisance and profanity. Soon they were standing in an Arlington court, with Richey hoping that McCain would tell the truth: that he alone, not Richey, had shouted the profanity at the girls. As Richey recalls, McCain said nothing — explaining to Richey later that he didn't know what good it would have done to speak up.

"I was annoyed for a little while with John, I guess," Richey recounted. "But I understood his not talking — we were both paralyzed. What I remember most about the day is the humiliation. John's mother was really upset. I don't even remember if John's father was there. I just remember his mother, and how angry she was."

By then, McCain had told Richey what school he would be attending next: the Naval Academy.

"He just said it matter-of-factly," remembers Richey, who was surprised by the news. "I thought, why the hell do you want to go there? I'd have thought, given John's ways, he would have wanted more liberty and freedom at a college. I know I said something to him about it. And he just said, well, his father had gone there, and his grandfather, too."

McCain later wrote: "There were times in my youth when I harbored a secret resentment that my life's course seemed so preordained. I often wondered if my father had ever felt the same way."

FEELING 'BOXED UP'

His college future was out of his hands, and his days ahead at Episcopal were devoid of surprises. Sometimes he sneaked off campus to have a drink and listen to music at a favorite jazz club in Washington, but the diversions weren't nearly enough to stem his disdain for the school's rules. He piled up demerits for conduct violations, which Episcopal students generally erased by marching on the athletic field or doing chores for faculty members. McCain chose the latter.

It was about the time he had met an English and literature teacher named William Ravenel, a World War II veteran who had served in the Third Army under Gen. George Patton and who, in his late 30s, did what no other teacher could at Episcopal: reach McCain in some place so deep that the churlish boy sought out the man. McCain volunteered to work off his demerits at the Ravenel residence on campus. On cold autumn mornings, he arrived there in a bomber jacket and dirty jeans, then began walking amid trees by himself and raking leaves into huge piles.

Staring out from a window, Bill Ravenel's 10-year-old daughter, Katharine, watched him. He had intense blue eyes, she thought, and wavy dark hair that, shockingly for a boy so young, had wisps of gray. He looked totally and defiantly comfortable to her in his isolation, the very thing that others at the school viewed as evidence of McCain's surliness.

She dared to join him outside. "I was a pre-pubescent rebel and it seemed he was a rebel, too," she remembers. "He'd rake and talk, blah-blah-blah about rules and how he felt constrained. He didn't divulge exactly what he had done wrong at the school. It was just more of a grumble that his life was boxed up, pent up, that he felt so frustrated that he had to do certain things and that he would be expected to do more things. 'Let me tell you: Boxed up,' he'd say. His whole life looked like it was going to be more of the same to him."

At some point during his raking, Katherine's father usually strolled outside to speak to McCain. "I think he saw in John McCain a Navy brat who had moved around a lot and was not part of the school's country club set," Katharine Ravenel said. "McCain was unhappy — unhappy with his circumstances — and my father noticed that."

AN EARLY MENTOR

That unhappiness often revealed itself in outbursts around the school, in response to which the teacher spent long hours with the rebel, mentoring the boy before the term existed.

"My father believed in the rewards of mental discipline and tried to convey all that to John, give him a little peace," Katharine Ravenel said. "I think he altered McCain's perception of himself."

No one else knew what the man and boy said to each other in their private encounters. But McCain later wrote glowingly of Bill Ravenel in his memoirs, and Katharine recalls a day when McCain, who played on the school's junior varsity football team that Ravenel coached, made a breakthrough in the estimation of the mentor.

When another player faced expulsion for breaking a team rule, McCain asked for the opportunity to speak to the players and coaches. "McCain said they should keep the kid," Katharine recounts, in a story passed along to her by her father. "Something about giving the kid a second chance and forgiving his mistake. My father was impressed. He saw in McCain a person with potential in all that feistiness."

Bill Ravenel died in 1968 while McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. After his release in 1973, McCain came home to discover that his mentor was gone. Stunned, he confided to a friend that Ravenel was virtually the only person with whom he wanted to discuss his ordeal.

Decades later, McCain wrote a note to Ravenel's wife, Ruth, who showed it to Katharine. "Bill Ravenel is the greatest man who ever lived," McCain wrote, according to Katharine, whose family never had a great deal of contact with McCain after he left Episcopal.

That was like McCain, too. He'd led a transient life, and even his intense relationships generally had been fleeting.