He graduated 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy, racked up demerits like high scores, and crashed multiple military jets. On paper he looked headed for a disciplinary discharge, not a half-century at the center of American political history. So how did John McCain become a war hero, presidential nominee, and Washington’s defining maverick?

This episode follows McCain from the crushing gravity of a family with two four-star admirals, through five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, to the Senate floor. We trace how the shame of a forced confession became the engine of a lifelong crusade for honor, and how his contradictions played out from campaign finance reform to his final thumbs-down vote.

• Why he refused early release as a POW, anchoring himself to the first-in-first-out code despite escalating torture
• The Keating Five rebuke and how its humiliation fueled his obsessive push for the McCain-Feingold soft-money ban
• The South Carolina push-polling smear that weaponized his adopted daughter and killed his 2000 campaign
• The town-hall moment he took the mic back to defend Obama as a decent family man
• His terminal glioblastoma diagnosis and the dramatic midnight vote that killed his own party’s ACA repeal