Certainly McCain could not have been unaware of the havoc unleashed by his bombing missions over Vietnam. Though Pentagon war planners and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara preferred to emphasize the antiseptic nature of aerial bombardment against carefully chosen targets, a highly publicized series of articles in late 1966 by Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs. "Bomb damage...extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway" near one target, he wrote, noting that "small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated." Several years ago, a chastened McNamara acknowledged that Operation Rolling Thunder, which unloaded 800 tons of bombs a day over North Vietnam, caused more than a million deaths and injuries in Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968.

Standing stiffly in the sun outside a New Hampshire high school after a campaign appearance, McCain curtly rejects the idea that he had any second thoughts about his role in Rolling Thunder. He denies the accuracy of the quotation from 1967, stumbling briefly over his words before barking, "That wasn't the exact statement." Instead, he says, he was simply referring to the "terrible power we had" and reacting to the horror of war. And perhaps it is too much to expect McCain, born on a naval air station in the Panama Canal Zone and programmed virtually since birth for his part in the war, to have let his conscience get the better of him. In any case, within weeks of the '67 incident, McCain made the fateful decision to plunge back into combat, getting himself assigned to the carrier Oriskany, where he joined an A-4 squadron called "the Saints." On October 26, 1967, on his twenty-third bombing mission, this one against a thermal power plant in what McCain described in his book as "a heavily populated part of Hanoi," he was shot down, plunging into a lake just blocks away from Ho Chi Minh's presidential palace, and taken to prison.

"Nobody made me fly over Vietnam," McCain says now, as quoted in John McCain: An American Odyssey, the biography by Robert Timberg. "That's what I was trained to do and that's what I wanted to do.

Outside the GOP candidates' debate in Manchester, a contingent of McCain-supporting Vietnam veterans taunts a group of Bush backers with the chant: "How much coke did George do?" The Bush people respond with a question of their own: "Why is the media supporting McCain? Is he a liberal?"

He's not, of course. But the media's love affair with McCain makes it a question worth asking. Aboard the Straight Talk Express, where McCain, his staff and a gaggle of reporters are packed in cheek by jowl, there is an eerie and unsettling camaraderie. Mixed in amid laughter, banter and jokes about football and the upcoming Army-Navy game are a string of easy political questions. (Q: Do you enjoy campaigning? A: "I love it. This is what I really enjoy.") Reporters are enthralled by McCain, and it shows in the friendly, even gushing, coverage he gets. Even a grizzled veteran like CBS's Mike Wallace--who said, half seriously, that he was considering quitting his job to work for McCain--has fallen in love, while liberal pundit David Nyhan of the Boston Globe praises McCain so effusively that copies of his recent columns (calling McCain "brave," "gutsy" and "a straight-shooting, high-flying, damn-the-torpedoes military hero") litter literature tables in McCain's New Hampshire campaign headquarters. A profile in Esquire is called "John McCain Walks on Water." Ted Koppel, host of ABC's Nightline, wondered aloud whether McCain "is just so popular with us in the media that we are artificially breathing life into his campaign."

One certain factor in the media's adulation is that McCain's status as a tortured POW, which gives him a certain cachet with voters, also seems to have caused the media to deal gingerly with him. "It's as if the POW issue is something isolated from the war," says Howard Zinn, the historian and author of A People's History of the United States. "To me, that's just part of the general inclination of the culture, and the media, not to bring up the war. Whenever the issue of POWs comes up, they are seen as victims, and never as victimizers."

Perhaps the most striking example of the media's unwillingness to challenge McCain's air of moral authority is when he shocks listeners by casually calling the Vietnamese "gooks." The racist and disparaging term, popularized by GIs during the war, occurs repeatedly in a 1973 U.S. News & World Report account penned by McCain after his release from prison. "The 'gooks' were bombarding us with antiwar quotes from people in high places back in Washington," he wrote, referring to the propaganda that his captors gave him. A quarter of a century later, while speaking with reporters aboard the Straight Talk Express in October, McCain was still calling Vietnamese "gooks"--and according to a reporter who was there, no one called him on it. It's enough to make you wonder whether the reporters were thinking: Well, this guy spent five years in a prison camp, so he can say anything he wants. Roger Simon, writing in U.S. News, cited the incident and added: "John McCain says 'gooks,' and who's going to tell him not to?"

Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, thinks the media ignore Vietnam in part because the war is ancient history for a younger generation of reporters. "The animosities of the war, the days when people were screaming at each other over dinner tables, that's all gone now," he says. "Probably not many people under the age of 50 even remember the war." And, for reporters over 50 who opposed the war, perhaps McCain's candidacy allows them to expunge a bit of lingering guilt over the way Vietnam veterans were excoriated.

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