Hard Call

John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 United States election. McCain followed his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals, into the United States Navy, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958.... He became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. McCain experienced episodes of torture, and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. His war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, he served two terms, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, winning re-election easily four times, most recently in 2010.
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Mark Salter is an American speechwriter from Davenport, Iowa, known for his collaborations with United States Senator John McCain on several nonfiction books as well as on political speeches. He is portrayed as a sympathetic figure by actor Jamey Sheridan in the 2012 HBO production of Game Change ... for his role in the latter months of McCain's unsuccessful 2008 Presidential campaign. Aside from having worked on Senator McCain's staff for 19 years , Salter has also written, in collaboration with McCain, the books Why Courage Matters, Faith of My Fathers, Worth the Fighting For, Character is Destiny, and "Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them". Some point to Salter as the author of the anonymously written book "O: A Presidential Novel." Salter lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife Diane, and their two daughters, Molly and Liddy.
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