Through all of his internal struggles with his mistakes or regrets, it was his quiet faith that sustained him. I did a long interview with then-presidential-candidate McCain about his faith on his campaign plane in April of 2008. It wasn't until his plane was shot down over Hanoi that he began to rely on his faith. "The public John McCain felt the need to reconcile his imperfections," Graham said, citing McCain's position change on the Confederate flag as an example. In the last months of his life, McCain's friends took comfort in the various iterations of the refrain he came back to again and again in their private conversations: "I wasn't cheated."

Source: CNN August 30, 2018 05:03 UTC