Quick Take
- Narration: John Bedford Lloyd brings a measured gravitas to Salter’s prose, suiting the elegiac tone of a tribute written by someone who genuinely loved his subject.
- Themes: Bipartisan public service, friendship and loyalty, Vietnam POW experience
- Mood: Warm and admiring, with genuine emotional weight in the POW sections
- Verdict: A portrait that earns its reverence because Salter is honest about the man’s edges, not just his virtues.
I started The Luckiest Man on a flight home from a conference, somewhere over the middle of the country, and I finished the last two hours the following evening on my back porch. There’s something appropriate about listening to a biography of John McCain in transit, because Salter’s account of his life makes clear that McCain was almost never still. Restlessness is one of the through-lines Salter identifies and returns to throughout the book, a quality that shaped him from his peripatetic childhood through his final Senate years.
Mark Salter is an unusual biographical subject because he is also one of the book’s characters. He co-wrote seven books with McCain and served as one of his closest political advisors for decades. This is not a biography written by a detached observer. It’s written by someone who was in the room, often literally, and that proximity creates both the book’s greatest strength and a limitation worth naming.
The Access That No One Else Had
What Salter brings to this account that no outside biographer could provide is texture: the specific weight of McCain’s silences, the way his anger flared and subsided, the small moments of sentimentality that the public persona of the tough, uncompromising veteran almost never admitted. Salter covers the expected major events, the peripatetic naval childhood, the crash and capture in Vietnam, the five years as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton, the Senate career built on an unlikely reputation for bipartisan principle in an increasingly partisan political culture. But he also introduces the man the public rarely saw, and those passages are the book’s most valuable.
The reviewer who describes this as a candid tribute to an admirable public statesman puts it accurately. Salter does not pretend his subject was without flaws. The volatile temper gets acknowledged. The stubbornness that was also a form of courage gets its honest accounting. The result is a portrait that earns its admiration, because Salter is honest about what made McCain difficult before he gets to what made him remarkable. That choice, to show the edges before the achievements, is what separates biography from hagiography.
Five Years in Hanoi
The chapter devoted to McCain’s captivity is, as multiple reviewers note, worth the price of admission on its own. Salter handles this material with particular care, likely because he co-wrote McCain’s own account in Faith of My Fathers and understands the terrain of those years from the inside. He brings to it here a retrospective dimension that the earlier account couldn’t have, understanding those years not just as the ordeal that shaped McCain’s politics, but as the experience that became, over time, the lens through which he understood everything that followed.
Salter’s account of the Hanoi years doesn’t rely on heroic inflation. The suffering was extreme and the psychological cost was real, and Salter describes both without prettifying them. McCain’s refusal of early release, the decision that later became the cornerstone of his political biography, is rendered not as a moment of simple nobility but as a harder, more complicated choice than the campaign-trail version allowed.
The Limits of Friendship as Biography
The book’s limitation is inseparable from its strength. Salter loved McCain, and that love shapes what gets examined and what gets passed over. The Wall Street Journal called this moving and lucidly written, and The Washington Post identified it as a psychological portrait. Both descriptions are accurate. But a reader looking for a fully critical accounting of McCain’s political decisions, the policy positions where he miscalculated, the moments where his bipartisan self-image may have diverged from his actual record, will find those questions at least partly set aside.
This is not a flaw so much as a condition of the project. Salter is writing a tribute that draws on unparalleled access, and he makes no pretense of having written something else. At nearly twenty-five hours, the audiobook is long, and it earns that length not through padding but through the kind of granular detail that only someone with Salter’s access could provide.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
John Bedford Lloyd’s narration is reliably strong. His measured, clean delivery suits the elegiac register of Salter’s prose, and he handles the book’s considerable length without losing consistency. For a twenty-five-hour biography, that sustained quality matters. This is not a book to begin if you have only passing interest in John McCain. But if you have any genuine curiosity about how his character was formed, what his inner life looked like to someone who was close to it, and what he was actually like outside the carefully managed political image, this is the closest account you will find. The reviewer who noted that the long chapter on the POW years is worth the price of the book on its own is not wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the same as Faith of My Fathers, the memoir Salter co-wrote with McCain?
No. Faith of My Fathers, published in 1999, was McCain’s own memoir focused primarily on his naval career and POW years. The Luckiest Man is Salter’s tribute written after McCain’s death in 2018, drawing on their full decades-long friendship and covering McCain’s entire life and political career.
How does Salter’s close friendship with McCain affect the objectivity of the biography?
Salter is transparent about his relationship with McCain throughout the book, and the biography is frank about his subject’s flaws, particularly his volcanic temper and stubbornness. However, this is ultimately a tribute from a close friend rather than a critical biography, so readers seeking a fully skeptical political accounting should supplement it with other sources.
Does the book cover McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and Sarah Palin in detail?
The synopsis emphasizes McCain’s character and philosophy over specific political campaigns, though the campaign years are addressed. Listeners primarily interested in the 2008 race and its aftermath would benefit from reading this alongside dedicated campaign accounts.
At nearly 25 hours, is there significant repetition or does the length feel justified?
Reviewers consistently note the length as earned rather than padded. The detail Salter provides on lesser-known periods of McCain’s life, particularly his antebellum years and the texture of their friendship, gives the length its value.
