When the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona was in his 60s, a story came out that described a time when he was “physically mistreated by bad men who, for a while, kept [him] in prison.” It was a reference to the five-and-a-half years he had spent in harsh captivity in Hanoi after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War.
In that story, he called his captors “some very bad names” and used words that were “not appropriate for polite company,” McCain recounted in the introduction to his 2005 book, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories We Should All Remember. His mother noticed.
“I never taught you to use that kind of language,” she said to him, “and I have half a mind to wash your mouth out with soap.”
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