In '06 speech, McCain launched pitch for national service

John McCain, left, and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell waited for the start of ceremonies in 2006. (Josh Meltzer/ New York Times File)

WASHINGTON - On May 13, 2006, John McCain delivered the commencement speech at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and, in the eyes of many critics, began a period of capitulation to various branches of the conservative movement that didn't end until he clinched the Republican presidential nomination in March.

But McCain's speech at Liberty could just as easily be viewed as the start of his effort to replace the traditional GOP pieties of God and family with a new, values-oriented message aimed at promoting national service.

The ideal of national service, which McCain said last week would be the core of his campaign, has been overshadowed within the Republican Party in recent years by a harsher call for fidelity to religious values. And Falwell, who died a year after McCain's speech, had been a driving force for religion in politics since the 1970s.

So when McCain stood before Liberty's graduating class, on the sprawling campus in Lynchburg, Va., that represented the growth of Falwell's influence, the fact of his presence received more attention than the content of his speech. During his 2000 presidential campaign, McCain had described religious-right leaders as "agents of intolerance," and his decision to speak at Liberty clearly seemed aimed at appeasing Falwell.

But the speech itself was anything but an endorsement of the religious right's agenda. With an almost subversive subtlety, McCain instructed the students that true character isn't something that's asserted, but rather forged over time. It doesn't spring from orthodoxy but grows out of experience. And the end product of all that growth is a greater appreciation of others and an awareness that respecting disagreements is a crucial part of protecting one's freedoms.

Neither are sentiments that are ordinarily associated with Falwell or the religious right.

But McCain was able to win a warm response partly because most evangelical Christians are less dogmatic than some in the religious right might like and because he used himself as the prime example.

"When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so, because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew," McCain said. ". . .With my superior qualities so obvious, it was intolerable to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to inform them."

McCain went on to say: "It's funny, now, how less self-assured I feel late in life than I did when I lived in perpetual springtime."

This newfound humility, McCain said, led him to the realization that "love of freedom" requires "more than tolerance," but rather mutual respect, and is furthered when people of common ideals engage in disagreements.

"We must love [freedom] enough to argue about it, and to serve it, in whatever ways our abilities permit and our conscience requires, whether it calls us to arms or to altruism or to politics," McCain said. And in case the message was unclear, he added: "Americans should argue about this [Iraq] war."

He ended his speech by urging students to refrain from judging others. He described how, as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, his captors broadcast a speech by an American student activist who had visited Hanoi to express his outrage over his country's actions. Then and now, McCain considered such an action unthinkable.

But years later he got to know the man - a Democratic political consultant named David Ifshin, though McCain never mentioned his name. They became friends, and worked together on humanitarian causes.

"He remained my countryman and my friend, until the day of his death, at the age of 47, when he left a loving wife and three beautiful children, and legions of friends behind him," McCain concluded. "His country was a better place for his service to her, and I had become a better man for my friendship with him. God bless him. And may God bless you, class of 2006. The world does indeed await you, and humanity is impatient for your service."

McCain's call for service, then and now, may be too broadly conceived to have much impact; it lacks an obvious rallying point. But its meaning for the Republican Party - and the country - is clear: Patriotism has many facets, and many faces, and no one has a monopoly on virtue.

Far from catering to the mandarins of the right, McCain is challenging them.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.