John McCain: From war hero to maverick

McCain, 81, died on Saturday after a battle with brain cancer.

"At his death, he had served the United States of America faithfully for sixty years," his office said in a statement.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and then the Senate in 1986 from the south-western state of Arizona, McCain rose to the top of the Republican Party as he developed a reputation as a political maverick willing to go his own way.

McCain was the conservative party's nominee in 2008 against Democrat Barack Obama, losing to the first African-American president as US voters soured on Republican president George W Bush amid a spiralling economic crisis and protracted war in Iraq.

McCain took a political gamble in choosing little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, who though initially popular among Republicans quickly became the butt of political jokes.

McCain lost the nomination to Bush in 2000, but along the way burnished his reputation as a no-nonsense politician with appeal to independents as he toured New Hampshire in a bus dubbed the Straight-Talk Express.

McCain was diagnosed with a incurable glioblastoma, a brain cancer, in July 2017 while undergoing an operation to remove a blood clot from his eye. The cancer was the same type that killed Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, John Sidney McCain III was born in 1936 in Panama, while his father was serving in the then-US controlled Panama Canal Zone.

A Naval Academy graduate, McCain became a fighter pilot.

He narrowly survived an explosion on the US Navy aircraft carrier Forrestal in July 1967. Later that year he was shot down over North Vietnam, breaking both arms and a leg.

He spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, where he was denied medical treatment, tortured and kept largely in solitary confinement.

When his captors learned that his father was a top US commander in the Vietnam war, they provided McCain some medical care. But he refused North Vietnamese offers of early release, insisting on waiting until fellow US prisoners of war who had been held longer were freed.

In politics, McCain was unusually willing to butt heads with members of his own party. In recent years he frequently clashed with President Donald Trump, who drew widespread condemnation during his 2016 presidential campaign when he questioned McCain's military service, claiming he liked people who had not been captured.

After his cancer diagnosis, McCain continued criticism of what the long-time foreign policy hawk saw as an "unpatriotic" abdication of US leadership on the world stage, denouncing Trump's policies as "half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems".

McCain irked Trump in July 2017 when he helped scuttle long-standing Republican efforts to overturn health care reforms implemented by Obama. This ended Trump's bid to repeal the health care reforms despite having allowed debate of the matter to move forward by returning to Congress just days after his cancer diagnosis.

Trump later won a partial victory in his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare when its requirement that Americans buy health care insurance or face a fine was cancelled in another bill.

In reflections on the Senate floor after his emotional return to Washington, McCain chastised his colleagues for the partisanship that soured efforts to work across party lines and encouraged lawmakers not to simply go along with Trump.

He called on senators to remember the freedom on which the United States was founded and its contributions to the international order amid what critics have seen as Trump's desire to retreat from the world stage.

"We have been the greatest example, the greatest supporter and the greatest defender of that order. We aren't afraid," he said.

"We don't covet other people's land and wealth. We don't hide behind walls. We breach them. We are a blessing to humanity."

The remarks reflected McCain's longtime reputation as maverick as well as his role as a senior voice on foreign policy as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee after returning to the Senate following his failed presidential bid.

One of McCain's biggest legislative achievements came in 2002 in a bill to reform the funding of US political campaigns. A part of the law that sought to limit campaign spending by corporations was later struck down by the Supreme Court.

One of his failures was a bipartisan effort in 2013 to reform US immigration, which would have included a means for those in the country illegally to eventually gain citizenship. It was the closest Congress came during McCain's tenure to reforming US immigration law.

McCain is survived by his wife, Cindy, seven children from two marriages and his mother, Roberta McCain, 106.

Australian Associated Press