Page 40 - Mark Salter News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

We felt. he kept asking me and others like mark salter and carly how are you doing? you okay? i'm not the one with the disease, john. i'm worried about you. but his compassion was really strong, and we greatly appreciate that that's probably one of the things i'll remember most. >> you wonder where he was drawing, whether it was the five plane crashes that lindsey graham talked about today, or whether it was the 5 1/2 years he spent as a prisoner of war. you wonder if that affected his approach to his own mortality, his approach to his final days. >> i think he actually thought he would die a ...

Did get to spend so much time with him and the mccain family in the final days and really over the last months of his life. what was that like? >> well, i spent a lot of time with him over 25 years. and since his -- since his illness and since he has been here in sedona especially, i've tried to be with him, you know, every couple of weeks. so, you know, i saw the progression of the disease and what it did to his body, but his spirit and his mind stayed strong to the end, and he was really an inspiration to us. he was always worried about how we felt. he kept asking me and others like mark sal...

Wanted to leave americans with. >> you know, it's interesting, mark salter, who collaborated on all of senator mccain's books and was a trusted aide, speech writer for him, he wrote a piece in tribute to him in which he said in part, mccain was romantic about his causes and cynical about the world. >> yep. >> and that is such a poignant line because that really does capture mccain, whose words that you just played, yes, they were a rebuke of trump, but really they were bigger. they were a rebuke of the populist politics that are coursing the globe in parts of europe and certainly in russia and...

Ago. now it's even gotten more intense and so the politicians today are dealing with a very different environment that john mccain didn't largely have to deal with. >> it's such an important point. i want to go to break. as we go to break, i want to pull up an exchange that i had with john mccain's speechwriter, long-time collaborator, mark salter, on the idea of the words that he wrote for john mccain and what the words that he's written, and he's written probably millions over the past however many years, had the most meaning. let's listen. >> you've written a lot of words for and with john ...

Us. when you hear mark salter talk about that, about the fact that people who, you know, you wouldn't even think that they would know who john mccain is, never mind have that kind of -- that he had that kind of impact on them while they were in prison just because he mentioned their name, what does that say to you? >> well, it speaks right to the credibility that he had on issues of human rights, having been a prisoner of war himself, having known what that feels like. it gave him so much greater weight. and the other thing, when you look back at the legislation he sponsored, the foreign polic...