In 1974, as Watergate was destroying the Republican presidency of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington to cheer up—and electrify—a rising generation of New Right activists. His patriotic speech ("We are … the last best hope of man on earth") was the first shot in what came to be known as the Reagan Revolution. The address was laced with praise for three recently released POWs he had brought with him. Proof that America was not a "sick society," he said, could be found in the "men who went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam." One of them was a Navy pilot who had become Reagan's (and his wife Nancy's) close friend. His name was Lt. John McCain.

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