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COVER: MR. COOL VS. MR. HOT - HOW THEY SEE THE WORLD

NEWSWEEK LOOKS AT FIVE FACTORS THAT HAVE BEEN CRITICAL TO SHAPING MCCAIN'S AND OBAMA'S WORLD VIEWS: TRIPS TO ASIA; STRONG MENTORS;

PAST PRESIDENTS' USE OF POWER;  PREDECESSORS AND SEPT. 11 

New York-How John McCain and Barack Obama see the world-and hence how they might deal as president with an unexpected crisis-may seem obvious by now. But to understand truly the candidates' world views, one needs to look more closely at the places, people and ideas that have shaped each of them since 1968, the year that helped make them who they are. In the October 6 Newsweek cover "Mr. Cool vs. Mr. Hot-How They See the World" (on newsstands Monday, September 29), Senior Editor Michael Hirsh examines five factors that have been critical to shaping both McCain's and Obama's worldviews.

Two Trips:  McCain and Col. Bud Day, a POW cellmate of his and a close friend, returned to visit a teetering Saigon in late 1974. They wanted to find out what was going on with the South Vietnamese government now that American money had been cut off.  They learned that North Vietnam had a pipeline built to within 80 miles of Saigon and the South Vietnamese were down to 10 rounds of ammo a day. Former senator Gary Hart says his old friend McCain, "like other veterans, believes that we could have 'won the Vietnam War' but the politicians panicked."  That view turned McCain into an early advocate of what would come to be called the "Powell doctrine," named after fellow vet and later Secretary of State Colin Powell: do not commit U.S. troops unless the mission and exit strategy are clear and overwhelming force is applied. Then give the military, and your allies, full and unstinting support.

Barack Obama's first trip back to Asia was equally mind-opening. With a Pakistani college roommate, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, he went vagabonding around South Asia in 1981. He found himself overwhelmed by Karachi, a vast and chaotic metropolis clogged with the poor, and then, as now, rife with sectarian tensions. "Part of the most memorable portion of the trip," Obama told Newsweek earlier this year, "was traveling to ... a more provincial area outside of Karachi, seeing what was essentially a feudal life"-peasants who were eking out a subsistence living in the middle of a modern democracy. Obama was relearning as a young man, in other words, what he had only dimly understood as a child in Indonesia: most people around the world are looking to fulfill basic needs like shelter, jobs and education for their kids. Later, these experiences contributed to Obama's concept of "dignity promotion"-working to ease these conditions of misery rather than focusing only on elections and other trappings of democracy.

Maverick Mentors: For McCain, the hawkish Democratic senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, one of the leading lights of the neoconservative movement, "remains the model of what an American statesman should be," as the GOP candidate said in a speech in June.  McCain's admiration is revealing: Jackson was a maverick who bucked his own party on the biggest issue of the day-how to confront the Soviet Union.

Obama's senatorial role model is also a man of principle from the opposing party: Richard Lugar.  What Obama most admired was that Lugar, a pragmatist and internationalist with far-reaching vision, was focused on core national-security issues like nuclear nonproliferation. To achieve his long-term goals Lugar set aside politics to work across different administrations and party lines.

The Uses of Power: After first being leery of committing U.S. troops to a ground war in the desert after Saddam Hussein's tanks rolled into Kuwait in 1990, McCain ultimately voted for the war and its outcome altered his thinking on the exercise of American power. As Hirsh reports, McCain still resisted what he saw as muddled interventions in Somalia and, initially, Bosnia. But after the massacre of thousands of Muslim men in Srebrenica, he endorsed a bombing campaign there, and later harangued President Clinton for not being active enough in halting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

For Obama, the gulf war was less transforming than an event that had occurred a year earlier- Nelson Mandela's release from prison after 27 years. As a freshman student in the early 1980s at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama got his first taste of organized politics and foreign policy in the growing antiapartheid movement. The success of the antiapartheid movement shaped Obama's views on how to tackle problems that don't lend themselves to military solutions.

The Predecessors: John McCain's hero worship of Teddy Roosevelt dates back to McCain's days as a boy talking about historical figures at the breakfast table, says McCain's brother, Joe: "He's probably his most important historical role model, a sickly asthmatic kid who became a robust type."

While Obama hasn't made Kennedy his role model as forthrightly as McCain has TR-he also likes to invoke Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lincoln-he has sought to identify himself with JFK's foreign policy (at least after the disastrous Bay of Pigs). The candidate likes to compare his proposal to talk to Iran without preconditions about its nuclear program to JFK's bold bid to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear-test ban with the Soviets at the height of the cold war.

Everything Changed:  For McCain, September 11 signaled the start of another grand struggle, like the one that his grandfather undertook after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. McCain, though, continues to group the various strains of Islamic extremism together, calling them collectively the "transcendental challenge" that faces the country and the next president. "You could trace [the threat] back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut" by Hizbullah, McCain told Newsweek earlier this year.

For Obama, 9/11 brought into focus all that he had learned abroad-in Indonesia, Pakistan and elsewhere-about how raising people's living standards is key to U.S. national security. He saw the challenge of the post-9/11 era as similar to the one taken up by JFK and, before him, Harry Truman: to introduce long-lasting strategic structures in concert with U.S. allies to tackle the world's worst problems. In a larger sense, 9/11 was a chance to reaffirm America's wisdom and promise as global leader.             # # # (Read cover story at www. Newsweek.com)