John McCain, ultimate survivor

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John McCain secured the Republican presidential nomination as the ultimate survivor -- winning it eight years after his first failed attempt and decades after cheating death in the Vietnam War.

Easy to laugh and easy to anger, McCain carries with him the scars of battle in both armed conflict as a naval pilot and in the political wars of Washington as a U.S. senator from Arizona.

The 71-year-old McCain would be the oldest American ever elected to a first presidential term if he is able to defeat the Democrats' choice in the November election. He is also a cancer survivor, having undergone surgery for two malignant melanomas in 2000.

Polls initially put him in a strong position to compete against either Democrat Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

That would seem at least in part a credit to a strategy aimed at attracting independent and moderate voters rather than exclusively courting the Republican Party's right wing.

On the campaign trail, he often travels with his wife, Cindy, and has a repertoire of old jokes that he tells repeatedly, such as, it is so dry in Arizona that the trees chase the dogs.

Or there was one about the man who came up to him and said, "'Did anybody ever tell you, you look like Senator John McCain?' I said yes. He said, 'Doesn't that make you mad as heck?'"

A hawk on military matters, McCain served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when Republicans held control of the Senate in recent years and is now a ranking member for the minority party.

Sometimes known by his colleagues as "Senator Hothead," McCain can be quick to lose his temper, which is what happened last May when he and Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn quarreled over the details of proposals to deal with illegal immigration.

"(Expletive) you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room," McCain was said to have told Cornyn.

From his Senate seat McCain has been a strong advocate of maintaining U.S. troops in Iraq, and staked his political career on a successful outcome in the unpopular war.

"I'd rather lose an election than lose a war," he said.

At the same time, he has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, blaming former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a botched war plan.

His positions on the war and in favor of a plan to give millions of illegal immigrants a pathway to U.S. citizenship nearly killed off his campaign last summer.

On political life support, McCain shed staff and concentrated exclusively on winning New Hampshire. A victory in that state gave him the momentum to outlast several better-funded rivals.