days, like the small his final message is trying to show what all of us believed the greatness of america could be. in just a few minutes the family is going to arrive here. you his casket come down here. started pouring rain yesterday as he entered into the capitol ahead of that ceremony. he has been lying in state ever since. members of the public who came to see him and pay their respects. it was a break from protocol that made their own statement. >> he asked chuck schumer to

join senator mcconnell. they did it together, and then after that, the speaker called and invited nancy pelosi to join him in placing a wreath from the bipartisan groups, something that we have not seen very much of. john mccain was the kind of leader that could build relationships across party lines. you had that great give and take of trying to get information. he is now the 31st person to lie in state. joining me right now from the nation naal kcathedral is andre

mitchell. each of you take a moment to talk about can you explain why this is such a big deal to our republic this day. >> first of all, it is so significant that john mccain feels like he is the last of a certain breed of senators, if you will, whom i covered in the 80s and 90s on the hill that worked together. and joe biden referenced that when he said you could sit next to each other, even though they were from opposite political parties, they would sit next to each other. and they would not really be listening to depates on a tuesday, they would break for

their tuesday launwn lunches wi joe biden and john mccain were rebuked by party leaders for being seen hitting and chatting. and that was the moment that joe biden recalled that he and his fellow senator started to feel it was all changing. that is the time in the mid 90s when the great men and women that i remember stepped down and decided not to run again in both political parties. we lost so much of that culture and john mccain seems now so unique and irreplaceable.

arguing against torture, and fellow p.o.w.s from hanoi, he lost friends for awhile for standing up to change the laws that were changed to go up against president bush and others and the administration in the iraq war. there are so many moments along the way going with cam campaign finance. that is what is sol significant about the tributes today. the paeople involved in the service, it is for those that they fought for and sought. and for them to reach out to barack obama and george w. bush

is so significant. i think most notably the south carolina primary, what ended his hoping in 2000 after the succession, it was a bitter and divisive primary with terrible hate and innuendos, false accusations that were so crushing to him, his family, and his adopted daughter, bridget who later years read back and discovered on google what was said about her father and herself. so for him to reach out to the push people again today is also to say let's think about a better political future for all of us and it is a rebuke to the man in the white house. >> so well said. we are watching the family and the children of john mccain coming into the capitol there. john, i think it is so powerful, because he suffered so much for

the five-and-a-half years in a hanoi prison, and he invited someone like warren beatty, hold only, we're going to watch the casket come into the u.s. capitol. come out of the capitol.

[ silence ] let's bring in john mechum as we watch the casket being brought down. you never know, watching history, when things come, you're not ready for how big they are. i think we're all struck by the power of this loss. >> it is a sacred hour for a

hand who gave his all to preserving our journey toward a more perfect union. he was a perfect man who kept us moving guard higher ground, and today by his conscious design, is an extraordinary embodiment not of the fact that we should always agree or that there is a mythical centrism in the american spirit, because there's not. we fought from loyalists versus revolutionaries, federalists and antifederalists. north and south. interventionists and isolationists. we have fought and fought, but at our best, and john mccain understood this, we had to be one great family. one of the statues that senator mccain spent last night under the gaze of, was andrew jackson. and believe me, they had a good

bit in common including a temper, but he said that we were one great family. another statute was gerald ford that put us back together after a very divisive crisis. another was ronald reagan who respected, like mccain, someone that went west and found joy and brought that joy back to the country itself. . so it is a sacred hour, a journey that will move from that row tund rotundra, he will be brought on the ground, the theater roosevelt, to build this lumt to

both faith and to unity. and on that day, when theodore roosevelt, the theater of mccain, he wrote to the generpe of our time and any other time, he is a doer of the word as john mccain was. >> steve schmidt, i want to bring you in here and pay attention to the family here. meghan in crying, and we don't have steve yet, look at the family here. this is a human being, i want to bring you in, another young person here. we have watched jaump in here. the way he was destroyed in

scare, we have all been in these chapters. as a moderate republican, and you have seen this guy take the turmoil and pay the price of being in politics. >> he did, and what is interesting about the parallels between his life as being a sailor, a soldier, and someone that has been in harm's way, in a camp where he was tortures, and the torturous path of politics. it is part of what formed him. hi shared that with us particularly in his later years many retried to see. he tried to keep it real for

real people in so many ways, chris. it was difficult in politics because he watched as politics retreated to the corners and the edges, it was no longer in the center ring where they would duke it out. they would go at it over a bill and fight it out, that's why he called for regular order from one of his last great speeches from the senate floor, to remind members what is their purpose. yes, this is tough and hard. torture is hard but i endured it. politics is hard but we will endure it together. i think that is something that has been lost on a lot of the members. >> what did you think of the test list today, michael, when you saw warren beatty who was such a symbol of hollywood anti-war politics. them being invited to speak, to

be pallbarers, what did you think of that? >> i think again john mccain is forcing the country and his colleagues to take notice of what his life's work was about. it was not about isolating politics, it was about reaching across and having people share in the moment. he turned a lot of it over to political rivals. that is something that we have not seen. you heard andrea and others talk about his relationship with ted kennedy, and they would -- they were told they could not sit next to each other, and people are starting to talk, you're spending too much time on the

aisle. they come forward and speak. >> let me go, i want to say the word communion comes to mind. there is a priest that will give -- father reeves will give the ser mon, there is a mix, he was raised an e mipiepiscopalia. it is an interesting mix today. what do you make of the word communion. i think it captures the country coming together like congress. what we have in common is more important than the fights in every day politics. >> it is very much about

communion. it is an idea, a concept of coming and gathering around a table where you're sitting opposite of someone that you may have a relationship with, you may not. but it is that sense of coming together. america is foundationally built on this idea. and they have to come to a space, john mccain is trying to strike a balance with it. of course throughout most of his life, starting with his presidential campaign. starting in that moment with the woman in the town hall that he rebuked, and his convention

speech where he talked about the nation and the sense of coming together. his concession speech was a remarkable moment where he not only reached out an olive branch to say i want to work with this president because he is my president, but made it clear that it was important for the the nation to go forward. the communion was a big part of his life, he shared that in his cell with soldiers that were captive with him. that is a very important point to make. it is a important part of his life. >> thank you my friend, michael steele, you're a bit younger than michael and i, and i have to tell you that there is something that maybe i remember that some younger people don't. there was a political life in this country, a culture, where you could fight left and right, sometimes viciously, but it would seem different.

certainly the vietnam war, and we're going to the vietnam memorial now, those that were honored there for the loss of their lives in the vietnam war. even then i think there was a culture that john mccain is trying to reestablish in this funeral service. this culture of we have a common nature and a common purpose that unites. what are your thoughts about that. i know it is not popular in politics today. progressive, right wing politics, it seems to total these days, the war fafare. >> it feels like the country is ripping apart, it is so polarized. people are in trump or democrats, you want the president to impeach and go away or you think the country is in some ways in part of a deep state and everyone is going

against president trump and then you have john mccain inviting two presidents that beat him who really could have signified his biggest failures in life and he is saying please, come to my funeral, speak to the people, talk about what you know about my life, and in some ways you can tell in that moment that he is bringing two political sides together saying george bush, barack obama, at the end of the day we're all americans and we want to celebrate that and duty to your country. it's not lost that president trump will not be there. he is someone that when he became president wanted to be part of these groups, he wants to be part of the celebratory gathering where people from all political stripes are there and instead he is left out. he is sitting in the white house watching as all of this unfolds, really. >> you know when you get to go to vietnam and you see where john mccain was shot down over hanoi, the capitol, that he was

attacking. they were angry, he was bombing his city. he was beat up for five-and-a-half years, and he was one of the people along with john kerry and others that have been working very hard to rebuild vietnam and build a positive relationship. he is leading the building of a university over there. it is all part of this mccain fee nom n f phenomenon. he pushed on campaign reform, and he seemed to be in a constant process of making himself better, and now today, inviting the people -- in fact w., his campaign was really brutal toward him down in south carolina. accusing him of having a

illegitimate daughter, not an adopted daughter, saying his wife had drug problems, and look who is speaking at his funeral. >> john mccain is someone that admitted that he hadflaws. in interviews when it was coming to the end of his life when people were asking him how do you want to be remembered, he said he wanted to be remembered as someone who served his country and sometimes did it well and sometimes made mistakes. the fact that sarah palin and some republican operatives weren't invited to this funeral, the reporting is that he wanted to signify that that was a darker period in his life where he didn't really feel as proud of that campaign against barack obama. even though there was that stunning moment where he stopped a woman who was calling candidate president obama at the time saying he was a muslim and arab and he stopped and told that woman, no, we have our political differences but that's

not what we're about, he's an american and you need to stop that. but there's this idea that he wants to have this funeral where people are going to think about not just the good times in his life but also the rough times where he made mistakes. that's i think a lesson for all the people, not just for people in office but for people around the country who maybe have done something and you think i really want to make amends with that. >> let's bring in mash liebvich. mark, tell us, how does this hit you so hard? i'm just going to say it, it hit me so hard, this whole june republ -- run-up to this death of john mccain. i look at the list of people speaking today, the people who are coming, everyone's coming and everyone seems to have had a personal relationship and still does with john mccain. it's very personal today. >> yeah, and we knew obviously

this day was coming. he's been sick for a while, very sick for a while, and then we knew he was in hospice care and even after that, after he died last saturday night, it was a shock to the system. it was a shock to the system of i think of a kind of america that we are really fighting to sort of keep but also of the nation's business. people -- obviously john mccain proved his mettle 80 million times over in vietnam. he was also a product of washington and getting things done but also he was comfortable here. he was comfortable in the media, he was comfortable with friends from all walks of sort of official washington life. look, i felt really, really lucky to have been around him and he could be teased, he could be lacerated. he actually did that sometimes to himself and other people would and the thing you take away from mccain is just a

million little stories, little throwaway lines, the little quirks. there was something both very, very larger than life and so -- i wouldn't say smaller than life but really familiar. there was something about having him around that was very, very familiar and very, very comfortable and i think that that is already missed and i think you're seeing that today with the outpouring. >> i think many people have experiences good and bad and they've never quite figured him out. would you agree that this is one politician that would not have been replaced by artificial intelligence. you couldn't just plug in code for liberal or conservative or moderate republican or nice guy. you couldn't plug him in as artificial. what did you think of that question, predicting john mccain each day? >> he was certainly unpredictable. i think over time he became

somewhat predictably unpredictable and there were people who did figure out very easily how to work with him. your point about the template of john mccain being someone who is not invented in the traditional partisan media, partisan lab that you sort of come up with politicians these days, also, it's a cliche to say we will not see his likes again but certainly the model of john mccain as the heroic figure inside the republican party is very much in question. this is a party that's been given over to donald trump and donald trump's not here today. i'm guessing donald trump would probably beat john mccain pretty handily in a republican primary if a hypothetical race like that happened. so look, i think we will not see his likes again. it's obviously cliche but he was an original and we miss him. >> thank you. let's go to garrett hak because we're heading to the vietnam memori memori

memorial, cindy of course, to honor the loss of her husband. garrett, give us a sense of what we're going to see now. >> we're starting to see perhaps a few hundred people gathering here at the vietnam memorial. this will be a brief moment here. cindy mccain will be escorted to the wall by two members of the trump administration who actually in some way represent a through line with john mccain, generals mattis and kelly, the secretary of defense and the chief of staff. they'll take her to the wall where she will lay a wreath and just spend a quiet moment here with the crowds, push back to the barricades before they continue on to the cathedral. we've been talking so much we almost short-handed talking about senator mccain's time in the hanoi hilton, five and a half years of confinement, several years of that in solitary confinement. as much as we want to talk about it, you can report it 100 times, it's so far beyond what the rest of us have experienced.

i've seen a number of vietnam veterans, a number of folks with p.o.w. m.i.a., the small and diminishing fraternity of people who do get it, who do understand fully this idea of this turning point in john mccain's life that is a biographical point to us but is a touchstone moment for people of that generation. a number of those former p.o.w.s will be at the ceremony with the mccains later this afternoon. again, what will be a brief moment here will carry a lot of meaning for those folks in that fraternity who really do understand the value of this in john mccain's life. chris. >> let's go to colonel jack jacobs, a metal of honor winner. thank you for joining us. i guess you're the one to speak about this, the legacy of those who fought, the legacy of those who opposed the war and did not fight, and how that fits into the soul of john mccain. >> well, it was a very complex period. a lot of people who were drafted into the army against their will

and fought, nowadays 50 some odd years later, are very proud of what they did, proud of their service, and they represent -- we represent an entire generation that made a contribution to the defense of the republic in a very difficult time. nowadays we love the troops. we have a very small number of young men and women who are out there defending a country of 325, 350 million people. to all of us, both of that generation and this generation, particularly of fighting men and women, john mccain represents the best that this nation can produce. among his many virtues was the fact that though he never took himself seriously, he took what he was doing seriously. he joked often about being very near the end, the last guy, at

the end of his graduating class, but that he put himself into a position where he could do the best job he possibly could and when in prison and given the opportunity to get out early -- his father had been made the commander of all the naval forces in the pacific and the north vietnamese thought that this would be a great turn opportunity to get some problem beg -- propaganda value out of releasing him, offered him a release and he refused. many of us and i think you may have too, spoken to some people who were in prison with him at the time, chuck boyd and jim stockdale and all of them said the same thing, he was among the bravest people they have ever met. john mccain represents and was the embodiment of duty, honor and country, and he would tell

you and he did talk about how flawed he was himself but that like the old -- i think it was a german observation, we get too soon old and too late smart, and he vowed to spend the majority of his life getting as smart as he possibly could. he always gave himself a hard time for breaking, but anybody -- >> excuse me for a second. colonel, hold up for a second. i want to let everybody see, john kelly, the chief of the staff and secretary of defense mattis who are escorting cindy mccain to the vietnam memorial there to pay tribute to all those who were lost. the children are behind them there. this is a very powerful moment. this is going to be in the papers tomorrow. this is an amazing picture here of solidarity of our country. back to you, colonel, tell me

about this as a veteran and a decorated one, isn't it something that the most famous veteran of the vietnam war was a p.o.w., that it -- it wasn't murphy or colin kelly who went down the smoke stack of a ship. it wasn't something like that. it was kind of a different experience. what do you make of the fact that he is court of the figure we think of in politics certainly who served? >> well, i think it's a complete different experience. it's one thing to be in uniform and fight against the enemies of the republic and serve and in many cases give the last full measure. it's something else again to be in a position where you have to continue to endure torture for a long period of time. it's not surprising that john mccain was one of the most outstanding opponents of enhanced interrogati