U.S. President Joe Biden said he “didn’t say anything bad” about the late Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, although he once called him a “friend” and “angry man.”
On Thursday, Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 16 Americans, including McCain, who died of brain cancer in 2018. His widow, Cindy McCain, received the award on behalf of her late husband.
“I confess to my Democratic friends that I was the person who encouraged John McCain to come home and run for president because I knew what incredible courage, intelligence and conscience he had,” Biden said.
The President added: “We competed with each other, which I didn’t like, for tickets to the highest office in the country. I was running for vice president and he was running for president. I never stopped liking John. said something bad about him in my life because I knew his honor, his courage and his commitment.”
Despite his statements, Biden said a lot of negative things about McCain during the 2008 election, when McCain was running for president as a Republican and Biden was running for Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden said of McCain during a speech in Florida a month before McCain’s defeat in November 2008, “You can’t call yourself a rebel when all you’ve ever done was loud.”
“What most Americans are looking for is a firm hand, leadership, not an evil man staggering from position to position,” he added.
A few weeks earlier, Biden had suggested that McCain, a former Vietnam POW and Navy pilot, was a coward after asking, during a speech in New Mexico, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”
Biden responded, “In my neighborhood, if you have something to say to a man, look him in the eye and say it.”
The Bidens and McCains had a longtime friendship that deteriorated in 2008 but then reconciled ahead of the 2020 presidential election when Cindy McCain crossed the line in favor of Biden over then-President Donald Trump.
Source: Foxnews