I spent much of the summer of 1972 at Robinson Bar Ranch, on the Salmon River below Stanley. A consortium of Boise oligarchs owned the place, and I was dating one of their daughters, a young woman of beauty, grace, and privilege.

Robinson Bar was a welcoming place then, full of music and laughter, and at twenty-one I had my own share of beauty and grace. But I remember gazing at beautiful young wives playing with their children beneath the stilled rotors of corporate helicopters, and thinking that privilege was beyond me.

I was wrong. That summer North Vietnam released a number of POWs. Within weeks, some of those POWs were brought to Robinson Bar.

I don’t know how unreal the bluegrass band and the food-laden tables and the dancing guests looked like to men who had been starved and beaten and told they would never go home again. I do know those skeletal and still-frightened people looked at the log walls, the non-military helicopters on the lawn, and the lawn itself as though they didn’t exist. If their eyes closed, they were back in Hanoi, listening for air-raid sirens.

Insight doesn’t come easy when you’re twenty-one, but I understood that those POWs had survived an experience that would have destroyed me. They had suffered in ways I could not dream of, and their suffering would be with them forever. Living, for them, was an act of heroism. Nothing could bridge the gulf between a just freed prisoner-of-war and a callow young man who had held student deferments from 1968 to 1971.

Almost forty years later, one of those POWs is running for president. John McCain wasn’t at Robinson Bar that summer, but he was in Hanoi, and I know he came home as skeletal and as frightened and as heroic as the POWs I observed. He had been tortured and broken.

McCain doesn’t look skeletal or broken now. He walks and talks like a strong and intelligent old guy. What his opponents call an anger problem is a refreshing refusal to put up with politics as usual. Only the famous photo of McCain embracing George W. Bush, his head in the president’s armpit, suggests there was a time when cringing was a reflex for him.

McCain is recognizably more in touch with reality than Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney or Rudy Guliani. Even as he struggles to appease the religious right, his blunt language constantly moves him toward the truth. It’s as if his experience of torture in a Hanoi prison gave him a base-line for reality, an understanding of what human life—of both captives and captors—could be reduced to. Tell a lie around McCain, act the phony, pretend to be his friendly interrogator, and he will see right through you, smile and nod, and maybe tell you what you want to hear. He’ll save his contempt for later.

Even so, I doubt that McCain would have succeeded as a politician if he hadn’t had some serious therapy. If his prison experience showed him what was real, therapy must have made it possible to negotiate the ideologies, political postures, and pork-and-lotus-blossom smorgasbords that pass for the real in Washington, D.C. And McCain’s therapy wouldn’t have focused on what was making him tick, it would have focused on what was making other people tick, so he could live among them without violently insisting that they get real.

But if he becomes president, it’s another story. If the past fifteen years of Bush and Clinton have shown us anything, it’s that the power of the presidency will bring out the hidden, the pathological, and the long-suppressed need for revenge. Lots of old scores will be settled, not all of them with sadistic Vietnamese jailers.

Starting with talk-show hosts and Karl Rove, I expect a Republican Night of the Long Knives. The party that will result will be more disciplined, leaner, less sleazy and more firmly under the control of its leader. If I were a fat and privileged Bible-toting South Carolina Republican, I’d stay awake at night during a McCain administration.

But don’t think that I’m voting for McCain. The world has not been well-served by leaders who have brooded in prison between episodes of torture. Too many of them learned to bide their time, and then did unto others what had been done to them. If McCain wins, we’ll finally have a president who knows firsthand what’s underneath the mask of privilege in our world. That’s not necessarily a good thing.