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Early last summer, his campaign finances in ruins and his presidential ambitions all but reduced to ashes, Senator John McCain picked up the phone and sought some advice from a trusted friend, Orson Swindle.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"From what I see," replied Mr. Swindle, a blunt former Marine pilot, "it's a hell of a mess."

Mr. Swindle, who was shot down and captured by North Vietnamese troops in 1966, on what was supposed to be his last sortie, knows a thing or two about messes - and more than a thing or two about John McCain.

For 18 months, the two men slept side by side on a concrete slab, part of a group of a few dozen "rotten apples" who'd been confined together in the infamous prisoner-of-war camp known as the Hanoi Hilton. Each endured brutal torture; each listened, at night, to the cries of friends who were choked with towels, flayed with fan belts and prodded with bayonets, usually with the aim of extracting a confession.

Mr. McCain served as de facto chaplain, educator and entertainer to this bedraggled lot, not just to boost morale but to ease the torment of monotony. Together with Mr. Swindle, he devised a lecture series on the history of the English novel, retelling the stories of Damon Runyan, explaining the Crusades and instructing his fellow prisoners on the classics.

His considerable recall skills also furnished the basis for "Monday night at the movies," a weekly event during which he would dramatize a Hollywood film to the best of his ability and then extemporize the rest. Two Marlon Brando vehicles - Viva Zapata! and One-Eyed Jacks - were among his favourites. He relished delivering a line from the latter: "You scum-sucking pig." He was smart and funny, but also fearless - sometimes dangerously so.

"He was a tough little guy," Mr. Swindle remembers. "He's also daring, which has gotten him into trouble a couple of times."

This pluck, mixed with an ample dose of deep-rooted conviction, has also come to define Mr. McCain's political career. And here, too, it has often been a bedfellow to trouble. He is a constant burr in the side of Republican orthodoxy. He recently staked out an unpopular position on immigration, which conservative hardliners equated with an amnesty program for illegal workers. He championed stem-cell research, deaf to the denunciations of evangelicals and right-wing talk radio hosts, and he fought for campaign-finance reform. Most infamously, he insisted last year that the United States should deploy more troops to the quagmire of Iraq - a heretical idea at the time for many in both the Republican and Democratic camps.

As his campaign kicked into high gear during the spring, some of the senator's closest confidants grew concerned. They could live with his maverick tendencies, even if polls showed his support for a military surge threatened to alienate voters. What they couldn't live with was Mr. McCain not being, well, Mr. McCain.

Mr. Swindle, a former federal trade commission and now an adviser to Mr. McCain's campaign, recalls watching a debate in which his friend appeared to be rummaging through a mental filing cabinet, searching for an answer that had been scripted by one of his high-priced consultants. The man he knew - unswerving in his beliefs, even if they clashed with received wisdom or hurt his political chances - had somehow morphed into a choreographed marionette of his political handlers.

John McCain had lost sight of who he was.

"We said, 'What the hell is going on here?' " Mr. Swindle recounted. "Every one of us said, 'Let's let John McCain be John McCain. Let this man be himself, with all his warts and freckles.' I told him, 'John, just say what you want to say.' "

Morality play

The John McCain story, in its most popular form, follows an arc of Lazarus-like redemption, one in which courage, luck and faith repeatedly coalesce to triumph over a series of near biblical trials - plane crashes, imprisonment, torture and, most recently, malignant melanomas.

To supporters, his campaign has acquired the sheen of a morality play, with the White House looming as the reward for a character forged on the anvil of adversity.

"You've got to be able to sell your story," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant who managed Fred Thompson's brief campaign. "But you've got to run in a year when no one has a better story."

Few have one that can compete with Mr. McCain's, as borne out by his surging lead in the race for the presidential nomination. He is all but a lock now to lead the Republicans, following the decision Thursday of his chief rival, Mitt Romney, to drop out of the contest after a weak showing in the Super Tuesday primaries. Mr. McCain has already secured 707 delegates, more than half of the 1,191 he will need to win, an improbable comeback that reinforces the legend of his knack for survival.

John Sidney McCain III was born near the Panama Canal in 1936 into a distinguished military family. His grandfather, John (Slew) McCain, was an admiral in the U.S. Navy, and commanded the country's fleet of aircraft carriers in the Second World War. His father Jack, also an admiral, was a decorated submarine captain. The two men were the first father-and-son pair in U.S. history to notch up four stars each.

Like many navy brats, the younger McCain had a peripatetic upbringing, spending his formative years shuffling between a variety of places, including Connecticut, Pearl Harbor, Virginia and Washington, D.C. He was a diminutive kid with an outsized temper - an Achilles heel that would dent his political fortunes later in life. (For example, the governor of Arizona, Mr. McCain's home state, cited his outbursts as one of the reasons she endorsed George W. Bush in 2000.)

His childhood tantrums were so severe that he would fall into unconsciousness, prompting his parents to devise an equally stern remedy, dunking him in an icy bath until the demons were exorcised. While this had some effect, it wasn't quite a cure.

"Together with the challenge of my transient childhood, my small stature motivated me to prove quickly to new schoolmates that I could stand up for myself," he wrote in his first memoir, Faith of My Fathers. "The quickest way to do so was to fight the first kid who provoked me."

Mr. McCain never did grow much and his love of a good fight never abated. He was just 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds when he bowed to family tradition and joined the U.S. Naval Academy, an experience he once described as a "four-year course of insubordination and rebellion."

He boxed regularly, remained quarrelsome in the face of authority, earned reprimands for bad behaviour and graduated fifth from the bottom of his class in 1960 - a statistic he is fond of quoting, with what his friends say is self-deprecating slyness.

"He likes to joke about his performance at the naval academy, but don't let him fool you," fellow Arizona Senator Jim Waring said. "This guy has a better grasp of the issues than anyone."

Mr. Waring, a towering health buff outfitted in pressed khakis and a button-down checked shirt, once served as a legislative liaison to Mr. McCain and "did everything but pick up his dry cleaning." He recalled a public meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz., several years ago, during which someone in the audience mentioned Shakespeare. Mr. McCain responded by quoting a full page from Henry V. He is a voracious, eclectic and, by all accounts, furiously fast reader, a student of history and literature who has an uncanny knack for absorbing information. One friend described him as a "human trivia machine."

"He's got this colossal memory," said Colonel Bud Day, who was Mr. McCain's ranking officer in the Hanoi prison camp. Mr. Day, who is still trying cases almost 60 years after passing his bar exam and is reputed to be the most decorated U.S. military official alive, described Mr. McCain as a brilliant study who simply refused to live off the family name.

"Had he put his mind to it, he could have been valedictorian of that class. But he was going to [fashion] his own image - he wasn't going to make it through the canopy and shadow of his grandfather and father."

For a time, it seemed that Mr. McCain was more inclined to veer sharply away from their example. After graduating in 1960, he spent two years as a pilot at a naval base in Florida and, by his own admission, was more interested in women and parties than he was in flying fighter planes, one of which he had already crashed (he escaped unscathed).

He spent his time in bars, prowled the town in a Corvette and dated an exotic dancer who called herself Marie, the Flame of Florida. Once, Mr. McCain took her to a party with some naval colleagues and their polished wives; Marie broke the awkward silence by pulling a switchblade from her pocket and using it to clean her nails.

Eventually, though, Mr. McCain did show some promise as a combat pilot, and with this promise came the creeping realization he was ready to grow up. In 1965, he married a Philadelphia divorcee, Carol Shepp, and adopted her two children. A year later, the couple had a daughter, Sidney, who now lives in downtown Toronto. The family was together only a matter of months before Mr. McCain, anxious to carve out his own legacy in combat, was ordered to join a squadron and soon dispatched to Vietnam.

Battered and scarred

It is difficult not to view John McCain, the presidential candidate, through the prism of his experience in the Vietnam War - not merely because of his status as a hero, but because his military credentials furnish the thickest plank in his campaign.

One day in the fall of 1967, while on a mission over Hanoi, he was shot down and forced to eject from his plane. He broke his left arm, fractured his right arm in three places and wrecked his right knee. When he regained consciousness in front of a posse of Vietnamese soldiers and began to cry out, one of them broke his shoulder with the butt of a rifle. Others bayoneted him in the ankle and groin. He was at first denied medical attention, so convinced were doctors that he would not survive.

"My instant thought was, 'This guy ain't going to make it till tomorrow,' " said Mr. Day, who cared for Mr. McCain that first night in prison. "But dying wasn't in his playbook."

He did recover, of course, over the 5½ years he was held captive, but the physical effects of repeated torture are clearly visible today: His gait is stilted, hobbled by a gimpy leg and arms that he can barely raise above his head. The beatings, including one form of abuse in which he was suspended by a rope around his biceps, exacerbated the shoulder fractures he had already sustained.

Mr. McCain likes to joke now that he's "older than dirt" and has "more scars than Frankenstein" - the latest, tracing a line down the side of his face, courtesy of an operation in 2000 to remove a cancerous growth on his temple (it was the third time he had had a melanoma excised).

These hardships, not to mention his tireless championing of the troops in Iraq, have made him immensely popular with the military. Tuesday night here in Phoenix, 1,500 people crammed into a room at the Biltmore Resort & Spa to hear him speak after the primaries. The noise was deafening every time the screens flashed a picture of Mr. McCain in the lead; they were equally loud when booing Mitt Romney. Many supporters, some in full military attire, toted signs reading, "Vets for McCain," or wore pins proclaiming, "No Surrender," referring to his refusal to quit whether in prison, on the campaign trail or in Iraq.

This hawkishness helps to buttress his conservative credibility, which has come under fierce attack; some ideologues, such as TV personality Ann Coulter, are so incensed by him that they have threatened to support the Democrats if he wins the nomination.

Yet Mr. McCain is anti-abortion, anti-gun-control and in favour of smaller government, lower taxes and a beefed-up military. While he has rankled conservatives with his softer stance on immigration and his desire to clean up both the environment and the murky world of campaign contributions, these appear to be poor explanations for his appeal to independent voters. More likely, it is due to his cult of personality, or what people in Arizona repeatedly referred to as his "character." He is viewed as someone who does not bend easily to political expedience and doesn't allow polls to guide his decisions.

"He's developed this persona of a straight shooter, man of principle, tell it like it is," said John Garcia, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. "That can resonate with people who are distrustful of politics in general."

At a Super Bowl party last week in a gated community of Spanish-styled homes on the outskirts of Phoenix, a few dozen people gathered to watch the game and discuss the primary races. It was the prime McCain demographic - middle-class, moderate Republicans turned off by the antics of Rush Limbaugh and other far-right pundits.

Bill Gates, a lawyer for golf-club manufacturer Ping, hosted the party along with his wife, Pam. Mr. Gates, who has a McCain sign staked in his front lawn, has helped to raise money and joined other volunteers to make hundreds of thousands of calls out of state (the actual budget for Arizona was close to nothing, so confident was Mr. McCain of victory in his adopted state).

Mr. Waring, the senator, was there along with several other supporters who had travelled with Mr. McCain on his campaign in Florida. Aside from a few people who quietly admitted to backing Barack Obama (including Mr. Gates's grade-school daughter, who insisted on putting up a poster of the Illinois senator to make her views known), the room was buzzing with expectation for their not-quite-native son.

"It's about believing in something greater than yourself," Eric Sloan, a 25-year-old government worker, explained between sips of a beer by the backyard pool. Mr. Sloan, a former Democrat, credits Mr. McCain's memoir with inciting him to cross party lines. "Reading something like that, it really changed my outlook on things. They said he was wrong about the Iraq war, wrong on immigration, and yet he had the moral courage to stick to his guns."

Candid to a fault

Mr. McCain's arrival on the political scene was in some ways accidental. After being released by the North Vietnamese in 1973, he returned home to a hero's welcome and a deteriorating marriage. His wife, Carol, had been badly injured in a car accident and absence had driven them apart. He admitted to having extramarital affairs after his return, and the two soon agreed to separate, with the Vietnam veteran heading to Washington to take a senior navy job.

Six years later, on a trip to Hawaii, he met a former cheerleader named Cindy Hensley, a wealthy young woman from Arizona whose father ran one of the country's largest beer distributors. He was 43 - she was just 25. They married and went on to have four children, including a daughter adopted in 1991 from an orphanage in Bangladesh. (Ms. McCain had a near-fatal stroke in 2004 but recovered and continues to campaign alongside her husband and chair her family's business, Hensley and Co.)

The pair moved to Arizona in 1980, and Mr. McCain began to mull a run for Congress. The mere idea stunned Mr. Day, who remained a close friend and even had handled his divorce case.

"I said, 'John, there's no way that's going to be a successful thing for you. That place requires more compromise than you've probably done all your life.' He leaned back in his chair and said, 'Bud, you know me better than that.' And I said, 'No I don't.' "

But Mr. Day helped out, and in 1982, Mr. McCain was elected as a U.S. congressman.

Bruce Merrill, a professor at Arizona State University who did polling for Mr. McCain during his nascent political career, said the senator has not changed that much over the years: He continues to "say it like it is," as he did as a young congressman when he challenged Ronald Reagan's decision to keep troops in Beirut.

Of course, this candour is both a virtue and a vice, acknowledges Dan Schnur, who was Mr. McCain's communications manager during his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in 2000. Before their chances vaporized in the South Carolina primaries when George W. Bush's team mobilized the religious right against him, Mr. McCain was looking like a serious candidate, particularly in New Hampshire. One night, rather than make a last-minute push on the campaign trail, he informed his staff that he was taking the night off so he could take his daughter Morgan to the MTV awards. The staff arranged for Mr. McCain to be interviewed by a VJ after the event, hoping to cultivate younger voters.

But when the interviewer asked what he thought of the concert, Mr. McCain compared it to his time as a PoW: "It was the greatest assault on my senses since Hanoi."

Mr. Schnur winced at the memory. "If you weren't working for him, it was hilarious," he said. "He says what he thinks to a fault and he can unnecessarily turn off voters."

Sometimes Mr. McCain is merely straightforward; other times his bluntness borders on the offensive. He has called his Vietnamese jailers "gooks" in public, and an Associated Press story in 1998 claimed that he cracked the following joke at a Republican fundraiser in Washington: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."

More recently, in South Carolina on his current "Straight Talk Express" campaign, someone asked Mr. McCain what message the U.S. should send to Tehran. He sang back, to the tune of the Beach Boys hit Barbara Ann: "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran."

Although Mr. McCain followed the path of his father and grandfather, he has frequently said how much he takes after his mother, Roberta, a dynamic 96-year-old widow who accompanies him on many campaign stops and can be as blunt and independent-minded as her son.

Last year, when an agency in France refused to rent her a car because of her age, she walked across the street and bought a vehicle, which she sold again before leaving the country. Asked recently about her son's support among the Republican base, she answered, "I don't think he has any." Another time, she took a jab at Mr. Romney, a Mormon, by implying that the Mormons had a hand in Salt Lake City's Olympics scandal. Mr. McCain, in a rare backpedal, hastened to say he didn't share all of his mother's views.

Yet the public seems willing to overlook some of Mr. McCain's gaffes (and, some would say, policy positions) because of what they perceive as his authenticity.

"He can walk into a place, and within 15 minutes everyone thinks he's from the neighbourhood," said Oliver Harper, a doctor who has a property beside the McCains outside Sedona, Ariz., and travels with the campaign. "When we're up in the country, I think he knows every tree, and how the peach tree is doing, and the berry crops. He loves to grill for everybody and put dinner on for whoever shows up. I've seen him so content up there."

Mr. Harper is enjoying the highs of the McCain campaign right now, but he has experienced the lows as well.

Last July, around the time Mr. McCain phoned his friend Orson Swindle to gauge his thoughts, his candidacy had reached its nadir. Inexplicably, to many observers, he had abandoned his familiar role as the feisty outsider in favour of portraying himself as an establishment man, the presumptive heir to the current president's throne; he had hired several top-ranking Bush advisers and put together a costly, unwieldy political machine. On stage he appeared rehearsed and careful, hardly the qualities that connected with independents in the past. By summer, the campaign was nearly broke, and support for Mr. McCain had plummeted.

But when Mr. McCain returned from visiting the troops in Iraq on Independence Day, he took drastic action. He parted ways with senior staff, including Terry Nelson and Jeff Weaver, and cut expenses to the bone. Pundits had consigned him to the dustbin, but he vowed he would press on.

"We had the meeting up in the country this summer and the campaign decided to reform," Mr. Harper recalled. "John told everyone on that campaign, 'We're going to be fine. It's going to be okay.' And he put the whole campaign on his back and started to climb the mountain. I think he did better in the underdog role. Having to scrap against the odds rather than having the wind against his back. I think the struggle suits him."

Mr. Schnur, the former communications manager, put it another way: "I think the campaign meltdown last summer may have served to remind John McCain of what kind of candidate he was."

The bus was traded in for a minivan; large audiences gave way to small-town parades; advertising was abandoned in favour of pressing the flesh.

Mr. McCain took his "No Surrender" tour on the road, boosted by the fact that the Iraq surge seemed to be paying dividends and the immigration furor was subsiding. Adding to his luck was the lacklustre field arrayed against him, a ragtag assortment of Republicans with little profile, narrow support and plenty of flaws.

"Although I've never minded the role of the underdog and have relished as much as anyone come-from-behind wins, tonight I think we must get used to the idea that we are the Republican Party's front-runners," he told a crowd of chanting admirers in Phoenix Tuesday night, after shuffling to the stage to the pulsing theme from Rocky. He waited for the shouts of "Mac is back! Mac is back!" to die down, before throwing his superstitious caution to the wind. "And I don't mind one bit."

But can he win?

Mr. McCain's real challenges are only beginning. As a candidate, he inherits a party that has been badly fractured and his task will be to rebuild it - a tall order for a man not known for his conciliatory ways.

In 1999, when he was mounting his last run, the Arizona Republic ran an editorial describing his "volcanic" temper and wondering aloud about the senator's fitness to lead the country. "There is much there to admire," the paper stated, but added: "There is also reason to seriously question whether McCain has the temperament, and the political approach and skills, we want in the next president of the United States."

This time around, the paper has squarely endorsed him. Mr. McCain's backers insist that the stories about his temper are overdone. He has been adopting more of the statesman's role, particularly in recent weeks, and drops Ronald Reagan's name whenever possible - not merely to conflate himself with that hallowed brand of conservatism, but to convince Republicans that he can entice independents and Democrats into the fold as the former president did.

That seemed to work in the primaries, when he was battling a fairly weak cast of characters. Some political experts, such as Michael McDonald of the Brookings Institution in Washington, are not convinced that it will last. "At the end of the day," he said, "when people learn McCain wants to stay in Iraq for the next eight years, and perhaps expand this war to Iran, I don't think he'll continue with this high an approval level."

Few in the Republican Party doubt Mr. McCain's ability to prosecute the war on terror and keep the country safe. Yet he has remained curiously mute on the financial costs of a protracted war, and less than clear on how he intends to fix the faltering U.S. economy - a decisive concern among many voters.

"I think McCain's gotten better at telling his story," observed Mr. Galen, the Republican consultant. "He is selling the notion of someone who's actively been involved in these negotiations and discussions. He's not a doctor of economics, but he knows enough about how to get things done that people are willing to trust him."

He had better hope so. Pundits (who, it should be pointed out, have been plenty wrong so far) believe that Mr. McCain would have a much harder time fending off Barack Obama than he would Hillary Clinton, as Mr. Obama has proved so effective at garnering the independent vote himself.

Regardless of whom he faces, Mr. McCain will no doubt attempt to position himself as a battle-tested leader against a political neophyte, an agent of stability facing agitators for change and, hence, the unknown. Given the sickly state of his party, this will be an uphill task. His Vietnam-era friends say he is an average poker player at best - but even he must recognize the weak hand he's inherited from President Bush, whose popularity continues to slide.

Almost anyone who knows the Arizona senator will highlight two qualities: his eerie ability to defy the odds and his willingness to impale himself on a point of principle regardless of political consequences. The question in the months that lie ahead is which of these will win out.

Sinclair Stewart is a Globe and Mail reporter based in New York.