U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., gave a speech Monday night that deserves to be heard or read by every American. McCain talked about what it means to be American, with all of its blessings and its obligations, and what America means to the world.

McCain was being honored with the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for his efforts to “secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.”

Press coverage of the event focused on McCain’s veiled shot at the Trump administration for shirking America’s leadership role in the world: “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

That was the money quote, but there was much more, including a condemnation of the “blood and soil” rhetoric of neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August:

“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.”

Context is as important as content. McCain, 81, has been given what he calls a “very poor prognosis” for an aggressive brain cancer. He appears to be writing the last chapter of an extraordinary life. He has gone from Naval Academy wild man to heroic prisoner of war to maverick Republican senator to conventional Republican nominee for president who, despite his “Country First” slogan, chose the spectacularly unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate.

He is now back in maverick mode, casting the deciding vote against his party’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill in July. He voted against GOP tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 because they were fiscally irresponsible and tilted to the rich. He might do it again.

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

President Donald Trump may or may not have said something insensitive or excessively blunt to the widow of a soldier killed earlier this month in Niger. We don’t know. No one has produced a transcript of the conversation yet.

But our point is a larger one than whether Trump’s remarks were misconstrued, inartful or inappropriate.

The fact is, Trump made the call - even after his chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired Marine general whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, advised against it. Trump made the call after Kelly told him that other presidents didn’t always call every family of a fallen soldier. Kelly said that when his son was killed, his family did not get a call.

“If you elect to call a family like this, it is about the most difficult thing you could imagine,” Kelly said. “There’s no perfect way to make that phone call. When I took this job and talked to President Trump about how to do it, my first recommendation was he not do it. Because it’s not the phone call that parents, family members, are looking forward to.”

Kelly said Trump asked him what he should say. Kelly responded with something that every American should hear, something that his casualty officer said to him when his son was killed: “He was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war, and when he died . he was surrounded by the best men on this earth, his friends.”

He was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do. Strip out the politics and that’s the essence.

Let’s all take a deep breath, set aside political rancor and honor the four soldiers who died serving this country in Niger.