This is an article that was in the San Francisco Chronicle on the 18th.

Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a
racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and
held him captive during the war.

``I hate the gooks,'' McCain said yesterday in response to a question from
reporters aboard his campaign bus. ``I will hate them as long as I live.''

McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner
of war camp, was questioned about the language because of a story last
month in the Nation magazine reporting his continued use of the slur.

Since then, reports of McCain's language have been circulating on Internet
chat sites and e-mails among Asian Americans, many of whom find the the
term offensive and inappropriate for an elected official.

McCain's appeal to voters has been as a wartime hero and a feisty
politician who speaks his mind and damns the consequences. But his comments
on the eve of the key South Carolina primary show the candidate's vaunted
`'straight talk'' in another light.

``The use of a racist slur can't be acceptable for any national leader,
regardless of his background,'' said Diane Chin, executive director of the
San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action. ``For someone running
for president not to recognize the power of words is a problem.''

While McCain's words may have little effect in conservative South Carolina,
where few Asian Americans live, they could come back to haunt him in other
states.

``Historically, straight talkers who say things off the top of their heads
eventually hang themselves with those sorts of remarks,'' said Bruce Cain,
a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.

``While it might not hurt him now, Democrats are not going to have any
hesitation about using this stuff to string him up later.''

TERM FOR HIS CAPTORS

McCain made no apologies yesterday.

``I was referring to my prison guards,'' McCain said, ``and I will continue
to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the
beating and torture of my friends.''

McCain made it clear that his anger extends only toward his captors. As a
senator, he was one of the leaders of the postwar effort to normalize U.S.
relations with Vietnam.

Campaign officials do not expect the controversy to hurt McCain, either in
tomorrow's South Carolina primary or later in the campaign.

``If people understood the context, they wouldn't be upset,'' Mike Murphy,
a senior adviser to the campaign, said last night.

But the racial slur used by the senator has a long, painful history that is
felt by many Asian Americans.

The word ``gook'' was first used in 1899 by American soldiers fighting
Filipino insurgents. During the Korean War, the term was aimed at Koreans
and Chinese. It was directed at the Vietnamese when Americans were fighting
in Vietnam. It is now used as a slur toward any Asian or Pacific Islander.

The Arizona senator prides himself on running an open campaign. He is
surrounded by reporters, television cameras and tape recorders perhaps more
than any presidential candidate in history. Reporters are given full access
to the candidate between each campaign stop on a customized bus
purposefully dubbed the ``Straight Talk Express.''

The bus, which also carries his top staff and often his wife, Cindy, is
crammed with network anchors and local newspaper reporters, who endlessly
engage McCain in what amounts to a news conference on wheels.

The comments are usually recorded and always on the record.

Sometimes the questions are pointed and serious. Sometimes they are not.

McCain has declared on his bus, ``I hate the French.'' He often begins
meetings with Californians joking, ``I hate Californians,'' noting that
they steal Arizona's water and lure his constituents away in the summer.

MCCAIN'S IMPRISONMENT

But those comments are clearly in jest. Yesterday's were not.

McCain was captured after his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi on Oct.
26, 1967. During the time he was held, he was brutally tortured by his
captors, finally reaching the point where he was unable to resist signing a
``confession.''

McCain and his fellow prisoners suffered terribly in the prison camp. In
the crowd at yesterday's rally in Greenville was retired Adm. Robert
Fuller, who was in prison with McCain at the infamous ``Hanoi Hilton.''

Fuller, who lives in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., spoke informally of the
despair of living in single cells, where the only form of contact was by an
ingenious code devised by the prisoners. Fuller said prisoners were
sometimes tortured for as many as six days. When they returned, he said,
the others would send messages of support by tapping on the wall.

``They would be put in ropes for six days, and they would confess,'' Fuller
said. ``When they came back to their cell, guys would tap on the wall, `We
love you. I wish we could give you a hug.' ''

The horrors of the past cannot be an excuse for hurting people in the
present, said Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian
Americans, an anti-defamation group.

``If Sen. McCain had been captured by Nigerians, could he call those people
`niggers' and think he wasn't going to offend everyone who is black?'' Akoi
asked. ``We can all feel for what he went through, but if that's his level
of sensitivity, I'm very disappointed.''

McCain usually treats his experience as a prisoner of war as a terrible
time in his life, but a period he has moved beyond. At times, he even uses
it as a punch line for jokes.

At a pancake breakfast recently, he said he had gone with his daughter to
the MTV Music Awards, ``and that was the greatest assault on my senses
since I was in prison.''

Yesterday's comments made it clear that McCain had neither forgotten, nor
forgiven, his captors.

``I will call right now, my interrogator that tortured me, a gook,'' McCain
said. ``(I can't believe that) anybody doesn't believe these interrogators
and prison guards were cruel and sadistic people who deserve the worst
appellations possible.''

McCain said he does not consider the comment an epithet.

``Gook,'' he said, ``is the kindest appellation I can give.''