Perhaps they learned their lesson about going easy on the disingenuous hatchet jobs, which they have tried many, many times this year, ever since McCain became the presumptive Republican candidate. Despite all the whining the Times did, the McCain campaign did not involved the Times in the release of his medical records, so, perhaps they are trying to get back in McCain’s good graces with a flowing piece on McCain’s history of how he went from coming back from Vietnam to the US Senate (and hopefully beyond!)

At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman told Capt. John S. McCain III that he was about to attain his life ambition: becoming an admiral.

But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs.

He had found a sense of purpose in an apprenticeship to some of the Senate’s fiercest cold warriors. And in Senator John G. Tower, a hawkish Texas Republican, he had found a new mentor, beginning a relationship that many compared to the bond between a father and son.

It’s a long, long story, 4 Internet pages, but well worth the read, and you can probably consider it part of the Times’ penance. It is well written, and favors McCain’s side of the story.