Warren Beatty will be among the pallbearers at Sen. John McCain’s Washington memorial service — joining an aisle-spanning roster of pols and pals that includes former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, former Sen. Gary Hart and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Beatty, an Oscar winner and self-described “liberal Democrat,” was a longtime friend of Republican McCain, with the pair filming a TV ad together in 2000 to oppose campaign contribution caps in California.
“I consider my friendships to be friendships,” Beatty once told the Atlantic magazine of his ideology-defying relationship with McCain. “I don’t think that political ideology is necessarily germane to friendships.”
Also among those helping to carry McCain’s coffin during a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday will be former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and FedEx founder Fred Smith.
Among the speakers paying tribute will be former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
There will also be a service for the six-term Arizona senator in Phoenix on Thursday, where Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald will be among those delivering eulogies.
McCain was an avid Cardinals fan and the two had formed a close friendship.
Fitzgerald wrote a tribute in Sports Illustrated last year after McCain revealed he had been diagnosed with brain cancer, in which the athlete revealed that he once went to Vietnam and visited the jail cell where McCain was held as a prisoner of war for more than five years.
He told ESPN this week that speaking at the memorial service would be “one of the greatest honors of my life.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) paid tribute to McCain on the Senate floor Tuesday, saying his pal’s lasting legacy is that he “taught us how to lose” with grace.
“When you go around the world, people remember his concession speech as much as anything else,” Graham said of the night in 2008 McCain lost the presidential election to then-Sen. Barack Obama. “So he healed the nation at the time he was hurting.”
