John McCain's mother Roberta dies at 108

Roberta McCain, the mother of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, has died at 108, Cindy McCain announced Monday.

Born a week before Arizona even became a state, McCain married John McCain Jr., who rose to be a four-star Navy admiral, and raised three children with him. Her son John McCain went on to serve 30 years in the Senate and run for president before he died of brain cancer in 2018; Roberta visited his casket in the U.S. Capitol.

When John McCain was shot down during the Vietnam War and kept as a political prisoner, Roberta McCain rarely talked publicly about it, though she did send a letter to then-President Lyndon B. Johnson reiterating her support for the war. She didn't exactly back her son's presidential campaign in 2000, later saying she "didn't think he had enough money, enough expertise, enough anything," The Washington Post notes.

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That changed in 2008, when she encouraged even Republicans who didn't love John McCain to "hold their noses" and vote for him. "When John McCain's critics questioned whether he was too old to serve as president — he was 72 on Election Day 2008 — he simply introduced them to his mother," the Post writes.

In a Monday tweet, Meghan McCain remembered her grandmother as "everything I ever aspired to be." Kathryn Krawczyk