THE moment she heard that the Republican candidates in the 2008 presidential election would be holding a debate close to her home in New Hampshire, Erin Flanagan determined to confront them with the reality of the war in Iraq.

Two years earlier, Flanagan’s brother, First Lieutenant Michael Cleary, had been killed by an Iraqi roadside bomb eight days before he was due to return home. Angered by the candidates’ failure to commit themselves to an early withdrawal of US troops, Flanagan carefully compiled an emotional question that she hoped would put them on the spot.

If there was a single moment that marked the turning point in John McCain’s remarkable advance on the Republican presidential nomination, it may have come at that debate last June when Flanagan stood up and asked in a quivering voice how the candidates intended to stop the suffering of families who had lost their loved ones to a badly managed war.

McCain’s response to Flanagan’s anguished question not only earned him glowing reviews that helped to revive a presidential campaign that was then floundering and nearly bankrupt; it also led to a meeting of extraordinary poignancy between two very different American families who found themselves united by their experiences of Iraq.

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Last week, Flanagan spoke for the first time of the private dinner she subsequently hosted for McCain and his 19-year-old son, Jimmy, a newly trained Marine rifleman who was departing for Iraq the following week.

“It was a very powerful evening,” she told The Sunday Times. “McCain’s brave, handsome son had so much in common with my brother. They believed in what they were doing. They wanted to serve their country.”

There were no cameras or reporters present as the McCains arrived at the Flanagans’ spacious home in Bedford, New Hampshire, for an exceptional encounter that casts new light on the 71-year-old senator’s closely guarded relationship with his teenage soldier son.

It also shows how the Republican candidate’s transparent conviction and sincerity lit a spark that would eventually transform the presidential race and mark one of the most improbable resurrections in American history. After his victories in last week’s Super Tuesday polls and the subsequent surrender of his chief rival, Mitt Romney, McCain now appears assured of his party’s nomination.

“Last summer McCain was dead,” said Michael Rubinoff, a media studies professor at Arizona State University. “Now he’s the prospective Republican nominee. There’s nothing in presidential history remotely comparable to this comeback.”

When Flanagan posed her question last summer, McCain startled his debating rivals by climbing off his stool and walking forwards. Quietly and gently, he sympathised with the 38-year-old housewife, agreed that the war had been “very badly mismanaged for a long time”, but insisted that America had to continue fighting to defeat the terrorist threat.

He looked Flanagan straight in the eye and told her, regretfully but firmly: “We will ask more young Americans to sacrifice, as your brother did.”

For weeks, McCain had been dismissed as too old, too temperamental and too attached to an unpopular war to have a chance of the Republican nomination. Yet the morning after the New Hampshire event, the headlines hailed McCain’s “show-stopping performance . . . straight from the heart . . . a touching display of compassion”. Most analysts agreed that despite being so low on funds that he had banned his staff from buying doughnuts, McCain had won the debate.

Flanagan had not heard the promise of withdrawal she wanted, but she admitted to being impressed with McCain, a former US navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and spent almost six years as a prisoner of war. She was even more impressed when, a few days later, her telephone rang and the senator himself was on the line.

“He said he wanted to express his appreciation for my brother’s service in person,” she said. “So I invited him to dinner, and he asked if he could bring his son.”

Jimmy McCain is in one sense the black sheep of the McCain family. His grandfather and great-grandfather were both US navy admirals. His father and older brother Jack also attended the US navy academy at Annapo-lis.

Yet Jimmy turned his back on the officer class. He enlisted as a Marine Corps “grunt”, graduated from boot camp as an ordinary rifleman and would later be promoted in the field to lance-corporal.

Presuming that McCain would want media present for such an unusual evening, Flanagan offered to open her home to film crews. It is almost impossible to imagine any of the other 2008 candidates turning down the opportunity for sympathetic media coverage, but McCain told Flanagan he was bringing no reporters. This was to be a private occasion.

It can scarcely have been easy for either of the McCains to hear the heartbreaking details of the death of Flanagan’s brother. Having vowed to join the military on September 11, 2001, the day of the World Trade Center attacks, Cleary eventually arrived in Iraq in January 2005 as leader of an army platoon with one of the most dangerous jobs of the war – finding and defusing improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs.

“He had eight days left and he had just completed his last mission,” Flanagan said. “His platoon had destroyed a bomb factory, and on their way back to camp they ran over an IED.”

Shortly before he left for Iraq, Cleary had become engaged. On the Sunday before he was due to return, the family held a bridal party for his fiancée. “On the Tuesday we had the knock on the door to tell us Michael was dead,” said Flanagan.

It quickly turned out that like Cleary, Jimmy McCain had become engaged shortly before his departure for Iraq, to the evident chagrin of his father, who was dismayed that his son was committing himself so young.

“I think both families felt that these boys were too young to be getting married,” said Flanagan.

Six months later, Jimmy McCain is about to end his first rotation to Iraq. In more than a year of campaigning, McCain has publicly mentioned Jimmy only twice - once in Iowa, when he casually mentioned his son’s promotion to lance-corporal; and once to Time magazine, when he admitted to being both proud and nervous about his son’s deployment. He then called the magazine and asked them not to use the quote.

McCain’s reticence is in one sense understandable - he has not wanted to draw attention to Jimmy for fear of making him more of a target in Iraq. “Frankly, it’s for [Jimmy’s] security and the security of the men and women serving around him,” says McCain’s spokes-woman, Brooke Buchanan.

Some of McCain’s rivals regard him as almost perverse for not trying to gain political advantage from his warrior sons. In a city well known for its presidential draft-dodgers, McCain has long stood out in Washington as an authentic military hero.

“I just feel it’s inappropriate for us to mention our children,” the senator said recently. “I wouldn’t want to seem like I’m trying to gain some kind of advantage. I’d like them to have their own lives.”

When Flanagan asked her question last June, she was thinking of voting for Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate. Even after meeting McCain, she was not sure she could vote for the Republican senator.

Yet the memory of that dinner, and McCain’s polite tenacity in sticking to his support for the surge in Iraq - even at the risk of his own son’s life - has since persuaded her that the role of America’s commander-in-chief should be filled by a man who understands the real meaning of war.

“I now believe John McCain is the best man to lead us as president,” she said.

Video: John McCain speaks at CPAC 2008

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