John McCain's Hostage

Tapper launched his career as a national reporter at Salon.com, a progressive-branded online outlet born at the dawn of the online news era. David Talbot, the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon, remembered Tapper as a driven careerist.

"The main thing I remember about Jake was his driving ambition," Talbot added. "He seemed to be headed for the TV spotlight all along. So I don't find it surprising that he's become a fixture of centrist, mainstream news."

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Talbot recalled Tapper transforming into what he called "a John McCain groupie." Tapper gushed over the Arizona senator when the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked him in February, 2000, "When you're on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall under the magical McCain spell?"

"Oh, you can't. You become like Patty Hearst when the SLA took her," Tapper joked in reply [10]. "In fact, I think McCain was referring to me as Tanya at one point" (the name Hearst took after being kidnapped by and then joining the SLA).

The same month, Tapper described [11] McCain as "basically a cool dude."

In April, Tapper followed McCain to Vietnam, where the senator had returned to visit the land where he was held as a POW after being captured on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. Tapper returned with a fawning portrait [12] of McCain spreading the gospel of free trade and "putting aside whatever personal animus he had for the sake of bringing the country into the 20th century."

Yet two months earlier, McCain had said [13] of the North Vietnamese who held him captive, "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live."

After the 9/11 attacks, McCain emerged as one of the most fervent supporters of invading Iraq, belting [14] out, "Next up: Baghdad!" while touring an aircraft carrier on the Arabian Sea in early 2002. The senator's support for the war was part of his zeal for further regime change operations in countries from Iran to North Korea.

Salon, for its part, was one of the key voices of opposition to the war on Iraq, condemning it and George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policy with a constant stream of op-eds and critical reporting. Tapper stood apart from his more impassioned colleagues, reporting dryly on the run-up to invasion and the occupation that followed. Talbot said Tapper "didn't exhibit a hawkish bias, as far as I can remember," but did not distinguish himself as much of a critic of the war either.

"Jake was never out to change the world as many of us at Salon were," Talbot recalled, "but simply to cover it, and to make a successful career from doing so."

But Talbot wondered if Tapper's admiration for McCain has led him to adopt the senator's fanatical militarism. As the host of CNN's "The Lead," Tapper has shed all pretense of journalistic objectivity to pump up regime change and sanctions across the globe.