Originally posted by Q5echo
if "dodging the point" means calling you on your presentation of the facts, i'll sit patiently here till you can muster up the courage to prove to me otherwise. until then you will remain a historical revisionist and obfuscator. good luck.
Sigh. You really are curmudgeonly.
quote:
The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind
By Sharon Churcher
Last updated at 1:45 AM on 08th June 2008
Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.
While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.
And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.
Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.
Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.
For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.
Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’ she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.
‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’
Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.
He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.
But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’.
His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding floozy nicknamed ‘Marie, the Flame of Florida’ to a tobacco heiress.
Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain.
It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.
‘He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children,’ recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.
The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning
to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.
He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.
What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.
Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.
It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house.
It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.
After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’
H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.
When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.
But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’
He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.
‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.
Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.
But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.
McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.
He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.
In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.
Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.
‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’
Another friend added: ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’
Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the break-up was Carol’s decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.
Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all his campaigns. ‘He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy,’ one observed.
McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He also agreed to pay her alimony and child support.
A former neighbour says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. He said: ‘My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking.’
Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.
And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife.
Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.
‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.
‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.
‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’
One old friend of the McCains said: ‘Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defence mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life.’
Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicise her support for the man who abandoned her.
Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. ‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured us. ‘We are still good friends. He is the best man for president.’
But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.
‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.
‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’
For someone who supposedly pays attention to this election like you do, it's kind of sad you didn't already know this story. But then again, you probably haven't seen it on the news because... McCain's been given a free pass.
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
if "dodging the point" means calling you on your presentation of the facts, i'll sit patiently here till you can muster up the courage to prove to me otherwise. until then you will remain a historical revisionist and obfuscator. good luck.
Are you kidding me? So now you're denying that your boy McCain didn't cheat on his disfigured wife with his newer, younger wife?
Jesus, revisionist and obfuscation indeed.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Sigh. You really are curmudgeonly.
For someone who supposedly pays attention to this election like you do, it's kind of sad you didn't already know this story. But then again, you probably haven't seen it on the news because... McCain's been given a free pass.
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Are you kidding me? So now you're denying that your boy McCain didn't cheat on his disfigured wife with his newer, younger wife?
all "credible" accounts, including his own, say they were separated at the time. Elizabeth Edwards was fully prepared to be the First Lady. big difference.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
did you just reference a British tabloid? >link<
It's an old story bub, lots of sources have reported on it.
quote:
Different hero, different war
John McCain's first wife won't say a harsh word about the man who dumped her. Is she a spineless wimp or a quiet hero?
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
Mar 6, 2000 | With a great deal of restraint and not a trace of opinion, the New York Times last week reported details of what writer Nicholas Kristof calls "an awkward time" in John McCain's life. The story, related in delightfully quaint language, managed to be fairly astonishing regardless of one's feelings about the Republican presidential candidate whose most familiar handle is that of "war hero."
It seems that McCain, who had once revealed to fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam that he wanted to be president, was restless in 1979. As Navy liaison to the Senate, he didn't have the career momentum he had counted on to propel him into an admiralty and on to the White House. He was 42, mired in stifling ordinariness. (Civilians call it "midlife crisis.")
[color]But McCain was making bold career moves on the home front, hotly pursuing a 25-year-old blond from a wealthy Arizona family -- while married. Carol, his wife at the time, had once been quite a babe herself apparently, until a near-fatal car accident (while her husband was in Vietnam) left her 4 inches shorter, overweight and on crutches. The couple had three children, whom Carol cared for alone while her husband was in Vietnamese prisons.
McCain's strategy worked perfectly: After chasing Cindy Hensley around the country for six months, he closed the deal late in the year, had a divorce by February and was married to Hensley shortly thereafter. Bingo! McCain was a candidate for Congress by early 1982, his coffers full, his home in the proper Arizona district purchased.[/color]
The story is compelling -- and repellent -- for a lot of reasons. And it raises some familiar questions. We have to wonder why Americans are able to excoriate a presidential candidate (or president) who cheats on his wife but accept one who did the same thing with the concentration and energy of a military strategist. Is it because McCain didn't get caught? Is it because he married his mistress? At this point, after much navel- and penis-gazing, it seems like a moot question, if only for reasons of sheer exhaustion.
The real riddle in that New York Times story, and in the life of John McCain, is his ex-wife's apparent acceptance of his actions and her continuing support. Says Kristof, "No candidate could be luckier in his choice of an ex-wife than Sen. McCain, and he must be the only politician around who could cheat on his wife and divorce her and still get her support and her campaign contributions today."
It is mysterious and yet incredibly important to McCain's legend. Even the people who might have felt some outrage while reading about McCain's shenanigans were probably mollified by the fact that his ex-wife seems to be eternally supportive, even cheerful, after experiencing such incredible cruelty. It becomes very easy to forgive McCain once his wife has: Heck, if it's OK with her, it's OK with me! The whiff of impropriety, the stench of character flaw is suddenly removed. O lucky man!
I was not prepared to vilify the magnanimous homewrecker after learning of his "awkward time." Like a lot of voters, I choose to focus on the issues. But I could not help being fascinated by Carol McCain. What is up with her? And then it occurred to me that what John McCain has benefited from here is the same reward enjoyed by ex-husbands everywhere in the aftermath of bad behavior and take-no-prisoners divorce when the person they are dumping and dumping on is a mother. In particular, a mother who adores her children and is painfully aware of conventional divorce wisdom that says never, ever criticize the departing dad in front of his children. It is an act of maternal suicide.
How many women do you know who willfully, in public and even in private, refuse to say an unkind word about the father of their children after divorce? I know many. They are all well-versed in the terrible damage that dissing daddy can do to children, who are fiercely resistant to any information that puts their father in an unflattering light. They also know that a child's reaction to this sort of information is often anger, and a distancing from mom, who covets her relationship with her children even more in the wake of abandonment.
The constant tongue-biting, the squelching of the truth, the careful avoidance of history can be brutal and is, in many ways, heroic. And yet it is mostly unsung, sometimes completely undetected. I suspect that many of those who read about McCain's "troubled period" (don't you love the New York Times?) will assume that Carol McCain is some kind of ditsy or emotionless punching bag without the good sense to hate her husband. They might assume that she somehow deserved to be humiliated and left to eat her husband's dust as he raced to claim his just reward.
How many will guess that Carol McCain is quite possibly a hero of a different kind of war? How many will read between the lines of her exalted ex-husband's legend and decide that she is simply one of the most courageous examples of a wounded mother who has loved and protected her children at all costs?
Dan Nowicki, Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 1, 2007 10:33 AM
CHAPTER V: ARIZONA, THE EARLY YEARS
In 1979, John McCain came face to face with his future.
He was in Hawaii, attending a military reception. While there, he met a young, blond former cheerleader from Phoenix named Cindy Hensley.
McCain was immediately dazzled and spent the event chatting her up.
"She was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident," McCain wrote in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "I monopolized her attention the entire time, taking care to prevent anyone else from intruding on our conversation. When it came time to leave the party, I persuaded her to join me for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By the evening's end, I was in love."
McCain recalls that both he and Cindy initially misled each other about their ages. McCain made himself a little younger, and Cindy made herself a little older. They found out their real ages when the local paper published them. McCain was 43, Cindy 25.
"So our marriage," McCain cracks, "is really based on a tissue of lies."
Early in the courtship, McCain called Cindy from Beijing, where he was traveling with a Senate Foreign Relations Committee contingent. Cindy was in the hospital recuperating from minor knee surgery. She thanked him for the lovely flowers in her room, sent from "John."
What McCain didn't tell Cindy was that he hadn't sent the flowers. They were from another John, who lived in Tucson.
"I never thanked him," Cindy notes with a grin.
After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.
McCain needed a divorce from Carol, his wife of 14 years from whom he was separated. After McCain's dramatic homecoming from Vietnam, the couple grew apart. Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs.
"If there was one couple that deserved to make it, it was John and Carol McCain," author Robert Timberg wrote in John McCain: An American Odyssey. "They endured nearly six years of unspeakable trauma with courage and grace. In the end it was not enough. They won the war but lost the peace."
In February 1980, less than a year after he met Cindy, McCain petitioned a Florida court to dissolve his marriage to Carol, calling the union "irretrievably broken."
Bud Day, a lawyer and fellow POW, handled the divorce proceedings.
"I thought things were going fairly well, and then it just came apart," Day later recalled. "That happened to quite a few. . . . I don't fault (Carol), and I don't really fault John, either."
In his book Worth the Fighting For, McCain offers his own post-mortem on his failed marriage. He "had not shown the same determination to rebuild (his) personal life" as he had to excel in his naval career.
"Sound marriages can be hard to recover after great time and distance have separated a husband and wife. We are different people when we reunite," McCain wrote. "But my marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine."
Carol, who remains on good terms with her former husband, generally has avoided reporters interested in hearing her side of the story.
She did briefly address her divorce to Timberg: "The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don't know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else."
In the divorce settlement, McCain was generous with Carol, the mother of their daughter Sidney and two sons, whom McCain had adopted. Among other things, McCain gave Carol the rights to houses in Florida and Virginia and agreed to provide insurance or pay for additional treatment she was expected to require.
Except for signing the property settlement, Carol did not participate in the divorce. A court summons and other paperwork sent to her during the proceeding went unanswered.
In April 1980, the judge entered a default judgment and declared the marriage dissolved.
A month later, McCain married Cindy in Phoenix, where the couple would move. The wedding party included a couple of McCain's high-profile friends from Washington. Sen. William Cohen was the best man. Sen. Gary Hart was a groomsman.
Carol went her separate way, finding work as a personal aide to Nancy Reagan during the 1980 presidential primary campaign and later running the White House Visitors Office.
Originally posted by Q5echo
all "credible" accounts, including his own, say they were separated at the time. Elizabeth Edwards was fully prepared to be the First Lady. big difference.
I've never read a single account that says they were separated at the time. Carol McCain herself says the divorce request blind-sided her. Do you have a source?
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
I've never read a single account that says they were separated at the time.
Originally posted by Q5echo
uhh, you just posted one, bub.
This part?
quote:
After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.
McCain needed a divorce from Carol, his wife of 14 years from whom he was separated. After McCain's dramatic homecoming from Vietnam, the couple grew apart. Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs.
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
all "credible" accounts, including his own, say they were separated at the time. Elizabeth Edwards was fully prepared to be the First Lady. big difference.
His divorce filings showed that he was dating Cindy for 9 months while he was still living with Carol:
And he doesn't deny that either in the interview. In fact, I'm curious if there's any verifiable evidence to counter both this interview as well as the article Lebez posted above. I'm not exactly sure how you can get around his divorce filing records, but I'm darned interested to hear you try.
Here's another article for verification to our argument:
quote:
McCain's broken marriage and fractured Reagan friendship
The nature and timing of his divorce from Carol Shepp alienated key friends -- and his version doesn't always match that in court documents.
By Richard A. Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 11, 2008
Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain and offered a significant -- but less than exuberant -- endorsement.
"Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed," the Republican matriarch said in March. "Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party." They were the only words she would speak during the five-minute photo op.
In a written statement, she described McCain as "a good friend for over 30 years." But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain's decision to divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans, and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona beer distributorship.
The Reagans rushed to help Carol, finding her a new home in Southern California with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.
So let's once again examine what McCain said in his book:
quote:
McCain, who is about to become the GOP nominee, has made several statements about how he divorced Carol and married Hensley that conflict with the public record.
In his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For," McCain wrote that he had separated from Carol before he began dating Hensley.
"I spent as much time with Cindy in Washington and Arizona as our jobs would allow," McCain wrote. "I was separated from Carol, but our divorce would not become final until February of 1980."
But by golly, wouldn't ya know it? Those darn court documents say something completely different:
quote:
An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had "cohabited" until Jan. 7 of that year -- or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.
Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.
Gosh, that's just weird, huh? A Republican says one thing - a die-hard Republican voter such as yourself who never seemingly sways from the Republican line on anything believes it as "truth", and therefore anything else is deemed not "credible". Strange.
quote:
Until McCain filed for divorce, the Reagans and their inner circle assumed he was happily married, and they were stunned to learn otherwise, according to several close aides.
"Everybody was upset with him," recalled Nancy Reynolds, a top aide to the former president who introduced him to McCain.
By contrast, some of McCain's friends, including the Senate aide who was at the reception where McCain first met Hensley, believed he was separated at that time.
Albert "Pete" Lakeland, the aide who was with McCain at the reception in Hawaii in April 1979, said of the introduction to Hensley: "It was like he was struck by Cupid's arrow. He was just enormously smitten."
As the pair began dating, Lakeland allowed them to spend a weekend together at his summer home in Maryland, he said.
The senator has acknowledged that he behaved badly, and that his swift divorce and remarriage brought a cold shoulder from the Reagans that lasted years.
In a recent interview, McCain said he did not want to revisit the breakup of his marriage. "I have a very good relationship with my first wife," he said. In his autobiography, he wrote: "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity. The blame was entirely mine."
Tucker Bounds, a McCain campaign spokesman, said: "Of course we will not comment on the breakup of the senator's first marriage, other than to note that the senator has always taken responsibility for it."
Carol McCain did not respond to a request for an interview.
About all she has ever said is this to McCain biographer Robert Timberg: "John was turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again."
After leaving the White House, Carol McCain worked in press relations in the Washington area, retiring about five years ago after working for the National Soft Drink Assn. She now lives in Virginia Beach, Va., and has not remarried. She has two sons from an earlier marriage: Andy, a vice president at Cindy McCain's beer distributorship, and Doug, a commercial airline pilot.
Carol and John McCain had a daughter, Sidney, who works in the music industry in Canada.
John McCain, who calls himself "a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution," said in his memoir: "My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy . . . was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.
"I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship."
Joanne Drake, spokeswoman for Nancy Reagan, did not return phone calls seeking comment.
The first Mrs. McCain
McCain met Carol Shepp through a mutual friend and fellow midshipman at the Naval Academy, from which McCain graduated in 1958. That friend, Alasdair E. Swanson, married her in 1958. In the early 1960s, the Swansons lived in Pensacola, Fla., where Alasdair Swanson and McCain served as Navy pilots.
But that marriage ended in June 1964 after Carol sued for divorce, alleging that her husband had been unfaithful.
According to McCain, he started seeing Carol shortly afterward. They were married in Philadelphia, her hometown, in July 1965. McCain adopted her two sons, and they had a daughter together. Then in October 1967, McCain's plane was shot down and he was captured by the North Vietnamese.
She became active in the POW-MIA movement. A former model, she dedicated herself to her children and kept the family together, friends said, while awaiting his return.
"She had the perseverance to carry on," said Melinda Fitzwater, a cousin of McCain's who later worked with Carol McCain at the White House. "She had a little baby and small kids. She was a great, unique person."
On Christmas Eve 1969, while she was driving alone in Philadelphia, Carol McCain's car skidded and struck a utility pole. Thrown into the snow, she broke both legs, an arm and her pelvis. She was operated on a dozen times, and in the treatment she lost about 5 inches in height.
After John McCain was released in March 1973 and returned to the U.S., he told friends that Carol was not the woman he had married.
Reynolds, working for then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, said she first met the couple in San Francisco at a reception for ex-prisoners. She later introduced them to the Reagans at their home in Pacific Palisades.
"They were just an attractive couple," Reynolds said. "The Reagans had great admiration and respect for John."
In 1974, Reagan invited McCain to speak at a governor's prayer breakfast in Sacramento. The former prisoner of war told the story of a fellow captive who had scratched a prayer on a cell wall. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were reduced to tears. It was "the most moving speech I had ever heard," Reynolds said.
In the next few years, family and friends said, there was no sign that McCain was unhappy in his marriage. Fitzwater recalled visiting the family on Thanksgivings, and McCain seemed content barbecuing a turkey on his outdoor grill near Jacksonville, Fla.
Navy officers in the squadron McCain commanded in 1977 said they did not know anything was wrong. "When I went to parties at their home, everything seemed fine," said Mike Akin, a naval flying instructor. "They seemed to be a happily married couple."
But two years later, while on a trip as a Navy liaison with the Senate, McCain spied Hensley at the Honolulu reception. In a recent television interview with Jay Leno on the "Tonight Show," Cindy McCain joked about how the Navy captain had pursued her. "He kind of chased me around . . . the hors d'oeuvre table," she said. "I was trying to get something to eat and I thought, 'This guy's kind of weird.' I was kind of trying to get away from him."
John McCain was 42; she was 24. During the next nine months, he would fly to Arizona or she would come to the Washington area, where McCain and Carol had a home.
Carol McCain later told friends, including Reynolds and Fitzwater, that she did not know he was seeing anyone else.
John McCain sued for divorce in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., where his friend and fellow former POW, George E. "Bud" Day, practiced law and could represent him.
In the petition, he stated that the couple had "cohabited as husband and wife" until Jan. 7, 1980.
His wife did not contest the divorce, and Day said that the couple had reached an agreement in advance on support and division of property. By then she was living in La Mesa, in San Diego County, with the family of Meese, a close Reagan aide and future attorney general.
"We knew John and Carol both since he came back from Hanoi in 1973," Meese said recently. "They have been friends of ours ever since.
"She was with us for maybe four or five months. Their daughter and our daughter were friends, and they went to school together."
Carol McCain was distraught at being blindsided by her husband's intention to end their marriage, said her friends in the Reagan circle.
"They [the Reagans] weren't happy with him," Fitzwater said. Carol McCain "was this little, frail person. . . . She was brokenhearted."
By that time, Nancy Reagan had come to Carol McCain's aid, hiring her as a press assistant in the 1980 presidential campaign.
When the Reagans moved to Washington, she was named director of the White House Visitors Office.
"Nancy Reagan was crazy about her," Reynolds said. "But everybody was crazy about Carol McCain. . . . And the Meeses were very generous and helpful and comforting to her."
Fitzwater said that living in Southern California and working on the Reagan campaign helped Carol McCain move past the loss of her marriage.
It's hard to depict who is worse, McCain or Edwards. In my opinion they're both despicable. One cheats on his wife who has cancer, lies about it repeatedly, and nearly would have destroyed his party had he been nominated. Another returns from war with a wife waiting for him all this time, gets disfigured from an accident, and he turns around and cheats on her with another woman almost a coupla decades younger, only to marry that younger girl later, leaving his disfigured wife and children behind. Both are selfish despicable turds. The bad news, of course, is that one of those turds actually has the opportunity to be the President.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
But by golly, wouldn't ya know it? Those darn court documents say something completely different:
taxes. i guarantee you thats why he filed the petition the way he did so he could claim her. i did the exact same thing.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
This part?
close, but no.
this part. same paragragh.
quote:
After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.
McCain needed a divorce from Carol, his wife of 14 years from whom he was separated. After McCain's dramatic homecoming from Vietnam, the couple grew apart. Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs.
Lebezniatnikov
Oh, well now that we have that cleared up, I guess the philandering is ok!
