MarkMiller

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Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.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.




Forgotten woman: But despite all her problems Carol McCain says she still adores he ex-husband
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.


Golden couple: John and Cindy McCain at a charity gala in Los Angeles

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.

War hero: McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US in 1973 after his five years as a PoW in North Vietnam

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.’



John McCain Disgusts me.

anhailla

It always kills me to read he was divorced and got MARRIED ONE MONTH LATER...can't ya wait awhile to get married, out of respect for the crippled spouse you cheated on?

Geezus.

__________________
...either I go, or that wallpaper does.

Oscar Wilde

MarkMiller

This will garner him some Republican votes....you know how they love sex....with anyone but their spouses. LOL!

aloysious

Was I expected to read more than 1/10 of that article?
Am I really supposed to care?

Rollerball

Why? Did someone ask if you do?

__________________
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

One Nation, Yes We DID!

anhailla

__________________
...either I go, or that wallpaper does.

Oscar Wilde

BillCosby

With his wife, Cindy, standing by his side, John McCain lashed out Thursday at a report in The New York Times that revisits the Republican presidential candidate’s relationship with a female lobbyist, and rebuked the paper for spreading false rumors.

The Times article described how campaign aides kept him and lobbyist Vicki Iseman apart during the 2000 election for fear they were giving the impression they were having an affair. It noted how McCain wrote to government regulators on behalf of a client of the lobbyist while he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

McCain called a press conference in Toledo, Ohio, to slam the paper for embellishing his committee activities on Iseman’s behalf.

“I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece. It’s not true,” he said.

Asked about his relationship with the lobbyist, he said, “I have many friends in Washington who represent various interests and … I consider her a friend.”

He said he saw her “on occasion” at fundraisers, receptions and committee meetings, but that was all.

His wife Cindy, standing by his side, defended her husband, saying, “He’s a man of great character and I’m very disappointed in the New York Times.”

The article, published in Thursday’s edition of the Times but released the day before on its Web site, rehashes rumors spread during McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

The lengthy profile carried four bylines and detailed instances where McCain seemed to contradict his own anti-special interest message. It described, for instance, how he flew on corporate jets of executives looking for his support. The article was framed by accounts of his alleged relationship with Iseman.

McCain, 71, and Iseman, 40, long ago denied ever having a romantic relationship, but the story argues that “his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.”

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller released a statement Thursday saying, “On the substance, we think the story speaks for itself.

“On the timing, our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. ‘Ready’ means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats. This story was no exception. It was a long time in the works. It reached my desk late Tuesday afternoon. After a final edit and a routine check by our lawyers, we published it,” he said.

The Arizona senator said his campaign had been repeatedly contacted by the newspaper about the story.

“For months The New York Times has submitted questions and we have answered them fully and exhaustively, and unfortunately many of those answers were not included in the rather long piece in the New York Times,” he said.

McCain lamented that “this whole story is based on anonymous sources,” saying that could encompass any of the more than 100 aides he’s had contact with through the Commerce Committee.

The newspaper quoted anonymous aides as saying they had urged McCain and Iseman to stay away from each other prior to his failed presidential campaign in 2000. In its own follow-up story, The Washington Post quoted longtime aide John Weaver, who split with McCain last year, as saying he met with lobbyist Iseman and urged her to steer clear of McCain.

Weaver told the Times he arranged the meeting before the 2000 campaign after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about Iseman.

Speaking with FOX News, Weaver said he met with Iseman at Union Station in either 1999 or 2000, he can’t remember which year, for about five minutes. The nature of the conversation was not about romantic involvement, but instead about how she was going around telling people how much enormous influence she had on McCain.

As a campaign professional, he said he didn’t want anyone saying they had influence over McCain so he met with her and told her to quit boasting, especially since McCain was making lobbying legislation at the time. Weaver said the conversation with Iseman and other related topics were well vetted by The Boston Globe during the New Hampshire primary in 2000.

But McCain said he was unaware of any such conversation, and denied that his aides ever tried to talk to him about his interactions with Iseman.

“Since it was in The New York Times, I don’t take it at face value,” McCain said with a laugh.

Iseman’s firm Alcalde & Fay released a statement Thursday decrying the article’s contents as “malicious innuendo” that is “utterly false.”

“Alcalde & Fay’s relationship with Senator McCain has been professional, appropriate and consistent with his legislative, jurisdictional and constituent duties,” president Kevin Fay said in the statement. “The story is based upon the fantasies of a disgruntled former campaign employee and is without foundation or merit. Ms. Iseman is a hard working professional whose 18 year career has been exemplary and she has our full support. It is beneath the dignity of a quality newspaper to participate in such a campaign of character assassination.”

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager in 2000, told FOX News on Thursday that the campaign never had deep concerns about the relationship with Iseman or allegations of illicit favors for her client.

“I never had a single instance where this was a major issue in our campaign or any kind of an issue. And the idea that a decade later they have somehow uncovered some kind of a mystery is ridiculous,” Davis said.

Campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker likened the report to a “kind of gutter politics.”

“There is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career,” she said.

Davis said the newspaper “didn’t say that there was anything improper here. They just tried to imply it. They didn’t say he had done anything for this lobbyist or this lobbying firm but they tried to imply it. If they are going to go this kind of route, why don’t they tell us where they got the information?”

The Times had endorsed McCain and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton prior to the Super Tuesday primaries in New York Feb. 5.

With McCain now the presumptive nominee of his party, he said Thursday he intends to put the Times story to rest and move forward with the campaign.

Rumors of the newspaper’s investigation first surfaced two months ago, and at the time, senior officials in the McCain campaign adamantly denied to FOX News any personal or professional wrongdoing. Officials also confirmed that McCain had hired Washington attorney Bob Bennett to prepare the campaign for the coming “smear.” Bennett continues to be on retainer at this time.

“If there’s one thing I am absolutely confident of, it’s that John McCain is an honest man,” Bennett told FOX News Wednesday night. “I think for The New York Times to dig this up just shows that John McCain’s public statement about this is correct. It’s a smear job.”

Asked about the article, Republican rival Mike Huckabee wouldn’t comment on the newspaper’s allegations, but said he knows McCain to “be a man of integrity.”

“He is a good and decent and honorable man,” Huckabee said.

When details of the newspaper’s investigation emerged in December, McCain said he was going to battle the rumors much more vigorously than he fought other claims made against him in 2000.

“We’re getting close to the primary,” McCain said in December before he emerged as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “These allegations are coming out at a very interesting time, and I have never, ever done a favor for any lobbyist or special interest group.”

McCain’s denials in December, including of the alleged affair, was in response to expectations that the Drudge Report was going to preempt the investigation before the newspaper actually reported it, campaign officials said.

Though Drudge did not print the story, campaign officials contend that the newspaper decided to go ahead and publish it now because The New Republic was planning a scathing critique of the newspaper for revealing the contents of its investigation.

McCain campaign officials said two weeks ago, they got a call from The New Republic asking for comment and information because it was planning a story on the newspaper’s investigation.

Officials argued The New York Times, buffeted by reporter scandals in recent years, is covering itself, publishing a deliberate smear under pressure from the magazine and because of sensitivity to its reputation caused by reporter Judith Miller, who investigated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and was a key player in the subsequent CIA leak investigation involving Valerie Plame.

The McCain stories also allege that the Arizona senator wrote letters and pushed legislation involving television station ownership that would have benefited Iseman’s clients.

In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson’s chief executive, Lowell W. “Bud” Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain’s request “comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process” and “could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission’s deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties.”

McCain addressed the letters Thursday, saying: “I said I’m not telling you how to make a decision; I’m just telling you that you should move forward and make a decision on this issue. I believe that was appropriate.”

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

MarkMiller

I heard Cindy talk about how they met and how he pursued her and chased after her....about them both lying about their age and not discovering the truth until after they were married.

All and all pretty disgusting when you realise he was married to someone else. The story she tells is a story of infidelity! Of a cheat...not to mention she knew he was married. They are both adulterers.

John McCain has PROVEN he cannot be trusted......at all!

StillNoScript

....Yikes. No wonder he dumped her. Can't blame him for the wife swap. But I still hope team Obama gets maximum value out of this. Make him look like a real prick. Link it to Bill-Monica. Allude to how McCain will likely go through another mid life crisis while President, when blondie starts getting up there in age.

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aloysious

Implied by the initial post.
I'm already against McCain because of his Hundred Years war stance.
If he was totally out of love with his ex, so be it , who cares? That wouldn't influence my opinion of him one iota.
Just like Billy Boy fucked around for years , decades, on The Hildebeast. I would've too if I'd been married to someone like that and felt compelled to stay married to "it".
Plus, it's not like McCain is a sex addict. He dumped his ex for a wealthy fox. Happens all the time. You fucks can certainly come up with something better than this.