Today begins part one of an occasional series, a retrospective if you will (probably every Sunday) about John McCain, the presumptive nominee of the Republican party. I am impelled to start this series for a number of reasons. First, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Second, I have come to the conclusion that many of my readers have a life, and don’t spend most of their spare time, as do I, cruising other blogs and/or other internet websites, obsessively reading up on this sort of stuff. Based on conversations I have had with a number of people, I have come to the conclusion that the media narrative about the noble John McCain has seeped deep. so that many otherwise reasonable Democrats, or Democratic leaning voters, have misperceptions about McCain that have been planted in their minds by years of fawning media coverage. Despite his hard right views, for instance, they believe in the myth of his moderation, or, as so many people did with Colin Powell, project their own beliefs on to him. I would like to do my part to disabuse my small corner of the blogosphere of such notions.
First subject: the trophy wife. I broach this subject with some hesitation, because I would be the first to acknowledge that we cannot know what goes on in anyone’s marriage and a person’s personal life is not necessarily indicative of his or her political character. But, judge not lest ye be judged. McCain was comfortable voting to impeach Bill Clinton for a blow job, so it’s only fair that we see how his own behavior measures up against the standards he imposed on Clinton.
In a nutshell, McCain fits quite comfortably within the Gingrich tradition. As you may recall, Newt visited his wife as she lay suffering from cancer in a hospital bed to discuss details of their divorce. McCain’s story is somewhat similar. Let’s set the stage:
Before John McCain’s tour of duty in Vietnam, he married Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia. On his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1967, McCain was shot down and captured.
While he was imprisoned, Carol was in an auto wreck (1969), thrown through her car’s windshield and left seriously injured. Despite her injures, she refused to allow her POW husband to be notified about her condition, fearing that such news would not be good for him while he was being held prisoner.
When McCain returned to the United States in 1973 after more than five years as a prisoner of war, he found his wife was a different person. The accident “left her 4 inches shorter and on crutches, and she had gained a good deal of weight.”
McCain spent the years between 1973 and 1980 as a serial adulterer. Let the fawning Nicholas Kristof, who finds good in all McCain does, tell the story:
It was 1979, and it was becoming clear that [McCain] would never make admiral like his father and grandfather. He had always dreamed of doing something great, of imprinting his name on the history books, but at age 42 he found himself with a stuttering military career and no base from which to go into politics.
On top of that, his personal life was a mess: Although he was still living with his wife, he was aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich.
But Cindy Hensley was a two-fer. Not only was she young and beautiful, but she was rich. Or at least her daddy was, and he was rich enough to get McCain’s career jump started for him:
In 1979 at a military reception in Honolulu, McCain met Cindy Hensley, an attractive 25-year-old woman from a very wealthy politically-connected Arizona family. Cindy’s father, Jim, founded the Hensley and Company, the nation’s third-largest Anheuser-Busch distributor.
McCain described their first meeting, “She was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident. 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.”
While still married to Carol, McCain began an adulterous relationship with Cindy. He married Cindy in May 1980 — just a month after dumping Carol and securing a divorce. The newlyweds honeymooned in Hawaii.
So, like Newt, McCain left a disabled wife for a younger woman, and never looked back. His new father in law bankrolled his political career.
Now, McCain has not, until lately, been as insufferable a hypocrite as Newt, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, et. al., ad nauseam, about matters of personal morality. I bring this up only because I have observed that somehow, a very benign version of these events has seeped into a lot of people’s view of McCain’s marital past. One person I spoke to was convinced that Cindy was the same age as McCain; one that he had divorced his first wife while fresh from imprisonment in Vietnam, still reeling from the trauma of imprisonment. I think these sanitized narratives come about not because they are consciously propagated by anyone, but because they are consistent with the overall media narrative we are fed, in which McCain is a noble moderate maverick just oozing integrity, whose very faults are proof that he is superior to the common political herd. It’s important that we disabuse right thinking (meaning left thinking) people of these sentiments.
Next time: the Keating Five.
