What a terrible story this is. I knew none of this though I had heard he dumped his wife for his mistress. I don’t know that “the left” is embracing him so much as looking to him as someone less horrible than the usual Trump Republicans. When there’s so little to choose from people sometimes pick what they assume is the best of a bad lot. In this case, though, he’s no better than Trump and the worst Trump supporters. This is sickening. This should be distributed far and wide.,
Lois
Getting to Know the REAL John McCain
By
Burma Davis Posey
[John] McCain graduated 894th in his class of 899 students from the Naval Academy . He was known for being wild and it usually revolved around women. He was a member of a group of students who called themselves “The Bad Bunch”.
He married Carol Shepp who was a successful swimsuit model. She had been married to one of his classmates and had two children from her first marriage. She and McCain became parents of a daughter one year later. He had been quite a playboy and was already becoming bored with the domesticated life. He requested active duty in Vietnam While he was there, Carol faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news about her husband. His plane was shot down in 1967 and he became a POW.
On Christmas Eve 1969, Carol and the children were spending the holiday with her parents. After dinner she was going to take gifts to some friends. The road was icy and she slid head-on into a telephone pole. She was thrown from the car through the front window. Her legs, spine, and right arm were crushed and she was in the hospital for 6 months. Ross Perot was an advocate of POW’s and he paid her medical bills. She requested that John not be told because she felt he already had enough to deal with.
McCain was released in 1973 and returned home to much fanfare. Carol had several surgeries, lost 5 inches in height, and gained some weight… McCain told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again. But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance.
As a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles. “He started carousing and running around with women.”, reported Robert Timberg. Bob Timberg was a retired Marine, an American journalist, writer, and author of four books, including THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG and JOHN MCCAIN: AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY.
McCain admitted he started having many girlfriends and affairs during this time. On one trip to Hawaii he met an Anheuser Busch distributer heiress, Cindy Hensley, at a cocktail party. She was 17 years younger than McCain and worth $100 million dollars. He invited her to have drinks with him at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He said by the end of the evening he was in love.
They had an affair for nine months while he was still married to and living with his wife Carol. McCain wanted to marry Cindy but needed first to get a divorce. He and Carol separated in January 1980. He requested a divorce in February, the divorce was sped along and granted in April. He and Cindy married 5 weeks after the divorce was final on May 17, 1980. Carol and their children were devastated. McCain callously left his first wife and children behind. He and Cindy moved to Arizona . Cindy’s father was well-connected and helped McCain move smoothly into Congress representing Arizona in Washington DC
McCain’s new wife and her family were extravagantly wealthy. Her father was one of the largest distributors of Anheuser Busch in the country and she was an only child. The divorce settlement afforded Carol McCain full custody of their three children, alimony, child support, including college tuition, houses in Virginia and Florida , and lifelong financial support for her continuing medical treatment from the car accident.
Carol said the reason for the divorce was John turned 40 and he wanted to be 25 again. Carol was extremely hurt. She went to work as the press assistant for soon-to-be First Lady Nancy Reagan. She became loved and respected in Washington . She kept a dignified silence about the horrendous way McCain had treated her.
Some of the McCain friends were 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.
Despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who have not forgotten his treatment of his first wife. Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights.
Ted 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, beautiful, and very wealthy. McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.
“This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. Yet he has no character. He is a fake.”
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.
Mr. Perot said, "McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory.
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.
A man who cannot be faithful to a loving, self-sacrificing wife cannot be trusted to be faithful to the American people
Cindy has also had to learn the lessons about her husband the hard way. Even though she and McCain put on a perfect front for the public, especially when he is running for office, she really is an invisible wife to him.
Tom Gosinski, who served as director of Cindy McCain’s nonprofit American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) wrote in his journal about the McCain marriage:
“During my short tenure at AVMT I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman. Her marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to distance herself from friends, cover feelings of despair with drugs, and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences. She became addicted to Percocet and had a doctor prescribing them for her illegally. When her parents learned she was taking them, they helped her stop.
Washington rumors were saying McCain had an inappropriate relationship with the young and lovely lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. Ms. Iseman began visiting McCain’s offices and campaign events so frequently in 2000 that his aides were “convinced the relationship had become romantic”. One staff member supposedly asked, “Why is she always around?” His staff members began a campaign to “save McCain from himself” by restricting Iseman’s access to McCain during the course of the 2000 presidential primary. According to the Washington Post, McCain’s political advisor John Weaver met with Iseman at Washington 's Union Station to tell Iseman not to see McCain anymore.
It is not a real marriage between John and Cindy McCain. Real marriages usually involve living together. McCain and Cindy have not “lived” together for 20 years. To defend this, McCain brags the family takes two vacations together every year and Ms. McCain is the one who has always made that happen.”
Two vacations per year…What a farse and fake!! Nothing about this man is real. He has no compassion or empathy for anyone except himself. The only real thing emotion he is capable of is anger. He is famous for his anger.
His father and grandfather were both decorated Navy Admirals. He was given special privileges and extreme preferential treatment while he served in the Navy. He was a pilot but according to his colleagues he was a very bad pilot. He actually crashed three planes. There was a horrendous incident that happened on his aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Forrestal, that killed 134 men. There has been a debate since the incident with some being convinced John McCain was responsible for this accident. Others are angry about anyone who would dare speak against a Naval officer and embarrass an entire branch of service.
Many witnesses have reported that McCain was guilty of a “wet start”. When a pilot wants to be a show off, with a “wet start” his engine start creates a large startling flame and lots of surprise noise from the rear of a jet engine on start up. McCain did the “Wet Start”. It was not an accident. The flames from the wet start torched off the launching of a powerful Zuni rocket on the plane behind him. The Zuni rockets were famous for having electrical problems. It shot across the carrier’s deck hitting other parked planes that were packing 1,000 high-explosive pound bombs. This caused the bombs to explode. The subsequent massive explosions, fire and destruction went several decks below and nearly sunk this major 82,000 ton U.S. aircraft carrier.
This stunt and aftermath caused the death of 134 sailors and blew off arms, legs, and caused blindness and burns to another 161 sailors. McCain jumped from his plane, rolled across the flames, and escaped. He watched the men dying and the burning from a closed circuit television on the ship. Sadly all of those lives were lost.
They had to take the ship off the battle line for 2 years when it had to be taken back to port for $76 million dollars of extensive repairs. That does not include the cost of replacing the airplanes or ammunition.Other Navy pilots causing this type of death and destruction would have been arrested and would probably still be in prison. Why didn’t this happened to John McCain?
McCain’s grandfather was a famous FOUR STAR Navy admiral and his dad, at the time of the incident, was also a powerful illustrious FOUR STAR Navy admiral. McCain had graduated from the Naval Academy . Witnesses say the good ole boy Navy tradition went into high gear immediately. McCain was not even repremanded. When there is a cover-up, the soldier is usually simply assigned to another ship. McCain was quietly assigned to another ship. There is an ongoing debate about the incident to this day.
John McCain’s lack of character was further demonstrated when he voted not to repeal Obamacare. He had run his 2016 Senatorial race under the banner he would LEAD the fight to repeal Obamacare. He hates Donald Trump so very much he gleefully held his thumb down for his vote rather than a thumbs up. He laughed afterwards and said, “Let’s see Donald Trump save America now!”
What a horrible man. He stabbed his constituents and the citizens of America in the back. Liberal socialists now call him their hero.
McCain has recently discovered he has a brain tumor. I am genuinely sorry for anyone who has to face a health issue especially when it involves cancer. Thankfully for him the doctors have said it is curable. The fact that he now has a brain tumor does not change the horrendous things he has done in his life because of his extremely low flawed character.
If Senator McCain’s own health care was dependent on the Obamacare he has continued to saddle the American people with, I guarantee he would not have voted thumbs-down.
But because he married a wealthy heiress and has plenty of money to take care of his own health needs, he does not care.
John and Carol McCain | Snopes.com
Some parts of this story are verified, but the majority is hearsay. First off the author’s name is either a pseudonym or former Miss.Georgia refuses to take credit for this article. If the author will not take credit, it must be held as suspect at least. Then there are minor to major discrepancies, such as the entire part about the USD FORRESTAL fire is completely plagiarized from “The Burning Platform” by Lee Rockwell. Any writer who blatantly steals (via cut and paste), we must question their integrity. I found that in about 10 min of research(I have not found that anyone else has noticed this yet), and I doubt it is the only plagiarism present. A character assassination of this scope should contain citations, even the tabloid site that originally posted(majority in 2008 with add-on and edits since) it included their own citations for the sources they researched.
Character witnesses, “quoted as saying”, does not constitute fact. A man’s relationship with his wife does not disqualify him from public service. Many witnesses have said he and Carol were separated already when he met Cindy, if we accept either of these the truth becomes so convoluted it is impossible to discern. This is not an honest piece of journalism, it is a biased character assassination in the tabloid format.
A few facts:
1.John McCain is 80 years old.(People mature and change)
2.John McCain is a war hero that saved lives, volunteered for extremely dangerous missions, spent five years being tortured including solitary confinement, and refused to be released early unless every man captured before him were released first.
3.He voted against the GOP healthcare bill.
4.He has brain cancer and isn’t up for anything to be “picked” or “chosen” you said.
It is an insult to the intelligence of liberals for this to be “distributed far and wide”, we are supposed to be better than this. If you believe this story, you have to have foregone independent thought in favor of self-serving bias.
Yes, I am a Democrat and an atheist, but not before I am a principled philonoist. We must maintain our dignity and integrity, or we may aswell be right-wing nuts.
I don’t know all the details, but documentaries I’ve seen on McCain from neutral sources, long before he ever ran for POTUS in 2008 painted a picture along the lines of your story Lois. He was bottom of the barrel in the navy, much like Bush the W had special favors because of his dad, and so on. He was not a very good pilot and did not volunteer for dangerous missions and did not save lives, above and beyond what any pilot would have. He did get shot down and endured years as a prisoner and that is something. But as for that making him a hero? That’s a matter of opinion. Of course at this point in the game, the media has dubbed him a hero and anyone going against that will be roundly denounced.
This is what I mean, if you do not cite the documentary then we have to just take your word it was “neutral”. Which is hard to believe when according to you it paints him in such a bad light. I am not a fan of John McCain, but he just did something good in my opinion and a lot of that story is just hearsay. We can not maintain our integrity unless we holld ourselves to the standard of that integrity, regardless of what others do.
A man who cannot be faithful to a loving, self-sacrificing wife cannot be trusted to be faithful to the American peopleTelling line. This piece reads like a jilted woman chastising McCain because of his playboy lifestyle. As to McCain's service history - some of it is true, some is false, some exaggerated. Its accurate that he was a crappy naval cadet who raised hell and was given special treatment because of his father and grandfather. His father most likely pulled strings for him to be accepted into the flight school (which is very hard to get into). He was generally an average pilot with a reputation for recklessness (this is not uncommon for naval aviators). He did crash a few planes, but some were the result of mechanical failure, some the result of pilot failure - which he admitted to. The USS Forrestal fire was definitely an accident caused by catastrophic failure, the investigation concluded he wasn't at fault. As to his personal life - yes, he was a wild man who ditched his deformed wife for a younger, sexier piece of ass, and no doubt that's a lowlife move. In the link he owns up to this behavior; but as Waylon Cash said that doesn't disqualify a person for holding office. Nor should it. FWIW I don't like McCain as a politician (when I was in the military 10 yrs ago he voted against shit we needed) and he is generally out of touch on most issues, but this piece should definitely not be passed around as truth.
It’s been pointed out that the McCain article I sent is different than the one on Snopes that was deemed TRUE. For one thing, the article I sent mentions McCain’s cancer and his Obamacare vote, both of which happened long after the article was written that appeared on Snopes. The article on Snopes, which was deemed TRUE, was last updated in 2008.
In the interest of clarity, here’s everything that appears on Snopes. I’m sorry if the article I sent misled anyone.
Here’s everything from Snopes, including source notes. The material about McCain’s cancer and his Obamacare vote, in fact, anything that happened after 2008 is suspect and not included in the Snopes assessment as TRUE.
Carol McCain
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fiber 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.
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. Today, she stands at just 5′ 4″ in 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.
“My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens … it just does."
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. Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer 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.
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."
“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."
Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, and a former presidential candidate, 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.
ORIGINS: The text reproduced above is a shortened version
of a June 2008 Daily Mail (a UK newspaper) article about Carol McCain, John McCain’s first wife, which has been circulating as an e-mail forward. Shorn of its vitriolic and subjective comments, the article presents a factually true framework regarding the circumstances surrounding the break-up of John McCain’s first marriage.
On 3 July 1965, 28-year-old Naval aviator John SidneyMcCain III married 27-year-old Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, whom he had initially met while attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, several years earlier. John McCain adopted Carol’s two sons (Douglas and Andrew) from a previous marriage, and the couple had a daughter (Sidney) together in 1966.
In July 1967, Lt. Commander John McCain was taken prisoner after his plane was shot down on a bombing mission over North Vietnam and was held as a POW for over five years. During her husband’s captivity, Carol McCain was involved in a near-fatal automobile accident that left her with permanent injuries, a circumstance that posed some difficult adjustments for the couple after they were finally reunited in March 1973:
One fact was especially difficult to deal with [after McCain’s return to the U.S.]: Carol’s physical condition. At Christmastime in 1969, while McCain was imprisoned in Vietnam, Carol was almost killed in a car crash. “Carol had taken the kids to her parents’ house for the holidays," McCain later wrote. “After dinner on Christmas Eve, she drove to our friends, the Bookbinders, to exchange gifts. It had begun to snow by the time she started back to her parents, and the roads were icy. She skidded off the road, smashed into a telephone pole, and was thrown from the car. The police found her some time later in shock, both legs fractured in several places, her arm and pelvis broken, and bleeding internally.
“Several days passed before she was out of immediate danger. It would be six months and several operations before she was released from the hospital. Over the next two years, she would undergo many more operations to repair her injured legs. By the time the doctors were finished, she would be four inches shorter than she was before the accident. After a year of intense physical therapy, she was able to walk with the aid of crutches." Carol’s new appearance was one of the more shocking details McCain had to deal with during his period of adjustment; quite simply, Carol was a different person from the one she was when he left.
By the end of the 1970s, the McCains’ marriage was strained to the breaking point, even if it was not evident to those who knew them:
Even though friends saw a rosy picture when they looked at John and Carol McCain’s marriage from outside, privately the couple was having difficulty. After years in captivity, McCain was not totally able to return to the life he had led with Carol before he went to Vietnam. As the marriage became rocky, McCain was unfaithful to Carol, or perhaps the marriage became rocky because McCain was unfaithful. Later, there would even be reports that he had, as the Boston Globe put it, “affairs with subordinate female personnel." The McCains had tried to achieve some semblance of a normal life after McCain’s return home — and, to a great extent, they had accomplished this — but the problems continued nonetheless. Years later, Carol would tell a reporter the main trouble was not complicated: McCain may have been 40, but he was acting like he was 25.
In 1979, then 42-year-old John McCain first met Cindy Lou Hensley, a 25-year-old school teacher who was also the daughter (and heir) of James Hensley, the founder of one of the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorships in the United States; the two began dating and married the following year. Sources differ as to the timing of McCain’s separation from his first wife, Carol, and the beginning of his relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Cindy Hensley; whatever the circumstances, McCain remarried five weeks after divorcing his first wife:
McCain 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."
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.
McCain stated in his autobiography that he was solely responsible for the failure of his first marriage: “My marriage’s collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity. The blame was entirely mine."
As for the subjective parts of the article, a number of different people who knew the McCains, including John and Carol themselves, have offered widely differing opinions and interpretations regarding John McCain’s first marriage and the reasons why it ended — the “why" is a question with no definitive answer. It’s worth noting, however, that John and Cindy McCain have now been married for over 28 years and have four children (one of them adopted) together, and that in a portion of the Daily Mail article referenced above (which was not included in the excerpt circulating via e-mail), Carol McCain is quoted as saying of her former husband: “He’s a good guy. We are still good friends. He is the best man for president."
LAST UPDATED: 10 September 2008
Sources:
Alexander, Paul. Man of the People: The Life of John McCain.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. ISBN 0-471-22829-X.
Churcher, Sharon. “The Wife U.S. Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind."
The Mail on Sunday. 8 June 2008.
McCain, John S. with Mark Salter. Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir.
New York: Random House, 2002. ISBN 0-375-50542-3.
Serrano, Richard A. and Ralph Vartabedian. “McCain’s Broken Marriage and Fractured Reagan Friendship."
Los Angeles Times. 11 July 2008.
Timberg, Robert. John McCain: An American Odyssey.
New York: Fireside Press, 1999. ISBN 0-684-86794-X.
Vartabedian, Ralph. “McCain May Have Conflict Brewing."
Los Angeles Times. 22 June 2008.
This is what we need, honest research, evidence, and analysis. LoisL posted this even though it negates a good portion of the original article/post. I applaud you sir.
This is what I mean, if you do not cite the documentary then we have to just take your word it was "neutral". Which is hard to believe when according to you it paints him in such a bad light. I am not a fan of John McCain, but he just did something good in my opinion and a lot of that story is just hearsay. We can not maintain our integrity unless we holld ourselves to the standard of that integrity, regardless of what others do.Sorry I don't have perfect memory like you. It was a documentary on either the National Geographic channel or maybe the History channel. Both of them are close enough, based on all the shows I've watched, of being neutral.
I don't know all the details, but documentaries I've seen on McCain from neutral sources, long before he ever ran for POTUS in 2008 painted a picture along the lines of your story Lois. He was bottom of the barrel in the navy, much like Bush the W had special favors because of his dad, and so on. He was not a very good pilot and did not volunteer for dangerous missions and did not save lives, above and beyond what any pilot would have. He did get shot down and endured years as a prisoner and that is something. But as for that making him a hero? That's a matter of opinion. Of course at this point in the game, the media has dubbed him a hero and anyone going against that will be roundly denounced.It is heroic to put oneself in danger of being made a prisoner of war. Credit where credit is due. But it doesn't wipe put his failures as a student, a member of the military, a husband or as a decent human being. Lois