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....
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....
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.’....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.’
Here's the problem: As the Mail on Sunday's story reminds us, McCain goes further than most politicians in casting himself as a moral exemplar. (Just look at the books he's written.) And this, in turn, makes it completely fair for the media to examine whether this self-description holds up.
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