McCain's First Marriage

We all know McCain flagrantly cheated on his first wife, Carol, especially upon his return from Vietnam. He has offered a variety of explanations, but not everything jibes with court documents.

Furthermore, his relationship with the Reagans became strained because of the way he treated Carol, a woman who endured a lot when McCain was a POW only to be repaid as if she were a piece of shit.

He flagrantly lied about those last months of his first marriage:

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.

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.

He was a sneaky shit to boot. He fooled a lot of people, not just Carol.

This article goes into more detail than the Daily Mail article of a few months ago does.

I Think That In Order [Updated]

to understand Cindy McCain, one really needs to look at the entire story of how John met her in the first place.

I have to give Newsweek a little bit of credit for mentioning it, though:

In the spring of 1979, Cindy joined her parents on a trip to Hawaii. At a Navy cocktail party, a cocky captain came up and introduced himself. John McCain was the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate in Washington. He was 41, but told her he was 37. Cindy was 24, but told him she was 27. By both accounts, it was love at first sight—though for McCain, it was far more complicated. He was a married father of three. His relationship with his first wife, Carol Shepp, was coming apart, and the two were separating, though he didn't divulge any of that to Cindy that first night.

And this:

Shepp no longer discusses the marriage, but has said she doesn't blame McCain. She has told reporters she thinks of him as a friend and supports him for president. The marriage soured because of "John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again," she told McCain's biographer Robert Timberg. Others who know them say McCain pursued Cindy as a way of putting his war years behind him. "I think John very much saw her as reclaiming the life he had lost," Albert (Pete) Lakeland, a former congressional staffer who was with McCain when he met Cindy, told Timberg.

The war had nothing to do with it. McCain was a womanizer BEFORE he went to Nam.


The bottom line is this: John McCain probably cares for Cindy, but he had political ambitions, and staying in the military wasn't going to cut it. Cindy wasn't just any pretty trophy wife--she had money, tons of it, and that money was instrumental in getting him where is today.

The article, which makes much of her personal problems, including miscarriages, a stroke, and drug dependency, is mostly a puff piece.

For the record, a comparison of the two wives using the wedding photos.

The first picture of Carol McCain and her ex, taken at their wedding in 1965, I got from the Washington Post:




One month after Navy veteran John threw Carol overboard, he married the very wealthy Cindy Hensley:



And also for the record, this picture, also taken from the Washington Post website, gives one an inkling of what kind of person the first Mrs. McCain was like:



This was a Thanksgiving picture of the McCain family when he was a POW. We all know how he eventually thanked THEM.

Campaign Dirty Laundry.

If he is elected president, which is all but a sure thing if Obama is the opponent, John McCain will be the second divorced president in American history. Ronald Reagan, of course, was the first one.

So what about that first marriage? Well, it IS old news McCain cheated on his first wife; he admits it. And the two of them are still on good terms. That's old news.



But the U.S. media won't write about it because they will claim it is ancient history and McCain has fessed up, at least with regard to her. But what is her story in case anybody cares?

She fell sucker to his charm even though he was carousing around in his youth, let alone after he returned from the Hanoi Hilton.

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.

After sustaining serious injuries in an automobile accident, Ross Perot helped pay her medical bills. Of course her husband couldn't possibly help her out.

After returning to the states, he was glad to see her, but obviously she wasn't going to do in the looks department. Once again he reverted to his bad habits.

Moreover, he was starting to make some political connections. Enter Cindy Hensley:

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.’

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is Carol McCain is still crazy about him. But not everybody who knew the two of them are crazy about John, including Ross Perot.

More is here, here, here, and don't forget this article about McCain and Perot.

John McCain's

womanizing has never been any kind of secret, and he was messing around with Cindy while still married to his first wife.

The article was from last year along with more articles about McCain's life story.

The fact his first wife, Carol, doesn't seem to have hard feelings against him pretty much inoculates him from the womanizing charges:

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."