John McCain: character or 'a character'?

John McCain

Republican Nominee

(Image from Wikipedia)

I can't say that I know a lot about candidate John McCain, but I suppose that now is the time to begin paying attention, so I've read a couple of articles on the man to try to get a sense of his character.

The first article, from U.S. News and World Report, presents McCain's first-person report on his five-and-one-half years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam: "John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account" (May 14, 1973; posted online January 28, 2008).

In this account, McCain describes what happened to him from the moment that he ejected his Skyhawk dive bomber on October 26, 1967 until the moment that he boarded a U.S. Air Force plane on March 15, 1973, and a little bit more, so it's a long online article of 17 pages.

McCain doesn't boast about his experience, but his story is impressive, given that he survived beatings, torture, war injuries, poor nutrition, and bad health care for five and one-half years of imprisonment.

At the time of this article's publication, he had only been back to the US for two months, and he expressed gratitude for the support that his wife had given him through her faithful wait:

I'm proud of the part . . . my wife, Carol, played here at home. The temptation for the wives, as the years went by, was to say, "God, I want them home under any circumstances." When Carol was pressed to take this line, her answer was, "Just to get him home is not enough for me, and it's not enough for John -- I want him to come home standing up."

I received very few letters from Carol. I got three in the first four months after I was shot down. The [North Vietnamese] . . . let me have only one during the last four years I was there. I received my first package in May of 1969. After that, they let me have approximately one a year.

The reason I got so little mail was that Carol insisted on using the channels provided by the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners of war. She refused to send things through the Committee for Liaison with Families run by the antiwar groups.

And he tells us of what he learned about life:

I had a lot of time to think over there, and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life -- along with a man's family -- is to make some contribution to his country.

Pretty impressive, it seems to me.

I was thus rather disappointed in the McCain that I read of in the other article, published by Sharon Churcher in Britain's Daily Mail: "The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind" (June 8, 2008). Despite being a conservative paper, which might be expected to portray the Republican nominee more positively, the depiction of McCain as a family man is not very impressive. His then-wife, Carol, had suffered a horrendous accident at Christmastime of 1969 that had left her nearly crippled and a full 5 inches shorter that when he had married her:

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.'

Reportedly, however, McCain soon grew unfaithful to his wife, met Cindy Lou Hensley in 1979, pressed for a divorce with Carol, and quickly married Cindy. This didn't set very well with some observers:

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.'

I can't entirely agree with Mr. Sampley, for I think that any man who could survive five and one-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam under the conditions that McCain endured surely has character . . . as a soldier. He simply lacked the character required of a husband. He was thus more right than he knew when he said, "I don't look so good myself."

I won't say that McCain is unfit for the presidency. Nobody's perfect, and many men have been unfaithful to their wives yet have managed to serve their country with distinction -- even as president -- and some men have managed to grow better in their maturity, having learned from reflecting on the things that they've done. Perhaps McCain has. I don't know, for my view is partial.

Yet, I do have a fuller picture of the man who McCain is, an impressive but flawed man, and I'll have to pay close attention, as election day draws near, to this increasingly fascinating campaign.