McCain Cheats in Marriage
A few facts -
- Carol Shepp-McCain, a swimsuit model when McCain married her, had a very bad car accident while raising their three kids while McCain was at war .
- John “Just Practice Abstinence” McCain married Cindy “I’m an Only Child” Hensley one month after his divorce to Carol Shepp-McCain was final.
- John McCain and Cindy Hensley had an affair for about nine months before he left Carol, who had waited for him while he was at war.
- When he returned McCain was upset that Carol had lost several inches of height due to surgery and was aghast that she had gained weight from the pain medication.
- McCain admits he lied to Cindy about his age when they started dating (while he was still married to Carol)
- McCain soon got Carol to accept financial terms for a quiet divorce
McCain dumps disabled wife for next hot thing
"After he came home, she [Carol McCain] 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 January 2008
“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.”
True insight to his character |
McCain cheated on then dumped his first wife for Cindy’s money and connections. |
Ted Sampley, former US Special Forces Vietnam, now lead campaigner for veterans’ rights
The wife U.S. Republican John McCain left behind
McCain prides himself for being compassionate and patriot to a fault, having served the country as a war hero and former POW. He sees the campaign more as a moral responsibility to return the U.S. to the solid family Christian values of yore. He will restore the Presidency to its’ former glory, after Clinton, after 8 years of Bush whom he seems to both love and hate.
McCain panders to the public by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, as though that alone were proof that he should be the next President. McCain’s wife Cindy is always at his side, smiling her best smile, as the Senator demonstrates his commitment to family values he says he holds so dear. The 71-year-old former US Navy pilot often refers to his beautiful blonde wife, with whom he has four children, as though that alone were proof enough that he should be President.
At the beginning of the Presidential race, not everyone was aware that there is a ‘former’ Mrs. McCain, Carol. It is no wonder that she really only recently became widely known for her marriage to the Senator since she is rarely seen in public and until now has had little appeal for the press. Carol McCain, now age 70, is the mother of McCain’s three eldest children. Her story reads like a Greek tragedy yet she has some how managed to survive sadness beyond words.
Carol (nee: Shepp) McCain had the bad luck of marrying John McCain but if things had been different, she might well have been on the arm of the man Who Would Be King (well, president). As a young woman, Carol Shepp was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model; in 1965 she married John McCain.
It was thoughts of Carol that kept McCain going in his darkest hours during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison. She was a faithful, stay at home Mom looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
McCain returned to the U.S. in 1973 and was received with a hero’s welcome and a handshake from Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve in 1969 Carol was driving when her car skidded on an icy road and slammed into a telegraph pole. Among her many injuries were a shattered pelvis, a mangled arm and massive internal injuries.
It truly did not look good for Carol, even when she was released from the hospital 6 months after the accident. Her legs had been so damaged in the accident that surgeons had to cut out large sections of her once beautiful model’s legs. Her legs were indeed saved but she lost five inches in height and was confined to a wheelchair, catheter and all. The accident that could have killed her would become her life from then on. Carol’s own strength of character and determination enabled her to learn to walk again but there were still many challenges ahead.
By the time John came home in 1973, Carol had gained a substantial amount of weight. Moreover, there was little of the Carol he had left behind, the tall beauty of his war dreams. Carol walks hesitatingly with a noticeable limp. From her many surgeries, her body is held together by screws and metal plates. At age 70, her tired face shows the lines etched in over the past decades of suffering in silence.
Over all these years Carol has been steadfastly silent about her accident and later divorce from John. Recently, however, she gave an interview to The Mail from her bungalow where she now resides in Virginia Beach, a seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington. Carol told her story – John’s meandering, the divorce in 1980 and subsequent marriage to Cindy Hensley, one month later. Cindy, 18 years younger than the Senator was not just pretty, she was pretty rich as the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune.
Carol resists the notion that the results of the 1969 accident were the reason her marriage collapsed. What she did say was “… I have no bitterness. My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce. My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’
For some who were close to the McCain’s during that awful time and even still, there cannot be full forgiveness for John’s behavior after coming home from the war. Some say the man is egocentric and sex driven. Some say McCain sexed around until he found his trophy wife: pretty, blond and really rich.
Yes indeed, it seemed the new Mrs. McCain happened to be the daughter of Jim Hensley, a multi-millionaire with political connections in high places. John, on the other hand, was earning the salary of a naval officer of the time.
In the 1950s, John McCain was privileged to be the son and grandson of two of America’s most distinguished admirals. As an heir to the third generation of military might in America, he was stationed at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. This is where he first met Carol but the somewhat rebellious young McCain clearly wanted to sow his wild oats.
McCain even hung with a group of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’. Real catchy name. John’s primary goal was getting laid and some of the stories say his conquests included a knife-wielding skank nicknamed ‘Marie, the Flame of Florida’ and a tobacco heiress to name only two.
Carol 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. She later divorced the lout for constant infidelity.
When she rekindled ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain, it seemed like a dream come true. McCain had already started slowing down a bit on his tramping around. “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.
John and Carol were married and John adopted Carol’s two sons. A year later the couple was blessed with a daughter they named Sidney. But good ole’ John was getting restless again. The McCain’s were regulars on the party parades in Washington. Then at the end of 1966, John McCain asked for combat duty in Vietnam. He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The story of John McCain’s contributions to his country in the Vietnam war is real and much of his experience was horrendous. It has made him a legend in his own time and clearly under the scrutiny of a presidential race, a legend in his own mind. McCain was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam. It is said that he was badly beaten by the north Vietnamese who pulled him angrily on shore, half-drowned from the lake into which he plunged.
His next five and a half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison were endless days of torture and mistreatment. During that awful time, back home in the U.S. in 1969 Carol had her life altering accident. She had joined her parents for her third Christmas without John at their home.
It was after dinner that Carol left to deliver gifts at a friend’s house. Hours later she was discovered in critical condition next to her car. Unbelievingly, she was thrown through the windshield on impact with the pole and yet she was still alive.
Despite many initial surgeries, Carol was told she may never walk again. Doctors assured her they would do everything possible to get a message to John. She refused their offer saying: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’ Meanwhile, Ross Perot, a now well known Texas billionaire paid for her medical care.
When McCain came home in 1973 his hair had turned white and his body was skeletal, he was so thin. He told reporters at the time that he was overwhelmed with joy to see Carol again.. In private, friends say, John was actually ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. Initially, John was a doting husband, quipping: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’
John bought Carol a bungalow near the sea in Florida. He and another former POW built a railing so she could look out over the dunes to the water. ‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. It soon became clear though that John was heading for bigger and better things and as a war hero was getting noticed in certain power circles.
The McCain's met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California through their friendship with Ross Perot. Nancy Reagan, sympathetic to their situation became a close ally of Carol’s. Behind the scenes though things were not as rosy as they appeared. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.
McCain doesn’t like getting into the nitty gritty details of his girlfriends during this time. A few of their friends thought John was simply unhappy with Carol but Carol herself believes he was going through a mid-life crisis. For John, the realization that he would never become an admiral like his father, and his father before him, made McCain determined to turn his attention to politics.
McCain was still married to Carol when he met Cindy Hensley in 1979 at a cocktail party in Hawaii. He pursued her like a tiger in heat, following her all over the country just to be with her. This would be the death knell for the John and Carol McCain marriage.
Friends of Carol’s were mortified by John’s push for a divorce. Carol and her children were absolutely devastated. Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide said “It was a complete surprise. They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagan’s were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’
Another friend said : ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’
Carol’s decision to acquiesce to the divorce was terribly sad to those who loved her. Mostly they say because Carol never stopped loving John to the nth degree. They have remained friends it is said and Carol has been a real supporter of John’s political ambitions. Someone close to the situation said: ‘He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy.’
McCain applies for marriage before first one final, lies about age to cheat on faithful wife
The divorce proceeded with John giving Carol the Florida beach house. Alimony and child support were part of the package, plus the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. According to a neighbor, Carol later sold in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. The neighbor said: ‘My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking.’
McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride Cindy right after their 1980 marriage. His power brokering father- in- law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political movers and shakers. It was these men who would smooth McCain’s passage to Washington, first at the House of Representatives and later, the Senate.
Even as John is elevated to the fair haired boy position within the GOP, there are some who cannot and will not forget or forgive his treatment of his first wife, Carol.
An old friend of the McCain’s said: ‘Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defense mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life.’
Carol remained faithful and loyal as McCain’s political career picked up speed. From her perspective, she says she openly talked about all of this because she wants all Americans to see that she still has support for this man.
Ross Perot, who can and does do just about anything he likes, has said that he thinks both Carol McCain and the American people have been politically seduced by a man who is unusually slimy and cruel, even by the standards of these crazy times of ever shifting political sand.
