Ancient Verses Contemporary History – McCain Style

The other day I was watching CNN’s coverage of John Edwards’s sexual affair that apparently occurred back in 2006. The moderated discussion was between two talking heads, one an obvious surrogate for McCain, the other for Obama. The Obama guy stated that coverage of the Edward’s affair would be more detrimental to McCain than Obama, since it would dredge up memories of old affairs that McCain had participated in back when he was married to his first wife, Carol. McCain’s surrogate was quick with the rebuttal argument that “…this was ancient history.”

My initial thought was yeah, why hold something against a guy that happened thirty years ago. But then I remembered watching a recent TV ad that Mr. McCain said he approved of at the end of the ad. Part of the ad showed an old clip of Mr. McCain when he was a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton. So I began to thinking, since Mr. McCain was a POW before he was an adulterer, maybe the McCain camp had a system of history that did not rely on chronological order to define what is ancient and what is contemporary. Since I could find no such definition at Mr. McCain’s web site, I have decided to help him out, listing what should be considered contemporary verses ancient history.

Contemporary – Graduation –

Mr. McCain graduated from the United States Navel Academy in 1958.

Ancient – Nearly last in the class –

Mr. McCain Graduated at a very low class rank of 894 out of 899, or among the bottom six in academic ranking.

Contemporary – Shot down –

Mr. McCain was shot down by a North Vietnamese missile while piloting a bomber on a run over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. Mr. McCain fractured both arms and a leg when he parachuted into a lake in Hanoi.

Contemporary – POW –

Mr. McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years. Mr. McCain suffered from poor medical care as well as torture from the Vietnamese. His captors offered him early release as a propaganda ploy. The North Vietnamese thought they might get some political mileage out of this since in 1968 Mr. McCain’s father, an Admiral, was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam Theater. Mr. McCain refused to be released unless every prisoner captured before him was released as well. Mr. McCain was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973 along with the other captors.

Ancient – First marriage –

Before McCain’s tour of duty in Vietnam, he had married Carol Shepp, a stunning model from Philadelphia. In 1969 while Mr. McCain was a POW Carol suffered severe injuries in a car wreck. Mrs. McCain refused to allow any word of her accident to be sent to John as she feared it would negatively impact his morale while he was a POW.

When John returned from North Vietnam in 1973 he was shocked to find his wife was no longer the stunning bride that he had married a few years earlier. Instead she was over-weight, unable to walk without crutches, and a full four inches shorter in height due to lifesaving surgeries. At first John reportedly told her not to worry about her appearance saying “I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.” However it wasn’t long before their marriage began to crumble. Mr. McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, but has never provided details. Some friends blame John’s dissatisfaction with Carol, but others including Carol, believe it was due to a mid-life crisis.

During this philanderer period Mr. McCain met Cindy Hensley at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Within six months, Mr. McCain was pushing to end his marriage with Carol. Of course, Carol and the children were devastated. Even so, Carol didn’t fight the divorce saying, “He just wants to make up for lost time.” Mr. McCain and the new Mrs. McCain moved to Arizona after their marriage in 1980. His new millionaire father-in-law provided immediate employment and helped grease the skids towards his political aspirations of a seat in the House of Representatives and later the Senate.

Ancient – ‘Keating Five’ –

McCain met Charles H Keating Jr. a flamboyant developer in 1981 at a Navy League dinner where McCain was a featured speaker. In 1982, during McCain’s first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting over $10,000 from employees of American Continental Corp. By 1987, Mr. McCain had received approximately $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. Interestingly, Mr. McCain co-sponsored a resolution that would delay new regulations to restrict risky investments made by S & Ls such as Lincoln Savings and Loan, a subsidiary of Mr. Keating’s American Continental Corp.

Ironically, by March 1987 Mr. Keating needed help because of such risky investments. After Federal auditors had examined its books, the government was poised to seize Lincoln. Mr. Keating asked Senator Dennis DeConcini, D-Arizona for help. As with Mr. McCain’s campaigns, Mr. Keating had previously contributed thousands of dollars to Mr. DeConcini’s campaigns. Mr. Keating wanted Mr. DeConcini and other friendly senators to use their influence to terminate the government investigation and likely take-over of Lincoln.

Mr. DeConcini set up a meeting with the regulators and three other senators. One of them was John McCain. The first meeting, on April 2, 1987 included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. The two additional senators were Alan Cranston, D-California., and John Glenn, D-Ohio. At this meeting, Mr. Gray offered to set up a second meeting between the senators and regulators who were located out in San Francisco and closer to the investigation.

The second meeting was held on April 9, 1987 and also included an additional Senator; Don Riegle, D-Michigan. William Black, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC attended from the regulators end.

Despite the senators’ interference, within a month, the San Francisco regulators had finished their audit, recommending that Lincoln be seized. However, the report was affectively pigeonholed because of political rankling on the bank board. The Keating Five (as the Senators were known after a Senate ethics investigation got under way) who had accepted over $300,000 in total contributions from Keating and his associates had accomplished their mission, i.e., intimidating the regulators to back off of American Continental Corporation’s problems. However, despite the reprieve, Keating’s businesses continued their downward spiral. In April 1989, Lincoln Savings and Loan was seized by the federal government.

In September 1990, Mr. Keating was arrested and charged with forty two counts of fraud and was booked in the Los Angeles County Jail. Bond was set at five million dollars. Several elderly investors who had lost their life’s savings by investing in American Continental junk bonds were included as witnesses for the prosecution.

A federal jury convicted Mr. Keating of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and he was sentenced to about twelve and a half years in prison. However the conviction was overturned on a technicality. He later pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and was released based on time served.

Mr. McCain along with others in the ‘Keating Five’ attended the 23-day public hearing held by Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee ruled that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings.

Mr. McCain received a rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising “poor judgment” for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. As a side note, The Arizona Republic reported that Cindy McCain and her father had invested over $359,000 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before Mr. McCain along with the other ‘Keating Five’ met with the regulators. It was also reported that John and Cindy accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Mr. Keating’s expense. Some of the trips were aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were vacation get-aways to Mr. Keating’s luxurious retreat in the Bahamas. Mr. McCain eventually reimbursed Mr. Keating for the trips; some of the reimbursements years later after Mr. Keating’s problems over Lincoln surfaced.

Mr. McCain agreed with the Ethics Committee’s ruling saying: “I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment.”

Ancient – The Iraq War will be easy –

Mr. McCain early on supported President Bush’s plans to attack Iraq. In fact, Mr. McCain co-sponsored the Use of Force Authorization that gave President George W. Bush a green light for going to war with Iraq. [SJ Res. 46, 10/3/02] McCain argued Saddam was “a threat of the first order.” Mr. McCain also said that a policy of containment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is “unsustainable, ineffective, unworkable and dangerous.

Mr. McCain hasn’t tried to duck his responsibility for support of President Bush’s decision to attack Iraq. On January 6, 2008 Mr. McCain said “The war, the invasion was not a mistake.” [Meet the Press] but his memory seems to fade from the facts on how difficult the war was to be.

Mr. McCain stated on September 24, 2002 that “Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.”[CNN] On September 29, 2002 he further added: “We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN] Then on January 22, 2003 he said: “But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC]

Mr. McCain’s on January 6th, 2007 contradicted his own statements saying that he knew all along that the war in Iraq was “probably going to be long and hard and tough,” and that he was “sorry” for anybody who voted it thinking it would be “some kind of an easy task.” Either Mr. McCain’s 2002 & 2003 statements were made in an effort to help President Bush lie us into war or he has a poor memory.

Contemporary -The Surge

On May 12, 2004, Mr. McCain was asked if Donald Rumsfeld , the Secretary of Defense, could continue to be an effective secretary of defense, McCain said “Yes, today I do and I believe he’s done a fine job. He’s an honorable man.” [Hannity and Colmes]

However, by December 15, 2004, Mr. McCain had reversed his opinion of Mr. Rumsfeld, stating he had “no confidence” in Rumsfeld, citing his handling of the war in Iraq and the failure of the Pentagon to send more troops to Iraq. McCain, speaking to The Associated Press, added that his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, explaining that President Bush “can have the team that he wants around him.” Mr. McCain also added that 80,000 more Army personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines would be needed to secure Iraq. This was the beginning of his call for the so called ‘surge’.

On November 8, 2006, just after the mid-term elections, President Bush announced Rumsfeld would resign his position as Secretary of Defense. Bush also nominated Robert Gates for the position signaling a change in Iraq war policy. On January 10, 2007 President Bush ordered the deployment of five additional U.S brigades to Iraq, mainly to Baghdad, and extended the tour of four thousand Marines already stationed in Iraq. The ‘surge’ was underway. Many in congress including House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi opposed the surge but were unable to garner enough support to stop it. In addition to the increased military personnel in Iraq the plan termed ‘The Way Forward’ called for increased Iraqi leadership, helping to better protect the Iraqi population from extremists, isolation of extremists, creation of more space for political progress, better diversification of political and economic activity and a regional approach to strategy.

Barack Obama, along with the other Democratic hopefuls opposed the plan, and instead pushed for a plan for a timetable of redeployment that sounded more like a plan for withdraw.

In January 2007, President Bush announced that General David Petraeus would succeed General George Casey as commanding general to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq. General Petraeus had had success in the Iraqi city of Mosul, by employing classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability much like the planned ‘The Way Forward’ proposed for all of Iraq.

As of the summer of 2008, it appears that the ‘The Way Forward’ has significantly contributed to the successful reduction of violence in Iraq. I use the term ‘The Way Forward’ rather than ‘the surge’ since the reduction in violence can probably be attributed as much to other changes on the ground as to the infusion of reinforcements per Mr. McCain’s suggestion back in December of 2004. These changes include positioning troops with Iraqi forces out in the neighborhoods, the so called Sunni tribal ‘awakenings’, i.e., changing their allegiance, at least for now, from pro al-Qaeda to pro coalition, and Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to declare a unilateral cease- fire by the Mahdi Army. Mr. McCain can take credit for his early support for the surge of troops but the other features of ‘The Way Forward’ were not really his.

Wayne Nolen

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