The Separate Peace of John And Carol

"He goes off and he becomes a POW for 5 1/2 years and he lives as almost all the POWs" did, said Joe McCain, John's younger brother. "They were badly treated. They were in isolation, and they had to retreat to fantasy worlds. You know, they built houses in the air. . . . And I think that during those 5 1/2 years, they both changed to a certain degree under all that stress. When he came back, they wanted the marriage to work, [but] I think they'd just gone to different places and they couldn't put it back."

Says Bookbinder: "He lost all those years. Think of all that went on in the world during that time and all that he missed. Marrying someone 17 years younger gave him those years back. That's the way Carol saw it."

But John and Carol have rejected blaming the marriage's demise on McCain's war years. In "Worth the Fighting For," McCain writes: "Sound marriages can be hard to recover after great time and distance have separated husband and wife. We are different people when we reunite. 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."

He also told his biographer, Robert Timberg: "I had changed, she had changed. People who have been apart that much change."

In a 2005 study of 98 repatriated Vietnam POWs, in fact, 56 divorced their spouses within 20 years of their return. Although that rate is only somewhat higher than divorce in the general population, it's a far higher percentage than the study's control group of Vietnam War-era Navy aviators who were not imprisoned. "Marriage can be a casualty of war," concluded the researchers, "even among those who are high functioning and have many personal advantages."

In one of the few public comments she has made about the marriage, Carol McCain -- now 70 and living quietly in retirement in Virginia Beach -- told Timberg in 1995: "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."

Carol has never publicly criticized McCain; she has been supportive of his political career. She has contributed money to several of his campaigns and today sports a "McCain for President" bumper sticker on her car, according to Bookbinder.

During McCain's first race, an opponent called her seeking "negative material" to use against him, she once said. She not only declined but also told her ex-husband about the call. As she later said in an interview with an Arizona newspaper: "I told [the opponent] I believe in John McCain. He's a good person. I wish him every bit of success."

In the divorce's immediate aftermath, however, there were clearly hard feelings. Neither Carol nor the McCains' three children -- Doug, Andy and Sidney -- attended John and Cindy's wedding. Andy, who is John and Carol's second-eldest child, didn't meet the second Mrs. McCain until years later. According to Bookbinder, Carol has never met Cindy.

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Carol and John were married in the Bookbinders' living room on a stifling hot day in Philadelphia in July 1965. McCain was a handsome and much-admired Navy flier. Carol, a former swimsuit and runway model for Jansen sportswear, was a statuesque beauty (5 foot 8) from Philadelphia whom McCain dreamily called "Long Tall Sally" during his long days and nights in a Hanoi prison.