This past week, the country mourned for U.S. Sen. John McCain, who died Aug. 25 at age 81. He was lauded by Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others as a hero, a friend, a voice of reason, an “extraordinary man.” While I didn’t necessarily agree with McCain’s politics, I agree that he was a man of values. And then I remembered how his first marriage ended, with infidelity, and I feel a little less enthused. 
McCain married Carol Shepp, a single mom of two, in 1965 and had a daughter together, Sidney, the next year. In 1967, he was captured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and held for five-and-a-half years — enough to strain any young marriage.
While he was in captivity, Carol was in a devastating and disfiguring car accident involving 23 operations. She could barely walk. When John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and was not the same beauty he’d married.
Then McCain met Cindy Hensley at a point when some say he was “carousing and running around with women,” and a few months later McCain, then 43 and still married, asked Cindy, 25, to marry him. The two got a marriage license four weeks before his divorce from Carol was final, and tied the knot six weeks later.
McCain’s midlife crisis
While Carol says her accident was horrible, “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.”
Yes, it does.
And he wouldn’t be the first man to dump a woman at her most vulnerable time.
“He was looking for a way to be young again, and that was the end of that,” she says in a new documentary, For Whom the Bell Tolls, about McCain. “I didn’t know anything about it, I had no idea what was going on, I was pretty much blindsided and it broke my heart.”
While Cindy never spoke ill of her former husband, the divorce — and the new love affair — impacted their children. A parent’s infidelity can be complicated for children. “I truly believe that my dad is very much in love with Cindy, and I think she is very much in love with him, and I think there is something very beautiful about that. At the time it was really awful,” daughter Sidney says.
Was McCain a ‘bad person’?
I’ll bet it was. To his former wife and children at the time, and perhaps to many others, McCain was hardly an “extraordinary man” with good values. Many have trouble with people who leave a spouse to be with someone new. But are you a bad person if you do? We don’t like the idea of people leaving spouses for new love yet many of us consider Sleepless in Seattle to be an uber romantic love story although it’s essentially about a woman cheating on her fiance to be with a man who’s a much better match for her. Yet we root for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan … even though she’s engaged and is lying to her fiance, a “nice guy.”
But, 40 years have passed, enough time for people to make amends. The McCains did, but not every person can. Many people can’t forgive a former spouse, and many children become estranged from a misbehaving parent.
For anyone who’s thinking of leaving a marriage the way McCain did, that’s something to consider.
Want to explore consensual non-monogamy? (Of course you do!) Find The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press) at your indie bookstore or on Amazon; follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
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