As his military career was taking off, McCain's personal life was struggling. While he was in Jacksonville, "my marriage to Carol McCain was falling apart," McCain wrote in his memoir.

McCain told Robert Timberg, who wrote the biography John McCain: An American Odyssey, that he had several affairs during the Jacksonville years (though none with female officers under his command). But it was still several years before the McCains, who had three children, divorced.

McCain has said little about what went wrong in his marriage, though in all his public statements he has placed the responsibility at his own feet.

"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," he wrote. "The blame was entirely mine."

Several of the couple's friends said they were unaware the McCains were having problems. The couple had bought a beach house in Florida and often invited their friends to visit.

Smith, who spent time with the McCains in Jacksonville and later in Washington, D.C., said he remembered them as a happy couple and even recalled talk of them having another child.

But Joe McCain, John McCain's younger brother, said he thought the couple quietly pushed through difficulties for several years, hoping things would improve.

"I'm sure they thought it's just a matter of time, or maybe it's just, 'I'm a POW, I'm thinking differently,' " he said. "But after a while, the points piled up and they realized, we're really not the same couple we were."

Other than one interview with Timberg, Carol McCain has declined to say much to reporters about her divorce.

"The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things," she told him. "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."

But by all accounts, she remains friendly and close with her former husband. Friends said the two quickly put the divorce and McCain's infidelities behind them, and Carol McCain has supported all of her ex-husband's political campaigns.

Inside the Senate

Toward the end of his stint in Jacksonville, McCain flirted with a possible run for Congress. During his time there, he'd toured the region, giving talks and impressing local Republicans. He was quickly talked out of the idea by his military friends - the odds were too long and he had not yet secured his naval pension.

But it was McCain's final military assignment that stirred his political ambitions most profoundly. In 1977, he moved to Washington as a Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate.

"That's when I became motivated to think of a political career seriously," he said.

It was a job he almost didn't get. Holloway, the chief of naval operations, thought McCain would be a natural for the legislative liaison job, but the Navy's personnel department was unaware of Holloway's plans and had assigned McCain to a desk job in the Navy's department of aeronautics.

"He almost got away from us," Holloway said.

The Senate liaison job had its high- and low-prestige moments. McCain was the main contact for senators with questions about Navy policy - everything from whether they should approve a new weapons system to an inquiry about a constituent's benefits. He quickly became a trusted resource for members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. But he was also their escort during foreign travel, which meant booking flights and hotels, and carrying luggage.

McCain shared a small corner office in the Senate's Russell Building. The room was always a busy and noisy, colleagues remembered.

"It was like going into a ward boss's office," said Rhett Dawson, who was then the staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Things were constantly in a state of flurry and the phone was ringing off the hook and things were moving. But despite all that, when you walked in, if John was on the phone, he'd get off and get up and shake your hand and make you feel important."

For senators on key committees, he was equally deferential. Bill Cohen of Maine, who was elected to the Senate in 1978, said McCain was a key sounding board for questions on military policy. Cohen, who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said McCain could be counted on for honesty.

"He knew the people involved," Cohen said. "He is, as you know, slightly irreverent. He would let us know when someone was blowing smoke at us."

McCain became personally close with several senators, particularly Cohen, Gary Hart of Colorado and John Tower of Texas.

Few senators or staffers who worked with McCain during his tenure recalled much about the Navy's legislative priorities at the time, but they all remembered their travels when McCain was an escort. Cohen said McCain quickly established himself as the most organized and entertaining of the military liaisons, and he was almost always picked for important trips.

In one sensitive visit to Oman, Tower chose McCain to be his sole companion as he met with the country's leader, Sultan Qaboos bin Said. McCain, unable to cross his legs because of his war injuries, inadvertently offended the sultan when he sat on the floor of the tent with the soles of his feet visible. As the sultan and his bodyguards seethed at this perceived gesture of disrespect, Tower intervened to explain the problem. The sultan forgave the offense.

"Tower, however, never let me forget it and loved to remind me time and again how he had once saved my life in the Omani desert," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For.

William Bader, then the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recalls vividly a trip he took with McCain and a large delegation of senators just after the U.S. normalized relations with China. McCain had taken his place at the back of the plane with other staffers, and one at a time, a half-dozen liberal senators came back to talk with McCain.

"I just had the sense they came up to talk to him and they were making their peace with him," Bader said. "Here was a man who suffered, almost died, in a war that these men thought was stupid, dangerous and deadly."

Hart, a Democrat and vocal opponent of the war who had managed George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, said he never detected any hard feelings from McCain about his views.

"He didn't want to refight the war - who was right, who was wrong. He was very aware that I had organized George McGovern's campaign that was largely focused on ending the war, but he didn't seem to hold that against me."

McCain would answer questions about his experiences as a POW, friends from the period said, and his history was well known, but he rarely discussed his imprisonment unbidden.

But Bader recalls one time when the past came rushing back. The two were in China, waiting for the Senate delegation to finish a factory tour. As they wandered around the site, they poked their heads into an attached infirmary.

"First we both sort of looked in, and then I felt him staring at the bed. And all of the sudden his whole features changed. He became very quiet, and I just couldn't understand what was going on," Bader said.

"He said, 'Bill, Bill, those blankets were the ones in the Hilton,' " referring to the North Vietnamese prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton," where McCain had been held. "And all of the sudden all of this came out of him, what all of that had done to him."

'Love at first sight'

In 1979, John McCain was traveling with a Senate delegation when he spotted a tall blonde at a cocktail party in Honolulu. Bader said he was chatting with Cindy Hensley when McCain walked over.

"I, in fact, ended up introducing a certain beautiful young lady to him who was out there and who he took an immediate shine to, and I went off to do other things," Bader said.

Hensley, now McCain's second wife, was a special education teacher traveling with her parents, who owned a large Budweiser distributorship in Phoenix. She said the two ended up talking for the rest of the party and left to have dinner afterward at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

"I think it was love at first sight," she said.

McCain was legally separated from Carol in early 1980, and the divorce became final shortly afterward. The settlement left Carol McCain most of the couple's assets, according to Col. Bud Day, a POW friend of McCain's who served as his lawyer.

McCain was remarried in May of that year in a formal wedding with more than 400 guests. Cohen was McCain's best man, and his other groomsmen included his Navy colleague Smith, Hart, and Jerry Dorminy, the founder of the Hogs Breath Saloon in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., Smith said.

None of McCain's friends doubt that the couple felt a genuine and intense attraction, but many also noticed that his second marriage gave McCain new opportunities. The Hensleys were wealthy and active in Arizona Republican politics, and the state was about to gain a new congressional district, though no one knew where.

It wasn't until after they'd married that the McCains realized how many years separated them - both had lied about their ages and learned the truth in the newspaper wedding notice. John McCain was 43 on his wedding day; while Cindy was three days shy of her 26th birthday.

Why not Arizona?

As McCain became familiar with the workings of the Senate, he also began thinking about the next phase of his career.

McCain's senator friends said that he was fascinated by the workings of the Senate - how legislation was crafted and alliances formed. And he wrote in his memoir that his years on Capitol Hill taught him how much power legislators had to shape military policy.

"He really began to grasp not just the kind of fundamentals of politics, which I think he knew something about, but the actual tools of politics and how the toolbox works," said Joe McCain, his brother.

According to Cindy McCain, John McCain failed a critical flight physical that would have precluded him from getting a carrier command assignment, the obvious next step in his ascension in the military. In retrospect, McCain said, he thinks he might have made admiral if he had stayed in the Navy. But his friends at the time said he was certain he would not. McCain put in for retirement in 1981 and finished his Navy career just as he learned that his father had died.

McCain said he consulted with his senator friends about the wisdom of a congressional run. His marriage to Cindy had provided him with one necessary prerequisite: a place to run from. Though he had never lived in Arizona - as a Navy brat and career officer, he had never lived any place but Washington for very long - the fast-growing state would be adding a third congressional district, and his new wife's family knew the state's power brokers.

Cohen, a Republican, put McCain in touch with Jay Smith, a political consultant who was well versed in Arizona politics. McCain announced his plans to run for Congress the next year.

"I was impressed," Smith said. "I thought he was very knowledgeable, and I loved his wittiness, but whenever anybody tells me they're going to move to a state and run for office the next cycle, I have a little bit of a problem believing it's a viable plan. I remember I kept asking him which district, and he said, 'I don't know. We'll figure it out when we get there.' "

McCain moved to Arizona and took a job working for his wife's father. His job was ostensibly in public relations, and it provided a good pretense for traveling around the state and giving speeches. As it turned out, the state's new district was in Tucson, too far from the Hensleys' Phoenix base. Then McCain got his political break. In January 1982, John Rhodes Jr., the longtime Republican congressman from Mesa, announced his retirement. McCain called Cindy from the press conference and told her to start looking for a house in the district.

McCain was little known and faced three other Republicans in the primary, so he and Cindy started knocking on doors.

"The difficult part was making sure that people got to know my husband, and the only way we knew how to do that was to do what we both did - we walked door to door," she said.

According to Smith, the McCains visited the homes of more than 10,000 Republican voters, working long days in the heat of the Arizona summer.

But the strategy worked: McCain eked out a victory in the primary, then easily defeated his opponent in the general election

"To this day, it was the hardest campaign we have ever run," Cindy McCain said.

But if McCain's goal was to enter a new phase of public service, Vietnam still intruded into the race. The moment most observers remember was when McCain lost his temper during a debate. One of his opponents repeated the common charge that McCain, the Arizona newcomer, was a carpetbagger.

"Listen pal," he replied. "I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world.

"I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."

------ End of article

By MARGOT SANGER-KATZ

Monitor staff

Single page