Cindy McCain, the woman who suddenly found herself playing second fiddle to sexy Sarah Palin in public, wasn’t around during young John McCain’s many drunken escapades and relentless sexual predations in his less than stellar career at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. The woman he met and married first was named Carol, a former fashion model who then left her husband and joined John with her two children, soon to become impregnated once more by the, er, war hero-in-waiting.

In the September issue of CounterPunch magazine, co-Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair relate how, while Carol was carrying his child, John grew restive, began having affairs and became a fixture on the party circuit. By end-1966, McCain volunteered for active service as a bomber pilot in Vietnam where he was shot down and made a prisoner of war. [We’ll focus on his Vietnam sojourn in Part II next week.]

Meanwhile Carol brought up their three children. During Christmas 1969, while visiting her parents, Carol drove her car to deliver presents, slid off the icy road, hit a tree, and was hurled through the windshield. Badly hurt, she lay in the snow for several hours before being discovered.

The accident crushed her hip and mangled her legs so badly that surgeons had to remove large sections of her leg bones, shortening her by 5 inches and leaving her with a limp and in more or less permanent pain, say Cockburn and Clair. She refused to send word to McCain, saying "he’s got enough problems." At that point, it was to Texas billionaire Ross Perot that McCain’s mother turned to for help, and Perot stepped in to pay Carol’s medical bills. Incidentally, poor Carol was completely airbrushed out of McCain’s "compelling story" at the recent Republican Convention, even while her three children trooped onstage to complete the Convention’s ‘family tableau’. [Some family, some tableau!]

Tall and slender when she saw John off to Vietnam, Carol was five inches shorter, in a wheelchair and using a catheter when he returned home in 1973 and saw her for the first time in seven years. John privately told friends the sight of her had "appalled" him. The CounterPunch editors quote John’s friend Robert Timberg as saying, "John started carousing and running around with women."

Journalist Sharon Churcher, writing in the London Daily Mail on June 8 this year, quoted Ted Sampley, a Special Forces veteran: "I’ve been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There’s something wrong with this guy. 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. Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better. This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He is a fake."

McCain recalls, "My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear."

Ross Perot told Churcher he now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel - even by the standards of modern politics. "McCain is the classic opportunist", said Perot. "He’s always reaching for attention and glory. After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. The rest is history."

It was at a cocktail party in Honolulu in 1979 that McCain, then 42, met the 24-year-old Cindy Hensley, an heiress to her father’s beer distribution empire in Phoenix. Cindy recalls, "He kind of chased me around the hors d’oeuvres table. I was trying to get something to eat, and I thought, ‘This guy’s kind of weird.’ I was kind of trying to get away from him."

McCain pursued Hensley, inviting her to Washington DC, started an affair with Cindy and suddenly told a stunned Carol that he was leaving her. McCain began living with Cindy in January of 1980. He divorced Carol in April of that year and married Cindy a month later.

JoAnn Wypijewski, writing in The Nation, noted: "John, having boosted his image and his net worth via a marriage vow, soon reverted to the pattern of insults and macho-egotism that has typified most of his life. He denigrated Cindy’s education at USC as a tour through ‘the University of Spoiled Children’. On the campaign trail in McCain’s 1992 Senate bid, when Cindy playfully twirled John’s hair and said, "You’re getting a little thin up there", he exploded, "At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***," a one-two punch hurled in front of three journalists and aides but unreported except in Cliff Schecter’s 2008 book, The Real McCain." [John’s excuse to the journalists: it had been a long day.]

Cockburn and Clair write: "According to two emergency room physicians in Phoenix, interviewed by CounterPunch, and who tell us they don’t want their names used, it was at this time that Cindy sought medical attention in the Phoenix area for injuries consistent with physical violence: bruises, contusions and a black eye. There were at least two more visits for medical attention in the Phoenix area by her, with similar injuries, between 1988 and 1993.

"Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the period during which Cindy developed an addiction to opiate painkillers. She was taking 20 pills a day, with a physician at American Voluntary Medical Team [of which she was President] writing illegal prescriptions. When one of the employees discovered the illegal prescriptions and told the executive director, he was fired. He promptly alerted the Drug Enforcement Agency, which opened up an investigation. Cindy was rushed into a drug treatment center and went into a pretrial diversion program, thus escaping prosecution."

"CounterPunch has noticed that in recent weeks, when political circumstance brought them briefly together, Cindy had her arm in a sling and featured a bandaged wrist. The McCain campaign said it was repetitive handshaking disorder. Maybe. On the other hand, McCain publicly joked in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun this summer about how ‘I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago’."

Until the presidential campaign got going, Cindy was spending much of her time in San Diego with their daughter Bridgette. In 2007, asked by San Diego Magazine, "How many days a month do you see your husband now?", she replied, "Not many. Two or three, maybe."

I’m connecting the dots, recalling the New York Times’ lengthy exposé in February this year of McCain’s first White House run in 2000 when he got cozy with sexy blonde lobbyist Vicki Iseman, taking frequent corporate-jet flights together while she tried to ‘charm’ him into favouring the telecom companies she was representing.

So don’t say I didn’t make you privy to what’s going on the dirt-track that’s also called my mind: John McCain will still fancy feisty Sarah Palin an irresistible running mate well after this presidential campaign ends.

In Sarah, John’s found not his voice but his Viagra-substitute.