1190: Carol McCain
Former White House Visitor’s Office Director
Born: 1938, Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Carol attended college at the Centenary Junior College for Women in New Jersey.
She also worked as a model.
Carol had two children with her first husband*, however, she is best known for being the first wife of John McCain. With John she had a daughter, Sidney (he also adopted her two sons). While John was serving in the Vietnam War, Carol raised her three children as a single mother. After her husband was taken captive, Carol become very active in the POW/MIA movement.
In 1969, Carol was in a horrendous car accident that almost killed her. After two years and numerous surgeries, Carol’s mobility was permanently damaged, and she was four inches shorter than she had been before the accident.
Wikipedia goes into more detail about the accident, describing it thusly:
“While visiting family and friends in the Philadelphia area on Christmas Eve 1969, McCain skidded and crashed into a telephone pole as she was navigating an icy, snowy, isolated portion of Pennsylvania Route 320 near Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, driving alone.[3] She was thrown from her car into the snow, going into shock;[7] she thought she would never be seen and would die there.[3] Hours later she was found and taken to Bryn Mawr Hospital.[7] She suffered two smashed legs, a broken pelvis, broken arm, and a ruptured spleen.[3] She spent six months in the hospital and underwent 23 operations over the following two years in order to rebuild her legs with rods and pins, and had extensive physical therapy.[6][20] During this time, her daughter stayed with her parents in Landsdowne while her sons stayed with friends in Florida.[3]”
Her medical bills were paid for by politician Ross Perot. Carol did not tell her husband about the accident in the letters she wrote to him because she thought he already had enough to worry about as a POW.
After the Vietnam War ended, Carol and John became good friends with another power couple, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Carol became Nancy’s personal assistant, and helped campaign for the Reagans as Ronald ran for president in the 1980 election. After he won, Carol became the director of the White House Visitor’s Office and organized the Inaugural Ball. She also managed many of Reagan’s private and public social events during their time in office.
In 1987, Carol left the White House in order to become programming director of We the People 200, inc. The group was focused on celebrating the United States 200th anniversary of adopting the Constitution. By 1990 she had become a spokesperson for the event-planning company Washington Inc.
Carol and John divorced in 1980 because of John’s affair with his better-known next wife, Cindy (who was eighteen years younger than John). “John and Cindy obtained a marriage license in Arizona in early March 1980, four weeks before his divorce from Carol was final. They married six weeks later, on May 17,” (quote courtesy of People Magazine, article linked below).
Ross Perot, the man who had paid for Carol’s medical bills following her accident, had this to say about their divorce:
"After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain] and the rest is history."[23] (Quoted from her Wikipedia article).
When asked about it years later, Carol said this experience broke her heart. She said she was “blindsided” by it all and that she believed John’s attraction to Cindy was partly due to him wanting to be “young again.” Carol didn’t want the divorce and still loved her husband deeply at the time. One of her sons stated in an interview that the entire family was shaken up by the affair, but that in hindsight the signs were there because of the extremely high rates of divorce among people who used to be held as Prisoners of War.
As the years went on, the entire family healed from the trauma of the divorce and moved on. All three of Carol’s children became close to Cindy and remained close to John. Carol also seems to have moved on and let bygones be bygones.
She retired in 2003 and has stayed relatively out of the spotlight ever since. Carol did campaign from the sidelines for John’s 2008 presidential campaign, however.
*Sadly, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Carol and her first husband divorced because he was also unfaithful to her.
Sources:
https://www.lifestories.org/interviewees/carol-mccain
https://people.com/politics/john-mccain-daughter-sidney-first-wife-discuss-divorce/