John Edwards Sinks To A New Low....Even For A Politician!

McCain recalls that both he and Cindy initially misled each other about their ages. McCain made himself a little younger, and Cindy made herself a little older. They found out their real ages when the local paper published them. McCain was 43, Cindy 25.

"So our marriage," McCain cracks, "is really based on a tissue of lies."

Early in the courtship, McCain called Cindy from Beijing, where he was traveling with a Senate Foreign Relations Committee contingent. Cindy was in the hospital recuperating from minor knee surgery. She thanked him for the lovely flowers in her room, sent from "John."

What McCain didn't tell Cindy was that he hadn't sent the flowers. They were from another John, who lived in Tucson.

"I never thanked him," Cindy notes with a grin.

After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way.

McCain needed a divorce from Carol, his wife of 14 years from whom he was separated. After McCain's dramatic homecoming from Vietnam, the couple grew apart. Their marriage began disintegrating while McCain was stationed in Jacksonville. McCain has admitted to having extramarital affairs.

"If there was one couple that deserved to make it, it was John and Carol McCain," author Robert Timberg wrote in John McCain: An American Odyssey. "They endured nearly six years of unspeakable trauma with courage and grace. In the end it was not enough. They won the war but lost the peace."

In February 1980, less than a year after he met Cindy, McCain petitioned a Florida court to dissolve his marriage to Carol, calling the union "irretrievably broken."

Bud Day, a lawyer and fellow POW, handled the divorce proceedings.

"I thought things were going fairly well, and then it just came apart," Day later recalled. "That happened to quite a few. . . . I don't fault (Carol), and I don't really fault John, either."

In his book Worth the Fighting For, McCain offers his own post-mortem on his failed marriage. He "had not shown the same determination to rebuild (his) personal life" as he had to excel in his naval career.