He'll be releasing everything about his repeated cancer surgeries. But he won't release his psychiatric records, which hold clues to the effect of his Vietnam captivity.
By Mark Benjamin
Salon composite / Reuters image
May 22, 2008 | Presidential candidate John McCain has survived three plane crashes, four melanomas, and more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, enduring torture and solitary confinement. There would be questions about his health and his fitness for the office he seeks even if he weren't turning 72 in August, and even if he weren't likely to be running against a man 25 years his junior.
On Friday, after repeated pledges to do so going back more than a year, the McCain campaign is set to release new information about the Arizona Republican's health history. The release, according to the campaign, will cover the year 2000 forward, a period when McCain had three of his four skin cancers removed, as well as lymph nodes and part of a salivary gland. It will not, however, include McCain's psychiatric records, which McCain allowed a select group of reporters to examine in 1999 but have never been released to the public. The new information is unlikely to quash recurring questions about McCain's age, his bouts with cancer, or how his experience in Vietnam may have affected his mind.
The most famous of McCain's physical ordeals began when a SAM missile knocked his A-4E Skyhawk out of the sky above Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967.
By then, McCain had already survived three other harrowing incidents involving airplanes (not counting the time he snapped some power lines in Spain by flying too low). Soon after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1958, McCain's plane dove into the water near Texas. Knocked unconscious, he woke up as the aircraft settled on the bottom and he swam to the surface. McCain ejected from another plane near the Maryland coast in December 1965 when the engine died. McCain was also lucky to escape with his life on July 29, 1967. He was sitting in the cockpit of his A-4E Skyhawk on the deck of the USS Forrestal off Vietnam when a missile on another plane accidentally discharged, striking his plane. He dove out of the cockpit through flames. Fire engulfed the Forrestal, nearly sinking her, and killing 134 men. McCain was hit with shrapnel in the legs and chest, but recovered.
Less than two months later, McCain was shot down during a mission over Hanoi. He ejected from the cockpit, breaking his right knee and both arms. Dragged from a lake by an angry crowd, he was bayoneted in the ankle and groin. Today McCain suffers from arthritis in his shoulders and knee, his records show, and he may need joint replacement surgery.
During the five and a half years of captivity that followed, McCain was held in solitary confinement for two years straight, inflicting psychological strain the senator has described as worse than a beating. He memorized the names of POWs, details of guards and interrogators and reconstructed books and movies in his mind. "It's an awful thing, solitary," McCain wrote in "Faith of My Fathers," his 1999 memoir. "I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me to a place in my mind from which I might fail to return."
What were perhaps McCain's darkest hours came in the summer of 1968, during three days of nearly continuous beatings and torture with ropes that left him in an interrogation cell with a broken arm, cracked ribs, broken teeth and lying in a puddle of his own blood and waste. He gathered enough strength to stand on a waste bucket and try, twice, to hang himself with his shirt. Both times guards disrupted his suicide attempts.
During McCain's first White House run, his unsuccessful battle with George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999 and 2000, he faced a whispering campaign from rivals that suggested his Vietnam ordeal had permanently damaged his psyche -- specifically, that his famed outbursts of temper might be a sign of something serious, like post-traumatic stress disorder.
It is well documented that the sort of treatment McCain endured can harm the mind. A 1989 study in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, one of many studies on the subject, showed that a third of American World War II prisoners of war met diagnostic criteria for PTSD fully 40 years after their release.
In 1999, McCain responded to the questions about his mental health by allowing selected reporters to peruse 1,500 pages of his health records dating back to his release from Hanoi in 1973. Reporters were not permitted to photocopy any of the documents. The reporters who looked at the records did not describe any mention of a PTSD diagnosis. However, they failed to note that it would have been impossible for McCain to receive such a diagnosis -- since the term "post-traumatic stress disorder" was not in use until seven years after McCain's release from captivity. The term first appeared in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.
There are behaviors associated with the candidate that would be consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD. Author Robert Timberg mentions McCain's intense explosions of anger --- a hallmark sign of lingering mental trauma from war -- in his book "John McCain: An American Odyssey." Timberg describes the episodes as "an eruption of temper out of all proportion to the provocation." Timberg, who McCain has said "knows more about me than I do," wrote that McCain's sudden fury is a result of Vietnam coming "back to haunt him." McCain has himself described having an adverse reaction to the sound of jangling keys, which reminds him of his Vietnam jailers. McCain also told doctors that during solitary confinement he had strayed pretty "far out" and had referred to himself as "mentally deteriorating."
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