Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Ronald Kessler's excellent piece on Senator John McCain's erratic and explosive temper is 100% dead on target. As someone who has known McCain for 32 years, I can unequivocally state that he should be nowhere near the Oval Office.
His behavior through the years tells us all we need to know: he is a spoiled brat-turned adult who demeans people who dare to disagree with him; he has an explosive temper that can erupt on a nanosecond's notice; he might tell you something one day and then deny it the next; he is a political chameleon who is enabled by the so-called Main Stream Media; and his former POW status has allowed him to get away with things - i.e. the Keating Five Scandal - that others would have gone to jail for.
In sum, McCain is a disaster waiting to happen.
In 1990-1991 I had the great privilege to meet and ultimately befriend retired Air Force Colonel Ted Guy. Ted had been a POW in Vietnam for over six years - after being shot down and captured in Laos and driven on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi.
Ted became famous as the war ended as he tried to bring changes against several of his fellow U.S. POWs who he thought had cooperated with the North Vietnamese while in captivity; after coming home in 1973 his superiors decided not to press charges. But Ted was forever branded a "real hard ass" because of this incident.
For a while Ted was the Senior Ranking Officer (SRO) in - I believe - The Plantation (a POW camp on the outskirts of Hanoi) in which John McCain was also being held.
The SRO kept the chain of military order among the POWs; they took orders from him and kept discipline that way.
When I got to know Ted Guy, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on POWs was being organized; McCain was named a member. Ted Guy's thoughts about McCain? "John was a good troop in camp."
Ted Guy - since repatriation in 1973 - had discounted any chance that living U.S. POWs were left behind in Vietnam after the January 27, 1973 Paris Peace Agreements.
In fact, by his own admission, Ted often became gruff with MIA family members who asked him if their loved one might have been left behind in captivity. "I told them there was no chance and they needed to get a life."
This was the same message many of the former POWs were delivering to relatives of the thousands of men who did not come home in Operation Homecoming: "Forget it ... we are the only living men ... give it up and move on with your lives." Of course, that was easy for them to say: they had come home!
The U.S. Government never officially briefed the returning POWs about the egregious violations of the Paris Peace Accords - by both Hanoi and Washington DC.
Washington refused to pay the $4.25 billion President Nixon secretly promised in a February 1, 1973 letter to Premier Pham Van Dong - and kept hidden from the Congress for three years; Hanoi failed to release the other group of 600 U.S. POWs they were holding as an insurance policy against these funds.
If the truth had been told to our returning heros, they would probably have led the charge for the return of their comrades; but they were not told. Instead they were sent out to America's heartland as the war heros we so desperately needed - McCain and Ted Guy included.
Except that Ted Guy read all the new revelations that began surfacing in the 1980's; by 1991 he had seen enough. "I was lied to," he told me. "I am now certain we knowingly left men behind in captivity."
Ted also got a fellow former POW, Terry Uyeyama, to join our little ‘group' as we went around DC trying to get the U.S. Government to reverse policy and negotiate for the living men still being held in Vietnam and Laos.
Then McCain entered the picture.
As the Senate Committee heated up - and more and more new information surfaced showing that indeed we did leave men behind held against their will in Vietnam and Laos - McCain began a long and vicious campaign to discredit and shoot down any new information or anyone advocating that the truth about our POWs be made public. Thus emerged for many to see the mean and ugly side of John McCain.
Ted Guy, his old Senior Ranking Officer and friend and admirer, soon changed his mind about McCain and questioned the truthfulness and emotional stability of his former POW veteran.
Sadly, Ted Guy died of leukemia 7 years ago. A healthy Ted Guy today could have and would have stood up and told the truth about John McCain - and had the former-POW status to take McCain on.
McCain these days goes unchecked. Ron Kessler has opened the topic of McCain's dangerous temper to further public scrutiny.
In sum, John McCain is not the man for the presidency. Yes, he would beat Hillary one on one. And we can't have her either.
But before everyone rushes to sign up for McCain's campaign, let's take a break and learn more about McCain the man and his character.
Once you get to know this man, you will agree: he must be defeated by a real Reagan conservative for the GOP nomination.
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