Overcoming scandal, moving on

Dan Nowicki, Bill Muller

The Arizona Republic

Mar. 1, 2007 10:41 AM

CHAPTER VIII: OVERCOMING SCANDAL, MOVING ON

For many politicians, the Keating Five scandal would have been too much to overcome.

Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., declined to seek a fourth Senate term in 1994.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., refused to give up.

He employed a dual strategy. He would make himself accessible to any reporter anywhere who wanted to talk about the Keating Five, and he wouldn't let the controversy detract from his work as a senator.

McCain grimly marched about the country, struggling to clear his name.

"I have to say, it was not an easy time," said Torie Clarke, McCain's former press secretary. "But because of the strategy he decided to pursue . . . nobody had time to sit around and feel sorry for themselves."

McCain's hobnobbing with the press had an unexpected side effect. Reporters started to like him.

McCain always returned phone calls. He showed up for his television appearances. He was willing to go off the record to help reporters unearth certain stories. He answered questions bluntly, without much political tap dancing.

For Beltway reporters bored with bureaucrats, McCain was fresh, new and different.

"Everybody in town," Clarke said, "from the makeup artist at the local news station to the producers and directors, every reporter and every editor, loves working with John McCain because he does not stand on ceremony; he has no airs."

Going into the 1992 election, some thought McCain was in trouble and not just because of Keating.

President Bush was dropping in the polls and would lose that year to Democrat Bill Clinton.

McCain's Democratic opponent was Claire Sargent, a Phoenix community activist.

Former Republican Gov. Evan Mecham also was running for the Senate as an independent despite having been impeached and removed from office in 1988.

Mecham, a divisive and controversial figure in Arizona politics, nursed a grudge against McCain, who had joined other Arizona GOP establishment figures, including former Sen. Barry Goldwater, in calling for Mecham's resignation. (And "for which I earned the lasting enmity of some of his supporters," McCain would later note.)

Some conservative voters remained fiercely loyal to Mecham. Certain state lawmakers central to the impeachment proceedings - notably Arizona House Speaker Joe Lane, R-Willcox, and Senate President Carl Kunasek, R-Mesa - lost their seats in the immediate aftermath. (Ed Buck, the well-known activist behind a drive to recall Mecham, considered running against McCain but decided against it.)

Some Republicans worried that Mecham could act as a spoiler and throw the Senate seat to the Democrats. The McCain campaign initially sought to block Mecham from the ballot.

But McCain bounced back in 1991. Soon after the Persian Gulf War broke out, McCain was in demand. The phone began ringing off the hook the day POWs were taken.

"The Today Show called, and we started on The Today Show at four-something in the morning," said Scott Celley, a former aide. "The last thing I remember him being on was Australian Nightline, which was done here at Channel 10, a few blocks away, at close to 11 p.m. He was on television or the radio every minute of that day."

McCain became a regular on public-affairs shows, using his expertise as a former Navy pilot and POW. He quickly became a national authority on foreign affairs.

The din of the Keating Five began to lessen. McCain stayed on message, and the scandal gradually faded from the public consciousness.

The tough re-election fight McCain dreaded never panned out.

Sargent never mounted much of a campaign, though she did briefly draw national attention after making a slightly off-color observation.

"I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts," Sargent joked. "After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough."

A few sparks did fly between McCain and the ever-combative Mecham, who also happened to be a former prisoner of war held by the Germans during World War II. At a news conference, Mecham accused McCain of "selling out his fellow POWs" and participating in a government coverup concerning U.S. servicemen abandoned in Southeast Asia.

McCain called Mecham's allegation "the kind of contemptuous lie which the people of Arizona have sadly come to expect in any of Mecham's political campaigns."

It made for entertaining political theater, but Mecham ultimately had little impact on the ballot-box results. His day in Arizona politics had passed.

Even in a race split three ways, McCain swept up 56 percent of the votes to clinch his second term. Mecham finished behind Sargent.

"The pictures of me cavorting on a Bahamian beach with Charlie that I had anticipated seeing in Arizona newspapers never made an appearance in the campaign," McCain reflects in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For. "(Fellow Keating Five member) John Glenn also was re-elected."

In 1995, The Nightingale's Song lionized McCain. The book examined the military and political careers of McCain and four other Annapolis graduates: Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Oliver North and James Webb, who in 2006 would win a hard-fought race against Sen. George Allen, R-Va.

In anticipation of McCain's 2000 presidential run, author Robert Timberg spun the McCain portion of The Nightingale's Song into its own book. John McCain: An American Odyssey still stands as the most authoritative McCain biography on the shelves.

Timberg penned this coda about the Keating Five:

"Stripped of the veneer of sleaze that coated the affair, McCain's defense of his actions was solid and credible. It didn't matter. The Keating Five label endured, shabby journalistic shorthand that made up in simplemindedness what it lacked in precision."

On Election Night 1992, the triumphant McCain told The Arizona Republic: "I think this puts the issue behind me, yes, politically."

By 1996, McCain's image had recuperated to the point where the vice presidential candidate chatter resumed. This time, McCain was a rumored front-runner to be Bob Dole's running mate before Dole chose Jack Kemp in his race against Clinton and Al Gore. McCain that year had strongly supported the short-lived White House bid by his friend Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. He even served as Gramm's national campaign chairman.

The Keating Five scandal, which never was easy to understand or explain, wasn't even much of a factor in McCain's 2000 presidential bid and barely comes up anymore.

McCain knows it will never disappear altogether.

"Despite my recovery, the Keating Five experience was not one that I have walked away from as easily as I have other bad times," McCain wrote in 2002. "Twelve years after its conclusion, I still wince thinking about it and find that if I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important, something that was sacrificed in the pursuit of gratifying ambitions, my own and others', and that I might never possess again as assuredly as I once had."

'I'm Cindy, and I'm an addict'

By the early 1990s, McCain's political rehabilitation seemed complete, but the Keating Five fallout would continue to overshadow his personal life and affect his relationship with the local media.

In August 1994, a group of Valley journalists received an unusual phone call from Jay Smith, McCain's political strategist.

They were offered an exclusive story in exchange for agreeing to certain terms. They would attend individual interview sessions Aug. 19 and sit on the story until Aug. 22. The five journalists - three print reporters, a television reporter and a radio reporter - agreed.

One by one, they went to the McCain home, where they heard an incredible story.

Cindy McCain, 40, told them that she had been a drug addict for three years. From 1989 to 1992, as the Keating Five made headlines, she was addicted to Percocet and Vicodin. Worse, she had stolen pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a relief organization that she founded to aid Third World countries.

"More than anything, I wanted to be able to face my children, for them to know I wasn't lying to them," she said at the time. "They're too young to fully understand right now, but someday they will."

Cindy blamed two back surgeries and the Keating Five scandal - a blend of physical and emotional pain - for hooking her on drugs.

Things started to unravel when a Drug Enforcement Administration audit found irregularities in the charity's records, prompting an investigation, Cindy told the reporters.

In 1992, as the Keating affair surfaced again during McCain's run for a second Senate term, Cindy's parents confronted her about her drug use.

What had been clear to Cindy's parents was lost on McCain, who said he had not noticed his wife's addiction.

"I was stunned," McCain said at the time. "Naturally, I felt enormous sadness for Cindy and a certain sense of guilt that I hadn't detected it. I feel very sorry for what she went through, but I'm very proud she was able to come out of it. For her, it was like the Keating affair had been for me, a searing experience, and we both came out stronger. I think it has strengthened our marriage and our overall relationship."

The late Phoenix Gazette political columnist John Kolbe helped break the story.

His Aug. 25, 1994, column was headlined and led with a powerful quote:

"I'm Cindy, and I'm an addict."

Kolbe also drew a straight line between Cindy's drug predicament and the Keating Five stress.

"As the family bookkeeper, she was unable to find records of her reimbursement to Keating for three vacation trips to the Bahamas on Keating's corporate plane," Kolbe wrote. "The apparent lack of reimbursement - which wasn't resolved until the records turned up months later - became a key ethical charge against the senator."

Cindy explained to Kolbe: "It wasn't my fault, but at the time, you couldn't convince me. (Senate Ethics Committee Chairman) Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) even told me it was my fault."

To avoid prosecution on drug charges, she would enter a federal diversion program.

In telling her story, Cindy got choked up when she told of federal drug agents knocking on her door, asking about missing pills.

The reporters were sympathetic.

Cindy had always been physically fragile. She suffered two miscarriages early in her marriage to McCain until doctors determined she was a "DES baby." Cindy's mother had been given the drug diethylstilbestrol during her pregnancy.

During the 1940s and 1950s, DES was thought to prevent miscarriages. Instead, it caused numerous birth defects, including deformed uteruses in female offspring. Doctors finally detected the problem and took special precautions during Cindy's third pregnancy.

Even so, there were long separations because Cindy could not travel while pregnant. Besides, she preferred Arizona to Washington.

Cindy told the reporters that she finally entered The Meadows, a drug-treatment center in Wickenburg, and went to anti-dependency meetings twice a week.

In 1993, she said, a hysterectomy ended the nagging back pain that had driven her to the painkillers.

So why go public a year later?

"If what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile," she said. "They should know it's OK to be scared. It's OK to talk about it. And there's nothing wrong with staying home, carpooling and potty-training a 3-year-old."

Given Cindy's heartfelt confession, the handpicked journalists did what Smith expected. They painted Cindy as the victim, a courageous soldier beating back the devil of drug addiction.

"As surely as John McCain was a casualty of Vietnam, Cindy is a casualty of political life," Kolbe quoted an unnamed "friend" as saying. "But now she is fighting to save herself."

But the select group of reporters had not heard the whole story. It became apparent the next week, as more details came out.

The McCain camp had organized the interviews to head off a more negative story that was pending publication in the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times. That piece centered on a former American Voluntary Medical Team employee who accused Cindy McCain in a lawsuit of ordering him to conceal "improper acts" and "misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding."

The accuser was Tom Gosinski, whom the charity had fired in 1993. He had tipped the DEA to check out Cindy's organization. He filed the lawsuit as a warning shot. His real allegation was that Cindy McCain had fired him because he "knew too much" about her drug use.

The details were in a 212-page report from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office that was about to become public when McCain arranged the interviews.

Ironically, County Attorney Rick Romley entered the fray at the request of McCain lawyer John Dowd, who alleged that Gosinski was extorting the McCains by offering to settle the case for $250,000.

By asking Romley to investigate, Dowd helped to create a public record that otherwise would not have existed.

The invitation-only interviews were not exactly a suave PR move. By playing favorites with the disclosure of the news, McCain created hard feelings among the Valley journalists who were not invited. They aggressively chased the story.

McCain refused to talk to reporters who were not invited to Cindy's private interviews.

Dowd, who would later defend Gov. Fife Symington, put it plainly to a Republic reporter who called him for comment:

"You're not going to talk to Cindy. You're not going to talk to me. You're not going to talk to anybody associated with us. Have you got the message?"

Then he hung up.

Meanwhile, new allegations were surfacing, feeding the press frenzy for fresh angles, especially in light of McCain's silence.

Gosinski alleged that Cindy had asked him to lie to make it easier for her to adopt a baby from Bangladesh.

Backed up by court documents, the McCains characterized the adoption (from one of Mother Teresa's orphanages) as "proper in every respect." They noted that the adoption probably saved the abandoned infant's life, as her cleft palate would not have allowed her to survive in Bangladesh.

In an Aug. 26, 1994, response to a Phoenix Gazette news article about the adoption, McCain accused the newspaper of trying to "tarnish a story of kindness with the brush of scandal."

"I will accept a great deal in public life, but I cannot accept this," McCain wrote. "I ask the reporters of The Gazette and every reporter to please take a moment to consider whether it is really in the people's interest to make a family - any family - suffer in public because they chose to live some of their happiness and their sorrow in private."

Gosinski's credibility started to slip. In Romley's report, several charity staffers said Gosinski had privately threatened to blackmail Cindy if she ever fired him.

Ultimately, Gosinski's lawsuit was dropped, and he was never prosecuted.

Cindy maintains she has avoided drugs since the scandal, which she candidly revisited in a 1999 Dateline NBC interview.

"I have done good things, and the best thing I've ever done is go into recovery and stay drug-free," she said on the TV show.