Monday, August 18, 2008

Mark Salter: McCain Told Me the "Cross in the Dirt" Story   [Byron York]

I just got off the phone with Mark Salter, John McCain's closest aide whom some in the blogosphere are suggesting made up, or embellished, or did something to create the "cross in the dirt" story.  Salter told me that he absolutely did not do that.  This is how it came about, according to Salter:

Salter told me that when he was working with McCain on Faith of Our Fathers, "I would sit down with him about six or seven o'clock at night when the Senate was in session and interview him for a couple of hours over the course of a year."  Salter says McCain and his fellow POWs were guided by an ethic of "faith in God, faith in country, and faith in each other."  As part of the book research, Salter says, he said to McCain, "Give me personal experiences about all three categories.  So he talked about a couple of Christmas services that they had, the event known as the 'church riot,' and the punishment cell.  And he told me the 'cross in the dirt' story, which we used in the book and in speeches."

When I asked about questions of whether McCain used the story publicly before the book was published, Salter said, "McCain never told this story?  In what?  In a magazine piece.  We did a book about his prison experience.  It was 120,000 words.  There are many, many stories in that book that I bet never appeared in U.S. News and World Report."  

As for assertions that the "cross in the dirt" story was a "pivotal" experience in McCain's time as a POW, Salter said, "That's just plain bulls—t.  His pivotal experience was his refusal of early release and the three or four days of torture he took for it, his confession, and his attempted suicide.  That was his pivotal experience.  He's never represented [the "cross in the dirt" story] to be that."

08/18 05:37 PMShare