Sun Aug 17, 5:03 PM Pacific • posted by Jed Lewison
McCain And Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the Dirt" Story
Image From McCain's Ad
Either McCain ripped his "Cross in the Dirt" story off or Solzhenitsyn and the two of them had nearly the exact same experience. Three kossacks explore the details, here, here, and here.
If it was stolen, I wonder McCain made it up himself, or if Mark Salter came up with it, and somehow convinced McCain it was true?
Andrew Sullivan asks the right question:
As he tells it today, it was the pivotal moment in his struggle to survive in the Hanoi Hilton. And yet, in his first thorough account of his time in captivity, in 1973, the story is absent. ... I have one simple question: when was the first time that McCain told this story?
As for whether or not there's precedent for McCain fabricating POW stories, consider the fact that he claimed that he became a fan of ABBA's Dancing Queen before his capture (Dancing Queen came out two years after his release), and consider his convenient swapping of the Green Bay Packers with the Pittsburgh Steelers in another POW story when he was in eastern PA.