Posted by Jed Lewison on Mon Aug 18, 2008 at 2:13 AM Pacific

The Evidence That McCain Stole Solzhenitsyn's Story

I'm working on a video on the "Cross in the Dirt" story and as I started to put my thoughts together on the facts of the matter, I realized I ought to post them -- both to share what I know and to find out what what I don't know (but should).

For starters, here's precedent for McCain distorting his history as a POW and for plagiarizing material.

1. During a June visit to Pittsburgh, he retold a POW story involving what he said was his favorite football team, but swapped out the Packers in favor of the hometown favorite Steelers.
2. He recently defended his preference for ABBA's "Dancing Queen" by citing his POW experience, saying that he has not been interested in music published since then. Dancing Queen wasn't published until two years after he returned from Vietnam.
3. In a recent speech on Georgia, McCain plagiarized at least three passages from Wikipedia's history of the country.

As for the story itself, the details of McCain's version of Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the Dirt" story don't add up. Specifically:

1. As first reported by kos diarist rickrocket, McCain's story is nearly identical to a story told by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
2. In McCain's version of the story, a guard who had befriended him later drew the cross in the ground.
3. According to McCain's 1973 retelling of his experience, there was only one guard who he considered human, and that guard befriended him in 1969. (kos diarist Calouste made this connection, which extends into the next two points.)
4. This means that McCain's Christmas story would have taken place in 1969.
5. Between when he met that guard and Christmas of 1969, McCain changed prisons. Unless the guard followed him to the new prison, McCain's story is not true.

There is also a ton of circumstantial evidence raising doubts about McCain's story:

1. In McCain's early stories about his POW years, he made no mention of the story.
2. At a 1974 prayer breakfast arranged by Ronald Reagan, McCain did not tell the Solzhenitsyn story. He told a completely different one about a prisoner scratching a prayer into a wall. It is unimaginable that he would not have told the "Cross in the Dirt" story if it were true. (kos diarist TomP linked to another version of the prayer breakfast story, but the link was a dead link.)
3. There is no evidence McCain ever told this story before 1999.
4. McCain's story has shifted subtly over the years since he first told it in 1999. (His most recent written version is here.)
5. McCain (or, more likely, his ghost writer Mark Salter) is a huge fan of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

Am I missing anything major?