Andrew Sullivan and others have dissected the history of John McCain’s story about the prison guard drawing the cross in the sand, documenting how McCain didn’t start telling the story until 1999, years after recounting his prison camp experiences without that detail, and only after Chuck Colson, Jesse Helms, and Billy Graham popularized a similar story from Alexander Solzhenitsen’s The Gulag Archipelago. Greg Sargent finds a Solzhenitsyn biographer who says that John McCain — or his friend and co-author, Mark Salter — couldn’t have cribbed the tale of the prison guard drawing a cross in the sand with his toe from Solzhenitsyn because no such thing ever actually happened to Solzhenitsyn during his time in the Soviet gulag. Even so, the mystery remains: is the story true? Did McCain plagiarize it from someone else?
If McCain’s making the story up, then he’s risked telling a lie for very little gain. I’ve been hearing him recycle the anecdote on the campaign trail for about a year and a half now, the first time in his little-noticed appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network in March 2007, nakedly designed to prove his Christian credentials around the time he announced his candidacy. He tells it to other audiences he thinks want to hear about his religion — like the Values Voters Summit last year, even though the crowd was half asleep during his speech, and most recently at Rick Warren’s forum. But I have yet to talk to an evangelical or other religious person — whether someone in a leadership position or a rank and filer — who is impressed with the story. Every last one has told me, in so many words, that they want to hear about McCain’s faith, not someone else’s.
It would be hard to prove that the story is false — there are only two witnesses, after all, and one of them is McCain — although evidence that someone else recounted an identical experience first could be compelling. Even if he’s not making it up (but especially if he is), his continued retelling of it shows just how much he disrespects the evangelical base that, despite recognizing how it’s been used by the Republican Party, continues to throw its support his way.
–Sarah Posner