"A Daily Kos diarist named rickrocket has determined that a story John McCain tells repeatedly, about a prison guard in Hanoi who drew a cross in the dirt one Christmas, bears a striking resemblance to an anecdote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's writings. It's been noted that McCain made no mention of this incident in a detailed account of his POW years that U.S. News published in 1973, and no one, so far, has found evidence of McCain telling the story before 1999 -- when his most formidable opponent for the GOP presidential nomination was a man who was making a concerted effort to court religious voters.
I just want to point out that there's a chapter specifically devoted to three Christmases of McCain's captivity in The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg's critically acclaimed 1995 book, which helped put McCain on the map as a political celebrity -- and the cross story does not appear. Nor does it appear anywhere else in the book.
The chapter is titled "'Tis the Season to Be Jolly." It says that on Christmas Eve 1968, a guard tried to compel McCain to attend a church service that was being staged for the benefit of visiting photographers. McCain decided "to ruin the picture," letting out a series of curses ("'Fu-u-u-u-ck you, you son of a #####!' shouted McCain, hoisting a one-finger salute whenever a camera pointed in his direction"). There's certainly no mention of a cross in the sand in this account."
No More Mister Nice Blog