In a 60 Minutes interview that was recorded March 4 and which aired March 9, John McCain pledged that he would be "doing the medical records thing with the media sometime in the next month or two."
(Forgive the 30-second pre-roll ad. The transcript is below. The relevant exchange is at 11:10. It's worth watching the whole interview. He's already flip-flopped on so many topics since that long-ago era of March, like on the topic of waterboarding.)
SCOTT PELLEY (Narr): At 71 years old, McCain's health has been an issue. After his presidential race in 2000, he was diagnosed with the most lethal form of skin cancer.
PELLEY: How's your health?
JOHN MCCAIN: It's excellent, excellent, thank you, and we'll be doing the medical records thing with the media sometime in the next month or two.
PELLEY: There has been some criticism that you have not released your medical records. You're saying in this interview that you're about to do that.
MCCAIN: Oh, I will do that in the next month or so, yeah.
PELLEY: Is it fair to say that at this point in time there's no sign of a recurrance of cancer?
MCCAIN: Oh no, no there's none.
As you might have noticed, he's missed his deadline. This is the third time he's missed his deadline.
But it turns out, he's not going to release his medical records at all. The reason he refers to this elusive event as "the medical records thing" is because this event will not be an actual releasing of records.
Instead, he will force a small number of his favorite reporters to play "Beat the Clock!" with his multi-thousand page medical history for 90 minutes. That's a farce. In 1999, before his operation, his medical records were 1,500 pages thick. Add another 300 pages or so and those select few reporters will have less than an absurd three seconds to read and memorize each page. Then, their memories can be freely challenged by the campaign, since reporters will have no way to prove their own claims. Other reporters will be allowed access to ... a teleconference.
Why can't he just scan in his medical records and post a PDF on his website?
Many doctors suspect that his skin cancer, already the deadliest form, was much more serious than has been reported. The primary reason is that his operation, the one that left that large mound on his cheek, took far longer than expected and was very extensive.
Since the 2008 campaign began, doctors not connected with Mr. McCain’s case have expressed intense interest in the extent of the face and neck surgery that he underwent on Aug. 19, 2000, at the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale in Arizona.
Some of these doctors have noted in e-mail messages and in comments to reporters that the surgery appeared to be so extensive that they were surprised his melanoma was not more serious — perhaps Stage III, which would give him a bleaker prognosis.
These doctors said they would be surprised to learn that such an operation would be performed without evidence that the melanoma had spread.
But a number of melanoma experts said in interviews that such an operation was understandable according to the medical standards of 2000 and that the extensive surgery did not necessarily imply Stage III melanoma.
According to that New York Times article from two months ago, that concerningly long operation lasted five and a half hours.
But back in 2001, his wife told Newsweek, "He was in surgery for about nine hours."
What really happened?
McCain won't let us know.