Cindy McCain Interview: A Hero's Heart

The wife of Republican presidential nominee John McCain opens up about her family, the campaign, her humanitarian work and overcoming tough times.

The way Cindy McCain tells it, when her husband finally got around to asking his wife whether he should run for president in '08-"Of course, he asked me last''-she was ready for him with a considered response: Uh-uh. No. Having been through it before, she wasn't sure she could stand any more good times like the South Carolina primary of 2000, when a flood of "McCain has a black love child" phone calls and flyers proved there's no biographical fact that can't be turned into a political liability. (The smear referred to their then-eight-year-old daughter, Bridget, whom Cindy brought home as a baby from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh.) If anything, a series of life-changing events since 2000 had only made the senator's wife more hesitant to re-up. In the two years before her husband decided to run again, Cindy had suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak clearly for several months and had also made the difficult decision to allow her younger son to enlist in the Marines-at 17, he still needed her permission. And, she adds, "I had just lost my mother too."

In all likelihood, no sane spouse ever answered the should-I-run question with "Great idea! Do you want to drag the dirty laundry out front, or shall I?" But Cindy McCain, retiring by nature, has never been fully at ease on the public stage. Little wonder, given that her formative experience in politics was arriving in Washington at age 28 with her new congressman husband only to find herself shut out by friends of the first Mrs. John McCain. These weren't just any old friends, either. Carol McCain had been taken under the wing of Nancy Reagan, who gave her a job in Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign and, later, in his White House. After one frosty year in Reagan's (and Carol's) Washington, Cindy moved back to Phoenix, in 1984, and ever since has been doing what she calls "this bicoastal thing," adding that John is "home only on weekends.''

So why is she on the hustings at all? Because she believes in her husband, of course, and because-as the daughter, wife, and mother of military men-she is a good soldier herself. She has often said that though John left the service long ago, she still thinks of herself as a Navy wife, raising four kids mostly on her own while her husband was deployed to Washington. When I run this view of the candidate's wife past her husband's best friend, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, he says, "You got it. This wouldn't be her first choice." (He also suggests that Cindy saw something of her father in John: "Her dad got shot down during World War II. Cindy must be attracted to guys who get shot down.'')

Now that she's signed on for another tour, she's marching through the campaign well defended, with her silk-lined armor and flawless hair and makeup a kind of protective shield. "Cindy dresses immaculately and looks like she could be on the cover of a magazine," Graham says, "so it's easy to stereotype her. But behind this very glamorous person is a very good person. She has a good heart and has gotten a thicker hide, but this doesn't come easy to her.''

Her press aide makes that clear enough by offering some unusual guidance before we sit down for an interview: Feel free to ask Mrs. McCain about her past addiction to pain pills, the aide tells me-everybody does that-but please don't upset her by mentioning a New York Times story linking her husband to a female lobbyist. (The story was deemed so unfair that it wound up helping the campaign, but five months later, it remains a sore spot with the candidate's wife.)

Physically, Cindy is much changed from 2000. She has grown out her ultrashort, spiky hairstyle. Although never heavy, she's sleeker, too; after losing 30 pounds, she wears size 0 jeans and complains of having trouble keeping weight on. She's also more skittish than I remember her being on the campaign bus during her husband's previous run, and she is extraordinarily guarded when we do talk, facing each other in two straight-backed chairs in the middle of an otherwise empty room in her husband's campaign office in Coronado, California: "There is no McCain temper; I've never seen it...He's as healthy as a horse and as young as one too...We never argue.'' Ever? "No, we do not argue.'' Even after she tells me her family spent the 4th of July weekend playing Wii Rock Band-"I grabbed the mic, but it was pretty pathetic''-and I ask what song she belted out, she stiffens at the question. "I'm not going to tell you,'' she says. Later it occurs to me that I've never been with her when her husband wasn't around; he is the one who always makes her laugh.

Her best friend, Phoenix real estate CEO Sharon Harper, explains that Cindy's "personality is really twofold; she's reserved and gentle but also strong and independent.'' On one hand, she is a cowgirl-literally, a former rodeo queen-who sleeps in tents on humanitarian missions, took up car racing after her stroke, and overcame her fear of flying by getting her pilot's license. But she's the rare cowgirl who stands in perfect fourth position after years of ballet and reflexively crosses her legs at the ankle.

At 54, Cindy sticks close to her husband on social occasions, even when the party is in her own home. In Phoenix, where she spent most of her adult life living across the street from her parents, she's known for being hard to know. Lindsey Graham mentions that "Cindy and I started bonding'' when her son Jimmy was serving in Iraq last year-in other words, almost a decade after Graham became a semipermanent fixture at the McCain cabin in Sedona.


Cindy Lou Hensley was lonely sometimes, growing up as an only child. As the daughter of Jim Hensley, who borrowed some money to buy an Anheuser-Busch beer distributor and turned it into one of the country's largest, she could have done anything with her life, or nothing. And though her husband has jokingly called her alma mater, USC, the University of Spoiled Children, she was drawn to the unglamorous field of special education.

At 24, she was on vacation with her parents, and on break from her new job teaching disabled teenage children of migrant farmworkers, when she met 42-year-old former POW John McCain at a reception in Honolulu. The McCains love telling the story of how they both fibbed about their ages that night; Cindy made herself four years older and John, four years younger. In a recent late-night TV appearance, Cindy told Jay Leno that "he kind of chased me around an hors d'oeuvres table'' that evening. "I was trying to get something to eat and I thought, You know, this guy's kind of weird."

McCain was married at the time but has freely admitted that long before meeting Cindy, he'd "started carousing and running around with women,'' as his friend and fellow Vietnam vet Robert Timberg wrote in John McCain: An American Odyssey. Carol McCain had been through a lot, waiting five and a half years for him to be released from captivity in Hanoi and barely surviving a car crash on the third Christmas Eve he was a prisoner. A former swimsuit model, she was much altered by the accident and has had trouble walking ever since. But she doesn't speak harshly of her former husband and doesn't seem to blame Cindy either. "I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else,'' she told Timberg in the only interview she has ever given on the subject.

Just over a month after the divorce was final (and after signing a prenup), John married Cindy, in May 1980, and went to work for her father, who helped him launch his political career. Speaking now about their emotional division of labor as a couple, his wife of 28 years is modest: "My husband is the strong, vivacious, energetic, charismatic, determined one in our family, and I think I bring stability. My husband does his thing, and I make sure we all stay together as a family.'' (Apparently, she's also in charge of the candlelight; when a reporter recently asked McCain to name the last romantic thing he'd done for his wife, his answer was, "Let's see … Over the weekend, we ordered out, which was nice. Chinese. Didn't have to entertain anybody. Didn't have to have a political conversation. Didn't have to ask anybody for money.'')

Three of their four children are grown now: Meghan, 23, works on her dad's campaign; Jack, 22, is a senior at the Naval Academy; Jimmy, 20, is home from Iraq and still in the Marines; and Bridget, at 17, is "looking forward to getting her driver's permit,'' according to her dad's campaign website. While raising them, Cindy also became deeply involved in international relief work that until recently had received relatively little attention. Accompanying her on a recent trip to Rwanda, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson noted admiringly that "Cindy McCain has had decades of personal contact with the suffering of the developing world. And in some future crisis or genocide, it might matter greatly to have a first lady who knows the smell of death."

Few women attain the financial independence that Cindy has had from the start, and she does not rely on her husband to help her make even the most important decisions. She surprised him at the airport with their daughter Bridget: "I found her at the orphanage with a serious cleft palate, and I realized at the airport that I couldn't give her up. I knew I didn't need to ask my husband. I got off the plane and I had her in my arms, and he was there and he said, 'Where's she going to go?' and I said, 'She's going to come to our house,' and he just looked at me and said, 'I knew that.'"

Years later, when she became addicted to painkillers after spinal surgery for two ruptured disks, she kept that from her husband too. It was her parents who noticed. She didn't tell John about her addiction until right before a story about a DEA investigation into her theft of pills from her medical charity hit the front pages. As part of the deal that Cindy made to avoid prosecution, she got into treatment, did community service, and paid a fine.

But the most striking thing isn't that Cindy kept the addiction from her husband-as she says, "That's what the drugs do to you; they make you hide''-but that she'd never let her husband see that she was in pain in the first place. "I didn't want to tell him, because he had so much on his plate,'' she says, adding that that was all part of her "trying to be perfect, the perfect mother, the perfect political spouse.'' And now? "The truth is, you do the best you can.''

Following her stroke in April 2004, Cindy went away for a few months by herself, to a condo on the beach here in Coronado, to recover. Just after the stroke, McCain's office issued a statement, quoting her doctor that the damage was minor: "Her speech is mildly affected, but she is otherwise intact.''

But she says now that there was nothing minor about it: "Right after I had the stroke, I was just lying there and I couldn't communicate, I couldn't talk, and I hadn't been able to say goodbye to my family. I was sure I was going to die. I could mumble, but I couldn't form words. I could hear it in my head, but I couldn't get it to come out.'' The stroke happened, she says, because she wasn't taking her blood pressure medication properly.

It's hard to see how she's pared back her schedule any since then. Even on the campaign trail, she's an active chairwoman of Hensley & Co., which she inherited after her dad died in 2000. She speaks daily with the company's CEO and also works closely with the CFO, 46-year-old Andy McCain, her stepson. Her wealth has been an issue in the campaign, both because she has refused to release her complete tax returns-she and her husband file separately-and because the information that is available catalogs the kind of holdings that the public seemed to hold against Teresa Heinz Kerry in 2004. Cindy is worth an estimated $100 million and has charged as much as $500,000 on her Amex card in a single month.

Then again, there wouldn't be a McCain campaign without her. "She has been very involved in this campaign on the business end, and that doesn't get talked about,'' Graham says. "When we hit a wall last summer, she helped get this thing reorganized financially,'' personally sitting down with the books.


Her campaign speeches rarely last more than a minute or two, but she has been quite effective on the attack, including against Michelle Obama. And Cindy neatly lays out the choice the country faces in November, suggesting that the most important difference between the two candidates is fiscal: "If you want less taxes and less government, then my husband's your man.''


The upside of being guarded is the gaffes you avoid. The downside is that's no way to let the country get to know you. Carl Anthony, a historian who has written extensively about first ladies, suggests that being too cautious is almost as risky as over-sharing. Voters do want to see "a certain degree of vulnerability,'' he says. We "most appreciate and support first ladies who are neither too blunt, undiplomatic, flippant, and aggressive-honest-nor too controlled, stiff, artificial, and passive-dishonest.'' Oh, and we have a few thoughts about how they should wear their hair.

On the question of whether there's any particular first lady she'd like to emulate, she is diplomatic in the extreme: all of them. "I kind of feel like I have a bit of every one of them in me. I see my protectiveness of my husband in Nancy Reagan,'' she begins, and "I see some of the humanitarian things that Laura Bush has done in me. I see something marvelous in all of them.'' Including Hillary Clinton? "Oh, yes! Oh, no, she was remarkable''-of course, she had better say that, given the number of Hillary fans who, polls show, are thinking about voting for her husband. In what way? "Her interest in our country, her interest in promoting education and children. She absolutely did marvelous things as first lady.''

When I ask whether she feels the way Clinton was treated during her presidential run could properly be characterized as sexist, however, she smiles and steps around that word. "I looked at it from the aspect of a family member. I'm proud of my husband for having run-and he's going to run-a clean, aboveboard, and, for lack of a better word, gentlemanly campaign,'' she says, suggesting perhaps that Barack Obama has not always done likewise. "Anytime you delve into personal issues, it's not good.'' In her experience, certainly, it hasn't been. But nothing is more personal than presidential politics. And no one knows that better than Cindy McCain.


See a photo slide show of the women at readersdigest.com/firstlady.