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.
Advertisement 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
feeds instead
