Mrs. Maverick
By Nancy Gibbs/Sedona
Cindy McCain is sitting by the creek that runs through the McCains' ranch, under a sycamore tree that is equipped with a ceiling fan. The spread near Sedona, Ariz., has served as the family retreat for nearly a quarter-century, and right now, there's a lot to retreat from.
"Look," she says with a deep breath. "I understand what's at stake here and what I have to do. I've opened my life up. I'm not saying it's without frustration. I mean, I'm only human. I do the best I can. But there've been times I'd like to not answer." For the past 48 hours, stories have been breaking in great shuddering waves; one profile explores her beloved father's criminal record (he was a bootlegger before he was a fantastically successful beer distributor), which followed multiple accounts of her half sister's resentment of her and a furor over her husband's inability to account for how many houses they own. All this comes as she prepares to step out center stage in Minneapolis and help her husband woo the female voters who so far aren't on his team. "I'll show them what I'm about and hope for the best," she says with a serene, almost placid smile. "I believe in the good spirit of people, that they want to see the best in you and don't believe everything they read."
To watch her in her tailored suits, her hell on heels, you almost hear the assumptions snap into place. Google her name plus trophy wife, and you'll get something like 18,000 hits. Anyone tracking new lows in misogyny this year, who hated the treatment of Hillary and Michelle, should note that Cindy gets her share too, from sneers about Republican Barbie to the vicious dismissal of her as a product of a taxidermist.
So I understand how careful she is now, why her answers come out with all the edges sanded down. I ask her about her life and her role and what she hopes people take away from getting to know her better. "I'd like them to see the kind of relationship that my husband and I have," she says. "What I hope you'll hear from me is our commitment to continue putting our country first in every way." And it's hard to miss that the campaign's new slogan is embedded in her answer.
It's all the more striking when, practically midsentence, her tone and temperature totally change. We have seen Cindy McCain much more than we've heard her until now, and she has always benefited from the element of surprise. It's when she discusses her travels and work overseas that she sounds 20 years younger, eager and unscripted--a hint that, as First Lady, she would use the spotlight to advance her cause. Until very recently, she could just head off and do her thing, have a life far away from Washington intrigue: no cameras, no questions, with missions to Nicaragua, Kuwait, Vietnam, Afghanistan. This past Easter, she was touring minefields in Kosovo; she was in Rwanda in July and was about to fly to Georgia to meet with soldiers wounded in the Russian invasion and monitor refugee relief efforts. McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace previews the partnership the campaign will roll out in Minneapolis: "She's on the phone with the World Food Program; he's on the phone with [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili," she says. "It was a great picture of what they'll be like in the White House."
Cindy started messing with people's expectations long before she had so much as glanced in the direction of John McCain or public life. The junior Rodeo Queen with the gold Mercedes graduated from USC (University of Spoiled Children, her husband likes to call it) with a master's in special education and proceeded to teach children with Down syndrome and other disabilities in one of Phoenix's poorer schools. When she met a dashing war hero at a cocktail party in Hawaii, she was 24 but said she was three years older; he said he was four years younger. The McCains learned the truth of their 17-year age difference only when they applied for their marriage license, and they were wed just over a month after his divorce was final.
Her adventures overseas began early in their marriage. They were on vacation with another couple in 1984 in Truk Lagoon, Micronesia, when their friend had a minor accident that required stitches at the local hospital. Cindy and John, meanwhile, got a tour of the facility. "I couldn't believe what I saw," Cindy says. "I was looking at rats in the OR. I was looking at raw sewage everywhere. There were no beds. There was an X-ray machine with no film. There was no power half the time. I was so astounded by it that when I left, I said to the hospital director, 'Let me see what I can dig up at home. I have some friends in the medical industry.' I started sending supplies to this little hospital, and it really kind of grew from there." She founded her own charity, American Voluntary Medical Team, in 1988.
After a string of miscarriages, the couple went on to have three children, and the experience of becoming a mother, Cindy says, propelled her deeper into her relief work. In 1991, when she was touring Mother Teresa's orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she met an infant with a cleft palate so severe, the nuns weren't able to feed her properly, and they feared she couldn't be saved. Cindy decided to take the baby home with her to get treatment and concluded during the long flight that the child would be joining their family. She informed her husband only when she landed.
This is a bit easier, of course, when you are the multimillionaire daughter of one of the nation's largest Anheuser-Busch distributors. But she had her trials too: there was a series of spinal surgeries for a ruptured disk, which occurred just as her husband was fighting off charges that he had misused his influence on behalf of a contributor in the Keating Five scandal. Eventually, she later admitted, she was taking as many as 15 pain pills a day, including drugs she'd stolen from her charity. She wrestled with addiction for several years; it was her parents, not her husband, who saw that she had a problem, and she quit cold turkey. When a federal probe into her charity's missing drugs meant the whole thing would become public, she finally told her husband.
I wondered whether she had kept her secret from him out of shame or pride or the determination to make sure everything went smoothly when he came home on the weekends. "No," she says. She's had to talk about this over the years, but she looks away, clearly wishing she could skip it this time. "It was about my mistaken understanding of my relationship with my husband. He is my best friend. And I didn't go to him, and I didn't talk to him when I should have. I thought I didn't need to bother him; he was very busy. That was the wrong thing to assume or do."
She disputes the standard separate-lives narrative of the McCain marriage, though there have been signs of tension in the past. They decided to raise their children in Arizona, she says, because her roots there were deep and they could give the kids a normal childhood. He was home every weekend, she says, and now she's urgent, insistent: "I want people to understand, he was not a father who was from afar. He was very involved with his kids and in our relationship. I felt like we saw more of him by living out in Arizona because when he was home, he was dedicated to us."
McCain's political operation has such a smell of a band of brothers in the foxhole that it's hard to imagine Cindy, or anyone else, breaking in. But she says that when it really counts, she's the only one in the room. "I know the one person he trusts the most is me," she says. "And so when it comes right down to it, particularly in the job we're doing now, we have to rely on each other." So as he made a final decision on a running mate, would it come down to just the two of them in the room? She gives a small smile and nods.
But you get the clear sense that Cindy's chief influence is not with his campaign but with their kids. During an hour-long chat, the cell phone that is her lifeline never leaves her side. She learned to check homework, approve clothing choices and practically administer Band-Aids by cell phone during the 2000 campaign. She has three BlackBerrys and is the family techie, programming the computers and solving problems. Bridget is now 17; Cindy is on the phone with her constantly, as well as with eldest daughter Meghan and sons Jimmy, a Marine who returned from deployment in Iraq in February, and Jack, who will be a senior at the Naval Academy. They too will be stepping out in Minneapolis for the first time, along with McCain's three children from his first marriage.
It's just one of those fateful twists that John McCain now finds himself in the same position his father was in, she notes, when Admiral John S. McCain Jr. was commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, ordering bombing runs on Hanoi as his son was being held prisoner there. "Now, my husband is not calling the shots in this war, but he's very involved, obviously, in what the strategy is and shaping American policy toward it. With that said, at the same time, his son is in Iraq. So yes, it's very personal for me."
Cindy's father, whom she revered, was a World War II bomber pilot who was shot down three times over the English Channel. Her husband survived being shot down over Hanoi. Listening to her talk, you get the sense that she's every bit the warrior too, with her own discipline, her own mission, her own scars. (Her wrist is in a soft cast--some of the bones are fused--because of injuries made worse by fans who shook her hand too enthusiastically.) "I want my sons led by a Commander in Chief who understands what it means to send young men and women into combat--and more importantly, how to bring them home." That's been enough to keep her in the trenches--even when she's the one coming under fire.