In Search of Cindy McCain

Shepp no longer discusses the marriage, but has said she doesn't blame McCain. She has told reporters she thinks of him as a friend and supports him for president. The marriage soured because of "John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again," she told McCain's biographer Robert Timberg. Others who know them say McCain pursued Cindy as a way of putting his war years behind him. "I think John very much saw her as reclaiming the life he had lost," Albert (Pete) Lakeland, a former congressional staffer who was with McCain when he met Cindy, told Timberg.

McCain adopted Arizona as his new home and soon began thinking of a fresh career. He had doubts he would ever be an admiral like his father and grandfather. Instead, he resolved to return to Washington as a congressman from Arizona. McCain worried he would be branded a carpetbagger, but his war story was compelling and the Hensley name got him access to money and connections. In January 1982, a congressional seat came open near Mesa, just outside Phoenix. Cindy bought the couple a house in the district so they could establish themselves as residents. McCain lent his campaign $169,000, money that came from Cindy's trust fund. (It was the last time Cindy would tap into her accounts to fund her husband's races, in part because of tighter ethics rules.)

When McCain was sworn in to Congress in 1983, Cindy quit her teaching job and joined him in Washington. Just 28, she was younger than some of her husband's own congressional-staff members. (She was also just a few years senior to McCain's kids from his first marriage—five years older than Doug, who is currently a pilot for American Airlines; eight years older than Andrew, who is a vice president of the Hensley Co., and 12 years older than Sidney, a music industry exec who lives in Canada.)

Cindy struggled to be taken seriously in the capital. She went out for drinks with staff and tried to make friends with other congressional spouses, without much success. For the first time in her life, she was an outsider. She knew what people were saying behind her back. Some of her husband's own staff privately called her a trophy wife; his political opponents carped that he'd married her only for money.

Lonely and homesick for Arizona, Cindy sought comfort in starting a family. She had always wanted a lot of kids, but she suffered several miscarriages in their first years of marriage. The first time, she frantically tried to reach McCain on the House floor. He got the message in time to take her to the hospital. The two were apart the second and third time she miscarried. "Look, it was hard, but I can only view it as God's plan," she says. "I was never bitter about it, but I think he felt guilty." When Cindy found out she was pregnant again in early 1984, her doctors ordered her to stay off her feet and not travel. That was all the excuse she needed to leave Washington and move back to Arizona for good. Since then, she has seen her husband mostly on weekends, and travels to the capital only once or twice a year.

In October 1984, just a few days before Election Day, Cindy gave birth to her first child, Meghan (a former NEWSWEEK intern, she is now a Columbia grad who writes a political blog). As McCain moved up in Washington—he took over Barry Goldwater's Senate seat in 1986—Cindy focused on family. She moved into the home she had grown up in, and her parents moved across the street to help her with the kids. That year, she gave birth to John Sidney IV, the naval cadet; James, a Marine who recently returned from duty in Iraq, was born in 1988.

She was happy to be back home, but with McCain in Washington full time she confessed to friends she felt alone. "She was under a lot of stress," says Cindy's friend Sharon Harper. "He tried to be home every weekend, but when he wasn't, they must have talked 20 times a day." Cindy recalls how relieved she sometimes was when her husband would come through the door. "I will tell you that there were times when he would come home on Friday, and I'd had a long week with the little ones running around and I would say, 'Welcome home, I'm going out'," she says.

In 1984 Cindy was on a scuba-diving trip in Micronesia when a friend was injured and had to be taken to the hospital. She was sickened by the filthy conditions in the ER: "There were cats in the operating room and rats everywhere," she says. When she returned home, she began collecting medical supplies and sending them to the hospital. "Finally, the hospital called and said, really what we need is a good orthopedic surgeon," she says. "So I called some friends and we planned a trip … I don't know what made me do it."