The roots of this week's cover can be traced back to Holly Bailey's observation that almost everything almost everybody seems to think about Cindy McCain is wrong. "Covering her husband's campaign, I've spent a lot of time observing Cindy McCain on the trail over the past year and I was always struck by how different she seemed offstage and away from the cameras," Holly says. "People always talk about how rich she is or how plastic she seems. But watching her interact with people, especially her kids, it was always clear there was more to her than this caricature that has really come to define her over the years. Like Michelle Obama, she chose to raise her kids outside Washington, and because of that has had to bear a lot of responsibilities and life-changing experiences largely on her own. I've found that Mrs. McCain isn't much different from her husband. He doesn't like talking about his service to the country because he thinks he's done nothing that anyone else wouldn't do. And when it comes to her own accomplishments, she's the same. She's traveled all over the world to do charity work, camping in jungles and in war zones to help people in need."
Holly finished up her reporting in Vietnam last week. In a hospital, a little girl and her family ran up to Mrs. McCain and hugged her. Mrs. McCain told Holly later that she had taken in the girl and her mother a few years ago, letting them live with her in Arizona for several months while the girl's cleft palate was fixed. (She had learned of the girl's plight from a waiter at her favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Phoenix. The man had come up to Cindy and asked for help, showing her only a picture.) "I think the story is a reminder that whether it's Cindy McCain or Michelle Obama, people shouldn't so easily try to generically categorize the women who would be First Lady," says Holly. "Both of them are accomplished women in their own right, not simply political wives."
We have several pieces on the Middle East in this issue, from Lally Weymouth's exclusive interview with King Abdullah II of Jordan to Fareed Zakaria's suggested speech on Iraq for Barack Obama to Larry Kaplow's dispatch from Baghdad on the secularization of the country—as told through the rising popularity of liquor stores, among other things. On July 1, Larry will become Baghdad bureau chief. He joined us, in Baghdad, in May 2007, after covering Iraq and the Middle East for many years for Cox Newspapers. He arrived in Baghdad before the invasion in 2003 and has been there ever since.
Larry succeeds a familiar byline: Babak Dehghanpisheh, who became Baghdad bureau chief in December 2006. One of our summer interns in 2001, he was a block away when the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. He immediately started reporting from the scene. A few weeks later, as we were making plans to cover the coming U.S. attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mark Miller, our chief of correspondents, gave Babak, an Iranian-American, a digital camera and a big wad of cash and sent him off to Iran, where he has family. Our hope was that Babak would be able to make his way into Afghanistan, which he eventually did, while other NEWSWEEK reporters entered the country from different directions.
Babak never really came home after that. He has been a key member of our team, reporting from Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in the region. He is now taking a richly deserved break as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. We thank Babak for his service, and wish Larry the best as he begins his.