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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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In Search of Cindy McCain
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | COSDem |
| Last Edited | COSDem Jul 06, 2008 10:16pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| Media | Magazine - Newsweek |
| News Date | Tuesday, July 1, 2008 04:15:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Ambitious naval officers who hope to make admiral know they must put in years of sea time, long deployments aboard ship where they prove themselves as sailors and earn the respect of their superiors. Back home, their wives work, chase after the kids and take care of the house, building lives of their own while their husbands build their careers. Cindy McCain knows what that's like. Over the 28 years of her often long-distance marriage to Capt. John McCain, USN (Ret.), she says she thought of herself as a Navy wife whose husband was off on tour—albeit on Capitol Hill instead of somewhere in the North Atlantic. "It was almost like a deployment," Cindy told NEWSWEEK. "What I told the kids from the time they were little is that their dad was deployed and serving our country in Washington."
Cindy has sometimes likened herself to a single mother; now 54, she has often been far away from her husband during difficult moments, including two of three miscarriages she suffered in the 1980s. Years later, her husband did not notice when she became addicted to painkillers, a habit, she says, brought on in part by the stress of politics. In 2004, he was on the other side of the country when she suffered a stroke that left her partly debilitated. On her own, she learned to walk again. Cindy says she doesn't resent the time she has spent without her husband. It was her choice to stay in Arizona while he rose in Washington, and she says she knew when she married him that he was always going to "put country first."
She certainly isn't looking for pity. Unlike many Navy wives, Cindy McCain has never had to worry about scraping up enough money to pay the phone bill. The heiress to a fortune that is estimated at more than $100 million—her father built the largest beer distributorship in Arizona—she raised the couple's four children in the house where she grew up, and the couple has a ranch near Sedona. Her life away from Washington has given her the freedom to unhitch herself |
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