A few months later, Jim Hensley traveled to Washington for his son-in-law’s swearing in and for the reception that followed. Pete Lakeland remembers feeling buoyant as he worked his way through the receiving line. He first congratulated McCain, then turned to Cindy and her father. “Sir, you don’t know how lucky you are that John could walk faster than I could, or you might have ended up with me as a son-in-law,” Lakeland said. Cindy shrieked with delight. But Jim couldn’t appreciate the joke. He just stared skeptically at McCain’s nebbishy former colleague.

Back in February of the previous year, as McCain was formulating his plans to run for office, he and Cindy sat down for dinner at the Biltmore with Bill Shover, Tully’s right-hand man at the Republic, and his wife. McCain expounded on his political ambitions for the better part of an hour. Toward the end of the discussion, Shover noticed that Cindy hadn’t uttered a word. “Cindy, don’t you have something you want to say?” Shover asked. This elicited a few incomprehensible grunts, at which point McCain stepped in. “Cindy had oral surgery today, and she’s in a lot of pain. She can’t talk because she had her jaws wired.” Shover was aghast. “My God, why didn’t you wait till she got better?” he asked. “Because I wanted to get to know you,” McCain said. Cindy just looked on silently.

In retrospect, the dinner stands out a subtle omen. After that first pivotal race, McCain’s star would rise faster than he or Jim Hensley could have expected. But Cindy seemed to lose her voice. She almost instantly found Washington oppressive and moved back to Arizona one year into McCain’s first term. Once there, she built a largely separate life--her own support network, her own form of service (charities that clear land mines and repair cleft palates for children). And, of course, there is her well-documented addiction to prescription painkillers in the early ’90s. According to those reports, it was her parents who finally noticed something amiss. McCain has said he was oblivious. (The McCain campaign did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

These days, the Cindy who accompanies her husband on the stump is still largely mute. Profiles describe her as deeply ambivalent about McCain’s run for president, and she gives the impression of dutiful--rather than enthusiastic--participation. With the exception of her poorly received jab at Michelle Obama’s patriotism, she’s hardly registered in the political conversation.

One evening in early August, I met Cindy’s half-sister Kathleen Portalski at her home in a middle-class neighborhood of Phoenix. Kathy is an attractive older woman with sad green eyes and long blond hair, which she was wearing in a ponytail. Her husband, Stan, answered the door and led me into a cluttered living room. A Budweiser clock flanked the doorway.

Before Jim died in 2000, he’d repeatedly indicated that Kathy and the family would be taken care of. But, when the time finally came to sort out his will, the Portalskis ended up with a mere $10,000. Still, Kathy herself seemed less angry than hurt. What she seemed to want most of all, even at 65, was a dad.

Kathy’s lasting impression of Jim was his emotional distance: Her earliest memories of her father involve the two of them at a bar. “He didn’t know how to talk to little girls,” she told me. As a child, she looked forward to shopping for school clothes with her father every year. But, by adolescence, he simply outfitted her with a charge card--one of the first in Phoenix--and sent her off on her own. At several points in the conversation, she looked at no one in particular, slowly shook her head from side to side, and said, “It was very disappointing to have a father like that.”

Kathy explained that she had always been more expressive than her sister. The difference was largely a function of Smitty, who tended to Cindy’s manners and instilled an ethos of stiff-upper-lip-ness. Kathy recalls sitting with Cindy in the Hensley living room after their grandmother’s funeral in the 1970s, at which point she began to cry. Cindy was barely an adult, but was offended by the outburst. “Oh, pull yourself together,” she chided her sister repeatedly.

As Kathy talked, it became clear that Cindy’s childhood had instilled a particular lesson: If she put on a perpetually good face, she’d eventually be rewarded. And, for a while, it looked like that bargain had held. John McCain seemed to be a reward ten times over. By marrying him, Cindy was pleasing one father and getting another. Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

Years later, at Jim Hensley’s funeral, friends and family members would see John McCain choke up while reciting a Robert Louis Stevenson poem in honor of his father-in-law. “Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” In her own remarks, Cindy poignantly recalled how her father had sent her to school and to Europe and pronounced him her friend. But she shed no tears, at least not for public consumption. As with so many times in the past, she’d somehow managed to pull herself together.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic.

This article originally ran in the September 10, 2008, issue of the magazine.