Earlier this year, at a town-hall meeting at the Fantasy of Flight aircraft museum, in Polk City, Florida, Cindy McCain introduced her husband, the Republican Presidential nominee, with a speech about the nature of “the man.” There are, she said, many things “that make a great man, but being a good father and a good husband are most important to me.” She wore a tight black leather blazer over a black turtleneck, and her hair was styled stiffly in a ponytail. “I was working one day, one day a long, long time ago, in Bangladesh,” McCain said. “I stumbled upon a little girl in Mother Teresa’s orphanage, and she had a really bad cleft palate and she was sick and tiny and she was only ten weeks old. And I got to know her a little bit, and I was with her for quite a while. Mother Teresa—as only she could do at that time—prevailed upon me and said, You know, you can get help for her. You could, you can get her out . . . and, being a tenacious woman, I thought, Yeah! I can. Sure.”

“If you look at Cindy,” the co-founder of one of her charities says, “she does crazy things in terms of most people’s idea of normal.” Illustration by Robert Risko

McCain said that on the flight home from Bangkok she “realized that this child had chosen me and I could not give her up.” But there was something even more remarkable: “What you don’t know about this story is I didn’t tell my husband.” McCain smiled mischievously as she said that, and several members of the audience tittered. “I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, with this baby in my arms, and in front of a thousand reporters and a whole lot of people he whispered down to me and said, ‘Well, where’s she going to go?’ And I said, ‘I thought she’d come to our house.’ And he looked at her and he loved her just the way I have ever since. And I think that says a great deal about the man.”

McCain’s account of bringing home a daughter without first informing her husband of her decision has become the core of the Cindy stump speech. She revisits the narrative routinely in her brief but frequent campaign appearances, and the Republican National Committee offered a version of it in a video that was played before her speech at the Convention last week. Almost every friend of the McCains with whom I spoke offered his or her own retelling of the tale. It is fact and fable: last month, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Mother Teresa was not actually at that orphanage at the time of Cindy McCain’s visit. (The McCain campaign subsequently revised the story on its Web site.) The story certainly helps to portray John McCain as openhearted and charitable. But it also happens to reflect the nearly separate lives lived by the two McCains, and the peculiar defiance that is characteristic of Cindy—a woman who claims to pride herself on being traditional.

In her size-0 St. John skirt suits, and with her lacquered coiffures, Cindy McCain appears pampered and brittle. She was taken to a hospital with a sprained wrist after a fan shook her hand with too much gusto at a campaign event in Michigan last month. Her movements are quick and sharp—birdlike—and she often seems skittish, wary-eyed, and fidgety, fussing with her nails or her BlackBerry. McCain has said that she kept her phone with her at all times so that she wouldn’t miss a call from her son Jimmy, a marine, while he was in Iraq. But he returned in mid-February, and the BlackBerry remains in his mother’s hand much of the time. She seems to be vigilant on behalf of all her children: Meghan, twenty-three, a recent Columbia graduate; John Sidney IV, twenty-two, a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy; Jimmy, twenty; and Bridget, the daughter from Bangladesh, who is now seventeen. At times, Cindy McCain seems to be channelling Nancy Reagan in her nervousness and her apparent conviction that without her protection harm will befall her family in the dangerous sphere of public life.

But McCain has unusual grit, too. She has taken up race-car driving and flying, and she has a long history of going on charity missions to Third World countries. According to her spokeswoman, Melissa Shuffield, McCain spends between two and three weeks a year travelling with Operation Smile, an organization that provides surgery for children with cleft palates, and the Halo Trust, a group that removes land mines from countries still riddled with unexploded ordnance. Like her husband, however, she does not support an international ban on land mines. “As much as I know her, I don’t get in any big political discussions with Cindy or intellectual discussions about poverty,” Dr. Bill Magee, the co-founder of Operation Smile, said. “It’s more like, What can we do for these kids today? People have a great time. It brings together the risk-taker with the compassionate. If you take a look at Cindy, she does crazy things in terms of most people’s idea of normal.” Magee went on to talk about McCain’s race-car driving, and offered his version of her decision to adopt Bridget: “She’s on the tarmac, she’s got this impoverished black kid with a hole in the roof of her mouth, and John says, ‘Fine!’ It’s crazy.”

When I travelled with the campaign in late spring, I asked the McCains, who were seated on the curved banquette at the back of the Straight Talk Express, how they imagined Cindy’s role as First Lady might affect her humanitarian work.

“I think some of her travels might be curtailed,” Senator McCain, who was wearing a blue Navy baseball cap, replied. “She’s been to Cambodia, where land mines are very dangerous, and no one knows exactly where they are, so that may be a little bit of a downside of her involvement.”

Staring into the middle distance, as she often does, Cindy McCain proceeded to contradict her husband. “What I tell everyone is, regardless of whether we win or lose, I will continue to do what I do because it’s so important to be an example,” she said firmly. “To my own children, and also for other kids in the community. Regardless of whether we win or lose.”

“Stop saying that,” John McCain interrupted.

“Say ‘when we win,’ ” Janet Huckabee instructed. She and her husband, the former Arkansas governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, were travelling with the campaign that day.

Cindy McCain gave a flicker of a smirk. “When we win,” she said. And she didn’t say anything more.

The streets of Phoenix sound as if they were named by a movie cowboy: Camelback, Copperhead, Buckeye. The famously dry heat hurts your eyes and chaps your lips and makes you wonder about the sort of person who elects to endure it. Cindy McCain “is very strong and independent,” Sharon Harper, who has been a friend and neighbor of McCain’s for more than twenty years, told me. Harper is a commercial real-estate developer in Phoenix, with whom Cindy has invested in two properties. “There’s something very special about the West,” she said. “There’s a real tradition of independence here. I don’t know if you’ve read Sandra Day O’Connor’s book about growing up on the Lazy B?”—an Arizona cattle ranch. “Cindy’s that kind of woman. People are supposed to be strong and independent growing up here; it’s an expectation.”

McCain has a complex relationship with independence—a quality that many people attribute to her. “I’m a stay-at-home mother,” McCain told voters at a town-hall meeting in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1999, when John McCain was running against George W. Bush, who was then governor of Texas. “I don’t like labels, but, if there’s a label for me, it would be ‘traditional,’ and I’m very proud to be traditional.’’ Last December, in an interview with the Arizona Republic, her home-town paper, she said, “I think the American people truly still want a traditional family in the White House.”

In that interview, she added that she was “reluctant to get involved” in this year’s Presidential race because of the treatment that her family received in 2000. “You can see the toe marks in the sand where I was brought on board,” as she put it. She was referring to what happened after McCain won the New Hampshire primary by a nineteen-point margin: the McCains were subjected to a smear campaign in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary. Anonymous calls and “push-polling,” believed to be the inspiration of Karl Rove, convinced many voters there that Bridget was John McCain’s illegitimate daughter. Rove and the Bush campaign always denied involvement, but McCain lost, and Cindy McCain wept in front of reporters.

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It’s possible, though, that Cindy McCain’s reluctance to enter this race also had to do with the fact that her family is not actually that traditional—far less traditional, in fact, than the Obamas. Since childhood, McCain has been expected to embody certain pillars of conventional femininity: beauty, refinement, altruism, and an inclination to encourage the ambitious men in her life. She is probably better suited to this particular formulation of public wifehood than the outspoken, muscular, and frankly powerful Michelle Obama. But, if you watch her closely, from time to time you can see Cindy McCain slip out of character.

Cindy Lou Hensley was born in 1954 and grew up on North Central Avenue in Phoenix, a street lined with pepper trees and large adobe-style houses with salmon- or sand-colored stucco façades. That street remained the axis of her life for fifty years. The house at 7110, where Cindy was brought up by her parents, James and Marguerite Hensley—and where, years later, she reared her own children—is a long, low ranch-style house, comparable in size to the small strip malls that are occupied by tanning salons and dry cleaners a few blocks to the south. The house is imposing, with four bucking-horse statues around a fountain on the front lawn (Cindy had horses of her own, which used to be stabled in the back yard), but it is not obvious that this was once the home of one of the richest men in Arizona.

“When I was growing up and when Cindy was growing up, Phoenix was a small town,” McCain’s friend Betsey Bayless, the former Arizona secretary of state, who grew up in the same neighborhood, said. “Now the place has just exploded.” The Hensleys, she continued, “were well known because they had a beer distributorship, but there was no such thing as being socially prominent—any business owner was as socially prominent as you get in small-town Phoenix.”

James—whom everyone called Jim—and his brother Eugene Hensley built their wealth on alcohol. After Jim returned from service as a bombardier in the Second World War, the brothers entered the wholesale liquor market and began operating two warehouses—United Sales Company, in Phoenix, and United Distributors, Inc., in Tucson—in partnership with Kemper Marley, Sr., a Phoenix businessman. (Police reportedly suspected Marley of having had a hand in the 1976 murder of Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic who had written extensively about Marley’s business and political machinations. Marley died in 1990.) In 1948, the Hensleys were convicted on federal conspiracy charges after filing more than twelve hundred fake invoices to cover up under-the-table sales of liquor to night clubs and bars throughout the state. Eugene was sentenced to a year in prison, Jim to six months, but, with the help of their lawyer, a former mayor of Phoenix, Jim had his sentence suspended.

Despite his criminal conviction, in 1955 Jim Hensley was granted a liquor license to start an Anheuser-Busch distributorship, which he called Hensley & Company. Hensley was the first Anheuser-Busch distributor to invest in refrigerated warehouses, which are now an industry standard. “Jim was always willing to take that first step that perhaps other businesses weren’t,” Robert Delgado, the current C.E.O. of Hensley, told me. Since 1975, when Jim Hensley hired Delgado, the company has grown to be the third-largest Anheuser-Busch wholesale distributor in the nation, and the largest in Arizona, selling twenty-three million cases of beer a year. “Mr. Hensley acquired this business when Phoenix was a small town,” Delgado said. “We’ve had tremendous population growth in the fifty-three years since, and tremendous market-share growth.” Delgado said that Hensley now controls approximately sixty per cent of the Arizona beer market.

Jim Hensley, who died in 2000, was “the quintessential Western gentleman,” in Delgado’s opinion. “He was a cowboy, is a good description. A guy who enjoyed horses, loved Arizona, loved everything about the West.”

Oliver Harper, a doctor in Phoenix who is married to Cindy’s friend Sharon Harper, remembers Hensley as “the Gary Cooper type of larger-than-life, very manly guy.” (For many years, the McCains and the Harpers went on an annual family trip to Lake Powell, and the Harpers own the property that abuts the McCains’ ranch in Cottonwood, near Sedona.) “Cindy would go on these wonderful vacations with Jim—they’d go on these horse rides where you’d be out and you’d be packing overnight, and you’d be twenty-five miles a day on a horse. When we went to Africa together”—in 1995—“I remember Cindy saying her father had taken her to the Mt. Kenya Safari Club years ago, when she was a little kid. I think they did a lot of father-daughter stuff, the more adventurey, outdoorsy type of stuff, and Cindy loved that.”

Cindy attended Central High, where she was the best-dressed girl in school, according to her senior yearbook. In 1968, she was named Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona. “I could have been a brain surgeon at twelve and my father would not have been as proud of me,” she told Vogue recently. Her mother, Marguerite, nicknamed Smitty (after her last name, Smith), was “a very refined woman,” according to Sharon Harper. “She was polite and always dressed in such a lovely way. She taught Cindy impeccable manners.” At the University of Southern California—or the “University of Spoiled Children,” as her husband is fond of telling reporters—Cindy pledged the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta, and graduated in 1978, with a master’s in education. Her father gave her a Porsche as a graduation present. She crashed it. He replaced the Porsche with a gold Mercedes.

Many of McCain’s friends noted that after graduation she took a low-paying job as a special-education teacher at Agua Fria High School, near Phoenix, rather than a more lucrative position at her father’s company. McCain, too, frequently refers to his wife’s teaching background. She worked at Agua Fria for just one year.

In 1979, Cindy Hensley was on vacation with her parents in Honolulu when, as she has said, “this awfully nice-looking Navy captain in dress whites” started following her around at a cocktail party. John McCain was eighteen years her senior, and a celebrity after five and a half years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in Hanoi.* Cindy was taken with this warrior—a different variety of cowboy. “Having a strong father, I wanted an older man,” she told Harper’s Bazaar recently. And there he was. Just over a year after that first meeting, they were married.

“I think John very much saw her as reclaiming the life he had lost,” McCain’s friend Pete Lakeland told Robert Timberg, McCain’s biographer. “Cindy stood for everything he didn’t have in prison. This was the sweet, innocent, pure American dream.” Cindy Hensley also came with enormous wealth and useful connections.

When the couple met, John McCain was serving as the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, and he was eager to give up the military—the world he was born into as the son and grandson of Navy admirals—and enter the realm of politics. He signed his Navy discharge papers in 1981, the day that his father was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Soon after he married Cindy, McCain began working for Hensley & Company as the vice-president of public affairs. He was paid to travel around Arizona promoting the company; in the process, he laid the groundwork for his first campaign.

John and Cindy McCain had signed a prenuptial agreement, but Cindy’s assets were, from the beginning, crucial to her husband’s success. In 1982, she received six hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars from a Hensley subsidiary. On the very day that John Rhodes, a fifteen-term Republican congressman, announced his retirement, the McCains bought a house in his congressional district. McCain was elected to the Ninety-eighth Congress. Today, the fortune at Cindy McCain’s disposal has been estimated at a hundred million dollars, and, according to the Times, she owns ten houses.

In 1986, after two terms in the House, McCain won the Senate seat that Barry Goldwater had relinquished. For two years, Cindy McCain attempted to make a life with her husband in Washington. But there were no wide-open spaces, there was no privacy, and the credentials that made Cindy prominent in Phoenix had no value in the capital. She returned to Phoenix to bring up her family; her husband joined them on weekends. That has been the pattern of their lives ever since.

“She was very much a mother—she always relished that designation,” her friend Betsey Bayless told me. “She was always driving her carpool, up and down Central Avenue. She really maintained the home fire.” Staying in Phoenix was also an assertion of Cindy McCain’s determination to remain in her own territory. She moved back into the house she’d grown up in, her children went to private schools on Central Avenue, and the family attended the massive North Phoenix Baptist Church, just a few blocks down the road, an island in a sea of asphalt.

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On an outrageously hot day in June, Pastor Dick Stafford was sitting in his office on the ground floor, amid the extensive collection of elephant statuettes that he amassed as a missionary in Africa and Southeast Asia. “It has no political statement,” he said. “They have lifelong family relationships—we could learn a lot from elephants.” Stafford said that North Phoenix Baptist is “very careful about not taking a partisan stance,” and serves a diverse community. “We have some of the most expensive property straight up Central Avenue; we have a large population of multifamily housing, heavy Hispanic population. We’re multiethnic, multiracial, multigenerational, and we want all that here in the church on Sunday.” (Cindy McCain was brought up as a Congregationalist. John McCain’s great-grandfather was an Episcopalian minister. He has never been baptized.) The majority of the congregation opposes abortion, and, of homosexuals, Stafford said, “We would want to help a person who’s struggling with any of those life issues find a healthy way to resolve it.” (When he was asked for an example of another such life issue, Stafford replied, “Materialism.”) The memorial services of both Jim and Marguerite Hensley were held at North Phoenix Baptist. “Cindy’s dad’s service was quite large, because of his business connections,” Stafford said.