PREFERENCE ASIDE, CINDY MCCAIN HANDLES LIMELIGHT

Candidate's Wife Fills Several Roles in Public, Private

SEDONA, Arizona -- On a recent balmy Sunday, John and Cindy McCain
hosted the national press corps at their ranch here. Mrs. McCain's
touches were evident -- the ceiling fans hung from tree branches, the
art of their children displayed on the cabin's walls, the Budweiser
beer tap from her family's business. Dogs she has adopted ran about.
[cindy] Cindy McCain regularly introduces her husband at events, but
often retreats when her duties are done.

Showing off his barbecue skills, Sen. McCain pulled sizzling ribs off
the grill and dispensed them on the sweeping porch. Mrs. McCain, in
skinny jeans with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, stood nearby and
just smiled.

The 53-year-old wife of Sen. McCain doesn't seek the limelight. While
the picture-perfect Mrs. McCain regularly introduces her husband at
campaign events, she often retreats after her duties are done, donning
her fully loaded iPod and typing away on her silver BlackBerry.

"The campaign gets to be a little too much for me," she said in an
interview. "I take some time off occasionally...and then I get back
out."

As the wife of the expected Republican nominee, Mrs. McCain will face
intensifying scrutiny. Both of Sen. McCain's potential opponents have
high-profile spouses who have assumed very public roles in the
campaigns -- and have at times undergone fierce criticism and media
attention.

The pressure already has begun. Recently, Mrs. McCain faced the press
with Sen. McCain to deny news reports that her husband of 28 years had
an affair with a lobbyist.

Although she says she wants to be a "traditional" first lady, Mrs.
McCain has led a life that by any measure has been
untraditional.

She heads one of the nation's largest beer distributorships, an
Anheuser-Busch Cos. franchise inherited from her father. She has
sported "MS BUD" on her license plate, and from the campaign trail she
uses her BlackBerry and cellphone to oversee this region's rollout of
Bud Lite Lime and to expand her corporate empire. [cindy] Daughters
Bridget (left) and Meghan.

Last month, while Sen. McCain was touring Europe and Iraq to show his
foreign-policy credentials, Mrs. McCain flew into postwar Kosovo on a
mission to clear land mines. It was the latest of several trips she
has made in recent years as part of a detonation team. She also
supports the charity arranging the trips by serving on its board and
making donations.

"Cindy is a private person with her own stresses and commitments --
apart from her public role in John's campaign," said Sen. Lindsey
Graham, a close friend of the McCains. "She juggles bowling balls."

Sen. McCain, 71, calls his wife "a real trooper." After
knee-replacement surgery following a fall in a grocery store a few
months ago, Mrs. McCain, always meticulously dressed and coiffed even
on crutches, quickly hit the trail. "Sometimes when we get in bed at
night, I hear her groan" from the pain, the senator said in an interview.

When John McCain met his future wife, Cindy Hensley was a 24-year-old
only child on vacation with her parents. In Phoenix, she had been her
high school's rodeo queen, sporting a cowboy hat complete with a
crown. After earning education degrees at the University of Southern
California (which Sen. McCain has called "University of Spoiled
Children"), she became a special-needs teacher.

She also got involved in the beer distributorship started by her
father. Art Pearce, who worked at his own family's company, a Coors
distributor in Phoenix, frequently ran into her at industry events.
"You could tell by her air that she was very proud of her family's
business," Mr. Pearce said.

Her focus shifted as soon as she met John McCain, a dashing Navy
officer in his dress whites, at a cocktail party in Hawaii, where she
was vacationing with her parents. They had "instant chemistry," Mrs.
McCain has said. She didn't know he had been a prisoner of war in
Vietnam for five years. She has said that they both lied about their
ages: He said he was four years younger; she said she was three years
older.

At the time, Sen. McCain was separated from his first wife, with whom
he had a daughter. He had adopted his wife's two sons. After a
divorce, he married Cindy Hensley in 1980. Having signed a prenuptial
agreement that her assets would remain separate, he left the Navy to
join her father's business, Hensley & Co., as a public-relations
manager for $50,000 a year. His young wife brought home much more from
company distributions.

Her family provided some of the funding when he ran for Congress in
1982. After his election, the couple began a commuter marriage, with
Mrs. McCain staying in Phoenix to raise their growing family.

"We really feel that one of the smartest things we ever did was have
our kids grow up in Arizona," Sen. McCain said recently on the trail.
"It's very tough to be a relative of a politician in Washington,
because of the fishbowl effect." Although the commuter marriage
continues to this day, Sen. McCain said the family took two vacations
together every year and Mrs. McCain "is the one that always made that
happen."

In 2000, when Mrs. McCain's father died, she inherited the beer
distributorship. Hensley's chief executive, Bob Delgado, said he sat
down with Mrs. McCain to ask what she wanted to do with the business.
He expected her to put it up for sale.

"I want the employees and their families to know that I will take care
of them the way my dad has," she recalls telling Mr. Delgado. "I'm not
going to sell just because he died." Mrs. McCain said she wanted the
company her father built from scratch to go to her children someday,
Mr. Delgado said.

Mrs. McCain assumed her father's position as chairman. She began
focusing on strategic issues and big-budget items, leaving day-to-day
operations to Mr. Delgado and Chief Financial Officer Andy McCain, her
stepson.

"I have good people in place...I trust them and I love them," Mrs.
McCain said, adding that she speaks to Mr. Delgado almost daily. "I'm
the ultimate person who makes the large decisions; major changes,
growth decisions."

Since James Hensley's death eight years ago, the distributorship has
nearly doubled, holding a significant portion of the Phoenix-area
market share. It has 700 employees and annual revenue of about $300
million. Mrs. McCain has approved the buyout of another
distributorship, helping bring sales last year to 23 million cases of
beer.

Mrs. McCain (who can tell a beer's freshness by tasting it, according
to her daughter Meghan) declines to say what percentage of the company
she owns or its value. Industry experts estimate her stake at about
$100 million.

She owns a private jet, which Sen. McCain's campaign pays to use on
the trail. She started the Hensley Family Foundation, largely
committed to children's causes, to which Sen. McCain donates some of
his speaking fees and book proceeds.

In 1991, Sen. McCain became embroiled in the "Keating Five" scandal,
in which five senators were probed for ties with a thrift executive.
The Arizona lawmaker wasn't charged with any ethics violation.

That same year, Mrs. McCain underwent two back surgeries, and she said
she became addicted to painkillers. She resorted to stealing some
drugs from a medical charity she had started and using others' names
for prescriptions, according to news reports at the time.

"I was trying to be the perfect woman," Mrs. McCain said in interviews
at the time. "That was the darkest period of my life."

The Drug Enforcement Administration began an investigation of Mrs.
McCain in 1994, but she avoided prosecution by paying a fine,
performing community service in a soup kitchen and joining Narcotics
Anonymous. She had to close her medical charity.

"Cindy faced up to her addiction," Sen. McCain said.

Since coming clean, "I've never been secretive about it at all,
because [talking about addiction] is part of the recovery process,"
Mrs. McCain said. "It's part of my life; it has made me a better
person and certainly made me a better mother."

The past year has been particularly stressful because their
19-year-old son, Jimmy, did a tour of duty in Iraq. Their son Jack
also is in the military, attending the Naval Academy, as did his
father, grandfather and great grandfather. Meghan, a recent Columbia
University graduate, travels and blogs for the campaign, while the
younger daughter, Bridget, attends high school.

One day, Mrs. McCain answered her son Jimmy's call from Iraq as the
campaign bus pulled up to a town hall where the McCains were scheduled
to appear. The phone line suddenly went dead; she grew teary. Two
minutes later, she stepped onto the stage and calmly introduced her
husband.

In 1991, Mrs. McCain came across a girl in an orphanage in Bangladesh.
Mother Teresa implored Mrs. McCain to take the baby with a severe
cleft palate; the senator's wife did so without first telling her
husband. The couple adopted the girl, named her Bridget, and has seen
her through some dozen operations to repair her cleft palate and
resolve other medical problems.

When Bridget drops into the campaign, Mrs. McCain goes out of her way
to point her out. "I want to make sure everyone knows she's a part of
us, too," she said. (The dark-skinned child was the subject of a
"dirty trick" during Mr. McCain's presidential run in 2000, when
unknown operatives spread the rumor that Bridget was the product of an
affair.)

These days, Mrs. McCain is active in charities specializing in
war-ravaged and developing countries. This summer, Mrs. McCain will
join an overseas mission of Operation Smile, a charity she has long
supported that travels the world to perform corrective surgery on
children's faces.

Her reticence about the spotlight is why she surprised some friends
and advisers recently by wading into a controversy involving Michelle
Obama. The wife of Sen. Barack Obama had commented that her husband's
run for the presidency made her proud of her country for the first
time in her life. Mrs. McCain declared on the stump that she always
has been, "and always will be, proud of my country."

"It wasn't planned," Mrs. McCain said. "It wasn't about my stepping
out on my own, but I do have opinions." However, she's more likely to
keep them to herself.

"My husband's the candidate," she said. "I'm not."