Profile: Cindy McCain rallies for global causes

Editor’s note: Here is the second of a two-part profile of Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Last month, Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, was profiled.

If Cindy McCain were to become first lady, an ill-defined role that depends wholly on the person who fills it, McCain is unlikely to sit in on Cabinet meetings as Rosalynn Carter did. Nor is she likely to take the lead in crafting controversial legislation, as Hillary Clinton did with health care.

Most likely, McCain would be a traditionalist, said Barbara Kellerman, professor of public leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“I have every reason to think she will be quite visible but not break the mold, and find some middle ground between those first ladies who have really been quite conservative, such as Laura Bush and Barbara Bush, and those first ladies who have been cutting edge, such as Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and in some other ways Nancy Reagan,” Kellerman said.

Despite her reluctance to comment about policy in any way, in at least one instance McCain got sufficiently riled up to offer her own opinion.

That happened one morning in Wisconsin, when she was watching CNN in her hotel room and she saw video of Michelle Obama saying that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

The comment, with its implication that Michelle Obama had never been proud of her country before, set off a small furor. Taking the stage to introduce her husband, McCain said something that caught the media’s attention: “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country,” she said, with more bite than usual.

Despite many people’s assumption that her words had been devised by a campaign strategist, she insists they were spontaneous. “You have to remember, I have a son” in Iraq, she said. “It just spilled out of my mouth, and then I got back on the bus and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I thought, ‘Oh, I should never have opened my mouth. How did that happen? I’ll put duct tape over it.’ ”

Shy and reserved compared to her loquacious spouse, McCain prefers to avoid calling attention to herself.

“They’re cut out of two different molds,” said Betsy Bayless, a former Arizona secretary of state who traveled with Cindy McCain during the 2000 campaign. “You know what he’s like, and she’s just not that way. She respects and admires his interest in talking to all these reporters and all these people, but that’s just not her thing.”

Robert Delgado, the president and chief executive officer of Hensley & Co., the beer distributorship begun by her father, calls her a good judge of character, with a sense of humor that is not on display for everyone.

“It’s kind of the old Arizona way,” said Delgado. “She has to get to know you.”

But McCain is no wallflower, either. Campaign advisers describe her as an avid participant in strategy sessions, speaking up if she disagrees. When the campaign was running aground and hemorrhaging money last summer, she went to her husband and expressed her concerns. Not long after, John McCain parted ways with his campaign manager and his longtime strategist, a decision she said was his alone.

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Cindy Hensley McCain grew up an only child in Phoenix, the daughter of James Hensley, a wildly successful businessman who cornered the market on Budweiser in Maricopa County, and Marguerite Hensley. When her father died in 2000 and left his business to her, Hensley & Co. had become the third largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributor in the country.

In high school, she was named Rodeo Queen, and at the University of Southern California she was a cheerleader. By age 24, she had met John McCain, 18 years her senior, who was separated from his wife and already the father of three kids. “I couldn’t imagine he would be remotely interested in me because I was so young,” she said of meeting the famous POW with her parents at a Navy reception in Hawaii.

A year later, they married, and she was working as a special education teacher.

It was on a scuba diving vacation in Truk Lagoon in Micronesia that McCain got the bug to help more than just her disabled students at home. A friend was cut in an accident and had to go to the small island hospital. The McCains went, too, and were given a tour while they waited.

“They opened the door to the OR where the supplies were, and there were two cats and a whole bunch of rats climbing out of the sterile supplies,” McCain recalled. “They had no X-ray machine. It was very rudimentary, and also they had no beds. To me, it was devastating because it was a (U.S.) trust territory. It was embarrassing.”

She went home and arranged for medical supplies and a hyperbaric chamber to be sent back.

Later, the hospital contacted her and said it needed an orthopedist to treat children on the island. McCain put together a medical team and returned to Truk, and that’s how her medical relief missions began. She visited Kuwait five days after the 1991 Persian Gulf war ended there, as well as Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Rwanda and even Vietnam before relations were normalized with the United States.

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According to IRS reports, McCain and her husband give roughly $200,000 a year to a range of causes, from their children’s schools to AIDS research, as well as research on heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and Down syndrome.

McCain sits on the boards of HALO, which is based in Scotland; Operation Smile, which arranges for plastic surgeons to fix cleft palates and other birth defects in children; and CARE, which fights global poverty. All three programs receive financial support from the McCain family trust.

“I mean, I’m not the Ford Foundation, but I do what I can, and I’m intent on doing it,” she said.

She sees herself not as a policymaker, but more as a fixer who tries to repair the damage after the fact.

If she were to become first lady, McCain said, she would work on the same issues she cares about now.

“I would continue doing exactly what I’m doing,” she said. “Nothing would change. I would just probably do more of it, which would be great.”