I must admit I knew nothing about Cindy McCain beyond the fact that she is beautiful. So, I was rather surprised to discover while reading Holly Bailey’s Newsweek article In Search of Cindy McCain that she is a woman of substance. Unlike Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, she is not motivated by ambition and the lust for power rather, like Laura Bush, by the wish to be her own woman and set her own goals. In other words, Cindy McCain is as independent minded as her husband. I suspect he would not have it any other way. And, yes, their’s seems to be a very modern but sweet love story:
In the spring of 1979, Cindy joined her parents on a trip to Hawaii. At a Navy cocktail party, a cocky captain came up and introduced himself. John McCain was the Navy’s chief liaison to the Senate in Washington. He was 41, but told her he was 37. Cindy was 24, but told him she was 27. By both accounts, it was love at first sight —though for McCain, it was far more complicated. He was a married father of three. His relationship with his first wife, Carol Shepp, was coming apart, and the two were separating, though he didn’t divulge any of that to Cindy that first night.
What kind of a wife is Cindy? An assertive one:
She named her charity the American Voluntary Medical Team. In 1991, she camped in the Kuwait desert five days after the end of the gulf war to take medical supplies to refugees. That same year, she visited Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she saw 160 newborn girls who had been abandoned. The nuns handed her a small baby with a cleft palate so severe that the infant couldn’t be fed. Another baby, also just a few weeks old, had a heart defect. Worried they would die without medical attention, Cindy applied for visas to take the girls back to the United States. But the country’s minister of Health refused to sign the papers. “We can do surgery on this child,” an official told her. Frustrated, Cindy slammed her fist on the table. “Then do it! What are you waiting for?” The official, stunned, simply signed the papers. “I don’t know where I got the nerve,” Cindy told Harper’s Bazaar.
When she arrived in Phoenix, she carried the baby with the cleft palate off the plane. Her husband met her at the airport. He looked at the baby. “Where is she going?” he asked her. “To our house,” she replied. They adopted the little girl and named her Bridget. Family friends adopted the other little girl.
As the French say, “cherch la femme.” You want to know the man, examine the woman he marries. And this one, is quite a woman and she raised quite a family!
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