http://www.newsweek.com/id/142650
check out the entire article...but here you go, some tidbits, folks. 


Cindy has sometimes likened herself to a single mother; now 54, she has often been far away from her husband during difficult moments, including two of three miscarriages she suffered in the 1980s. Years later, her husband did not notice when she became addicted to painkillers, a habit, she says, brought on in part by the stress of politics. In 2004, he was on the other side of the country when she suffered a stroke that left her partly debilitated. On her own, she learned to walk again. Cindy says she doesn't resent the time she has spent without her husband. It was her choice to stay in Arizona while he rose in Washington, and she says she knew when she married him that he was always going to "put country first."

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.

"I monopolized her attention the entire time," McCain writes in "Worth the Fighting For." Afterward, he persuaded her to join him for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. At first, Cindy had no idea that her date was a celebrated war hero who'd endured years of torture in a Vietnamese prison. Her parents had to tell her his story. In his book, McCain writes, "they were more welcoming of my attentions to their daughter than I had a right to expect. I doubt I could match their graciousness should I find one of my daughters attracted to someone who reminded me of me."

Over the next few months, John and Cindy traveled between Washington and Arizona to see each other. On one of Cindy's visits to the capital, McCain proposed over drinks. They had known each other less than a year, but Cindy accepted immediately.

First, McCain had to deal with his current marriage. He had met Shepp, a former fashion model, before he went to Vietnam. He had adopted her two sons from an earlier marriage and together they'd had a daughter, Sidney. In 1969, while McCain was a POW, Shepp was nearly killed in a car accident. The wreck left her with permanent injuries. When he returned home in 1973, the two tried to make the marriage work, but they had little in common after six years apart. McCain has said he is responsible for the breakup. In February 1980, he filed for divorce. Little more than a month after the divorce was final, Cindy and John married in a glitzy ceremony at the Arizona Biltmore.

Under stress and still in pain after surgery, she began taking more of the pain pills doctors had prescribed. Soon she was addicted, taking up to 20 Percocets and Vicodins a day.

Initially, her doctors simply refilled her prescriptions. But as her appetite for pills increased, she began stealing drugs from her own nonprofit, asking doctors who worked for the group to obtain the pills for her trips overseas. She worked hard to conceal her habit. If anyone saw her downing a pill, she said it was a vitamin. Her husband, away in Washington most of the time, suspected nothing.

Her mother was the first to notice something was wrong. Cindy looked terrible and had lost weight. "What's the matter with you?" she asked Cindy one night in 1992. Cindy confessed, and says she quit the pills cold turkey that day. But she didn't tell John. "I was scared," she told NEWSWEEK. "I didn't want to disappoint him." The secret didn't keep. A little more than a year later, an employee who had been fired from Cindy's nonprofit went to the Drug Enforcement Administration and reported that pills had gone missing. When the DEA called Cindy to ask questions, she broke down and confessed. But first, she called McCain from her lawyer's office to tell him the news. The senator rushed home. "I should have known that it was happening," he told NBC News later. "Maybe I was wrapped up too much in Washington and my ambitions to pay as much attention as I should have." Cindy paid restitution, did community service and attended counseling sessions.