The Perfect Part

John McCain had much the same reaction at a party in Honolulu in 1979. He was working as a naval liaison to the Senate and, by some accounts, was separated from his wife, Carol Shepp, who'd raised their three children alone during her husband's 5 1/2 years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war. (Years later, McCain would acknowledge what biographer Robert Timberg called "dalliances" after his return from war. In one of his autobiographies, he would attribute the collapse of his first marriage largely to "my own selfishness and immaturity.")

Peter Lakeland, then a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remembers how McCain, white-haired and 42, walked across the ballroom like a "guided missile" in the direction of the young blonde.

Cindy, 24, was there with her parents. By that time, she'd earned a master's degree and was teaching disabled children at a public school in Phoenix.

Her youth and her innocence must have been part of her appeal, Lakeland says: "He had just come out of hell, and his marriage had fallen apart, and I think he really saw Cindy as a chance to really begin over again."

They started dating. Friends recall that they were a study in opposites, with Cindy "always deferring to John," according to William Cohen, the former secretary of defense who was the best man at their wedding. John, for his part, was animated in his excitement about the woman he called "Cindy Lou."

Shy Cindy Lou's fate was to marry in 1980 into a family of talkers.

"You just can't just help but love her, honey," says John's mother, the irrepressible 96-year-old Roberta McCain, who several times during an interview says she has nothing to say and then keeps adding things. She describes Cindy as a seamless mother who has managed her four children's lives with seeming effortlessness, all while looking fantastic and wearing the most stylish clothes. "I don't see any chink in her armor, and I'm not biased," she says.

Reticent but Resolute

Cindy McCain is a careful, watchful person. She is "reserved," friends say. She is "shy." In stories McCain tells about herself, she comes across as trying so hard not to impose her problems on her husband and others that she can seem self-abnegating. She talks often about her unease in the spotlight and her hesitation over both of her husband's presidential runs.

"Our married life began almost as quickly as our public life did," she once told the Baltimore Sun, recalling how her husband began running for Congress shortly after their wedding. She has had years to perfect her role of candidate's wife as humanizer, the one who talks about afternoon barbecues at home and kids' games and who poses for pictures, smiling, just behind the shoulder of the husband. She has refused to become a Washington wife, however. John McCain has been a fixture of the Hill for more than 25 years now, but his wife decided not to raise their children here.

During this campaign, McCain has done few large events on her own, especially compared with Michelle Obama. Several people familiar with the campaign say she has at times agreed to do campaign events and then backed out later. When she introduced her husband at a June town-hall meeting in Philadelphia, she praised the senator from Arizona as a "husband and father" who has "good judgment." The whole thing clocked in at 1 minute 10 seconds.

She steers clear of policy. "Cindy doesn't want to say the wrong things on issues," says someone familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly. "She has seemed to be always happy to give a speech . . . on the type of person her husband is."

She is, in the words of her brother-in-law Joe McCain, a self-editor. Aware she is under a spotlight, she recognizes that everything she says must be carefully framed, or it can be taken out of context. "The best way to put it in context is to not say it," he says.