The Perfect Part

The McCains' marriage -- like any in which a spouse has chosen to remain in the home district -- has been marked by geographical distance. The McCains lived in Alexandria during the early years of their marriage, but Cindy eventually decided to move back to Phoenix, in part out of a desire to start a family where she'd grown up, Harper says. John came home on weekends.

Cohen says Cindy didn't seem to like Washington. "It's hard on wives," he says. "There used to be a rule: If your husband isn't in town, you don't exist."

Perhaps, suggests one person familiar with the McCain campaign, staying in Arizona was a way for Cindy to maintain her own identity. The source recalls a comment she made last year: "You know, when John's around he sort of sucks up all the light."

Cindy had several miscarriages before she gave birth to Meghan, who is 23 and now blogs about her dad's campaign; Jack, 22, who is at the Naval Academy; and Jimmy, 20, a Marine who has served in Iraq. "John was with me the first time I lost a baby," she told Harper's Bazaar last year, "but not for those after, which was hard."

The couple adopted Bridget, now 17, as a baby. Cindy raised her children in the home she'd grown up in, while her parents moved to a house nearby. (In 2006, the McCains moved to a large, $4.6 million condo in Phoenix.)

The household filled up with animals, some of them the children's and some of them the strays that "sentimental" Cindy, as Joe McCain puts it, has a habit of taking in. Not having John there during the week was difficult, Cindy told the magazine, and she would "get angry" -- but, she added carefully, "always at the situation, not him."

Friends and family describe Cindy as not easily rattled, at least not outwardly. Keegan describes her as someone who puts "a lot of emphasis on conquering things" and controlling herself.

She did, however, cry in front of reporters after smear attacks during the 2000 South Carolina primary insinuated that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child -- a reference to Bridget, born in Bangladesh.

While on vacation to Micronesia in the mid-'80s, after seeing the appalling state of a hospital there, Cindy became interested in medical care abroad. In 1988, she founded an organization she called the American Voluntary Medical Team, which sent teams of doctors and nurses to spots throughout the Third World.

It was during this time that the senator was implicated in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal. After months of unflattering disclosures, a Senate committee issued McCain a mild rebuke and concluded that he'd committed no ethics violations.

In Cindy's telling, the stress of this scandal, plus spinal surgeries for two ruptured discs and the pain of an enlarged uterus, all combined to feed her addictive behavior. She has said she did not tell her husband about her growing problem, even as she was stealing painkillers from the medical organization she'd founded.

By 1992, she wrote later in Newsweek, she was taking 10 to 15 pills a day, claiming they were vitamins if she had to swallow them in public. The fact that her husband didn't notice made her feel like she was still in control of the problem.