Cindy McCain

Political Relative

Name at birth: Cindy Hensley

Cindy McCain is an Arizona businesswoman and the wife of U.S. senator John McCain. Since 2000 she has been the chairman of Hensley & Company, the Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship founded by her father in 1955. An only child, Cindy McCain was raised in Arizona and earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in special education at the University of Southern California. She taught at Agua Fria High School in Arizona before meeting John McCain in 1979, when he was still married to (though separated from) his first wife. They were married on 17 May 1980. John McCain was elected to Congress in 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1986, making the McCains one of Arizona's most prominent families. Cindy McCain was especially in the news in 1994, when she admitted to a painkiller addiction and said she had stolen drugs from from a charity she founded, the American Voluntary Medical Team. She was not charged with a crime, but agreed to repay the AVMT and enter a diversion program. She has also been active in charities including Operation Smile, CARE, and the land-mine removal group The HALO Trust.

Extra credit: According to her company's official site, as of 2008 "Hensley is the third largest Anheuser-Busch wholesaler in the nation (out of nearly 800) with sales that in 2007 exceeded 23 million cases of A-B beers sold"... Cindy McCain does not publicly state her date of birth. The Cox News Service reported it as 31 December 1954 in an article on 7 March 2008... The McCains have four children: Meghan (b. 1984), John IV (known as Jack, b. 1986), James (b. 1988), and Bridget (b. 1991 in Bangladesh, adopted by the McCains in 1993)... According to her campaign biography, "Cindy founded and ran the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) from 1988 to 1995."

If McCain's husband becomes president, the couple will qualify for our loop on May-December Presidents. The all-time leader in presidential age differential is John Tyler, who was 54 when he married 24-year-old Julia Gardiner in 1844.

Blog posts mentioning Cindy McCain:
First Lady or 'First Laddy'?