USA TODAY International Edition
McCain emerges ‘ Stronger’ in her memoir
Cindy McCain gives her perspective on the late Sen. John McCain’s long political career and their 38- year marriage in a new memoir.
“Stronger: Courage, Hope & Humor in My Life With John McCain,” offers her insights into her husband’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns and provides details about his final days battling brain cancer, her 2004 stroke and her struggle with opioid addiction. She discusses their courtship, the 18- year difference in their ages, the end of John McCain’s previous marriage, their wedding and their family.
Here is a sampling of the book’s revelations:
A senator’s condescending behavior during Keating Five hearings made Cindy McCain ‘ physically nauseous’
McCain has harsh words for Sen. Howell Heflin, D- Ala., the Senate Ethics Committee chair who ran the drawn- out hearings into the Keating Five influence- peddling scandal that involved her husband and then- Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D- Ariz.
John McCain and DeConcini were among five senators who were accused of intervening with federal thrift regulators on behalf of developer and financier Charles H. Keating Jr., whose Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed.
McCain remembers Heflin referring to her with patronizing terms such as “little lady” and getting nasty about her over a record- keeping problem.
“He was condescending, arrogant, and paternalistic in the most offensive way,” she writes in “Stronger.”
In 1994, McCain had said Heflin made her feel that she was to blame for her husband getting into trouble.
“It wasn’t my fault, but at the time, you couldn’t convince me. Howell Heflin even told me it was my fault,” she told a Phoenix Gazette columnist.
John McCain shared his wife’s contempt for Heflin, who died in 2005.
In 2008, when McCain was running for president, DeConcini disclosed to The Arizona Republic a March 1991 incident in which John McCain refused to shake Heflin’s hand while on a Senate delegation trip to Kuwait.
It happened shortly after the Ethics Committee concluded that McCain had displayed “poor judgment” in meeting with the regulators on behalf of Keating. The panel called DeConcini’s “aggressive conduct” toward the regulators “inappropriate.”
She says John was unaware she was addicted to opioids
During the stressful Keating Five period, Cindy McCain, who had undergone a hysterectomy and back surgery, became addicted to opioid painkillers.
“My psychic pain became unbearable,” she wrote.
In “Stronger,” she writes that she hadn’t told her husband about her drug use, something she characterizes as “another huge mistake.”
“Like most addicts, I felt ashamed, and I did whatever I could to cover it up,” McCain says. “When John came home, I always had the house running smoothly, and I maintained a carefully controlled front of conversation and good cheer. I don’t think he ever had any suspicion of what was going on.”
After Cindy McCain’s drug use became public in the 1990s, John McCain maintained that he didn’t know anything about it.
“Naturally, I felt enormous sadness for Cindy and a certain sense of guilt that I hadn’t detected it,” he said at the time. “I feel very sorry for what she went through, but I’m very proud she was able to come out of it. For her, it was like the Keating affair had been for me, a searing experience, and we both came out stronger.”
Cindy McCain’s mom and dad intervened in the crisis. At her father’s urging, she writes, she quit the opioids cold turkey.
Cindy McCain ultimately agreed with husband’s choice of 2008 running mate Sarah Palin but didn’t invite her to his funeral
Cindy McCain says in the book that John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, brought her into the conversation about who he should pick as his running mate.
She agreed with her husband that it should have been his friend, former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Before his death in 2018, John McCain disclosed that he regretted not going with his maverick instinct and choosing Lieberman. But McCain’s campaign aides managed to talk him out of the idea, which likely would have been asking for trouble from the GOP delegates at the Republican National Convention.
John McCain instead was persuaded to consider then- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose political inexperience and poor performance on the campaign trail became a liability for the Republican ticket. The choice of Palin, who was not up to speed on the issues, all but erased a perceived advantage on national security and foreign affairs that the seasoned McCain had over Democratic rival Barack Obama.
McCain writes that she believes the media treated Palin unfairly. But she also notes that Palin shared the blame because “she didn’t want to take direction from John’s team” or participate in other preparation ahead of interviews.
“Ultimately, it was our decision,” McCain writes. “We made what we thought was the best choice at the time and stood by it.”
McCain also defends the decision not to invite Palin to McCain’s 2018 funeral. Palin called the public snub a “gut punch.”
“Sarah Palin, who had been John’s vice presidential nominee in the 2008 race, did not attend because in the fourteen months that John had been sick, she never once spoke to him,” McCain says in the book. “He had put her on the political map, and she didn’t even send him a note of good wishes when he was down. That is not someone you invite to a final farewell.”
‘ A cold chill ran through’ Cindy McCain as her husband fumbled questioning of James Comey
“Stronger” provides new details about the emergence of John McCain’s glioblastoma, the brain cancer that would kill him Aug. 25, 2018, at age 81.
McCain noticed that her husband had started to act irritably some time after his election to a sixth U. S. Senate term in 2016.
She writes in the book that, despite his reputation over the years as a hothead, he had never lost his temper with her during their marriage.
“Now he was edgy with me and everyone else in a way I didn’t recognize,” McCain writes.
John McCain started sleeping for 12 hours a day and still came across as “logy,” per the book.
Their children noticed the change and daughter Meghan McCain brought it up. He said he was just getting old.
The senator’s garbled questioning of former FBI Director James Comey during a 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing alarmed her even more. At one point during his remarks, he referred to “President Comey.”
In his 2018 book, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations,” John McCain described himself as “incomprehensible” at the hearing and called the episode “one of the more mortifying experiences of my public career.”
“When I heard him talking, a cold chill ran through me,” Cindy McCain writes in “Stronger.”
In “The Restless Wave,” John McCain also suggested that the confused performance was related to his brain tumor.
Cindy McCain endorsed Biden but hasn’t lost hope for the GOP
Republican Trump upset Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. The same night, John McCain won a sixth term in the Senate.
The McCains were among the Americans whose jaws dropped as key states delivered for Trump, who had been at odds with John McCain for months and would keep their public feud going even after McCain’s death.
Cindy McCain quotes her husband shortly before going to sleep that night: “I don’t recognize what’s happening in the country, but it’s my job to help him be a good president.”
As Trump’s presidency got going, McCain often found himself in the role of White House critic.
John McCain famously foiled Trump in July 2017 by derailing Republican efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act. Getting rid of President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform achievement was a top Trump priority and he has nursed a grudge against John McCain for giving the GOP’s “skinny repeal” bill thumbs down.
In the 2020 election, Cindy McCain made the decision to cross party lines and endorse Trump’s Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime friend of the McCain family. In doing so, she helped tip swing state Arizona to the Democrats for the first time since 1996.
The Arizona Republican Party censured her this year, a gesture that McCain laughed off Monday in an interview with The Arizona Republic, part of the USA Today Network. “It hasn’t affected me in any way at all,” she said.
Still, McCain writes in “Stronger” that she continues to pull for the GOP.
“My Republican roots run deep, and I haven’t given up on the party. I hope it can regenerate itself and swing away from the disgrace it has become. Republicans in Arizona and elsewhere deserve better,” she writes.”
“The party fell in thrall to a snake oil salesman. I prefer the gold standard of politics that I learned from John and Joe – that whether you win or lose, you do it honorably. I am glad that when I travel internationally now, I can once again be proud of our president.”