Cindy McCain
Cindy Lou McCain is an American diplomat, businesswoman, and humanitarian who is the executive director of the World Food Programme. McCain previously served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture from 2021 to 2023. She is the widow of U.S. Senator John McCain from Arizona, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.
McCain was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and is a daughter of wealthy beer distributor Jim Hensley. After receiving bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Southern California, she became a special education teacher. She married John McCain in 1980. The couple moved to Arizona in 1981, and John McCain was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the following year. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. From 1988 to 1995, Cindy McCain operated a nonprofit organization, the American Voluntary Medical Team, which organized trips by medical personnel to disaster-stricken or war-torn third-world areas.
Upon her father's death in 2000, McCain inherited majority control and became chair of Hensley & Co., one of the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributors in the United States. She participated in her husband's 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns. She continued to be an active philanthropist and served on the boards of Operation Smile, Eastern Congo Initiative, CARE, and HALO Trust, frequently making overseas trips in conjunction with their activities. During the 2010s, she became prominent in the fight against human trafficking.
A Republican, McCain made a cross-party endorsement of Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election. She was nominated to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture ambassadorship by President Biden in June 2021 and was confirmed by the Senate in October 2021. Much of her tenure in that position focused on the 2022–2023 food crises largely caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the effects of climate change on agriculture. United Nations officials appointed her as executive director of the World Food Programme in March 2023, and her efforts in that role have revolved around the humanitarian impact of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip following the October 7 attacks.
Early life and education
Cindy Lou Hensley was born in Phoenix, Arizona, to James Hensley, who founded Hensley & Co., and Marguerite "Smitty" Hensley. She was raised as the only child of her parents' second marriage and grew up on Phoenix's North Central Avenue in affluent circumstances. Dixie Lea Burd, the daughter of Marguerite Smith through a prior relationship, was her half-sister, as was Kathleen Hensley Portalski, the daughter of Jim Hensley and his first wife, Mary Jeanne Parks. Cindy Hensley was named Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona in 1968. She attended Central High School in Phoenix, graduating in 1972.Hensley enrolled at the University of Southern California. She joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority as a freshman, and had many leadership roles in the house during her four years there. Hensley graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in education in 1976. She continued on at USC, and received a Master of Arts degree in special education in 1978. There she participated in a movement therapy pilot program that led the way to a standard treatment for children with severe disabilities; she published the work Movement Therapy: A Possible Approach in 1978. Declining a role in the family business, she worked for a year as a special education teacher of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities at Agua Fria High School in Avondale, Arizona.
Marriage and family
Hensley met John McCain in April 1979 at a military reception in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was the U.S. Navy liaison officer to the United States Senate, and was accompanying a group of senators heading for China. She was in Hawaii on a family vacation with her parents. Hensley was talking to Jill Biden, the wife of Senator Joe Biden, who suggested that she talk to McCain; her father made the introduction. He was almost 18 years her senior; by her later description, each fudged the age they said they were to the other: "He made himself younger, and I made myself older, of course."He had been married to Carol McCain for 14 years and they had three children.
McCain and Hensley quickly began a relationship, traveling between Arizona and Washington to see each other. John McCain then pushed to end his marriage and the couple stopped cohabiting in January 1980, Carol McCain consented to a divorce in February 1980, it was finalized in April 1980.
Hensley and McCain were married on May 17, 1980, at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. They signed a prenuptial agreement that kept most of her family's assets under her name; they kept their finances apart and filed separate income tax returns.
Image:Republican National Convention, September 1-4, 2008. Presidential candidate John McCain's family, wife Cindy in the middle in green outfit, St. Paul, Minnesota LCCN2010719276.jpg|thumb|right|The full McCain family in 2008. In the front row are the children with Cindy: Meghan, Jimmy, Jack, and Bridget. In the back row are his children from John McCain's first marriage: Andrew, Douglas, and Sidney.|alt=
Her father's business and political contacts helped her new husband to gain a foothold in Arizona politics. She campaigned with her husband door to door during his successful first bid for U.S. Congress in 1982, and was heavily involved in campaign strategy. Her wealth from an expired trust from her parents provided significant loans to the campaign and helped it survive a period of early debt.
Once her husband was elected, the McCains moved to Alexandria, Virginia. She spent two months in late 1983 writing handwritten notes on over 4,000 Christmas cards to be sent to constituents and others. She was considered an outsider who was snubbed by the Washington congressional social scene, in part because Carol McCain was a popular figure in town, and she grew homesick for Arizona. She had several miscarriages.
She moved back to Arizona in early 1984 and gave birth to the couple's daughter Meghan later that year. She subsequently gave birth to sons John Sidney IV in 1986 and James in 1988. Their fourth child, Bridget, was adopted in 1991. McCain's parents lived across the street and helped her raise the children; her husband was frequently in Washington and she typically only saw him on weekends and holidays. In his absence, she organized elaborate fund-raisers for him and expanded their home.
In April 1986, McCain and her father invested $359,100 in a shopping center project with Phoenix banker Charles Keating. This, combined with her role as a bookkeeper who later had difficulty finding receipts for family trips on Keating's jet, caused complications for her husband during the Keating Five scandal, when he was being examined for his role regarding oversight of Keating's bank.
American Voluntary Medical Team
Founding and mission
In 1988, inspired by a vacation that she took four years earlier to substandard medical facilities on Truk Lagoon, McCain founded the American Voluntary Medical Team. It was a non-profit organization that organized trips for doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to provide MASH-like emergency medical care to disaster-struck or war-torn developing countries such as Micronesia, Vietnam, Kuwait, Zaire, Iraq, Nicaragua, India, Bangladesh, and El Salvador. She led 55 of these missions over the next seven years, each of which were at least two weeks in duration. AVMT also supplied treatment to poor sick children around the world. In 1993, McCain and the AVMT were honored with an award from Food for the Hungry.Adoption
In 1991, the AVMT went to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to provide assistance following the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone. While at Mother Teresa's Dhaka orphanage, the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa Children's Home, McCain met two infant girls she felt needed to be brought to the United States for medical treatment. She decided to adopt one of the girls, later named Bridget, with her husband readily agreeing; the adoption became final in 1993. She helped coordinate the adoption of the other little girl for family friend Wes Gullett.Prescription drug addiction
In 1989, McCain developed an addiction to Percocet and Vicodin. She initially took the opioid painkillers to alleviate pain after two spinal surgeries for ruptured discs. She also used the drugs to ease emotional stress during the Keating Five scandal. The addiction progressed to where she was taking upwards of twenty pills a day, and she resorted to having an AVMT physician write illegal prescriptions in the names of three AVMT employees without their knowledge. In 1992, her parents staged an intervention to force her to get help; she told her husband about her problem and subsequently attended a drug treatment facility where she began outpatient sessions to begin recovery from drug addiction. In 1993, she underwent surgery, which resolved her back pain.In January 1993, Tom Gosinski, an AVMT employee who had discovered her illegal drug use, was terminated on budgetary grounds. Subsequently, he tipped off the Drug Enforcement Administration about her prior actions and a federal investigation ensued. McCain's defense team, led by her husband's Keating Five lawyer John Dowd, secured an agreement with the U.S. Attorney's office for McCain, a first-time offender, which avoided charges while requiring her to pay financial restitution, enroll in a diversion program and do community service. Meanwhile, in early 1994, Gosinski filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against McCain, in which he alleged she ordered him to conceal "improper acts" and "misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding;" he told her he would settle for $250,000. In response, Dowd characterized this request as blackmail, and requested Maricopa County attorney Rick Romley to investigate Gosinski for extortion. In the end, Gosinski's credibility was undermined by testimony in Romley's report from other charity staffers who asserted Gosinski privately vowed to blackmail McCain were he ever fired, and both Gosinski's lawsuit and the extortion investigation against him were dropped.
Before prosecutors were able to publicly disclose her addiction to pain medication, McCain preemptively revealed the story to reporters, stating that she was doing so willingly: "Although my conduct did not result in compromising any missions of AVMT, my actions were wrong, and I regret them... if what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile."