Bridging 2 marriages, a large, close-knit brood

Embracing what he almost lost
In interviews with four of Mr. McCain’s seven children (two sons were not available because they were serving in the military, and the McCains do not allow Bridget to be interviewed), themes about life under the parental tutelage of John McCain emerged.

Sports were important, and grades mattered. If you wanted face time with Dad, you approached him as he stood over a sizzling grill. (“You can have an audience with him because he doesn’t want to leave the meat,” Andy said.) Unless you failed to manage basic responsibilities, your life choices were respected as long as they were within reason.

“I kind of figured out pretty quick in high school if you make good grades and play sports and were willing to follow a few basic rules you can pretty much do what you want,” said Doug, who with his younger brother Andy was adopted by Mr. McCain when he married their mother, Carol.

For Doug, Andy and Sidney, Mr. McCain’s oldest daughter, the earliest memories of Mr. McCain were his absence. The family lived on modest means in a Navy community in Florida while Mr. McCain languished in prison camps in Vietnam.

“I didn’t really have a father to miss because I didn’t know what a father was,” said Sidney, who was 9 months old when her father was captured and is now an executive in the music industry. “I was very spoiled at the time in the sense of complete strangers would come up and give me things like a P.O.W. bracelet or a stuffed animal.”

She said that when Mr. McCain came home in the spring of 1973, “I remember my dad just squeezing me and not wanting to let me go.”

“It was very overwhelming at the time,” she said.

On his return, his children found a discipline-minded dad who expected the yard raked, was intolerant of back talk, maintained a constant presence at the Little League games, where the handsome former prisoner of war drew crowds of admirers, or at their beach house, crabbing at low tide. “Dad was the spotter,” Andy recalled. “Just don’t miss one. You miss a crab and he’d get angry. He was very competitive that way.”

Mr. McCain’s job as commanding officer of the Navy Replacement Air Group meant he was home for dinner each night, yet he struggled at times to find his domestic role.

Toughness and admiration
Discipline and order returned to the house. “He had to find his way into the family dynamic that didn’t wait for him,” said Andy, who is 45. “My mom was running the show there for a long time and he wanted to set the tone quickly, and that was an evolution. But we didn’t have a problem knowing who was in charge. If you wanted to deviate from expected policy and he said no, he never felt an obligation to give you a reason.”

When the family went to a wrestling match at the Naval Academy and a group of thuggish kids would not get out of their seats, Mr. McCain told them, “You need to get out of those seats or I’ll get someone to get you out of them,” Andy recalled. “He was just a tough guy. And I remember feeling proud of that.”

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After years of waiting for their family to congeal, the children were devastated when Mr. McCain left their mother for another relationship. Mr. McCain soon began a new life with Cindy, to whom he has been married for 27 years.

“It was very, very difficult,” said Andy, who — like his siblings — did not attend the wedding, and only met the second Mrs. McCain years later, in his father’s Senate office. “There will always be some memory there,” said Andy, who added that he had grown to be very fond of Cindy and who now plays a key role in her family-owned beer-distribution company in Phoenix.

A varied bunch
The second family, children of privilege who grew up in the quickly developing Southwest, experienced an altogether different paternal presence, the senator-father who arrived on Friday nights from Washington, often to pass the weekends in the family country hideaway, but who was absent from the both the mundane and profound routines of growing up.

By all accounts of outsiders and siblings, the children get along, and some of them, like Sidney and Meghan, talk regularly. Many attended Jimmy’s graduation from Marine boot camp.

“Lots of guys would not have maintained a close relationship with those two boys,” Grant Woods, a former chief of staff for Mr. McCain, said of Mr. McCain’s relationship with his adopted sons. “And yet he has.”

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His relationship with Sidney, 41, is perhaps the most politically interesting. Sidney, a registered Democrat until recently, has worked in the music business for years, and was the child who challenged Mr. McCain’s authority the most. She continues to debate him on a wide variety of issues.

“Sidney is a character,” Mr. Woods said. “I think she stretched him a lot. When I was hanging around John, his favorite movie was ‘Gigi.’ Sidney has been very involved in the entertainment industry and taken him to the award shows even though her interests have been quite divergent from his. He is very close to her as well.”

By many accounts, Mr. McCain’s daughters were the most resistant to his authority. “I was the boundary pusher,” Sidney said. “In high school I was very rebellious. I needed to look at all sides. At least he would hear me out.”

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