CNN iReport

The campaign has attempted to portray McCain's past addiction to prescription painkillers and her public statements about it as a Betty Ford-style story of altruism and accountability. "It is a problem that is a national problem," McCain has said. "Particularly with women. And so I try to talk about it as much as possible, because I don't want anyone to ever wind up in the shoes I did at the time." But Cindy McCain's openness about that period has not been entirely voluntary, and hers was not the only life damaged by her addiction.

From 1988 to 1995, McCain ran and funded her own charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team, delivering supplies and assistance to countries in crisis. In 1991, she hired a young man from Nebraska named Tom Gosinski, the former manager of government and international affairs for America West Airlines, to be a director of A.V.M.T. He became a close friend of the McCain family, and gave swimming lessons to Cindy's sons.

In the summer of 1992, Gosinski began to notice that his boss was behaving erratically. He kept a journal, which was later obtained by two reporters, Amy Silverman and Jeremy Voas, and published, in 1994, by the local alternative weekly paper, the Phoenix New Times. On July 20, 1992, Gosinski wrote:

I do not know what Cindy is up to but it appears as though she is trying to use several doctors' DEA #'s so that she can acquire drugs for personal use. . . . I certainly hope that Cindy does not get herself or AVMT in trouble.

The journal entries grow increasingly fretful throughout the summer. In late August, Gosinski wrote about an upcoming mission to Africa:

August 28, 1992: Mark Salter in John McCain's Washington office has stated that the State Department and the Department of Defense believe it is not safe to travel to Somalia or the northern regions of Kenya. Cindy insists that we are going to go on the trip and that it may be wise for us to pack guns. She is absolutely crazy-I don't know how to load a gun let alone shoot one.

About a month later, the situation came to a head:

October 2, 1992: Well, it is done. Last night Jim and Smitty confronted Cindy regarding her dependency to prescription drugs and she admitted to her addiction.

In December, Gosinski discovered a prescription for painkillers that had been made out in his name by the charity's doctor, John M. Johnson. Cindy McCain had filled it at her neighborhood pharmacy. Gosinski was fired in mid-January, and soon afterward met with the Drug Enforcement Administration to discuss his former boss's behavior.

A year later, Gosinski filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit. The McCains retaliated by enlisting John Dowd, a Washington lawyer who had helped extricate them from an earlier scandal, when McCain was one of five senators accused of interfering with the 1989 federal investigation of Charles Keating, Jr., the disgraced chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. McCain had accepted more than a hundred thousand dollars in contributions from Keating, a family friend. Keating had a vacation home in the Bahamas, and the McCains had flown there with him several times. Cindy claimed to have misplaced receipts that supposedly showed that the McCains had reimbursed Keating for these trips. (With her father, Cindy had also invested three hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars in a shopping mall that Keating was constructing. When a writer for the Arizona Republic first called McCain to ask about his wife's business ties to Keating, McCain called the reporter a "liar" and an "idiot.") McCain was eventually exonerated, but he called his involvement with Keating "the worst mistake of my life."

Cindy McCain wrote in a column for Newsweek in 2001 that during the Keating Five investigation "the painkillers cushioned me. The newspaper articles didn't hurt as much, and I didn't hurt as much. I can remember sitting in the Senate hearings, listening to Howell Heflin saying terrible things not just about my husband but about me. The pills made me feel euphoric and free."

By the late summer of 1994, the New Times and the Arizona Republic were on the verge of exposing Cindy McCain's addiction and her misconduct at A.V.M.T. When the McCains learned that the story was about to come out, they called a press conference. Cindy admitted stealing drugs from A.V.M.T., and claimed to have completed a federal diversion program. She made no mention of Gosinski or of implicating her employees in illegal activity. John M. Johnson lost his state medical license. Tom Gosinski let his wrongful-termination suit expire and went back to work for America West.