John McCain’s Seven Children Attend His Funeral At The National Cathedral

Senator John McCain had seven children, and though he acknowledged they were a “blended” family, he rarely spoke of how that came to be, and which children belonged any specific parents. But all seven children attended all of the funeral services at the side of their mother and stepmother Cindy McCain to wish their father farewell.

Town & Country broke the large McCain family down and shared the strong connection between the children and their father, John McCain. Meghan, Jimmy, Jack, Andy, Doug, Bridget, and Sidney McCain have each taken their turn honoring their father with a speech or a psalm at the services in his honor.

The oldest McCain children, Doug, Andy, and daughter Sidney are from his first marriage to Carol McCain (1965), which was cut short when John McCain was shot down and captured in Vietnam. Doug and Andy were Carol McCain’s sons from her first marriage, but the senator adopted them when he married their mother. Carol McCain raised her three children alone until her husband was finally freed from captivity in 1973.

Son Andy admits that John McCain’s time in a Vietnam prison was understandably damaging to his marriage.

“As dad progressed, he was gone a lot, doing a lot of international travel, and it was putting a little stress on the marriage.”

John and Carol finalized their divorce in 1979, and he married second wife Cindy the same year.

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— ATHLETES FOR CHARITY (@A4C_ATHLETES) September 1, 2018

Though Carol McCain said she was heartbroken by the end of her marriage, she and her ex-husband maintained a close relationship, and she refused to speak ill of him, even when provoked.

“A lot of people tried to get me to say bad things about him during [the 2008 presidential campaign. And I was like, ‘Are you crazy? I would never do that, you don’t know me or you wouldn’t ask me…. I mean, I love the man. I would never do anything to harm him in any way.”

Meghan McCain is the first child of the senator and Cindy McCain. Meghan McCain and her father were very close, and she toured with him on many of his campaigns. After his death, she tweeted her love for her father.

“In the thirty-three years we shared together, he raised me, taught me, corrected me, comforted me, encouraged me and supported me in all things.”

The next child of John and Sidney McCain is John (Jack) Sidney McCain IV, who like his father is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis where his father will be laid to rest today. James (Jimmy) McCain is the youngest son of John McCain, and he is a Marine who served in Iraq.

The youngest child of Cindy and John McCain is Bridget, whom Cindy adopted while on a trip to Bangladesh doing humanitarian work. Cindy McCain met Bridget as a baby at an orphanage overseas (Bridget had a severe cleft palate and a congenital heart defect) and brought her home to Arizona.

Friends of the family say that Cindy never made a distinction between Bridget and her other children.

“[Overseas adoptions] were very odd, rare things then, but Cindy never said anything more than, ‘We have this baby now. Just ‘This is my daughter, she’s from Bangladesh, I couldn’t leave without her.'”