There was never any question in our house about Watergate: bad. Very bad. And the scandal definitely had an impact on me. But it was nothing stars and stripesy, nothing like seeing the movie “All The President’s Men” and deciding to become a journalist. To be honest, I decided to be a reporter after Meg Ryan moved to New York to go to journalism school in “When Harry Met Sally.” Looked like fun, so I did the same thing.

It’s more that Watergate became my baseline for evil. My mom wouldn’t let me see scary movies as a child so Richard Nixon was my Freddy Krueger. This point of view worked fine for years — it was, for instance, a perfectly acceptable opinion for an adult living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But when I moved back to Phoenix a few years ago, I realized much of the world had bought into some revisionist account of the Nixon era. Suddenly, the guy was OK.

Nowhere was this new spin so celebrated as my native state. Arizona had become like some sort of Argentina for Watergate-era figures from both sides of the aisle. One of the lawyers for the Committee to Re-Elect the President lives here, as does a special prosecutor from the Department of Justice. The guy whose desk at the Democratic National Committee was rifled practices law in Phoenix. Richard Kleindienst, Nixon’s attorney general, lived a couple of hours north of Phoenix until he died in February. Even G. Gordon Liddy, the freaky, flesh-burning, Limbaugh wannabe who started the whole Watergate mess in the first place, has a home in Scottsdale.

Mostly coincidence, I’m sure, but this place has always attracted Do-Overs, people who leave their families and their pasts to start again on the strip-malled frontier. Arizona attracts libertarians too, more than just conservative Republicans. Don’t particuarly care for the laws of the land? In Arizona, there’s always a way around ‘em.

All of which makes Phoenix a great place to be a crooked politician or a political reporter.

Being a political reporter here has forced me to broaden my horizons. I can honestly say that I have friends who are Republicans. And after our last governor, Fife Symington, was convicted of bank fraud and left politics to become a chef (in a fancy restaurant, not prison — he’s dodged that bullet so far), I thought nothing could faze me.

Then came Tom Liddy. Yes, that Liddy, the son of G. Gordon. He announced his candidacy for Congress earlier this year in the state’s 1st District, a seat once held by John McCain and, earlier, by then-House Majority Leader John Rhodes, the guy who once upon a time broke the news to Nixon that he didn’t have the votes in the House to survive impeachment.

It must be a joke, I thought. I mean, guys run for office using daddy’s name all the time — just look at George W. and Al Jr. — but using the name Liddy? G. Gordon Liddy sells “Stacked and Packed” calendars (scantily clad women holding guns) on his Web site. He bragged in his autobiography of eating rats as a child to test his endurance. He offered to kill Jack Anderson!

That kind of thing may sell on AM radio, but does it qualify his son to hold a seat in Congress?

Tom Liddy thinks so. He has no real credentials, other than the family name. At 38, he’s pretty green, a lawyer with a few years experience at the Republican National Committee and some time in the Marine Corps. He’s lived in the district less than a year.

The bizarre part? Tom Liddy just might win. The 1st District includes parts of southeastern metropolitan Phoenix, a conservative district with a lot of Mormons and a smattering of seniors, the kind of folks who live in trailers and shoot endangered species for sport.

I had to meet him.

Turns out, he’s really nice. Unlike his dad, Tom’s got a full head of hair and a little bit of a paunch. He’s sweet. (Like his mom, friends and family told me.) We sat down at a coffee shop near his campaign headquarters and Tom told me all about what it was like to grow up as the son of G. Gordon Liddy. There was no rat eating. But there were lean times while dad was away at prison. (He served almost five years — longer than any other Watergate figure.)

Tom was 10 when his dad left. The junior Liddy recalls that for Christmases before his departure, G. Gordon had put radishes out for the reindeer and made sooty Santa footprints on the carpet to fool the kids. Christmas changed a lot when he went to prison, Tom told me.

“What I remember about my dad being in prison wasn’t what I didn’t get. What I remember is my mom crying. My oldest sister would have to stay up and wrap the presents because my mom couldn’t do it alone and we didn’t have any money, and one year my mom sat down and explained to us — she put five kids on the couch — that Christmas is really about Jesus Christ.

“It’s about God loving us …” At this point Tom stopped, sobbing, unable to continue for a long time. “… and it’s about how we have to love each other and treat each other well. She told us we weren’t going to have a Christmas. And that was tough. As a parent, it’s tough to think of your mom doing that. We were like, ‘Mom, don’t be ridiculous. We don’t care about presents.’ We gave her a hug.”

I looked around the coffee shop, embarrassed. Should I do something? Get the guy a Kleenex? Call his mom? He was on the verge of hysterics. But I soon got used to it. Tom Liddy cried several times while I was with him, during one-on-one interviews and in speeches before dozens of people. He cried so much I started to wonder if maybe we should send the guy to therapy rather than Washington.

And I was confused. Tom Liddy talked a lot about how he loves his dad, and a lot about how he loves his country. But to me, it seems impossible to have it both ways. No matter how you look at Watergate, it’s about G. Gordon Liddy betraying his country or the country betraying G. Gordon Liddy, right?

Tom didn’t answer that one. And here’s the answer I got when I asked, “Was what your father did wrong?”

“Wrong? Wrong deals with morality. It was illegal, I would say. Clearly, it was illegal … Knowing what I know now, I probably would have handled things differently. But I think it’s unfair, not just to my dad but to everyone involved, to prejudge. I don’t know what my dad knew at the time, and certainly the country was in a completely different situation, in the middle of the Cold War, with the riots and all that sort of stuff. I just feel that it’s not appropriate for a son to judge his father.”

Nor did I get a satisfactory answer to the question “Why, after you’ve endured so much trauma in the public spotlight — trauma still evident in frequent emotional outbursts — are you out there seeking it?”

Liddy just kept saying that he feels obliged to serve, that he knows what it means to suffer financially (from the days Dad was locked up) and therefore wants to lower taxes. And protect the Second Amendment, of course. His supporters think he’ll make a great congressman because, as one told me, he’ll have name recognition like Sonny Bono did when he got elected.

And he has a lot of supporters. He may not win the September primary (it’s a tight race with five Republicans competing), but he’ll probably come close. I went to a fundraiser at G. Gordon’s home (a surreal event, the house decorated wall-to-wall with Watergate memorabilia and firearms) and there, amid the AM radio junkies, were quite a few members of the Phoenix establishment. Friends of my parents! Elected officials! All of them admiring the Watergate Hotel ashtray and the lamp made of bayonets and a shotgun, and paying to have their photos taken with G. Gordon Liddy.

I went home and called my mother. “Oh no, hon, you’re not crazy. Watergate was bad. Very bad,” she told me.

That didn’t help much, so I called Anne Kleindienst.

Anne is another honest-to-goodness child of Watergate, the daughter of Richard Kleindienst, who had the bad luck of taking a job as Nixon’s attorney general five days before the bungled Watergate break-in. Like Tom Liddy, the younger Kleindienst (she’s practiced corporate law in Phoenix for years) was deeply affected by Watergate. She was in college at the time, old enough to really see her father suffer, even though he was never charged with a crime.

Unlike Tom Liddy, Anne Kleindienst doesn’t celebrate the event. And unlike the Liddys, the Kleindiensts never made peace with Nixon. Richard Kleindienst wanted to call his memoir, “Mr. President, You’re Wrong.” (The publisher said no, so Kleindienst called it “Justice”)

I told Anne that Tom Liddy was running for office using his father’s name, with the promise he’d make our lives better than his had been when his dad was in jail. Her eyes got big but all she’d say was that since she doesn’t live in Liddy’s district, she doesn’t have to worry about picking a candidate.

To this day, people still hear her name and ask about her relationship to Watergate. She doesn’t like it, but it’s a part of life. She’s 46, happily married and involved in local Republican politics, although she says she’d never run for office. Years ago, someone asked her to consider it, and she did, but ultimately decided against it.

“I felt that I had already sacrificed enough of my personal life and I didn’t want to take any chances that I would sacrifice any more,” Kleindienst said.

I went home and called my mom. Good for her, we decided. And too bad for the rest of us.

You’d think such close quarters would breed contempt between a rep-tied father and his Doc Martened daughter. But really, our relationship has never been better.

Dad and I barely spoke before I took the job at New Times. Of all my childhood memories, one of the clearest is the feeling of my tiny hand in my father’s huge, warm one, slowly swinging back and forth as we walked. I don’t recall where we were going, but I do know that the memory is precious because it is rare.

My father almost never touched my sister or me. It wasn’t because he wasn’t around — he was, always. I can’t recall a night, growing up, without him stretched out on the couch, watching bad TV. He wasn’t abusive. I’m almost certain that he would not have preferred sons to daughters. I don’t think he wished he hadn’t had kids at all. He just wasn’t interested.

Looking back, I realize he was jealous of us. Jealous of the attention we snuck from the love of his life, our mother. And, again in hindsight, I see that he was shy. He didn’t know what to say to us, these whiny, tangle-haired creatures with his hazel eyes, one with a freckle in the center of her lower lip, just like her dad.

He was uneasy around us, and gruff. My sister and I learned not to make a peep during “The Rockford Files,” not to request extra bathroom stops on the way to San Diego, not to dare try to ease away a nightmare by crawling into bed with Mom and Dad.

In a lot of ways, I suppose, he was a pretty typical father for my generation. Hardworking, hardhearted. He expressed his love for us by working his ass off.

So you might be surprised by what happened when, at age 26, resigned to a long-distance relationship with my crosstown dad, I took the job at New Times.

Initially, Dad questioned my decision to join the hippie paper. He curled his lip and shook his head, and walked out of the room, disgusted. He took a lot of abuse from his pals. But then something odd happened. We found ourselves, my father and I, living in the same world: the Phoenix political scene. We were on opposite ends of the spectrum, to be sure, but suddenly we shared a common language. He had something to talk about with me.

My phone started ringing at 5:30 nearly every afternoon. Car phone static, then, “Hey, Ames!” I’d drop everything and scramble to answer the inevitable “So what’s new in town?” Sometimes he even trusted me with gossip about his cronies — strictly off the record, of course.

“Good story,” he’d harrumph once in a while, and only after I asked. His friends insisted he bragged about me constantly, but I always figured Mom was my one true-blue fan.

And then, last year, about the time the national media started writing about Sen. John McCain’s presidential prospects, I got a call. A guy identified himself as David Grann, a reporter for the New Republic, and said he was profiling McCain.

His question went something like, “So, tell me about that time, a few years back, that John McCain screamed at your dad in the Senate dining room, over a story you wrote for New Times.”

I was stunned. As a political reporter in Arizona, there was (and is) no greater hide to hunt than that of McCain. I had made a hobby of collecting anecdotes about McCain’s temper long before most Americans had ever heard of the hotheaded war hero. I sputtered to Grann that I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that he had a source who knew all about the incident. Then he asked for my father’s work number. I gave him the number for Salt River Project’s press office, then hung up and called my father.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not asking you if it happened. I just want you to know about the call I just got.” Dad thanked me, and changed the subject.

Although they both declined to discuss the incident with Grann, neither McCain nor my father denied it. In his story, Grann reported that McCain had cornered my father and “showered him with curses.”

Later, a Phoenix political insider told me he’d known about the incident for years, that it happened in 1994, shortly after I wrote a story about McCain’s wife, Cindy, and an FBI investigation into her drug addiction and theft of drugs from a nonprofit organization she’d founded. It was my first big story as a young reporter; my father had just been promoted to general manager of Salt River Project.

McCain didn’t speak to me for five years after I wrote that story. But I had no idea he’d gone after my dad. Oh yeah, my source blabbed, your father was devastated. “Why can’t you control your daughter?” McCain had reportedly asked. My dad had even worried that he wouldn’t be able to work with the state’s senior senator — a huge liability for a man hired, in part, to lobby Congress.

Amazing. My father felt like he couldn’t do his job because of me?

The man who bellowed if my sister or I woke him from a Sunday afternoon nap never said a word, never asked me to stop writing about McCain. And he still hasn’t. We don’t talk about the incident, although we talk almost every day.

I suppose there really is room for me in my father’s world, after all. And I’m proud to be his daughter. But I still won’t be showing up at his office anytime soon for Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

And then video games got violent. I’d walk past the study and see my otherwise angelic husband, Ray, pointing an enormous, very real-looking gun around the interior of a half-submerged submarine, waiting for a predator to pop out. Boom!

“It’s relaxing,” he explained, eyes on the screen, keys clicking, mouse poised, muscles clenched.

As far as I was concerned, being a true video-game junkie required more time than I was willing to spend. I’m the queen of multitasking: I shop on the Internet while I do the laundry. Or I watch “Ally McBeal,” talk on the phone, pet the dog and eat a Starbucks low-fat frappuccino bar. Or walk on the treadmill, read the paper, listen to a CD, watch the “Today” show and talk baby talk to the dog.

But that all changed when, a couple of weeks ago, my friend Rob came over and insisted that he had to show us this video game, Sissyfight 2000, that he’d read about in the New York Times. Although the concept is different from traditional video games, Sissyfight is no less violent, let me assure you, than Ray’s shoot’em-up games. The players are girls on the playground and the goal is to humiliate the other girls until you win. The graphics were cute, so I watched over Rob’s shoulder. But I wasn’t really interested — it was just another video game.

Then one night, after I became tired of eBay and I’d already bought a CD on Amazon.com, I noticed www.sissyfight.com on our bookmarks.

So I pulled it up. I haven’t been heard from since.

It’s not just that Sissyfight is fun, which it is. Or that I’m getting good at it, which I am. This game has stirred something inside me I thought was dead: the urge to bludgeon someone — whether with words or fists — on the playground. It’s a vicious pleasure that I never got to indulge in as a child.

Here’s how Sissyfight works: You go to the Web site and create a player. You choose a name, facial expression, skin tone, hairstyle and hair color. The girls then gather on playgrounds in groups of three to six. The object is to fight your opponents until two of you remain. You can chat back and forth, egging one another on and forming alliances. You can beat up on each other by grabbing, scratching, teasing or tattling on your opponents. Or you can cower. Suffice it to say that strategy is required.

I’m learning. The best thing is to cower during your first turn, while you wait to see where other alliances have formed. Don’t attack too soon. And certainly don’t tattle — it’s widely considered to be the worst offense. You’ll cost your opponents points if they’re caught grabbing, scratching or teasing and, just like in the real world, those who you’ve ratted out will turn on you.

I used to start by encouraging the other girls to beat up on someone — “She smells! She was mean to me!” — but it works better to stay quiet and see which way the tide turns. (A strategy I never learned when I was a real schoolgirl.) I’ve had to resist the urge to make fun of the other players’ grammar and I’ve had to scale down my vocabulary. Again, these are skills I could have used in third grade: I once used the word “unfortunately” in the course of delivering an insult to Ronnie Sullivan, and was castigated for months. (I make a much better adult; trouble is, I did when I was 8, too.)

To win Sissyfight, you must learn to conform. Rob had to change his name from “Sissyclit” to “Big Grrl” because he was teased so much. (Those names aren’t unusual; yesterday I was on with a “Cuntilla”.) Rob’s mohawk and green skin didn’t help, either. “I was called a slut and they made fun of my hairdo,” he told me. He changed his look and now he’s winning on a regular basis.

My name is “Sweetrosy” and I have pale skin and red pigtails. I always say, “Hi, girls,” when I come into a playground and I always compliment the winners, even if I think they’re lame. I cherish my alliances as if they’re real friendships — even though I know that “Peri” or “Lynette” could easily turn on me in the next round.

Just like in real life.

In real life, the childhood me had the wrong look: wrong hair, wrong body, wrong tone of voice, wrong everything. It wasn’t tragic — it wasn’t like I didn’t have any friends — but I was never popular. I was a geek. A creative geek, but a geek all the same. When I ran for class secretary in the sixth grade, I walked around with a stuffed Woodstock taped to my shoulder, because it fit in with my Peanuts campaign theme.

I lost the election.

If I did the equivalent of taping a stuffed Woodstock to my shoulder on Sissyfight, I’d be teased off the screen. So I don’t. And I’m winning.

When I told my mom about Sissyfight, we tried to decide just what makes a girl popular. It’s not just looks. I recalled a girl named Carmen, with frizzy hair, a pig face and a big butt, who always hung out with the cheerleaders in high school. “And remember Sue Anne, your sister’s friend, the one who was really popular?” my mom asked. “She always smelled.”

But Sue Anne was comfortable with herself, my mother and I decided. And so was Carmen. (Or maybe she was sneaking vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet for the other girls.) And now, years later, so am I.

But I sure do enjoy a good round of Sissyfight.

“Amy shines at Christmas,” my husband tells our friends, as I’m struggling to tie the reindeer antlers around the dog’s head, or coercing cocktail party guests into decorating gingerbread men.

Someone should start a support group for us, the Jews who love Christmas. For as much as I throw myself into the season, there’s always been something missing, something more than the Christmas tree I’ve never had.

I don’t think it’s religion — really, I don’t. Like most of my Christian friends, my love of Christmas has nothing to do with faith in any force beyond that of Visa and Mastercard. But the fact that I’m a Jew has always made me feel like I’m cheating, stealing the holiday from those who deserve it, crashing the world’s biggest party, year after year, never invited. Even the least pious Unitarian has more of a claim to Santa than I.

I’ll live with the guilt, in exchange for some of those red and green M&Ms.

It’s probably genetic. My mother is a closet Christmas-loving Jew, too. There’s a story she told me when I was in the seventh grade and she and my dad came home from a holiday party to find that, dejected over not having a Christmas tree, I had decided to make a Chanukah bush out of a gift-wrap tube and some colored Xerox paper.

She said that when she was 7, growing up in Forest Hills, New York, the big apartment buildings near Queens Boulevard were covered with shiny blue Christmas balls. She begged her mom (my grandmother, Nanny) for a tree, never expecting to get one. To her surprise, her mom said yes. (“I think it was her revenge against my dad’s orthodox mother,” my mom told me recently. “That was the one who wouldn’t give Nanny the stuffed matzo ball recipe.”)

There were three conditions: The tree was to stay in the basement. It had to be of the tabletop variety. And my mother was to tell no one.

So the purchase was made. The tree sat on the pingpong table in the basement, decorated with an ugly string of multicolored lights –”the kind that looked like more electrical cord and less light,” my mom remembers. She sat alone in the basement and sobbed.

When I was growing up, my parents dutifully trotted out the menorah every year and made a show of celebrating Chanukah — which is, let’s face it, the also-ran to the Holiday of Holidays. (I mean, really, how can a bunch of Maccabees hope to compete with Baby Jesus? And a dreidel just doesn’t stack up to a ride on Santa’s lap.)

But we had Christmas, too. Sort of.

“Santa Claus doesn’t discriminate!” my mom insisted cheerfully, but I always secretly thought that he did. My sister and I got our big gifts during Chanukah, so while my friends had endless piles to open under the tree on Christmas morning, we had just a couple of boxes. And while we did have stockings, they were Chanukah stockings (yes, really!) — blue and white, embroidered with the Star of David.

But no tree. Never a tree. Yes, it’s a pagan symbol, but certainly no worse than humming “Away in a Manger” around the house. Yet we never had one. I recently asked my mom if this had something to do with her own tree memory, and she said no, that she’d never really thought about it, but she supposed that a Christmas tree was just too much of a commitment to a holiday that isn’t hers to celebrate.

The Christmas spirit lives on in my mom; to this day, she still drapes the menorah with tinsel.

Last year I married a fallen Catholic, which gave me instant entree into a world that includes a real Christmas celebration with the in-laws, complete with red and green stockings and presents piled under a real Christmas tree. I love losing myself in the revelry of the day, a celebration without apology.

But not in my own home. The first Christmas we lived together, my mom presented my now-husband and me with a Christmas tree. A tabletop model, sprayed gold, but a bona fide Christmas tree, nonetheless. She figured that my alliance with a fallen Catholic bought me the right to a full-blown Christmas.

And so did I — until I got the tree home. I stuck it in a closet and eventually gave it away, settling, as usual, for my iced cookies and greeting cards.

I know my mom understood.

I had dij` vu watching Cindy McCain on television, perky in a purple suit with tinted pearls to match. It was so reminiscent of the summer day in 1994 when suddenly, years after she’d claimed to have kicked her habit, McCain decided to come clean to the world about her addiction to prescription painkillers.

I believe she wore red that day. She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story — Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers, now a columnist with the Arizona Republic (and, it must be added, normally much more acerbic) — wrote this rather typical lead:

“She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man’s daughter who became a politically powerful man’s wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly.”

What McEachern and the others didn’t know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain’s storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain’s Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.

I know, because I had been working on that story for months at Phoenix New Times. I had finally tracked down the public records that confirmed Cindy McCain’s addiction and much more, and the McCains knew I was about to get them. Cindy’s tale was released on the day the records were made public.

But the story I was pursuing was not so much about Cindy McCain’s unfortunate addiction. It was much more about her efforts to keep that story from coming to light, and the possible manipulation of the criminal justice system by her husband and his cohorts. The irony is that Cindy’s secret would have stayed secret if John McCain’s heavy-hitting lawyer, John Dowd (of D.C.’s Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; his most recent claim to fame was serving as co-counsel for fellow partner Vernon Jordan during impeachment) hadn’t heavy-handedly pulled out all the stops to protect the McCain family.

Dowd tried to get back at the man on Cindy McCain’s staff, Tom Gosinski, who had blown the whistle on her drug pilfering to the DEA. But in the course of trying to get local law enforcement officials to investigate Gosinski — Dowd and the McCains considered him an extortionist; others might call him a whistleblower — Dowd set in motion a process that would eventually bring the whole sordid story to light. When that maneuver backfired, the McCain media machine went into overdrive to spin the story.

It’s a story of unintended consequences. It’s also a story of power politics and media manipulation that’s very un-McCain-like — if you believe his national media hagiography.

But both of Cindy McCain’s staged, teary drug-addiction confessions have been vintage John McCain. His MO is this: Get the story out — even if it’s a negative story. Get it out first, with the spin you want, with the details you want and without the details you don’t want.

McCain did it with the Keating Five, and with the story of the failure of his first marriage (Cindy is his second wife). So what you recall after the humble, honest interview, is not that McCain did favors for savings and loan failure Charlie Keating, or that he cheated on his wife, but instead what an upfront, righteous guy he is.

Candor is the McCain trademark, but what the journalists who slobber over the senator fail to realize is that the candor is premeditated and polished. John McCain shoots from the hip — but only after carefully rehearsing the battle plan, to be sure he won’t get shot himself.

This is the story of a time that strategy backfired, and yet the McCain machine still managed to contain the damage.

In the early 1990s, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, which did relief and medical volunteer work in third world countries.

Hired by Cindy McCain in 1991, Gosinski enjoyed his job, but he began to notice McCain’s erratic behavior in the summer of 1992. In his journal, he wrote that he and others suspected the boss was addicted to painkillers and might have been stealing them from the organization.

From Gosinski’s journal, July 27, 1992:

I have always wondered why John McCain has done nothing to fix the problem. He must either not see that a problem exists or … not choose to do anything about it. It would seem that it would be in everyone’s best interest to come to terms with the situation. And do whatever is necessary to fix it. There is so much at risk: The welfare of the children; John’s political career; the integrity of Hensley & Company [Cindy's parents' business]; the welfare of Jim and Smitty Hensley [Cindy's parents]; and the health and happiness of Cindy McCain.

The aforementioned matters are of great concern to those directly involved but my main concern is the ability of AVMT to survive a major shake-up. If the DEA were to ever conduct an audit of AVMT’s inventory, I am afraid of what the results might be … It is because of [Cindy McCain's] willingness to jeopardize the credibility of those who work for her that I truly worry.

During my short tenure at AVMT I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences.

In his journal-writing over the next few months, Gosinski would alternately complain about Cindy McCain and express concern for her well-being.

In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn’t afford him.

Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees’ names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain’s suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.

Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski’s attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.

Rumors about the untold details of the lawsuit hit the cocktail-party circuit that spring, but the story was locked up tight. As a federal criminal investigation, the DEA probe was completely secret; none of it was public record.

The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn’t entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.

“We believe that Mr. Gosinski is aware that in the past Cindy had an addiction to prescription painkillers … Given Cindy’s public position, exposure of this sensitive matter would harm her reputation, career, the operation of AVMT, and subject her to contempt and ridicule,” Dowd wrote on April 28, 1994.

Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain. Although the federal investigative materials were not public, the county investigative materials were. Romley launched an investigation, and one of the first things his people did, naturally, was ask the feds to turn over their investigative materials.

New Times finally got hold of the county investigative materials and we did our own story. So did the Arizona Republic, which was uncharacteristically aggressive, perhaps because the McCain machine had left the paper out of the loop on the story of Cindy’s addiction.

Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.

Did Gosinski intend to blackmail Cindy McCain? He told New Times he didn’t. Other AVMT employees told county investigators that he did. But the time line makes extortion hard to believe, since Gosinski had already gone to the DEA before he brought his lawsuit against the McCains.

In any case, Tom Gosinski didn’t out Cindy McCain. John Dowd did, and then Jay Smith was called in for the clean-up.

A few postscripts: Tom Gosinski left town shortly after Cindy McCain’s story broke. By that time, his lawsuit had died, ignored. The county did not pursue the extortion investigation against him.

John Max Johnson, the doctor who had written the prescriptions for Cindy McCain, surrendered his medical license.

Cindy McCain still does relief work and raises the McCains’ four children.

John McCain, of course, is running for president.

And only a handful of people remember the details of Cindy McCain’s 1994 “outing” for drug addiction and drug pilfering, and the work of the McCain machine to protect her.