This Bud's for John

By now, anyone who follows American presidential politics -- heck, anyone who owns a television set -- knows Arizona Senator John McCain's family story. His best-selling memoir, Faith of My Fathers, chronicles the lives of the senator's father and grandfather, distinguished admirals. The book takes readers up through John McCain's own military service, including his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. But Faith of My Fathers ends there, a few years short of John McCain's marriage to Cindy Lou Hensley and the advent of his political career.

The rest could be called "Cash of My Father-in-Law," a tale of how beer baron James Willis Hensley's money and influence provided a complement to McCain's charisma and compelling personal story and launched him to a seat in Congress -- and perhaps to the White House.

Most Americans know Cindy Hensley McCain as the smiling blonde at John McCain's side. But what they don't know is that Cindy is John's meal ticket; the seed money for McCain's first congressional race came from her father's beer business -- today one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributorships in the country.

Both McCain and Hensley declined to be interviewed for this column. But the public record provides a glimpse into Hensley's history and how McCain has benefited from it -- and how Hensley, in turn, benefits from McCain's powerful post as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where the champion of reform in the tobacco and campaign finance areas has virtually turned his back on another subject in need of attention: alcohol regulation.

The story of Hensley's start in the liquor business is not the stuff of presidential campaign commercials, although it might well make a best seller. The family saga swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger.

In 1945, James Hensley returned home to Arizona from the war, and joined his older brother, Eugene, in the liquor business. The brothers partnered with a powerful Phoenix businessman named Kemper Marley who had cornered a large share of Arizona's wholesale liquor business after Prohibition was lifted in 1933.

During and after World War II, the sale of whiskey was tightly regulated by the federal government. Demand for whiskey was high, particularly on the black market, where prices were more than double the regulated market price.