Cindy McCain's Half Sister 'Angry' She's Hidden

by Ted Robbins

All Things Considered, August 18, 2008 ·

Last Tuesday, NPR broadcast a story about Cindy McCain's business and charity work. In it, Ted Robbins described [Cindy] McCain as the only child of Jim Hensley, a wealthy Arizona businessman. The next morning, NPR received an e-mail from Nicholas Portalski of Phoenix, who heard the story with his mother.

"We were listening to the piece about Cindy McCain on NPR, All Things Considered, and it just struck us very hard," Portalski said.

His mother Kathleen Hensley Portalski is also Hensley's daughter.

The Portalski family is accustomed to hearing Cindy McCain described as Hensley's only child.

She's been described that way by news organizations from The New Yorker and The New York Times to Newsweek and ABC.

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase "only child," as she did on CNN last month. "I grew up with my dad," she said then. "I'm an only child. My father was a cowboy, and he really loved me very much, but I think he wanted a son occasionally."

McCain's father was also a businessman — and twice a father.

"I'm upset," Kathleen Portalski says. "I'm angry. It makes me feel like a nonperson, kind of."

Who Is Kathleen Hensley Portalski?

Documents show Kathleen Anne Hensley was born to Jim and Mary Jeanne Hensley on Feb. 23, 1943. They had been married for six years when Kathleen was born.

Jim Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17, flying over Europe during World War II.

He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman — Marguerite Smith. Jim divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945.

Cindy Lou Hensley was born nine years later, in 1954.

She may have grown up as an only child, but so did her half sister, Kathleen, who was raised by a single parent.

Portalski says she did see her father and her half sister from time to time.

"I saw him a few times a year," she says. "I saw him at Christmas and birthdays, and he provided money for school clothes, and he called occasionally."

Jim Hensley also provided credit cards and college tuition for his grandchildren, as well as $10,000 gifts to Kathleen and her husband, Stanley Portalski. That lasted a decade, they say. By then, Jim Hensley had built Hensley and Co. into one of the largest beer distributorships in the country. He was worth tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

Sole Inheritor To Hensley's Estate

When Hensley died in 2000, his will named not only Portalski but also a daughter of his wife Marguerite from her earlier marriage. So, Cindy McCain may be the only product of Jim and Marguerite's marriage, but she is not the only child of either.

She was, however, the sole inheritor of his considerable estate.

Kathleen Portalski was left $10,000, and her children were left nothing. It's a fact Nicholas Portalski says his sister discovered the hard way.

"What she found in town — on the day of or the day before or the day after his funeral — was that the credit card didn't work anymore," Nick says.

The Portalskis live in a modest home in central Phoenix. Kathleen is retired, as is her husband. Nicholas Portalski is a firefighter and emergency medical technician looking for work.

They say it would have been nice if they were left some of the Hensley fortune.

They also say they are Democrats, but Nicholas Portalski says he had another reason for coming forward.

"The fact that we don't exist," he says. "The fact that we've never been recognized, and then Cindy has to put such a fine point on it by saying something that's not true. Recently, again and again. It's just very, very hurtful."

Kathleen Portalski says she'd like an acknowledgment and an apology.

NPR asked the McCain campaign — specifically, Cindy McCain — to comment or respond. Neither replied.

George Bush and John McCain

Founding Member of the Keating Five

Back in the old days, defendants in famous trials got numbers -- the Chicago Eight, the Gang of Four, the Dave Clark Five, the Daytona 500. McCain was one of the "Keating Five," congressmen investigated on ethics charges for strenuously helping convicted racketeer Charles Keating after he gave them large campaign contributions and vacation trips.

Charles Keating was convicted of racketeering and fraud in both state and federal court after his Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $3.4 billion. His convictions were overturned on technicalities; for example, the federal conviction was overturned because jurors had heard about his state conviction, and his state charges because Judge Lance Ito (yes, that judge) screwed up jury instructions. Neither court cleared him, and he faces new trials in both courts.)

Though he was not convicted of anything, McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating after Keating gave McCain at least $112,00 in contributions. In the mid-1980s, McCain made at least 9 trips on Keating's airplanes, and 3 of those were to Keating's luxurious retreat in the Bahamas. McCain's wife and father-in-law also were the largest investors (at $350,000) in a Keating shopping center; the Phoenix New Times called it a "sweetheart deal."

-RealChange.org

John McCain vs. John McCain vs...

In a Losing Campaign, McCain Aims to Drive Home Obama ‘Celebrity’ Label

John McCain’s campaign is sticking with its argument that Barack Obama is an aloof celebrity, as aides privately acknowledge that previous efforts to label Obama as a flip-flopper have been nowhere near as effective.

The campaign’s ad this week comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, though attracting criticism from Democrats, got heavy play on the Internet and in print and TV media.

The campaign reportedly is spending $140,000 a day to run the ad in battleground states, and aides are echoing its content in daily talking points.

“We’re running against a celebrity. He is someone who gathered throngs of fans overseas,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds told FOX News Saturday.

And after Obama’s campaign announced Saturday it would accept three presidential debates with McCain — and not the kind of town hall meetings McCain had wanted — McCain spokesman Brian Rogers again invoked the comparison.

“We understand it might be beneath a worldwide celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude to appear at town hall meetings … but we hope he’ll reconsider,” he said in a statement.

McCain has struggled to stick with one label for Obama, casting him as a pessimist, a liberal and more recently a flip-flopper.

But aides say the flip-flopper charge has not stuck in the minds of voters, and that the campaign will instead continue to define Obama as an inexperienced celeb.

The campaign even tried to mockingly compare him to Moses in an ad released Friday.

McCain told reporters at the time his campaign is just “having some fun” and showing a “sense of humor.”

But that might not be all he has in mind. After Obama spoke to more than 200,000 spectators at his rally last month in Berlin and held high-level meetings recently with members of the Bush administration and foreign leaders, the McCain campaign is driving home the message that Obama is being too presumptuous.

It’s unclear what impact the gambit will have on the polls in the long term, but the Gallup daily tracking poll Saturday showed Obama and McCain tied at 44 percent for the second day in a row. That’s after Obama had opened up a 9-percentage-point lead a week ago.

The McCain campaign even balked at an opportunity to bring back the flip-flopper charge Saturday, after Obama told a Florida newspaper he would support a compromise plan in Congress to allow some offshore oil drilling, which he’s long opposed.

“This wasn’t really a new position,” Obama told reporters.

And the McCain campaign agreed.

They circulated Obama’s claim and sent out their own statement saying: “We hope Barack Obama will realize that his ongoing opposition to John McCain’s realistic energy solutions and additional off shore drilling is wrong.”

Granted, McCain was the first to reverse course and support offshore oil drilling. But his campaign also seemed to drop a charge that Obama was playing the race card. That charge was leveled earlier in the week after Obama told a group of Missouri voters that Republicans would try to make voters afraid of him because he doesn’t look like past presidents.

McCain said Friday he did not bring up the issue, that Obama did, and now he wants to “move on.”

Obama said Saturday he doesn’t think McCain is racist, only cynical. And he ridiculed McCain for the celebrity ads.

“You’ve got statistics that say we’ve lost another 50,000 jobs, that Florida is in a recession for the first time in a decade and a half and what was being talked about was Paris and Britney,” Obama said.

“They’re clever on creating distractions from the issues that really matter in people’s lives,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure we keep focused on people’s day-to-day concerns. We don’t take the skill of the Republicans in engaging in negative campaigning lightly.”

FOX News’ Mosheh Oinounou and The Associated Press contributed to this report.