With Friends Like These ...

It was the kind of press conference no presidential contender wants to have to call. But last Wednesday morning in Toledo, Ohio, beneath too-bright television lights, Sen. and Mrs. John McCain found themselves taking questions about sex and power. In response to reporters, McCain referred to the lobbyist Vicki Iseman as his "friend." But what, exactly, is a friend in Washington? Journalists are friends with their sources to get them to leak information. Politicians are friends with journalists to spin them. Lobbyists are friends with politicians to get them to support legislation that helps clients. Politicians are friends with lobbyists to get campaign contributions. "If you want a real friend in Washington," goes the old saying, "get a dog."

It's often more complicated than that. Iseman, who was a 32-year-old, attractive, single woman when she began lobbying McCain in 1999, may have enjoyed flirting with a war hero who is fun to be around. If McCain, a married man who was 63 at the time, wasn't a little flattered by the attention, he would be unusual. But that doesn't mean they were sleeping together or that he was performing legislative favors for her.

Still, The New York Times implied as much. In a front-page article reviewing McCain's long history with lobbyists, but zeroing in on Iseman's ties to the Arizona senator when he was preparing to run for president in 1999, the Times wrote: "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself—instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

The political talk shows immediately huffed about hanging such a potentially damaging story on anonymous sources. Both McCain and Iseman denied that they had a sexual relationship. McCain was unambiguous in his denunciation of the Times story. He stated he had never been warned by his campaign aides that his relationship with Iseman was somehow inappropriate, and the campaign at first insisted that he had not been contacted by the company Iseman represented—Paxson Communications—on the particular matter in question, two letters that McCain, then chairman of the Senate commerce committee, sent to the Federal Communications Commission. (Alcalde & Fay, the lobbying firm that employs Iseman, calls the Times article "completely and utterly false" and describes her as a "hardworking professional whose 18-year career has been exemplary." Iseman herself did not respond to requests for comment.)

In his effort to convince voters, particularly conservative ones, that he had been "smeared" by the Times, McCain may have dissembled a bit or misstated the facts. NEWSWEEK spoke to two close associates of the candidate who claimed that McCain had been warned to stay away from Iseman in 1999. (It's unclear whether these associates, who did not want to be named publicly crossing McCain, are the same sources the Times cited.) One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that he had confronted McCain about the relationship with Iseman, though in that meeting there was no explicit reference to a sexual affair. Neither source had evidence of an intimate relationship.

NEWSWEEK has also found a legal deposition in which, contrary to a statement released by his campaign, McCain admitted that he was personally lobbied by Lowell (Bud) Paxson, the president of Paxson Communications—and possibly Paxson's lobbyist, Iseman—to act on a long-stalled bid by Paxson (now Ion Media Networks) to buy a TV station in Pittsburgh. (Paxson told The Washington Post last week that he recalled lobbying McCain about the FCC issue in a meeting in the senator's office set up by Iseman.) McCain had refused to push the FCC for or against, but he did agree to prod the slow-moving bureaucracy to decide one way or the other. With his typically blunt, almost cheery way of admitting the sinfulness of man, including his own weaknesses, he acknowledged in the deposition that his relationship with Paxson—flying on the corporate jet, taking $20,000 in campaign contributions—would "absolutely" look corrupt to the ordinary voter.