Lobbyist Speaks: Rumor Of McCain Affair False, Damaging

Vicki Iseman talks for the first time about the GOP nominee, The New York Times, and the story that changed her life.

Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008
by Edward T. Pound
National Journal

In one of the most sensational stories of the presidential campaign, The New York Times published a 3,000-word, front-page article in February suggesting that a little-known telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman had an affair with Sen. John McCain during his first run for the White House in 1999. The story did not provide any evidence of an affair, but said that McCain's top aides became convinced that the relationship was romantic and took steps to keep McCain and Iseman apart.

The story generated massive publicity, and media and political critics accused The Times of publishing a salacious and unfair story. The Times' own public editor joined the chorus of criticism saying, "Although [the newspaper] raised one of the most toxic subjects in politics -- sex -- it offered readers no proof that McCain and Iseman had a romance."

McCain, now 72, hotly denied a romantic tie to Iseman and accused The Times of "a hit-and-run smear campaign."

What did Iseman, whose blond good looks helped to drive the story, have to say about the explosive allegations? She refused to be interviewed by The Times, but in e-mail exchanges with the paper's reporters, she denied ever having a romantic relationship with McCain and disputed key assertions made by The Times' unnamed sources.

Now, after more than seven months of silence, Iseman, who just turned 41, has decided to speak out and aggressively defend herself. In a series of interviews and e-mail exchanges with National Journal, she said she and McCain had a "strictly professional" and cordial relationship.

"I did not have a sexual relationship with Senator McCain," she said in a three-hour interview last month in a seventh-floor conference room in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. "I never had an affair or an inappropriate relationship with Senator McCain, and that means I never acted unethically in my dealings with the senator." Iseman, a partner in the lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay, where she has worked for 18 years, adds, "I have never even been alone with Senator McCain."

Iseman says she answered every question put to her by The Times, but that the newspaper "chose to disregard" many of her answers. "The New York Times set out to write a story about a 'romantic relationship' in exchange for legislative favors.... Make the lobbyist a prostitute -- pretty heady stuff. The only problem was, they were wrong on all counts."

In strong language, Iseman also lashed out at John Weaver, a former top McCain strategist who left the campaign after a power struggle in July 2007. She said that Weaver had an "ax to grind" and had used The Times to orchestrate the story and damage McCain's presidential campaign. "The New York Times had four reporters [work] almost four months on this," she said in an e-mail to National Journal this month, "and John Weaver made them his marionettes." Weaver, she says, was "Machiavellian" and a "Benedict Arnold."

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