The McCain code; from airport security to Enron, the Arizona senator keeps picking fights.(Senator John McCain)(Letter from Washington)

Senator John McCain, at the age of sixty-five, still has moments when he looks like a mischievous little boy who's hoping not to get nabbed for some bit of deviltry, and that was how he looked one Thursday morning in November just after he had arrived at work. This may have been because he had just flown into Washington on the early shuttle, after a gala evening in New York, where he spoke and received an award at a fund-raiser for the International Rescue Committee, spoke again at a dinner in honor of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and then spent the night at the Waldorf-Astoria. McCain comes from the military aristocracy -- he's John Sidney McCain III, the son and grandson of admirals, third-generation Annapolis -- but New York is outside that group's ambit, so he can think of a trip there as a country boy's sojourn in the big city. It added to the little-boy feeling that McCain takes an unconcealed pleasure in being fussed over, which he had been, and in mingling with celebrities, which he had done. And that he was eating a doughnut out of a white paper bag and there was powdered sugar all over his mouth. And that he sensed a big political win coming within range -- a forbidden and therefore all the more delicious win over his own party, the Republicans, who for the past year have been his usual opponents.

The issue at hand was how, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, to improve the dangerously low level of security at American airports. McCain was a principal sponsor of a bill that directed the federal government to take on the task, and which had passed in the Senate by a vote of 100-0. But the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republicans and is led, to all appearances, by their aggressively conservative whip, Tom DeLay, of Texas, had passed a different bill, supported by President Bush, in which security personnel at airports could continue to work for private firms. Congress was about to adjourn for Thanksgiving, and its members were terrified by the prospect of having to explain to voters at home that there would be no airport-security bill. But the two sides were far apart; a conference committee, in an atmosphere of intense pressure, was going to meet that morning. A win for McCain's side would mean that Congress had flouted the preference of a popular President in wartime.

McCain wiped off the powdered sugar with a napkin and rearranged himself into a more senatorial position. McCain's father, before he became an admiral, was a submarine commander (McCain himself was a naval aviator), and the McCain operation has something of the feeling of a submarine at sea. The staff occupies a long, narrow line of offices, each room opening into the next down a hallway, at the end of which is the hearing room of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain's principal power base (he is the ranking Republican). The vessel seems isolated, because of McCain's opposition to his colleagues' usual way of doing business. The commanding officer is a long way from his wife and children, who live in Arizona, call in a couple of times a day, and see him on weekends. There is an intense camaraderie between McCain and his aides, forged during wartime (which is to say, the 2000 Republican Presidential-primary campaign), and they switch back and forth a lot between insouciance and discipline. McCain's own office sits roughly in the middle of the line, and his aides wander in and out all day as if it were center stage in a drawing-room comedy.

"Yesterday, we discussed making all airport security federal, and after a period of time they" -- the airports -- "could opt for private security," McCain said. "We agreed, at least in principle. It will be interesting to see what the blowback is, because the hard-line people won't like it. The White House got in a bad position on this. Norm Mineta" -- the Transportation Secretary -- "met with us and basically agreed on federalizing the employees. Then he went to the White House and was excoriated. Tom DeLay" -- never directly in view but never out of mind in McCain's office, like the enemy destroyer the sub is chasing -- "got them to agree to vigorously oppose us, to the point where they spent days in the White House bringing people in. Remarkable, in the middle of a war. They wound up buying votes. They bought the New York congressional delegation by putting in a World Trade Center liability provision. And they won in the House by four votes. There was a quote by DeLay that this was the toughest vote since impeachment. Remarkable!"

McCain interrupted himself to call out, loud enough to be heard up and down the row of offices, "Where's Buse?" Mark Buse, or "the ferret," as McCain sometimes calls him, was the Republican staff director of the Commerce Committee. Buse is as close to a downtown-looking guy as you can find in Washington -- he is clean-shaven but has two-day-stubble-length hair and sideburns and wears earth-toned suits -- and, though not yet forty, had been working for McCain for eighteen years. In McCain's office, much of every day is spent trying to thwart politicians' attempts to help interest groups by sneaking provisions into unrelated pieces of legislation -- a practice that seemed to McCain to have stepped up since September 11th. Buse was one of the lead actors in this struggle, and McCain wanted him as a witness, to make sure he was getting the details right.

Mark Salter, a sad-eyed, bearded, perpetually on-watch man who is McCain's chief aide, speechwriter, and alter ego, wandered in, and so did Nancy Ives, McCain's very busy communications director. In common with most politicians, McCain likes company. The more crowded his office got, the happier and more voluble he seemed to become. The conference committee was due to meet in a few minutes. "So we won't agree," he said. "There'll be a lot of talk for an hour and we'll break up. But the House doesn't want to go home for Thanksgiving without a deal. We'll keep up the pressure through the day. We'll hold fast."

McCain likes to do imitations. He put on a gruff, blustery, stagily tough voice, in order to play an unspecified House member of the Republican apparatchik type, and said, "If I let them federalize airport security, then I'd have a bunch of new union members who'd vote Democratic!" He rolled his eyes and went back to being himself. "They got off that kick. Then it was" -- a different voice, that of a White House water carrier wearing patriotic garb -- " 'Give the President flexibility. We're in a war.'