Mounting the rostrum in the House chamber, Bush began to turn the nation from grief to determination. He explained to Americans who had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden what he saw as the roots of the attacks. He vowed tolerance for peaceful Muslims. And he laid down his ultimatum to Afghanistan's leadership.

"Tonight, the United States makes the following demands on the Taliban," he intoned. Among them was to hand over al-Qaeda leaders and shut down their training camps. "These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate."

Bush defined al-Qaeda as an enemy of American freedom, ignoring bin Laden's own statements about specific grievances against the United States, such as the troops still present in Saudi Arabia a decade after the Gulf War. "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" Bush said. "They hate what we see right here in this chamber-a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

Joining Blair in the House gallery were Tom Ridge, who had agreed to head the new White House Office of Homeland Security, and Lisa Beamer, widow of Todd Beamer, whose reported words "Let's roll" came to stand for the determination of the passengers who attempted to retake United Airlines Flight 93 and inspired the nation. Bush warned that the war would be long and arduous, sometimes visible, and sometimes in the shadows. He held up the police badge Arlene Howard had given him. "I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it," he said. Then, summoning a Churchillian tone, he uttered the line he had resisted but that would become a memorable statement of resolve: "I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."

He spoke for forty-one minutes and was interrupted thirty-one times by applause, and if the nation was not sure what to think of him when he started, many millions came to agree with Daschle by the end. The speech hit all the right notes and generated a standing ovation. Even some of his harshest Democratic critics believed he had hit a home run. As Bush made his way out of the chamber, he encountered Daschle, and the two embraced, the conservative president and the liberal senator swept up in the emotion of the moment. Unwittingly, they created a symbolic statement of national unity as newspapers transmitted pictures of "The Hug" across the world.

Afterward, Bush learned that the speech had drawn rapt audiences across the country; even a game between the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Rangers at First Union Center in Philadelphia was suspended when fans insisted on watching the president speak on the Jumbotron rather than proceed with the third period.

After all the stumbling moments, the scripted statements that came across as stilted or forced, Bush now seemed to be in the zone. Nine days after the calamity, he had found his voice. He was almost exuberant afterward, in a way he rarely was following a speech.

"What do you think, Barty?" Bush asked Dan Bartlett.

"You did a great job," Bartlett responded.

"I've never been more comfortable in my life giving a speech," Bush said.

He called Gerson, who made a point of never actually attending the big addresses he helped write. The president was upbeat. "I have never felt more comfortable in my life," Bush repeated.

The next morning, Bush got on the phone with Daschle. "Did we get into trouble last night for hugging each other?" he asked lightly. After all, this was a town where that could cause either of them political grief.

"I don't think so," Daschle responded. "It just seemed like the natural thing to do. I think that was what the American people expected."

9.

"The first battle of the war"

In the weeks after September 11, Vice President Cheney, the commanding presence at every table, suddenly became a disembodied voice emanating from a video screen. The fear of a "second wave" consumed the White House, and Cheney spent much of his time removed from the building to maintain presidential succession in case the worst happened. To avoid overlap, a special color-coded schedule showed the future locations of Trailblazer and Angler, as the Secret Service called the president and the vice president.

The notion of the vice president disappearing to an "undisclosed secure location" captured the public imagination, first as a chilling sign of the way life had changed and later as fodder for a thousand late-night jokes. In truth, the infamous undisclosed location was often no more mysterious than the vice president's residence. Since it was several miles up the road from the White House, as long as no one knew that was where he was, that was good enough. "The whole goal was to keep them separate," said Neil Patel, a top Cheney aide. Scooter Libby would join the vice president in the office on the third floor of his official residence on the Naval Observatory grounds, and a couple of other aides like Patel would squeeze into a tiny office to the side or borrow space in a larger office on the main floor where Lynne Cheney's staff was located.

More often, the secret hideout was Camp David, for once in its history serving as a de facto headquarters and refuge from danger rather than the scene of family holidays and the occasional Middle East summit. Accompanied by Libby, a personal aide, secretary, military aide, doctor, and either Patel or David Addington, Cheney would fly up by helicopter on Sunday nights, then fly back to Washington on Friday evenings. He and his staff got their own cabins, and they would join each other for breakfast and lunch in Laurel Lodge, then work out of the president's office space all day. Cheney would usually retire for dinner by himself in his cabin. Sometimes he used a secret military compound bristling with satellite dishes and antennas known as Site R and located not far from Camp David on the Pennsylvania border. And his vacation house in Wyoming served the same purpose at times.

The attention to security affected almost everything. The president's and the vice president's schedules were no longer distributed by e-mail, and the passwords to access them were restricted. Cheney, who at first had still escaped to the grocery store, now lived in a tighter security bubble than any vice president before; his motorcade no longer stopped at traffic lights, and his armored vehicle was equipped with a protective suit in the event of chemical or biological attack.

The physical constraints took Cheney away at the very moment when he was most engaged. He participated in most meetings via a secure video hookup that proved disconcerting. A curtain would be set up behind him so no one would know his location; once, it was jostled, and aides recognized the backdrop as Cheney's own home. In another surreal moment, the vice president nodded off on-screen.

The phrase "undisclosed secure location" quickly entered the cultural lexicon. One day when he emerged from what aides called "the Cave" to return to the White House, one of Cheney's domestic policy advisers, Ron Christie, gave him a recording of a Saturday Night Live sketch in which the vice president's secret location was revealed as Kandahar, Afghanistan, and he was presented as a "one-man Afghani wrecking crew" demolishing the Taliban and al-Qaeda single-handedly. The comic Cheney, played by Darrell Hammond, explained how he could do this with a weak heart by tearing open his shirt to reveal a metal device attached to his chest.

"I got me a bionic ticker!" the impersonator crowed. "This thing regulates my heartbeat, it gives me night vision and renders me completely invisible on radar!"

Then, pushing a button, he said, "Check this out." Coffee began pouring from the mechanical heart. "I brew my own Sanka! Oh yeah, now that's good coffee."

What a difference a few months had made. Before September 11, the running joke on Saturday Night Live had been Cheney's monotonous demeanor: giving a speech on energy policy, the ersatz Cheney said he had personally demonstrated conservation by putting his personality into an "energy-saving mode." Cheney, unsurprisingly, enjoyed the revamped version, describing the bionic-heart skit as one of his favorites.

Even beyond the vice president's absences, the West Wing in the weeks following the attacks was almost unrecognizable. Large, menacing men swathed in black and armed with assault rifles and shotguns suddenly showed up everywhere. Tours were cut off. Access to the West Wing was restricted. The staff table at the White House mess was largely empty many days, as if aides were "either unable or unwilling to be seen" taking a break from work. "We were all under an almost suffocating amount of tension and stress," as Christie put it. Staff members went to work thinking they might never get married or have children because there was a decent chance they might be killed-all very dramatic sounding years later and yet the way it felt at the time. "You had brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, spouses, telling people you can't work there anymore," Joe Hagin said. Bush's schedule was thrown out, and it took three weeks for his schedulers to get it back in order. The White House chef began preparing comfort food for the president, a lot of Black Angus beef fillet with gratin of silver corn or garlic-scented chicken breast with asparagus.

Each morning greeted Bush and Cheney with a new Threat Matrix, a compendium of potential horrors, as many as a hundred threats a day culled from a broad array of intelligence sources. They included everything from wiretap surveillance to anonymous tips; almost nothing, it seemed, was left out, no matter how far-fetched. In the postSeptember 11 world, no one wanted to take a chance of missing anything. But the shotgun approach undercut the usefulness of the reports since separating the real from the phantom was virtually impossible. The president and the vice president understood it was in part a "cover-your-ass kind of bureaucratic procedure," as Cheney put it. But bombarding the commander in chief and his number two with endless reports of possible mayhem and tragedy naturally influenced the approach they took to defending the country. "It had a huge impact on our psyches," Condoleezza Rice recalled. George Tenet later said it was impossible to read what crossed his desk "and be anything other than scared to death." Laura Bush remembered the effect on her husband. "He didn't bring it all home," she said, "but he brought enough that I could see the lines cut deeper in his face and could hear him next to me lying awake at night, his mind still working."

For Bush, this was his new mission. Until September 11, "Bush lacked a big organizing idea," observed David Frum, his speechwriter. Now this war on terrorism would define his tenure. His domestic agenda, compassionate conservatism, all of it would take a backseat. "Nine-eleven blew him away, like it blew all of us away," said Joe O'Neill, his friend. "All of a sudden, that overrode everything, getting reelected, everything. We were attacked, and so he was going to go after them." And with his approval rating hitting 90 percent, the highest of any president ever recorded, he had considerable latitude.

For Cheney, this was not so much a new mission as the mission for which he had long prepared. All those years focusing on continuity of government and homeland security seemed validated. "I think he has a certain level of fatalism and a feeling that the world is not a safe place," said Anne Womack, who served as his press secretary, "and when 9/11 happened, my guess is that it confirmed a lot of things that he had felt for a long time." From then on, nothing else would matter as much. "How are the bad guys going to get us?" said Kevin Kellems, another press secretary. "He woke up every morning with that first thing on his mind." Pete Williams, his friend and former aide, said the vice president concluded that "the country was fundamentally unprepared" and "it was really kind of up to him."

Despite the surreal physical separation, Bush turned to Cheney in a way he had not before. Bush had let the vice president handle the transition during the recount, manage legislative strategy on Capitol Hill, and drive decisions on issues like energy. But as a former governor, Bush had command of most of the issues that dominated the national conversation until Septem- ber 11. Now he was heading into unfamiliar territory and happy to have Cheney as his guide. "In the period after that," recalled Neil Patel, the Cheney aide, "they were almost closer than ever."

THE DAYS THAT followed the address to Congress were a blur of meetings and decisions, many of them improvisational as Bush and Cheney cobbled together a war plan that combined traditional military action, special forces, diplomacy, law enforcement, financial tools, and intelligence operations.

On September 21, the day after the speech, Bush invited Cheney and the military team to the study on the second floor of his living quarters to talk about attacking Afghanistan, assuming the Taliban did not comply with his ultimatum. He cleared two hours from his schedule, an unusually long stretch in any president's day, and seemed in no rush even when the discussion went long. "We're okay, Don," he assured Rumsfeld when the defense secretary hurried the generals briefing him. "This is important information."

General Tommy Franks, head of Central Command, which had responsibility for the region, presented a four-phase plan of attack on Afghanistan. Franks was from Midland, Texas, like Bush, and had gone to school with Laura. He bonded with the president in Lone Star fashion. Once, when Bush asked how he was doing, Franks answered, "I'm sharper than a frog hair split four ways." Shucking his jacket and lighting up a cigar, Bush listened intently as the general outlined the succession of actions and basing rights he would need. The president's dog Barney wandered around the room. Bush struck aides as focused but more relaxed than he had been since the attack.

Rumsfeld warned that the plan was crude and quickly assembled. "You are not going to find this plan completely fulfilling," he said. "We don't." General Hugh Shelton, the Joint Chiefs chairman appointed by Bill Clinton, thought that Bush, like his predecessor, "had a solid grasp of the tactical, operational specifics as well as the overall strategic concerns." Bush wanted the operation to demonstrate an enduring commitment. He wanted a sense of progression, not just a single strike.

Bush asked Franks how soon he could begin.

"Mr. President, in about two weeks," he said.

"I understand," Bush said. "Two weeks."

Franks noted that they could begin an air campaign sooner but wanted to launch Special Forces operations simultaneously and that would require negotiations for basing and transit rights with neighbors like Uzbekistan.

"I understand," Bush said. "A large air operation would make a statement."

He paused for a moment and then added, "On the other hand, I'm willing to wait. When we do this, we'll do it right. My message to the American people is to be patient."

But patience was difficult with Americans itching for action. Bush worried that the longer it took to respond, the harder it would be to keep the public behind him. So when he heard that weekend that Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill was planning to announce moves to freeze assets of people and groups linked to terrorism, the president tracked down Karen Hughes at Sunday school.

"This financial action is the first battle of the war," he said. "Why am I not announcing this?"

The next morning, September 24, Bush appeared in the Rose Garden with O'Neill and Colin Powell to announce the order. "Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations," he declared. "Today, we're asking the world to stop payment."

FOR YEARS, BUSH had started each day reading the Bible, and in the days following September 11 he sought comfort from the holy book. One morning shortly after the attacks, he read Proverbs 21:15: When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.

The phrase may have stuck in Bush's head. On September 25, he took a short motorcade ride over to FBI headquarters, which served as a venue for a speech urging Congress to pass the new law enforcement powers he was seeking. "I see things this way," Bush said. "The people who did this act on America, and who may be planning further acts, are evil people. They don't represent an ideology. They don't represent a legitimate political group of people. They're flat evil. That's all they can think about, is evil." He later used the word "evildoers" twice to describe terrorists.

The speech bothered Ari Fleischer, who worried it might sound unsophisticated. In the car back to the White House, Fleischer advised Bush to go easy on the word "evil," suggesting it was too simple.

"If this isn't good versus evil, what is?" Bush countered. He reminded Fleischer that Ronald Reagan had not gone to Berlin to say "put a gate in this wall" or "take down a few bricks." He said "tear down this wall," all of it. Sometimes simple was best.

Bush was getting second-guessed at every turn. Not much later, Hughes broached his use of the word "folks" to describe the attackers.

"Mr. President, I'm not sure you ought to be calling the terrorists 'folks.' It sounds like the nice people next door."

"Folks aren't all good," he said. "There are a lot of bad folks in the world."

"But it just sounds too familiar, too folksy," she said. "These are trained killers and it just doesn't sound right to call them folks."

Bush, irritated, turned to Andy Card, Condoleezza Rice, and Karl Rove. "Anybody else not like anything else I say?"

On September 26, Bush and Cheney got word that the first CIA paramilitary operatives had arrived in Afghanistan. Fifteen days after Septem- ber 11, the United States was ready to take the fight to the enemy, implementing a strategy to dislodge the Taliban by using local Afghan forces on the ground aided by the power of American munitions from the air. Arriving in a Russian-made helicopter with a suitcase filled with $3 million in $100 bills, the CIA operatives were to hook up with the Northern Alliance, the ragtag collection of mainly Tajik and Uzbek fighters who had been waging a largely ineffective rebellion against the Taliban government since its inception but now had the world's only superpower behind them.

But as war in Afghanistan loomed, Bush also had his mind on something else. Even though he had shut down Paul Wolfowitz at Camp David, he had been pondering what to do about Iraq. After the National Security Council meeting that morning, Bush asked Rumsfeld to stay behind. The two talked alone in the Oval Office.

"I want you to develop a plan to invade Iraq," Bush said. "Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don't have to take so much over."

Rumsfeld was surprised. The Pentagon's on-the-shelf plan for Iraq was basically just Desert Storm redux. But since he was already reviewing all of the military's stock war plans anyway, he told Bush, he could have Tommy Franks update the Iraq plan without drawing too much attention.

The meeting, which would remain secret until Rumsfeld revealed it in his memoir in 2011, was the first time Bush set in motion the action that would ultimately shape his presidency. How intent he was at that point to go all the way was uncertain. Iraq had been a preoccupation of Bush and Cheney's from the start, but that did not mean they always intended to invade. There was little public appetite for war with Iraq, and Bush had done nothing in his first eight months in office to build a case for it. "No one in the discussions at that time was pushing for an invasion of Iraq," said Zalmay Khalilzad, a national security aide who would later go on to become ambassador to Baghdad. When Rumsfeld urged a high-level meeting to craft a new Iraq strategy in July, Bush did not follow up. It is possible he might have found cause for war eventually anyway, but it is also possible he would have simply waged a more aggressive version of the shadow campaign that had been going on since his father's time, with covert operations to undermine Hussein and aid to opposition groups seeking regime change, everything short of troops on the ground.

Either way, the experience of September 11 changed the dynamics. Even if Iraq did not have a relationship with al-Qaeda, as Cheney suspected, Hussein now looked more dangerous in a world where the United States could no longer afford to let threats fester. If Hussein once seemed manageable in the box Washington had constructed for him, it no longer seemed reasonable to Bush or Cheney to leave in power an openly hostile enemy of the United States who might have chemical, biological, or even possibly nuclear weapons that he could use himself or potentially pass along to terrorists.

In years to come, that calculation would look different, but at that moment it seemed logical. Bush gave Rumsfeld his marching orders.

But before letting him leave, Bush raised a personal matter.

"Dick told me about your son," Bush said. Rumsfeld's grown son, Nick, had been struggling with drug addiction and just checked into a treatment facility.

Rumsfeld, the tough man, unexpectedly broke down and cried. He could not even speak. Finally, recovering a bit of composure, he said, "I love him so much."

Bush was struck by the unusual display of emotion. "I can't imagine the burden you are carrying for the country and your son," he told Rumsfeld.

Then Bush stood up, came from around his desk, and hugged him.

Rumsfeld later jotted down notes in his day calendar about the meeting with the president. "Amazing day," he wrote. "He is a fine human being." And then at the bottom of the page, he scribbled, "Joyce says I have to let Nick go."

WHILE CIA OPERATIVES went to work, Bush and Cheney braced for more attacks at home. Every night when Bush went to bed, he felt a moment of relief that another day had passed without incident. Al-Qaeda had America on its heels, and now was surely the time it would press that advantage. It would take weeks, months, and even years to tighten security for a country as large and open as the United States, and it seemed implausible that terrorists would not mount follow-up attacks. "There was a pervasive feeling that 9/11 itself was not the end of the story," remembered John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director.

On September 28, McLaughlin sat in for Tenet to deliver the daily intelligence briefing to Bush and Cheney. They went through the various threats and tidbits of information picked up in the previous twenty-four hours.

Finally, the president, anxious and edgy, asked, "Why do you think nothing else has happened?"

McLaughlin did not have a certain answer. "Tighter security matters," he offered. What they were doing made a difference. Their aggressive efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda, he theorized, might have militants scattered and in hiding.

Bush hoped so. But he soon had reason to doubt it. On the morning of October 4, Bush got word of an attack in Florida using anthrax, a deadly biological agent. A photo editor at the Sun, the supermarket tabloid, had been hospitalized after opening an envelope containing the spores that had been mailed to the newspaper. No one knew if it was the work of terrorists, but Bush was anxious that this was the beginning of something much worse. Tightening security at airports was one thing. How could they stop a weapon they could not even see?

Bush was heading to the State Department for a speech, but his mind was elsewhere. He looked haggard and worried, his shoulders slouched as he stared out the window of his car. "When Bush got the first information about Florida, nobody knew what the facts were yet," remembered Ari Fleischer, who accompanied him. "That was the lowest I ever saw Bush."

Bush picked up the phone and called Karen Hughes, who was at home working on a statement. "I'm here with Ari," Bush said. "Are you on a secure line?"

No, she said.

He went ahead anyway. "Well, we may have a case of anthrax in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We don't know the source, it appears to be a high concentration in one person. This is a critical moment. We'll need to calm people. I may need to make a statement."

In the end, they decided not to have the White House issue a statement but to have it come from the Department of Health and Human Services to avoid a panic. The statement emphasized that "so far this appears to be an isolated case." At least they hoped it was. The Florida photo editor, Bob Stevens, died the next day, the first anthrax death in the United States in twenty-five years. The question was who was next. "There was a real, almost fatalistic concern that we were going to get hit again," remembered Dean McGrath, Cheney's deputy chief of staff. "In that atmosphere, the anthrax attack threw people for a loop."

AMID THE FEARS of a second wave, Bush and Cheney cast about for any advantage they could find, pressing intelligence agencies to push further. The National Security Agency, which operated spy satellites and tapped telephones and e-mail servers overseas, lifted some of its self-imposed restrictions. For years, in the interest of protecting civil liberties, it had employed a practice called "minimization"; if American citizens not under suspicion turned up in overseas eavesdropping, names and identifying information were generally omitted from reports. But after September 11, Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the agency director, removed those safeguards on communications out of Afghanistan.

All of this was deemed legal by government lawyers. But when George Tenet mentioned the move to Bush and Cheney during a morning briefing, he made light of longtime sensitivities about the agency's activities.

Oh, by the way, Tenet said, Hayden is going to jail.

Tell him we will bail him out, Cheney replied dryly.

Turning serious, Tenet explained the process. Bush and Cheney had no objection and wondered if Hayden was going far enough.

Is there anything else he could do? Cheney asked.

Tenet said he would find out.

After the meeting, Tenet called Hayden. "Is there anything else you could do?"

"Not with my current authorities," Hayden said.

"That is not what I asked you," Tenet said. "Is there anything else you could do?"

Hayden said he would call back. After huddling with his staff, he came up with a plan to vastly widen the net. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the NSA could target communications involving someone inside the United States only with a warrant from a secret court. But with so many foreign telephone calls and e-mail now coming through American communications trunks, it was impractical, Hayden and his team concluded, to seek individual warrants. The average wait when the NSA asked the Justice Department to obtain covert permission was four to six weeks. Even using emergency authorization under the current law usually involved a delay of a day or so.

A plan was devised to bypass the FISA law by citing the president's inherent power under Article II of the Constitution to defend the nation. The NSA would be authorized to collect the data and content of telephone calls and e-mail when there was probable cause to believe one person in the communication was in Afghanistan or preparing for terrorist acts.

"Mr. Vice President," Hayden said, "we can do this, but you know, we really have to be careful. Ever since the Church Committee, my agency up there, NSA, we have been at bat with a one-ball, two-strike count on us, you know. We aren't taking close pitches."

"Okay," Cheney said. "I understand."

The reference to the Church Committee touched directly on Cheney's long-standing concern about limits placed on executive power. Named for Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, the committee exposed abuses by the CIA, FBI and NSA in the 1970s, leading to reforms, including the FISA law. The committee was a thorn in the side of the Ford White House run by Cheney, who considered its queries an intrusion into executive activities.

Bush summoned Hayden to the Oval Office to hear about his plan. Clearly Cheney had already briefed him.

"Mike, thank you for coming," the president began. "I understand your concerns, but you know, if there are things we could be doing, we ought to be doing them."

With the World Trade Center still smoldering and body parts still being recovered, the imperative was to do anything conceivable to avoid another attack. If the government had the ability to track communications of terror cells, Bush and Cheney reasoned, they had to do it. No legal niceties should stand in the way of that. If there were another attack, how could they explain not doing everything in their power to prevent it? Whatever it takes, the men at Ground Zero had told Bush.

Hayden went home that evening and took a walk with his wife. "I have some choices here," he told her. Without disclosing details, he said, "I can't not do what I am being asked, but this is not without risk."

Bush signed an order on October 4 authorizing the new program. He built safeguards into it, requiring it be recertified roughly every thirty or forty-five days. But in the rush to start, Attorney General John Ashcroft was asked to certify the program on the same day he was told about it, and the first formal Office of Legal Counsel opinion supporting its legality by a young lawyer named John Yoo was not drafted until a month later, on November 2.

There was discussion about whether Congress should be told. Bush agreed to inform only the leadership. Cheney invited the Gang of Eight-leaders of both parties from both houses, plus chairmen and ranking minority members of the Intelligence Committees. Cheney and Hayden explained the program and what it could do.

"Do we need legislation?" Cheney asked.