No, Cheney said. "It'll be like the American troops going through Paris."

In the end, Armey felt he had no choice but to go along. It was a fateful decision. Had the Republican majority leader opposed the authorization of force, it would have freed other nervous Republicans and given cover to Democrats to oppose it as well. Cheney had accomplished his mission. But it would ultimately destroy his relationship with Armey, who came to feel betrayed. "I deserved better than to have been bullshitted by Dick Cheney," he said years later. "I can't definitively say that Cheney purposely lied to me, but if you demonstrated it to me, I wouldn't be surprised."

That same day, the British government released a dossier accusing Iraq of possessing banned weapons and went beyond even what the American intelligence agencies had been saying. Among other things, the dossier asserted that Iraq had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa" and claimed that some of Hussein's chemical and biological weapons "are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." That meant mortars and other battlefield tactical weapons, but many assumed from the breathless media coverage that it referred to missiles that could reach London or Washington.

The CIA had warned the British against those claims, but Bush would eventually adopt both of them. "According to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the order were given," he said in the Rose Garden on September 26, despite the skepticism of his own CIA.

In a closed meeting with eighteen lawmakers just before heading out to the Rose Garden, Bush had also embraced another unfounded assertion. "Saddam Hussein is a terrible guy who is teaming up with al-Qaeda," he told the lawmakers, ignoring the lack of any hard evidence of such an alliance.

One of the lawmakers asked him what would happen after Hussein was toppled, and Bush seemed to almost dismiss the concern.

"Nothing can be worse than the present situation," he said. The "timeframe," he added, "would be six months."

Later that day, he flew to a fund-raiser in Texas and repeated publicly what he had told lawmakers privately a week earlier about his family's relationship with Hussein. "There's no doubt his hatred is mainly directed at us," Bush said. "There's no doubt he can't stand us. After all, this is the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time."

BUT DID HE have the weapons Bush and Cheney said he did? While they were stretching the case, the reports sent to the president and the vice president suggested Hussein did have at least some weapons. Cheney, a voracious consumer of intelligence since his service on the House Intelligence Committee, even went to the CIA headquarters nearly a dozen times with aides to dive more deeply into the agency's information. At times, George Tenet thought, Cheney and Scooter Libby knew the agency's material better than it did, embarrassing analysts who could not keep up with questions. The visits would become hotly disputed, a sign to many that Cheney pressured the CIA, although subsequent investigations found no evidence that anyone changed an assessment of Iraq's weapons program because of pressure from the vice president.

"There is this mythology that he would come out to the agency frequently for briefings and try to muscle us into stuff," John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director who sat in on most of the meetings, said later. "We never viewed it that way." Cheney, he said, "wasn't passive at all, but he was not bullying in any sense. He was always very respectful and engaging, and you just have disagreements." Still, less senior analysts might not have seen it so benignly. "They might have had a different feeling than I did," McLaughlin said. "That is always something you have to be on guard for."

Others said that while there was no obvious pressure, at some point analysts knew what the vice president was looking for and were "overly eager to please," as Michael Sulick, then the CIA's associate deputy director of operations, put it. "Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember," an intelligence official told a reporter at the time. Some in the agency even nicknamed the vice president Edgar, as in Bergen, the famous ventriloquist who made his dummy talk. A Cheney aide concluded later that even if the vice president did not intend to influence anyone, "he's a pretty intimidating guy, and he was even more intimidating during that time because people didn't see much of him." Richard Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who led an independent review, concluded the steady requests from the White House created "significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

To the extent there was pressure, in McLaughlin's mind it came from a desire to be more definitive in conclusions rather than sticking to typical on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand hedging. "In the history of writing National Intelligence Estimates, the pendulum had sort of swung over to the view that in your key judgments, basically you just say what you think," he said. "What do you really think? I don't need the two-armed economists; just tell me what do you think?" That stemmed in part from experience with a 1990s commission on ballistic missile threats headed by Donald Rumsfeld. "They felt our work had been too bound to evidence and there had been too little willingness to go beyond the evidence, to speculate, to infer, to come to the logical conclusion based on what you are seeing or not seeing here," McLaughlin said. And after not connecting the dots prior to September 11, analysts erred on the side of being more aggressive.

So the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, sent to Congress on October 1 offered strongly worded key judgments that minimized doubts and dissents. "The nuance was lost," Tenet later admitted. The estimate declared flatly that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons," was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," and, if it acquired fissile material from abroad, "could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year." The conclusions were based on poor tradecraft, mistaken assumptions, and overinterpretation. The main evidence of Hussein's attempt to rebuild a nuclear program was the purchase of the aluminum tubes that Cheney had highlighted on television. But the Energy Department believed those tubes were not suited for enriching uranium and instead were for conventional rocket launchers, a conclusion shared by the State Department intelligence unit. Conclusions about biological weapons were based on tenuous sourcing, particularly an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who was being held by the German intelligence agency, which had not let the CIA interrogate him. Unmanned aerial vehicles being built, supposedly to deliver biological or chemical weapons, were actually not suited to the task, according to the air force. For what it was worth, the NIE's key judgments did not include the reported uranium deal with Niger that had attracted Cheney's interest, itself based on forged documents provided to the Italian intelligence agency that did not pass basic scrutiny for names, dates, and titles. It was, however, mentioned in the body of the report.

The ninety-two-page NIE included dissents, but mostly in the back of the document. While 71 senators and 161 House members went to the White House for briefings by Bush, Cheney, and their aides, no more than 6 senators and a handful of House members actually went to the secure room on Capitol Hill to read the full NIE past the five pages of key judgments. Even Bush later acknowledged he never read the NIE, in his case figuring he had seen all this intelligence in his daily reports. And those daily reports, Tenet later concluded, were even "more assertive" than the NIE.

The importance of the issue could hardly be overestimated. The day after the NIE was released, Bush sealed a deal with Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, on a resolution authorizing force, and the two appeared in the Rose Garden along with Republican leaders and Senator Joseph Lieberman, increasingly one of the leading hawks among the Democrats. Tom Daschle refused to go along. For Gephardt, the weapons were the issue. "Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, but I didn't think we should go to war in Iraq just because he is a bad guy," Gephardt remembered later. "If that is the test, then we have to go to war in fifty countries." So he told Bush, "If I come to the conclusion that he does not have weapons, I am not going to vote for this."

Largely unnoticed was an exchange during a closed-door meeting on the same day. Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, asked John McLaughlin whether Hussein was likely to attack American interests with biological or chemical weapons. McLaughlin said the chances were low, but if the United States attacked Iraq, then the chances would be "pretty high." In other words, Hussein was a direct threat only if Bush and Cheney acted first. The CIA agreed to declassify that exchange for the public, but it drew little attention. "I always wondered why they never used it more in their debate," McLaughlin said later. "That tells you something about the atmosphere at the time." Because the NIE was classified, the CIA released a white paper summarizing its conclusions for public consumption on October 4. The white paper was even more definitive, generally leaving out the dissents and caveats, such as the State Department doubts about a nuclear program and the air force assessment of the unmanned aerial vehicles.

Fanning the concern about weapons in Hussein's hands was a smooth-talking Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi. A jowly, charming banker with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, Chalabi headed the Iraqi National Congress, a group dedicated to toppling Hussein but deeply distrusted by American intelligence agents. After a CIA-backed coup failed in the 1990s, agency officials blamed Chalabi for exposing the plot and issued a "burn notice" against him, cutting him off from any support. But Chalabi had deftly worked the corridors of Washington, befriending neoconservative figures like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and John Hannah in the years before they ascended to power with Bush and Cheney. They considered him a hero for his determined opposition to a dictator, an "enormously talented" figure, and a "huge asset for the United States," as Perle put it. The CIA and the State Department, by contrast, considered him a huckster and his cheerleaders inside the administration "like schoolgirls with their first crush," in George Tenet's words. That did not stop information from Chalabi about purported weapons from circulating through government and even onto the front pages of newspapers like the New York Times.

All of this fed into what Scott McClellan, then Bush's deputy spokesman and later White House press secretary, called "our campaign to sell the war." After breaking with Bush, McClellan described "a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage." He said, "We were more focused on creating a sense of gravity and urgency about the threat from Saddam Hussein than governing on the basis of the truth of the situation."

Nor were they focused on what would come next. When a visiting lawmaker noted at a closed meeting on October 1 that the retired general Wesley Clark had predicted the United States would be stuck in Iraq for ten years, Bush brushed it off.

"I don't know how he gets ten years," he said.

WITH THE VOTES in Congress approaching, Bush decided to give a closing argument laying out the case. Advisers had long ago concluded the Oval Office even with its majesty did not suit Bush well as a venue. He needed an audience to play off; just staring into a camera made him look awkward and uncomfortable. So Bush agreed to deliver his prime-time address in front of an audience at a Cincinnati museum, picking a setting metaphorically in the middle of the country.

Much debate went into crafting the speech, both in substance and in style. Adam Levine, a press aide, recognized that it would be delivered almost exactly on the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis and suggested harking back to the line John F. Kennedy drew against the threats of his era.

One of the speechwriters protested that Kennedy was a Democrat.

"Yeah, that's right," agreed Karl Rove. "What about that?"

"Yeah," Levine shot back, "the worst you are going to get is Ted Sorensen will write a New York Times op-ed that says exactly why everything you have said President Kennedy would have disagreed with."

But if so, Levine went on, it will mean they had struck a chord. Invoking Kennedy would take some of the partisan sheen off the case and summon a memory associated with strength.

A more serious quarrel broke out over the evidence to put in the speech. The drafts written by Michael Gerson and the other speechwriters accused Hussein of building a "massive stockpile" of anthrax and producing "thousands of tons" of mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas. It expressed concern that Iraq could use unmanned aerial vehicles to strike the United States. It echoed Cheney's speech from the summer asserting that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program, citing the disputed aluminum tubes. The sixth draft of the speech also asserted that Iraq had "been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from sources in Africa-an essential ingredient in the enrichment process." When the text was sent to the CIA for review, analysts objected to the uranium assertion and rushed to see George Tenet on October 5.

Tenet called Stephen Hadley. "Steve, take it out," he said, arguing that Bush should not be a "fact witness" on a disputed issue. Tenet's executive assistant followed up with a memo to Hadley and Gerson, noting that the CIA had already disagreed with the British on the matter. "We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue," the memo said. The next day, another CIA analyst followed up with a second memo reinforcing the point, noting that "the evidence is weak" and that Iraq would not need the supply since it already had a large stock of uranium oxide. Moreover, the agency had told Congress "that the Africa story is overblown."

The White House complied and deleted the line. Even without it, Bush's speech was plenty provocative. At 8:00 p.m. on October 7, Bush addressed the nation with a compendium of frightening warnings. If Iraq developed nuclear weapons, it would "be in position to dominate the Middle East," "threaten America," and "pass nuclear technology to terrorists." As Levine suggested, he quoted Kennedy declaring that the world could not "tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threat" by any nation or wait until "the actual firing of weapons" to respond to danger. He all but declared war. "Saddam Hussein must disarm himself," he said, "or for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."

Three days later, on October 10, at 3:05 p.m., the House of Representatives voted 296 to 133 to authorize force in Iraq. With Richard Gephardt's help and Dick Armey's acquiescence, 81 Democrats joined a near-unanimous Republican caucus. Less than ten hours later, voting just past midnight, the Senate followed suit, 77 to 23. Twenty-nine Democrats backed Bush, including Tom Daschle, Joseph Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton; only one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, balked. After the sun came up, aides sent Bush a memo telling him that he had won bigger majorities than his father had twelve years earlier.

But with lawmakers persuaded about what would go wrong if America did not attack Iraq, Bush and Cheney were confronted with a roster of what could go wrong if it did. Rumsfeld had scrawled out by hand a list of all the possible setbacks, then returned to his office to commit them to a memo. Marked "SECRET" and dated October 15, the three-page document became known as the "Parade of Horribles" and cited twenty-nine possible bad outcomes. Number one was that Bush would fail to win UN approval, meaning that "potential coalition partners may be unwilling to participate." Others included the entry of Israel into the war, a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan, eruption of the Arab street, disruption of oil markets, higher than expected collateral damage, and Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction against American forces. Number thirteen was "US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world." Number nineteen was "Rather than having the post-Saddam effort require 2 to 4 years, it could take 8 to 10 years, thereby absorbing US leadership, military and financial resources." And number twenty-seven was "Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Sunni, Shia and Kurds."

Still, Rumsfeld was not opposing war. He concluded his list by noting that "it is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq."

THROUGH ALL OF this, a separate crisis was brewing with another member of the axis of evil. American intelligence agencies had uncovered evidence that North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to the plutonium program it had suspended as part of the Agreed Framework negotiated with Bill Clinton. James Kelly, an assistant secretary of state, was instructed to confront the North Koreans during a trip to Pyongyang. When he did, the North Koreans responded in a way that Kelly took as confirmation.

Suddenly Bush and Cheney had another rogue state developing nuclear weapons. Bush in particular had developed an intense personal animus toward Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator. "I loathe Kim Jong Il," he told the journalist Bob Woodward. To Republican senators, Bush had called Kim a "pygmy" and "a spoiled child at a dinner table" who was "starving his own people" and running "a Gulag the size of Houston." But it was not in Bush and Cheney's interest to overemphasize North Korea at the moment, and the announcement on October 16 was largely overlooked amid the public debate on Iraq. "We decided to park this problem in the six-party talks until we dealt with Iraq," Cheney said at one point in the Oval Office.

The skepticism Bush encountered at home was mirrored in the chambers of the Security Council. If they had to seek another resolution, then Cheney wanted it to have teeth and insisted on a draft threatening to use "all necessary means" if Hussein was found in violation. Powell knew that was a nonstarter but sent it up just to make the point; sure enough, every other member of the Security Council, including the British, rejected such explicit language. Powell and the British instead convinced the French to go along with threatening "serious consequences" without explaining what that meant, leaving enough ambiguity for Washington to define it as it chose.

Moreover, Powell set the resolution's terms such that Iraq was almost certain to violate them. "We built a lot of ambushes or traps into 1441 for Saddam Hussein," he said afterward. "The big one was the initial one, where we said, you're in material breach now." Rather than let Iraq off the hook for the past twelve years, the Security Council would start from the premise that it was still in violation of its obligations, putting the burden on Baghdad to establish otherwise. The other "ambush" that Powell helped insert was a requirement that Hussein file a full declaration disclosing all banned weapons programs. Either he would deny having weapons, which would be widely considered a lie, or he would admit having the weapons, which would confirm that he had been lying for years. Then the United States could move straight to "serious consequences."

The drive to war paid off in the midterm elections. As Karl Rove had urged, Bush and Cheney had taken their leadership of the war on terror to the voters. Rove's "72-Hour Project" drove up turnout in the final days of the campaign. On November 5, Bush invited Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, and other congressional leaders to dinner in the Family Dining Room and then to watch returns. Cheney was not among the guests. Bush was fired up. Republicans defeated Max Cleland and picked up two extra seats in the Senate for a total of fifty-one, recapturing the upper chamber lost when James Jeffords left the party. In the House, Republicans gained eight seats, padding their majority. Bush grabbed Ken Mehlman's cell phone to call winners like Bob Ehrlich, who was elected governor of Maryland. "You won!" Bush exulted.

It was the first time since 1934 that an incumbent president's party picked up seats in both houses in a midterm election. Bush had raised more than $200 million, traveled to forty states, and lent an approval rating that, while down from its postSeptember 11 high, remained in the mid-sixties. Cheney too dedicated enormous time to the project, making roughly thirty trips in the last couple of months of the campaign and raising more than $40 million. For Bush, it seemed to some advisers that this finally provided him a measure of validation, even legitimacy, after the much-disputed outcome in 2000. If Bush did not win a mandate then, he had won one by proxy in 2002.

Two days after the election, on November 7, Bush was in an expansive mood at a news conference celebrating the victories. He called for a return to the bipartisan spirit that had reigned ever so briefly after September 11.

But with the 2002 election over, the reporters were already turning to 2004. Bill Sammon of the Washington Times asked if he would keep Cheney on the ticket.

"Should I decide to run," Bush said flatly, "Vice President Cheney will be my running mate. He's done an excellent job. I appreciate his advice. I appreciate his counsel. I appreciate his friendship. He is a superb vice president, and there's no reason for me to change."

For Cheney, the president's comments were obviously satisfying. But they were not necessarily the final answer.

13.

"You could hear the hinge of history turn"

In the fall of 2002, Vice President Cheney allowed himself to muse aloud about the differences between the current White House and previous ones where he had served. "In this White House," he said, "there aren't Cheney people versus Bush people. We're all Bush people." He was talking about the fact that he had no aspirations to run when President Bush was done, a virtually unheard-of situation in modern American politics that meant there was no subtle competition between president and vice president that drove their teams apart, as had happened so often in the past.

Bush thought much the same-at first. He valued Cheney's counsel, and one of the attractions of picking him was that "he didn't want it." While the vice president intimidated others with his quiet, powerful certitude, Cheney was careful to defer to Bush, almost never disagreeing with him in front of others and keeping a low profile to avoid upstaging the president. While outsiders imagined Cheney dominating meetings, in fact Cheney largely kept silent until the president asked for his opinion. When he did talk, he tended to ask questions rather than state his views explicitly, although it was not always hard to tell from his questions which direction he was leaning.

By the time the midterms had passed, though, there were in fact Bush people and Cheney people. In both the national security and the economic teams, fissures had opened that reflected profound differences in policy and personality. Bush and Cheney themselves remained close, and the president still relied heavily on his number two. But the president allowed a fractious struggle to play out beneath him without resolving it firmly one way or the other. Most significantly, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were increasingly fighting with Colin Powell, sometimes joined by Condoleezza Rice. At times, Bush grew frustrated enough to demand better behavior, only to retreat when nothing really changed. As the confrontation with Iraq accelerated, there were moments when Cheney worried Bush would not prove decisive enough and those when Bush resented Cheney pushing him.

For all of his Texas swagger, Bush hated conflict within his team and was still a relatively new president with limited experience. He had surrounded himself with some of the nation's most seasoned hands, which at first was reassuring. But friends said it later became something of a straitjacket. "After 9/11, it was, my God, nobody could be luckier having these people there, and he was very fortunate to have them," said Jim Langdon, Bush's longtime friend from Texas. "And with that kind of experience sitting around the table, maybe it did not leave a lot of room for his own judgment in these matters. His team has been there, done it, seen it all, had the context while Bush was governor of Texas."

Bush was often seen as acceding to Cheney's judgment. Yet it was more complicated than that. Even in this period, when Bush and Cheney were closest, the president rejected his advice at key moments. He gave his Middle East speech, he refused to bomb the Khurmal terrorist camp in northern Iraq, and he decided to go to the United Nations, all at odds with Che- ney's recommendations. "One of the things people fail to recognize about George W. Bush-he would almost always agree with Cheney and Rumsfeld about what the objectives should be, which was a hawk, but what people miss is that he would agree with Condi Rice and Colin Powell about how to achieve it," reflected Ari Fleischer.

The growing schism between Cheney and Powell was profound and damaging. The two Gulf War partners who rose to prominence side by side in the first Bush administration had become fierce adversaries in the second. Powell had long understood that Cheney was more conservative than he was-a "right-wing nut," as he had once called him semi-jokingly to his face-but now he saw what he considered a fever in Cheney when it came to Iraq and terrorism. The vice president, for his part, increasingly viewed Powell, in the words of his aide Neil Patel, as a "pain in the ass," basically a freelancer more interested in his own press clippings and personal stature than in following orders.

Powell had developed a theory about Cheney and what made things so different this time around. While some believed the vice president had changed, Powell did not think so. In Cheney's past jobs, under Gerald Ford or George H. W. Bush, he was contained. He was too young and inexperienced to impose his will on the Ford White House, and in the first Bush White House he was serving a president who was very sure of himself on foreign policy and national security. As defense secretary, Cheney had often expressed ideas similar to those he would advance as vice president. But back then, he was surrounded by other adults in the room with experience and gravitas-Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Powell himself, and of course the president. In this White House, Powell believed, Cheney was not effectively contained by anyone. He had a much freer hand with a president whose background gave him little real preparation to be commander in chief. Powell thought Cheney saw himself as Tom Hagen, the mentor-tutor of the Godfather movies, the consigliere advising a young mob leader.

Cheney came out on the winning end of these struggles more often than not. Powell recognized that the vice president had the advantage of proximity, seeing Bush multiple times a day, often one-on-one. There was no competing with that. Moreover, Bush did not connect with Powell. "The president was never comfortable with Secretary Powell," said one White House official, "because Powell loomed so large that I always had the sense that the president felt like his all-star quarterback big brother was always around telling him what he should do better."

Bush generally left it to Rice to manage the rivalries, a formidable task even for a more experienced bureaucratic infighter. Rice had never held a government post higher than senior director in the National Security Council, a relatively mid-level position. Now she was charged with riding herd over a vice president who had previously served as secretary of defense and White House chief of staff, a secretary of state who had previously served as four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had held her own position as national security adviser, and a secretary of defense who also had been White House chief of staff and was on his second tour running the Pentagon.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, the two old friends, were a powerful tandem. "He never came over to me and organized against some decision or said we have to marshal support for this or that," Rumsfeld said. But he did not have to. The two were instinctively on the same page. Powerful as Cheney was, it was Rumsfeld with whom Rice tangled most visibly. He was widely regarded as brilliant but prickly and had aggravated his own uniformed officers who thought, as General Hugh Shelton put it, that Rumsfeld ought to put a sign on his desk that said, "Don't Tell Me, I Already Know." Rumsfeld thought the generals had gotten too used to running the show under Clinton and that civilian leadership needed to be reasserted. With everything on his plate, he had little patience for the endless White House meetings Rice called and was dismissive of White House aides who presumed to issue instructions to his people. At times, he called Andy Card and berated him by telling him he was failing at his job. For a while, he resisted sending military officers to staff the NSC or as liaisons to the State Department, as was tradition, asking why he should have to give up his talent for their convenience. And he constantly threw roadblocks at White House efforts to get information, to the point where Rice asked one of her top aides, Frank Miller, to use back-channel Pentagon contacts to ferret out what was happening.

When Rice tried to convene meetings on what to do with captured enemies, Rumsfeld refused to attend. She finally brought it up after a meeting on another subject, only to watch astonished as he got up to walk out.

"Don, where are you going?" she asked.

"I don't do detainees," he said.

The tension came to a head in late 2002 when Rumsfeld sent a testy memo telling Rice to "stop giving tasks and guidance to combatant commanders and the joint staff." He wrote, "You and the NSC staff need to understand that you are not in the chain of command. Since you cannot seem to accept that fact, my only choices are to go to the President and ask him to tell you to stop or to tell anyone in DoD not to respond to you or the NSC staff. I have decided to take the latter course. It [sic] it fails, I'll have to go to the President. One way or the other, it will stop, while I am Secretary of Defense."

Rice bristled at the haughtiness but could not figure out how to address it. One day, after another clash during a White House meeting, she found herself walking alone with Rumsfeld through the Colonnade adjacent to the Rose Garden.

"What's wrong between us?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "We always got along. You're obviously bright and committed, but it just doesn't work."

Bright? Rice was taken aback. To her, that sounded condescending. She was not a peer in his mind, she concluded, but a subordinate.

Rumsfeld was surprised later to learn she had taken offense, saying, "It certainly was not meant in a derogatory way." His loyalists thought she read too much into a word he used a lot, but agreed it might have been hard for a man who had mentored someone to see her as an equal. That she would presume to oversee his stewardship of the Pentagon, even demanding to clear his travel in advance, just rankled.

Powell, for his part, pressed Rice to ask the president to rein in Rumsfeld. She was reluctant to bring in Bush and wondered why Powell did not take his grievances to him directly. Given his stature, Powell would have more chance of being heard. But he did not, and she concluded that the soldier in Powell resisted a direct confrontation with the commander in chief. Still, one day he asked Rice, "Why doesn't the president just square the circle? One of us needs to go."

As it happened, there was more unanimity on the UN Security Council, which on November 8, just three days after the midterm elections, voted 15 to 0 for Powell's resolution holding Iraq in "material breach" of previous UN edicts and giving it a "final opportunity to comply" by admitting inspectors and providing a complete accounting of its weapons programs. Failure would result in "serious consequences." In a surprise, even Syria, the only Arab country on the council, voted yes.

IN THE WEEKS after the elections, Bush approved a strategy of "tailored containment" against North Korea, ratcheting up pressure to stop its nuclear program, starting by halting American funding for fuel oil. He also flew to Prague, where he successfully pressed NATO to invite seven Eastern European countries to join, including the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. He signed legislation establishing a commission to investigate the September 11 attacks, despite Cheney's concerns. And in the aftermath of the ugly election campaign, he signed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security, which he would turn over to Tom Ridge.

Most consuming in those days, though, was a raging fight over further tax cuts. Bush wanted to double down on the 2001 plan, hoping it might boost the economy. Cheney had little opportunity to shape the first tax cut plan designed before his arrival on the ticket, but he was determined to play a central role in shaping this one. "I would say all along he was a big driver," recalled Glenn Hubbard, the White House economist. But Cheney found himself at odds with the Treasury secretary he had recruited. Paul O'Neill opposed another package of tax breaks on the grounds that "the economy did not need" it but "we did need the revenue for other important purposes" as the inherited surplus turned into deficit. O'Neill saw the tax cut as purely political. "I think they believed it was a way to assure reelection," he reflected later.

At an economic policy meeting on November 15, O'Neill cautioned that the country was "moving toward a fiscal crisis" with rising deficits.

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Cheney countered. "We won the midterms. This is our due."

In saying deficits did not matter, Cheney meant that Ronald Reagan's tax cuts and defense buildup in the 1980s were financed partly through deficit spending but the economy still grew. Cheney's domestic policy adviser, Cesar Conda, had been sending him memos arguing that the size of the deficit did not seem to correlate to interest rates historically, despite conventional wisdom. Either way, the drive for a new tax plan made clear how isolated O'Neill had become from his friend Cheney and the White House staff, who were developing economic policy behind his back. The plan "was designed in the White House and basically handed to us, and it drove him insane," remembered one O'Neill aide.

The debate played out in front of the president in the Roosevelt Room on November 26. Cheney, who participated via secure video, wanted to accelerate the 2001 rate cuts, which had been phased in over time, while reducing the double taxation of dividends and cutting capital gains taxes. Backed by Hubbard and Lawrence Lindsey, Cheney argued that would do the most to assist business expansion and job creation. "The vice president was always interested in just what are the arguments he could make for pro-growth policy, particularly on the tax side," Hubbard recalled. O'Neill made his case for deficit control, joined at times by Mitch Daniels and Joshua Bolten, but Bush seemed less concerned about that than the structure of the tax plan. He favored doing something about double taxation of dividends; companies distributing profits to shareholders had already paid taxes on that money, then the individuals paid taxes on the dividends they received. To Bush, the concept seemed unfair, and he thought they should get rid of it altogether, not just reduce it. But he questioned cutting capital gains taxes because, he said, they were already doing enough for the rich.

"The argument that rang most familiar with the president really wasn't any of those" made by the vice president, Hubbard said. "It was more fairness. He was really concerned about double taxation. The same rhetoric he used to rail against the estate tax-he would call it the death tax-he used on dividend taxes. Frankly, those arguments did very well with the public. All the economist stuff about faster growth and all that, I don't think that's what sold the policy. I think his political instinct was spot-on and people caught on-why should I pay taxes twice?"

ANOTHER MAJOR INITIATIVE was shaping up around the same time. Since taking office, Bush had developed an interest in fighting AIDS in Africa. He had agreed to contribute to an international fund battling the disease and later started a program aimed at providing drugs to HIV-infected pregnant women to reduce the chances of transmitting the virus to their babies. But it had only whetted his appetite to do more. "When we did it, it revealed how unbelievably pathetic the U.S. effort was," Michael Gerson said.

So Bush asked Bolten to come up with something more sweeping. Gerson was already thought of as "the custodian of compassionate conservatism within the White House," as Bolten called him, and he took special interest in AIDS, which had killed his college roommate. Bolten assembled key White House policy aides Gary Edson, Jay Lefkowitz, and Kristen Silverberg in his office. In seeking something transformative, the only outsider they called in was Anthony Fauci, the renowned AIDS researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"What if money were no object?" Bolten asked. "What would you do?"

Bolten and the others expected him to talk about research for a vaccine because that was what he worked on.

"I'd love to have a few billion more dollars for vaccine research," Fauci said, "but we're putting a lot of money into it, and I could not give you any assurance that another single dollar spent on vaccine research is going to get us to a vaccine any faster than we are now."

Instead, he added, "The thing you can do now is treatment."

The development of low-cost drugs meant for the first time the world could get a grip on the disease and stop it from being a death sentence for millions of people. "They need the money now," Fauci said. "They don't need a vaccine ten years from now."

The aides crafted a plan in secret, keeping it even from Colin Powell and Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. They were ready for a final presentation to Bush on December 4. Just before heading into the meeting, Bush stopped by the Roosevelt Room to visit with Jewish leaders in town for the annual White House Hanukkah party later that day. The visitors were supportive of Bush's confrontation with Iraq and showered him with praise. One of them, George Klein, founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition, recalled that his father had been among the Jewish leaders who tried to get Franklin Roosevelt to do more to stop the Holocaust. "I speak for everyone in this room when I say that if you had been president in the forties, there could have been millions of Jews saved," the younger Klein said.

Bush choked up at the thought-"You could see his eyes well up," Klein remembered-and went straight from that meeting to the AIDS meeting, the words ringing in his ears. Lefkowitz, who walked with the president from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, was convinced that sense of moral imperative emboldened Bush as he listened to the arguments about what had shaped up as a $15 billion, five-year program. Daniels and other budget-minded aides "were kind of gasping" about spending so much money, especially with all the costs of the struggle against terrorism and the looming invasion of Iraq. But Bush steered the conversation to aides he knew favored the program, and they argued forcefully for it.

"Gerson, what do you think?" Bush asked.

"If we can do this and we don't, it will be a source of shame," Gerson said.

Bush thought so too. So while he mostly wrestled with the coming war, he quietly set in motion one of the most expansive lifesaving programs ever attempted. Somewhere deep inside, the notion of helping the hopeless appealed to a former drinker's sense of redemption, the belief that nobody was beyond saving.

"Look, this is one of those moments when we can actually change the lives of millions of people, a whole continent," he told Lefkowitz after the meeting broke up. "How can we not take this step?"

That was not the end of the fight. In later weeks, Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin tried to prevent Gerson from putting the announcement of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, in the State of the Union address for fear it would send a message to the American people that Bush cared only about what was happening overseas. But Bush was committed. He would announce it from the biggest platform he had.

BUSH SHARED HIS passion for helping Africa with Paul O'Neill, but that was about all the two shared. Bush "never clicked" with O'Neill and felt his Treasury secretary was too focused on tangential issues, too out of touch with the administration's economic priorities. "He came in and he talked about safety at the mint," Bolten recalled. "Safety at the mint was not a top priority." O'Neill, who had been a corporate chief executive for years, "was not a team player," one aide said.

Bush also worried about repeating his father's mistake by not focusing enough on the economy, so shaking up the economic team might send a useful signal. That would start with O'Neill. Bush also decided to replace Lawrence Lindsey, who had gotten in hot water with his back-of-the-napkin prediction that the Iraq War could cost $200 billion but mainly fell victim to being the coordinator of an economic team that resisted being coordinated. Yet while Bush was willing to make the decision, he left it to Cheney to carry out, avoiding conflict.

Just after lunchtime on December 5, Cheney placed the call to O'Neill at the Treasury Building next door to the White House.

"Paul, the president has decided to make some changes in the economic team," Cheney said. O'Neill would remember a pause before Cheney spoke again. "And you're part of the change."

O'Neill had been meeting with aides on the financial markets when the call came in, and it took him by surprise. He understood he was not always in tune with Bush and Cheney, but he was floored at being unceremoniously shuffled out over the phone.

O'Neill sat down. "The president should have around him the people he wants," he told Cheney. "I'm happy if the president wants to make a change."

With people in his office, O'Neill asked to call back. After reconnecting, Cheney outlined the plan.

"We'd like to have you come over tomorrow or next week and meet with the president, and we'll make an announcement that you've decided to return to the private sector," the vice president said.

O'Neill stiffened. If he was out, then he would announce his resignation the next day. But he would not go along with the cover story.

"I'm too old to begin telling lies, and that's a lie," he said. "I'm not going to do that." He went on, "I'm perfectly okay with people knowing the truth that the president wants to make a change. That's his prerogative."