On the first weekend of the Iraq invasion, Bush headed to Camp David with advisers and friends, hoping to show that he was not obsessing over every incremental development on the battlefield. But in between workouts and walks along the trails, he was glued to television reports from Iraq and talked about little else. "He is just totally immersed," reported Roland Betts, an old college friend who joined him that weekend.

As the invasion accelerated, the military returned to a long-identified target, the Ansar al-Islam camp in Khurmal in northern Iraq, which was bombarded on March 21, the second day of the war, by sixty-four Tomahawk cruise missiles. A week later, on March 28, Special Forces, accompanying Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, arrived at the scene and took on the remaining extremists in a four-day pitched battle. Reports to Bush and Cheney indicated evidence of a chemical weapons facility. Tests detected traces of cyanide salts, ricin, and potassium chloride, and soldiers found chemical hazard suits and Arabic manuals on chemical munitions. But there was no evidence the group was tied to Hussein's regime. Worse, the strike did not succeed in taking out Zarqawi.

On March 27, Bush hosted Tony Blair at Camp David, where the two discussed the war. Bush was looking ahead, hoping the invasion would send a signal to other international outliers. Already there were positive signs. Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime dictator of Libya, had just approached the United States through British contacts to open a dialogue about his country's own weapons of mass destruction. The younger Qaddafi indicated that Libya was contemplating a radical rapprochement with the West and that "everything would be on the table," including renunciation of its weapons program. Bush and Blair debated Qaddafi's motivations. Was it a ruse or was he serious?

Libya had been moving to settle accounts for some time, including a settlement admitting culpability in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was certainly possible that Qaddafi was watching what was happening in Iraq and determined to avoid Hussein's fate. "When Bush has finished with Iraq, we'll quickly have a clear idea of where he's going," Qaddafi had said in a typically fiery interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro in which he compared Bush to Adolf Hitler about a week before the invasion. "It won't take long to find out if Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Libya will be targets as well."

Bush and Blair agreed to pursue the outreach to see where it would lead, but keep the discussions secret even from many inside their own governments. Only Bush, Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Stephen Hadley, and a couple of others would know. Powell and Rumsfeld would be told only in very general terms that something was going on, and Bush would leave it to the CIA and his own staff to explore the opportunity. "We had a real concern that if we told the Defense Department, it would leak in ten seconds. If we told the State Department, it would leak in five seconds," Robert Joseph, a National Security Council official tasked with working the issue, said later. "So the goal was to keep it very tightly held."

The tension between State and Defense escalated as the invasion progressed. On March 31, Rumsfeld confronted Powell, accusing his deputy, Richard Armitage, of "badmouthing the Pentagon all over town." Powell countered that Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had clearly been leaking against State, which Rumsfeld denied. The defense secretary was frustrated by the national security team's fractiousness and thought it was moving too slowly in coming up with a replacement for the day Hussein fell. The next day, April 1, he sent a memo to Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the National Security Council urging them to let him set up an interim government. "We have got to get moving on this," he wrote. "We can't afford to have a protracted interagency debate. This is now a matter of operational importance-it is not too much to say that time can cost lives." A new government would convince many Iraqis that the Americans would not stop until Hussein was truly gone, giving them the courage to side with the invaders. Even though Bush had already ruled out a government made up of exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, the fight was not over.

AS AMERICAN FORCES drove toward Baghdad, Bush and his wife boarded Air Force One on April 3 to fly to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to visit marines. With reports of renewed momentum in the field, Bush was in an upbeat mood as he climbed a makeshift stage set up on a field ringed by tanks and packed with enthusiastic young men and women in uniform. Camp Lejeune had sent 17,500 marines and sailors to Iraq, with more soon to go.

"There's no finer sight, no finer sight, than to see 12,000 United States Marines and corpsmen-unless you happen to be a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard," Bush said to raucous applause. "A vise is closing," he declared, "and the days of a brutal regime are coming to an end."

After ribs and macaroni and cheese with troops in the mess hall, the president and first lady went to a chapel annex to meet families of five marines killed in Iraq, his first such session since the invasion began. So far, thirteen troops from Lejeune had been killed, more than any other military installation, and another six were missing. Each family was seated separately, some wearing pictures of their lost relative on their lapels, and the Bushes offered each words of comfort. "He's in heaven," the president told the relatives of one slain marine. Two of the marines had left behind children they had never met, babies born after their deployment.

Bush met twin six-week-old girls whose father had been lost. How could he not think about his own twin girls, and all they had meant to him, and how these two babies, these two girls who could be so much like Jenna and Barbara, would never know their father? Bush was teary-eyed by the time he left the chapel and boarded Marine One. Usually after such moments, he would bounce back and regain his upbeat demeanor, but not this day. He sat during the twenty-minute helicopter ride in utter silence, staring out the window the whole time. Ari Fleischer had never seen him quite like that, clearly bothered by "that wrenching realization of a family torn apart, broken up, so similar to his."

Aides worried about how Bush was holding up. Stephen Hadley had a moment alone with him after a meeting and asked how he was doing.

"I made the decision," Bush said. "I sleep well at night."

Despite Bush's decision not to install a government of exiles, Ahmad Chalabi's patrons in the Pentagon managed to slip him into Iraq. On the morning of April 5, Powell and Tenet woke to learn that Chalabi and a force of his Free Iraqi Forces had been airlifted to Nasiriyah. Rumsfeld thought the insertion of the Iraqi exiles would be "a useful corrective to the perception that the United States was invading Iraq to occupy the country rather than liberate it." Powell and Tenet thought it was crazy and undercut the argument that America favored Iraqis choosing their own leaders.

ON APRIL 9, one of Bush's assistants called into the Oval Office to tell him he should look at the television. American forces had swarmed into Baghdad, and now in Firdos Square, in the heart of Baghdad, liberated Iraqis were attacking a statue of Saddam Hussein, trying to bring it down. Bush walked to the outer office and glanced at the television as an Iraqi man swung a sledgehammer again and again at the base of the statue. The images were powerful. An American marine unfurled an American flag on the statue, before someone thought better of it and realized it would be politically wiser to put an Iraqi flag there. Finally, a marine tank recovery vehicle arrived to bring down the statue.

"They're hooking it up and they've got the crane out there," one of the assistants called to Bush, who had retreated back into the Oval Office.

"Well, let me know," he said.

"Well, it's about to come down," the assistant replied.

So he hustled back out to watch the fateful fall. Looking back on that moment years later, he described himself feeling "overwhelmed with relief and pride." But others remembered him being more restrained. Eric Draper, his photographer, recalled Bush pausing just for moments to watch the scene. "A second and a half later, he headed back to the Oval," Draper said. "He really wasn't interested. He was so focused on certain things, and what may be dramatic to you and I may not be dramatic to him because he was already past it. He's already thinking ahead."

In reality, it was a small moment in Baghdad involving only a few hundred people. But the symbolic parallels to such iconic scenes as the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall dominated the media. CNN replayed the toppling of the statue that day on average every 7.5 minutes and Fox News every 4.4 minutes. Bush's father sent him an e-mail praising his "conviction and determination." It would be hard for a president not to feel a sense of satisfaction.

Cheney watched in a hotel room in New Orleans, where he had flown to give a speech. By evening, he had returned to Washington and had an unanticipated visit at the White House from Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile author who had told him and Bush that Americans would be greeted with "sweets and flowers."

"Thank you for our liberation," Makiya said.

Cheney took Makiya down the hall to the Oval Office so he could thank Bush.

Rice arrived in the Oval Office right around then. "You did this," she congratulated Bush. He did not respond. "He was very much inside his own thoughts," she noticed.

Liberation, however, proved to be messier than anyone had hoped. Cheney and Makiya were right when they said that Americans would be welcomed as liberators by Iraqis. They were, at first. Long-suffering Iraqis were jubilant at Hussein's fall. The stories of torture that spilled out in those days after the statue fell made up a Stalinesque tapestry of cruelty. Where Cheney and Makiya got it wrong was presuming the welcome would last or that the joy over Hussein's overthrow necessarily translated into enduring amity for the overthrowers.

Iraqis had endured a dozen years of international sanctions that Hussein had blamed for widespread malnutrition, disease, and every economic malady. They had been told that a rash of cancers was the result of depleted uranium in American bombs left over from the Gulf War or used to enforce the no-fly zone. Shiites and Kurds were still resentful that after freeing Kuwait, the Americans did nothing to help as Hussein brutally crushed their uprising in 1991. And there was deep-seated suspicion that the Americans had come back not to help them but to take their oil. It did not help that American troops sat by and did little to keep order amid the chaotic scenes following the collapse of the Hussein regime as looters ransacked government buildings. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld glibly said. But forces were being set loose that would take years to control.

For the moment, that was lost on the White House team. On April 13, Cheney hosted a small dinner to celebrate the fall of Hussein. The few invited included Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Kenneth Adelman, a longtime friend and aide to Cheney and Rumsfeld who had written in the Washington Post that the invasion of Iraq would be "a cakewalk." As the vice president welcomed the guests, Adelman surprised him by hugging him, something that generally made Cheney uncomfortable. But emotions were soaring. "We were euphoric," Adelman recalled. "The mood and feeling were just wonderful. I just thought it was a magical moment."

Over dinner, the group toasted Bush and victory in Iraq. Cheney was high on his partner. "It is amazing his courage," the vice president told his guests.

"When do you think this all started?" Adelman asked.

"I am pretty sure it was decided right after 9/11 to go in," Cheney said, "but it took us all too long if you ask me."

The group agreed they had rid America of a terrible enemy, demonstrated the capacity of the U.S. military, and created hope of a genuine ally in the heart of the Middle East. Cheney was not as interested in the democracy experiment that absorbed Bush; he was more focused on American security.

As the evening wound up, Adelman interjected the only sour note. "I wonder why we haven't found WMDs yet," he ventured.

Libby jumped on him. "Oh, we are going to find them," he said. "Don't worry about that."

"They haven't found them, because they have been looking for other stuff," Cheney added.

"Well, if they don't find them pretty soon," Adelman said, "people are going to be pretty pissed off."

WITH HUSSEIN DRIVEN from power and the military engaged in what seemed like mop-up operations, Bush and his team thought the war was all but over. Stephen Hadley even called Richard Armitage to ask how victory parades were organized after the Gulf War.

Tommy Franks was eager for some sort of presidential speech to recognize what his troops had achieved in just a matter of weeks, and Bush wanted to accommodate him.

Joe Hagin came to Bush and told him that the USS Abraham Lincoln was returning to port in San Diego after being deployed longer than any vessel since Vietnam; it seemed like the picture-perfect venue. Bush would fly out to the carrier as it approached the coast and deliver a nationally televised speech from the deck. The idea appealed both to the former Air National Guard pilot in Bush and to his inner political showman.

The setting chosen, the question became what to say. When Michael Gerson wrote a lofty speech inspired by Douglas MacArthur's remarks on the deck of the USS Missouri ending World War II, it drew plenty of skeptical responses, not least from Rumsfeld. Reading it during his first post-invasion trip to Baghdad, the defense secretary thought the speech "seemed too optimistic" and told the White House to "tone down any triumphalist rhetoric." Rumsfeld wondered where the talk of democracy came from. "Bringing democracy to Iraq had not been among the primary rationales" of the war, he knew. The only one who talked like that in their numerous Situation Room meetings was Rice, "but it was not clear to me whether she was encouraging the president to use rhetoric about democracy or whether it was originating with the president." Rumsfeld was not the only one with concerns; Colin Powell and Karen Hughes weighed in too. But for all the attention to the wording of the speech, what the political advisers did not consider deeply enough was the wording of a banner that the White House had printed up at the request of a proud Lincoln crew.

While the White House initially explained that Bush would fly to meet the carrier because it was still too far offshore for a helicopter trip, in fact it had arrived close enough to the West Coast that it had to be repositioned to exclude land from the camera shot. The truth was Bush simply wanted to fly onto the carrier the way a combat pilot did, and his advisers understood the power of the image. To fly to the carrier in an S-3B Viking, Bush and Andy Card had to undergo water-survival training. The president donned an aviator's flight suit and harness and practiced jumping into the White House swimming pool and removing the gear before touching bottom.

On May 1, Bush flew aboard Air Force One to Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego Bay, where he met his pilot. Commander John "Skip" Lussier warned Bush of the inherent dangers of flying a jet onto the deck of a moving ship.

"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, everything goes really smoothly," Lussier told him. "But there's always that .1 percent chance that something could happen."

"Luce, you don't need to worry about that," Bush said. "We've got a great vice president."

Bush and Lussier soared into the sky aboard the Viking out toward the Pacific. "Mr. President," Lussier said after a few minutes. "You want the jet?"

Of course he did, excited as a kid to be flying again at four hundred miles per hour, much to the obvious discomfort of the Secret Service agents in the back.

Lussier took the controls back when it came time to land on the Lincoln, hitting the deck at 150 miles per hour and catching the fourth and final cable that brought it to an abrupt halt. Bush emerged in his flight suit looking like an older Tom Cruise from Top Gun. Any political strategist would have killed for the picture of the manly commander in chief. Except that after he changed back into a suit to give his speech, he now shared the picture with the banner requested by the crew: "Mission Accomplished."

The speech itself was more modulated, after the rewrites Rumsfeld and others insisted on. "My fellow Americans," Bush said, "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." The sailors and airmen applauded. "And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country." Bush declared that "we've removed an ally of al-Qaeda," once again advancing a claim that overstated the intelligence. But he made sure to add the important caveat that the fighting was not over. "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes."

Those sentences became a crutch for Bush aides for years afterward to argue that he was not glossing over what was still to come in Iraq. And certainly, he was correct that "major combat operations" were over in the sense of the big army-on-army battles that ousted a government. That claim hardly seemed controversial; just a week earlier, Tom Brokaw of NBC News had prefaced a question during an interview with Bush with the phrase "Now that the war in Iraq is over." Still, the tone of the speech conveyed triumph, portraying "the battle of Iraq"-which followed "the battle of Afghanistan"-as just another step in a broader campaign as if he were describing the gradual liberation of Europe in World War II.

And the banner, no matter how it got there, no matter what it was intended to mean, became shorthand for the day's message. "Our stagecraft had gone awry," Bush later concluded. "It was a big mistake."

15.

"Mr. President, I think we've got a problem"

Five days after the made-for-television landing on the aircraft carrier, President Bush sat down for lunch with the man he wanted to accomplish the next mission in Iraq. Across from him in the dining room off the Oval Office was L. Paul Bremer III, a former ambassador in charge of counterterrorism and former chief of staff to Henry Kissinger. Bremer was Bush's choice to govern Iraq and transition it back to Iraqi hands.

At first glance, Bremer had a background almost designed to draw Bush's skepticism. A product of northeast elite circles, Bremer was the son of the president of Christian Dior Perfumes and an art history lecturer, earned degrees from Andover, Yale, and Harvard, studied at a French political institute, and boasted a resume of State Department and foreign policy experience a mile long. But at sixty-one, he still had thick, wavy hair and chiseled good looks, worked out vigorously, and, most important, exuded a take-charge energy that appealed to Bush.

From that first meeting on May 6, Bush decided to invest in Bremer. And from the start, Bremer, who went by the name Jerry, laid out a vision in direct conflict with the sketchy plans Bush had made for Iraq. While the president and his team imagined a quick handover of power and a drawdown to thirty thousand troops by September, Bremer saw a longer, much more involved process. And at that lunch just before the announcement of his appointment, he got Bush to buy into his approach.

"We'll stay until the job is done," Bush told him over a salad of pears and greens. "You can count on my support irrespective of the political calendar or what the media might say."

Bush and Cheney had long planned to bring in someone like Bremer to run Iraq, but the plan was accelerated when Jay Garner got off to a rough start as interim administrator. The ease with which Hussein was dispatched had masked the challenge to come and just how unprepared the administration was to deal with it. Even before the fall of the statue at Firdos Square, the struggle for control within Bush's team was escalating to a volatile point. Donald Rumsfeld told Garner to get rid of two people on his team, Thomas Warrick and Meghan O'Sullivan, because a "higher authority" had insisted. The higher authority, Garner later concluded based on sniffing around, was Cheney's office, which regarded the two as insufficiently committed to the mission; Warrick had led a "Future of Iraq" project for the State Department that Cheney's team found suspect, and O'Sullivan had authored a book before the war suggesting alternatives to force for influencing rogue states like Iraq. Eventually, Garner convinced Rumsfeld to let him have O'Sullivan, though not Warrick.

The episode underscored the divisions inside the administration. When Colin Powell sent the Pentagon seven ambassadors with experience in the region, most of them Arabic speakers, Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's undersecretary and one of the leading neoconservatives in the administration, rejected them. Powell was told the reason was that "we want people who are really committed and believe in what we are doing." Furious, he called Rumsfeld and threatened retaliation. "You know," Powell told him, "you are going to need a lot of help, and I am pulling these guys from embassies and I am pulling anybody who is not in an embassy but can help. But if you are blackballing my seven ambassadors, then I am not sending anybody." Rumsfeld eventually accepted several people from Powell's list.

By that point, Garner had lost support in Washington. He had managed to get crosswise first with Rumsfeld and then with Powell by switching plans for a transition. He did not seem like a decisive enough figure, and he certainly was not seen as part of the team in Cheney's office. Cheney moved quickly to bring in what he hoped would be a stronger figure. Paul Wolfowitz asked to be considered, but he was viewed as more of a thinker than a manager, and his bid went nowhere. Instead, Scooter Libby contacted Bremer and told him he was being considered.

After their lunch, Bush took Bremer into the Oval Office to meet with reporters. With Cheney absent, Bremer sat in the vice president's chair in front of the fireplace as Bush hailed him as "a can-do type person."

Then after the journalists shuffled out, Bush and Bremer sat down privately with Cheney and the rest of the national security team.

"I don't know whether we need this meeting after all," Bush told his advisers. "Jerry and I just had it."

While he was only joshing, Bush had just sent a lasting signal. Bremer took from that that "I was the president's man," not the secretary of defense's. Rumsfeld, ever alert to turf and chain of command, took notice too. "POTUS had lunch with him alone-shouldn't have done so," he jotted down in a note to himself, using the acronym for president of the United States. "POTUS linked him to the White House instead of to DoD or DoS."

What's more, Bush agreed when Bremer insisted he recall Zalmay Khalilzad, a White House aide with deep contacts with Iraqi opposition figures who had been named special envoy. Bremer argued it would be confusing to have two people reporting to the president. Bush styled himself as an MBA president and believed good management was to pick good people and then delegate to them. If Bremer wanted Khalilzad out, Bush would oblige him.

Powell was stunned and called Khalilzad. "Zal, what the hell happened?"

"Colin, you're asking me?" Khalilzad replied. "I'm a poor staffer here."

Colleagues took it as an early indication that Bremer wanted no rivals, but it cost the administration one of its most talented specialists-and one who was determined to facilitate a quick transfer of authority back to the Iraqis. As for Garner, he was asked to stay a while under Bremer, but he got the message and began packing.

Bremer arrived in Baghdad to set up a Coalition Provisional Authority six days later, wearing what would become his trademark outfit, a coat and tie with tan desert boots. On May 16, four days after arriving, he issued Order Number 1, formalizing a ban on Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and removing tens of thousands of its members from government jobs. Garner and the CIA station chief protested to no avail to Bremer, who likened the move to de-Nazification in postwar Germany and based it on a draft given to him by Douglas Feith. A week later, on May 23, Bremer issued Order Number 2, disbanding the army altogether, not just the elite units loyal to Hussein as envisioned by the plan approved by Bush. Bremer reasoned that the army had dissolved itself, its bases effectively stripped and rendered useless. In both cases, he was trying to reassure the Kurds and the Shiites who had long suffered at the hands of Hussein's party and security organs. Restoring the army might have touched off a sectarian backlash. "We would have had a civil war on our hands right away," Bremer said later.

Both orders went against the grain of what Bush originally had in mind, but in neither case did he intervene, continuing the hands-off approach he established during Tora Bora. The two orders put hundreds of thousands of people on the street without jobs, many of them with weapons and military training. Bremer also allowed Ahmad Chalabi to be put in charge of de-Baathification, empowering the controversial figure to decide who kept a job and who was banned. With the passage of time, Bremer would defend his orders, saying "they were the right decisions," and disputing the "encrusted body of mythology around them." But he eventually concluded that his mistake was handing the party-purge process to Chalabi, who used his authority at times indiscriminately.

After just two weeks, Bremer was asserting control and settling in for an extended transition. In his first report to Bush on May 22, Bremer wrote that he had made clear to leaders of Iraq's various tribes and parties that "full sovereignty under an Iraqi government can come after democratic elections, which themselves must be based on a constitution agreed by all the people. This process will take time."

Bush gave his approval the next day, making clear he had switched from a quick-handover strategy to a longer occupation. "You have my full support and confidence," he wrote to Bremer. "You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time. We will fend off the impatient...."

Among the impatient were those asking where the weapons of mass destruction were. While it had been just weeks, so far none had turned up, and inside the White House there was a growing anxiety about the political dangers if they never did. On the same day that Bush appointed Bremer, White House officials picked up the New York Times to find a column crystallizing that hazard in a way no one would immediately recognize.

The column, by Nicholas Kristof, bore the headline "Missing in Action: Truth." Noting that no weapons had been found in Iraq, Kristof suggested the White House had ignored evidence that they were never there. Reprising the sixteen words in the State of the Union about the Niger intelligence, Kristof reported that "the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger." The ambassador reported that "the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged."

Kristof was referring to the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom he had met days earlier at a Democratic conclave. Wilson, the unnamed source in the column, had exaggerated to Kristof some of the details: he had never seen the documents he supposedly debunked, for example, and congressional investigators later concluded that the results of his trip were not as unequivocal as he averred. Even so, Kristof's reference set in motion a chain of events that would call into question the administration's credibility on the central justification of the war, sow division and mistrust within the White House, and permanently damage the friendship between Bush and Cheney.

BUSH AND CHENEY left Iraq to Bremer while they focused their energies on pushing through the latest tax cut package. After their internal debate, Bush had agreed to seek $726 billion in breaks; Cheney had won on the dividend tax cut and accelerating the 2001 cuts but lost on capital gains so that Bush could give small businesses a bigger break and extend unemployment benefits for the jobless.

As the legislation progressed on Capitol Hill, Cheney's friend Representative Bill Thomas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had slipped the capital gains tax cut back into the bill. But while Republicans controlled both houses again, they were swallowing hard at Bush's bottom line. House Republicans pared it back to $550 billion while Senate Republicans, with just a two-vote majority, deferred to their moderate wing and capped it at $350 billion. The gulf between the houses grew so deep that Thomas and his Senate counterpart, Charles Grassley, were at loggerheads, forcing Bush to intervene.

On May 19, Bush and Cheney hosted Thomas, Grassley, and other Republican leaders on the Truman Balcony of the White House. Cheney had his back to the balcony as Speaker Dennis Hastert launched a direct assault on Grassley. "Mr. President," he said, "I think we've got a problem." Hastert said Grassley had locked himself into a position and should be barred from talks between House and Senate. Hastert noticed Cheney with "his slight little smile" as Grassley's face grew redder.

It fell to Cheney to broker the deal. He spent the next few days shuttling between Thomas and Grassley and other leaders until they finally agreed on a $350 billion package, meeting the Senate's bottom line but adopting some of the ideas of the House plan. Once again, Cheney's tie-breaking vote was required to push it through the Senate on May 23, while the House approved it the same day.

Cheney was deeply involved in another argument with fellow Republicans at the same time, this one inside the administration over environmental regulations. For more than two years, he had been pressing Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator, to approve a new interpretation of clean air rules that would allow utilities more leeway to upgrade their plants without having to install expensive new pollution scrubbers. Whitman had put off revising the so-called New Source Review rules as long as she could but lost a war of attrition when Andy Card finally ordered her to sign it.

Rather than do it, she handed in her resignation on May 21. For public consumption, she said she was eager to spend more time with her family. But the regulations and Card's order, at Cheney's behest, were the final triggers. "It just got to the point where I said I just can't sign this, and that's when Andy called me in and said do it, and they had every right to order me to do it," she recalled. "I didn't exactly stall it for two and a half years, because there really were a lot of questions and a lot of backing and forthing. Andy thought I was stalling, but I wasn't consciously-well, maybe a little bit, but mostly because I didn't want everyone to make a mistake. I thought they were going down the wrong path, and I felt if I just could have a little more time to help him see that there was a way to do this" and provide the certainty industry wanted "but not to let the really bad actors who had been knowingly gaming the system get out."

Cheney was happy to see her go. They had known each other since their days under Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. But as with Paul O'Neill, they had drifted apart ideologically and personally. "A lot of people I've talked to that have known him, that knew him and worked with him over the years, say there's been a change-whether it was the heart attacks or the working in Halliburton or the combination of the two, but it was a different person who came back in the government than the one they'd known before," Whitman reflected years later. "But I never knew him well enough to make that kind of distinction except that I felt before, he was more approachable."

In the midst of everything else, Bush was busy with reconciliation on another front. After years of estrangement from his alma mater, the president took another step toward peace with Yale University by hosting a reunion for his class of 1968 at the White House. Some of his classmates opted to stay away in protest of the war, an echo of the antiwar passions also roiling campus during Bush's day. But for the president, it was a chance for closure of sorts, to come to terms with the elite side of his multifaceted heritage and put to rest some of the demons that had haunted him since his youth.

It was also a night when the compassionate side of his conservatism was on display. Among those in the receiving line that evening was Petra Leilani Akwai, who had been known in college as Peter Clarence Akwai before undergoing a sex-change operation in 2002. Dressed in an evening gown, Akwai nervously waited her turn.

"Hello, George," she said when presented to the president. "I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man."

Bush did not flinch. "But now you're you," he replied, leaning forward with a warm smile.

BY LATE SPRING, it had been nearly two months since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and Bush was still waiting to find the weapons he had been assured were there.

"What if we don't find them?" he asked one day.

"Oh, we'll find them," Condoleezza Rice reassured him.

Yet no one was taking the lead in the search. Sitting with his war cabinet, he described how he had asked Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks who was in charge.

"They went-" Bush said, pointing his fingers in opposite directions to indicate the buck-passing he detested.

He turned to George Tenet. "As a result," Bush said, "you are now in charge, George."

Tenet and his slam-dunk certainty had gotten him into this, Bush reasoned, so he should be the one to prove they had been right. Tenet hired David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector who had gone into Iraq after the Gulf War and established himself as one of the premier experts in the field. Like others, he had believed before the war that Iraq had weapons and accepted the challenge.

The pressure to find them only increased. As more media inquiries came in, Cheney was becoming exercised by the story of the unnamed ambassador's mission to Niger supposedly sent at his behest. He had never heard of any such trip or any results from it, and yet he was being accused of ignoring evidence that contradicted his assumptions about Iraq's weapons program.

Finally, Cheney picked up his secure phone and pushed the button that connected him directly to Tenet.

"What the hell is going on, George?" Cheney asked.

In Cheney's memory, Tenet was embarrassed and said he had not known about the trip until the media accounts. In the course of the conversation, Tenet noted that the ambassador's wife "worked in the unit that sent him." He promised to get more information.

Cheney was flabbergasted. He had spent years as a consumer of intelligence and had never heard of an envoy being sent on a trip by his wife, with the director in the dark. "It sounded like amateur hour out at the CIA," Cheney concluded.

Cheney received a call from Scooter Libby, who was preparing to return a call from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Cheney passed along what he had learned from Tenet and then said in what Libby remembered as "sort of an offhand manner, as a curiosity," that the ambassador's wife worked in the counter-proliferation division of the CIA. Libby, who was taking notes, jotted that down with his blue pen: "CP/his wife works in that divn." Libby also scrawled down the salient talking points: "1) didn't know @ mission, 2) didn't get report back, 3) didn't have any indication of forgery was from IAEA." Libby called Pincus and passed along those points but did not mention the wife. Pincus's story on June 12 recounted the still-unnamed ambassador's trip, questioned the sixteen words from the State of the Union, and reported that the vice president had not known about the trip or received any report about it.