Cheney's defining test came in a far different arena when in August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. While Powell questioned whether anyone cared enough about Kuwait to commit troops, Cheney clearly did. His question was whether President Bush would go for it. "Did the president have the balls to call out the Reserves?" Cheney wondered. He did. Cheney wanted to prove he had balls too. When he read another Washington Post article quoting another air force chief speaking out of turn, he again took action. This time it was General Michael Dugan discussing plans to target Saddam Hussein and other sensitive details. Cheney read the article twice, went for a walk along the C&O Canal to cool down, returned home, reread the story, and got mad all over again. He called the president at Camp David, pulling him off the tennis court to tell him he might relieve Dugan. The next morning he did. "It sent a hell of a message," Cheney said later. "Dugan was a gift from that perspective."

Cheney also found himself at odds with Powell. The general did not think it was worth going to war over Kuwait and made that point in a White House meeting, only to be dressed down by Cheney, who made clear that his job was to offer military, not policy, advice. Likewise, Cheney rejected the first war plan sent to him by Powell, an up-the-middle assault that he and James Baker, by then the secretary of state, derisively called the "Washington Monument plan." Bypassing Powell, Cheney ordered a rewrite that envisioned a left hook to cut off Iraqi forces. Worried about "bugs and gas," Cheney also ordered contingency plans to use tactical nuclear weapons if Iraqi forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The notion was so sensitive that Powell later had the study destroyed. As for the war itself, Cheney argued against asking Congress for permission, but the president disregarded him and won authorization. Cheney later admitted he had been wrong.

Two nights before the Gulf War began, Cheney made a secret visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington to contemplate mistakes of the past and pray he did not repeat them. But he was no tortured soul. The night the war started, he ordered Chinese food and calmly monitored reports. He spent so much time schooling himself on military techniques that his uniformed staff later jokingly awarded him an honorary war college degree. He did not like everything he learned. When military attorneys barred a strike on a Hussein memorial, he scoffed, "Lawyers running a war?"

In any case, American forces easily expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait. When retreating Iraqis were being slaughtered on what was now called the Highway of Death, the president asked whether it was time to end the war. "The unanimous view of those of us who were there, civilian and military, was yes," Cheney later said. "Our objective was to liberate Kuwait." The war was over with just 148 American battle deaths.

In years to come, critics dismissed by Powell as "simple solutionists" would deem it a profound mistake not to have taken out Hussein. But Cheney never publicly expressed second thoughts. A few months before the 1992 election, he defended the decision and predicted America would have gotten "bogged down" running Iraq if it had deposed Hussein. "Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place?" Cheney asked. "You know, you then have accepted responsibility for governing Iraq." He added, "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many." Eight years later, just before joining George W. Bush's ticket in 2000, he had not changed his mind. "I still think we made the right decision there," Cheney said in a secret oral history taped that year but not released until after his vice presidency. "I don't think we should have gone to Baghdad."

As successful as the Gulf War was, it was the zenith for the Bush team. From Texas, George W. was tapped by his father to help sort out a dysfunctional West Wing, starting at the top. John Sununu, the chief of staff, had burned bridges. "Smart guy, arrogant, didn't know what he didn't know," as Cheney later described him. The president wrote notes to seven or eight longtime allies seeking advice. His son then put them inside envelopes with his own return address in Dallas and followed up with telephone calls. The verdict was unmistakable, and so the day before Thanksgiving the younger Bush arrived at the West Wing to deliver the message.

"You know," he told Sununu, "I've talked to a lot of people. They're down on you. It's going to be tough for you to work with these people."

But Sununu did not take the hint. Only after Bush's father sent three aides, Andy Card, Dorrance Smith, and C. Boyden Gray, to deliver the same message one after another did the headstrong chief resign.

George W. Bush was even less successful in dislodging the vice president, whom he deemed a drag on reelection. Much as Cheney helped orchestrate the replacement of Nelson Rockefeller, Bush tried to persuade his father to dump Dan Quayle from the 1992 ticket. In his place? He recommended Cheney. The defense secretary knew nothing about this, but he had made clear through intermediaries like Baker that he also thought Quayle should go. While the president privately acknowledged that he "blew it" by picking Quayle in the first place, he was unwilling to cut loose a loyal lieutenant.

"But," George W. Bush wrote waggishly after his own presidency, "I never completely gave up on my idea of a Bush-Cheney ticket."

THE DEFEAT OF the president in 1992 disappointed both Bush and Cheney, but it also proved liberating. For the first time in years, each of them could again pursue an independent path.

Bush had been eyeing the Governor's Mansion in Texas but put off a run while his father was in office. With his father now retired, he was free to run-not that anyone thought he could beat the incumbent governor, Ann Richards, a folksy, well-liked Democrat. "George, you can't win," his mother told him with characteristic bluntness. His friends told him the same thing. "I thought she was unbeatable," said Charlie Younger.

Undaunted, Bush threw himself into the campaign, eager both to prove himself and, friends thought, perhaps even to avenge his father against Richards, who had memorably mocked the president for being "born with a silver foot in his mouth," and Bill Clinton, who had prematurely ended his father's presidency. When the sportswriter Randy Galloway sidled up to the candidate in the dugout and asked why he was running against Richards since she would beat him, Bush said, "I'm not running against her. I'm running against the guy in the White House." His motivation increased when Richards turned her taunts on him, calling him "some jerk" and "shrub." When Bush found himself in an elevator with Richards heading to a debate, he wished her luck. She responded, "This is going to be rough on you, boy."

It proved rougher on her and a surprise to the nation. With a youthful message of change much like the one Clinton had used successfully against his father, Bush barnstormed the state focusing on four campaign issues: education, juvenile crime, welfare reform, and litigation limits. With the help of Kenneth Lay of Enron and other deep-pocketed contributors, Bush competed financially. "He just flat outworked her," said Joe O'Neill. As it happened, his upset victory with 53 percent in November 1994 came the same night Jeb Bush lost his first race for governor of Florida. George was disappointed that his parents were focused on consoling Jeb. "Why do you feel bad about Jeb?" he asked his father over the phone. "Why don't you feel good about me?" His parents did feel good about him, of course, as did Republicans far from Texas who saw a new star.

Also working the campaign circuit that fall was Cheney, who had cleared out his desk at the Pentagon and left without even saying good-bye to his partner, Powell, who later admitted being "disappointed, even hurt, but not surprised." Cheney decided to test his own possible run for the presidency, driving eight thousand miles across the country to appear at nearly 160 fund-raisers and political events for Republican candidates. Cheney raised $1.3 million for a political action committee run by David Addington and spent so much time on the road that he mailed dirty shirts home to be laundered. At Christmas, he retreated to snowy Jackson Hole to talk it over with his family. Ultimately, he decided against it.

When Cheney announced his decision in January 1995, Sean O'Keefe, a former aide, asked why. Cheney said he would explain when they had more time, so the two arranged to go fishing in Pennsylvania one day. As they stood there in Spring Creek, Cheney was "beating the water as hard as you can imagine," as O'Keefe recalled it, but hours passed without an explanation. Finally, O'Keefe couldn't stand it.

"Mr. Secretary, you told me you were going to tell me why you didn't do this," he said. "We were in the foxhole ready to do this."

Cheney cast his line and looked at O'Keefe. "You know," he said, "the idea of spending the rest of my life begging for money was just unappealing."

And then he flipped the fly right back in. That's it? O'Keefe thought. "Caught a lot of fish that day," he later recalled, "and one nugget of insight."

Cheney was somewhat more expansive with other former aides. Grilling steaks one afternoon in the backyard of his Wyoming home, he told Pete Williams, "I just decided I didn't want to do this to my family and they didn't want to have this done to them. And there was the health issue. But at the end of the day, I just didn't have the fire in the belly for fixing the Social Security system." Over lunch with another former aide, Stephen Hadley, Cheney articulated a three-part test: "You have to first be able to visualize yourself in the office. Then you have to be able to decide that you are prepared and able to put together the organization and the money that you need to win it. Then you have to make sure that you have the fire in the gut to see it through. I couldn't check all three of those boxes."

For Cheney, this was to be the end of his political career. He received a call from Tom Cruikshank, with whom he had gone fishing a few months earlier. Cruikshank, chief executive officer of Halliburton, was retiring. Would Cheney be interested in taking over the oil services giant? Cheney accepted and told a Wyoming newspaper that his political career was "over with." Asked whether he might think about the vice presidency, he scoffed. It was, he said, a "cruddy job."

Arriving in Dallas in the fall of 1995, he took over a $5.7 billion company with nearly sixty thousand employees, while Lynne became co-host of CNN's Crossfire political show. For the first time in Cheney's life, he was making big money, and when he flew back to Wyoming in the company jet, his friend Bill Thomson reminded him of his complaints about schlepping around the campaign trail. "I see you have solved your transportation problems," Thomson told him. Cheney set out to expand business with the federal government and became an active voice opposing unilateral sanctions against countries like Iran, arguing that it made no sense to deprive American companies of business.

His biggest move at Halliburton grew out of a quail-hunting trip in January 1998 with Bill Bradford, chairman of Dresser Industries-the same company that Prescott Bush helped go public and that gave George H. W. Bush his start fifty years earlier. Out of their conversation, Halliburton bought Dresser for $7.7 billion, a merger that expanded the company. Only later would it seem questionable. The purchase came at the top of the market, with Halliburton paying a 16 percent premium; by the time the merger was complete, Cheney had to cut ten thousand jobs right away. Moreover, Dresser brought vast liability for past asbestos use that forced Halliburton to put part of the company into bankruptcy and pay out billions of dollars to victims. Still, it was a period of great growth; over the course of Cheney's tenure, Halliburton would expand to an $11.9 billion giant.

Cheney now lived just up the highway from Bush, who had moved his collection of autographed baseball cards into the governor's office and was proving to be an effective executive, pushing through his legislative program with the help of a bipartisan alliance he forged with Bob Bullock, the powerful Democratic lieutenant governor. Bullock was "an irascible, crazy old Texas politician," as Sandy Kress, a Bush adviser, described him, but he took a fatherly liking to the governor. Bush courted Bullock and the Democratic House Speaker, Pete Laney, at weekly breakfasts and roamed the capitol popping his head into the offices of other lawmakers.

His irreverence worked. Once Bullock declared that he was on the opposite side of a bill. "Governor, on this I'm going to have to fuck you," he said.

Bush got up from his chair and leaned over to plant a kiss on Bullock's mouth. "If you are going to fuck me, you've at least got to kiss me first," Bush said playfully.

Bullock proved to be such a close ally that he endorsed the Republican governor for reelection in 1998, even though he was godfather to the son of the Democratic nominee, Garry Mauro.

With Newt Gingrich the harsh-edged, shut-the-government face of the Republican Party in Washington, Bush stood out as a different kind of Republican, one trying not only to forge bipartisan alliances but to break out of the old paradigm of a seemingly heartless conservatism. He drew attention for disagreeing with Governor Pete Wilson's attempts in California to limit public benefits for illegal immigrants, and he implemented policies intended to address social ills but through more conservative means. His willingness to buck party orthodoxy attracted the likes of Mark McKinnon, a Democratic media consultant who switched parties to work for Bush.

In February 1998, Bush visited a juvenile detention center in Marlin, Texas, and was surprised when a fifteen-year-old African American boy locked up for petty theft asked, "What do you think about us?" Bush, searching for an answer, said, "The state of Texas still loves you all. We haven't given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law." He was still dwelling on the encounter the next day when a young political operative named David Kuo came down from Washington to talk about a job. "I didn't have an answer," Bush told Kuo. "I still don't. I said something, but I don't remember exactly what it was. But I have to have an answer to that. There has to be something done about the gap between the rich and the poor. There has to be something done about racial justice, economic justice, social justice."

Bush told Kuo that day that he was not sure he wanted to run for president. "I just don't know if I can spend the rest of my life in a security bubble," he said. "I'll never walk down a street alone. Never again." It was a theme of his conversations that year. He told Karen Hughes, his communications director, "I'll never again be able to just walk into Wal-Mart and buy fishing lures." As Bush cruised to an easy victory over Mauro, becoming the first Texas governor to win a second consecutive term, the real drama was what he would do about national office. The Rangers were sold, and he received a check for $14.9 million, a healthy return on his $606,000 investment and enough for him to pursue his political dreams without financial worry. But his teenage daughters had no ambivalence about the notion: they were against it.

"I'm not going to run," he told his friend Doug Wead one day.

"And why not?" Wead asked. "You are at the head of the pack."

"Because of the girls," he said. "They would be in college then and it would ruin their lives."

"Did it ruin your life?"

Bush paused. "No," he said. "It made my life."

3.

"The fire horse and the bell"

For George W. Bush, the idea of running for president in 2000 was both eminently logical and utterly far-fetched. While Americans disapproved of Bill Clinton's character, they were content with the way he governed the country. In this interregnum following the Cold War, the United States was largely at peace, the emerging information age economy was generating jobs, wealth, and innovation, and the federal treasury was overflowing with surplus money for a change. The brief war in Kosovo had demonstrated America's capacity to assert its will without a single American casualty. The warning signs of a gathering terrorist threat, manifested in attacks on American embassies, a military barracks, and a navy ship overseas, had done little to shake the public out of its satisfaction. Vice President Al Gore could run on that record.

And yet here was Bush, with just one term as governor of Texas and the same first and last names as the last president rejected by American voters, seriously eyeing a run for America's highest office. He found himself leading polls for the nomination, albeit largely due to his familiar name. Every time he turned around, someone was telling him he could be president. "I feel like a cork in a raging river," he said over dinner with a couple of reporters in October 1998.

It was intoxicating, and unlike Dick Cheney, who found the idea of hustling for the 1996 nomination too unpleasant, Bush enjoyed the feel of the campaign trail. Besides, the more he looked at the other possible candidates, the more he came to the conclusion that he was as good as, or better than, any of them. There were not many times in life, he told his cousin John Ellis, when the main thing standing between you and a presidential nomination was Steve Forbes, the nebbishy magazine publisher. Ellis was not so sure. He thought the timing was bad, that Al Gore would run the campaign his father did in 1988, and that even if Bush won, a recession was overdue and he would inherit it.

But there were other signs, ones that a deeply religious man would see and vest with great meaning. In January 1999, he sat in church in Austin preparing to take the oath for a second term as governor. The Reverend Mark Craig delivered a sermon on leadership, recalling that Moses was reluctant when called upon to lead his people but assumed the duty. "We have the opportunity, each and every one of us, to do the right thing, and for the right reason," the pastor said. Barbara Bush leaned over and mouthed to her son, "He is talking to you." Her son thought so too. "I feel as if God were talking directly to me," he mentioned at a family gathering. It took Laura to temper his grandiosity. "I think that's a bit of a stretch," she told him. And other family members thought a presidential run seemed ludicrous. "Are you nuts?" his brother Marvin asked.

As he prepared his campaign, Bush had a core team from Texas centered on the so-called Iron Triangle of Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove. Hughes, tall and booming, was a former television reporter who became Bush's communications guru and styled herself the voice of soccer moms and other everyday people. Allbaugh, six feet four and gruff with a military-style flattop haircut and a gift for bringing order to chaos, had come from Oklahoma to serve as chief of staff for the governor, who called him "Big Country." First among equals, though, was Rove, with spectacles and round cheeks that gave him an owlish look. A longtime Republican consultant who had worked for Bush's father, Rove had built a reputation as a latter-day Lee Atwater, a political genius with a touch of deviousness, a searching intellect, and manic energy, someone "who makes the Energizer Bunny seem lethargic," as Hughes put it. Rove practically worshipped Bush, recalling his first impression: "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma-you know, wow."

From his father's team, Bush enlisted people who could school him in foreign policy, starting with Condoleezza Rice, a former National Security Council aide who was now provost of Stanford University. A black minister's daughter, she grew up in Bull Connor's Birmingham and knew one of the girls killed in the 1963 bombing that galvanized the civil rights movement. But through bristling determination and a series of eager mentors, she trained as a Soviet scholar and concert pianist who endeared herself to President George H. W. Bush and later bonded with his son over workouts and sports talk. To educate him about the world, she assembled a group of experts she called the Vulcans, named for a statue in Birmingham. "I need your help," Bush told them at their first meeting in Austin. "Not to become president. I will take care of that. But I need your help to be a good president."

Bush also brought in people with no connection to his family past like Marvin Olasky, author of the influential book The Tragedy of American Compassion, and Sandy Kress, a former Dallas School Board president he had been working with on education reform. Olasky, a onetime Marxist who now argued that private organizations, particularly Christian churches, do a better job than government at tackling social ills, brought a group of policy wonks to see Bush in Austin in early 1999 for a three-hour briefing on poverty. "It was very much like a graduate school seminar," Olasky remembered.

His father's old crowd was a mixed blessing. Bush liked to joke that he "inherited half of his friends and all of his enemies." But he knew he could not be seen as simply his father's son. When Ron Kaufman, White House political director for the first president Bush, sent a fund-raising letter urging donors to "send an important signal about the strength of the Bush network," Rove slapped him down-and then leaked it to the columnist Robert Novak. "Rove let me know that the boarding party had been repelled," Novak said later, "and that Kaufman and the rest of the Bush Senior entourage would not be on the son's ship." The senior Bush entourage got the message. "We had to be the back-of-the-bus guys," Kaufman recalled, "and we had to be onboard help but know our place, and we did that very effectively."

Indeed, Bush seemed more interested in assuming the mantle of Ronald Reagan than that of George Bush. In April 1999, he went to the Palo Alto, California, home of George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state, for cookies and coffee with many of the former president's circle. In Shultz's living room, Bush impressed the elder statesmen of American conservatism with his talk of Social Security reform, the rise of India, and the need to control federal spending. He told them he wanted to achieve big things. Shultz gave him the blessing he was seeking, taking him aside and telling Bush that he had brought Reagan to the same spot in the same home in 1979 and given him the same message: run.

Two months later, he did. Bush kicked off his campaign on June 12, 1999, with a flight to Iowa filled with national journalists and skyrocketing anticipation. Well aware that he now had to justify that, Bush cheekily dubbed his inaugural foray the Great Expectations tour. As he boarded a chartered MD-80 just after sunrise, he came on the public address system. "This is your candidate speaking," he started. "Please stow your expectations securely in the overhead bin as they may shift during the trip and they could fall and hurt someone-especially me." The maiden voyage went so well that Karl Rove said over dinner one night that "the only thing we haven't done well is to lower expectations."

While keeping distance from his father's crew, Bush wanted at least one person from the first Bush administration: Dick Cheney. He had served on a business advisory council for the Texas governor and had occasionally joined Rice's foreign policy group. But Bush wanted more. In November, while Cheney and his wife, Lynne, hosted a benefit for Barbara Bush's literacy campaign at their Dallas house, the governor took Cheney aside.

In Cheney's library, Bush asked the former defense secretary to chair his presidential campaign.

Cheney said no. "Look, I'm really committed here at Halliburton," he said. But if there was anything else he could do, he told Bush, just call. "I'm eager to do what I can to be helpful."

IF BUSH STARTED out with well-defined thoughts about domestic policy, he was a virtual blank slate on foreign policy. But there were plenty of competing factions eager to claim him, including neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and more traditional Republicans like Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, all in Rice's Vulcans.

When they sat down at one point in the spring of 1999 just as American-led NATO air strikes were driving Serbian forces out of Kosovo, Bush asked whether they would have advocated the original Balkans intervention in Bosnia. All but two supported it. The dissenters were Dov Zakheim, a former Pentagon official under Reagan, and Dick Cheney. Bush told them that "his heart was with the minority," as Zakheim recalled it, "but his head told him it was the right thing to do." And now that the United States was committed, he added, it had to complete the task.

Bush laid out his thinking about the nation's armed forces in a speech at the Citadel military academy in South Carolina in September. It was a blueprint for a humbler, more restrained use of American power, a rejection of Clinton's humanitarian interventionism and nation building, which Bush considered distractions from the mission of the military. "That mission is to deter wars-and that mission is to win wars when deterrence fails," Bush told the cadets. "Sending our military on vague, aimless and endless deployments is the swift solvent of morale." While disavowing an isolationist "retreat from the world," Bush said he would be more "selective in the use of our military" to relieve "the tension on an overstretched military," sentiments that would not survive long into his presidency. But Bush foresaw what would become the defining challenge of his time. "I will put a high priority on detecting and responding to terrorism on our soil. The federal government must take this threat seriously."

Just as Clinton had sought to shift the Democratic Party away from its liberal, soft-on-crime, weak-on-defense, pro-welfare identity, Bush was now trying to redefine the Republican Party, sanding off the harsher edges of the Gingrich revolution. Instead of what Karen Hughes called "grinchy old Republican" promises to abolish the Department of Education and deport illegal immigrants, Bush advocated more federal intervention in schools to fight the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and more acceptance of the millions of undocumented workers. Hughes was a driving force behind this approach. An army brat born in Paris, she moved with her family to Texas, where she studied journalism at Southern Methodist University and then went into television news. Eventually, she became a political operative and went to work for Bush, bonding over their shared devotion to religion. She called his brand of politics "compassionate conservatism," a term that unbeknownst to her had actually been used for years by others, including Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God minister who befriended Bush while working as his father's liaison to evangelicals, had popularized the phrase, which was adopted by Ron Kaufman for the elder Bush's campaigns.

But no one had put the notion as front and center as George W. Bush. By branding his conservatism "compassionate," he was summoning the Samaritan legacy of Christianity while signaling to secular voters a more humane ideology. Behind the slogan was the idea of pursuing liberal goals through conservative means. Bush would fight poverty with "armies of compassion" by using government resources to help churches, synagogues, and mosques do charity work. He would steer more money to schools to bridge the gap between rich and poor in exchange for accountability measured by standardized tests. Even his centerpiece domestic promise, a sweeping package of tax cuts with plenty of benefits for the wealthiest Americans such as eliminating the inheritance tax and reducing top marginal tax rates, also included ideas targeted at those with less means, like doubling the child tax credit and reducing the lowest tax bracket for the working poor. For conservative economists, such ideas made no sense because they would not trigger economic growth. "Somewhat different from many conservatives, certainly at the time, he asked a lot of questions about fairness and safety nets," recalled Glenn Hubbard, who advised him on economics. "He's a little bit of a hybrid."

The notion turned off many Republicans, who considered compassionate conservatism an insult to traditional party values or believed it "sounded less like a philosophy than a marketing slogan," as David Frum, who would work for Bush, put it after leaving the White House. But it drew others to Texas hoping that Bush's idealistic talk was more than a campaign tactic, people like Michael Gerson, who became his chief speechwriter, a low-key, bespectacled evangelical Christian uncomfortable with Texas swagger and locker-room humor. "It took a little getting used to for me because I am not much of a towel snapper," Gerson said.

For all the speeches he would give and policy papers he would issue, Bush crystallized his image as a different kind of Republican with a single sentence one day that fall when congressional Republicans proposed stretching out earned income tax credits to the working poor.

Hughes went to Bush's hotel room. "You're going to get asked about this," she said. "It doesn't sound like something you would do."

Bush agreed, and when a reporter did ask, he responded, "I don't think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor."

He could get away with the overt appeal to independents and moderates in part because of his own ties to the Christian conservative wing of the party. While his father's faith was the traditionally quiet Episcopalianism of New England, the new Bush had publicly embraced the evangelical notion of Jesus Christ as his personal savior. "I'm always amazed when I read that George Bush is moving this way or that way for the religious right," his cousin John Ellis once said. "George W. Bush is the religious right."

When Bush said at a Republican debate in December that his favorite philosopher was Jesus, his father was chagrined. "I don't think your answer will hurt you too much," the elder Bush told him.

"Which answer?"

"You know, that one on Jesus."

Rather than hurt, it served as a powerful message to a section of the party that voted most often. Consciously or not, Bush was again emulating Ronald Reagan, who once said that Christ was the historical figure he most admired. And Bush was distancing himself from his father, who lost reelection after breaking his famous "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. "This is not only no new taxes," the younger Bush said of his economic plan during a debate in January 2000. "This is tax cuts so help me God."

ON THE CAMPAIGN plane, Bush acted playful, even goofy with the reporters following him. He enjoyed a winking, mischievous relationship with Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of the Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and a documentary filmmaker following him with her camera. He showed her his boots and Texas-seal belt buckle, performed an Elvis Presley impression, and grabbed her camera to quiz her about her dating life. "I can see a little chemistry there," he teased her about another reporter. "You know what I mean by 'chemistry there'?" At times, he was too loose. Talking with the conservative writer Tucker Carlson, he mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman put to death in Texas in more than a century. "Please, don't kill me," he whimpered in imitation.

That was, for the most part, an aberration. As a campaigner, Bush described himself as "a uniter, not a divider," and largely meant it. He rejected advice to demonize gays and lesbians. "I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner," he told Doug Wead. "How can I differentiate sin?" He complained about the Christian Coalition's divisive tactics. "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality." He added, "I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays."

Still, Bush was rough on the campaign trail, a walking gaffe machine at times, mocked for bringing his own pillow on the road. He mangled various nationalities, referring to "Grecians" and "Kosovarians." He confused Slovakia and Slovenia and failed a pop quiz by a radio reporter who asked him to name the leaders of Taiwan, Chechnya, Pakistan, and India. Words had a way of coming out in all the wrong places. "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" he said one day in South Carolina. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," he said a couple weeks later in New Hampshire. Bush was okay with it if it meant his rivals thought less of him. "They misunderestimated me," he declared.

And yet, backed by money, charm, and a famous name, Bush quickly outdistanced most of the Republican field, including not just Steve Forbes but also Dan Quayle, the former transportation secretary Elizabeth Dole, and the former education secretary Lamar Alexander. To win the nomination, Bush still had to vanquish Senator John McCain, a war hero from his years as a prisoner in North Vietnam and the embodiment of a maverick reformer. Bush did not take McCain seriously at first. "He's going to wear very thin when it is all said and done," he told Wead. The scale of that misjudgment became clear when McCain thrashed Bush by eighteen percentage points in the New Hampshire primary on February 1, 2000. Not used to conceding defeat, Bush left it to Karl Rove to call McCain, which did not go over well with the senator's consultant John Weaver. "Consultants don't concede to candidates," Weaver instructed an aide to tell Rove. A few minutes later, Bush himself called to talk with McCain. The conversation lasted about ninety seconds. "We said good-bye as friends," McCain recalled. "We would soon be friends no more."

Bush took the loss better than his advisers, who were summoned to his hotel room expecting to be fired. Instead, the candidate bucked them up. "This is my fault, not yours," he told them. Every president stumbles on the way to the White House. His father had lost Iowa in 1988 before winning the nomination. Such defeats strengthened a campaign. "He really was like a coach whose team had a bad first half," said Senator Judd Gregg, who led the New Hampshire effort. "He was telling everyone to suck it up and get back in the game. There was virtually no self-pity or woe is me. Just the opposite." But in private, Laura Bush put her finger on the problem; he had gotten away from his core message of changing Washington. "You got defined," she told him. "And you need to make up your mind whether or not you're going to go down there and tell people who you are, instead of letting people define you."

The campaign's crucible was South Carolina. Karen Hughes called Rove to vent about how a longtime senator and chairman of the Commerce Committee had somehow co-opted their outsider status. "McCain has managed to steal our reform mantra," she said. They came up with a new slogan, "Reformer with Results," and resolved to refer to McCain as "Chairman" to paint him as a creature of Washington. Then the campaign in the Low Country took a decidedly low turn. Bush, who had rejected divisive politics against gays, visited Bob Jones University, the conservative Christian school known to almost everyone but him apparently for its ban on interracial dating. He also stood by as a surrogate at another campaign event accused McCain of forgetting fellow veterans when he returned after five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi. At McCain headquarters, reports poured in about flyers and phone calls insinuating scurrilous things about the senator-that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, beat his wife, was mentally unstable, had a secret Vietnamese family, was a Manchurian candidate. Bush denied involvement.

Bush all but ended McCain's threat with a strong victory in South Carolina on February 19. McCain did little to hide his anger, calling Bush "a combination of the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow"-in other words, a man with no courage, no heart, and no brain. Eventually, McCain backed Bush for the general election without enthusiasm. He grew testy at reporters parsing his words, at one point blurting out, "I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush," repeating it seven times as if he were scrawling his punishment on a chalkboard. For years afterward, a debate would rage over whether McCain actually voted for Bush. Several liberal celebrities claimed he told them at a dinner once that he did not. McCain denied it.

Either way, the bad blood ensured that Bush would not follow Reagan's precedent of picking his toughest competitor to join the ticket in the fall.

WHILE BUSH WAS securing the nomination, he began thinking ahead to the general election. Weeks after South Carolina, he sent Joe Allbaugh to visit Dick Cheney with a question: Would he agree to be considered for the vice presidential nomination?

Cheney said no. "I cited all the reasons why that was a bad idea," he said later. He had had three heart attacks, he would reinforce the notion of a Big Oil ticket, and he brought no geographic balance to the campaign. Indeed, there could even be a constitutional problem because under the Twelfth Amendment electors cannot cast ballots for both presidential and vice presidential candidates from their own state. Since Cheney at the time lived in Dallas, that would mean Texas's electors could vote for Bush but not for Cheney.

Undeterred, Bush came back a few weeks later with another request. If you won't be my vice president, he asked, will you find one for me? This time, Cheney said yes. He figured at most that assignment would last a few months and he could then return to Halliburton full-time.

He set out to cull names, relying on the help of his daughter Liz, David Addington, and a few others. He eliminated the most obvious candidates, including McCain. Cheney's old Pentagon partner, Colin Powell, now one of the most popular figures in the country, made clear he was not interested and insisted on a public statement that he was not under consideration. Senator Connie Mack of Florida told Cheney that if he was put on a list, he would never speak to him again. Cheney wanted his old mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, to be considered, but Bush personally shot that down. Cheney assured Bush that Rumsfeld really had not been out to get his father in the 1970s, but it was a nonstarter.

Cheney soon assembled a list of nine candidates: Governors Frank Keating of Oklahoma, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, and John Engler of Michigan; Senators Bill Frist of Tennessee, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and Jon Kyl of Arizona; Representative John Kasich of Ohio, former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and former senator John Danforth of Missouri. Each agreed to fill out a seventy-nine-part questionnaire and turn over tax returns, medical records, employment and residential history, and every speech and interview ever given.

Helping put together voluminous binders on the candidates, Addington joked that if Cheney did a good enough job, maybe Bush would ask him to be the running mate. Cheney just laughed.

He deflected friends who suspected something was up. When former senator Alan Simpson quizzed him about who was on the short list, Cheney refused to say.

"Are you on it?" Simpson asked.

"No. Lynne isn't going to go for that. I'm not going to go for that."

When his old aide and friend Pete Williams, now at NBC News, called to ask, Cheney said, "I am so glad to be out of public life. Forget it."

What happened from there usually falls into two competing narratives. The official version is that Bush never gave up on the idea of having Cheney as his running mate and wore him down. "If someone says no, do they mean it?" he asked his father at one point. The more conspiratorial version is that Cheney actually did want the nomination and manipulated the process to uncover the flaws of the others, leaving himself the only logical candidate without ever being vetted himself.

In the years that followed, Cheney offered a powerful rebuttal to the suspicions. "He didn't have any desire to be vice president," Liz said, "otherwise he would have agreed the first time Joe Allbaugh asked him if he wanted to be on the list." And Bush by his own account told Cheney every time they talked that he was the solution to his problem. Yet some losing candidates and even some Cheney friends were convinced it was all an elaborate orchestration. "Cheney engineered the whole vice president thing," said one friend. "The brilliance of Cheney is he let the other alternatives just light themselves on fire, one after the other. It was perfect." Cheney never said as much to this friend, but it says something that someone close to him would come to this conclusion.

By summer, Cheney was certainly entertaining the idea. In June, he flew to South America for a hunting trip with his daughter Mary. They spent a week sitting in duck blinds, talking about family and Mary's school plans and their home in Jackson Hole. Only on the flight home on July 1 did he reveal what really was on his mind.

"What do you think about me running for vice president?" he asked.

Mary thought he was kidding. She knew he headed the search committee but did not realize until then that Allbaugh had sounded him out or that Bush still wanted him.

Cheney asked what she thought. Mary had come out to her parents in high school and was now in a committed relationship with another woman, Heather Poe, a former park ranger. Her private life was sure to come under public scrutiny if he were to run.

"Personally, I'd rather not be known as the vice president's lesbian daughter," she told him frankly. "But if you're going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you. I want to do whatever I can to help out on the campaign. And you'd better win."

When they got home, the family had several conversations about the idea. Lynne Cheney was unexcited. She liked their life. She had her own career writing fiction, appearing on television, and serving on boards, still leaving her time for grandchildren. For months, she had been asking her husband, "You're not going to do this, right?" And he would answer, "No, no"-right until he said yes. Liz Cheney, on the other hand, was bursting with enthusiasm, joking that she had already started painting "Cheney for Veep" signs.

Two days after the flight home from South America, Cheney went to visit Bush at his ranch outside Crawford, Texas.

LAURA BUSH AND her friend Nancy Weiss made sandwiches while Bush and Cheney went through binders in the other room. It was July 3, and the Republican National Convention was only a few weeks away. Time was running short, and Bush had conducted no formal interviews for the job. Bush and Cheney then joined Laura, Weiss, and Karen Hughes for lunch.

Laura asked how the search was going.

"The man I really want to be the vice president is here at the table," Bush said as he ate his sandwich.

Cheney said nothing. The others at the table were stunned.

The two men then retired to the back porch on what Cheney described as a "punishingly hot" day to keep talking amid the cactus and sagebrush. Cheney would later joke that the heat overcame his good sense because he finally agreed to consider joining the ticket. He would have to consult with Halliburton's board and see a doctor, plus talk with Lynne again. He mentioned that Mary was gay. He also said he wanted a chance to go through all the arguments against his selection. Bush said fine.