"Don just called," Bush said. "The military thinks they've got Saddam." "I'm skeptical," he added. "But we're not breathing a word of this."

"It's probably a double," said Rice.

Bush asked her to let Andy Card and Colin Powell know. He tried to call Cheney, but the vice president was on Air Force Two heading to Newburgh, New York, for a fund-raiser. Cheney got the message when the plane landed and called back. The two connected at 3:43 p.m.

"Dick," Bush began, "it looks like we've captured Saddam Hussein."

Cheney agreed they should proceed cautiously.

Moments after Cheney hung up, Rumsfeld called and said they planned a DNA test to match Hussein with genetic material from one of his slain sons. Assuming it was him, Rumsfeld said, they would announce it the next day. Cheney worked the phone for the next hour and a half as he gathered information, leaving well-heeled Republican donors waiting.

After finally making it to the event, Cheney headed back to Washington and suggested to his daughter Mary, who was traveling with him, that they drop by Rumsfeld's house for his own Christmas party. Lynne Cheney had gone on her own. But Mary thought it was odd since it was already 9:00 p.m. Her father gave her a hint after the plane landed and they had flown by helicopter back to the Naval Observatory grounds. Walking to the limousine that would take them to Rumsfeld's house, Cheney quietly told his daughter there was news out of Iraq but she had to stay mum since it was not confirmed. Once in the car, he handed her a note saying that a "high-value target" had been captured and was being identified by DNA.

Cheney did not say anything more about it for the duration of the party, but he and Rumsfeld were in a festive mood and at the end of the evening sat around a coffee table swapping war stories from the Nixon and Ford administrations. Only after the Cheneys returned to the residence and no one else was around did the vice president finally tell Lynne Cheney that they might have captured Hussein.

Just after three o'clock in the morning of December 14, Bush was jarred out of sleep by a call from Rice.

"I'm sorry to wake you, sir," she said, "but we got him."

"That's fantastic," Bush said. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said. She had just heard from Bremer that it really was Hussein.

Among the people Bush told at that point was his father. This was as big a moment for the elder Bush as for the younger. The scourge of their family, the man who had vexed father and son for a dozen years, was now in custody.

"Congratulations," the father told the son. "It's a great day for the country."

The son corrected him gently: "It's a greater day for the Iraqi people."

A few hours later, Bremer appeared before reporters in Baghdad to announce the news. "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him," Bremer said to raucous cheers from Iraqis in the room.

Rumsfeld was annoyed. He had called Ricardo Sanchez and told him to make the announcement; after all, it was the military that had captured Hussein. Rice had a different reaction. It should have been not Bremer or Sanchez but an Iraqi who made the announcement. It was a lost opportunity, she thought, to showcase the fact that Iraqis were taking control of their own fate from the dictator who had brutally repressed them. Still, she did not mention that to Bremer; instead, she called to praise him for a "really first-rate" news conference.

Either way, the capture gave the Bush team hope that Iraqis would see they no longer had anything to fear from Hussein and could therefore embrace the future of their country. Hussein would be put on trial by Iraqi prosecutors in an Iraqi court, albeit with substantial American help, to send a signal: it was time to move on. The picture of a disoriented and disheveled Hussein released by the American military was meant to be a powerful reinforcement of that lesson. "We really believed it was a key to ending the insurgency," Rice remembered.

From the Cabinet Room later that Sunday, Bush made that case directly. "I have a message for the Iraqi people," he said in remarks televised at 12:15 p.m. Washington time. "You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again. All Iraqis who take the side of freedom have taken the winning side."

He added, "In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over. A hopeful day has arrived. All Iraqis can now come together and reject violence and build a new Iraq."

THE CAPTURE OF Hussein seemed to help the United States in Libya as well. American and British experts had been secretly visiting Libya and inspecting its weapons program since the outreach from Muammar el-Qaddafi's son back in March. To make sure the rapprochement worked, Bush had kept it secret from even top cabinet officers as he personally oversaw negotiations. "The president was the principal action officer orchestrating the Libya action plan," recalled Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who led the effort for Bush. By tapping Joseph, one of the administration's most vocal hard-liners, Bush reassured Cheney.

The Libyans had acknowledged a nuclear weapons program and twenty-five tons of mustard chemical weapon agent. They had agreed to submit to international inspections and provided nuclear weapons design materials acquired from A. Q. Khan, the charismatic father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb and mastermind of an illicit proliferation network. But after months of haggling over the details, the Libyans were suddenly ready to finalize the agreement on December 16, just two days after Hussein's capture was announced. Two days later, Tony Blair called Bush. He had reached out to Qaddafi to persuade him to approve the agreement and had promised he and Bush would reciprocate with positive statements.

Bush agreed. At the White House the next day, December 19, he waited for Qaddafi to issue the statement, but hours passed with no word from Tripoli. As morning turned to afternoon and evening, Rice tried "to manage the anxiety" of the president. Only later did they learn Qaddafi was waiting for an important soccer match to finish first. While he was supposed to deliver the statement personally, in the end he put it out in writing. Bush decided that was good enough.

Finally, at 5:30 p.m., the president marched into the briefing room to welcome the agreement. It sent a message, he said, that "leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations."

The Libyan disarmament was an important victory for Bush and Cheney not only because it took a potentially erratic nuclear player off the board but because it helped finally unravel the nuclear schemes of A. Q. Khan, who turned out to be perhaps the most prolific distributor of dangerous material, technology, and know-how in modern times. As investigators chased his trails, they discovered that he had been a one-man shopping channel not just for Libya but also for North Korea and Iran. Within weeks of the Libya deal, Washington had pressured Pakistan into placing Khan under house arrest and forcing him to issue a public confession.

Just as important, Libya allowed Bush and Cheney to assert that the Iraq War had made it easier to bring other rogue states to the bargaining table. Not every potential threat would require military force if Iraq served as a demonstration project of sorts. "Just simply the fact that Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program because he didn't want to end up like Saddam Hussein is an example of what took place because of what happened," Rumsfeld said years later. But the disappointment for Bush and Cheney was that other states like Iran and North Korea did not follow suit.

WITH THE APPROACH of Christmas, Bush was feeling the effects of time. He was fifty-seven years old and had been running most days since 1972, an activity he pursued with relentless fervor to help clear his head and keep his equilibrium. But now his right knee was hurting, and doctors gave him a magnetic resonance imaging test, or MRI. They concluded he had worn out his knees and needed to give up running and switch to cross-training. It was a significant adjustment, a sign of advancing age, not to mention the stresses of the office.

Bush had little time to get used to the changes in his personal routine. Intelligence agencies had reports of terrorist plots on planes bound for the United States from Europe. It was probably the most serious worry about a specific threat since September 11, and Bush and Cheney were confronted with the question of how to respond: Should they alert the public and cancel planes at the risk of overreacting, disrupting a major holiday, and being accused of stoking fear for political purposes? Or should they let the planes fly, do what they could to hunt down plotters, and pray nothing happened?

"Which one of you, based on this information, would put your family on one of those flights?" Bush asked during a meeting with Tom Ridge and other advisers.

No one said they would. That made the decision easy. The targeted flights would be canceled. The next day, Ridge raised the national threat level to high risk. No attacks materialized, and the holiday passed safely.

For Bush and Cheney, though, the end of the year still brought bad news. John Ashcroft had recused himself from the CIA leak case because Karl Rove used to work for him, so the matter had fallen to his deputy attorney general, James Comey. In turn, Comey had decided to turn it over to a special prosecutor. On December 30, he announced that Patrick Fitzgerald, a boyish-faced U.S. attorney in Chicago and a close friend, would lead the investigation of the White House.

17.

"We were almost all wrong"

On January 21, 2004, Vice President Cheney's phone rang. It was his daughter Mary. I need to talk, she said.

There was no mistaking the urgency in her voice, and he told her to come right over. Lynne and Liz Cheney soon heard and rushed over as well. Liz Cheney came so quickly she did not have a chance to change clothes and strode past the Secret Service officers into the West Wing in jeans in violation of the president's dress code.

For the Cheneys, it was a crisis like no other, a clash between personal principle and political loyalty. Mary had agreed to duplicate her 2000 role as her father's campaign operations director heading into 2004, but now she was not sure she could work for a ticket headed by President Bush. In the three years since they took office together, the vice president had never been torn from Bush in such a personal way.

The issue was same-sex marriage. The day before, Bush in his State of the Union address had defended "the sanctity of marriage," which was code for opposing legally sanctioned marriage between gay couples. In an election year, it was an obvious appeal to Bush's conservative base, a way of reminding them that whatever their misgivings about his other policies, this was a president in tune with their social views. But when Mary saw a copy of the speech the day before it was to be delivered, she was shocked. She had planned to sit in the House gallery for the speech but abruptly canceled. "I sure wasn't going to stand up and cheer," she later wrote.

Mary was no liberal; she supported her father on many issues. But this was an existential question. Could she serve a ticket that now officially stood for discriminating against her because of her sexual orientation? Several campaign operatives stopped by to see her at headquarters to express solidarity. It was striking how many people working for the president did not agree with him, a sign of a broader generational shift already under way. They told Mary that it was not that big a deal since no state actually recognized same-sex marriage, but that was little consolation. She felt she should quit, pack her bags, and head back to her home in Colorado. She had a long, heart-wrenching phone call with her partner, Heather Poe.

On January 21, the four Cheneys closeted themselves in the vice president's office as Mary vented. The vice president had made clear before that he split from conservative orthodoxy when it came to gay rights, declaring in his 2000 debate with Joseph Lieberman that "freedom means freedom for everybody." Now he counseled his daughter that if she felt she had to resign, he would support her. But he said she had played an important role in 2000 and would again if she stayed. The discussion went round and round.

Finally, Cheney noticed the time; he had to leave for New York for a fund-raiser, with Mary slated to join him in her campaign role. Lynne spontaneously decided to go along. While the vice president posed for photographs in a Manhattan apartment, she and Mary found privacy in a bedroom and sat opposite each other on twin beds talking. "If you feel like you have to leave," Lynne said, "then that's the right thing to do."

Ultimately, Mary calmed down and decided to stay. Quitting would call more attention to her. She did not want to be "the vice president's lesbian daughter" or a symbol for a movement; she bristled when activists put her picture on milk cartons because she was "missing" from the fight for gay rights. She loved her father, she supported his political career, and she did not like being used as a wedge against him.

The momentary crisis underscored a rare fault line in the Bush-Cheney partnership. Since the two teamed up on the Republican ticket in the summer of 2000, Bush and Cheney had agreed more than they disagreed. But the signs of change were increasingly there. Bush's brief flirtation with the idea of replacing Cheney "to demonstrate that I was in charge" betrayed his sensitivity. It gnawed at him that they had failed so far to find the weapons Cheney had told Bush were in Iraq, and some close to the president wondered whether he had let himself be led down a dangerous path. By this point, Bush was already talking with Condoleezza Rice about ways to repair the damage with allies and put more emphasis on diplomacy. For his part, Cheney had enjoyed a longer stretch of influence than anyone had expected. When they took office, some on Cheney's team figured the vice president's outsized sway would last six or nine months until Bush grew more comfortable in the job and did not need to lean on his more experienced number two. But Cheney's clout had endured, partly because of the national security issues suddenly thrust to the fore and partly because of his skill at advancing his viewpoint while remaining deferential to Bush.

In the focus on same-sex marriage, Cheney saw the hand of Karl Rove, another powerful force in the White House who had circled carefully around the vice president since arguing against his selection in 2000. Cheney and Rove avoided issues where the other specialized, a tacit arrangement that since September 11 had left the vice president in the dominant position. But now it was 2004 with the next election in sight, putting Rove back at the helm. Rove had been invested in Bush's political success since volunteering in the failed 1978 congressional campaign. A bare-knuckled operative who rattled off poll numbers and election results like others memorized baseball statistics, he orchestrated Bush's two gubernatorial campaigns and the 2000 presidential campaign, then outlasted the other two members of the Iron Triangle, Karen Hughes and Joe Allbaugh, although Hughes still parachuted in at times. Bush called him the "boy genius" when he was happy with him and "turd blossom" when he was not. Critics dubbed him "Bush's brain," underestimating Bush and overestimating Rove.

Heading into 2004, Rove had something to prove. The 2000 campaign that was supposed to be a masterstroke of Rovian politics came unraveled at the end, and now he and Bush both wanted to show they did not need the Supreme Court to win an election. If it took tough tactics, Rove would not shy away; he knew the Democrats would not either. As a result, Cheney figured the line in the State of the Union would probably not be the end of the matter. Armed with Matthew Dowd's analysis of the shrinking political center, Rove was pursuing a strategy focused as much on bolstering Republican turnout as on reaching swing voters.

A squadron of Democrats was vying to challenge Bush, sensing vulnerability born of a war launched on what increasingly looked like false intelligence, including Representative Richard Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader who had supported Bush on Iraq; Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee who had engaged in such a civil debate with Cheney; Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War hero who became one of the nation's most prominent antiwar activists; Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a telegenic trial attorney running on an antipoverty platform; General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander who won the Kosovo War; and Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, a physician who pioneered civil unions for gay couples.

Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards had all voted to authorize war in 2002, complicating their efforts to criticize Bush, while Dean, who had no vote, was making inroads with a vocal antiwar message. Rove conducted an informal survey of the president's political advisers. Four predicted Dean would win the Democratic nomination. Five picked Gephardt, including Bush. No one chose Kerry.

Every weekend, Rove convened "Breakfast Club" meetings at his house, serving scrambled eggs with cheese and cream as well as venison, wild boar, and nilgai sausage while he and other strategists built the architecture of a reelection campaign. The advisers were not the only ones getting geared up. Bush's daughter Jenna dreamed that her father had lost, so she and her sister, Barbara, who had defiantly sat out past campaigns, volunteered to work on this one. If he was going to lose, they reasoned, they wanted to have done what they could. Bush was delighted.

Rove's talent for political forecasting proved no better in Democratic primaries than it had in the 2000 general election. Dean knocked Gephardt out of the race during a brutal campaign in Iowa-with Bush's help. "Dean ran an ad with me in the Rose Garden on that October day with Bush," Gephardt remembered, "and the day the ad appeared, my polls took off. There was nothing to be done." Gephardt, who won Iowa when he ran in 1988, finished fourth on January 19, behind Kerry, Edwards, and Dean. But Dean hurt himself fatally in the process thanks to a whooping scream at the end of his concession speech that got replayed endlessly on cable television.

Rove had been betting colleagues hamburgers that Dean would win the nomination and even now thought he could recover. Bush disagreed.

As he traveled to Ohio and Arizona, Bush offered his verdict. "He's done, it's over," Bush said in his armored car between events.

"Well, your father lost Iowa and went on to win," ventured Matt Schlapp, his political director.

"Yeah, my dad did lose Iowa," Bush said, "but this guy is done."

Dan Bartlett said the concession speech may have played well in the room but was too hot for television. "It's a good reminder," he said.

Bush spent the night of the New Hampshire primary, January 27, with friends and family at the White House. Kerry won with 38 percent, outpacing Dean, who had 26 percent. As the evening progressed, Bush and his guests debated lightly who would be a tougher general election opponent, Kerry or Edwards. Bush thought Edwards was too unseasoned and would be easier to beat, while Kerry would be a formidable opponent. Laura Bush disagreed. She thought Edwards would be the tougher challenger; nobody particularly liked Kerry, she reasoned, while Edwards was young, attractive, southern, and in his own way charming.

WHILE DEAN WAS making Iraq an issue, Bush was coming to terms with the failure to find the weapons. David Kay, the arms inspector hired by the CIA to find the banned arms, decided to step down amid tension with George Tenet, and on January 28, Kay appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give an assessment.

"Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong," Kay told lawmakers, "and I certainly include myself here."

He noted that even countries that opposed the war, like France and Germany, believed there were weapons. "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."

Kay rejected the common assertion that intelligence analysts were pressured by political leaders, calling that "a wrong explanation." And he noted that his group had found "hundreds of cases" of prohibited activities involving weapons research by Iraqis, and "not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material." But those activities fell short of actually creating or storing weapons, and Kay called it important for Washington to "understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates."

Bush and Cheney invited Kay to lunch the next day to grill him about his conclusions. Condoleezza Rice and Andy Card joined them. Bush did most of the questioning while Cheney remained silent.

Kay explained that the intelligence was wrong because the Iraqis acted like they had weapons.

"Why would Saddam do something like this?" Bush asked.

Because, encouraged by the French and Russians, he never thought the United States would actually invade, Kay said. Hussein, he added, was more afraid of the Shiites and Kurds he had kept in line with his mythological weapons, not to mention a coup from within his own power structure, and he feared losing stature in the Arab world.

But Kay had criticism for Bush as well. One reason the intelligence community fell down on the job, he told the president, was that he had brought George Tenet across the line between analyst and policy maker. "You're paying a price for having the director of the CIA essentially as a cabinet official and being too close," Kay said. "Every president I know anything about would like to have his own policy and his own facts. The intelligence community should be the holder of the facts. It's very difficult for George if he's sitting at the table."

"Do you think I should meet less with him?" Bush asked.

"Mr. President, this is not something I want to say," Kay said.

The next Monday, February 2, the situation grew worse with an interview that Colin Powell gave the Washington Post acknowledging that he might not have supported the invasion had he known there were no weapons. Almost exactly a year to the day after the landmark presentation to the Security Council that had deeply scarred his credibility, Powell admitted they had gone to war on false premises. While he told the newspaper that he still thought the war "was the right thing to do," he hedged when asked whether he would have favored it if he knew then what he knew now. "I don't know," he said, "because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." The "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus," he added, and "changes the answer you get."

Bush and Cheney were furious. Powell tried to backtrack.

"It was something we all agreed to, and would probably agree to again under any other set of circumstances," he told reporters.

George Tenet pushed back three days later with a speech at his alma mater, Georgetown University, where he acknowledged the agency's failures but defended the prewar intelligence. He noted that he had hired another weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, to replace Kay and that "despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished" looking.

Tenet concluded that the agency was "generally on target" about Hus- sein's missile program but "may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making" on nuclear weapons. While they had found no chemical or biological weapons, Hussein wanted to make them and had the ability to produce them on short notice. Tenet admitted being influenced by an Iraqi source with "direct access to Saddam" who told the CIA that the Iraqis knew how to fool inspectors. "Could I have ignored or dismissed such reports at the time?" Tenet asked. "Absolutely not."

There was blame enough to go around: A president who arrived in office ready to complete what his father left unfinished. A vice president so convinced of the dangers from Baghdad that he pressed for intelligence to back up his conclusions. A CIA that often overlooked dissenting voices to produce what it thought the nation's leadership wanted. A Democratic opposition cowed by the political winds and too willing to believe the same ultimately flawed evidence. Allied intelligence agencies like the British, Germans, and Italians that passed along thinly supported assertions, fraudulent documents, and wholesale fabrications without fully sharing their sources. An Iraqi dictator who never came clean on the assumption that America would never follow through on its threat. And a news media that got caught up in the postSeptember 11 moment, trusted official sources too much, and gave prominence to indications of weapons while downplaying doubts.

IF CHENEY HOPED the gay rights issue had blown over in the weeks after the State of the Union, he was soon disappointed. On February 4, the highest court in Massachusetts ruled that same-sex marriage was a right under the state constitution, a decision that turbo-charged the already heated national debate. A week later, the mayor of San Francisco ordered city officials to grant marriage licenses to gay couples contrary to California law.

In the White House, Karl Rove thought the president should go beyond his State of the Union address and explicitly endorse a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. While Bush had always taken a traditional view of marriage, he had never supported rewriting the Constitution to mandate it and indeed had declined to embrace such a proposed amendment when Bill Frist brought it up seven months earlier. But the Massachusetts and San Francisco actions had propelled the issue to new levels, and with the election approaching, it was an issue of great resonance among conservatives. Over the previous year, Tim Goeglein, the White House liaison to evangelical conservative leaders, "heard more about marriage than any other issue."

Bush agreed to consider it. Cheney asked his domestic policy adviser, Neil Patel, to research the issue. Patel assembled a binder with all of the president's past statements on the issue and other material, then gave it to the vice president. Cheney did not volunteer what he would do with it, and it was awkward to ask. Peter Wehner, the speechwriter who had been put in charge of a sort of internal White House think tank called the Office of Strategic Initiatives (sometimes called the Office of Strategery after a mangled Bush term), drafted a briefing laying out both sides of the argument in a dispassionate way, looking at the constitutional ramifications, the institution of marriage, and the state of the law. Bush was turned off by courts seemingly making up rights not explicitly found in law.

As the debate played out, Cheney remained quiet, as he often did. Everyone understood his view. But he chose not to engage, either in larger sessions or even in his one-on-one lunches with Bush. He could have weighed in and possibly tilted the debate but chose discretion. He had never been out front on gay rights, speaking only when asked. And in his calculations about which issues to expend political capital on, same-sex marriage did not make the list. That may have reflected his judgment about where Bush would end up, or it may have reflected a personal discomfort with the topic. In any case, he stayed on the sidelines.

Another person who stayed quiet was Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager who was secretly gay but had not yet come to grips with it, much less admitted it to Bush or his colleagues. Some suspected, but others were thrown off by the memory of Mehlman dating a young female campaign worker in 2000. Likewise, Israel Hernandez, Bush's longtime aide going back to the Texas Rangers days, was also secretly gay.

The issue, with all its awkward dynamics, played out against a presidential campaign coming into focus. Bush invited Cheney and top aides to the Yellow Room in the residence at 11:00 a.m. one weekday in February to listen to Rove and other strategists outline their plan for reelection. Rove showed a month-by-month plan of themes, travel, and media for the two principals and their spouses. The strategy was to present Bush as a man of strength and values, a steady leader in a volatile moment. "There is a strong sense that Bush provides security and makes people feel safe," aides wrote about Cleveland focus groups conducted in February. "Subtle images of 9/11 get the message across very effectively." Mark McKinnon, after a technical meltdown with his laptop, played five proposed television ads, including one with images of September 11. If Americans remembered how afraid they were after the attacks, they would side with Bush; if they focused on how astray the Iraq War seemed to be going, he could lose.

Rove, McKinnon, Mehlman, Matthew Dowd, and other political advisers had been preparing for reelection since days after the vote in 2000. Dowd's conclusion during the recount that independent voters were a vanishing force had already driven the White House approach, and now advisers devised a strategy effectively the opposite of the one they advanced four years earlier. Instead of simply devoting resources to a small group of swing voters, they would focus just as intently on identifying and turning out core Republican voters. "That decision influenced everything that we did," Dowd said. "It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff."

To research how previous presidents had handled reelection campaigns, Dowd spent the summer of 2002 traveling to presidential libraries, including Ronald Reagan's in California, Gerald Ford's in Michigan, and George H. W. Bush's in Texas. He put together a long memo about the opportunities and traps confronting an incumbent president and presented it to colleagues before the midterm elections. But the strategy Rove, Dowd, and the rest of the team put together was forward-looking, innovative techniques no president had tried before. Adopting the methods of commercial marketing, Rove and his colleagues sliced the electorate using "microtargeting" to tailor messages based on things like what magazines voters subscribed to, what cars they owned, and even what kind of liquor they drank.

For her part, Laura urged her husband not to make same-sex marriage an issue in the campaign. "We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay," she remembered. But when Bush and Cheney next had lunch, the president told the vice president he would endorse the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. "He brought up the fact that he knew that I might have a different view because he knew about Mary," Cheney recalled. "He was very gracious about it. I mean, I guess that would be the way I would describe it. I knew going in that this was a place where we differed." Bush was passing along his decision, not soliciting Cheney's advice. He told the vice president to tell Mary that he would understand if she wanted to issue a statement opposing it. The vice president accepted the decision without protest. But he was not happy. "Cheney was pissed off," said a friend, "and I think he blamed Karl for that."

On February 24, Bush made it public. "The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith," Bush said. At the same time, he said he wanted to make sure states could still pass alternative arrangements, such as civil unions, and he discouraged hateful rhetoric. "We should also conduct this difficult debate in a matter worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger." Bush, who had privately deplored gay bashing and welcomed his transgendered college classmate to the White House, read the statement in a flat tone that suggested his heart was not in it. He was a traditionalist, he did not think courts should be deciding such questions, and he was told it was good politics, but he also knew he was playing to the sorts of antipathies he had resisted in the past.

The vice president called Mary to tell her the president had offered to let her issue her own statement disagreeing with the decision. But the last thing she wanted to do was call more attention to herself. Having wrestled with this issue a month earlier, she had come to terms with remaining on the campaign and keeping her thoughts to herself.

The politics of the decision were clear. A poll taken a week before the announcement showed that 64 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage compared with 32 percent who said it should be legal. Among the conservative voters Rove was targeting, the margin was even more lopsided. Eleven states were poised to put the question on the November ballot, drawing out more Bush-Cheney voters. The Bush team would eventually put anti-gay-marriage ads on radio stations oriented to Hispanic and African Americans below the radar screen of the national media; some aides were never sure if Bush even knew about that.

At a private meeting after his announcement, Bush told Republican congressional leaders that he felt his hand had been forced by the courts. But he was also in a feisty mood, focused on the looming campaign. He had "gotten pretty well pummeled" during the Democratic primaries, he told the lawmakers, but was planning to go on offense. "The vice president and I are ready to fight," he said.

IN THE MIDST of a busy February, Bush absorbed a personal blow. His loyal dog Spot had suffered a series of strokes and had to be put to sleep on February 21. The fifteen-year-old English springer was born to Millie, his parents' dog, and had the distinction of being the only canine to live in the White House under two presidents. As with many couples whose children go off to school, Spot along with the Scottish terrier Barney occupied an important part of the president's family life. Where Barney was rambunctious and often had to be corralled, Spot was friendly and obedient, regularly making her way onto Marine One on the South Lawn for trips to Crawford without having to be nudged.

For Bush, the dog's death among all the other tragedy that he had overseen since coming into office, and particularly in the eleven months since invading Iraq, somehow struck home. Before she was to be euthanized, as Laura recalled it, Bush took the ailing dog to the South Lawn, set her down, and then lay on the grass next to her, "encircling her in the chill dusk with the warmth of his body and gently stroking her head for a final farewell."

CHENEY HUSBANDED HIS clout on same-sex marriage, but he used it on North Korea. Sensing weakness, he had been working for months to shore up the American position, insisting that any new round of the six-party talks be based on the goal of a "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of Pyongyang's nuclear program. "We don't negotiate with evil," he had declared at a meeting in December. "We defeat it."

By the evening of February 26, talks had opened again, but Cheney heard they were deadlocked over a joint statement. He met with Bush to intercede, fashioning language to force negotiators to take the unyielding line he had been pushing. He spent about an hour on the phone with Michael Green, the president's Asia adviser, wordsmithing the language.

Unaware of the latest intervention were Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, who were attending a black-tie dinner until summoned outside to take a secure phone call in the limousine and work out language with Stephen Hadley. Armitage argued, but Hadley pushed back. "The vice president feels very strongly," he said. Bush went with Cheney's tougher language and Hadley ordered Green to read it over an unsecure telephone to the delegation headed by James Kelly rather than send it through the usual State Department cable. Green said the Chinese would almost certainly be tapping the line and hear. "Yeah," Hadley said. "That's what we want."

Powell only learned later that Cheney's language had been sent when an anxious Chinese foreign minister called to say the American position could blow up the talks. The negotiations wrapped up before the American delegation could execute its new instructions, averting a meltdown. But this was exactly the sort of situation that had been aggravating Powell and Armitage for years. "Diplomacy in the Bush administration is, 'Alright, you fuckers, do what we say,' " Armitage complained at one point.

Powell confronted Bush at the White House the next day, February 27, before a meeting with Germany's visiting chancellor.

"Busy last night, huh?" he asked Bush pointedly.

"Didn't they tell you?" Bush asked.

"No, they didn't," Powell said.

It was lucky the talks adjourned, he scolded the president, because if they had gone ahead with these instructions, the process would have collapsed. "It would have been gone."

To Cheney, such arguments were beside the point. In his mind, Powell had become a captive of the State Department bureaucracy, which cared more about process than results. "The diplomats, whether they knew it or not, in my estimation didn't have license to strike a deal," said Stephen Yates, who was Cheney's Asia adviser. "But they may have thought they did, and so they kept trying to get these joint statements, trying to come up with solutions, which is sort of their job to try. Mysteriously, every time it would come up, they would receive instructions from the White House, from the very highest levels, not to agree to certain things or to remind them of their limited instructions on their interactions. That frustrated the diplomats; it offended people like Powell, Armitage, and Kelly who felt like they were fairly tough-minded people who served in the military, were no pushovers on these kinds of things." They had a point, Yates said, but they were not in charge.