Coming less than a month before the election, the report was politically damaging and exacerbated tensions between the White House and the CIA. Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, and other advisers to Bush and Cheney were convinced the CIA was leaking information to the opposition and the media in a deliberate attempt to influence the election. The friction grew so sharp that John McLaughlin, who had stepped in as acting director after Tenet's resignation, personally investigated. "I did some real homework in the agency, and there was no organized campaign there to undermine his election," he said years later. "I am absolutely convinced of that." He told Bush that by phone. "We at CIA are not trying to bring you down," McLaughlin told the president.

Bush met Kerry for their second debate, on October 8, at Washington University in St. Louis. This time it was a town-hall-style format with Missourians posing the questions, and Bush had worked harder to prepare. Right before going onstage, he asked to be left alone for fifteen minutes to collect himself, a rarity for a president who enjoyed company. It clearly helped. Joining Kerry before the cameras, Bush focused on containing any visible sense of annoyance. Still, as he roamed the stage, he mixed folksy charm with arguments that at times seemed too loud for the medium. Kerry responded by appearing as low-key as possible, although almost to the point of lacking passion.

A focus group convened by the Bush-Cheney campaign in Orlando found that "John Kerry exceeded voters' expectations in the two debates" and was seen as "more likeable, knowledgeable and charismatic than expected." A memo summarizing the focus group said "voters were disappointed by the President in the first debate" but "give him better marks for the second debate and many thought he came across more human than Kerry." For the third debate, Bush's team concluded that "we want to remind voters Kerry's not worth the risk. They know Bush. They don't like the war in Iraq, but they at least know Bush is a decent guy and he stands up for what he believes."

BUSH ARRIVED AT Arizona State University for the final encounter on October 13 accompanied by John McCain. Their events together were awkward. Despite their reconciliation, McCain was reported to have flirted with becoming Kerry's running mate. And the chemistry was still off. McCain kept trying to pump Bush up, sometimes to extremes. In the green room before the Arizona debate, McCain egged Bush on, telling him, "You're going to be great" and "This is how you've got to hit him back." Bush, looking for calm before the televised clash, found McCain's hyper boxing-coach performance off-putting. "Man, is he spun up," Bush marveled to aides afterward.

The Cheneys watched the debate on television at a hotel in Pittsburgh. When the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, asked if homosexuality was a choice, Kerry, like John Edwards the week before, raised Mary Cheney. "I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as," Kerry said.

In her hotel room, Mary looked up from the travel schedule she had been working on and shouted at the television. "You son of a bitch," she said.

Then she went down to her parents' suite to watch the rest of the debate with them. Her mother and sister were equally incensed. "A complete and total sleazeball," fumed Liz. Lynne was so hot she finally retreated to the bedroom to keep from distracting her husband, who was trying to concentrate on the rest of the debate. "Mom was especially furious that John Kerry had just used her child to try to score political points," Liz recalled. "She couldn't quit talking about it, she was so mad."

The Cheneys grew even more incensed afterward when they heard Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry campaign manager, say on television that Mary was "fair game." The vice president huddled with his family and advisers to decide whether to hit back. The vice president called Steve Schmidt.

"Well, sir, as long as Mary's comfortable with it, I don't see any reason not to," Schmidt said.

Mary overheard. "Make it hurt," she told her father.

Lynne jumped in and said she wanted to address the post-debate rally downstairs, although she had not been scheduled to speak.

Schmidt asked what she would say.

"That this is a man with a dark hole in his soul," she said. "He can have all the fake suntans and manicures he wants, but deep down inside he's rotten."

There was a long pause on the phone, and the campaign staffers on the other end could almost be heard shifting uncomfortably.

Scooter Libby spoke up. Let's just be smart about this, he said.

"She's my daughter and I'm angry and I'm going to say it," Lynne said.

Libby pulled Liz aside and asked her to talk with her mother.

"Look," Lynne said. "I know I'm not going to be stupid. I'm under control. But I'm mad and I'm going to say something about it."

Appearing before the crowd downstairs, the vice president's wife let loose. "I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more," she said. "And the only thing I could conclude is this is not a good man. This is not a good man. And, of course, I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick."

Dick Cheney saved his criticism for the next day, October 14, when he addressed a rally of twenty-five hundred supporters at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myer. "You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected," Cheney said. "And I am not speaking just as a father here-though I am a pretty angry father. But I'm also speaking as a citizen."

The Cheneys, both out of genuine anger and with a measure of political calculation, had successfully punished Kerry for bringing Mary into the campaign. Kerry issued a tepid written statement that neither reaffirmed his comment nor apologized for it. "I love my daughters," he said. "They love their daughter. I was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue." Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the vice presidential candidate, was less measured, accusing Lynne Cheney of being embarrassed by her daughter. "I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences," she told an interviewer. The public, though, sided with Cheney. He called the bump in the polls the "Mary Cheney bounce."

THE TEAM WAS confident, even cocky, heading into the final stretch. Bush and Cheney had defined Kerry as unreliable. Television ads showed an effete challenger windsurfing one way and then the other. A group of Kerry's war colleagues backed by conservative allies of the president and calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his war record with over-the-top attacks that, while factually suspect, took a toll on his national security credentials in a national security election. A counterattack on Bush's own record in the Air National Guard backfired when Dan Rather of CBS News had to retract a story based on forged documents.

By the time Bush landed in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 23, Karl Rove was feeling so sure of victory that he found the White House press pool and started joking around off the record. Rove said he had Osama bin Laden in his basement ready as a last-minute surprise, but the terrorist leader was a real pain, only bathed once a week, ate all the caramel popcorn, and did not even let the dogs out during the day.

No one was laughing a week later when bin Laden appeared in a videotape aired on Al Jazeera. Bin Laden, who had eluded American intelligence since Tora Bora, took on Bush, rebutting his claim that al-Qaeda attacked the United States because it hated freedom-if that were it, he told voters, ask Bush "why we did not attack Sweden." He hinted al-Qaeda would stage another devastating attack if Bush was reelected. "Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened."

Bush retreated to a private room to discuss the impact. Eventually, he decided it would work in his favor by reminding voters how much bin Laden hated him. But advisers fell into a sharp debate about how to respond. John Ashcroft, with support from Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to raise the nation's threat level. Tom Ridge thought no intelligence justified it. Is this about security or politics? he wondered. "A vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion ensued," he recalled. Ridge had his aide Susan Neely call Air Force One to ask Dan Bartlett to appeal to the president.

Bartlett got the point and raised it with Bush. "I don't have to tell you," Bartlett said, referring to the danger of politicizing national security.

"I know," Bush said. Soon word came down: the threat level would not be raised.

Operating from strength, Cheney engaged in a bit of psychological fake out by making a last-minute foray to Hawaii. While it was a Democratic bastion, polls suggested Republicans were within striking distance, and the campaign brain trust decided that a surprise visit would throw off the opposition. There was a reason no national candidate had campaigned in Hawaii in decades: it's a long flight for little electoral gain. But Lynne Cheney suggested it would be worth it, and the vice president agreed.

On October 31, Cheney started his day in Toledo, Ohio, then flew to Romulus, Michigan; Fort Dodge, Iowa; and Los Lunas, New Mexico, before heading out across the Pacific to hold a late-night rally in Honolulu, where he gamely wore a lei. After just two hours on the ground, he boarded his plane and took off again for Jackson Hole. Over twenty-four hours, he logged nearly eleven thousand miles and eighteen and a half hours in the air.

Still, more than ten thousand people showed up at 11:00 p.m. for the Hawaii rally, possibly his biggest crowd of the campaign. He and his team felt pumped up. Everything, they felt, was in hand.

19.

"The election that will never end"

President Bush woke up on Election Day at the ranch and stepped out into the overcast but relatively warm Texas morning. This was the day that would determine whether he would surpass his father by winning a coveted second term or go down in history as a transitional figure who only got into office after a fluky recount. He had rallied the nation after catastrophe, then plunged it into a war on wrong assumptions. Now came the verdict, what he would later call his "accountability moment."

He braced himself for a long day and headed to the Crawford Fire Department to vote. Then he got back into his motorcade for the short ride to the airport.

On the way, he called Matthew Dowd, his chief strategist. "What is going to happen tonight?" he asked.

"You should win," Dowd said. "It will be close, but you should be fine."

His strategists considered Ohio and Florida critical. If he won both, he would be reelected. Just hours earlier, some time after one o'clock in the morning, Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman had tried to figure a last-minute way to get him to both states on Election Day, but Rove checked with Joe Hagin and discovered it was logistically impossible.

"Only one," Rove told Mehlman. "You decide."

"Ohio," Mehlman said.

So Bush flew to Ohio, and his staff set up satellite interviews with Florida television stations. Even then, technical difficulties made it hard to get connected, and Bush grew irritated. "What is Karl making me do on Election Day?" he grumbled.

Bush got back on the plane and headed for Washington, anxious for information. As the plane descended toward Andrews Air Force Base, Rove heard from Sara Taylor, one of his deputies back at campaign headquarters outside Washington. The first exit polls were horrible. Taylor read them over the phone to Rove as matter-of-factly as she could without emotion, but that did not soften the impact. Rove's hand was shaking as he cradled the phone in his ear and tried to scribble down the numbers on a note card on his knee. Dan Bartlett held the paper for him.

The numbers made no sense. They were down in states where they should be up. They were even further down in states where they should at least be competitive. The exit polls had them losing by 18 percentage points in Pennsylvania and by several points in Florida and Ohio; they were fighting just to win stalwart states like South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama. How could that be? If these numbers were right, they were heading for a landslide defeat. As Rove read the numbers aloud, Bush "felt like he had just punched me in the stomach."

Everyone in the cabin was shocked. "That doesn't make any sense-losing Virginia?" said Karen Hughes, who had been traveling with Bush. An upset Condoleezza Rice rushed out and took refuge in the restroom, unable to look Bush in the eye.

Bush was deflated. "Look, if it is what it is, we'll deal with it," he said. "But I don't believe it. We've been here before."

He began working his way around the plane, thanking aides for their hard work. "Whatever happens, I love you guys," he said.

Awash in emotion, he ended up thanking Nicolle Devenish, his communications director, twice. She was crying, as was Mark McKinnon, the media consultant.

Bush phoned Ken Mehlman back at headquarters to learn more. Mehlman ran through the numbers. They were grim. But then Mehlman began pulling them apart.

"Here's why I think it's wrong," he said. Mehlman was a data-driven person, not given to trusting his gut. So he gave his evidence to the president for why the exit polls must be mistaken.

"This is really good," Bush said, momentarily encouraged. "Hold on."

From the plane, the president had the White House switchboard patch in his father, who was waiting back at the mansion.

"Say that again," the president ordered Mehlman, who repeated his analysis.

At the White House and at campaign headquarters, word of the exit polls spread quickly, and a deep depression sank in. Suddenly the spirit and energy of the morning had vanished. Campaign advisers found Dowd in his office lying on the floor in the fetal position, refusing to go downstairs to brief reporters. "He was in a dark place," Taylor recalled. She went down instead and gamely argued that it was too early to judge. "A lot of people got into an incredible funk," she remembered. "At that moment, it looked real, and people thought, 'Oh my God, we're losing.' "

Despite Mehlman's reassurance, Bush thought so too, and he was gloomy as the plane landed at Andrews, not sure what to think but increasingly worried that he had lost reelection just as his father had. As he prepared to disembark, he told aides, "Whatever happens, we left it all on the field."

Hughes reminded him that everyone was looking to him, so he should keep his game face on. "There are people still voting," she told him. "When you come down the stairs of Air Force One, smile and wave."

Bush complied, smiling and waving for the cameras, but he felt as if he were "in a daze" as he crossed the tarmac to Marine One. The short helicopter flight to the White House seemed to take an hour. He put his happy face on again as he made the short walk across the South Lawn into the mansion. As soon as he crossed the threshold and out of camera range, aides noticed the upward curve of his mouth instantly turn down.

He headed upstairs to the residence, unprepared to face aides who had come with him so far on the journey, only to lose like this. He "moped around the Treaty Room" and tried to gird himself for what could be a crushing night. Just as John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a president to reach the White House, lost reelection, now it looked as if George W. Bush were again following in his footsteps.

ON BOARD Air Force Two, Vice President Cheney maintained more equanimity as Mary got the same bad news from Sara Taylor. His family members, especially Lynne, "were feeling a little sick to our stomachs." But the vice president felt jaded about polls and was willing to believe these were as messed up as the ones in 2000. "I blew it off," he said.

From a last stop in Wisconsin, Cheney flew back to Washington in time to host an election night party at the vice presidential mansion starting at 6:00 p.m. Like Hughes, Lynne kept telling herself to smile, lest her face give away her anxiety. Many of their closest friends came, including Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Simpson, and Nick Brady and their wives, as well as Mary Matalin. Even after four years of partnership, Cheney and Bush were spending the most critical evening of their tenure in their separate spheres. There was the Cheney party, and there was the Bush party. Cheney would join the president for the official declaration of victory, but until then he had his own crowd.

At the White House, Rove set up a war room he called his "bat cave" in the Family Dining Room, complete with two large-screen televisions and a bank of phones and four computers. Rice, oddly bereft of anything to do, helped Rove track key states. Bush fired up a big cigar and from time to time wandered down to check on the latest or called Rove from upstairs in the residence, where he was joined by family and friends for dinner. Later waves of exit polls had narrowed the implausible Kerry leads but still showed Bush losing nearly every battleground state. As the evening drew on, Rove compared county-by-county numbers from 2000 and was certain the exit polls were wrong. Rove, Mehlman, and a recovered Dowd berated network executives about the obvious flaws in the data.

Actual vote counts proved closer to Rove's expectations, and Bush and Cheney began piling up the states they needed. After the early gloom, it looked as if they might pull it off after all. Sometime after 11:00 p.m., Bush went downstairs to Rove's bat cave for an update. "This is the election that will never end," the president moaned. But ten minutes later, ABC News called Florida for Bush and Cheney. The source of so much consternation four years earlier was now in the bag, and more of the president's friends and relatives crowded into the war room. Rove was annoyed since "some of them were a little sloshed and in the way," and he sharply told one Bush pal to stop bothering his staff or "get the hell out."

Andy Card called Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry campaign manager, to gently sound her out. Should they expect a call from the senator? No, she said.

At 12:41 a.m., Fox News, this time without Bush's cousin, called Ohio for Bush and Cheney, putting them an inch away from an Electoral College victory. Bush, back upstairs chewing on a cigar, got the news from Rove over the phone. With any of several outstanding states, they would go over the top.

The president walked out of his bedroom, found Laura, and hugged and kissed her. "He just looked relieved that it was over," said Eric Draper, the photographer.

But it was not. Around 1:00 a.m., the Cheneys bundled into a motorcade and headed down to the White House, assuming they would soon go to the victory celebration at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. But once they arrived, they learned it was not that clear. The networks, burned from 2000, were not calling the race, and Democrats showed no signs of conceding. Card called Cahill again after 1:00 a.m. "We're getting different numbers," she said. Soon after, she announced to the media that Democrats would insist on counting provisional ballots in Ohio. Rove calculated there were not nearly enough such ballots to overcome the Republican lead, but for a while Bush and Cheney feared a repeat of 2000. A plane of operatives and lawyers, including Sara Taylor and Mehlman's brother, was dispatched in the middle of the night to Ohio.

Bush worried about his father. The elder Bush might have been more nervous than anyone, anxious about the prospect of his son facing the same ordeal he had a dozen years earlier. At one point, the eighty-year-old former president distracted himself by launching into a long conversation with Cheney's granddaughter Katie, who was ten years old.

"Katie, you're the youngest person here and I'm the oldest," he told her. "We need to talk."

As the night wore on, the president urged his father to go to sleep. "Go on, nothing's going to happen," he said. "I'm going to win."

With no concession in sight, the Bush and Cheney advisers debated whether to go out and declare victory anyway. Rove, Card, Michael Gerson, and Jim Francis, a close friend of the president's, argued that they should. Why should they be held hostage to the media if the numbers were on their side? The longer they let this drag on, the bigger the risk of Democrats turning it into another Florida. But Nicolle Devenish had been secretly keeping open a back channel with Michael McCurry, a former Clinton White House press secretary who was advising Kerry. She knew McCurry and trusted him. Hold off, he urged. Kerry and Edwards would get there. After what happened in 2000, he said, they just needed time to satisfy themselves there was no real issue in Ohio.

Hughes, Matalin, Dan Bartlett, and Stephen Hadley urged Bush to heed the advice.

"You cannot go out there and put the crown on your own head," Bartlett told Bush. "You just can't do it."

Crucially, Laura agreed. "George, you can't go out there," she said. "Wait until you've been declared the winner." He agreed.

Cheney urged his family to return home and rest, but they refused. The vice president sank into the chair in his office, put his feet up on the desk, and fell asleep. Mary claimed the couch in his office, and her partner, Heather Poe, stretched out between a couple of armchairs. Liz found a sofa in the Roosevelt Room and lay down there. Lynne headed to the White House medical unit, found a pillow and blanket, and slept on an examining table. They did not leave the White House until 6:00 a.m., when they headed home for showers.

THE NEXT MORNING, November 3, dawned with little more clarity. Bush woke around 7:00 a.m. after just two hours of sleep and made it to the Oval Office by 8:00 a.m. His parents had to return to Houston. Advisers discussed how to pressure Democrats without overplaying their hand. Card called James Baker, the man who had secured the 2000 victory, and asked him to see if Vernon Jordan, a prominent Democratic lawyer who had handled debate negotiations for Kerry, could get the challenger to concede. Baker tracked Jordan down at the famed Amen Corner at the Augusta National Golf Club and forwarded the request. Jordan made the call, but suspected Kerry was already getting ready to concede. Bush and Bartlett called Devenish from the Oval Office, telling her to call McCurry and figure out what was going on. She got McCurry on the line. Don't worry, he said. "Kerry is calling now."

While Bush sat in the Oval Office with close advisers waiting for the call, well-wishers began making their way to the White House. Among them was Rumsfeld, who showed up "grinning ear to ear," as Scott McClellan recalled it, to congratulate the reelected president. Rumsfeld knew his future in a second term was uncertain, and Bush saw the visit in that context. "That was a job interview," Bush told aides immediately after Rumsfeld left.

At 11:02 a.m., the president's personal secretary, Ashley Kavanaugh, popped into the Oval Office. "Mr. President, I have Senator Kerry on the line."

Bush picked up the phone. It was a brief conversation but civil. "You were an admirable, worthy opponent," Bush told Kerry. "You waged one tough campaign. I hope you are proud of the effort you put in. You should be."

Just like that, he had won. He had defied the odds, the exit polls, the pundits, and even history. He had achieved what his father could not, entering the elite pantheon of two-term presidents, just the fifteenth incumbent to be elected a second time in a row. It was hardly a landslide; he won with 50.7 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48.3 percent, the smallest margin of any reelected president. But he was the first presidential candidate since his father's election in 1988 to win an absolute majority, and it came without the searing asterisk of 2000. The margin was stronger in the Electoral College, where Bush picked up 286 votes to Kerry's 251. Moreover, he was the first president since 1936 to be reelected to a second term with his party increasing its hold over both houses of Congress. He improved his showing over 2000 among Latinos, Jews, women, voters over sixty, and those without high school degrees. Bush won big among those who named terrorism or moral values as their top issue, and voters in surveys gave him credit for honesty, strong leadership, religious faith, and clear stances on the issues. While Bush lost ground among independents, the base-turnout efforts had succeeded in increasing the conservative share of the voting electorate from 29 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2004. Still, buried in the numbers were ominous signs. Just 51 percent of Americans still supported the decision to go to war in Iraq. Kerry won lopsidedly among voters who named Iraq their biggest issue.

The most important result for Bush and Cheney, though, was legitimacy. Now they would have four more years, enough time to finish what they had started in Iraq and bring dramatic change at home as well. Bush already had ideas about how to use the momentum. As he absorbed the news, he exhaled and teared up as he hugged advisers who had come on the journey with him.

"We're going to have fun in the next term," he promised Bartlett. "We're going to have a blast."

He called Laura in the residence to let her know. And then he opened the door and made his way out into the hallway.

"Where's the vice president?" he called out.

Someone told him Cheney was in the Situation Room and went to get him. Bush lingered for a few moments in the corridor waiting and then saw Cheney approach.

"Congratulations, Dick!" Bush said ebulliently.

"Congratulations, Mr. President," Cheney responded more formally.

Bush couldn't help but smile at his famously stiff partner. He stuck his hand out. "I know you're not a big fan of hugs, so we'll just shake hands," the president said.

At 3:00 p.m., the two took the stage at the Ronald Reagan Building for their delayed victory celebration. Cheney lavished praise on Bush. "He's a man of deep conviction, and personal kindness," Cheney told the audience. "His leadership is wise and firm and fearless. Those are the qualities that Americans like in a president-and those are the qualities we will need for the next four years."

Bush had kind words for Cheney as well. "The vice president serves America with wisdom and honor, and I'm proud to serve beside him," Bush said. He spoke for just ten minutes, reiterating his campaign promises and vowing to bring the country together. "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he said. "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."

IT WAS A heady moment for Bush and Cheney. "Everybody was buoyant," recalled Frederick Jones, who worked at the National Security Council. "People were excited. The president sensed that he could achieve his goals, and there was an optimism."

Bush showed up the next day, November 4, at Bartlett's communications meeting to thank the staff. He singled out Scott McClellan, the press secretary known for his loyalty and tight lips. "I want to especially thank Scotty for saying," Bush said with a waggish pause, "nothing!"

Later that morning, he convened the cabinet and thanked them as well. But he also signaled that some of them would not be sticking around. "I expect there to be lots of rumors and speculation about changes in the cabinet for our second term," he said. "Well, a few changes are very likely, but I haven't had time to think about them yet."

Cheney, who usually remained quiet in meetings like this, took the opportunity to reflect on what had changed in four years. "I remember our conversation coming off the recount of 2000 about whether to trim the sails," he said. "You said it was not an option, and it paid off. This time around, the mandate was clear."

In this case, the mandate included Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush mentioned that he had spoken with Iraqi leaders and they were relieved at the election victory.

"They were toast if you lost," offered Donald Rumsfeld.

"French toast," Bush joked.

He did not say so in front of the cabinet, but Bush was already toying with an expansive vision for the second term. He had been talking more about bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, an idea that he had raised in speeches even before the invasion of Iraq but that took on greater resonance as the weapons rationale for the war fell apart. Now he was ready to embrace it as the central mission of his presidency, a way of laying down a historical marker that would give definition to his tenure and at the same time provide a fresh ideological underpinning to the war on terror beyond simply killing extremists before they could kill Americans. An optimistic, forward-leaning idealistic call, he felt, would be more inviting for people on both sides of the aisle at home and for skeptical governments abroad.

After the cabinet meeting, he pulled aside Michael Gerson, who was thinking about either leaving or taking on a different role in the second term.