"I hear you're thinking about what you want to do next," Bush said, "but will you help me with my inaugural?"

Of course, Gerson said.

"I want it to be the freedom speech," Bush said. He wanted to "plant a flag" for democracy around the world.

Bush gave a hint of the scale of his new ambition a little while later when he met the White House press corps for his first postelection news conference. "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital," he said exuberantly. "And now I intend to spend it."

20.

"Not a speech Dick Cheney would give"

President Bush headed to Camp David to rest after the long campaign and think about his second term. He had gone full tilt for weeks, crisscrossing the country, working endless rope lines, giving the same speech day in and day out, and hitting up a long parade of well-heeled donors. He was ready for a break. He could also use a little time to reflect.

Tellingly, the advisers he invited to join him for part of the weekend were Condoleezza Rice and Andy Card, not the vice president. While Bush had put Cheney in charge of the transition before the first term, he planned to run his own transition to the second. He would consult with Cheney about policy and personnel, but he was not outsourcing them. He had definite ideas, some of which Cheney would agree with, but Bush felt no need to seek concurrence on the ones where he would not.

One thing he needed to do was to overhaul his national security team. The fractiousness of the first term had bothered him for years, and now he had an opportunity to do something about it. Since Colin Powell had told him long ago that he expected to leave after the election, Bush decided he would take advantage of the offer. He admired Powell but understood that he "wasn't fully on board with my philosophy and policies." Cheney supported a change. The vice president considered Powell, his once-trusted sidekick during the first Bush presidency, an increasingly disruptive force who handled policy differences by leaking and undermining the administration while building himself up as some sort of realist hero tilting at the neoconservative hard-liners. From Cheney's point of view, Powell, Richard Armitage, and their team were essentially mounting an "insurgency against the rest of the national security team," as Stephen Yates, a foreign policy adviser to the vice president, put it. "They felt the need to go after the right-wing nut jobs, as they endearingly referred to us," Yates said. "We did not have a similar campaign to go after the left-wing nut jobs, or the State Department folks or the Powell-Armitage folks." In that context, Cheney concluded, Powell's departure "was for the best." The feeling was mutual. To Powell and his team, Cheney and Rumsfeld had formed what Lawrence Wilkerson, the secretary's chief of staff, called a "secretive, little-known cabal" intent on subverting the process to advance a radical agenda. "Powell really thought that Cheney and Rumsfeld were treasonous," said a White House official, "and Cheney and Rumsfeld really thought Powell was treasonous."

Cheney might not have grasped that removing a rival would elevate an even more powerful one. To replace Powell, Bush settled on Rice. Unlike Powell, Rice, as everyone knew, had the president's ear, and she would have the opportunity to transform State into a vehicle for Bush's policies instead of an outpost of resistance. In joining the cabinet, she would finally be freed from the facilitator role she played as national security adviser, making her more of a peer of the vice president than simply a staff person. If he had any qualms, Cheney knew better than to express them. Bush was announcing his decision, not asking him about it. "He had thought about it, and this is the way he wanted to go," Cheney recalled.

Rice had a relationship with Bush like no other adviser. She worked out with him, had dinner with him and Laura in the residence, and spent weekends with them at Camp David. He trusted her implicitly, and she made clear she had no agenda other than his. They were so close that in a strange slip at a dinner party with Washington journalists, some around the table heard the unmarried Rice start to refer to Bush as "my husb-" before catching herself. Rice later denied it and in any case, few if anyone thought their relationship was in any way improper; it seemed more like a big-brother, little-sister connection. "She was treated like the kind of lonely bachelor girl," said one top official who worked with her. Over lunch one day in the first term, Rice told Christine Todd Whitman, "I can count on one hand the days when I have not spoken to the president over the last three years." As Whitman later reflected, "She didn't have a life. Her life was all about that."

The bond between the Texas cowboy and the Stanford Russia scholar confounded many around them. "He was very wary about intellectuals," said David Gordon, a top intelligence official who worked for Rice. "Intellectuals always had to prove something with Bush. And that's why the relationship between Bush and Condi is so interesting because Condi is a serious intellectual. She has all of these other interests obviously. She's a Renaissance woman completely. But she's an intellectual, yet she had developed this really fantastic relationship with the president."

For years, people speculated about her sway over Bush. She told another friend it was the other way around. "People don't understand," she said. "It's not my exercising influence over him. I'm internalizing his world." But if she proved adept at channeling Bush, she was a figure of great frustration to other members of the team who thought she was too eager to erase differences and create false consensus rather than bring difficult choices to the president. She had not been able to manage the sharp rivalries in the war cabinet. Powell thought she should have cracked down on Rumsfeld; Rumsfeld thought she should have cracked down on Powell. And she found herself outmaneuvered by Cheney, who bypassed her on the Kyoto treaty and military commissions.

"I personally favor an NSC and national security process not where you try to bridge everyone's difference and create a blended conclusion but rather taking the different options, different approaches, different views, shoving them up to the president, and having him make a decision," Rumsfeld said later. "That's the healthiest way because people then will salute and go about doing their business. If you have extended delays or you try to compromise different opinions, sometimes you end up with a solution that's worse than either of the options."

Through it all, Rice had somehow escaped blame for the failings of the Iraq War. "I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation," noted Scott McClellan. "No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview," such as the missing weapons, the sixteen words, and inadequate postwar planning. "And in private, she complemented and reinforced Bush's instincts rather than challenging or questioning them."

TO PUT THE changes in place, Bush dropped the news on Rice at Camp David on the afternoon of November 5. "I want you to be secretary of state," he told her.

Rice said she was honored but would need to talk about it first. While hoping he would not take it as criticism, she said they had a lot of "repair work to do with the allies" and would need "to reaffirm the primacy of diplomacy in our foreign policy."

In effect, she was saying, his approach to the outside world had to evolve away from the perception of a unilateral, preemption-minded cowboy who did not care what others thought. She considered that a myth that fundamentally misunderstood Bush, but she also realized that the image was powerful and a major obstacle. Cheney in particular had generated suspicion and hostility unnecessarily. It was time, in her view, to put aside the vice president's posture and return to a more constructive foreign policy like that of the president's father, although she never put it that way publicly. What she did say to Bush was that the new approach would mean, for example, a renewed commitment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and establishing a Palestinian state. He was skeptical but agreed.

Rice also insisted on a clear path. "I don't intend to spend my energy sparring with Don," she said of Rumsfeld. "I'm going to lead U.S. foreign policy, and I don't need his input."

Bush seemed taken aback but agreed.

The real question was whether it was time for Rumsfeld to go. Card thought so and urged Bush to think about it. He had a long list of potential successors. Bush was open to the idea. "At times, Don frustrated me with his abruptness toward military leaders and members of my staff," he said later. He was not the only one frustrated. Even Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, privately complained to a friend that the secretary was driving him crazy. The way Rumsfeld was handling Iraq, Wolfowitz said, "was criminal negligence."

Bush authorized Card to contact Frederick Smith from FedEx, his original choice for defense secretary, but Smith's daughter was ill. Bush also reached out to James Baker, but he had already been secretary of state and Treasury secretary and was not interested in a third cabinet position. Bush mulled Senator Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish Democrat whose own presidential campaign in 2004 fizzled because of his support of the Iraq War. But that did not seem like "the right fit." It was not enough to get rid of Rumsfeld; Bush felt he had to have someone ready to take over. And Cheney strongly opposed replacing his mentor, arguing that changing a defense secretary in the middle of a war was unwise and noting that confirmation hearings would invite a fresh public debate about Iraq.

Bush had other changes to make, some easier than others. John Ashcroft had grown distant from the White House during repeated clashes over the war on terror. He had defied Bush and Cheney on the renewal of the National Security Agency surveillance program and opposed holding detainees indefinitely at Guantnamo without some form of due process. He had fought to guarantee some rights for those tried by military commissions and insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, an al-Qaeda member arrested before September 11, be prosecuted in civilian courts for conspiring with the hijackers. Sensing he was on the outs, Ashcroft drafted a resignation letter by hand and personally delivered it to Bush on Election Day, deliberately circumventing presidential advisers with whom he had clashed. "He was not going to trust these people to spin his resignation and backstab him any more," said Ashcroft's aide Mark Corallo. The feelings were mutual. Bush's aides saw Ashcroft as "a self-promoter and grandstander."

Bush decided to elevate Alberto Gonzales to attorney general and chose Margaret Spellings, his domestic policy adviser who had followed him from Texas, to replace the departing education secretary, Roderick Paige. In picking Rice, Gonzales, and Spellings, Bush was effectively stocking the cabinet with three of his closest advisers, taking firmer hold over the reins of government for the second term.

ALTHOUGH BUSH HAD already asked Rice to become secretary of state, he had not yet asked Powell to vacate the post. The assumption was that he would, but the president never called to ask if the most prominent member of his cabinet was really ready to step down. Instead, he had Card call Powell on Wednesday, November 10, to ask for his letter of resignation by Friday.

Powell was not surprised, and yet he was a little taken aback by the suddenness. "I thought we were going to talk about it," he told Card, "because frankly I don't know when you want me out but there are some very important conferences coming up. So do you want it right away, or should I stay a couple of months?"

Card explained the plan was to package Powell's resignation with other cabinet changes. "We want the letters right away so they can be announced," Card said.

Powell said fine. Was Rumsfeld going too?

Card said he did not know.

"If I go, Don should go," Powell said.

After they hung up, something got lost in translation because Card took the conversation to mean Powell was hedging on leaving. Bush thought this was coming "out of nowhere" and suspected it was born out of Powell's resentment that he was going but Rumsfeld evidently was not. Powell would later deny any desire to stay beyond a couple of months, which he would end up doing anyway while waiting for Rice to be confirmed by the Senate. But the conflicting signals left a sour taste.

Powell told no one other than his wife and Richard Armitage about Card's call and personally typed his resignation letter at home, using it to reclaim ownership of the decision. "As we have discussed in recent months," he began, "I believe that now that the election is over the time has come for me to step down as Secretary of State and return to private life." The letter was delivered Friday, November 12.

Bush was still torn about what to do about his secretary of defense and cast around for advice. Hours after Powell's letter arrived, the president was talking with his visiting cousin, John Ellis. Bush regaled Ellis with stories from the reelection and then escorted him out to his car on the White House grounds. Just as Ellis was about to head out, Bush stopped him.

"What do you think about Rumsfeld?" he asked.

Ellis didn't hesitate. "I think you should fire him," he said. "I don't know the facts, but I know the building," meaning the Pentagon, "will be very happy if you fire him."

"Well," Bush said, "it's something to think about."

Others were volunteering advice. Michael Gerson ventured that it might be worth making some "personnel changes."

Bush understood the code. "You mean Rumsfeld?" he asked.

He did. Gerson acknowledged he could not speak to the strategic issues, but as a matter of public perception Rumsfeld was too identified with the previous approach. "It's going to be hard to get credit for any improvements in Iraq as long as we have the current leadership," he argued.

Recognizing Bush's strong sense of fidelity to those around him, Gerson said there was no betrayal in remaking the team between terms. "It's not disloyalty when someone's been there four years and there's a natural change," said Gerson, who advocated Lieberman as a replacement.

After another weekend mulling options, Bush announced Powell's resignation on Monday, November 15, in a written statement along with those of the secretaries of energy, education, and agriculture and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Powell was treated as just one more replaceable cabinet member. Bush made no public appearance to discuss Powell's departure, instead dispensing his secretary of state with three paragraphs that praised him as "one of the great public servants of our time." The next day, Bush did appear before cameras in the Roosevelt Room to announce Rice's nomination and the elevation of her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to replace her as national security adviser. Powell was not present. Neither was Cheney.

"WE ARE NOT winning."

Bush and Cheney were meeting with the national security team when they heard Richard Armitage's dour account. Armitage was leaving along with Powell, and he could afford to be blunt in his assessment of the downward spiral in Iraq.

Bush was taken aback. "Are we losing?" he asked.

"Not yet," Armitage said, hardly the answer Bush wanted to hear.

In the days after the election, American forces returned to Fallujah, where they had waged a brief assault on Sunni insurgents in April until being called off. Ever since, the city had become a haven for al-Qaeda, brimming with stockpiles of weapons and laced with an elaborate set of booby traps and improvised bombs awaiting any attackers. Perhaps three thousand Iraqi and foreign insurgents were now estimated to be in the desert city.

About fifteen thousand American and British troops, joined by a contingent of Iraqi forces, launched Operation Phantom Fury on November 8, forcing their way into the hornet's nest while up to 90 percent of the city's 300,000 civilians fled. As in April, the political reaction was explosive. The leading Sunni political party withdrew from the government, and Sunni leaders called for a boycott of national elections scheduled for January. Three relatives of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi were kidnapped in Baghdad and threatened with execution unless the operation was halted. In Fallujah, resistance was fierce, and the house-to-house battle would stretch on for weeks, with 2,175 insurgents reported killed, becoming the bloodiest of the Iraq War.

Amid the violence, Iraq was preparing to put together its first elected government. With Allawi's interim government ready to expire, elections were scheduled for January 30, 2005, to seat a parliament that would govern while a permanent constitution was written. Then elections would be held again in December to pick a full-fledged government that would move Iraq into a new era.

But as fall turned to winter and the vote approached, a debate broke out in Washington and Baghdad about whether to postpone it. With American troops clearing out Sunni militants in Fallujah, leaders of the Sunni minority that had dominated Iraq for decades under Saddam Hussein were calling for a boycott of the elections, fearing they would be marginalized by the newly emergent Shiite majority. Some Bush advisers worried about fueling an insurgency already hijacked by al-Qaeda.

Bush instinctively resisted changing a plan once it was set, and he thought giving in to pressure would be a mistake. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the foremost Shiite cleric, had rejected any talk of delay, and Allawi, also Shiite, had not asked Bush for one. Postponing the vote might be seen as selling out the Shiite majority. So on December 2, Bush sent a message. Asked about the elections during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, he said, "The elections should not be postponed. It's time for the Iraqi citizens to go to the polls. And that's why we are very firm on the January 30th date."

The same logic finally brought him to a resolution on Rumsfeld. Just as he did not want to change the elections under pressure, he decided not to change his defense secretary under pressure. Uncertainty at the Pentagon, he reasoned, could not help. Besides, he was reluctant to push out someone he considered completely loyal. If the strategy in Iraq was not working, Bush thought, it was his own responsibility, not Rumsfeld's. And Bush respected the secretary's blunt forcefulness and savvy understanding of how Washington worked. It wasn't at all clear that someone else could do a better job of riding herd over a uniformed military that often viewed political leadership as a transient obstacle. Bush aides spread news of his decision the next day, December 3.

The same day, he disclosed his nomination of Bernard Kerik to take over the Department of Homeland Security from Tom Ridge, who was stepping down. Bush wanted a hard charger who could tame the bureaucratic monster still trying to absorb twenty-two agencies. When Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, called to recommend Kerik, his friend and former police commissioner, Bush jumped at the idea. He had met Kerik in the rubble of the World Trade Center and was instantly impressed. Kerik was the sort of tough, colorful character who appealed to Bush. A high school dropout and son of a prostitute apparently killed by her pimp, Kerik became an undercover narcotics detective wearing a ponytail and diamond earrings before joining Giuliani's 1993 campaign as a driver. He grew close to Giuliani, who made him corrections commissioner and then police commissioner. Bush later sent him to Iraq to train security forces.

Bush had kept his decision to put Kerik in the cabinet secret, instructing Alberto Gonzales to vet him personally. It did not take much to uncover a trove of disturbing details about Kerik-various ethical scrapes, a civil lawsuit, a bankruptcy, a get-rich-quick board appointment to a stun-gun firm seeking business with homeland security agencies, not to mention criticism of his management while in Iraq. Most damning of all, the best man at his wedding worked for a New Jersey construction company with alleged Mafia ties that was seeking a big New York City contract and had provided Kerik with gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations. Gonzales, facing his own confirmation process for attorney general, grilled Kerik for hours. But in the end, Bush liked Kerik and brushed aside concerns.

It was a revealing miscalculation. In the week after the announcement, a torrent of media stories highlighted Kerik's checkered past, until finally people at Giuliani's firm scouring Kerik's finances discovered he had not paid Social Security taxes for a nanny who apparently was an illegal immigrant. Kerik later said the White House knew about everything that became public except the nanny. So the nanny became the excuse given for pushing Kerik to withdraw on December 10.

The political damage did not last long, but it should have been an alarm bell inside the White House. With reelection behind them, the danger was the sort of hubris that leads a president to believe that a fundamentally flawed nominee could still be pushed through Senate confirmation. Bush privately blamed Giuliani, angry that an ally would foist on him such a manifestly problematic candidate. But the Kerik case was not a situation where the vetting had failed to turn up negative information; to the contrary, it demonstrated that a president at the peak of his power and influence thought he could dismiss such issues and that the rest of Washington would go along.

Bush was not having an easy time finding someone else to become homeland security secretary. Richard Armitage said no. So did Joseph Lieberman, who also turned down the UN ambassadorship. Eventually, Bush and his team settled on Michael Chertoff, who had been the assistant attorney general at the beginning of the administration and was then appointed to a federal appeals court.

AS HE FINISHED the first term, Bush decided to reward three figures who had played important roles. At a lavish East Room ceremony on December 14, he awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to George Tenet, Jerry Bremer, and Tommy Franks. "These three men symbolize the nobility of public service, the good character of our country and the good influence of America on the world," Bush declared before draping the medals around their necks. The decision shocked Washington. The three awardees, critics were quick to point out, had been at the heart of the biggest mistakes of the Iraq War-the false intelligence, the heavy-handed occupation, and a postwar plan more intent on pulling troops out than properly securing the country.

In one sense, it demonstrated a president loyal to his people, determined to recognize their patriotism, dedication, and endless hours in service of their country, and unwilling to blame them for errors. In another sense, it was the act of a president fresh off reelection feeling empowered and a little bit defiant. Let the critics wag. He had political capital. And perhaps there was just a bit of calculation as well, keeping three critical players in the fold. Just a week earlier, Tenet had signed a book contract reportedly worth more than $4 million. Given his bitterness, Bush and Cheney had every reason to worry Tenet might come after them in print. Instead, a couple of months after the medal ceremony, Tenet put the book project on hold for a while.

Just three days later, Bush had another task left over from the first term. On December 17, he signed legislation restructuring the nation's spy agencies, a response to two intelligence breakdowns of epic proportions. The legislation passed Congress only after the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, went to Cheney asking for him to intervene. He agreed. "You won't hear anything about what I'm doing," he told them, "but that's when I'm most effective." The final bill centralized the sixteen intelligence agencies under a single director of national intelligence, but with billions of dollars and bureaucratic control at stake the measure emerged only after the new position was undercut even before it was filled. Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon controlled most intelligence resources, was unwilling to surrender them. How could a cabinet secretary run his department, he asked, if he did not control the spending of the agencies within it? "The result would be a train wreck," he had written in a memo to Bush during the legislative debate, "or you and your successors will have to spend a great deal of time acting as a referee, with some risk to U.S. intelligence capabilities." Cheney backed him and Bush went along, leaving the new intelligence director without the power to control spending.

The trick now was to find someone to take on the new position without the tools it would really require. Armitage said no thanks. Porter Goss, who had taken over as CIA director from Tenet, was having problems managing the agency, making a promotion implausible. Bush aides approached Robert Gates, a former CIA director under the president's father who was now president of Texas A&M University, but he declined. The search would stretch into the New Year.

The year's end brought one final act of cleanup from the first term. On December 30, the Justice Department adopted a new memo defining the legal contours of the terrorist interrogation program to replace the one first written largely by John Yoo and later abandoned by Jack Goldsmith. The new memo was more restrictive but still granted interrogators a lot of leeway and in one footnote effectively declared that what had been done under the old memo was still legal. This was seen as a quiet victory for Cheney and David Addington. Indeed, Yoo later declared that "the differences in the opinions were for appearances' sake. In the real world of interrogation policy nothing had changed."

AS THE NEW YEAR opened, Bush focused on redefining his presidency. One day Dan Bartlett and Nicolle Devenish found him in the Oval Office standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window, and musing about bringing home the troops from Iraq as soon as possible. He knew the public was weary of war. He seemed to be, too.

Bush wanted to use the "freedom speech" he had told Michael Gerson to write for the second inauguration to reorient his administration. His inclination was reinforced when he sat down to leaf through galleys of a book given to him by his friend Tom Bernstein, a former partner in the Texas Rangers. The Case for Democracy was a manifesto by Natan Sharansky, the Soviet refusenik, Israeli politician, and neoconservative favorite. Bush found it so riveting he invited Sharansky to visit. In the Oval Office, the president told Sharansky that he had been struck by a metaphor in the book comparing a tyrannical state to a soldier pointing a gun at a prisoner until his arms finally tire, he lowers the gun, and the captive escapes. Sharansky was surprised by how much Bush had internalized the message. "Not only did he read it, he felt it," Sharansky later recalled. "It says what I believe," Bush later told a group of rabbis.

Bush was encouraged in the weeks that followed when hundreds of thousands of people in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine took to the streets of the capital, Kiev, to protest a stolen election and force the end of a calcified regime. The demonstrators, clad in orange scarves, shirts, and hats, were reprising the popular uprising that occurred after a stolen election in Georgia, another former Soviet republic, just a year earlier, an uprising that succeeded in ousting the government in what came to be called the Rose Revolution. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine had a big impact on the White House. It did not go unnoticed either that the revolutionaries in both cases were pro-Westerners standing up to intimidation from Moscow, which thought Washington was behind the uprisings.

The speech-writing process was interrupted when Gerson, at age forty, suffered a mild heart attack in mid-December and had to be rushed to the hospital. Richard Tubb, the White House physician, had the hospital register Gerson under an assumed name, "John Alexandria," to forestall public attention. After doctors inserted two stents into Gerson's chest, Bush called to check in.

"I'm not calling about the second inaugural," he said lightly. "I'm calling to see how the guy who's working on the second inaugural's doing."

Gerson recovered soon and worked closely with his fellow speechwriter John McConnell to come up with the architecture for the speech. They solicited ideas from conservative thinkers. A three-page memo from John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale University scholar, particularly impressed them. "If there is ever to be a moment within the Bush presidency to think big, this is it," Gaddis wrote, matching Bush's own instincts. "The President has a convincing electoral mandate behind him. He's no longer running for anything. He has as much political capital now as he will ever have-and it can only diminish as the second term proceeds." Gaddis argued that the three clearest presidential statements of America's international aspirations in the twentieth century were Woodrow Wilson's address to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany to "make the world safe for democracy"; Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address proclaiming the universality of freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear; and Ronald Reagan's London speech declaring that Communism would wind up on the "ash heap of history."

Now, Gaddis argued, was a time for Bush "to think like Wilson, Roosevelt and Reagan." So he proposed that the president set the following goal: "that it will be the objective of the United States, working with the United Nations and all other states who will join in this cause, to ensure that by the year 2030-a quarter century from now-there will be no tyrants left, anywhere in the world."

The Bush team invited Gaddis and others to join them at the White House to talk through possible themes for the second term on January 10, 2005. Joining Gerson were Karl Rove, who was taking on a new title as deputy chief of staff; Dan Bartlett, who was moving up to counselor; and Peter Wehner, the strategic initiatives director. In addition to Gaddis, the outsiders included the conservative scholars and writers Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami, and Eliot Cohen. The conversation meandered for a while until there was a pause and Gaddis jumped in.

"Well, I think there ought to be a big idea," said Gaddis, echoing his memo. "I think the president should call for ending tyranny in our time."

No one said anything at first, which Gaddis took as disapproval. Krauthammer thought the idea was "utterly utopian." Cohen considered it "boffo" and wondered why not abolish evil as long as they were at it. But Gerson liked the idea and jotted it down on his notepad.

Bush had talked about freedom and democracy before but never set it out in such striking terms. As Gaddis saw it, to win wider appeal for the notion, the goal should be ending tyranny, not spreading democracy, because spreading democracy smacked of telling people how to live their lives. "Nobody likes tyrants, but not everybody necessarily likes democracy," he said later.

Gerson did not make such a distinction. When he sat down with McConnell, he had a thorough outline with a strong intellectual construct that married Sharansky's notion of promoting democracy with Gaddis's goal of ending tyranny, though without a target date. McConnell thought the outline was really good, and the two writers then managed to script out the entire address in just two or three days. The words "terrorism" and "Iraq" never appeared anywhere in it, nor did Bush want to directly refer to Sep-tember 11. Instead, the president suggested a metaphor, a "prairie fire." The writers thought that was a little too Texas, so it became "a day of fire." Karen Hughes expressed worry that a fire could become a conflagration, but the rest of the team liked the phrase and it stayed in. When it was done, they were pleased. "John Kennedy could have delivered the same speech," McConnell thought. "Word for word."

SUCH SWEEPING RHETORIC might have generated objections from the professional diplomats at the State Department, whose job was to sweat over how foreign governments react to presidential declarations. "That's why you don't show them the speech," Bartlett said.

The speech was kept secret even from top advisers until the end. Colin Powell saw it only a day or so before the inauguration and thought "it was over the top in terms of the democracy piece of it" but "it was already a done deal and nobody was going to listen to a thing I said anyway." On this, as it happened, he and Rumsfeld actually agreed. Rumsfeld suggested Bush focus on the word "freedom," not "democracy," mindful that America had taken two centuries to get as far as it had in building a democratic system. "I worried that it would be counterproductive to talk about imposing democracy, our kind of democracy, on others," he said.

Condoleezza Rice had her reservations as well. She kept thinking about the operational implications. How would you implement that? What would that look like?

"You know," she told Bush gently, "that is kind of a big goal there, end tyranny as we know it."

"Yeah," he said. "But what I really mean, of course, is we have to start toward getting everybody pulling toward this goal of the freedom agenda."

Andy Card was also struck by the idealism of the address. "This is not a speech Dick Cheney would give," he observed.

That much was true. Cheney thought pushing for democracy was fine, but for him it should be in service of the larger goal of securing the United States. Bush thought spreading freedom was the larger goal and believed that it would by definition make America more secure. Cheney was not so sure. If the theory was that repression led to extremism and therefore freedom would make America safer, then, he asked, what would explain all the Pakistani youth willing to blow themselves or others up in the United Kingdom, a country with as much freedom as America? Cheney was skeptical that they were properly diagnosing the drivers behind terrorism. Inside his household, Liz Cheney, still working at the State Department, was a passionate believer in the cause, and she was having an impact on her father. He teased her about being his "left-wing daughter," but thanks in part to her influence he was more open to the president's ideas than, for instance, his friend Rumsfeld.

Either way, Cheney played no real role in framing the second inaugural address, arguably the most important speech of the presidency and the foundational document for their remaining four years in office. As central as Cheney had been in setting the agenda for the first term, he was essentially uninvolved in laying out the road map for the second. He had never been much involved in presidential speeches. They were distributed to his office, and he understood they were important, but in the end they were words. He was more focused on the mechanics of governance.

Besides, he knew that Bush cared about them and did not need his help. "Unless there were some reason, I didn't pay a lot of attention to them," Cheney said. "There wasn't a lot I could contribute in that area, so I didn't spend a lot of time on it." But in this case, the words would lay down an important marker for the remainder of the Bush presidency, and in absenting himself from the process, Cheney had essentially sidelined himself.

As the day approached, speech rehearsals in the family theater were unusually free from stress. Bush was feeling good about the coming ceremony. The speech was short, and there were no policy elements to haggle over. Last-minute issues were minor. Dan Bartlett, for instance, wanted to take out the word "subsistence" because he thought Bush might stumble over it.

Bush laughed and needled him. "Dan, subsistence, subsistence, subsistence," he repeated, mantra-like.

He brushed off the concern. "You watch. I will nail it."

ON JANUARY 20, 2005, the day they would take office for the second and final time, Bush and Cheney awoke to a capital covered by a thin layer of snow and swathed in security the likes of which it had never seen. It was the first wartime inauguration in more than three decades. A hundred square blocks of Washington were closed to traffic as black-clad sharpshooters watched from rooftops, fighter jets and helicopters patrolled overhead, bomb-sniffing dogs searched vehicles, and thirteen thousand soldiers and police officers manned the parade route and other key locations. Bush was surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents so tight that he joked he was surprised his Texas friends "were able to penetrate security."

Bush, now fifty-eight years old, and Cheney, just ten days from his sixty-fourth birthday, were a little grayer and a little heavier, weathered by four years of tumult. Cheney was sworn in by his friend Speaker Dennis Hastert. Then, four minutes before the constitutionally prescribed noon hour, Bush again put his hand on the family Bible and took his oath from Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was leaning on a cane and sounding hoarse in his first public appearance since disclosing that he was battling thyroid cancer.

The twenty-one-minute speech that Michael Gerson and John McConnell had crafted dominated the event, perhaps even more than Bush anticipated. His clarion call for spreading democracy and human rights around the world, while echoing the most memorable words of his predecessors, seemed to go further than any president before in linking principles with policy. No longer was the ideal of democratic aspiration simply the moral cause of the United States. Now it was intrinsically tied to the nation's security.

"We have seen our vulnerability and we have seen its deepest source," Bush declared as Cheney watched. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny-prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder-violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom." He went on, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

It was a bold and sweeping statement, just as Bush had wanted, but the caveats would later be lost alongside the simple declarative nature of his promise. Democratic change, he said, "is not primarily the task of arms," nor did he harbor the illusion that it would happen swiftly; indeed, he said, "the great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations." But he vowed to predicate relations with countries around the world on their treatment of their own people. "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation-the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." To the people of the world he said, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

The ceremony was barely over when Gerson, walking back from the Capitol to sit in the White House parade stands, received a call from Stephen Hadley. Already, he told Gerson, there were countries calling to see what this would mean. It was a good question.

Bush didn't care if the foreign policy priesthood was in a dither.

"Don't back down one bit," he told Hadley.

PART FOUR.