21.

"Who do they think they are? I was reelected too"

Just ten days into his new term, President Bush was already sweating out another election. He worried about turnout, weighed the prospects of different parties, and anticipated policies that might come from a new administration. Most important, he hoped no one would get blown up.

The voters on Bush's mind that January 30 were six thousand miles away in Iraq, which was holding its first national elections since the invasion to install an interim government to transition the country to a constitutional democracy. Bush was anxious. Shortly after waking up, he picked up the phone and asked for the duty officer in the Situation Room to get an update. It was 5:51 a.m. in Washington but eight hours later in Baghdad. Turnout was high, he was told.

The election was a gamble, perhaps the biggest since the invasion itself. The disaffected Sunni minority that dominated Iraq during Saddam Hussein's days had threatened to stay home, and Shiites and Kurds feared violent retaliation if they turned out. For weeks, Bush had been told that holding an election in a war zone without any meaningful reconciliation among the sects could be a disaster. Images of voters being killed at polling places, or the reality of a lopsided Shiite-dominated government, could easily fuel the insurgency. Gloomy CIA warnings had gotten on his nerves so much that at one final briefing Bush clapped his hands sharply, slammed his briefing book shut, and declared defiantly, "We'll see who's right."

Now that the day had arrived, it looked as if it might have been him. Television carried pictures of eager Iraqi voters holding up fingers stained with purple ink indicating they had voted. Lines at polling places stretched out the doors. Eight million people showed up. For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, wrote Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prizewinning correspondent for the Washington Post, "the haggard capital and other parts of Iraq took on the veneer of a festival, as crowds danced, chanted and played soccer in streets secured by thousands of Iraqi and American forces." The day was hardly perfect; the military recorded 299 attacks killing about forty-five people, including an American marine. Just as troubling for the long term, Sunnis largely stayed home. But the spirit of the moment, defying months of relentless violence and centuries of ruthless autocracy, was infectious. For one day at least, something extraordinary seemed to be happening, the most audacious experiment in democracy in the history of the Arab world.

Bush was excited as he picked up the phone. Condoleezza Rice was on the line.

"You have to turn on the TV," she said. "You just have to see this."

"Is it good?" he asked. "Is it a good outcome?"

"It's really amazing. It's amazing to see what those Iraqis are doing."

Bush hoped this would turn the naysayers around, both in Washington and in Baghdad. Pressure had been building as the war dragged on. Just days before the election, Senator Ted Kennedy, the president's erstwhile ally on education, had called for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Kennedy had opposed the war from the start, but the last thing Bush or Cheney wanted was for more Democrats to pick up the refrain about pulling out.

In Iraq, the election was to be the first step in undercutting the insurgency by bringing to power a government with popular support. The interim government to be formed out of the elections would oversee Iraq while a commission wrote a new constitution by August 15. Voters would return to the polls on October 15 to ratify the constitution and then again on December 15 to pick a full-fledged government under the terms of the new national charter.

BUSH'S OPTIMISM ON Iraq fed into a strategic calculation about how to frame his second term and spend that political capital he talked about. In those heady winter days shortly after his inauguration, the president felt he was turning a corner in the war and could use his election victory to return to some of the priorities that had animated his run for the White House in the first place. He set four domestic goals for 2005: remaking Social Security, rewriting the tax code, liberalizing immigration laws, and limiting excessive litigation.

He and Karl Rove decided to hold off on immigration and tort reform for now and named a commission headed by the former senators John Breaux, a Democrat, and Connie Mack, a Republican, to craft a tax code overhaul. So they would start with Social Security. Ever since his failed run for Congress in 1978, Bush had talked about restructuring the retirement program so taxpayers could invest some of their payroll taxes in the markets, giving them as he saw it more control over their own futures. Now he and Rove thought it would be the defining domestic legacy of his second term.

The decision was presented without a real debate among his staff, some of whom, like Dan Bartlett, thought it was a mistake. Bush argued he had a mandate on Social Security, but skeptics on his team worried he was misinterpreting the election. He won, they thought, because voters felt safer with him during dangerous times than with John Kerry. Yet Bush had convinced himself that because he mentioned Social Security in, say, minute forty-nine of a fifty-two-minute speech-after spending the previous forty-eight minutes talking about killing terrorists-that meant the public favored changing the storied entitlement program. Others warned Bush and his advisers. Candida Wolff, now his top lobbyist, told Andy Card that the president had never laid out enough of a detailed plan to claim public support. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a key conservative ally, told a Bush aide they could never get enough Democrats to overcome a Senate filibuster. And Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican whip whose wife, Elaine Chao, served in Bush's cabinet as labor secretary, likewise warned Al Hubbard, the president's economics adviser, it might not get done.

Bush dismissed the warnings, confident he could assert his will over Washington. After all, despite similar pessimism, he pushed through tax cuts, education reform, and Medicare prescription drug coverage during his first term. Now he faced what he thought was an opportunity to refashion the liberal New Deal and Great Society into his conservative Ownership Society. "For the first time in six decades," Peter Wehner, his strategic initiatives director, wrote in a memo, "the Social Security battle is one we can win-and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country." A theme was emerging to define the second term, promoting liberty at home and abroad.

Bush and his advisers decided they needed to "create a crisis mentality" about Social Security, as Scott McClellan later put it, to convince the public to go along. Bush would warn of looming fiscal catastrophe as Americans lived longer and stayed on Social Security longer. To be sure, there was an imbalance in the system. While nearly seventeen workers contributed taxes into the system for every retiree benefiting from it in 1950, there were now just three workers per retiree. By 2018, the system would be paying out more in benefits than it was taking in through payroll taxes every year, and by 2042 it would use up the IOUs it had accumulated over time as presidents and Congresses diverted its surpluses to offset deficit spending.

But Medicare actually faced worse financial problems than Social Security; just that year, its hospital insurance expenditures had overtaken revenues, and were projected to exhaust the program's trust funds by 2019, more than two decades sooner than Social Security would. Moreover, the idea of investing some Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds might plausibly produce more retirement benefits for recipients if all worked as planned, but it would do nothing to shore up the overall health of the program. Indeed, in the short term, it would cost at least $700 billion over ten years in transition costs to keep paying current beneficiaries without the money that would be diverted to personal investment accounts for future beneficiaries.

To actually address Social Security's financial issues would require steps like raising the retirement age, increasing payroll taxes, limiting benefits for the wealthy, slowing the growth of benefits for everyone, or some combination. Bush and his advisers debated whether to send Congress a specific plan embracing such ideas. Joshua Bolten favored a detailed proposal, and Keith Hennessey, the president's national economics adviser, agreed, sending Bush a seven-page memo making the case that such an approach "maximizes the chance of getting a good bill," although it "also has a higher chance of producing an unbreachable partisan split that leads to stalemate." Rove opposed sending Congress anything specific, arguing it would just give Democrats something to shoot at and it would be better to stick to broad principles while letting Congress fill in the blanks as it did with No Child Left Behind. Bush sided with Rove.

The president kicked off his Social Security drive in his State of the Union address on the night of February 2. "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt," Bush said, at which point Democrats in the chamber responded with catcalls. "If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be dramatically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs."

The next morning, Bush flew out of Washington for a barnstorming trip, picking five states that he had won in November and were home to seven Democratic senators he hoped to pressure on Social Security. Cheney, on the other hand, remained out of the picture. On the central domestic initiative for the new term, he was neither a force in the internal debate nor a major surrogate in the fight to rally the public and Congress. He would do whatever he was asked, but he was preserving his energy for other fights.

THE UPLIFTING IMAGES of ink-stained voters from Baghdad were soon joined by scenes from Beirut, where tens of thousands were flooding into the streets demanding change in what looked to be a new "color revolution." On February 14, the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri had been assassinated in a brazen act blamed on the Syrians, who had occupied Lebanon for three decades. Now a popular uprising released stored-up frustrations. The Lebanese were calling it the Cedar Revolution.

The succession of developments gave Bush hope that his freedom agenda could result in tangible change. His first real test would come as he met with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Bush prided himself on their friendship despite their break over Iraq. But if he was serious about challenging "every ruler and every nation" over freedom, he could hardly ignore Putin's crackdown on dissent. Since their first soul-gazing meeting in 2001, Putin had taken over television networks, driven business moguls who challenged him out of the country, purged parliament of Western-oriented parties, and eliminated the election of governors. The arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, had shocked Bush and his team; some, like Condoleezza Rice, knew Khodorkovsky personally. Cheney was following the case and thought it proved Bush should not trust Putin.

When the American and Russian presidents sat down for a long, private discussion in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, on February 24, Bush pressed his points about freedom, and Putin grew defensive. As he often did, Putin tried to make equivalences, justifying his actions by comparing them to situations in the United States.

"You talk about Khodorkovsky, and I talk about Enron," Putin told Bush. "You appoint the Electoral College and I appoint governors. What's the difference?"

At another point, Putin defended his control over media in Russia. "Don't lecture me about the free press," he said, "not after you fired that reporter."

Fired a reporter? "Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?" Bush asked.

Yes, that was what he meant.

Rather, the longtime CBS News journalist, was stepping down as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News after the previous fall's report accusing Bush of not fulfilling National Guard service based on fraudulent documents. Bush explained he had nothing to do with Rather losing his job. "I strongly suggest you not say that in public," he added. "The American people will think you don't understand our system."

But Putin understood his own system. When the two leaders emerged for a joint news conference, a Russian reporter handpicked by the Kremlin challenged Bush on the same grounds Putin had just been citing in private.

"Why don't you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States?" the reporter asked. "About the fact that some journalists have been fired?"

Bush understood instantly that it was a planted question. Putin had proved Bush's point about the lack of free press in Russia.

"People do get fired in American press," he answered. "They don't get fired by the government, however."

The encounter stuck in Bush's craw, and he was still dwelling on it a week later when he filled in Tony Blair during a videoconference on March 1. "It was fairly unpleasant," Bush told him. "It was not hostile. It was like junior high debating." He recounted the Dan Rather exchange. "Seriously, it was a whole series of these juvenile arguments. There was no breakthrough with this guy." Bush was exasperated at the memory. "I sat there for an hour and forty-five minutes or an hour and forty minutes, and it went on and on. At one point, the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America. He was just sarcastic."

Still, events seemed to validate Bush's optimism. Just four days after Bush's encounter with Putin, fresh protests with tens of thousands in Beirut's Martyrs Square forced the Syrian-backed prime minister, Omar Karami, to resign, emboldening the Lebanese to press Syria to finally pull out. On March 5, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria announced a "gradual and organized withdrawal" of fifteen thousand troops from Lebanon, the beginning of the end of a twenty-nine-year occupation.

The resulting images of democracy on the march made for exhilarating days in the White House and temporarily won over some critics. Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader and socialist who branded American marines "enemy forces" when Ronald Reagan sent peacekeepers to his country, credited Bush for the wave of change sweeping the Middle East. "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," he said. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." In the United States, Jon Stewart, the liberal talk show host on Comedy Central who spent most of his time skewering Bush, acknowledged the president might be onto something. "This is the most difficult thing for me because I don't care for the tactics," he said one night, "but I've got to say I've never seen results like this ever in that region." Daniel Schorr, the National Public Radio commentator and frequent Bush critic, said that "he may have had it right." The president's aides were thrilled when Newsweek put the Cedar Revolution on the cover with a similar-sounding secondary headline that said "Where Bush Was Right."

Still, there were plenty of signs of trouble ahead. Iraq remained plagued by violence despite its elections. Lebanon was a cauldron of competing sects. Saudi Arabia permitted voting for some seats on municipal councils but continued to bar women from driving cars, much less casting ballots. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt announced he would allow challengers to run against him, but his government would still control which parties could participate.

Bush made personnel moves intended to advance his democracy agenda. He enlisted Karen Hughes to come back from Texas and serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, asking her to take over the government's moribund campaign to promote American values overseas and wage the battle of ideas with Islamic extremists. And he sent Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, to be president of the World Bank, where he could promote democracy along with development.

The elevation of Rice and the return of Hughes reflected an effort by Bush to cast off some of the unilateralist cowboy image. "The second term is going to be a time of diplomacy," he told aides. Whatever he had to do after September 11 to meet the immediate threat, it was now time to recalibrate. "What I think happened was after 9/11 in terms of the president's personal own philosophy there was probably more of a, maybe a pulling more away from where the president's heart and values really were," Hughes reflected. "And then there was a course correction while Condi was secretary of state. This would have pulled back to where the president really felt in terms of broader engagement and involvement with the world. I think one of the reasons he asked me to do what I did at State was because he wanted somebody close to him to be seen as reaching out to the world on his behalf."

Rice made her new mission clear from the start. She tapped Christopher Hill, a veteran diplomat and protege of Richard Holbrooke, negotiator of the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian War, to take over the North Korea portfolio. "Our nation has won two wars," she told him, with a premature declaration of victory, "and now we need diplomats for this term." Rice signaled the shift in her confirmation hearings too, declaring that "the time for diplomacy is now"-a line that generated a fight within the administration, because it either implied there had been no diplomacy in the first term or suggested a retreat from the president's muscular approach. "What it was basically saying is we're sorry for Iraq," said one Rice adviser. As for Rice herself, said another adviser, "that was essentially a declaration that I'm going to now be the leader of this administration."

Cheney was wary. He recognized that the president was heading in a different direction. For Cheney, the second term was already shaping up as a period of waning influence.

During a meeting with the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, his longtime friend dating back to the Gulf War, Cheney complained that others seemed to be trying to elbow him out of even the Iraq portfolio that he cared so much about.

"Who do they think they are?" he asked. "I was reelected too."

WHILE BUSH STUMPED for his Social Security plan, Cheney remained focused on the issues that stimulated him. First among them was terrorism and the defense of the country.

He was a fixture at Terrorism Wednesdays-which later became Terrorism Tuesdays-when the war cabinet gathered in the White House to talk about threats and where they were headed. These meetings, on top of daily intelligence briefings and other sessions, usually included the chief of staff, national security adviser, homeland security secretary, attorney general, director of national intelligence, CIA director, and later the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Frances Fragos Townsend, who had taken over as the president's homeland security adviser, had tried to recalibrate the White House approach to terrorism by changing the Threat Matrix devised after September 11 into the President's Terrorism Threat Report, shorn of much of the more improbable intelligence so as to present a more realistic picture of actual risks. The idea, she told colleagues, was to "readjust the thermometer."

But Cheney's thermometer ran hot, and he remained as seized by the grim possibilities as he was the day after September 11. While others had moved on to a certain extent, or allowed themselves to begin thinking about a domestic agenda, the vice president stayed locked on target. He was particularly interested in the threat of biological terrorism and what could be done to counter it. While there were medicines for anthrax and other threats, there was a real challenge in distributing them in time. At meeting after meeting, Cheney pushed to hand out medical kits with countermeasures that could be kept at home just in case. But the medicines required prescriptions, and the Food and Drug Administration resisted widespread distribution of drugs without doctor consent.

The vice president was also fighting rearguard actions to protect programs he viewed as critical to the country's security. He was intent on beating back challenges to the warrantless surveillance program and asserting the most expansive position in court fights over detention of terror suspects. He knew challenges were coming from Congress on interrogation methods and understood sentiment was growing within the administration for doing something to close the detention center at Guantnamo. Even Bush had hinted that he wanted to find a way to shutter the prison.

If his mind dwelled on the dark side, as he called it, Cheney did have one domestic assignment from Bush in the early months of 2005. Chief Justice William Rehnquist's health was in obvious decline; he had only just returned to the bench in March after months recovering from thyroid cancer. Since it seemed likely illness would force him to retire before long, the president asked Cheney to launch a clandestine search, in conjunction with Harriet Miers, Bush's former personal attorney from Texas who had taken over for Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel. They wanted a replacement all but ready to go the moment the seat opened up.

While it was unusual to have a nonlawyer head the search, Cheney immediately put together a team. One day in early spring, while flying back to Washington on Air Force Two, Cheney summoned to his cabin Steve Schmidt, his former campaign adviser who was now working as his counselor. On the floor was a large duffel bag filled with binders about possible candidates for the Supreme Court. Cheney pointed to it and told Schmidt to start studying. He wanted strict secrecy. Only a handful of people were to know.

"You're allowed to talk about this with me, with Karl, and with Harriet, and obviously the boss, should he talk to you about it," Cheney instructed. "But figure it out. We haven't done one of these in thirteen years, and there hasn't been one in thirteen years. We think we're going to have an opening. Come up with a plan."

The last time a Republican president filled a Supreme Court vacancy was in 1991, when Bush's father nominated Clarence Thomas. The world had changed dramatically since then. From the start of the administration, Bush and Cheney had anticipated the opportunity to name one or more justices, and the president had tasked the vice president with the project. Cheney and Gonzales had assembled a team of young lawyers to research prospective nominees and write memos about them. In the spring of 2001, Gonzales began meeting with candidates. He went out, for instance, to the Virginia house of J. Michael Luttig, a judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals who was considered one of the most stellar conservatives on the bench.

In the spring of 2005, Cheney and the team pulled out the old material and began culling through it again. This time, with the odds of a vacancy growing, Cheney wanted to meet top candidates personally. One by one, they were secretly brought to the vice president's residence in April and May for informal interviews with Cheney, who was joined by Gonzales, Miers, Rove, and Andy Card.

On the day of his interview, John G. Roberts, a fifty-year-old judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, drove to the vice president's residence forty-five minutes early so as not to be late, then sat in his car until the appointed hour. Ushered into a study, Roberts noticed that most of the books on the shelves were about trout fishing.

"Here, sit in the hot-wired seat," Rove told him with a grin.

Cheney nodded toward Gonzales. "Well, you're the lawyer," he said. "Let's get things started."

Roberts was a leading legal light for Republicans and had first been selected for the appeals court by Bush's father, but his nomination was not acted on by the Senate before the president left office. The younger Bush renominated Roberts, but it took two years to win confirmation, so Roberts had only been on the bench for two years.

With little track record to work from, Gonzales asked Roberts a series of questions to elicit his judicial philosophy. He asked why Roberts had told senators during his 2003 confirmation hearing that he did not label himself a "strict constructionist," the phrase often used by conservatives to signal a judge who does not overinterpret laws or the Constitution. Roberts said the term was not all that meaningful since some liberals considered themselves strict constructionists, an answer that could worry some Republicans but might help him slip through the gauntlet of the confirmation hearings.

Another candidate brought in was Luttig, a protege of Cheney's friend Justice Antonin Scalia. Probably no other person involved in the process that spring had as much experience with the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices as Luttig; as a young government lawyer, he had helped prepare Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, and David Souter for their confirmation hearings, and he had served as a clerk to Scalia and Chief Justice Warren Burger. But this was the first time he was on the receiving end of the questioning.

"Do I have to do this without counsel present?" Luttig joked as he entered the conference room to find a committee waiting for him. "I want my lawyer."

Everyone chuckled. Because he had served as a judge since 1991, Luttig's record as a conservative was clearer, and most of the questions were designed to get a sense of who he was as a person.

But it was not enough to evaluate candidates. The confirmation of Thomas and the failed nomination of Robert H. Bork made clear that Supreme Court selections had become another battleground in the political wars. By filibustering Bush's appointments to lower courts in his first term, Senate Democrats had already demonstrated an appetite for the struggle. Bush was determined to be ready as his father had not been. Rove and Gonzales invited four conservative lawyers to lunch to ask them to coordinate outside interest groups for a confirmation fight: Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to Bush's father; Jay Sekulow, counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a group formed by the televangelist Pat Robertson; Edwin Meese III, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan; and Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society. As the White House geared up for battle, they came to be known as the Four Horsemen.

IN EARLY MAY, Bush flew to Moscow for Victory Day ceremonies in Red Square marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Bush understood how important the celebration was for Vladimir Putin, who enjoyed being at the center of world attention. But Bush was not eager to commemorate an event that condemned half of Europe to Soviet domination for four decades, so he stopped first in Riga, capital of the former Soviet republic of Latvia, to express regret over the postwar division of Europe.

Once in Moscow, Bush kept his criticism to himself, hoping to avoid a repeat of the blowup in Bratislava. But Putin had his own way of making a point. During a visit to the Russian president's home outside Moscow, Putin's massive Labrador bounded up.

"Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner than Barney," Putin said, referring to Bush's Scottish terrier.

Much to Putin's irritation, Bush stopped on the way home in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to celebrate the democratic advances there and signal that he would not accede to Russia's claims to its old sphere of influence. Mikheil Saakashvili, the thirty-seven-year-old revolutionary turned president who had become a favorite of Bush's, went all out and gathered 200,000 people in Tbilisi's Freedom Square to greet the visiting president, an enormous turnout for a country of four million and one of the biggest crowds Bush had seen in his presidency. Bush was invigorated as sunlight bathed the square. "You're making many important contributions to freedom's cause," he told them, "but your most important contribution is your example."

The crowds overwhelmed security checkpoints, and a man in a leather coat who waited hours in the square under the hot sun muttering to himself suddenly hurled a Soviet-made grenade at Bush on the stage. The grenade bounced off a little girl's head and landed sixty-one feet from Bush but did not explode. In the swirl of events, with so many people crowded into the square, neither Bush nor his staff even realized what had happened; it was not until he was on Air Force One flying back to Washington hours later that he learned of the assassination attempt. The attack got relatively little attention because the grenade was initially presumed to be a dud, but authorities later concluded it was live and simply failed to explode because a red plaid cloth wrapped around it prevented the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

RETURNING HOME, BUSH found that his Social Security plan was going nowhere. He had traveled intensively, part of a plan in which he and top administration officials would hold sixty events in sixty days. He had lobbied lawmakers, and even finally embraced measures to slow the growth of benefits except for the poorest Americans in hopes of luring Congress into negotiations. But Democrats had seized on the issue to attack Bush, calculating it was a way of weakening a newly reelected president.

Bush lost Democrats he had collaborated with on tax cuts, like Senator Max Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, who was offended that the president visited his home state of Montana to pressure him. "Whatever we need to do to beat this thing, I'm in," Baucus told Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader. Bush's fellow Republicans were also running for the hills. Dennis Hastert never much cared for the plan and was now willing to let it die. No committee had even produced a written version of legislation, much less voted.

The debate Bush had started was marked by distortion and confusion. The president repeatedly told audiences that Social Security "goes broke" in 2042, which was not exactly the case. In 2042, Social Security would not have enough money to pay out everything recipients had been promised, but it would still have enough to pay out much of it. At the same time, many Democratic opponents misled Americans into thinking the president's plan would force them to put their Social Security money in the stock market. Actually, the plan was entirely voluntary and even then affected only those under fifty-five. Current recipients and near retirees would see no change as a result of the personal investment accounts, and anyone else who thought it was too risky to invest retirement savings in the markets could simply choose not to.

By the time Bush's Social Security tour reached the end of its assigned sixty days, it felt like a past-its-prime Broadway show. Not only was he no closer to success, but he had actually lost ground; support for private accounts had fallen from 58 percent the previous September to 47 percent by May. When he flew to Milwaukee on May 19 for what would amount to the seventy-eighth day of the sixty-day tour, a new poll showed most Americans agreed with his proposed cuts in future benefit increases-until they learned it was Bush's plan. Asked whether they would support trimming the programmed growth of benefits for everyone but the poorest Americans, 53 percent of Americans agreed while 36 percent disagreed. But when the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press changed the question to add the phrase "George W. Bush has proposed," support fell to 45 percent and opposition grew to 43 percent. Bush's own approval rating fell to an anemic 43 percent. For a man who planned to spend political capital after the reelection, the bank account seemed to be draining quickly.

CHENEY CONTINUED TO steer clear of the Social Security campaign, and in May two separate events made it clear that Condoleezza Rice, not the vice president, was the force now driving the administration's international relations.

On the evening of May 13, troops in the central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, a key ally in the war on terror, opened fire on demonstrators protesting poverty and repression in the eastern city of Andijan, killing hundreds of civilians. For Bush, the massacre pitted competing priorities-his vow to hold authoritarian governments accountable for cracking down on dissent versus his need for an airbase to support American troops in Afghanistan. Donald Rumsfeld argued for using American influence to nudge the Uzbeks toward more freedom without escalating into a major conflict. Rice, channeling Bush's freedom agenda, maintained they could not sacrifice the moral high ground.

"The military needs that base," Rumsfeld said. "Our security is at stake."

"Human rights trump security," Rice said.

Rice won when Bush made no effort to rein her in.

The other test in May dealt with the same part of the world. Rice had returned from her first trip to Europe as secretary-the "olive branch tour," as her undersecretary, Nicholas Burns, called it-struck that the one thing her counterparts wanted to talk about was not Iraq but Iran. The Europeans were worried that Bush and Cheney wanted to go after the mullahs of Tehran next. If they wanted to rebuild alliances, Rice told Bush, they should support European efforts to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, even if it meant making concessions.

The gestures she proposed were minor. The United States would drop its opposition to World Trade Organization membership talks for Iran and allow the sale of spare parts for American-made civilian airplanes. But they represented a sea change from the policy of confrontation Cheney had advocated in the first term. After all the talk of going it alone if necessary, Bush would now be letting the British, Germans, and French take the lead in pressuring Iran to give up uranium enrichment. Unlike with Andijan, this time Rice moved policy without a major clash. As she sat in the Oval Office one day describing her plan, even Cheney went along without protest. "That makes sense," he said.

The emergence of Rice underscored the evolution of Bush's partnership with Cheney. "There certainly seemed to be a difference in their relationship," Christine Todd Whitman observed from the outside. "At the very beginning the president did lean on him a lot in foreign policy because that was his area of weakness and Cheney's area of strength. And then I think it got to be a little bit of a habit, it just got to be reflexive. And then he suddenly said wait a minute, I'm the president, I'm not going to cede this much, it's getting out of hand now and I'm going to pull it back a bit."

Around the table in the Situation Room, it was evident just how much more of a role Rice was playing. No longer the facilitator, she was now an advocate, pushing for more diplomacy. She viewed this as a natural next step on the continuum from Bush's first term, which after September 11 was necessarily more hard-edged in its approach, and her influence with the president suddenly made the State Department, marginalized under Colin Powell in the first term, a more potent player, all the more so by having Stephen Hadley, her supremely loyal former deputy, now in her old job at the White House. "The interagency dynamic turned 180 degrees," said Kristen Silverberg, a White House aide who became an assistant secretary of state. "If there's an interagency debate and she had a view, that view was 95 percent of the time going to prevail."

Her elevation did not sit well with everyone. And Rice's increasing focus on her own status sometimes rubbed the wrong way. When traveling with the president, she paid attention to which car she was assigned in the motorcade and which helicopter she would fly in. On overseas trips, Rice sometimes insisted on occupying the chair next to the president typically reserved for the ambassador. She was "very, very focused on where she fits into the hierarchy and the appropriate trappings to reinforce to everyone else how important she is," remembered a White House aide. For an African American woman born into the Jim Crow South, life was always about proving herself. She was no longer staff, she was a principal, and she wanted to make sure she was accorded the respect she deserved. After four years in Cheney's shadow, perhaps that was the only way to assert her newfound authority.

CHENEY SEEMED TO disappear further into the shadows amid Rice's rise. "I've never heard him talk in a meeting, not once," said one White House aide. Frederick Jones, who worked at the National Security Council, considered Cheney as much an idea as a person. "I thought the vice president was a figment of people's imagination," he said, "because I never saw him."

When he did speak publicly, it sometimes came across the wrong way. Talking with CNN's Larry King for an interview aired on Memorial Day, Cheney rejected the conventional Washington gloom and doom about Iraq. "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency," he said. The comment reinforced the sense of a White House out of touch with what was happening on the ground. Even some in the White House were scratching their heads over Cheney's assertion. "Where did that come from?" asked Meghan O'Sullivan, the former Jerry Bremer aide who had become deputy national security adviser overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the briefings provided to Bush and Cheney offered such a conclusion; in fact, killings were on the rise. In May, 1,330 civilian deaths had been logged in Iraq, twice as many as in the same month a year earlier. In the year to date, killings of civilians were up by a third over 2004. As for coalition soldiers, 366 had been killed so far that year, slightly more than the previous year.

Cheney later explained he meant not that the fighting was ending but that the insurgency was a spent force and on the decline. The violence, he thought or hoped, amounted to "final acts of desperation, last efforts to terrorize and destroy." But looking back, Cheney acknowledged, he "was obviously wrong."

Senator Chuck Hagel, a maverick Republican upset about the "last throes" comment, cornered the president after an event.

"I believe you are getting really bubbled in here in the White House on Iraq," he said. Are you getting other viewpoints?

"Well, I kind of leave that to Hadley," Bush answered.

Hagel later went to see Hadley but remained concerned and told a reporter that "the White House is completely disconnected from reality."

Some Bush friends and advisers worried about the same thing. One person close to the family felt Bush did not have the network of contacts his father did from a lifetime in government and therefore the flow of information was too constricted. "It was analog, not digital," he said. Cheney, by contrast, had such a network but allowed himself to see what he wanted to see.

For months, Bush and his team had largely put Iraq to the side when it came to speeches and public events, a conscious attempt not to let the war consume his presidency while also allowing Iraqis symbolically at least to take the lead in their own country. But the Iraqis were not taking the lead; it had taken months for the Iraqis to settle their own differences and finally pick a prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a longtime opponent of Saddam Hussein who had returned from exile in London after the American invasion. The result was a void in leadership both in Washington and in Baghdad, resulting in shrinking public support at home. "No one other than the president was explaining the strategy in Iraq," said Michele Davis, a deputy national security adviser. "Nobody else was echoing him, driving home for the public, here's the path forward."

Finally, prompted by worried advisers, Bush agreed to reengage and give a series of high-profile speeches rallying the country. But aides disagreed on tone. Dan Bartlett, backed by Nicolle Devenish, who had succeeded him as communications director, wanted the president to acknowledge missteps to earn the public's trust; simply claiming that the situation was on the upswing would strain credulity. Karl Rove wanted no retreat, no display of weakness. The opposition would pounce, and Bush would be on the defensive.

On June 28, Bush flew to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to give a prime-time televised speech on the war to an audience of uniformed soldiers. Before going out in front of the cameras, he spent three hours visiting with ninety relatives of slain service members. One of the widows, Crystal Owen, a third-grade teacher, asked the president to wear a metal bracelet memorializing her dead husband, Staff Sergeant Mike Owen. Teary-eyed, Bush agreed.

By the time he went in front of his audience at 8:00 p.m., Bush was emotionally drained. His voice lacked power; his tone was flat and subdued. The soldiers had been told to remain quiet since they were the props for a national address, but the lack of applause that normally greeted Bush in military settings further sapped the energy out of the room as the president tried to thread the needle between Bartlett and Rove.

"Like most Americans," he said, "I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country."

It was, thought some aides, a necessary corrective to Cheney's "last throes."

WITH SOCIAL SECURITY going nowhere, Bush wanted to take on another domestic priority, immigration. Since his days as Texas governor, he had favored a more flexible approach to illegal immigration than many in his party, advocating a guest worker program and a route to legal status for some of the ten million undocumented immigrants in the country. It was both his personal conviction and an obvious political calculation. Two days before his first inauguration, Karl Rove had declared that making inroads among Latino voters was "our mission and our goal."

While Bush knew it would be an uphill challenge he figured a newly reelected president was in the best position to make it happen. But when Rove, Frances Townsend, and another White House aide, Brian Hook, went to Capitol Hill to talk with House Republican leaders on June 29, the reception was chilly. The Republicans wanted to talk about securing the border. Anything that smacked of amnesty was a nonstarter. Tom DeLay, the powerful House majority leader, called that "doing something good for someone who has broken the law," according to a White House summary of the conversation. "There was little support among key House Republicans for a comprehensive approach," Hook recalled. "They didn't want to hear what we had to say on anything other than the border. The message was secure the border first and then we'll talk reform."