Which was another way of saying no way.

22.

"Whacked upside the head"

President Bush and Vice President Cheney were having their weekly lunch on June 30 when Harriet Miers stuck her head into the private dining room off the Oval Office. She told them that Pamela Talkin, the marshal at the Supreme Court, had called to say she would be delivering a sealed envelope to the White House the next morning. Talkin did not say what would be in the envelope or who was sending it. But the natural assumption was that it was a retirement letter from a justice.

The news surprised Bush and Cheney. The court's term had ended three days earlier without any retirements, which were usually announced on the final day. Evidently, one of the justices had opted to wait until after the cameras had left. The obvious candidate, of course, was Chief Justice William Rehnquist given his health. That afternoon, Bush invited Representative Trent Franks, the conservative who had pressed him to appoint anti-abortion justices in exchange for his vote for the Medicare prescription drug program, to meet in his study in the residence.

Bush had the list of acceptable Supreme Court candidates Franks had sent him and they talked over the possibilities. Franks again spoke against Alberto Gonzales and described Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African American conservative just confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as his favorite. Bush thanked him for his input. That night, the president hosted a dinner party for several lawmakers and ambassadors as he tried out a prospective new White House chef. As they dined on squab, Texas Kobe sirloin steak, salad, and a chocolate mango-tango tart, the conversation turned to the Supreme Court. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana told Bush that if there ever were an opening, he should consider his home-state favorite, Judge Edith Brown Clement. Bush responded with interest but said nothing about what he knew was about to happen.

The next morning, shortly after 9:00, Bush got a phone call from Miers. "It's O'Connor," she said.

Miers had called Talkin to ask her to come a little early, and Talkin revealed the letter was not from Rehnquist but from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and as a swing vote its most influential member for a decade.

Bush gathered with Cheney, Miers, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett. O'Connor and not Rehnquist? Bush and Cheney understood that would change the dynamics. If it were Rehnquist, they could nominate a strong conservative without changing the balance of power. Since it was O'Connor, nominating a true conservative would actually shift the court's makeup-and therefore profoundly raise the stakes of the confirmation battle.

The court's Lincoln Town Car carrying Talkin pulled in to the White House driveway at 10:15 a.m. Miers accepted the plain manila envelope, walked it into the Oval Office, and handed it to Bush. "It has been a great privilege, indeed, to have served as a member of the Court for 24 Terms," O'Connor wrote. "I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the Court and its role under our Constitutional structure."

Some later interpreted that language as an implicit slap at Bush from the justice who wrote in the Hamdi case that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President." O'Connor, who had arguably been the critical vote sealing Bush's path to the presidency nearly five years earlier, had grown deeply disenchanted, viewing him as reckless and radical. "What makes this harder," she later told Justice David Souter, "is that it's my party that's destroying the country."

But if Bush harbored any resentment of his own, he kept it to himself. At 10:18 a.m., he picked up the phone to call O'Connor for what ended up being an emotional conversation. She had spent nearly a quarter century on the bench, becoming in the process the most powerful woman in public office in American history. And now it was coming to an end.

"You're one of the great Americans," he told her. Bush could hear her voice breaking with the weight of the moment. "I wish I was there to hug you," he said.

He added a few more words of praise and then concluded in a brotherly tease, "For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good."

Bush invited her to the White House to make the announcement together, but she declined, saying she was heading to the airport to escape the inevitable media frenzy.

WITH O'CONNOR'S DECISION, Bush and Cheney finally set in motion a game plan that had been in the works for more than four years. Lawyers working under Cheney had already produced dossiers on eleven candidates, some extending to a hundred pages summarizing information in the public domain, including biographical sketches, journal articles, and past rulings. Bush took the files with him to read on Air Force One during a trip to Europe a few days later.

But even before he had a chance to sort through his choices, he found one of his favorite confidants under attack. Within hours of the O'Connor announcement, conservatives launched preemptive assaults on Alberto Gonzales, concerned that Bush would find the prospect of nominating the nation's first Hispanic justice too appealing. The conservatives viewed Gonzales as a closet moderate, an assessment that overlooked the fact that he approved legal opinions disregarding the Geneva Conventions, ended the long-standing practice of giving the American Bar Association a chance to review judicial nominees in advance, backed Cheney's court fight over the secrecy of his energy task force, and oversaw a judicial selection process that had produced nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats.

Conservative activists focused on a case from his days on the Texas Supreme Court when he voted to allow a seventeen-year-old girl to consult with a judge before having an abortion instead of her parents. Gonzales wrote that while the decision might conflict with his personal beliefs, he had no choice because of state law. But it was enough to convince critics that he was another David Souter, the justice nominated by Bush's father who became a mainstay of the court's liberal bloc. Some joked that "Gonzales is Spanish for Souter." The Four Horsemen went to the White House to warn Andy Card and other Bush aides against Gonzales. "He doesn't quite fit the mold we are looking for," Leonard Leo told the White House officials delicately. "You can and should do better," Boyden Gray said. They recommended, in order, Judges John Roberts of the D.C. Circuit, Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, and Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit in Denver.

The attacks on Gonzales angered Bush, who finally lashed out while in Denmark on July 6, his fifty-ninth birthday. "I don't like it when a friend gets criticized," he told reporters testily. "I'm loyal to my friends. And all of a sudden this fellow, who is a good public servant and a really fine person, is under fire. And so, do I like it? No, I don't like it at all." In other words, lay off. But that did little to quell the storm, and for all his irritation Bush turned to other candidates as he returned from Europe, unwilling to push ahead with Gonzales without the support of his base.

He also got some unexpectedly public advice from his wife, who was traveling in South Africa on July 12 when she was asked whether a woman should replace O'Connor. "Sure, I would really like for him to name another woman," she said.

The comment stunned many back in the White House, who knew that was not the direction the search was heading and were unaccustomed to the first lady weighing in publicly. Even the president was surprised. "I didn't realize she'd put this advice in the press," he said when reporters asked about it. "She did? Well, good. I'm definitely considering-we're definitely considering people from all walks of life, and I can't wait to hear her advice in person when she gets back."

By this point, Bush had settled on five finalists, including one woman. All were appellate judges interviewed in the spring by Cheney, and three were on the list of the Four Horsemen: Roberts, Luttig, and Alito plus J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit and Edith Brown Clement of the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, the judge recommended to Bush by Senator David Vitter. Aides wanted to bring the candidates for interviews to Camp David to preserve secrecy, but Card knew he could sneak them into the White House without anyone noticing. He had them brought one at a time through the little-used east entrance and taken up to the residence, where they would not be seen even by other presidential aides.

The first was Wilkinson, who came late in the afternoon on July 14. Luttig and Roberts were brought separately the next afternoon. The next day, Bush had lunch with Clement and then interviewed Alito. As was customary, Bush avoided questions about specific legal issues, for fear of looking as if he were applying a litmus test, and instead focused on life questions, both great and trivial, as he tried to get a sense of the candidates. He also gave each a tour of the residence, showing them the Lincoln Bedroom and the Truman Balcony.

Bush asked Wilkinson about his exercise regime. Wilkinson said he ran three and a half miles a day but had ignored his doctor's advice to do more cross-training. Bush gently scolded the judge, warning that he would blow out his knees. With Luttig, a fellow Texan, the president swapped stories about the Lone Star State and then asked if there was anything that would be particularly controversial if he were nominated. Luttig mentioned that his father had been killed in a botched carjacking in 1994 and that the murderer was executed in Texas in 2002. "Why would that be controversial?" Bush asked. Ever since, Luttig explained, some lawyers had tried to disqualify him from death penalty cases. After Luttig left, Roberts was brought in, having just flown in from London, where he was teaching a summer class. Roberts's timing could not have been better; his appeals court in Washington just hours earlier had issued a ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which he had voted to put aside the Geneva Conventions and support Bush's plan for military tribunals developed in response to O'Connor's decision in the Hamdi case. More important, Bush clicked with Roberts, finding the judge's charm, confidence, and intellect appealing.

After interviews the next day with Clement and Alito, the choice came down to Roberts and Luttig. Wilkinson was courtly and impressive but also sixty years old, and Bush wanted someone young enough to serve for decades. Clement was being pushed not just by David Vitter but also by Bush's longtime friend Donald Ensenat, the State Department chief of protocol. As a woman, she would have Laura's support. But Clement did not have the stature among legal conservatives the others did, and she did not impress Bush during their interview. Alito was Miers's choice; she worried that Roberts did not have the record to prove his conservative bona fides. But Alito was a more reserved figure, without Roberts's easy charm or Luttig's forceful intellect. Cheney supported Luttig, the favorite of conservatives. So did Gonzales. During fourteen years on the bench, Luttig had taken strong stands on hot-button issues like abortion and was seen as the next generation of his mentor, Antonin Scalia. He was the one they had been waiting for. But Roberts had the support of many conservative lawyers who had cycled through the White House counsel's office over the past four years as well as Card and Rove. While he had been on the bench for only two years, he had argued before the Supreme Court thirty-nine times and was considered brilliant. And his decision in Hamdan seemed to answer any questions about his judicial viewpoint. Once again, Bush opted against Cheney's choice.

Given that it was O'Connor's seat, it was easier to nominate someone without a record as a full-throated conservative. Roberts might be as conservative as Luttig-indeed, they were close friends, Luttig having served as a groomsman in Roberts's wedding-but Roberts was polished, without Luttig's sharper reputation. At a party in July filled with big-name Washingtonians, someone asked what it meant that O'Connor had retired and not Rehnquist. Boyden Gray and Senator Charles Schumer, a leading Democrat, answered simultaneously, "It probably means Roberts and not Luttig."

Roberts, who had returned to London after his interview, was asked on July 18 to turn around and come back to Washington. That night, Card ran into Clarence Thomas at a state dinner for the prime minister of India. "You're going to love who the president picks," Card reassured him. The next day, Bush excused himself from lunch with the prime minister of Australia to call Roberts at home at 12:35 p.m. and offer the nomination. Bush was exultant, realizing he had made a decision that could shape American jurisprudence for decades. "I just offered the job to a great, smart fifty-year-old lawyer," he told aides.

William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, picked up Roberts and drove him to the White House. Roberts's family later joined him and the president and first lady for dinner in the residence at 7:00 p.m.

"Does your mother know?" Bush asked.

Roberts's wife, Jane, had called and told his mother to watch the news without saying why.

Bush insisted on calling her.

"Hello, Mrs. Roberts? This is the president," he said. "I just wanted to let you know I'm going to be nominating your son tonight."

At 9:00 p.m., Bush and Roberts strode into the East Room for the announcement. Roberts's four-year-old son, Jack, nearly stole the show, dancing around in short pants and mimicking Spider-Man as Bush spoke. "We're gonna have to grab him," Dan Bartlett whispered to Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman who had been tapped to manage the confirmation battle. "If we grab him, he might scream," Gillespie countered. "Right now, he's not on camera." In fact, the cameras caught the antics, but it proved to be a crowd-pleasing moment.

Bush was pleased too. Two nights later, he appeared at a fund-raiser and saw Boyden Gray, who had helped his father make his own Supreme Court nominations.

"Congratulations on Roberts," Gray told him.

"Yes, I spent a lot of time on that," Bush said. "I hope he is twenty years from now the way he is today."

Just as he had reversed what he saw as his father's mistakes on Iraq and taxes, Bush now believed he was exorcising the ghost of the David Souter nomination.

At the Capitol a few days later, he ran into Representative Trent Franks, the conservative who had pressed him to name anti-abortion justices. "I'm glad you liked my appointment," Bush said. "I told you you would, didn't I?" Franks did like the Roberts choice. "Well," Bush added, "I am just getting started."

THE DAYS LEADING up to Bush's vacation proved busy ones. John McCain was introducing legislation to ban torture in terror interrogations. Cheney, through his counsel, David Addington, quietly slipped a veto threat into an administration statement in response. At the same time, six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program reopened in Beijing, again under Cheney's watchful eye. As he and Donald Rumsfeld feared, Uzbekistan retaliated for Condoleezza Rice's tough position on the Andijan massacre by kicking out American troops using the airbase in Khanabad. And Bush decided to defy Senate opposition by using a recess appointment to install John Bolton, a hard-line Cheney ally at the State Department, as ambassador to the United Nations.

Bush had another problem. The CIA leak case had been accelerating that summer. Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, had been jailed for refusing to disclose her sources, while Matthew Cooper of Time reached a last-minute agreement with Karl Rove's lawyers allowing him to testify about their conversations. News reports revealed that Rove had, in fact, talked with Cooper and Robert Novak about Joseph Wilson's wife. Scott McClellan, who had vouched for Rove from the podium, felt as if he had gotten "whacked upside the head with a two-by-four." Rove had lied to him, he felt. Rove did not agree, arguing that he did not leak Valerie Wilson's identity; he simply told the reporter he had heard the same thing.

Rove tried three times to apologize to McClellan, once by phone, once in a note, and again at the morning senior staff meeting in front of their colleagues. But he was careful to say he was sorry for what McClellan was going through, not for misleading him. McClellan was not satisfied, and their rift cast a pall on the West Wing. Bush avoided intervening, and with Rove now at risk the president refined his previous promise to fire anyone "involved" in the leak. "If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," he said at a news conference, a new formula that meant Rove would be pushed out only if charged and convicted.

Happy to escape the tension, Bush boarded Air Force One on August 2 for the flight to Texas. It was his forty-ninth trip to the ranch since taking office, and he planned to stay nearly five weeks, his longest stretch away from the White House. By the time he landed, it would be his 319th day either partially or entirely spent at the ranch, or roughly 20 percent of his presidency. Bush was on track to overtake the most famous presidential vacationer in modern times, Ronald Reagan, who spent 335 days at his ranch in California over eight years; if Bush stayed as long as planned, he would beat Reagan's record with three and a half years remaining in his tenure.

The long getaway touched off the predictable late-night jokes and partisan jibes, reinforcing the impression that Bush took a lackadaisical approach to the world's most important day job. It had not gone unnoticed that Bush spent a month at the ranch before September 11, a period when many believed he should have been more attentive to warning signs. Sensitive to criticism, Bush aides now packed his schedule with plenty of events to foster the image of a "working vacation" at what they styled the "Western White House," right down to a customized "Western White House" seal as a backdrop for press briefings. Bush was slated to leave the ranch at various points to visit seven different states, mostly quick day trips. He would sign energy legislation, host President lvaro Uribe of Colombia, and then bring down Cheney and the war cabinet for consultations.

It was true, though, that the ranch appealed to Bush in a visceral way. Aides noticed him starting to get visibly excited whenever Air Force One approached Texas airspace. He loved the seclusion, the distance from Washington. He loved the mountain bicycle rides over rough terrain and relished exposing aides and reporters to hundred-degree heat. He loved jumping into his pickup truck and driving himself, something the Secret Service allowed only on the ranch. And he loved clearing brush, of which there seemed to be endless supplies.

Aides would be recruited to join the brush clearing and judged on their prowess and endurance in the sweltering heat. Stephen Hadley, the new national security adviser, was teased for showing up in tasseled loafers. (In fact, they were leather shoes with laces, but the loafers legend stuck.) "There was like a hierarchy that was completely different from any other hierarchy," said Steve Atkiss, the president's trip director who traveled regularly with him. "When you start, your job is basically, after someone cuts down a tree, to drag it out of there and put it wherever it is going to go. Then, if you really did good at that, the next level up was you could be in charge of making a pile of all the things that had been dragged over so that it burned well when you lit it on fire. If you were really good at that, you might be able to, one day, get to use a chain saw."

EVEN SO, IT was hard during those sweaty summer afternoons to avoid the grim news coming out of Iraq. Bush started each morning with a blue sheet overnight intelligence report that among other things listed overnight casualties. On his first morning at the ranch, the blue sheet reported a devastating roadside explosion that killed fourteen marines, ten of them from the same Lima Company of reservists from Columbus, Ohio, that had already suffered extensive losses, including six other marines killed in an ambush two days earlier. Reservists represented the heart of the military, men and women who detached from regular jobs to serve limited tours of duty before returning to civilian life. To have one unit of citizen soldiers hit so hard, so fast was numbing. "That really got him," Hadley remembered.

It got many other Americans as well. As Bush brought Cheney and other advisers to the ranch to talk about Iraq, just 38 percent of Americans approved of the president's handling of the war, and more than half said they believed it was a mistake to invade and favored withdrawing some or all troops.

Bush found a reminder of that closer to home. Just three days after he decamped to the ranch, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, arrived in Crawford aboard a bus painted red, white, and blue and emblazoned with the slogan "Impeachment Tour." She was stopped by police as she tried to approach the ranch, then settled in on the side of the dusty road, vowing to stay until Bush met with her.

Sheehan was one of the mothers Bush had met at Fort Lewis with John McCain a year earlier. While she was a critic even then, she had emerged from that meeting talking about Bush's sincerity and faith. Now as she recounted that meeting, she had a harsher recollection, accusing the president of being disrespectful by referring to her as "Mom" and not knowing her son's name. Suddenly the grieving mother turned peace activist outside the president's ranch became a media sensation, an easy story for White House reporters with little other news on slow summer days.

Sheltered in the ranch, Bush talked with aides about what to do. Should he meet with her? There was some sentiment for that, taking on the issue both to show that he was unafraid and to express the pain he felt for those who had lost loved ones. But he opted not to. He had already met with her once and disliked the idea of giving in to what amounted to a public relations stunt, backed in part by liberal donors and consultants. Instead, he sent Hadley and Joe Hagin to meet with her.

He could not have picked two more sympathetic or patient members of his staff, and for forty-five minutes they talked with Sheehan outside the ranch, listening to her grievances about the war and the president she blamed for her son's death.

"Don't let the president say that he needs to send more troops to get killed in order to honor the sacrifice of my son," she told them.

They promised to convey her message to Bush and made one last attempt to convince her of the president's sincerity.

"I know you feel like he doesn't care," Hagin told her, "but I can tell you, I sit in these meetings, and he cares very, very deeply."

"I don't believe you," Sheehan said.

They reported back to Bush. "We don't think we made a lot of progress," Hagin said.

Bush was bothered she would see him as uncaring.

Within days, other activists made the pilgrimage to Crawford as the protest captured the public imagination. Bush aides found photographs of his 2004 meeting with Sheehan that seemed to refute her depiction of it, about a dozen images of him hugging her, holding her hand, or putting an arm around her shoulder. Some wanted to release them to the media to undercut her account. "We are not going to do that," Bush said.

On August 11, Bush met with Cheney and the national security team at the ranch. Appearing in a short-sleeve shirt before reporters, he used the opportunity to respond to Sheehan.

"You know, listen, I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan," he said. "She feels strongly about her position. And she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right to her position. And I've thought long and hard about her position. I've heard her position from others, which is, get out of Iraq now. And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so."

Amid the violence in Iraq and discontent at home, Bush clung to the notion that the political process would turn things around. Iraqi negotiators were scrambling to meet an August 15 deadline for producing a new constitution. But in the four-page note he got every night from his Iraq advisers, Meghan O'Sullivan and Brett McGurk, Bush read on the evening of Au- gust 12 that there was no way the Iraqis would make the deadline.

Sure enough, a few days later, the deadline passed with no agreement. It would be two more weeks before they finally came up with an accord. Whether the agreement would bring the country together remained to be seen.

23.

"This is the end of the presidency"

President Bush pressed his face against the window, staring out at oblivion. As his jet swooped low over New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the president saw an expansive lake where a city used to be. He saw mile after mile of houses turned into so many matchsticks. He saw highways that disappeared into water, a train plucked off its track, a causeway collapsed into rubble. And he saw the next daunting challenge confronting his presidency.

It was August 31, and Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, laying waste to everything in its path. Hundreds of thousands of people were without shelter, electricity, food, or all three. Just two days earlier, Bush thought the coast had dodged a bullet, only to learn otherwise and belatedly cut short his Texas getaway to fly back to Washington to oversee the crisis response. With rescue efforts still under way, he was told it would be too disruptive to land the plane, but his pilots said they could give him a good look from the air.

Colonel Mark Tillman, the chief Air Force One pilot, pushed the plane down from its cruising altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet and skimmed seventeen hundred feet above the ground for a thirty-five-minute inspection of the arc of devastation. From the air, New Orleans appeared washed out, a city with virtually no visible signs of habitation. Bush noticed the Superdome with part of the roof peeled back and saw a neighborhood of houses where water reached up to and even above the roofs. As Bush watched, a Coast Guard helicopter hovered so low that its rotor blades whipped up the water below, apparently conducting a rescue mission. "It's devastating," Bush told aides. "It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

As the jet headed east to the city's outskirts and beyond, Bush saw that some suburban and rural communities were virtually obliterated. Acres of forest were leveled, trees flattened as if stepped on. An amusement park looked like a model in a bathtub, the hills of the roller coaster emerging from the water. Reaching Mississippi, Bush saw the demolished area around the towns of Waveland and Pass Christian, where wooden houses were smashed into scrap lumber. Bush thought it looked like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. "It's totally wiped out," he murmured. Bush pointed to a church still standing while houses around it were destroyed. In Gulfport and Biloxi, the casinos were partially destroyed. Bush said little as he absorbed the enormity of the disaster.

By the time he got back to the White House, Bush had launched himself into crisis management mode, reviewing the massive relief effort being mobilized-navy ships, medical teams, search-and-rescue squads, electrical generators, a mobile hospital, millions of gallons of water. He agreed to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to replace some of the oil and gasoline that would be temporarily cut off and then he marched out to the Rose Garden to reassure the nation that he was back and in charge. "The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented," he said. "But there's no doubt in my mind we're going to succeed."

The I'm-in-charge, we-will-succeed message that worked after the September 11 attacks did not work this time. The image of Bush staring out the window at the damage and the "doubly devastating" quote relayed to the media gave the impression of a leader flying above the fray, dangerously detached from reality on the ground. While he had been briefed repeatedly in the days leading up to the storm, delaying his return to Washington made it look as if he were dithering while New Orleans drowned, touching off a hail of criticism from his adversaries. "He has to get off his mountain bike and back to work," declared Representative Rahm Emanuel, a member of the Democratic leadership.

Now deep in the fifth year of a presidency already marked by one crisis after another, Bush was slow to recognize the scale of the disaster. He and his team were scattered-Bush cutting brush in Texas, Vice President Cheney vacationing in Wyoming, Andy Card celebrating an anniversary in Maine, Condoleezza Rice attending Spamalot on Broadway, and others traveling to Greece for the wedding of Nicolle Devenish and another Bush aide, Mark Wallace. By this point, the team had dealt with so many other crises, they had grown "perhaps a little complacent," as Scott McClellan concluded.

To be sure, Bush had received conflicting information. On August 28, before the hurricane hit land, the president walked over to one of the double-wide trailers at the ranch to join a secure videoconference about the storm, studying maps with his reading glasses as experts gave assessments.

"The forecast we have now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself," Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, told him. But Mayfield emphasized the fluidity of such predictions. "If that track were to deviate just a little bit to the west, it would-it makes all the difference in the world. I do expect there will be some of the levees over top even out here in the western portions here where the airport is."

He added, "I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very grave concern."

Michael Brown, who had succeeded his old college friend Joe Allbaugh as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, put it more starkly. "This is, to put it mildly, the Big One I think," he said.

Bush said little on the call other than to thank everyone for their hard work and promise any help the federal government could offer.

In the days and hours leading up to the hurricane's landfall, he received updates from Brown, Mayfield, and Joe Hagin, who was with him at the ranch. Brown called and implored the president to convince leaders in Louisiana to order a mandatory evacuation. "I can't get it through their heads," Brown told him. As the storm bore down on the coast, Bush called Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco in Louisiana, reaching her on her mobile phone as she was stepping up to a news conference.

"This is going to be a really, really big storm," he told her.

"Yes, Mr. President," Blanco said.

"I'm calling to ask you to call a mandatory evacuation," Bush said.

"Mr. President, we're on our way out to do that," Blanco said.

But while the city had been encouraging residents to leave for days, the mandatory evacuation order came too late for many to get out. On August 29, Bush left the ranch for a previously scheduled trip to Arizona, where he talked about Social Security and presented John McCain with a birthday cake that melted on the airport tarmac, then headed for California, where he was scheduled to participate the next day in a ceremony marking the end of World War II in the Pacific theater.

At first, he was told the hurricane largely skirted New Orleans, but Blanco called him that evening and asked for help. "We're going to need everything you've got," she said.

Bush told her help was on the way, but it was not clear exactly what she was requesting. Reassured by his aides that the government was on the case, Bush headed to bed.

At 5:00 a.m. Pacific time on August 30, he was woken at his San Diego hotel and told the situation was far worse than initially thought. He joined a videoconference, along with Cheney, Card, Brown, and Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary.

"What's the situation?" Bush asked.

"Bad," Brown said. "This was the Big One."

Brown sounded harried as he outlined what he knew. "I can tell you, sir, that 90 percent of the people of New Orleans have been displaced by this event."

Bush was stunned. "Ninety percent?" he asked. "Are you sure?"

The president decided to cut short his vacation. But he went ahead with his day's schedule in California first. While backstage in San Diego, a country music singer gave him a guitar as a gift, and the president gamely strummed it for a moment or two. He did not realize Martha Raddatz of ABC News was backstage at the time, and she caught the all-too-casual moment on film. Exacerbating the lack of urgency, he decided he would stop in Texas for the night before heading back to the White House the next morning.

For the return flight to Washington, Karl Rove suggested flying over New Orleans to demonstrate concern. McClellan and Dan Bartlett opposed the idea. "He's going to be at ten thousand feet, and it's going to make him look out of touch," McClellan complained on a conference call. The idea seemed to go away. But then the next day, the plane began heading toward the Gulf Coast anyway, and McClellan, feeling worn down by the ongoing fight with Rove over the CIA leak, did not protest again. At least don't bring the photographers to the front of the plane, Bartlett urged from Washington. But they were anyway, in keeping with the program Rove had set.

The television coverage that night was brutal, in Bartlett's mind probably the worst of the entire presidency.