Bush told Hughes on the way out to her car that afternoon that he was serious about Cheney, and soon he began telling other top advisers. But there was resistance. Hughes warned that they did not know enough about Cheney, who after all had not been vetted. She favored Tom Ridge. Karl Rove also harbored "real doubts" about Cheney and leaned toward John Danforth, as did Joshua Bolten, the campaign policy director. Matthew Dowd, a campaign strategist, still wanted Connie Mack. During a run with Bush, Mark McKinnon, the media consultant, argued for John McCain. Bush invited Rove, Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh to the Governor's Mansion on July 15 to present the case against Cheney. Gathering in the Austin Library, decorated with portraits of famous Texans, they were joined by Cheney himself.

"Tell me why you think I shouldn't pick Dick Cheney," Bush said to Rove.

Stealing a nervous glimpse at Cheney, Rove gamely plowed ahead.

The strategist mentioned the gamut of objections, from Cheney's health and congressional voting record to oil industry ties and the constitutional residency conflict. Unlike Danforth, Cheney brought no battleground state to the table; Bush would obviously have conservative Wyoming's three electoral votes no matter what, while Missouri looked close. And picking Cheney would look as if he were "falling back on his father's administration for help."

After a half hour, Bush asked Cheney if he had anything to ask Rove. Cheney shook his head. "He'd looked at me impassively the entire time, with a poker face that betrayed not a hint of emotion," Rove recounted. "If he was amused, dismissive, angry, or impressed, I couldn't tell." Rove worried he had made an enemy for life out of someone who was about to become vice president.

But Cheney made the same arguments to Bush and mentioned as well his two drunk-driving convictions and flunking out of Yale. Finally, he emphasized to Bush how conservative he was.

"Dick," Bush said dismissively, "we know that."

"No," Cheney said. "I mean really conservative."

Bush was unbothered. Cheney was his man. He had gotten to know Cheney and grown to appreciate his quiet command. He found it amusing when Cheney told him that a personality test had determined his ideal job would be funeral director. Bush emphasized to advisers that here was someone eminently qualified to step into the presidency, and he liked the fact that Cheney did not seem to actually want it. He had talked with his father about Cheney, although the elder Bush later said it was "absolutely inaccurate" that he drove the choice.

For the younger Bush, Cheney was the lesson from his father's mistakes, the un-Quayle who would never be accused of being a lightweight. And Bush understood that a neophyte on the world stage like himself could use a seasoned veteran like Cheney at his side. Cheney was "the mature person sitting next to him," Dennis Hastert, then the House Speaker, said years later. "He was the most prominent adult in the room," agreed Sean O'Keefe, the former Cheney aide who would go on to work in the White House. Details like Cheney's voting record were less important. "You know, I really wasn't looking that closely at it," Bush later told an ally.

Although he had made up his mind, Bush went through with plans to interview another candidate. If nothing else, it could reinforce that he had made the right choice while also throwing a head fake to the media. Cheney flew to St. Louis to pick up John Danforth and his wife, Sally, and accompany them to Chicago, where he spirited them unseen into a hotel on July 18 to meet with the governor. Bush was intrigued with Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest and former three-term senator known for his probity and sometimes called "St. Jack," both admiringly and derisively.

For three and a half hours, Bush chatted with both Danforths, mainly about personal issues rather than grand political philosophy. For Danforth and his wife, joining the ticket would mean a wholesale change in lifestyle, and that was on the top of their minds. "You'd think it would be about what should happen with taxes or foreign policy or the budget or something global," Danforth recalled a little ruefully. "And it was, well, how often could we get back to St. Louis? Dumb stuff like that." Bush did ask Danforth about the role of faith in his public life, and the former senator demurred. "I just wanted to make clear that I didn't see my religion translating into a political agenda," Danforth said.

Danforth had no idea the Sherpa who had escorted him to the interview had already been secretly tapped for the job ostensibly under discussion. Cheney even sat in on the interview until he was told that Liz was on the phone. Excusing himself, he picked up the line, and Liz told him Pete Williams had called to say that NBC was about to report that he was the pick for vice president. Cheney told Liz to call back and say no decision had been made. That might have been technically true, but reporters were picking up the scent, and the secret could not hold long. Bush left his meeting with Danforth impressed, but he had not changed his mind.

Cheney set about clearing away the underbrush. His longtime friend and aide David Gribbin called another Cheney friend, Joe Meyer, now Wyoming's secretary of state, to ask what had to be done to be a voter in the state; Meyer said a recent state supreme court case had made clear that someone who had a home in the state could declare it his primary residence and register. The deadline for the Republican primaries, though, was fast approaching. So Cheney and his wife made a secret trip on July 21 to Teton County, where their vacation home was located, and went to the courthouse to fill out paperwork. It did not take long for word to leak, setting off a flood of speculation. Caught off guard, Karen Hughes tried to find out what was going on by calling Liz Cheney, who was getting a haircut and had to slip into a utility closet to explain the Twelfth Amendment problem. Rove was eager to preserve surprise for Bush's decision. On July 22, he found a fellow campaign aide often suspected of leaking to the media and lied to him by saying Danforth was the choice. By that evening's network news, Danforth was being reported as a leading candidate.

Cheney, of course, knew better, even if he had not been formally offered the job or formally accepted. He confided in only a few trusted friends and presented himself as the reluctant candidate.

"Look," he said when he reached his friend David Hume Kennerly, who had been the Ford White House photographer. "You're going to hear something tomorrow that Bush has asked me to be his running mate."

Kennerly didn't miss a beat. "You told him no, right?"

"Well, not exactly."

"Not exactly? Let's get this clear-you helped him find his vice president and it's like a bad love story and it turns out to be you?"

"He kind of twisted my arm."

"Oh, bullshit, how's that one going to play?"

They would find out. At 6:22 a.m. on July 25, Bush called Cheney at home and formally offered him the nomination. Cheney, reportedly on the treadmill, accepted. He hung up the phone and turned to Lynne. "Honey, let's sell the house," he said. "I quit my job. We're going back into politics."

The Cheneys flew to Austin for the 2:00 p.m. announcement and then later to Wyoming for a raucous rally in the Natrona County High School gymnasium. During their speeches, both Bush and Cheney referenced Cheney's initial refusal to be considered and suggested their months working on the selection brought them together. "I was impressed by the thoughtful and thorough way he approached his mission, and gradually I realized that the person who was best qualified to be my vice presidential nominee was working by my side," Bush told supporters.

Cheney offered a similar account. "I was deeply involved in running a business, enjoying private life, and I certainly wasn't looking to return to public service," he said. "But I had an experience that changed my mind this spring. As I worked alongside Governor Bush, I heard him talk about his unique vision for our party and for our nation. I saw his sincerity. I watched him make decisions, always firm and always fair. And in the end, I learned how persuasive he can be."

PERSUASIVE OR NOT, it was still unclear why Cheney would want the job. Vice presidents have historically found themselves consigned to political exile, deprived of real power unless the most awful thing happened. John Adams, the first to hold the job, called it "the most insignificant office" ever invented, and John Nance Garner, one of Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidents, called it "not worth a bucket of warm spit," or something even more graphic. Lyndon B. Johnson was so despondent about the job that he stared at the television the morning after the 1960 election palpably depressed at having won the vice presidency and later declared, "I detested every minute of it." Walter F. Mondale called it a job "characterized by ambiguity, disappointment, and even antagonism."

Cheney knew that firsthand. "It is a crappy job," he said. "Jerry Ford often told me that it was the worst eight months of his life." Moreover, Cheney said, "I had been there in the Nixon administration and seen Agnew go down in flames, and I had been on the receiving end of Nelson Rockefeller's frustration, which was wide and deep; he hated the damn job." As the instrument of that frustration, Cheney understood intimately the office's limitations. The only constitutional duty beyond succession is to preside as president of the Senate, casting no votes except in case of ties. As Cheney had made clear with Dan Quayle during the attempted coup in the Philippines, the vice president is not in the chain of command.

But the vice presidency had been expanding since the days of Adams and Garner. Johnson was the first with an office in the White House complex, in the Old Executive Office Building next to the West Wing; John F. Kennedy gave it to him to separate Johnson from his old power base in the Senate, where vice presidents typically had an office. Jimmy Carter moved Mondale into the West Wing itself, finally installing him and every vice president who followed just steps from the Oval Office. Bill Clinton gave Al Gore broad responsibility over policy areas like the environment, Russian-American relations, and reorganizing government. Yet for all that, any vice president's influence is strictly derivative, dependent entirely on the beneficence of the president.

So why did Cheney accept? For all of his skepticism, the vice presidency ultimately appealed to him because it offered the prospect of shaping policy without having to endure the hassles required to be elected president. Cheney once said he had no appetite to run for president, but he would happily accept if someone wanted to simply offer it to him by fiat. The more Bush talked about making Cheney a real partner, the closer he came to such a scenario. Bush could be the front man, the baby kisser and rope-line worker, while Cheney focused on what he cared about most. Cheney surely understood that a president with as little knowledge or interest in details as Bush would leave him plenty of room to maneuver. "I was impressed and believed that he was serious," Cheney said years later, "that he was looking for somebody of consequence to do the job and he wasn't just worried about the Electoral College."

Cheney was also a competitive man, despite his quiet manner, and he had been turned off by what he saw of Clinton's White House. "The idea of not wearing a tie in the Oval Office and running around in jeans and just the whole style thing and Clinton's policies struck him as wrong," said Pete Williams. "I think he felt so viscerally that Clinton was pushing things in the wrong direction, that there was a part of him that said, this has got to be fixed. There was a part of him that's a little bit of the fire horse, and the bell rang."

Answering the bell, though, would require adjustment. It had been twelve years since Cheney last faced voters, twenty-two since his only competitive race, and that was a Republican primary in Wyoming, far from the harsh glare of the modern political-media culture. A decade earlier, while he was defense secretary, activists had threatened to out Mary if Cheney did not end the ban on gays and lesbians serving in uniform. He had ignored it. But there would be no ignoring such issues now.

On the day of the announcement, the new environment confronted him right away. Just after the speeches, Howard Fineman of Newsweek approached Mary with questions. She rebuffed him. Then he spoke with Cheney.

"Your daughter's sexual orientation and views on same-sex marriage have become a topic in the campaign," Fineman remembered saying. "What do you say to those who point out the conflict between her views and those of the party and the campaign?"

Cheney brushed it off. It was nobody's business, he said. "He did not snap at me or snarl," Fineman recalled. "He was grim as usual, but subdued. More sad and smoldering about politics and the world than visibly or volubly angry."

Overhearing the exchange, Bush leaned over and took it upon himself to answer the question Cheney did not want to. "The secretary loves all of his family very deeply," Bush volunteered.

The issue came up within the campaign operation when Cheney decided Mary would travel as his campaign aide. Two Bush advisers, Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer, were concerned it would invite media attention. The two agreed to talk with Cheney and rehearsed their approach. The next day they got into a car with the future vice president heading to the site of the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, where the nominations would be ratified. Bartlett expected Fleischer to raise the issue, but when the moment came, he was reading a newspaper and not paying attention. So Bartlett, all of twenty-nine years old, jumped in.

"There is one issue we need to talk about," he told Cheney. "We heard that maybe your daughter was going to be on the campaign trail with you. Perfectly fine, but I just want you to know that the press is really going to focus on this. They're going to maybe intrude more into her life than you would be prepared for."

Bartlett paused and noticed what he thought were darts shooting from Lynne Cheney. Nobody said anything for a minute. Bartlett looked to Fleischer for help, but he kept quiet too.

"Well," Bartlett ventured again, "I just wanted to put this on the table for you."

Cheney looked at him with impassive eyes. "We won't be talking about my daughter," he said flatly, shutting down the discussion.

"Okay," Bartlett said, retreating quickly. "Thank you very much."

No sooner had his selection been announced than Cheney and Lynne sat down with two speechwriters, John McConnell and Matthew Scully, to talk about his convention speech. It was Lynne who came up with the most cutting line. Recalling Al Gore's "it's time for them to go" riff from the 1992 Democratic convention, she suggested turning it against him. The speechwriters incorporated that into their draft.

As the planning for the convention advanced, Bush advisers concluded the governor's speech was too harsh and put the toughest lines in Cheney's instead. It was the time-honored role of the vice presidential candidate to be the attack dog. Cheney had no problem with that. But Andy Card, a former lieutenant for the elder Bush who had been tapped to run the convention, decided Cheney's speech was too negative as well and sent edits toning it down. Cheney ignored them and never got back to Card. When he got up before the cheering delegates at Philadelphia's First Union Center on the night of August 2, Cheney simply delivered the original speech as written, word for word. "I came up and gave them a little bit of red meat," he said later.

To raucous applause, Cheney argued that the Clinton-Gore administration had "done nothing to help children" in mediocre schools, "never once" offered a serious plan to save Social Security, and starved the military while demanding more of it than ever. To the armed forces, Cheney said, "I can promise them now help is on the way." He dismissed the Democratic team as full of "lectures and legalisms and carefully worded denials" and did his best, without explicitly mentioning Monica Lewinsky or Whitewater, to tie Clinton's scandals to Gore. "As the man from Hope goes home to New York, Mr. Gore tries to separate himself from his leader's shadow," Cheney said. "But somehow we will never see one without thinking of the other. Does anyone, Republican or Democrat, seriously believe that under Mr. Gore the next four years would be any different from the last eight?" Three times he used the line "It is time for them to go." Lynne beamed from the audience.

It was Bush's turn the next night, August 3. He accepted the nomination with a host of Bushes on hand to witness his triumph, most notably, of course, the father who had stood there eight years before. Even with his speech toned down, the new nominee offered a harsh indictment, arguing that the outgoing administration had "coasted through prosperity" and wasted opportunities. "Our current president embodied the potential of a generation," Bush declared. "So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose." Seeking to distance himself from Clinton and Newt Gingrich at the same time, Bush promised a new "responsibility era" and touted "compassionate conservatism." He noted, "I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years," and he vowed to "change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect."

It was an effective speech. But in a time of peace and prosperity, it was, as Scully put it, "just straining for big themes." If Bush and Cheney won, what would this presidency be about?

4.

"We wrapped Bill Clinton around his neck"

Governor Bush," the CIA man said, "if you are elected president, there will be a major terrorist attack during your time in office."

With the nominations in hand, life around George W. Bush and Dick Cheney began to change. Their security details increased, their perimeters expanded, the advance operations became more elaborate, the events bigger. And the prospect of actually becoming president and vice president loomed ever larger.

Within days, Bush welcomed to Crawford a team of CIA briefers sent by Bill Clinton to give him a classified tour of the world. What the briefers expected to be a one-hour session stretched into four hours as Bush peppered them with questions. Bush jumped in so assertively and proved so interactive that after ten minutes the briefers put aside their binder and engaged in an expansive conversation with the candidate about trouble spots around the globe.

For Bush, this was a tutorial like no other. He proved familiar with Latin America and the Balkans and was especially interested in Russia and China, but he had little of his father's grasp of the world and had traveled little himself. "There were some issues on which he was quite well briefed and others on which he wasn't, and he used the occasion to get smart about things that he didn't know a lot about," recalled John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director who led the briefing.

At one point, terrorism came up, and McLaughlin and his team had brought charts and graphs, as well as a briefcase that was set down in front of Bush and opened to expose a timing device with red digits counting down as if it were a chemical bomb. McLaughlin offered the prediction that terrorism would mark his presidency. After all, during Clinton's tenure, radicals had bombed the World Trade Center in New York, a housing complex full of American military personnel in Saudi Arabia, and two American embassies in East Africa, and intelligence agencies had broken up a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. The nation's intelligence agencies were hunting down a shadowy Islamic terrorist group called al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. Bush was attentive, though no more than on other topics like Russia. "He absorbed it and was interested and took it on board," McLaughlin said.

None of that played out on the campaign trail, where the issues were domestic. Bush and his team recognized his challenge of taking on Al Gore in a prosperous moment. Stuart Stevens, a consultant to the campaign, jokingly suggested the slogan "Times Have Never Been Better, Vote for Change." But Bush had little respect for his opponent, privately dismissing Gore as "pathologically a liar," and he anticipated an abrasive fall campaign. "I may have to get a little rough for a while," he told Doug Wead, "but that is what the old man had to do with Dukakis, remember?" While the elder George Bush had assailed Michael Dukakis on prison furloughs and his supposed lack of zeal for the Pledge of Allegiance, the younger Bush's strategy was simple. "What we did with Gore was we wrapped Bill Clinton around his neck and never talked about one without talking about the other," Cheney said later. Gore played into that by viewing the scandal-tarred Clinton as an albatross and keeping him on the sidelines. Bush baited the president to come out of hiding. "If he decides he can't help himself and gets out there and starts campaigning against me, the Shadow returns," Bush said.

For Cheney, the return to the stump proved rocky. The basics eluded him. Bush aides watched him walking with Lynne to a rally and thought he needed to learn how to hold her hand. Cheney cared more about the issues than atmospherics and spent hours boning up. "The binders came back fully consumed," remembered Stuart Holliday, an aide dispatched by the Austin headquarters to staff the new candidate. But it would take a while to find his best role on the trail, and with Cheney never vetted the way he had vetted other candidates, the campaign was ill-equipped to respond when Democrats attacked his conservative votes in Congress. "The whole thing was a surprise to him," said his friend Alan Simpson. "He hadn't prepared for it at all."

Heading out on the trail, Cheney was sent to South Florida, where he visited a couple of schools on August 31, only to realize he was delivering a speech on school bond financing to an audience of grade schoolers. He thought it was a fiasco and resolved to take control of his own schedule. "He basically sort of laid down the law to a certain degree and became, I think, an active partner in the overall process of determining what states, what events, what messages, and so forth," said Holliday. As the campaign progressed, Austin eventually got the message-no reading to children, not a lot of rope lines, no cocktail parties, no tailgating at college football games. Aides in Austin joked that they would just make a cardboard cutout of Cheney and send it on the trail.

Cheney joined up with Bush a few days later for a Labor Day event in Naperville, Illinois, on September 4. Waving to a boisterous crowd, Bush in a casual blue shirt turned to Cheney in a blazer and nodded toward the press section.

"There's Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times," Bush said.

"Oh yeah," Cheney responded. "He is, big time."

Neither realized that the microphones picked up the remarks; the audience could not hear, but journalists plugged into the sound system could and quickly asked whether Bush was living up to his vow of civility. Back aboard the campaign plane, Cheney's staff debated whether to smooth it over by inviting Clymer to the front for a drink with the candidate. Cheney had no interest. But from then on, his staff delighted in playing the Peter Gabriel song "Big Time" at campaign rallies.

Bush had been preparing for weeks to debate Gore, tapping Senator Judd Gregg to play the Democratic candidate in rehearsals in Kennebunkport and Crawford. Gregg spent hundreds of hours studying Gore tapes and transcripts. He badgered and interrupted and "was careful to break almost every rule of the debate agreement," as Stuart Stevens, the consultant playing the moderator, put it, just as he presumed Gore would. "There was no quarter given in these debate preps," Gregg said. "I was not deferential at all." But they were relatively loose affairs, with Bush not going through a full ninety-minute evening rehearsal until just days before the first debate. When he did, he was "flat," Stevens recalled. Bush looked as tired as anyone had seen him. Mark McKinnon fretted. "Lambs to the slaughter," he told Stevens.

Afraid of protesters in a liberal state, Karl Rove decided Bush should not fly to Boston the night before the first debate and should instead stay over in West Virginia. But when the governor and his entourage arrived at the hotel and found a table in the restaurant, the kitchen was empty of everything but chicken, and the staff was overwhelmed, making the increasingly impatient candidate wait an hour for his food. Don Evans, his friend and campaign chairman, kept going back to the kitchen to prod the staff, passing out $20 bills to speed up the service. Already irritated, Bush headed to his room to lie down, only to hear train whistles and barge horns outside the window all night.

Not well rested, he flew to Boston the next day, October 3. To avoid protesters, Bush's staff arranged for him to arrive at the University of Massachusetts campus by boat. In the holding room beforehand, he called Kirbyjon Caldwell, a minister from Texas, and prayed with him over the phone, beginning what would become a tradition before big events. He headed onstage and shook hands with Gore, who squeezed hard as if trying to intimidate him. Bush took his watch off and placed it on the podium rather than repeat his father's mistake from eight years earlier, when he was caught glancing at his timepiece in the middle of a debate.

Bush used the opportunity to lay out his vision of a humbler America stepping more gingerly on the world stage. "He believes in nation building," Bush said of Gore. "I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place." Overall, he added, "I believe we're overextended in too many places."

In the end, though, as often happens in modern presidential debates, the words mattered less than the pictures. Gore, his makeup caked on too thick, was caught reacting scornfully to Bush's comments in split-screen images. Gore rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at Bush's answers, making him look haughty to many viewers. Bush won mainly by keeping his sighs to himself.

NEXT UP WAS Cheney, who had not faced an opponent in years and now confronted Senator Joseph Lieberman, a confident and skilled debater. Cheney watched Lieberman's debates from his 1988 Senate race and studied thick briefing books on plane rides. By late September, he had retreated to his home in Wyoming, where Liz ran a more rigorous preparation than Bush's.

They practiced at a local theater with overstuffed red velvet seats that "felt like a cross between a frontier opera house and a bordello," as Stuart Stevens remembered it. After drawing too much attention, they retreated to the house, where they conducted a mock debate each night at a round table covered by a bedsheet against Representative Rob Portman of Ohio playing Lieberman. Portman needled Cheney about Halliburton and other issues, getting under the candidate's skin. The advisers tutored him on making his answers more digestible. "His tendency is to give a very long, substantive, heavy answer," Liz said. "We'd be like, 'Let's think about how we can personalize that.' " Liz also learned to keep her mother out of Cheney's line of sight because "she would throw him off."

Cheney cleared his mind the day before the debate by taking Portman fly-fishing and telling stories about the Nixon-Ford days. Then he flew to Kentucky the morning of October 5 and called Matthew Dowd, Bush's campaign strategist. How should he handle Lieberman? he asked. "He was getting all kinds of advice to be an attack dog," Dowd recalled. Dowd thought that would backfire and urged Cheney to resist what seemed to be pressure from his family.

"Whatever you want to do, Mr. Cheney," Dowd said, "but if you do that, you are making a huge mistake."

Cheney paused for a moment before finally saying, "Okay."

Lieberman came to the same conclusion. His staff had drafted attack lines against Cheney, including a hit on his growing wealth at Halliburton. Lieberman should note that most people were better off than eight years earlier and "I think that probably includes you too," according to a campaign memo. In years to come, though, Lieberman said he was later urged to stand down. "It is a loser, don't attack him," Lieberman remembered his political adviser, Stan Greenberg, telling him. Greenberg and his colleague, Robert Shrum, recalled it differently, saying they urged the candidate to go after Cheney vigorously and were surprised when he did not.

The two candidates met onstage at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, sitting at a table as if on a Sunday talk show, a format Cheney had insisted on. The seating arrangement had the effect of turning the showdown into a civil conversation. Indeed, the only time Lieberman turned to one of the scripted attack lines, it backfired.

Lieberman said most Americans were better off. "I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago too," he added.

"I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it," Cheney responded, provoking laughter in the hall.

Lieberman, realizing Cheney had gotten the better of him, tried humor too. "I can see my wife and I think she's thinking, 'Gee, I wish he would go out into the private sector.' "

Cheney took the opening. "Well, I'm going to try to help you do that, Joe," he said.

Of course, when Cheney said the government had nothing to do with his financial success, that conveniently overlooked the $763 million in federal contracts Halliburton received in 2000 alone. But Cheney's dry wit turned Lieberman's attack back on him. Cheney was deemed to have won, frustrating Democrats who considered it a missed opportunity. Both Cheney and Lieberman for years would take pride in the discussion. "The debate was actually very high-toned, I thought," Lieberman said. "I was proud of it, civil debate."

Bush emerged unscathed from his second debate with Gore on Octo- ber 11 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then set about preparing for the final debate with a town-hall-style format, this time with Portman serving as his practice opponent. Stools were set up in the Governor's Mansion to simulate the setting. Portman, who had been studying Gore's primary debates with Bill Bradley, surprised Bush by standing up in the middle of a rehearsal and walking over into the governor's space. Bush reacted playfully, leaning over and kissing Portman on the head, but he scoffed at the idea that Gore would try it.

"He's not going to do that," Bush said. "It's ridiculous."

"You bet he will," Portman responded. "He's going to try to intimidate you. Gore did it to Bradley."

Sure enough, at Washington University in St. Louis on October 17, Gore got up from his stool in the middle of a Bush answer on health care, walked over, and stood right next to him. Bush, looking surprised, gave Gore a quick nod and then returned to his answer. It was just the right dismissive reaction, and once again a debate dominated by body language favored Bush. "He put the move on me," Bush exclaimed to aides afterward.

By the end of October, Bush was feeling confident. He was ahead in the polls and saw no obstacle to victory. "I'll be the most surprised man in America if I don't win," he told Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. His mother was not so sure. " 'Miss Pessimistic' (me) really doesn't think he is going to win as we are at peace and because we have a strong economy," Barbara Bush wrote in her diary on October 31.

She had reason to worry. Two days later, on November 2, with just five days until the election, Karen Hughes rushed into Bush's room to tell him a reporter had found out about his drunk-driving arrest in Maine. "His face didn't change, but his body slumped a little," Hughes recalled. Bush had kept the arrest secret from all but a handful of trusted advisers and ignored their advice to disclose it earlier in his campaign autobiography, where it would have been received in the context of a redemption narrative. He rationalized by saying he did not want his teenage daughters to know. He likewise refused to say whether he had tried cocaine. At one point during the campaign, his press aide Scott McClellan overheard him telling someone on the phone, "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not," which McClellan considered an act of elaborate self-deception.

The report on Bush's arrest broke as a huge scandal days before the vote. Without telling anyone, Matthew Dowd commissioned last-minute polls in three states and found that Bush's lead had disappeared in Florida and Ohio, while Michigan was now out of reach. Swing voters might not have cared, but social conservatives were disturbed. "This thing has gone from probably-win to I-have-no-idea," Dowd told Dan Bartlett as they went golfing on the morning of Election Day. Karl Rove would later calculate that four million evangelical voters stayed home. Stuart Stevens concluded the story might have shifted enough votes to cost Bush the states of New Mexico, Iowa, Oregon, and Maine-and almost Florida.

Still, when the campaign's lawyers got together for brunch in Austin just before the election, they chewed over all sorts of scenarios-all but one. "The one thing on which there was absolute unanimity," recalled Michael Toner, the campaign's general counsel, "was we didn't have to worry about a recount."

BUSH AND CHENEY organized separate dinners for separate entourages on election night, November 7, expecting to join together late in the evening to declare victory. The campaign was confident enough to distribute a schedule showing that Bush would deliver his victory speech at precisely 10:39 p.m. Texas time, but the candidate himself was not so sure.

Bush and his family went to dinner at the Shoreline Grill, a restaurant in Austin. "It could be a long night," he told his parents on the way.

At the restaurant, tables were set and appetizers ready, but Bush kept checking out the television in the corner. At 6:48 p.m. in Texas, or 7:48 p.m. back east, the networks began calling Florida for Gore. Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida governor, were irritated; polls were still open for another twelve minutes in the conservative panhandle, where Bush had strong support. More important, Florida was critical to a Republican majority in the Electoral College.

Jeb Bush had tears in his eyes as he hugged his brother apologetically. "I felt like I had let him down," Jeb told his sister, Doro, afterward.

Already antsy, the candidate grew more agitated when the restaurant's television broke. "I'm not going to stay around," he whispered to his father. "I want to go back to the mansion."

Skipping dinner, Bush, his wife, and his parents headed out. As the car made its way through the dark, rainy night, the ride struck Bush as ominously quiet.

At the mansion, the family headed upstairs and flipped on the television. Rove, who had confidently predicted that Bush and Cheney would win with 320 electoral votes and a four- to seven-point margin in the popular vote, examined and reexamined the numbers and concluded the networks had gotten it wrong in Florida. He called to berate network executives, and eventually they began to back off.

Jeb Bush, in touch with officials back in Florida, realized his state was still in play and rushed over to the Governor's Mansion, bounding up the stairs.

"Back from the ashes!" he shouted.

At 8:54 p.m. in Texas (9:54 p.m. in the East), CNN and CBS News retracted the Florida call but were not yet ready to put the state in Bush's column.

In a suite across town at the Four Seasons Hotel, Cheney was following the same roller-coaster results with an electoral map of the country he clipped out of the newspaper and a yellow legal pad on which he was scratching out tallies. Joining him were friends and advisers like James Baker, Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Simpson, Nick Brady, Scooter Libby, and David Addington. Bush called Cheney at one point to declare, "We're still alive."

Bush's family crowded into the relatively cramped upstairs of the Governor's Mansion. Laura Bush made coffee in the kitchen and kept loading the dishwasher ("when she's stressed, she cleans," according to her daughter Jenna). Barbara Bush sat on a couch stitching a needlepoint canvas and listening through earphones to an audio version of a Sandra Brown novel. The elder George Bush was nervous and, in Barbara's eyes, "suddenly looked old, tired, and so worried." Another person who talked with the former president that night recalled him popping antacids, tormented by suspense.