"MR. PRESIDENT, I definitely need more troops." Blanco was on the phone and desperate for help. She had called the White House that Wednesday looking for Bush, only to be shuffled off to one aide after another. Finally, she and the president connected, and she asked for forty thousand troops. "I just ballparked it; I just did that in my head," she said later.

Without the military, the federal government was ill-equipped to respond to a disaster of this scope. FEMA did not own a single fire truck, boat, or helicopter; it was mainly a check-writing, contracting agency that financed frontline rescue work by states and localities in the days after an initial crisis. But Louisiana and New Orleans leaders were overwhelmed and as far as Bush could tell unable to cope without extraordinary help. On one videoconference, Michael Brown told Bush that Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans was behaving like a "crack head" and that Blanco was out of her league.

Bush was fully engaged at this point in leading the government's response. But having pushed every legal boundary in the wake of Septem- ber 11 to respond to what he saw as the threat to the country, four years later he now went in the other direction, allowing himself to be stymied by legal arguments about the extent of his powers. A nineteenth-century law called the Posse Comitatus Act barred the federal military from exercising police powers on American soil, and Bush was told by advisers that the only way to circumvent that would be to invoke another antiquated statute known as the Insurrection Act or have a state government agree to hand over control of the National Guard.

Donald Rumsfeld resisted sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, arguing that Americans might bristle at seeing soldiers in the streets.

Rice, back from New York, retorted, "They'll welcome the sight of the military."

Some White House officials were angry enough that they thought the president should tell Rumsfeld to issue deployment orders by noon or resign.

Rumsfeld was backed up by Lieutenant General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard bureau, who argued that federalizing the effort would be "overreach constitutionally" and "a colossal mistake" logistically; instead of helping, he told Bush, such a move would actually hinder the operations of the thousands of guardsmen already streaming into the region from states around the country.

Bush was aggravated but did not take on Rumsfeld. Nor did he call on the carpet Brown, the FEMA director whose background as stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association did little to prepare him for managing a national catastrophe. Brown at one point on television did not even realize thousands of people had taken refuge at the convention center in New Orleans without food or water. Bush watched with exasperation as rescue efforts faltered. "What the hell is taking so long?" he asked. "Why can't we get these people out of the Superdome?" If the media could get to the convention center, Bush railed, how come rescue workers couldn't? A volatile situation was made worse by false media reports about gunmen, scaring rescue workers away from the Superdome and other locations.

Bush decided to fly to the region on September 2, this time landing to examine the damage up close. As he prepared to leave the White House to board Marine One, Bartlett suggested he express his impatience in front of the cameras waiting on the South Lawn, reasoning that the public wanted to see him as frustrated as they were.

"Tell 'em," Bartlett said.

Bush agreed. "The results are not acceptable," he told reporters sternly, before boarding the helicopter.

Despite oft-repeated denials, Bush did, in fact, read newspapers, although he tended not to watch much television news. To make sure he fully understood just how bad the situation was, Bartlett put together a DVD of newscasts for the president to watch on the flight down to the region to give him a sense of what the rest of the country was seeing-and how much more dire the situation was than it seemed through official channels. Bush was shocked and angry.

At one point, Bush saw a fire burning on the video.

"What's that?" he snapped.

Some isolated fires had broken out along the coast, Michael Chertoff told him.

"Put the fire out now!" Bush said. "I want that fire out."

When he reached Mobile, Alabama, Bush doffed his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves, and met privately with regional leaders. Walking to an airport hangar, Governor Bob Riley of Alabama praised Brown and the federal workers.

"Your guys, Mike Brown, everybody is doing a heck of a job," Riley told Bush.

Evidently, the words stuck in Bush's head, because when he went back out in front of cameras a few minutes later, he repeated them.

"Brownie," he said, "you're doing a heck of a job."

Bush had gone from "not acceptable" to "heck of a job" in just a few hours. Just as he deferred to his generals in Iraq, Bush by inclination was not ready to question how his people on the front lines on the Gulf Coast were performing. But he cemented an impression of disconnect with a gaffe that would harden into one of the worst moments of his presidency.

Bush then flew to New Orleans, where he met with local leaders aboard Air Force One parked on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Mayor Nagin, exhausted and sweaty, used the plane's shower. The conversation that ensued was frenzied and unconstructive. Senator Mary Landrieu was distraught, talking through tears and seeming in emotional meltdown.

Bush tired of her. "Would you please be quiet?" he said sharply.

Nagin was frazzled too and "near nervous breakdown," Blanco thought. He lost his temper and slammed his hand down on the conference table, demanding that the president and the governor coordinate. Bush tried to cut through the emotion and figure out the chain of command.

"Who's in charge of the city?" he asked.

Blanco looked over at Nagin but he pointed to her. "The governor's in charge," he said.

Bush was flummoxed.

"Somebody's got to take charge of this," Nagin said.

"I'd like to have a private meeting with the governor," Bush said. Turning to Blanco, he said, "Would you come with me into my office?"

They retreated to his office on the plane, just the two of them and Joe Hagin. Bush asked her what she thought about federalizing the effort. Blanco was put off. The first she had heard about the idea had been a message Senator David Vitter had passed along from Karl Rove. The fact that Rove was mentioned set off her alarm bells. What was a political strategist doing making such a suggestion? To her, it meant the idea had more to do with politics than emergency response. Her advisers had told her federalizing the effort would make things more complicated, not better.

But then as she was leaving his office, she felt a pang of discomfort at stiff-arming the president of the United States, so she said she would consult her National Guard adjutant general. "I'll talk to him again and I'll let you know before twenty-four hours are out," she said. From her point of view, she was just being courteous, not wanting to completely slam the door in the president's face. From Bush's vantage point, though, she sounded more forward leaning than she later remembered it, on the edge of agreeing but dawdling before making a decision at a moment when someone needed to be decisive. If anyone was playing politics, Bush's aides thought it was the governor and her team.

After returning to Washington, Bush and his staff settled on a plan that would put all troops in Louisiana, including the National Guard, under command of the president but, in a face-saving gesture to Blanco, would have Lieutenant General Rossel Honore, the Pentagon's commander on the scene, report to her as well as to the Defense Department. Card had General Blum, the National Guard Bureau chief, fax a letter outlining the dual-hatted scheme to Blanco at the makeshift governor's mansion in Baton Rouge for her signature at 11:20 p.m.

"I want you to sign it and send it back to me in five minutes," he told her.

Blanco was taken aback. "I'll read your letter but I'm promising you I'm not signing anything until my lawyers look at it," she said.

"It needs to be signed tonight," Blum insisted.

"Why does it need to be signed tonight?"

"The president wants it signed tonight."

Blanco was aggravated. She thought the White House had been trying to pin blame on her through media leaks and now was trying to swoop in to claim credit just when the situation was being brought under control. Complicating the situation was the role of Blum, whom neither side trusted. He had told Blanco's team just what he had told Bush about what a mistake he thought federalizing the guard would be, but now at the direction of the White House, he was repeatedly urging Blanco to sign the document. "I was in a position where I had to read the script," he explained later, "but at that point, she knew the right answer." Finally, Card got on the phone and told Blanco that the president planned to announce the move first thing in the morning.

"I'm not signing anything," she told him angrily. "You guys are now trying to come in and save face. I've got thousands of people here in the trenches while you play your politics."

She added that Bush had the authority to do it without her consent. "You go ahead and declare the Insurrection Act and you take it over that way," she said. "I'm going to go out and say you all care more about politics than about saving lives."

At that point, Bush could have invoked the Insurrection Act, as his father did to restore order during Los Angeles riots in 1992, but in that case he did so at the request of the sitting governor. The last times a president invoked the act against the wishes of a governor were during the civil rights era, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent troops to enforce desegregation orders in the South. Bush was sensitive to the image of a white male Republican president declaring an African American city with an African American mayor and a female Democratic governor in insurrection. That, he thought, "could unleash holy hell" in the South. "I wanted to overrule them all," he later said. "But at the time, I worried that the consequence could be a constitutional crisis, and possibly a political insurrection as well."

Moreover, he worried about sending eighteen-year-olds armed with assault rifles and trained for Iraq into the Lower Ninth Ward. Bartlett argued that the details were less important than the image of someone taking charge.

"I don't care if we have to put corks in their guns and don't give them bullets," he told Bush. "We should just get them down there."

Bush ultimately finessed the issue by deciding to send seventy-two hundred active-duty troops on a humanitarian mission, rather than in a law enforcement role that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. But even then he ran into resistance.

Card conveyed the order to Rumsfeld, only to be lectured on protocol. "Look at the chain of command," the defense secretary berated Card. "Where's the chief of staff? I report to the president. I don't report to the chief of staff. If the president really wants me to do this, he'll tell me."

Eventually, Rumsfeld relented and issued the orders. By going house to house looking for survivors, the troops from the Eighty-Second Airborne and the First Cavalry Division freed up National Guard units that were permitted to do law enforcement. But precious days had gone by without visible action, and Bush's public standing would never fully recover. Steve Schmidt, the vice president's counselor, wrote in an e-mail to a colleague, "This is the end of the presidency."

JUST AS HE turned to Cheney after September 11, Bush tried to enlist his vice president to help respond to Katrina. But this time, he was rebuffed. Natural disasters were not a Cheney specialty, nor was public empathy. When Bush told Card to ask Cheney to head a task force overseeing relief efforts, the vice president said he would only if he had real authority and could hire and fire people. He quickly concluded, however, that it was a "primarily symbolic" assignment and made clear he was not interested. "I would be a figurehead without the ability really to do anything about the performance of the federal agencies involved," he recalled. Bush was no longer ceding power to his vice president the way he had in his first term.

Bush was a little edgy about the rejection. At a high-level meeting about the hurricane, he needled the vice president.

"I asked Dick if he'd be interested in spearheading this," Bush announced. "Let's just say I didn't get the most positive response."

He looked over at Cheney. "Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?" Bush asked.

Cheney said yes, but then added, "That'll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise."

The vice president went down to the region on September 8. He quickly concluded that Michael Brown was outmatched and spoke with Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary. Chertoff had already come to the same conclusion. Chertoff and Brown had been struggling for control of the crisis for days. Brown felt he needed direct access to the White House, while Chertoff was not about to be bypassed. Chertoff was annoyed that Brown was spending so much time on television instead of overseeing the crisis. He finally ordered the FEMA director not to leave the Baton Rouge operations center. "Get the fuck off television and manage the operation," was how Chertoff remembered his message. Brown disobeyed and left Baton Rouge for a firsthand look at the damage.

Chertoff told Bush he wanted to relieve Brown. "You do whatever you have to do," Bush told him. "It's your show." So Chertoff sent Brown back to Washington, benching him. On September 12, Brown resigned. Brown later acknowledged that he had become "insubordinate" but only because Chertoff "simply did not know how to respond to a disaster and was trying to micromanage our response" from Washington. In the end, the storm and its aftermath cost 1,833 lives, did $108 billion in damage, and left hundreds of thousands without homes. Bush asked his father and Bill Clinton to lead a relief effort.

Amid the dysfunction, Bush felt burned most of all by the accusation that he did not care about the largely African American residents of New Orleans. Whatever Bush's faults, few who knew him included racial insensitivity among them. He told Laura that "it was the worst moment of my presidency."

But he and Michael Gerson thought it might be an opportunity to open a discussion about race and poverty in America, and they crafted a major speech for him to deliver. On September 15, Bush flew to New Orleans, and in a prime-time national address from Jackson Square in the heart of a mostly empty, still flooded city, he promised "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." He accepted blame for the stutter-start response, saying, "I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution."

He tried to open the dialogue he and Gerson wanted. "As all of us saw on television," Bush said, "there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

But with so much else on his plate, that sort of broader action never took place. Bush and his wife would eventually make dozens of trips to the region, and he ultimately steered $126 billion in federal funds for response and recovery, a historic commitment by some measures equivalent to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. But Katrina would remain etched on his record as a failure of leadership, and at times he was bitter. "Can you believe they're blaming me for this?" he once told Kofi Annan in a private conversation.

JUST AS KATRINA took its toll on Bush's reputation, so did it swamp his domestic agenda. By the time the government came up for air, it was clear the president's Social Security plan was struggling. While Bush wanted to blame the Democrats for their lockstep opposition-and to be sure, Democrats made a calculated political decision not to even try to collaborate-it was the Republicans who killed it. Speaker Dennis Hastert delivered the news to Bush at the White House.

"Look, we got another situation where our guys are getting killed on it in an election, and this is a poison pill for us," Hastert told him. "We don't have that big a majority and it is very difficult to carry this load and I don't think we are going to be able to pass it."

Bush was deeply unhappy. "I wish we could be able to do this," he said, "but let's keep working on it and see where we are at."

He would never formally surrender, but just like that, the top item on his second-term domestic agenda was dead.

His second-term foreign agenda was equally shaky. The Cheney camp resisted accommodation with North Korea. Robert Joseph, the hard-liner who negotiated the Libya deal and later moved to the State Department as undersecretary for arms control and international security, was now pushing for a naval blockade to keep Pyongyang from providing fissile material or technology to terrorists. He even handed out a memo outlining how it would work. "If there is a nuclear explosion, this would change the world as we know it," he argued. But few others had much stomach for it with two other wars under way.

With support from Condoleezza Rice, Christopher Hill had labored for months to lure North Korea back into an agreement on its nuclear program, and it looked as if he were about to score a success, despite Cheney's doubts. On September 19, North Korea agreed to scrap its nuclear program in exchange for an American promise not to attack. Bush had already indicated he would rule out hostility if North Korea had no nuclear program. The breakthrough seemed like a major victory for Rice's new approach over Cheney's old one.

But the next day, in quintessential fashion, the mercurial North Korean leadership backed away from its own agreement and upped the ante, demanding the United States provide a civilian nuclear reactor as a trade-off for giving up its weapons program. That was essentially the same deal that Bill Clinton had made and that Bush had abandoned after taking office. Bush had no interest in reprising Clinton's greatest hits.

Then the standoff took a new twist. The Treasury Department declared Banco Delta Asia, a bank in Macao, a money-laundering operation for sheltering profits from the counterfeiting and money laundering of Kim Jong Il's circle. About $25 million in North Korean accounts at the bank were frozen. The action was not part of Hill's negotiating strategy, but it would come to dominate the talks as the regime found itself cut off from its money.

BUSH WAS IN bed with his wife on September 3 when the phone rang. As he reached for the receiver, he knew it would be bad news. No one called him at that hour with good news.

On the line was Karl Rove. Chief Justice William Rehnquist had died, he reported. The chief justice had been fighting cancer for a year, and it had been clear for months that it was only a matter of time. Bush understood immediately that it gave him an opportunity to further put his stamp on the Supreme Court. John Roberts had made a good impression with a confident demeanor during his courtesy calls on Capitol Hill and practice sessions. Now Bush had a second seat to fill.

The next move was relatively easy. While Cheney briefly floated the notion of promoting his friend, Justice Antonin Scalia, Bush instead decided to nominate Roberts for chief justice, moving him up even before he was confirmed. That had always been a contingency in the minds of the Bush team, but one that was reinforced by the smooth way Roberts handled his confirmation process. And with critics pounding Bush over Katrina, elevating Roberts was the safest choice. The president picked up the phone and called to offer him the job of chief justice, putting him on a path to succeed the man he had once clerked for. Roberts accepted and joined Bush the next morning at the White House to make the announcement.

Roberts was soon cruising to confirmation. He prepared for his hearings with a grueling set of "murder board" practice sessions, with administration lawyers throwing questions at him in a conference room at the Justice Department and measuring the length of his answers with a plastic kitchen timer. With occasional breaks for cookies from Harris Teeter, these sessions stretched on four hours a day, four days a week for four weeks. By the time he arrived on Capitol Hill, Roberts easily deflected Democratic opposition by portraying himself as a nonideological umpire calling balls and strikes.

Under Laura's quiet pressure, Bush was determined to find a woman to fill the other seat replacing O'Connor and told Andy Card to expand the search list. "No white guys," Card told Harriet Miers and her deputy, William Kelley. The list of women on federal appeals courts or in prominent law school positions was finite, and the vetting team quickly went through them. For one reason or another, none of them seemed quite right. Edith Brown Clement, who had made the final cut over the summer, had not impressed Bush in their interview. Edith Jones, a favorite among conservatives, was seen as too provocative. Other candidates included Priscilla Owen, Karen Williams, Alice Batchelder, Diane Sykes, Deanell Reece Tacha, Maura Corrigan, and Maureen Mahoney, but there was always something-either they asked not to be considered, had financial disclosure issues, or were insufficiently conservative. "We looked at every female appellate judge in the country who was plausibly a Republican," Kelley recalled.

Another woman, though, had been on Bush's radar screen even if not deemed a candidate by Cheney or his team: Miers herself. She was no constitutional scholar and had never served as a judge, but she was a pioneer in a way, the first woman to head the State Bar of Texas, a successful corporate attorney, and a former Dallas City Council member. She would bring real-world experience to a chamber filled with Ivy League credentials, just as many justices did before the modern era, when the court became increasingly the province of former appellate judges. Most important of all to Bush was that he knew her and was sure she would be a solid conservative vote. As far back as July, he had talked with Card about whether she might be a good candidate if a second seat opened, and Card had instructed Kelley, her own deputy, to secretly vet her.

Bush's instincts seemed reinforced when he hosted Senate leaders for breakfast on September 21 to talk about O'Connor's seat. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, had been impressed with Miers and declared that she would be someone he could support. "If you nominate Harriet Miers, you'll start with fifty-six votes," he told Bush, meaning the fifty-five Republicans and him. With Katrina, the collapse of his Social Security initiative, and the ongoing spiral of violence in Iraq, an easy confirmation appealed to Bush.

He summoned Miers to the Oval Office later that day and told her to put one more person on her list of candidates-herself.

"What do you mean me?" she asked.

Bush told her she had been vetted secretly, but she demurred, saying she was not the right choice. She still favored Samuel Alito.

"Well, Harriet, look at your resume," Card told her. "Is that the resume of someone you would recommend the president consider?"

Yes, she supposed so. If Bush wanted to consider her, she would not say no.

Bush began sounding out others inside the White House. Miers was well liked within the building and respected by many for her prodigious work ethic and unshakable loyalty to the president. But few could envision this graduate of Southern Methodist University's law school as a Supreme Court justice. She was the gatekeeper who made sure paper moved efficiently, who corrected grammar and quizzed aides about their choice of wording in memos, who once rejected the text of a White House Christmas card because she did not think it was well written. She had what the budget director Mitch Daniels called "that schoolmarm voice" that would calm a room, and she was at Bush's side during many of his most critical moments, from Air Force One on September 11 to the USS Abraham Lincoln for his speech on Iraq. But around the West Wing, Miers was deemed pedantic, not a deep thinker. She had never expressed a rigorous judicial philosophy. She hardly filled a room as John Roberts did.

Among those affronted by the selection of Miers was Cheney. While his views were tempered somewhat by those of David Addington, who shared a sort of kindred-spirits relationship with Miers as fellow graduates of non-elite law schools, Cheney did not view this as a wise choice. He had spent more than four years searching for the best and the brightest conservative minds to put on the court-at Bush's request. Cheney believed in curbing the liberal tendencies of the bench, if for no other reason than to respect the executive branch's power to wage the war on terror. The Supreme Court's intrusion into a wartime president's defense of the nation in Hamdi only reinforced the profound consequences of nominating the right people. And the president's onetime personal lawyer, in his mind, was not among them.

Bush anticipated that Cheney would not be thrilled.

"You probably aren't going to agree with this, Dick," Bush told him, "but I've decided to go with Harriet."

"Well, Mr. President," Cheney said simply, "that's going to be a tough sell."

BUSH TRIED TO figure out just how tough a sell. Even as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve Roberts's nomination on September 23, William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, called Leonard Leo, one of the Four Horsemen, to take the temperature on Miers. Leo said he thought it would be tough. After hanging up, he thought about it and called back to say they should talk more. Leo and Kelley met the next morning at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner outside Washington for two and a half hours. "This is going to be a real heavy lift," Leo told Kelley. It could be "a bloodbath" at first, he warned. But if handled properly, she could be confirmed. Still, Leo did not believe Miers was likely to be the candidate, and when he later called other conservatives to ask what they thought of her, they dismissed the question as too implausible to contemplate.

Cheney was not the only one who disagreed with the selection. Alberto Gonzales told Bush that Miers would be viewed as suspiciously as he was in conservative circles. Kelley and Brett Kavanaugh, the staff secretary, urged that Alito be chosen instead. Ed Gillespie, who was running the Roberts confirmation campaign and would presumably do the same for the next nominee, was urging the president to pick someone who would generate a clear-cut ideological fight. "A good, heated debate over striking 'under God' from the pledge, the merits of governments taking property from individual A to give to individual B, the validity of basing court decisions on foreign law and, of course, abortion on demand is not something we should shy away from," Gillespie wrote in a memo.

But Bush was not looking for such a fight. On September 29, Roberts was confirmed 78 to 22 and sworn in as chief justice. Bush invited the new chief justice as well as Gillespie and the former senator Fred Thompson, who had served as Roberts's Sherpa introducing him to the Senate, to the Oval Office, where he solicited advice.

Was it important, he asked, for the next nominee to be a woman?

Thompson said no, it was more important to pick the best-qualified candidate.

Gillespie disagreed. "Mr. President, I think if there's a qualified woman, it would be good," he said. Referring to his wife, he added, "Cathy's a conservative woman, headed up W Stands for Women, as you know, and I know she'll be disappointed if it's not a woman."

"That's pretty telling," Bush said. "My gut's telling me I should find a woman."

Bush headed to Camp David with Andy Card that weekend to think about what to do. He returned to the White House on Sunday, October 2, and summoned Miers to offer her the nomination. She accepted. The two of them joined Laura for a celebratory dinner.

For Bush, the decision fit a long pattern of turning to his own inner circle for appointments and, in a way, resembled the selection of Cheney, who likewise was in charge of finding a candidate, only to turn out to be that candidate. Bush trusted his own judgment of the people around him over the most sterling resumes of people he did not know. To stock his second-term cabinet, he had plucked Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, and Margaret Spellings from his White House staff. Sometimes that worked; loyalty forged good working relationships. Other times, it proved to be a disaster.

In this case, Bush thought he was avoiding a fight by picking Miers. But he overestimated the reserve of goodwill he had on the right. Rove that same Sunday tried to reassure the base by calling James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, a socially conservative advocacy group. Rove told him that Miers was a true-blue conservative who came from a well-known antiabortion church. Dobson agreed to endorse her. But when the White House called Leonard Leo just after 6:00 a.m. on October 3 to let him know that Bush would announce Miers's nomination in less than two hours, he was literally speechless. "Leonard, are you there?" came the voice on the other end.

Bush appeared with Miers in the Oval Office at 8:00 a.m. and called her "exceptionally well suited to sit on the highest court of our nation." At 8:12 a.m., two minutes before Bush even finished speaking, a well-connected conservative lawyer named Manuel Miranda sent out an e-mail message denouncing the choice to his expansive list of activists. "The reaction of many conservatives today will be that the president has made possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas, who had been the president's lawyer," Miranda wrote, referring to one of Lyndon Johnson's choices for the Supreme Court. Within hours, other conservatives expressed disappointment, including William Kristol, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Robert Bork, and Rush Limbaugh. While conservatives had been uncomfortable with some of Bush's decisions before, like No Child Left Behind, Medicare, and Social Security, this was the first time they revolted in such an overt, unrestrained way.

Cheney jumped in to defend the president's choice, calling Limbaugh to vouch for Miers despite his own doubts. "I'm confident that she has a conservative judicial philosophy that you'd be comfortable with, Rush," Cheney said. "I've worked closely with Harriet for five years." He added, "She believes very deeply in the importance of interpreting the Constitution and the laws as written. She won't legislate from the federal bench, and the president has great confidence in her judicial philosophy, has known her for many years, and I share that confidence based on my own personal experience."

Bush personally responded to the criticism the next day during a Rose Garden news conference, calling Miers "the best person I could find." But when he sent emissaries to meet with conservative groups, they were pummeled. At a luncheon of a hundred activists hosted by Grover Norquist, the antitax leader, on October 5, Ed Gillespie was shocked by the fiery reactions.

"She's the president's nominee," charged David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union. "She's not ours."

Gillespie was offended by what he saw as the notion that Miers was some glorified coffee fetcher for the president. "There is a whiff of sexism and elitism in some of the criticism of Harriet," he told the group.

The room erupted. "Are you saying people in this room are sexist and elitist?" asked Richard Lessner, an editorial writer turned consultant.

Gillespie quickly retreated. "No, I'm not," he said. He only meant some of the criticism of her education, intellect, and even makeup seemed out of place.

The dynamic was repeated at another luncheon with conservatives on the same day hosted by Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the modern conservative movement. "I've had five 'trust-mes' in my long history here," Weyrich lectured Bush envoys, referring to past Republican court nominees who turned out more liberal than advertised. "I'm sorry, but the president saying he knows her heart is insufficient."