Ken Mehlman, the president's reelection campaign manager who was now chairman of the Republican National Committee, responded that this was not the same. "What's different about this trust-me moment as opposed to the other ones is this president's knowledge of this nominee," he said.

BUSH HAD HAD IT with the conservatives who were beating up Harriet Miers. The more they attacked her, the more he dug in. "I do not care about them at all," he railed to an aide one day. "I don't care what they say. This is my choice. I know who she is. I know what kind of justice she will be. I trust her."

But the situation for Miers was growing worse, not because of the loud activists, but because of the soft-spoken nominee herself. Like John Roberts, Miers would prepare by going through "murder boards," practice sessions where colleagues playing senators would throw questions at her. To get ready, she invited several lawyers to her second-floor office in the West Wing, including William Burck from the White House and Rachel Brand from the Justice Department. They sat down in the paneled office and tried some practice questions, although they were continually interrupted by BlackBerry messages and phone calls as Miers also tended to her White House duties.

Burck quizzed her on criminal law, laying out hypothetical situations. "So, in this particular circumstance," he said at one point, "when you search a car, do you think the law is correct that all you need is reasonable suspicion versus probable cause?"

Miers looked hesitant and confused. "I don't know what either of those two mean," she admitted.

The lawyers were shocked. A corporate lawyer overseeing contracts and financial dealings might not need to know the definition of probable cause, but when it came to the highest court in the land, that was as basic as it got. If she could not handle the most fundamental terminology, how would she survive under the klieg lights of a Senate hearing? They went through more questions and discovered how little she knew. The Fourth Amendment on search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment on self-incrimination, "she literally knew nothing about it at all, nothing," one official recalled.

The formal murder boards were even worse. The prep sessions were so embarrassing that administration officials kept out conservative lawyers who often participated, including Boyden Gray and Leonard Leo of the Four Horsemen. "They wouldn't let us," Gray recalled, "and both of us looked at each other and said that means she isn't going to make it if they can't allow us to see what's going on."

It was not much better on Capitol Hill. When Miers got uncomfortable, she tended to shut down and as she paid courtesy calls on senators, she returned to the White House each day with less support than when she had left, even among the Republicans. "Harriet, you're going to have to say something next time," Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative from Alabama, told her after one meeting. When Miers asked Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma how she did during their session, he responded, "Harriet, you flunked." More critically, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was offended when she contradicted his account of what she had said about privacy rights during their meeting. He was even upset at her written answers to the traditional Senate questionnaire and sent it back to her to do over again, like a teacher forcing a student to redo her homework.

In the end, it was not the attacks by conservatives that would do in Miers. It was her own performance at the murder boards.

"Dan, we can't do this," one of the lawyers told Dan Bartlett.

"We know," he replied. "Give us time."

Andy Card offered a grim report to Bush in the Oval Office on October 25 and suggested Miers withdraw. She would be savaged on national television.

"We cannot put her through that," Bartlett told Bush. "We will forever damage her."

Bush understood and had already begun thinking out loud about who to nominate next. He was mad at his aides, aggravated that they had let this happen. But he realized he was the one who had put his friend in this situation and it was time to find a way out.

Card went to Miers that night and told her it was not going well. He left assuming she understood his meaning, but she did not. The next morning, William Kelley visited and was blunter. "You have to withdraw," her deputy told her. She resisted. But that morning's Washington Post had a story reporting that during a speech in 1993 she had suggested that "self-determination" should guide decisions about abortion and warned against "legislating religion or morality," comments that undercut whatever conservative patience remained. Concerned Women for America, a conservative antiabortion group, decided to oppose Miers. Bill Frist, at the White House for a budget meeting, privately told Bush that Miers was in deep trouble.

That much Bush knew. As the sun set, Miers accepted it was over, realizing that Bush, while never telling her himself, had been sending signals through Card and Kelley. Bush was working in his office in the Treaty Room in the residence at 8:30 p.m. when she called to tell him she would drop her nomination. He did not try to talk her out of it. Unaware of the development, White House aides finished revising Miers's rejected Senate questionnaire and delivered it to Capitol Hill at 11:40 p.m., three hours after she gave up. Miers scratched out a formal withdrawal letter and headed into the Oval Office to deliver it the next morning, at 8:30 on October 27, just twenty-four days after her nomination. The White House announced it at 9:00 a.m. Miers went back to the White House counsel's office to begin the search for a new nominee.

The experience would pain Bush for years to come. "If I had it to do over again," he later wrote, "I would not have thrown Harriet to the wolves of Washington."

Cheney could only shake his head at the unforced error. "I tried to tell him," he told an aide.

24.

"You could have heard a pin drop"

It was hard to miss the fact that Karl Rove was absent. It was October 28, the morning after Harriet Miers withdrew, and the senior White House staff had gathered for their regular meeting. Everyone knew the moment of truth in the CIA leak case was near and that the president's most prominent adviser could be indicted at any moment.

It had been a surreal environment in the West Wing for months. Aides were fixated on the investigation and what it could mean, yet they could not discuss it with each other, because the lawyers had issued strict instructions not to talk about it. Rove and Scott McClellan were estranged. Legal bills piled up for White House officials forced to testify. Even those not targeted by prosecutors, like Dan Bartlett, had trouble sleeping at times. Moreover, some thought the case had sown distrust between President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that Bush was not happy that Cheney had gotten them into this mess by overreacting to the criticism from Joseph Wilson.

As it turned out that morning, Rove was not the one the staff needed to be worried about. While the aides went over the day's business, someone came in and slipped a note to Scooter Libby. He read it wordlessly, then abruptly got up. He grabbed a pair of crutches he had been using since a recent accident and hobbled out of the room. "You could have heard a pin drop," Scott McClellan recalled. By the time the meeting ended, Libby had turned in his badge and left the White House, never to return.

Bush, who normally disdained television, sat glued to the set in the private dining room off the Oval Office watching as the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced Libby's indictment on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. Fitzgerald had not charged Libby with the leak itself, alleging only that he had not told the truth about how he learned about Wilson's wife and whom he told about it. Rove, who had shown up late for work that day, had escaped indictment, at least for now.

For the president and the vice president, the week was already one of the worst of their time in office. The flameout of Miers's candidacy was a shattering blow to Bush and a reminder that Cheney's advice had been disregarded. Now the prospect of a trial of the vice president's chief of staff was devastating. It would go to the heart of the most dangerous political question confronting the administration, namely its veracity in selling the country on war. The Libby case had fueled the suspicion that the White House had deliberately deceived the country; "Bush Lied, People Died" was the favorite bumper sticker of the Left.

While Bush was shaken, Cheney was pained in a far deeper and surprisingly personal way. A politician who had not been reluctant to fire subordinates in the past felt profoundly upset about this adviser, who had become a virtual alter ego. Cheney believed the case was aimed at him and that Libby took his bullet. Some on his staff saw Fitzgerald's zeal as an extension of the fight over the warrantless surveillance program, recalling that he was appointed by his friend James Comey. They suspected the case was prosecuted "essentially to disable the vice president," as one aide put it.

Libby had left a letter of resignation with Andy Card and departed without talking with Bush. Dean McGrath, Libby's deputy, who drove him off the grounds, took him straight to his lawyer's office. In a sign of his sudden turn of fortune, Miers sent out a memo virtually declaring Libby persona non grata, ordering that "all White House staffers should not have any contact with Scooter Libby about any aspect of the investigation." The staff was demoralized; most, though not all, liked Libby. "The lowest point that I can recall was the lead-up to the indictment of Scooter," Peter Wehner said.

Cheney wrote out by hand what he wanted to say in his statement, and Bush aides were struck by how personally he took the case when they compared his draft with the one they had come up with for Bush. "The only hurt I ever saw in him was with Scooter Libby," Alan Simpson said. And just like that, he had lost his most effective lieutenant, his "Cheney's Cheney," as colleagues called him, the alter ego the vice president counted on to keep tabs on what was happening around the West Wing and to make sure his own views were heard.

With Miers shot down and Libby under indictment, Bush retreated to Camp David to talk about what came next. The first task was to find another Supreme Court justice, and at this point Bush wanted no more fuss. To everyone's amazement, Miers resumed her role as counsel, throwing herself into the search for someone to take her place as if nothing had happened. "Her stock went out of the roof internally the week after that, just the way she conducted herself," Bartlett remembered.

Bush went down his list of candidates straight to Samuel Alito, the appeals court judge from New Jersey and Miers's first choice to begin with. Alito, like Michael Luttig, had compiled a strongly conservative record during more than a decade on the bench but was not as prominent and not as easy a target for Democrats. Bush called to offer him the nomination.

THE WHITE HOUSE was pushing through another important appointment at the same time, one not as visible but arguably more important to the rest of their time in office. After eighteen years as the nation's sometimes inscrutable chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was stepping down. During his long tenure, Greenspan had tamed inflation, coolly managed crises, and presided over a period of significant economic growth with low unemployment. But there were warning signs of trouble ahead.

Riding a wave of easy credit in the form of subprime mortgages, Americans were buying homes as never before, many stretching beyond their means. House prices had jumped nearly 25 percent in two years, creating a bubble that was pushing the economy along. Wall Street was taking those risky mortgages, repackaging them, and selling them as investments. Greenspan had reassured policy makers that this was not actually a bubble, only "froth" in certain local markets that could cool off. Other economists, though, worried that house prices had risen so fast on the backs of unsustainable mortgages that the bubble could collapse and bring on an economic downturn.

To replace Greenspan, Bush again turned to Cheney. Much as he did with the Supreme Court nominees, Cheney winnowed the list, then interviewed finalists in his West Wing office for ninety minutes each. In the end, he settled on Ben Bernanke-a Princeton University economist, former member of the Fed Board of Governors, and current chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers-and sent him to the Oval Office to see Bush.

Low-key and professorial, Bernanke was well regarded, one of the nation's foremost experts on the Great Depression. He shared Greenspan's comfort with the housing market, attributing the steep jump in prices to "strong economic fundamentals" like growth in jobs, incomes, and new households. He anticipated the possibility of "a moderate cooling in the housing market" that would not stop economic growth.

Bush announced the selection on October 24, drawing bipartisan support and touching off the biggest stock market rally in six months. Bernanke would go on to be confirmed by the Senate on a voice vote without opposition.

BUSH AND CHENEY increasingly found themselves on the defensive in the area where they had long been strongest, their handling of national security. John McCain, who was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp a generation earlier, was leading an uprising against the White House with legislation banning torture and restricting interrogation techniques used with terror suspects.

Cheney was outraged, seeing it as a self-defeating move that would hamstring their efforts to protect the country. He traveled to Capitol Hill to try to stop it, meeting with McCain and his ally Senator Lindsey Graham. He presented intelligence gained through the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and argued it could not have been obtained any other way. McCain and Graham pushed back. "We are on the defensive all over the world; enemies use this against us," Graham told him. "And there is a better way. You can get good information without abandoning your values."

Their meetings grew heated. At one point, Cheney gave McCain substitute language designed to preserve the interrogators' flexibility, but the senator rejected it. Frustrated, Cheney lashed out and said McCain would have blood on his hands. "Basically, they told me that if our legislation passes, I am going to have planes flying into buildings," McCain told aides afterward. Cheney said later that McCain was not willing even to listen to a briefing on what the interrogations had accomplished. "We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting," Cheney said.

McCain responded with a show of force. At the same time the Harriet Miers nomination was foundering, the Senate voted 90 to 9 to approve McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, enough to override a veto. In the White House, some in the Cheney camp wanted to threaten a veto anyway. When John Bellinger, the State Department's top lawyer, saw a draft veto message, he went to Condoleezza Rice and appealed to her to intervene.

He reminded her that she often talked about America being on the right side of history. "I think history is going to judge us badly on our decisions on detention," he said, "but we can change course and you want to be on the right side of history on these issues."

Rice agreed and weighed in at the White House. After a lot of wrangling, the veto threat was quashed. Bush sent Stephen Hadley to negotiate with McCain, benching Cheney. If the vice president was angry, he made no protest that his aides could see.

But even as Bush and Cheney were trying to stave off restrictions on interrogations, one of the most sensitive elements of their war on terror was suddenly exposed when the Washington Post reported on November 2 that the CIA had been holding terror suspects in secret "black site" prisons in foreign countries. At the request of the government, the Post withheld the names of Eastern European countries hosting secret prisons. Even Bush had not been told which ones they were, according to Michael Hayden, the NSA director who later became CIA director. But human rights activists and other journalists eventually concluded that they were Romania, Lithuania, and possibly Poland.

As Thanksgiving approached, Bush and Cheney decided to push back against critics. They were angry at what they saw as the hypocrisy of Democrats jumping all over them for a war many of them had supported too. While Bush headed to Asia for a summit, it fell to Cheney to launch the counteroffensive with a speech at a gala honoring Ronald Reagan sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom institute in Washington on the evening of November 16. In the hours before the dinner, speechwriters hastily tore up their draft and turned it into a turbocharged assault on the Democrats.

Wearing a tuxedo and his trademark sideways grin, Cheney could hardly have had a friendlier audience as he took the stage at the Mayflower Hotel near the White House.

"Two thousand and eight!" someone in the audience called out.

"Not on your life," Cheney, the noncandidate, quickly retorted.

He wasted no time going after the critics. "I'm sorry we couldn't be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Jay Rockefeller," Cheney said. "They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of commitment."

To make sure they got the point, he paused amid laughter. "I'll let you think about that one for a minute."

But his point was clear. "The suggestion that's been made by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city," Cheney declared. "Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions." Cheney was only getting warmed up as he assailed "a few opportunists" who were "losing their memory or their backbone" and hurling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" while troops abroad were fighting and dying. "We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," Cheney declared. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them."

Bush quickly amplified Cheney's attack from the other side of the world. Asked about it a few hours later during a news conference with the South Korean president, Bush said he agreed. "It's patriotic as heck to disagree with the president," he said. "It doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics. That's exactly what is taking place in America."

The attacks provoked a furious response. "We need a commander in chief, not a campaigner in chief," Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, complained on the Senate floor. "We need leadership from the White House, not more whitewashing of the very serious issues confronting us in Iraq."

But the more potent retort came from Representative Jack Murtha, the hawkish marine veteran of Vietnam and the top Democrat on the subcommittee controlling military spending. Murtha had supported the Iraq War, but on November 17 he declared the war "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion" and called for the "immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces," which he predicted could take six months. He teared up as he described meeting wounded troops and lashed out at Bush and Cheney. "I like guys who've never been there to criticize us who've been there," he said. "I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

Murtha's outburst rippled through the president's traveling party in Asia because he was known as one of the most pro-military members of his party. The president's advisers worried that if Murtha could abandon the war, opposition could snowball. Beyond that, it was a personal blow to Cheney. He and Murtha had become good friends in Congress. Murtha had thrown him a dinner upon his appointment as secretary of defense in 1989 and was the Democrat whom Cheney relied on most. "The place where I did my deals that I could count on was Murtha," he once said. Now the man he could count on was calling him a chickenhawk.

In Asia, Bush's advisers argued about how to respond. Some thought Bush should meet with Murtha, but those pushing for a tough slapdown won. The White House issued a statement accusing Murtha of "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party" and advocating "surrender to the terrorists." That only inflamed the debate. "That was the beginning of keeping our critics at arm's length," Nicolle Devenish, now going by her married name, Wallace, reflected later. "Obviously, it didn't work."

Bush seemed to think better of it too. In between meetings with Chinese leaders in Beijing on November 20, he summoned reporters and raised Murtha without being asked. "Congressman Murtha is a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman," Bush said. "He is a strong supporter of the United States military. And I know the decision to call for an immediate withdrawal of our troops by Congressman Murtha was done in a careful and thoughtful way. I disagree with his position."

Asked by a reporter about Murtha's attack on Cheney, Bush said, "I don't think the vice president's service is relevant in this debate."

WITH AMERICAN MILITARY fatalities in Iraq topping two thousand, the White House worried it was losing the war at home. "We may be running out of time," Stephen Hadley told aides. "I lived through Vietnam. A president cannot continue to fight a protracted war with less than a majority of support from the American people."

The president's advisers decided to revive their plan for the president to wage a concerted public campaign explaining a strategy that Condoleezza Rice had termed "clear, hold and build." This had been the plan for the fall until Hurricane Katrina came along and blew it out of the water. But once again, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett argued over what tone Bush should take-defiant or humble. Rove wanted an offensive against war opponents, while Bartlett argued that admitting mistakes would do more to restore credibility.

The running debate underscored a broader rift. Ever since Karen Hughes left, Bartlett had become the main counterweight to Rove on the political staff. Lanky and lean with an easy smile, Bartlett had spent his entire adult life working for Bush, joining Rove's consulting firm right out of the University of Texas at Austin just as the first gubernatorial campaign was getting under way. He made a point of showing up early every day and ended up answering the phone when the candidate called in, then bonded with him even more when assigned to research Bush's history to counter negative political attacks. His prematurely graying hair and his confident, mature demeanor made him seem older than his thirty-four years.

But Rove had a hard time seeing Bartlett as a peer, not the kid he had hired right out of college, and the younger man resented what he saw as the patronizing attitude. Eventually, Bartlett stopped returning Rove's calls, infuriating the older man, and the two were barely speaking outside of meetings. A no-better-friend, no-worse-enemy kind of figure, Rove could be funny, charming, and fiercely loyal to his colleagues, but some privately thought the college dropout had an inferiority complex that sometimes manifested itself in condescension. When someone was on his bad side, he did not hide it. His feud with Bartlett spilled over to Wallace, whom he seemed to resent for siding with Bartlett. At one point, he berated her brutally, a "big screaming match," as one colleague termed it, that echoed around the West Wing.

"Karl kicks the shit out of me because he is too scared to kick the shit out of Dan or he's afraid he would push back," Wallace complained to Andy Card over lunch in the White House mess one day.

Card dunked his grilled cheese sandwich in his tomato soup. "I can't do anything about it," he said. "He doesn't listen to me."

Bush was constitutionally loath to admit mistakes, seeing it as a Washington parlor game. But he understood what Bartlett and Wallace were saying. The aides turned to the research of Peter Feaver, a Duke University scholar who had joined the National Security Council staff over the summer. Feaver was an expert on public opinion during wartime and had conducted studies concluding that the key to support even when a war was going badly was whether people believed it could ultimately succeed. Americans turned against Vietnam less because of rising casualties than the sense that leaders no longer believed the United States could win. Most damaging to public opinion, Feaver believed, were public signs of pessimism by a president, whether it was Ronald Reagan after marines were killed in Lebanon or Bill Clinton after the Black Hawk Down battle of Somalia. So while admitting setbacks was okay, it was critical for Bush to convey confidence that victory was achievable.

Bush opened a series of five speeches on the war on November 30 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Feaver helped draft a thirty-five-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" mainly to prove that Bush had one. Feaver originally used the word "success," but the speechwriters insisted on changing it to "victory." "Plan for Victory" signs were hung around the stage, and in his forty-three-minute speech Bush used the word "victory" fifteen times. "We will never back down," he declared. "We will never give in. And we will never accept less than complete victory." Bush did resolve better than regret. He did not use the word "mistakes" but admitted that "we've faced some setbacks" and said "we learned from our earlier experiences."

Bush made more concessions as the series of speeches progressed. By the third outing, on December 12, in a hotel not far from Philadelphia's Independence Hall, he opened the floor to questions. The first person he called on was Didi Goldmark, a sixty-three-year-old former libel lawyer.

"Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed," Goldmark said.

It was a question that the White House and the Pentagon had consistently refused to address. But Bush gave a direct answer.

"I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," he said. "We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."

Bush moved on to the next question without identifying how he arrived at the figure, but he was right on the money, at least according to a group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count. As of the day he spoke, the group estimated civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892. Aides were struck that Bush knew the number without being briefed. It underscored, they thought, just how much he was living and breathing the war.

His plan for turning Iraq around hinged on elections scheduled for three days later, when Iraqis would go to the polls for a third time in 2005 to select a permanent government under the new constitution drafted in August and approved by a referendum in October. This time, the Sunnis, who had boycotted the election in January, were participating. The possibility of reconciliation seemed promising.

IN THE MIDST of his public defense of the Iraq War, Bush spent part of December defending the war on terror on another front. The New York Times planned to publish a story disclosing the warrantless surveillance program for the first time.

The Times had first learned of the secret program a year earlier, but the White House lobbied editors not to publish on the grounds that it would jeopardize national security. Michael Hayden, the NSA director, had invited Philip Taubman, the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, to visit the agency and hear firsthand from the people doing the eavesdropping-analysts who "were slack-jawed" to be describing one of the nation's deepest secrets to a journalist. The editors were persuaded.

But a year later, more questions were arising over the conduct of the war. James Risen, a reporter working the story along with Eric Lichtblau, was planning to disclose the NSA program in a book. The Times editors were revisiting whether it should go in the newspaper too, given what they had learned about the internal debate over the program's legality and the larger pattern of administration policies on interrogation, detention, and rendition.

Bush invited the Times leadership to the Oval Office to make a rare personal plea. Hadley and Hayden joined him, but Cheney stayed away, worried that the long-standing tension between him and the Times that led him to kick the newspaper off his plane during the 2004 campaign would be distracting. Taubman brought Bill Keller, the executive editor, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the chief executive and namesake son of the legendary publisher who resisted government pressure not to publish the Pentagon Papers. As the president welcomed them, he was polite, though not warm. He motioned to Sulzberger to sit in the chair normally occupied by the vice president or visiting foreign leaders.

Sulzberger tried to lighten the mood. "I know what it's like to sit in your father's office," he said lightly.

Bush's face registered no reaction; the Times executives thought either the joke went right over his head or he simply did not find it funny.

Bush turned the discussion over to Hayden, who pulled up a chair opposite the president and Sulzberger and laid down briefing materials. Hayden argued the program had prevented terrorist attacks, but one example he shared did not impress the newspaper executives, the case of a would-be terrorist who planned to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting suspension cables with a tool similar to a blowtorch. Sulzberger and the others found that fanciful at best. How long would it take to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch? Hours? Days? And no one would notice? Sulzberger glanced at Bush and thought he seemed to be snickering at the notion too.

But Bush made the hard pitch, arguing that disclosure could cost lives. There would be another terrorist attack someday, he said sternly, and if administration officials were called to account on Capitol Hill for why they failed to prevent it, the Times executives should sit in the dock right next to them. Keller later called that the "blood on our hands" warning. "Whatever you think of Bush," he said later, "hearing the president tell you you're about to do something that will endanger the country is no laughing matter." Yet when they left the White House gates, with a light snow falling, Keller, Sulzberger, and Taubman agreed they had heard nothing to change their minds. It was hard to imagine al-Qaeda militants did not assume their calls might be tapped, warrants or no, so the most compelling issues were the legal questions: Had Bush and Cheney exceeded their powers? Where were lines to be drawn in a democracy during wartime?

They posted the story on the newspaper's Web site on the evening of December 15, shortly after informing the White House. Bush and Cheney felt betrayed by not having much if any real notice, which exacerbated their anger. The story, under the headline "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," caused a sensation. Among those who had been kept in the dark about the program were Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and Frances Fragos Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, not to mention the vast bulk of Congress. Some inside the White House were stunned and wanted nothing to do with it. Frederick Jones, the press secretary for the National Security Council, refused to be part of any defense of the NSA program or, for that matter, the interrogation program many considered torture. "Maybe you should quit," another White House official snapped at him.

Bush ripped up his radio address for Saturday, December 16, to publicly acknowledge the program while defending it. Delivering the address live from the Roosevelt Room, he called the program "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." Senator Arlen Specter, the Judiciary Committee chairman, vowed to hold hearings. "He's a president, not a king," declared Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat. The administration, added Senator Patrick Leahy, "seems to believe it is above the law."

The episode prompted a debate inside the White House about openness. Dan Bartlett pushed to be more forthcoming about security initiatives, arguing that Bush was "just carrying too much baggage" from all the secret activities.

"Dan," Cheney replied, "we aren't doing these things for our entertainment. We're doing them because we're at war. These programs-and keeping them secret-are critical for the defense of the nation."

AT THE SAME time, John McCain pressed ahead with the Detainee Treatment Act. After winning the lopsided vote in the Senate, McCain now won an overwhelming nonbinding vote in the House supporting his position as well, 308 to 122, again enough to override a veto. Cheney wanted to keep fighting, but Bush knew he was beaten. On December 15, he endorsed McCain's legislation, taking satisfaction that Stephen Hadley had negotiated protection for interrogators from legal liability for past actions.

Inviting McCain and Senator John Warner to the Oval Office, Bush made the best of the situation, praising his former rival as "a good man who honors the values of America" and declaring himself "happy to work with him to achieve a common objective." McCain responded by thanking Bush no fewer than six times.

Cheney did not show up for the public rapprochement, but he was not done. With the help of allies in Congress, the final bill imposed less restrictive rules on the CIA than on the military, banning its interrogators from using cruel or inhuman treatment but not limiting them to the more conventional techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual. David Addington, who had replaced Scooter Libby as Cheney's chief of staff, made sure the cruel and inhuman standard would be interpreted according to a Supreme Court ruling that defined cruelty as an act that "shocks the conscience." In his view, that provided considerable latitude when measured in the context of a threat of a major terrorist attack. Once again, Addington had worked his will behind the scenes, encouraged by Cheney and tolerated by Bush.

Cheney articulated the more permissive standard during a surprise visit to Iraq. "The rule is whether or not it shocks the conscience," he told ABC News during a stop on December 18. "Now, you can get into a debate about what shocks the conscience and what is cruel and inhuman. And to some extent, I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder. But I believe, and we think, it's important to remember that we are in a war against a group of individuals, a terrorist organization, that did, in fact, slaughter 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11, that it's important for us to be able to have effective interrogation of these people when we capture them."

Addington intervened one final time, intercepting a statement the president would release upon signing the Detainee Treatment Act and striking most of the language with a red pen. In its place, he inserted a caveat, asserting that the president would construe the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief" charged with "protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." John Bellinger, the State Department's top lawyer, was furious and blasted out an e-mail saying they had just unraveled all of Hadley's careful negotiations. McCain was incensed; Bush was saying he would do whatever he chose, law or no.

Bush was operating from a position of weakness. Iraq had sapped his public standing and drained the political capital he believed he had earned a year earlier. Of the four domestic goals he had set for 2005, three were dead. Social Security disappeared without a vote. The Breaux-Mack tax commission produced a plan considered so politically toxic that Bush put it on a shelf never to look at again. And his immigration overhaul had so far gone nowhere amid Republican opposition. Only the fourth goal, a crackdown on court-clogging litigation, had been partially accomplished.

He found himself hamstrung overseas as well. The president who had vowed not to sit by and let another Rwanda genocide occur on his watch was now sitting by and watching what his own government termed genocide in Darfur. While Bush had taken a personal interest in Sudan and managed to broker a deal halting a long-running civil war between the Muslim government and rebels based in the south, authorities had begun arming local Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, which were rampaging through villages, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people. By late 2005, when he sat down with advisers to ask what could be done, he discovered no options he liked. What about establishing a no-fly zone or sending in combat helicopters to take out militias attacking refugee camps? But Iraq had made that impossible. It would be attacking another Muslim country, he was told, and would inflame much of the Islamic world.

Bush wrapped up his Iraq speeches with a prime-time Oval Office address on December 18, his first since launching the war thirty-three months earlier. This time, more of the concessions favored by Bartlett and Wallace made it into the speech. "This work has been especially difficult in Iraq, more difficult than we expected," he acknowledged to thirty-seven million viewers. "Reconstruction efforts and the training of Iraqi security forces started more slowly than we hoped. We continue to see violence and suffering, caused by an enemy that is determined and brutal, unconstrained by conscience or the rules of war." He offered an olive branch to war opponents. "We will continue to listen to honest criticism and make every change that will help us complete the mission."

The president was pumped up afterward. Instead of heading immediately to bed, as he generally did after a nighttime address, he lingered with aides to chew over themes for his upcoming State of the Union address. The Iraq speeches made him feel he was regaining momentum. He was rewarded with an eight-point bump in his approval rating to 47 percent, suggesting the public was still willing to listen. The lesson he and his staff took was that Iraq had come to consume his presidency and there was little room for much else unless he kept the public behind him on the war. They would have to keep pushing for support on Iraq and take on their critics. Peter Feaver waged an internal campaign to get Cheney to debate Jack Murtha on Larry King Live, much as Al Gore had taken on Ross Perot over the North American Free Trade Agreement in the last administration, but the vice president demurred.

Bush was feeling feisty, though, his competitive spirit coming through. On New Year's Eve, he asked Karl Rove about his New Year's resolutions. After an incredibly busy 2005, Rove said he hoped to devote more time to books, a passion that had eluded him lately. His goal for the next year, he said, was to read a book a week.

Three days later, he and Bush were together in the Oval Office when the president turned to him.

"I'm on my second. Where are you?"

With that, a contest was born.

AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, Bush and Cheney focused on confirming Samuel Alito. Senate hearings were turning heated over his memos and other documents from his time working for the Reagan Justice Department. Of particular interest was a 1985 job application when Alito was seeking a promotion after working in the Reagan solicitor general's office. "I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote. He described his "personal satisfaction" in pushing Reagan policies: "I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."