Now seeking the role of neutral arbiter, Alito explained that those were the words of an advocate and that his years as a judge had transformed him. But he had little of John Roberts's smooth charm, and Democrats were eager to fight since his replacing Sandra Day O'Connor would move the court to the right. The confrontation peaked on January 11, 2006, when Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, came to Alito's aid with a series of questions intended to mock the liberal attack on him, particularly his affiliation with a Princeton University alumni group that opposed special efforts to bring more women and minorities to the school.

"Are you really a closet bigot?" Graham asked.

"I'm not any kind of bigot, I'm not," Alito answered.

Graham agreed and said, "I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this."

Martha-Ann Alito, the nominee's wife, started crying. Rachel Brand, the Justice Department lawyer sitting next to her, leaned over and whispered, "It's okay to step out if you want." And so she left the room. It was a genuine moment of angst, but Cheney's man knew just what to do. Steve Schmidt, the vice president's counselor who was managing the confirmation, immediately sent a note to the dais asking for a recess so the dramatic moment could sink in.

When Martha-Ann had recovered and stood up to return to the hearing room, Schmidt stopped her.

"Sit down," he urged. "Revenge is best served cold. Wait twenty minutes and then walk out."

The evening news was approaching, and with any luck her return to the hearing room might be covered live. The episode had made Democrats look mean-spirited. For all intents and purposes, any real suspense over Alito's nomination was now over.

THERE WAS PLENTY of suspense in the Middle East, where Palestinians were preparing for their first parliamentary election in a decade. In the year since Bush vowed to make democracy the touchstone of his presidency, the results had been mixed. The Iraqi elections, Palestinian presidential elections that produced a moderate winner, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the so-called Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and various reforms elsewhere gave hope. Yet by the end of the year, there was evidence of retrenchment. Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, still receiving billions of American aid dollars, released from prison Ayman Nour, a top opponent, and allowed him to run against him in an election, then after an orchestrated victory reimprisoned him.

The upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections presented a fresh challenge to Bush. Israel already faced a crisis as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke and his powers were transferred to his deputy, Ehud Olmert. Amid that uncertainty, Israeli officials were nervous that the most violent faction, Hamas, would win the elections. For Bush, it was a fundamental question: Did democracy really mean leaders chosen by popular will even if it resulted in a government run by a party the United States considered a terrorist organization? Some aides, like Elliott Abrams, thought Hamas should not be allowed to run, disqualified by its own history of violence. But he knew where Bush and Rice were coming from and did not fight. Bush made no effort to stop the elections.

On January 25, as Palestinians flocked to the polls, Bush was told in his morning intelligence briefing that Fatah, the more moderate party of President Mahmoud Abbas, would win narrowly. It was not until the next morning as votes were counted that it became clear Hamas had actually won and would claim 76 of 132 seats in the parliament.

Bush talked with Rice by phone that morning. "What do you think we should do now?" he asked.

"The elections were free and fair," she responded.

"So we'll have to accept the result," he said.

But accepting the results did not mean working with Hamas, which had never recognized Israel's right to exist. While Abbas would remain president, the Hamas victory dashed hopes for a peace settlement and prompted the United States and Europe to cut off much of their aid to the Palestinian government. More significantly, perhaps, it struck a debilitating blow to Bush's freedom agenda. Enthusiasm inside the administration for elections faded fast, and the so-called realists who had always been wary of the president's high-flying rhetoric now had something to point to as they argued about the law of unintended consequences; popular will sounds great unless it advances enemies of one of America's closest allies.

WHILE BUSH HOPED to remake the Middle East in a more democratic image, he also aimed to make the United States less dependent on it. Adopting an ambition that had eluded every president since Richard Nixon, he decided as he opened his sixth year in office to focus on reducing America's reliance on foreign oil, seeing it as a way of depriving autocratic regimes in places like Iran and Venezuela of their lifeblood and minimizing American exposure to petro-blackmail. He had long been a fan of alternative energy, lacing speeches with talk of cellulosic ethanol made from corn and switchgrass. Now he wanted to use his upcoming State of the Union address to promote a research revolution.

Cheney was skeptical. He did not share the president's romanticism about alternative fuels. They were fine as far as they went, but the cold truth was that oil and gas were here to stay, at least for decades. Others in the White House shared his doubts. In an interconnected energy market, it was impractical to declare that one barrel of oil came from an undesirable source while another was acceptable, not to mention that allies would still be dependent on the same sources. Energy independence, they argued, was something of a misnomer; energy security might be better. Besides, while net oil imports had risen from 53 percent of American consumption to 60 percent since the president took office, only 11 percent of the country's oil came from the Persian Gulf, even less than before Bush's arrival. The United States was depending increasingly on Canada and Mexico for oil, much more reliable partners.

None of that dissuaded Bush. His State of the Union would call for a two-decade project to break American energy dependence, echoing promises made by presidents for generations. His goal was to replace more than 75 percent of Middle East oil imports by 2025. After multiple drafts of the speech, he inserted his own catchphrase near the end of the process: "America is addicted to oil." Coming from a former oilman, that would have resonance. And the choice of the word "addicted" for the former drinker was no accident. If Bush believed in redemption for the individual, this was a chance for national salvation. "That was all him," said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. "When we put it in, there was a lot of push back." Bush ignored the protests and kept it in.

Just hours before heading to the Capitol to give his address on January 31, Bush finally received one bit of good news. The Senate had confirmed Samuel Alito 58 to 42, overcoming Democratic filibuster threats. Alito was sworn in, just in time to appear in the House chamber in black robes next to the other justices.

"Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy," Bush declared in the fifty-one-minute address. "And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology."

The State of the Union was kicking off a new year. Things had to get better. What else could go wrong?

25.

"Please do not let anything happen today"

The quail flushed from its covey and flew off into the Texas sky. It was late in the afternoon on February 11, and the sun was dipping below the horizon at the fabled Armstrong Ranch. Vice President Cheney swung around and squeezed the trigger of his 28-gauge Italian-made shotgun. Only after some two hundred lead pellets roared out of the barrel did he notice someone in the line of fire, a fellow hunter dressed in an orange vest but partly obscured as he stood in a gully, only the upper part of his body visible. "The image of him falling is something that I'll never be able to get out of my mind," Cheney said later.

Cheney rushed over to the man. His face, neck, and torso had been shredded by dozens of bird shot and were splattered with blood. The man, a seventy-eight-year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington, was breathing and conscious but badly hurt. Just one eye was open.

"Harry, I had no idea you were there," the vice president said.

Whittington did not answer. He later remembered only the smell of gunpowder before passing out.

A physician's assistant from the vice presidential entourage ran over and administered first aid. Within thirty minutes, they loaded Whittington into the ambulance that followed the vice president wherever he went and transported the wounded man to a local hospital.

Shaken up, Cheney decided to take the night to think about what to do. The Secret Service informed Washington that there had been a hunting accident and that Cheney was unhurt, but when the Situation Room passed word to Andy Card, no one mentioned it was the vice president who had pulled the trigger. Card passed along the incomplete version to Bush. As it happened, Karl Rove was friends with both Whittington and the ranch host, Katharine Armstrong, and spoke with her about the incident at 8:00 p.m., evidently without passing along the information to many people. The Secret Service called the local sheriff, and he agreed to send a deputy to take statements in the morning.

David Bohrer, the vice president's photographer, called Neil Patel, the highest-ranking Cheney aide traveling with him.

"We have a problem," Bohrer told Patel, who was at a nearby hotel. "The boss shot somebody."

Patel asked what they were planning to do.

Bohrer told him the vice president was planning to wait until morning to make it public. Patel should come to the ranch then.

The news of what really happened made it back to the White House in the most circuitous way, and Bush's advisers were alarmed that the vice president had not publicly disclosed the accident. Even Laura Bush felt compelled to intervene. She was in Italy for the Winter Olympics when her chief of staff, Anita McBride, heard what happened from one of the first lady's Secret Service agents. She quickly called Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, to find out what was going on, waking him at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday. McClellan had been called by the Situation Room the night before but given the impression that the vice president wasn't involved.

"Has the vice president's office gotten it out yet?" McBride asked.

"Gotten what out yet?" McClellan asked groggily.

"That he shot someone."

"What?" Suddenly McClellan was wide-awake.

She told him she had heard from the Secret Service that Cheney was the one who fired the gun. "Mrs. Bush wants that information out right away," McBride said.

The first lady was agitated that the story was being sat on and told McBride more than once to call Card, first from the ground before taking off and then from her plane as she flew back to Washington. "She felt very strongly that whatever the truth was, immediately it had to be told," McBride recalled later. "There was absolutely no reason in her mind that we did not." While she rarely played a visible role in her husband's political operation, Laura had a clear instinct for the dangers if the story was not disclosed promptly. "She knew herself too that it would fester if they didn't do that," McBride said.

Down in Texas, Gilberto San Miguel Jr., the county's chief deputy sheriff, arrived at the ranch at 8:05 a.m. and was ushered in to meet the vice president. "Mr. Cheney shook my hand and told me he was there to cooperate in any way with the interview," Miguel later reported. The two sat at a table, and Cheney calmly explained what happened. Patel arrived during the interview and saw the vice president get his gun and show it to the deputy.

After the interview was completed, Cheney greeted Patel.

"What are we going to do?" the aide asked.

Cheney was genuinely worried about Whittington. But all around him a furor was growing about disclosing the incident to the public. From Washington, McClellan and Dan Bartlett were calling furiously, but Cheney's staff in Texas refused to take their calls, instead passing them off to Lea Anne McBride, the vice president's spokeswoman (who was not related to Anita McBride). She grew frustrated. "We've got to get back to these guys," she told Patel. "We've got to figure out what we're saying and when we're saying it."

Cheney seemed unusually withdrawn, growing quickly tired and even a little snippy about all the arguing. Liz Cheney called Mary Matalin, her father's former counselor who remained a key adviser from the outside, and asked her to help out. Matalin concluded the fastest and best way to get the information out was to pass it along to a Texas reporter, who would have access to the local sheriff. "Let's get it to the local press," she said.

The vice president got on the phone with Matalin. He did not have enough staff with him to handle something like this.

"It's not going to be a story," she assured him. "Don't worry, I'll get it done."

But she did not understand the agitation building inside the president's team in Washington. Bush's aides were aggravated at being ignored by the vice president. "We couldn't get hold of him for quite a bit of time," Bartlett later recalled. "They were strategizing on their own, which always got me worried."

Finally, when Cheney's team called Bartlett back, they said the vice president planned to tell the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Cheney had no illusions that would keep the story from exploding in the national media, but he saw no need to cater to people in Washington and New York who were eager to skewer him.

The vice president was not surprised that Bush's aides disapproved. Bartlett saw it as a disaster. It would look as if they were trying to hide the situation and would only fuel the fire.

"I have to talk to the vice president directly," Bartlett told the Cheney team.

When the vice president got on the phone, he listened patiently.

"Mr. Vice President, I know you don't have traveling press with you but we need to pull together a pool, get them down there, get you on the phone with them, get this worked out," Bartlett said.

Cheney said nothing. The silence unnerved Bartlett, as Cheney's silences often did.

Finally, Cheney spoke and made clear he had already decided what to do. "This is how we're going to handle it," he said flatly, inviting no further debate.

Not sure what else to do, Bartlett retreated. "Okay, Mr. Vice President," he said.

Cheney likewise "tersely refused" a similar appeal from Rove and headed to the hospital to visit Whittington. While the two traveled in similar circles-Whittington was friends with the elder George Bush and worked on one of his Senate campaigns-they had met only three times before and never hunted together. Cheney did not know what to expect when he walked into the hospital room.

Whittington looked terrible, his face bandaged and red. Bird shot had come close to his heart and carotid artery. While many pellets had been removed, dozens were still lodged in his body and would remain there the rest of his life. But he was incredibly gracious with the man who had shot him.

"How are you doing?" Cheney asked.

"I'm fine, don't worry," Whittington said. "I'm really sorry that this has all happened. How are you doing?"

Cheney dismissed the concern. "That's the least of your worries," he said. "Don't worry about it."

CHENEY RETURNED TO Washington later without speaking publicly about the incident. Sure enough, slipping the story to the Texas paper only exacerbated the furor, giving the White House press corps, the cable talk shows, and the bloggers two issues to chew on-the shooting itself and the way it was disclosed. Cheney was disdainful of the frenzy, dismissing it as the arrogance of an elite media that felt entitled to be hand-fed. What difference did it make if it broke in a Texas newspaper? In the Internet age, anyone in the world could read that story. It did not have to be in the New York Times first.

But it left McClellan and the White House under siege. At his briefing the next day, February 13, McClellan fended off a barrage of hostile questions. He did not go out of his way to defend the vice president, referring questions to his office, figuring they should have to clean up the mess they had created. Exhausted and beaten down as he left the briefing room, McClellan was handed a notebook and sent to the Oval Office for a meeting. The vice president was already there.

"You did a good job," Cheney told him, evidently having watched the briefing or part of it.

McClellan took no solace from that. You should be the one out there, he thought bitterly. But he did not say that out loud.

Cheney showed no interest in meeting the press, and as one news cycle flowed into another dominated by the topic, Bush and his aides grew agitated that the vice president would not simply answer questions and put the issue to rest. Nicolle Wallace suggested Cheney give an interview to Brit Hume on Fox News, someone he would be comfortable with and who would do a professional job but not be innately hostile.

That idea did not go over well in Cheney's camp. Matalin considered the press frenzy crazy and thought all the "mattress mice" in the White House had overreacted to it. She called Wallace on February 14 and ripped into her. "You are a fucking press lover," she snapped.

So Bartlett, Wallace, and McClellan felt they had no choice but to enlist Bush. They were not going to be able to talk about anything else until Cheney did the interview, they told him. Could he ask him? Bush seemed irritated at the distraction and agreed to intervene.

After five years in office together, no one had studied Cheney more intently than Bush, and he understood that a media interview would go against his grain. When Cheney dug in on a question like this, he was hard to move. Cheney hated the phoniness of the public emotional striptease the media demanded of politicians-as if apologizing on television would make a difference one way or the other. "We've got to make him think it's his idea," Bush told his advisers.

How he ultimately did that remains unclear, but Cheney finally backed down and asked Matalin what she thought.

"Is this a big deal?" he asked.

By this point, she had concluded it was time to lance the boil as well. "Yes," she said. "It's spun out of control."

"Is this the best way to fix this?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

Cheney sat down with Hume on February 15. He was genuinely upset about the shooting, and while he kept his cool, to anyone who had watched him over the years, his distress came across during the interview. "I fired and there's Harry falling, and it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life," Cheney told Hume. After days of Cheney's defenders essentially blaming Whittington for being where he should not have been, Cheney accepted responsibility. "It's not Harry's fault," he said. "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

The appearance accomplished its purpose. Cheney answered all the obvious questions, ending the firestorm after four days.

Cheney took satisfaction in one last jab at his media tormentors.

"You know why I picked Fox News, don't you?" he asked McClellan.

The press secretary didn't respond.

"Because when all the other media reports this," Cheney said, "I want them to have to cite Fox News."

But the damage went beyond a wounded friend and some political heat. His handling of the shooting was a moment that some inside the White House would call a turning point, an episode that soured the relationship between president and vice president and diminished Cheney's clout within the West Wing. "That had a big effect on the Bush staff and his inner circle," recalled Peter Wehner. Cheney increasingly came to be viewed after the shooting incident less as a sober and intimidating force and more as a political liability. He was even the butt of jokes that would never have been uttered aloud in the corridors of the White House in the first term. "People started rolling their eyes, you know?" said one aide.

Bush had already been pulling away from Cheney, more inclined to see him as one more person in his inner circle with a point of view, rather than the font of wisdom he had been at the start of their tenure. He was still defensive about the mythology that he simply did what Cheney told him to do. One day in that period Bush had lunch with Robert Strauss, the former Democratic power broker who had served as his father's ambassador to Moscow, and Jim Langdon, Bush's friend from Texas and Strauss's law partner.

Without being asked, Bush raised the question of the vice president's influence. "I always value Dick Cheney's advice," Bush told his guests. "There was never a time I didn't value Dick Cheney's advice. But we don't always agree."

THE STRING OF bad news did not let up with the shooting. Just days later, a furious revolt erupted among Republicans on Capitol Hill over a government-approved deal that would turn over management of six ports to a firm from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Republicans climbed all over each other to denounce what they called a national security threat. It was a telling indicator of how far Bush and Cheney had fallen that their own party did not hesitate for a moment to abandon them on a matter of security.

On Air Force One flying home from an energy event in Golden, Colorado, on February 21, Bush found Dan Bartlett entering his cabin.

"We've got a problem," Bartlett said, describing the latest moves by lawmakers to overturn the deal.

Bush was aggravated. This whole thing was political pandering, he felt, and an outrageous challenge to his own integrity.

Bring the press pool up here, Bush instructed Bartlett.

The very act of summoning reporters on the plane would send a signal since he almost never did it. By the time they sat down at his conference table, Bush was hot.

"I really don't understand why it's okay for a British company to operate our ports, but not a company from the Middle East when our experts are convinced that port security is not an issue," Bush said sternly.

"What do you say to those in Congress who plan to take legislative action?" a reporter asked.

"They ought to look at the facts and understand the consequences of what they're going to do," Bush said. "But if they pass a law, I'll deal with it, with a veto."

In five years in office, Bush had never vetoed a bill nor even issued quite such an in-your-face threat. A collision course with his own party was looming, and even some advisers were uncomfortable. "I was trying to get him not to," Karl Rove told Ken Mehlman after the plane ride. Republicans on Capitol Hill remained defiant. Shortly after the president's threat, Speaker Dennis Hastert sent him a letter calling for "an immediate moratorium" on the deal and adding that "this proposal may require additional Congressional action in order to ensure that we are fully protecting Americans at home."

The news was about to get worse. By the time Bush and Cheney arrived at work the next morning, on February 22, the war in Iraq had taken a drastic turn. The morning briefing was filled with reports about the bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in the city of Samarra, about sixty miles north of Baghdad. Insurgents dressed as security forces set off two bombs, reducing the gilded dome to a pile of rubble, and with it any remaining shreds of peace. "This is as 9/11 in the United States," declared Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq's two vice presidents. The shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, was one of the holiest religious sites in the Shiite world. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was in the streets taking revenge on Sunnis. The attack set off such spasms of anger that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made an unprecedented appearance on national television and issued a written statement ominously warning Iraqi authorities that Shiites might take matters into their own hands.

Bush appealed for calm and hoped to avoid a major rupture. But that quickly proved illusory. Bodies piled up as Shiite and Sunni fighters engaged in open warfare, presumably the goal of the bombing, which was quickly linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. That evening, Bush read his nightly report on Iraq and found a grim assessment. "For the first time," said the report prepared by Meghan O'Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and the Iraq team, "all of our contacts in Iraq now speak openly of civil war."

The bombing came at a time when the political process Bush and Cheney were counting on had already slowed. It had been two months since the Iraqi parliamentary elections, and there was still no sign of a new government. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the interim prime minister, was trying to hold on to the post, but he had not impressed the Americans as an effective leader or someone capable of stopping the violence. He was prone to waxing about the founding fathers but referred to them by names like George Jefferson and Jack Washington. Condoleezza Rice considered him "an odd man with the bearing of a humanities professor." O'Sullivan wrote a memo to Bush and Hadley urging them to resist considering Jaafari a fait accompli and arguing that it was in the American interest to push for another outcome. But some in the White House suspected that Zalmay Khalilzad, now the ambassador in Baghdad, was helping Jaafari. He later denied that, attributing such suspicion to his refusal to help a rival candidate, Adel Abdul Mahdi. Either way, Jaafari won the narrow support of his Shiite coalition. "I think this is the day we lost Iraq," McGurk wrote in an e-mail to O'Sullivan.