By the end of the week, Sunni political leaders announced they would drop out of government formation talks, and the Baghdad morgue reported as many as 1,300 corpses. Entire blocks of Sunni families had been wiped out, and reports reaching the Oval Office grew grimmer. On February 25, Bush called seven Iraqi leaders one after the other, imploring them to tamp down the incendiary rhetoric and come to the table. When he reached Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite party, he was met with silence. Then, finally, Hakim said, "Mr. President, please help us. Help us, Mr. President." Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders appeared in public together later that day to appeal for calm and announce that talks to form a government would go on, but something had changed.

Many would later point to the bombing of the mosque as the tipping point in the war, triggering sectarian conflict that would ultimately claim thousands more lives. The bombing was undoubtedly a grim milestone, but it was also the culmination of tensions ready to burst forth. The elections of 2005, for all their purple-fingered exultation, had papered over fractures tearing apart Iraqi society. The Sunni boycott, the rise of militias, the paralyzing deadlock in forming a government, all set the stage for the tumult that followed the bombing. Zarqawi had merely lit the match. "He actually succeeded and he touched off the sectarian violence and nobody was there in force or in a strategy and was viewed as an honest enough broker to put it down," Stephen Hadley later concluded. "From the bombing of the mosque in Samarra-it had really been building before that-but the real slide begins," recalled his deputy, J. D. Crouch.

Bush turned glum as a bloody winter turned into an even bloodier spring. "I don't think anything disturbed him more than the sectarian violence that occurred in the wake of the Samarra mosque bombing," reflected John Negroponte, the former ambassador to Iraq who was now briefing Bush every morning as the first director of national intelligence. "I think he went through a period for several weeks-I don't know if he went into a state of depression, but I think he was visibly discouraged by the situation in Iraq during this sectarian violence, almost to the point of despondence, because I think it looked to him like the whole game was going down the drain. He was really bothered by that." At some briefings, "it was almost as if he was pleading with us not to give him any more bad news."

Bush's consternation was mirrored by discontent on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers of both parties had concluded that Donald Rumsfeld should bear responsibility for the war. Andy Card tried to use that to convince Bush to finally push out the defense secretary. "Hey, up on the Hill, the drums are beating pretty loudly for change," he told Bush. "I think they're serious and you should think about it."

BUSH TURNED HIS attention briefly to the other war, the largely forgotten conflict in Afghanistan. On March 1, he and Laura made a secret trip to Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, then flew by helicopter to the capital. Bush was struck by the breathtaking scenery, the snowcapped mountains behind brown plains.

With all attention on Iraq, where the bloodshed was unremitting, Afghanistan had gone unnoticed for months, the assumption in Washington being that things were under control. For the moment, they appeared to be, but that misjudgment was fueled by a lack of intelligence, the assets having been moved to the other theater. In reality, Taliban elements were preparing to rally their forces again. "We don't have more troops, and the fighting is getting worse as predicted," Ambassador Ronald Neumann recalled.

Neumann had asked for $600 million for reconstruction projects like roads, power, agricultural development, only to have it cut to $400 million, less than the cost of two days of war in Iraq. So he urged Bush to emphasize American commitment to the Afghans. Over a lunch of kabuli palau, Bush assured President Hamid Karzai that America would stay for the long run. Then he went to the embassy to dedicate a new chancery. He didn't much care for the paint job.

"Who picked that baby-shit yellow?" he asked.

"Sir, Secretary Rice owns that building," Neumann replied.

For Laura, the trip was a rare chance to spend concentrated time with her husband on duty. She had watched as he absorbed one blow after another. She knew Bush needed a break from the bad news. "I am certain that all presidents have moments when they simply ask God, 'Please do not let anything happen today,' " she later observed.

Nothing all that bad happened that day. But a week later, the Dubai firm that had won the contract announced it would transfer its port operations to an American company. Bush's opponents had scared it off. His veto threat had failed.

ON THE NIGHT of March 11, Bush and Cheney attended the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie affair attended by presidents since 1885. If Cheney's mishap had made him the butt of jokes behind his back in the White House, Bush now chose to poke fun to his face.

The president at these dinners was expected to give a humorous talk, so Bush opened with a reference to the shooting incident, alluding to the last time a vice president shot someone, namely Aaron Burr's duel with Alexander Hamilton.

"Mr. Vice President," Bush said, nodding toward Cheney as he greeted the dignitaries onstage. Then, toward Lynne Cheney, he added, "Mrs. Burr."

He went on: "There are all these conspiracy theories that Dick runs the country, or Karl runs the country. Why aren't there any conspiracy theories that I run the country? Really ticks me off."

Bush noted Cheney's middle initial. "B. stands for bull's-eye," he joked. He said the media blew the hunting incident out of proportion. "Good Lord, you'd thought he shot somebody or something."

He kept going: "I really chewed Dick out for the way he handled the whole thing. Dick, I've got an approval rating of 38 percent and you shoot the only trial lawyer in the country who likes me." Bush added, "By the way, when Dick first heard my approval rating was 38 percent, he said, 'What's your secret?' "

Cheney took it with good humor, laughing when he was supposed to. If serving his president meant being the straight man, it was one more service he would provide.

The laughter was a brief interlude in the cascade of bad news. As Bush alluded to, his poll numbers had plummeted to the lowest of any second-term president other than Richard Nixon in the past half century, and Cheney's were worse. Some friends believed Bush needed to shake things up. After all, most of his inner circle had been there since the beginning, more than five years, not counting the campaign. Andy Card got up every day at 4:20 a.m., arrived at the White House an hour later, and did not return home until 9:00 p.m., with phone calls often coming in until 11:00. Then he would get up the next day and do it all over again. No other president's top aide had stayed as long since Sherman Adams under Dwight Eisenhower. Certainly, many of the problems were beyond Card's control, and he enjoyed deep respect inside the White House. But there were some who felt his low-key, self-effacing approach was no longer effective, that he was too weak, that fatigue had led to unforced errors. "We're all burned out," one aide confided at the time. "People are just tired."

Over lunch one day in that period, Bush heard from Clay Johnson, his longtime friend and deputy budget director, that the White House structure was a "clusterfuck," a jumble of crossed lines that he scratched out on a napkin for demonstration purposes. Rather than a commanding figure like other chiefs of staff, Card had been more like the ultimate body man, sticking close to the president through the day and serving as an alter ego; Cheney, in effect, had played the role of chief of staff, dominating the White House operation set up to feed decisions to the president. Card had at times been a punching bag for Rumsfeld, who called to berate him. "You don't know how to be chief of staff," Rumsfeld would tell him, as Card recalled to colleagues. "You're failing the president in your job."

Card at least understood, as Rumsfeld did not, that his time had come; he had been urging Bush to accept his resignation for more than a year, arguing that there were only a handful of people who had enough stature to make a difference in public perceptions by leaving: Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove, and himself. Bush had resisted, but now it was time. In March, he summoned Joshua Bolten, now the budget director, and asked if he would be willing to take over.

To break the news, Bush invited Card and his wife, Kathleene, to Camp David on the last weekend of March. When the president stopped by the bowling alley to talk with Card one evening, he did not even have to say the words. "My face must have betrayed my anguish," Bush recalled. He began telling Card how grateful he was for his service, but Card cut him off and said he understood.

Bush announced the decision at 8:30 a.m. on March 28, praising Card for "his calm in crisis, his absolute integrity and his tireless commitment to public service." Bush realized how much he had come to lean on Card. At a later farewell party at Blair House, Bush choked up and could not even get through his remarks.

Bolten had been with Bush even longer than Card and was just as hard a worker, but he arrived at his new assignment determined to "refresh and reenergize" the White House. He was a self-described "policy geek," serious, bright, well liked, "the smartest person in the room," as Nicolle Wallace put it. And yet he was also an avid Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle rider, a member of a rock band he named Deficit Attention Disorder, and a bachelor once linked to Bo Derek. He brought a dry wit to staff meetings; when someone strayed off course, he would throw a yellow penalty flag onto the conference table like a football referee.

While Cheney respected him, Bolten's selection was another ominous sign for the vice president. For one thing, Bolten intended to be more hands-on than Card, and he planned to make a series of personnel changes. For another, he was not as conservative as Cheney and was more interested in Bush's pet issues like fighting climate change and AIDS in Africa. Most significantly, he had Rumsfeld, Cheney's best friend, in his crosshairs and, unlike Card, would not be deterred for long.

As Bolten looked ahead, Iraq was at the top of the agenda. "Josh viewed his job as getting Bush to understand that Iraq was going to hell in a handbasket and some really big decisions had to be made," observed Michael Gerson. Just days after Bolten's selection, Rumsfeld got into a public spat with Condoleezza Rice that left the impression that he was out of touch with public discontent over Iraq. Rice in London had said that the United States had probably made "thousands" of "tactical errors" in Iraq but had gotten the broader strategy right. Rumsfeld fired back, saying publicly that such a comment betrayed a "lack of understanding" about the war.

Bush still saw the problem as perception as much as reality. He told a visitor that the situation was manageable but exacerbated by a press corps that emphasized failure and gave no credit to success. "The American people are watching-do I have the will to do what I'm doing or will I lose my nerve?" he said. "I will not lose my nerve."

BOLTEN TOOK OVER on April 14, but any ideas of easing out the controversial defense chief were undermined on his first day. Prominent retired army and marine generals had begun speaking out harshly about Rumsfeld and urging that he be fired. Among them were General Anthony C. Zinni, former head of Central Command overseeing operations in the Middle East; Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, former operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Major Generals Paul D. Eaton, who had overseen training of Iraqi troops, and John Batiste, who had commanded a division in Iraq.

But their criticism backfired. Rather than convincing Bush, it got his back up. Although he too had concerns about Rumsfeld, Bush bristled at the idea of military officers, even retired ones, effectively pushing out civilian leadership. Bolten realized any effort to replace Rumsfeld would have to wait.

"We need to step up and give a strong endorsement to Rumsfeld," Bolten told Bush.

Bush agreed and released a statement from Camp David, where he had retreated for Easter: "Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation."

Four days later, addressing reporters in the Rose Garden, Bush went further. "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation," he said. "But I'm the decider and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

That ended the public discussion for a while, but it did not put an end to it behind closed doors. As the Decider tried to reboot his presidency, Bush invited his closest advisers to the residence one evening in April. Sitting in the Yellow Oval Room, he solicited ideas for how to regain momentum. Ken Mehlman did not hesitate to recommend that Rumsfeld be fired. It was important to show that they understood things were not going well, he said. At the end of the day, it was not about pleasing elites in Washington but about recognizing that the reason a company like Walmart was successful was that every day it adjusted to changing circumstances. Gerson agreed, reprising the argument he made after the 2004 election when he first suggested replacing Rumsfeld.

Bush took that in, then asked for a show of hands. Who thought Rumsfeld should go? Most hands went up, including those of Bolten, Mehlman, Gerson, Rice, Card, Karen Hughes, Ed Gillespie, and Margaret Spellings.

When Joel Kaplan, Bolten's incoming deputy chief of staff, raised his, Bush looked surprised.

"You too?" Bush asked.

"Yes, sir."

But others were skeptical, including Rove, Stephen Hadley, and Dan Bartlett. After the generals' revolt, especially, it just seemed that changing horses at this point would be a mistake. Cheney had been making the same point to Bush in private. Bush agreed.

Bolten might have failed at first to take out Rumsfeld, but he had better luck imposing his will on the West Wing. His first act was to strip Rove of the policy portfolio he had won in the second term, giving it instead to Kaplan. Bolten wanted clearer lines of authority and thought Rove was ill-matched to the role. The new chief also eased out Scott McClellan as the press secretary and public face of the White House. As much as he liked McClellan, Bolten concluded that he was not a natural at the podium and would never be able to change the narrative. Neither move went over well; Rove simmered over the demotion, while McClellan left bruised and bitter. When Bush heard that McClellan's wife felt it was a betrayal, the president called her, but it did little to salve the hard feelings.

AFTER SOME DISCUSSION, Bush was also coming around to Rice's thinking about Ibrahim al-Jaafari. "The president had not liked Jaafari and found him to be weak and just talking too much but not doing the right thing," recalled one administration official. With Bush's permission, Rice flew to Baghdad to tell Jaafari to drop his bid to remain prime minister. "It is time for you to go," she told him bluntly. "You have no support from any other Iraqi leader besides Sadr, and for that reason you have lost the support of the United States." It was as overt an intervention in the management of a supposedly democratic country as Bush had attempted, but with the war getting worse, there seemed no choice. On April 20, four months after the elections, Jaafari abandoned his candidacy for prime minister.

The same day, much to Cheney's chagrin and against his better judgment, Bush and Rice opened yet another diplomatic front that might have been unthinkable in the first term, a possible grand bargain with North Korea. They decided to broach the idea with China's president, Hu Jintao, during a meeting at the White House. Hu's visit was the first by a Chinese leader in nine years and had been the subject of intense, edgy discussions between the two sides. Beijing wanted a full state visit, including state dinner, seeing it as confirmation of China's international stature. Bush resisted. He was not a fan of state dinners to begin with, and the notion of giving one to the Chinese, who were neither allies nor even reliable partners, would send the wrong message on human rights. Instead, he agreed to most of the trappings of a state visit, including an elaborate welcome ceremony on the South Lawn complete with twenty-one-gun salute and a review of troops, but opted to host Hu at a luncheon rather than a formal dinner. That was good enough for the Chinese. It was too much for Cheney, who swallowed his misgivings while attending the opening ceremony wearing sunglasses.

Bush's carefully laid plans, though, were undercut by two unexpected gaffes. After Hu was welcomed on the South Lawn by a drumroll and trumpet serenade on a sun-splashed morning, the White House announcer told the crowd that the military band would play the national anthem from "the Republic of China"-the formal name for the breakaway republic of Taiwan. Whether Hu noticed was unclear since he did not flinch. Then, moments into Hu's welcome speech, a woman standing on a press riser across the lawn unfurled a yellow protest banner and began screaming.

"President Hu! Your days are numbered," she yelled in English. "President Bush! Stop him from killing!"

The woman had gotten into the White House with a press pass issued to the Epoch Times, a newspaper associated with the Falun Gong, a religious sect outlawed in China. Hu froze until Bush encouraged him to continue.

"You're okay," he assured the Chinese leader.

For two and a half minutes, the woman shouted until uniformed Secret Service officers finally made their way through the crowd to take her away.

The flubbed welcome was deeply offensive to the Chinese, who were unaccustomed to the sort of dissent that American leaders experience regularly. Even before the visit, Chinese officials touring the East Room tried to close the curtains so that Hu would not have to see demonstrators outside the White House gates; White House officials had to stop them and explain that was not done. After the heckler, several Chinese officials refused to attend the ceremonial lunch, forcing the White House social secretary, Lea Berman, to scramble to remove empty chairs. Bush was chagrined. When he sat down with Hu in the Oval Office, Bush apologized. "This was unfortunate," he said, "and I'm sorry this happened." He hoped to move past the embarrassment to his North Korea plan, but Hu stuck to his Taiwan-focused talking points.

So when Bush ushered Hu into the East Room for the lunch of butter heirloom corn broth, Alaska halibut, snap peas, and sweet potatoes, he largely ignored the corporate titans from General Motors, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, and Caterpillar to hurriedly rearrange the seating chart. Michelle Kwan, the Olympic figure skater; Richard Levin, the Yale University president; and Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, were shifted around so that Bush sat on one side of Hu and Rice on the other.

"Condi and I have something to talk to President Hu about," Bush apologized.

Speaking softly so no one other than the translator and Hu could hear, Bush and Rice then outlined their idea.

"I want you to know I'm serious about this," Bush said. "I'm going to follow up on it, but if he'll give up his nuclear weapons, I'm ready to end the Korean War basically and to give him a peace treaty, and we need to talk about how to make this happen."

Hu seemed taken aback, so Bush kept repeating himself.

"I understand," Hu replied.

He agreed to deliver the message and ordered a lieutenant to leave Washington immediately for Pyongyang.

26.

"I'm not sure how to take good news anymore"

President Bush was already in the Oval Office by the time Joshua Bolten arrived at 6:45 each morning, sitting behind his desk and studying the blue sheet listing overnight casualties, which he had often circled with his Sharpie pen. Iraq was always on Bush's mind. Aides who showed up to talk about other issues often found him distracted and disinterested. Everything kept coming back to Iraq.

Bush was hearing criticism from many different quarters, including friendly ones. On April 23, he paid a courtesy call on Gerald Ford at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, and the ninety-two-year-old former president took the opportunity to lecture him about what was going wrong in Iraq. Ford said he had supported the invasion but felt Bush had done a poor job explaining to the public why it was important and made a mistake by predicating the war on the supposed weapons. "I don't think he admits it," Ford confided to the journalist Tom DeFrank after the meeting, "except that it's a fact."

The news out of Iraq that spring was so grim, so unrelenting. The report Bush got each evening provided increasingly dismal reading-bombings, assassinations, ethnic cleansing, political gridlock, sectarian strife. There were periodic updates on the investigation into the deaths of twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including unarmed women and children, killed in Haditha the previous November by marines upset after a roadside bomb killed one of their own. A trip report prepared by his aide Brett McGurk, who was just back from Baghdad, noted that American civilian officials could leave their fortified Green Zone headquarters only twice a week and with forty-eight hours' notice. Even then, trips were often canceled for security reasons.

In the face of that, it was hard even for the perennially upbeat Bush to keep an optimistic perspective. The jovial demeanor was gone; his face was etched with lines of worry. What could stop the cycle of violence? What could he do? He would later call it "the worst period of my presidency" and confessed that "I thought about the war constantly." For the first time, he worried he would not succeed in Iraq, that he had gotten himself and the country enmeshed in another Vietnam-again with devastating consequences for the country.

He was determined not to show it. "He keeps a lot of that very, very locked up inside himself," one longtime friend said. Constitutionally, Bush disdained hand-wringing and what he would mockingly describe as "woe is me" self-pity. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of everyone watching him. From observing his father's presidency, he understood how a White House takes its cues from the man at the top, and it would be even worse if soldiers in the field saw him "wallow in public" and thought he was losing heart. "Can you imagine the signal I would have sent," he asked a visitor after leaving office, "had I said, 'Ah, why me? Why am I thrust in the middle of all this stuff?' "

Bush was a study in contrasts with his fellow Texan LBJ, who agonized over Vietnam. "He never became a Lyndon Johnson figure, oppressed by the office," Michael Gerson believed. "I never saw any of that." Stephen Hadley said that "if he has dark nights of the soul, he doesn't show them to us." Dan Bartlett came to work every morning expecting Bush to finally succumb to the pressure. "He stunned me day after day," Bartlett said. "I am kind of like, this is going to be the day he breaks. This is the day. This has got to be it." Yet it never happened. Laura worried as well and made a point of regularly inviting over the president's brother Marvin, who lived in the Washington suburbs. Despite their ten-year age difference, "Marvelous," as the president called him, was closer to Bush than his other siblings. They sat together on weekends watching sports.

But he was consumed by the war, and friends could tell it was eating away at him even if he refused to admit it. "He did get kind of down," remembered Joe O'Neill, his childhood pal from Texas. "He feels that pain all the time," observed Jim Langdon, another Texas friend who lived in Washington. Bush prayed every day and leaned on religious advisers like Kirbyjon Caldwell, the Texas minister. "Putting parents, children, in harm's way weighed very heavily on him," Caldwell said. The upbeat image Bush conveyed veiled his internal reality. "Anyone who said he didn't care about that, they are just wrong," Caldwell said. "Just flat wrong about it."

Those who saw him for hours a day, like Bolten and Bartlett, noticed the impact in small ways. "It isn't like he's blowing up in rooms and throwing people out or things like that," Bartlett said. "Maybe a little shorter, but I would bet that the typical White House staffer who maybe runs into him every once in a while wouldn't notice it. It was us that were with him all the time and where he is sharing his frustrations" who could tell. "It would always show itself in different ways. It could be 'What the fuck did Rumsfeld say today?' " Or it could be a quiet spell. "Every day would kind of demonstrate and reveal itself in different ways. But he was never sullen. It would be closer to frustration and pissed more than depression and sullen."

How much he blamed himself was unclear. Most of the killings were committed by al-Qaeda affiliates, Shiite or Sunni militias, or other violent elements, not American troops, but he was the one who had failed to foresee the turmoil that would follow the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and he had stood back as it spiraled out of control. His approach was to trust and delegate to his generals and subordinates. "You fight the war, and I'll provide you with political cover," he told them over and over. But it had left him oddly passive as conditions deteriorated. He interposed no objections when Jerry Bremer overruled the plan Bush had approved for how to handle the Iraqi army and Baath Party, nor did he intervene when the six-month time frame he initially imagined extended to a year, then two, then three.

By late spring, whatever blend of optimism, confidence, and wishful thinking had propped up the White House on Iraq had faded. Through the end of 2005, Bush and Cheney had been able to hang on to the timetable of events they had laid out: Just get to the election for the interim government. Wait till the new constitution is written. Once it's ratified that will make a difference. Look toward the election of a permanent government.

The series of deadlines became beacons for eventual victory but turned out to be false hope. Instead of looking at the bigger picture, the White House had been fixated on the next date on the calendar. "There's always this kind of optimism, looking toward the next milestone," Frederick Jones of the National Security Council later reflected. "That's why it's always been hard to look back and say cumulatively, this has been a fiasco. It was hard on the inside to look back in a cumulative way." Now there were no more artificial milestones, no more illusions of progress.

McGurk and his boss, Meghan O'Sullivan, were quietly trying to send Bush a message through their nightly reports. An Oxford-trained scholar with little practical Middle East background before the invasion, O'Sullivan by now had as much experience in Iraq as any American official. She served as an aide to Bremer, negotiated the interim constitution, and was once forced to escape a hotel hit by a rocket by climbing out the window onto a tenth-floor ledge. She had deep contacts among Iraqi political figures and was controversial among some Americans on the ground for trying to orchestrate the situation from the White House, an "eight-thousand-mile screwdriver," as some termed micromanagers in Washington. But she had come to the conclusion that the strategy put in place by Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, and backed by Donald Rumsfeld, was failing. Underlying the strategy was the assumption that control had to be turned over as quickly as possible to Iraqis so that America could reduce its footprint and not be seen as an occupier. It was a reasoned analysis, informed by long study of the region by Abizaid, a Lebanese American who spoke fluent Arabic and was viewed as "our version of Lawrence of Arabia," in the words of John Hannah, who had taken over as Cheney's national security adviser. Perhaps a quick handover at the beginning of the war might have averted the backlash that followed, but there seemed no one capable of leading the country at the time. By the spring of 2006, more than three years after Saddam Hussein was toppled, it was too late to pretend Americans were not occupiers. And the theory that security would follow political reconciliation was proving hollow.

One morning that spring, Bush looked up from a blue sheet casualty report and shook his head.

"This is not working," he said to Stephen Hadley. "We need to take another look at the whole strategy. I need to see some new options."

"Mr. President," Hadley said, "I'm afraid you're right."

WAYLAID IN HIS PLAN to push out Donald Rumsfeld, Joshua Bolten focused on other changes he thought were needed to shake up the White House. To replace Scott McClellan as press secretary, he came up with a surprising choice-Tony Snow, a high-profile Fox News commentator who had worked as a speechwriter for Bush's father.

Not since the Ford administration had a White House press secretary come directly from the media, but Bolten thought Snow had the right combination of brash charm, nimble debating skills, and disarming humor to pull it off. Moreover, Snow had been tough on the president in his columns and radio show, so he would have credibility. Snow had lambasted Bush as an "impotent" president with a "listless domestic policy" who had "lost control of the federal budget." At one point, Snow said, "George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."

When Bush made the announcement on the morning of April 26, he said slyly, "I asked him about those comments and he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy.' "

Snow's arrival transformed White House press relations. He was the first press secretary for the talk show age, turning daily briefings into cable-style debates with reporters. In a marked shift from the hypercautious McClellan, Snow was not afraid to use bold language and glib repartee that went well beyond the staid talking points. He became an instant rock star, signing autographs, posing for pictures, hitting the lecture circuit, and appearing on television public affairs shows. While his freewheeling style sometimes crossed a line, and his attention to precision was episodic, almost overnight he provided a more popular face for a White House badly in need of it.

Bolten also made two other key changes. Porter Goss, who was constantly at war with the establishment at the CIA, was pushed out as director and replaced by Michael Hayden, the NSA director and architect of the warrantless surveillance program. Engaging, confident, and wise to the ways of Washington, Hayden was a Bush favorite. Now Bolten was ready to reshape the economic team by ousting Secretary of the Treasury John Snow. While Snow got along better with Bush and Cheney than his predecessor did, he was not seen as a powerful public advocate for the administration's economic policies. Besides, Bolten had a nagging sense that the country would be facing a financial crisis before the end of Bush's presidency, just based on the law of averages if nothing else. He figured it would be an international currency crisis of the sort that confronted Bill Clinton, missing early warning signs that it was actually the housing market that was overheating in a dangerous way.

Either way, Snow was not a markets expert, so Bolten set out to find one. Bolten, a former Goldman Sachs executive, pursued Henry Paulson, a onetime junior Nixon White House aide who became chief executive of the storied Wall Street firm, but Paulson said no. Bolten went to other leading Republicans in the financial world, including Charles Schwab, founder of the investment brokerage that used his name; John Thain, chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange; and Kenneth Chenault, chief executive of American Express. But he kept coming back to Paulson, making it a mission to change his mind and devoting hours a day to the project. Paulson was a formidable personality who filled the room. "He's hard to ignore," noted Michele Davis, later one of his chief advisers. "He's tall, but he's even more just gangly with arms flailing and just takes up a lot of space."

With Bush's help, Bolten finally wore him down, much to the chagrin of Paulson's family. His mother cried when Paulson told her he would take the job and expressed hope the Senate would not confirm him. "You started with Nixon and you're going to end with Bush?" she said. "Why would you do such a thing?" Paulson's wife, Wendy, a college classmate of Hillary Clinton's, and their son, Merritt, also opposed his taking the job, although their daughter, Amanda, supported his decision. "You'll be jumping onto a sinking ship," his mother said. But if he was, Paulson at least negotiated terms to his liking. He would run economic policy, not the White House, and not the vice president, who to the outside world seemed to have his hand in every pot.

Actually, Cheney's role was shrinking by the hour. Even as Paulson was boxing him out of economic policy, Rice was elbowing him out of foreign policy. While Iraq was the dominant priority, she was looking for opportunities to make progress on other fronts and saw Iran as a possibility. One night she went home to her apartment in the famed Watergate complex and wrote out a plan for a diplomatic opening in a color-coded chart that proved so complicated only she could read it. But the idea was to propose that the United States come to the negotiating table if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment. At Rice's urging, Bush had been calling other leaders to sound them out. He faced considerable skepticism from some, especially the Russians, who thought the American-led pressure campaign against Tehran risked becoming a repeat of the war in Iraq. "Utter bullshit that I'm going to attack Iran," Bush told Igor Ivanov, the Russian national security adviser, during a visit early in May. "For effectiveness, we can't take the military option off the table. The most important thing is to keep a united front so that there is no way for them to wiggle out of the box."

As Memorial Day approached, Bush finally agreed to make the overture to Iran, if only to keep the Europeans together. Recognizing that the Cheney wing would find it hard to swallow, Rice invited hard-liners to her apartment on the holiday to explain the policy and address objections. She had her collaborator, Nicholas Burns, her undersecretary, lay out the strategy for skeptics like Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser, and John Hannah, Cheney's adviser. Then she invited John Bolton, the hard-line ambassador to the United Nations, to dinner the next night at her favorite restaurant at the Watergate. "I just want to know we are all on the same page," she told him. She announced the new policy the following day, Cheney and his allies quietly going along.

ANOTHER MOMENT OF friction between Bush and Cheney that spring would come over the unlikeliest of issues. On the night of May 20, the FBI raided the Capitol Hill office of Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat caught with $90,000 hidden in his freezer. The raid triggered an eruption of anger in Congress that crossed party lines. To lawmakers, it was a violation of separation of powers and the speech-and-debate clause of the Constitution that protects them while performing their duties.

Speaker Dennis Hastert was "livid," as he later recalled, and gave Bush an earful about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Air Force One returning to Washington from an event in Illinois.

"This is just unacceptable," he told Bush. "I think you ought to ask for the guy's resignation."

Bush was not about to force Gonzales to resign but grew emotional, with tears in his eyes, during the heated exchange with Hastert. "Let me look into it," he said.

Cheney sided with Hastert and Jefferson. For a vice president fixated on the power of the executive branch, this was one instance where he believed the executive had encroached on the legislative branch.

The White House convened a conference call to review what had happened. David Addington "was just so exercised" and peppered the Justice Department officials with "very tough, aggressive questions" demanding to know the constitutional basis for conducting a search on Capitol Hill, according to Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general. McNulty argued that separation of powers did not make congressional offices immune from law enforcement, noting that a judge had authorized the search. Bush and Cheney then summoned McNulty to the White House to hear for themselves why the Justice Department thought it had the power to raid Jefferson's office. Bush noted that he had gotten an earful from Hastert, while Cheney pointed out that he was an old House guy and sympathized with their resistance to executive interference.

The dispute put Gonzales in an awkward position, torn between his inherent loyalty to Bush and his responsibility to defend his department. He began shuttling between the White House and the Justice Department looking for a solution, only to return to his office one day having surrendered.

"Well, basically here's the deal," he told aides. "We have to give the evidence back. We have until midnight to give the evidence back, or they are going to order us to give it back."

McNulty, a House Republican lawyer during Bill Clinton's impeachment and the U.S. attorney who prosecuted terrorism cases in Virginia outside Washington, balked. "We can't do that. We can't give the evidence back to the defendant." In fact, he added, "I will resign before I do it, and you can get someone else to do it."

McNulty went to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and Mueller agreed that he would resign as well if Bush and Cheney forced them to return the evidence.

Just like that, Bush and Cheney found themselves facing another "Saturday Night Massacre"style situation with the deputy attorney general and the director of the FBI threatening to quit rather than follow what they considered improper orders. A compromise was reached to temporarily put the evidence in a safe, sealed from prosecutors, while a court decided whether the Justice Department had overstepped its bounds. Once again, Bush and Cheney managed to avoid a rupture.

WITH IBRAHIM AL-JAAFARI out, the Iraqis had finally agreed on a little-known Shiite leader named Nouri al-Maliki as the next prime minister. He was sworn in on May 20, a full five months after the elections. American officials knew so little about him that they used the wrong first name for him for a while until Maliki himself corrected them.

Bush and Cheney convened the war cabinet on May 26. Rice, who had been under pressure from Donald Rumsfeld to get more civilians into the effort to remake Iraq, reported that she had forty-eight more on tap to go. General George Casey, on video feed from Baghdad, was not impressed.

"Excuse me, Madame Secretary," he said, "but that's a paltry number."

"You're out of line, General," Rice snapped.

"Well," Bush interjected, "on that happy note, we adjourn."