Rumsfeld was aggravated by what he saw as Rice's breach of the chain of command. It was the first time tensions between his department and State had boiled over so starkly in front of the president. He later told Rice that she should not scold his general; if she had a problem with one of his officers, she should bring it to him.

Despite a growing sense inside the White House that the strategy was not working, there was no consensus on what to do about it. Bush was still reluctant to second-guess commanders, while Cheney was so close to Rumsfeld he seemed unwilling to challenge his friend. Rumsfeld years later said Cheney and he shared the same concerns and recalled no moment when the vice president disagreed with his approach. "Every one of us was worried, wondering about the strategy, what was being done, and asking those questions-should there be more, should there be less, should they be here, should they be there, should their mission be more this than that?" Rumsfeld said. "And those kinds of questions went on continuously from Dick and others."

Hoping to shake up the policy, Stephen Hadley and aides like Meghan O'Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and Peter Feaver proposed a two-day summit on Iraq at Camp David, where the war cabinet could take a deeper look at the situation, a gathering modeled after Dwight Eisenhower's famed sessions in the Solarium when he had analysts present different approaches for dealing with the Soviet Union. Similarly, Bush's advisers hoped to put fundamental issues on the table: Was the current strategy working? How should Shiite militias be tackled? Could further outreach to Sunni insurgents defuse the uprising? Was the Iraqi government helping or making the situation worse? They prepared thick briefing books and invited outside scholars to debate the strategy in front of Bush and Cheney, including some who would advocate sending more troops and switching to a counterinsurgency approach more focused on protecting the population.

Before they could convene, a little good news intervened. On June 7, days before the Camp David session, Bush met in the Roosevelt Room with members of Congress back from Iraq. Representative Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican, told Bush he should target Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"We really got to get rid of Zarqawi," he said. "It would be like getting Saddam."

Bush quietly chortled at the obvious and elbowed Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, who was sitting next to him.

"Why didn't I think of that?" Hoyer whispered to Bush with a laugh.

Just minutes later, at 3:45 p.m., Hadley was summoned out of the meeting to take a phone call. On the line was Zalmay Khalilzad, the ambassador in Baghdad. They had indications that none other than Zarqawi had just been killed by two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped on a safe house near Baquba. Hadley returned to the meeting. Bush gave him a quizzical look, but Hadley waved him off, reluctant to announce something that had not been confirmed. He got pulled out again a half hour later for another phone call.

Only after the meeting did Hadley go into the Oval Office at 4:35 p.m. to tell Bush, Cheney, Bolten, and Rice the news. They needed to wait to be sure of the identification. Bush offered a restrained response to the possibility that the most potent enemy in Iraq might be gone. "That would be a good thing," he said simply.

It was not until after 9:00 p.m. that Bush received word that fingerprints, tattoos, and scars matched. It was indeed Zarqawi. General Stanley McChrystal, head of special operations forces in Iraq, had personally gone to the bombing site to ensure it was Zarqawi's broken frame pulled out of the wreckage shortly before he died.

Bush announced the news the next morning, June 8, then called Hoyer. "God, I'm so glad that Ray made that suggestion," Bush said.

And he called LaHood to tell him how prescient he was. "Hey, you might go down in history," the president joked.

Zarqawi had been the terrorist Bush declined to bomb in mid-2002 against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld for fear of starting a war too soon. He had gone on to become the key figure fomenting sectarian strife in the new Iraq, as lethal a foe as any since the September 11 attacks, responsible for more American deaths in Iraq than any other individual. Finally killing him, however belatedly, was the biggest symbolic victory since Hussein's capture two and a half years earlier. "I was just giddy," Rice recalled. Yet there was no euphoria in the Oval Office. Bush was sober.

"You don't seem happy," O'Sullivan noted.

"I'm not sure how to take good news anymore," he said.

BUSH'S TEAM HEADED to Camp David for their Iraq summit on June 12. Cheney flew by helicopter from his weekend home in St. Michaels, Maryland, landing at Camp David with his mind swirling with questions about the viability of the Iraq venture. O'Sullivan's staff had been up until 3:00 a.m. preparing briefing books, and she hoped the meeting could be a turning point that would force a reappraisal and new strategy.

The war cabinet gathered in Laurel Lodge and sat on one side of a conference table facing screens showing Abizaid, Casey, and Khalilzad in Iraq. Casey reported that the situation had "fundamentally changed" and was no longer just an insurgency against Americans but had become a broader internal struggle for political and economic power. The longer the Americans were there, the longer Iraqis would depend on them to solve their problems, and so he recommended keeping the current strategy to transition responsibility to Iraqi forces. "My view was always we had to draw down," he said later. "For us to be successful, we ultimately had to leave Iraq."

Then four military experts were asked to give presentations: Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Robert Kaplan, a longtime roving correspondent and writer; Eliot Cohen, a historian at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies; and Michael Vickers, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Kagan offered a robust argument for reversing course and adding more troops to implement a counterinsurgency strategy. Iraqi forces were not ready to take over, he said, and until Iraqi civilians felt secure and trusted their government, the strife between Sunni and Shia would continue. The success of the war was too important to wage anything less than a full-fledged effort. This was the message that O'Sullivan, McGurk, and Feaver wanted Bush to hear. Vickers, who had met separately with Bush two weeks earlier, presented the opposite theory. As a young man, he had been an architect of the CIA's successful proxy war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, a role later popularized in the book and movie Charlie Wilson's War. Now he urged a similar approach with Iraqis in the lead. He distributed a four-page paper maintaining that "it is highly unlikely that American forces, even with growing Iraqi security force assistance, will be able to defeat the insurgency within the next 23 years." Therefore, the United States should shift to "an indirect approach," withdrawing all but forty thousand troops that would serve as a quick-reaction force supporting Iraqis who would take the lead "no later than summer 2008." Rumsfeld, for one, found Vickers's case "to be persuasive." Worried about just that, Feaver had added Cohen to the list of speakers to bolster Kagan's side.

In the midst of the discussion, Bush got more good news. Karl Rove received word that he would not be indicted. Rove was on a plane around 4:00 p.m. about to take off for New Hampshire when his lawyer called to tell him the prosecutor had informed him no charges would be brought. For Rove, it was a powerful relief. While he had maintained a public stoicism about the investigation, "behind the mask, the whole thing was scaring the hell out of me." Now pumped up, Rove went on to deliver a red-meat speech to a Republican audience that night, accusing Democrats like John Kerry and John Murtha of "cutting and running" in Iraq. "They may be with you at the first shots," he said, "but they are not going to be there for the last tough battles."

At Camp David, Bush excused himself after a long day of discussion. It was late, and everyone assumed he was heading to bed. The next day would be key-a day of closed meetings just with the senior team and a handful of aides as they wrestled with what to do next. But Bush did not go to bed. Instead, he slipped into a car for a short ride to the helipad, where he boarded Marine One and took off for Andrews Air Force Base, flying through the night without lights. With his top advisers at Camp David, it was the perfect cover for another secret trip to Iraq, a "brilliant fake out," as Joshua Bolten saw it. The normally taciturn Cheney was left behind to filibuster since the rest of the team did not know about the trip.

The next morning, June 13, O'Sullivan was at Camp David on the phone with McGurk back in Washington preparing to brief Bush when their colleague Charles Dunne ran into McGurk's office at the White House and announced that the president was on television in Baghdad.

"Meghan, um, where's the president?" McGurk asked.

"He's here," she said. "We're about to get started."

"Charles said he just landed in Baghdad."

"What?" she asked, then quickly hung up.

She headed to the main lodge and found J. D. Crouch. It still had not sunk in until he confirmed what had happened.

"The president's not here," Crouch told her. "The president's in Baghdad."

Bush was at the Green Zone palace with Khalilzad and Nouri al-Maliki. He had flown into the city on an army helicopter that shot off flares to distract heat-seeking missiles. Casey and Khalilzad presented him with a stone from the house where Zarqawi was killed. "He was pumped up about" Zarqawi's death, Casey recalled. Bush took Maliki's measure and was impressed. "I sensed an inner toughness," he concluded.

He also met with Casey, who told him about his plan to launch Operation Together Forward using counterinsurgency techniques that had succeeded in the city of Tal Afar along the Syrian border.

Bush saw a contradiction-true counterinsurgency requires a sizable troop presence-but Casey and Abizaid kept advocating a drawdown.

"I have to do a better job of explaining it to you," Casey said.

"Yes, you do," Bush replied.

But with Zarqawi dead and a new prime minister in place, the stealth trip set back any serious revision of strategy. The bare-it-all Camp David session Bush's advisers anticipated turned out to be just cover for the trip. Cheney, who had grown unsettled about the current strategy, had hoped "to make a big case for how badly things were going," including charts with violence and a discussion of counterinsurgency, according to one adviser. But Bush, sensitive to his commander in the field, returned to Washington willing to give him a chance to turn the corner. "Troop levels will be decided upon by General Casey," Bush told reporters. It was a formulation he had leaned on repeatedly; one study found that he had said troop levels would be decided by ground commanders thirty times in 2006 alone. Joshua Bolten later recalled, "We came away from that trip with a lot of optimism, which was genuine. But it was masking what was going on underneath."

The rump group of insurgents inside the White House pushing for change was disheartened. "What I thought would have started a zero-base review of the strategy miscarries back into debates about implementation on the margins," reflected Feaver. O'Sullivan returned to the White House deeply upset, convinced that their summit had become a "PR session" that "didn't tackle any of the pressing issues of the moment."

27.

"Make damn sure we do not fail"

President Bush was in the Oval Office on the morning of June 29 meeting with the visiting prime minister of Japan when Dan Bartlett and Tony Snow interrupted. The Supreme Court, they told him, had just determined that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees at Guantnamo and threw out the military commission system, ruling that Bush had overstepped his authority. Harriet Miers came downstairs to give the president a "drive-by briefing" before he headed to the East Room for a joint news conference with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. "I will protect the people," Bush told reporters, "and at the same time conform with the findings of the Supreme Court."

Not if Vice President Cheney had his way. He was not ready to conform. The decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld not only overturned the military commissions that Cheney persuaded Bush to approve that autumn day shortly after the September 11 attacks but also represented a direct blow to the core of the Bush-Cheney war on terror. For nearly five years, Bush and Cheney had waged war largely as they saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, Cheney arranged for Bush to authorize it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, Bush and Cheney agreed to let it.

The two had operated on the principle that it was better to act than ask permission, convinced that protecting the country required the most expansive interpretation of presidential powers. If they were later forced to retreat from controversial decisions, they reasoned, it was worth the price to prevent what in those early hours and days seemed like a certain "second wave" of attacks. Better to "push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop," as David Addington had memorably put it. For years, that had worked. Now the Supreme Court in the latest and broadest of a series of decisions on the war on terror was interposing itself as a larger force.

Cheney and Addington argued for legislation that would overturn the Supreme Court decision. Addington drafted a one-page bill that would strip the court of its jurisdiction over the matter and affirm the president's power to do what he had done. From their point of view, it was outrageous for the Supreme Court to second-guess a wartime commander in chief, especially when it had backed Franklin Roosevelt's military commission scheme to try Nazi saboteurs.

The vice president's move generated a sharp debate. John Bellinger, the State Department's top lawyer, considered resigning if the president sought to reverse the court. "I was just shocked," he said later. "It was just unbelievable to me that anyone would urge the president to overrule the court." His boss, Condoleezza Rice, who had been circumvented by Cheney on the original military commission order, agreed. So did Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state in charge of repairing America's image in the world. She had concluded that the Guantnamo prison and perceptions of how detainees were treated were overpowering her efforts to win the war of ideas. As far as she was concerned, "we're not going to get anywhere as long as we have this big public relations black eye."

The issue came to a head at a meeting in the Oval Office.

"Mr. President, you cannot overturn the Supreme Court," Rice pleaded.

On Cheney's side were Miers and Alberto Gonzales, who argued that the president should not surrender his powers.

Five years after Bush had readily agreed to sign the military commission order when Cheney brought it to him in 2001, he was no longer willing to go along. "I'm not going to overrule the Supreme Court," he declared.

When someone worried that because of the ruling, international tribunals would try to pick it up and apply the Geneva Conventions to American detainees, Bush brushed it off. "I'm not worried about international tribunals," he said.

Instead, Bush decided to work with Congress to approve a military commission system that would meet the court's guidelines and have buy-in from the elected legislature as well. Some on his staff wondered whether it would have made sense to do that in the first place rather than waste so many years asserting unilateral authority. Either way, this time Bush decided to send Stephen Hadley to Capitol Hill from the start. Cheney was sidelined.

AS SPRING PROGRESSED, Bush found himself increasingly focused on Russia, which was set to host its first Group of Eight, or G-8, summit. To Vladimir Putin, hosting the summit was a validation of his country's reemergence on the world stage, but to critics it reflected badly on the West to give such a prominent stage to a country that did not meet the group's democratic standards. Having promised a freedom agenda favoring dissidents over despots, Bush found himself pressured at home by John McCain and others to boycott the summit. Bush had no intention of snubbing Putin, but he was in an awkward position. "I think we are headed to a firestorm with Putin," Bush confided in Tony Blair.

Among those who thought Bush was on the wrong side of history was Cheney, who had been skeptical of Putin from the beginning. While Bush pondered how to nudge Putin without sacrificing their friendship, the vice president privately launched his own effort to add backbone to American policy. He invited Russia specialists to his office to discuss options for pressuring Moscow, and a Russian opposition leader, Vladimir Ryzhkov, was secretly brought in to meet with the vice president without the Kremlin finding out about it. "He thought the Bush administration had gone too far in embracing Putin," recalled Michael McFaul of Stanford University, one of the scholars Cheney consulted.

With Bush's permission, Cheney flew to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to give a speech on May 4 lacerating Putin's Russia for "unfairly and improperly" restricting the rights of its people and using oil and gas as "tools of intimidation or blackmail" against neighboring countries. "Russia has a choice to make," Cheney said. "And there is no question that a return to democratic reform in Russia will generate further success for its people and greater respect among fellow nations." The speech infuriated Putin. But the message was undermined when Cheney flew next to Kazakhstan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic with no more freedom than Russia, and stood with its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, offering nothing but praise. The Kremlin saw that as the height of cynicism and chose to believe Cheney was just freelancing. But in fact the speech had been vetted at the White House, and Bush was comfortable with Cheney playing the bad cop to his good cop. "The vice president put a stake in the ground with his speech, which helped us," Bush told Blair.

In his more friendly vein, Bush tried to get Putin to put other tangible issues on the table for the summit to keep it from being dominated by the question of Russian democracy. In a phone call on June 5, Bush suggested four subjects-bird flu, Darfur, Iran, and nuclear terrorism. Putin thanked Bush for pushing ahead with Russian membership in the World Trade Organization and said only "a few more moves" and then it "will be finished."

Then, in an odd exchange, Putin mentioned Sergei Lavrov, his chain-smoking, hard-line foreign minister. "Lavrov just returned from London and had problems with his cheeks and lips being swollen," Putin told Bush. "We might need to take a closer look at what Condi did to him."

Bush, awkwardly, played along with what seemed to be a lurid form of sexual innuendo. "Condi is not blind," he joked.

"And she is a very attractive lady," Putin replied.

"She is a wonderful lady," Bush said, then tried to move the conversation along. "Listen, I'd like to get this WTO stuff done in the next couple weeks before we get to St. Petersburg."

The next day, June 9, Bush traveled to Camp David with the visiting Danish prime minister and talked about Putin. "We've had some tough meetings," Bush told his guest. "He's not well informed. It's like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong. I met him in Slovakia. He said, 'You've been saying bad things about me on democracy.' I said, 'Yes. I don't like what our press corps says about me but I don't close them down. You go out and close the media when you don't like what they say.' "

He said Putin had even tried to get to him by offering an oil industry job to Don Evans, the former commerce secretary and one of his closest friends. "Putin asked me, 'Would it help you if I moved Evans to an important position?' What a question! 'Will it help you?' " Bush was exasperated. "What I wanted to say is, 'What would help me is if you make moves on democracy.' It's strange the way he thinks." A few days before leaving for St. Petersburg, Bush confided in the visiting prime minister of Slovenia. "I think Putin is not a democrat anymore," Bush lamented. "He's a tsar. I think we've lost him."

Bush's efforts to divert attention from the democracy dispute by forging a last-minute deal to admit Russia into the World Trade Organization failed. His trade representative, Susan Schwab, negotiated three late nights in a row with the Russians in a frantic effort to reach an accord that Bush and Putin could announce-at one point going twenty-four hours straight and eating pizza for breakfast. They got so close that the Russians publicly declared a deal would be signed by the presidents. But at 2:30 a.m. on July 15, a day after Bush arrived in town, they finally hit a wall.

Disappointed, Bush put a brave face on the visit. After having dinner together, he and Putin appeared in a polite news conference with an undercurrent of tension. Bush's only public mention of Russian democracy was gentle compared with his private frustrations expressed to Blair and others in the months leading up to the summit.

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq, where there's a free press and free religion," Bush told reporters. "And I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing."

Putin, coiled and ready, seized on the remark. "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly," he said, provoking laughter from the Russian side.

Bush seemed caught off guard. "Just wait," he replied softly, maintaining a strained smile.

AS IT TURNED out, Bush need not have worried about the summit being dominated by questions of Russian democracy. In the days leading up to the meeting, Israel had invaded Lebanon in response to Hezbollah raids and barrages of rockets, a crisis that had forced its way to the top of the agenda in St. Petersburg.

While Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, had been trying to mediate, Bush was fending off pressure from allies to intervene, instead siding with Israel in its outrage over the attacks on its territory. Bush and Annan had what the UN secretary-general called a "charged and pointed debate" in front of the other leaders. "It was clear that Bush saw this as a simple matter of good versus evil," Annan recalled. "A simple battle between good and evil it was not."

Either way, the diplomatic maneuverings underscored just how closely Bush was working with Rice these days. He told her to work out language for a joint statement with the other governments at the summit. In doing so, though, he inadvertently alienated Stephen Hadley, who despite his closeness with Rice felt cut out. Suddenly Bush's tandem with Rice was risking a rupture in his White House team.

"I can't be his national security adviser if he doesn't trust me to do these things for him," Hadley told Rice. "I have to resign."

Rice talked him out of it and then told Bush he could not undercut Hadley like that. Bush meant no insult to Hadley; he was just so comfortable with Rice.

During a private lunch on the summit's final day, Bush shared his frustration over Lebanon with Tony Blair.

"Blair, what are you doing?" he asked. "You leaving?"

"No, no, no, not yet," Blair said.

As Bush ate and Blair stood over him, the two chatted for a couple of minutes about global trade talks and a sweater Blair had given Bush for his birthday.

"I know you picked it out yourself," Bush said sarcastically.

"Oh, absolutely," Blair replied with a laugh.

Then Bush turned the discussion to Annan, telling Blair he was going to send Rice to the region.

Blair offered to make a public statement to prepare the ground. "Obviously, if she goes out, she's got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can just go out and talk," he said, recognizing the different expectations when America got involved.

"What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over," an irritated Bush said with his mouth full as he buttered a piece of bread.

"Who? Syria?" Blair asked.

"Right," Bush said. "What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and [only then] everything else happens." Instead, he said, Annan should pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to rein in Hezbollah. "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen," Bush told Blair.

Bush left St. Petersburg frustrated on multiple fronts. Putin waited until he had cleared Russian airspace to tell a news conference that he would not support Bush in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear program. "Speaking of sanctions against Iran is premature," Putin said. "We haven't reached that point yet."

Bush and Blair vented their mutual aggravation with Putin during a call two weeks later. "I left St. Petersburg more worried about Russia than ever," Blair told Bush on July 28.

"You should be," Bush agreed. "We talked at dinner. He's okay with centralization, which he thinks leads to stabilization. I told him, 'What happens when the next guy comes and abuses it?' He said, 'I'll stop him.' He thinks he'll be around forever. He asked me why I didn't change the Constitution so I could run again."

WHETHER BUSH WOULD even want to run again was another matter. At home as well as abroad, the challenges were stacking up. After more than five years of working with a Congress mostly under Republican control, Bush was confronted for the first time with a bill he could not live with. Congress sent him legislation lifting his restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Among those leading the charge was Bill Frist, the senator Bush had privately considered as a replacement for Cheney on the 2004 ticket. Bush decided to veto the measure.

Rather than be defensive, he staged a ceremony on July 19 with "snowflake babies," or children born from discarded embryos adopted by other parents. The pictures on television showed a president surrounded by children, not a rigid conservative preventing lifesaving research. Bush had tempered the fallout from the veto. But the showdown foreshadowed more friction to come between the White House and its Republican allies with elections just months away.

Indeed, as summer progressed and Iraq and other issues soured the public, Republican candidates were going out of their way to avoid Bush and Cheney, and the White House staff was working overtime to find races where the president could help. The last thing they wanted was the perception that Bush was so toxic he was not welcome at the side of Republican candidates. But the ones who did agree to a visit were generally from safe districts. "We were trying to keep his schedule active," recalled Sara Taylor, the White House political director. "We didn't want the president sidelined. Being sidelined would not be a good thing for him. We had people who didn't want him to land at the airport."

The schism between the president and his party was brought home starkly on the same day as the stem-cell veto ceremony when Senator John Thune, one of Karl Rove's pet projects in 2004, distanced himself from Bush. "If I were running in the state this year, you obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda," Thune told reporters at the National Press Club. Rove erupted when he saw the comments. "He thought Thune was ungrateful and whiny," as one White House colleague put it, and told his staff to make sure the Bush donors who had helped Thune in the past knew about his betrayal. His staff balked, deeming it an excessive response, especially since Thune quickly apologized. But Rove persisted. "He would just not let it go," the colleague said. Finally, Joshua Bolten, who had received an apology directly from Thune, stepped in and forced Rove to drop the matter.

Republican lawmakers were not the only ones anxious about Iraq. After the failed reboot at Camp David, Stephen Hadley and the Iraq team tried to find a new way to force a strategy change. Meghan O'Sullivan and Brett McGurk sent Hadley a memo on the same day as Thune's comments pleading for a full-fledged review of the war. The two young advisers reinforced the message directly to Bush the next day in their nightly report. "The deteriorating security situation is outpacing the Iraqi government's ability to respond," Bush read. Turning over the country to Iraqi forces was unrealistic since they were actually part of the problem, engaging in sectarian attacks themselves. "Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining."

Hadley privately agreed and was trying to nudge the process along subtly while still serving as an arbiter among different factions. If he pushed too hard, too fast, it could generate opposition to change. At Bush's request, Hadley took the questions raised by O'Sullivan and McGurk and presented them to General George Casey during a videoconference on July 22. What was the strategy for Baghdad? Were more troops needed? What was the American mission? Had they let the Iraqis become too dependent on them, or was it the other way around? Casey found the questions demeaning and resented the civilian second-guessing. More forces would not fix the problem. The real solution was political, not military.

A few days later, on July 26, Nouri al-Maliki made his first visit to Washington as Iraq's prime minister. Bush welcomed him to the White House and listened as Maliki let his various ministers present somewhat tedious reports on their areas of responsibility.

Bush tried to lighten the mood. When introduced to the electricity minister, he asked, "Do people call you Sparky?" No one on the Iraqi side seemed to get the joke.

The president's more important message was one of fortitude. "If you take one thing away from this visit, it's that I'm behind you 100 percent," he said. "Don't worry about the politics here. Do the right thing. I'll be with you. Count on it."

CERTAIN ABOUT HIS resolve but uncertain what to do, Bush took off on Au- gust 3 for a break at the Crawford ranch, his first summer retreat there since Hurricane Katrina. As soon as he landed, he began pounding the pedals on the bicycle trails he had come to love. Just as exercise helped him purge the toxins of alcohol in his youth, now it helped him flush out the tensions of Washington.

He had just turned sixty that summer, a milestone that had clearly been on his mind. Bush made a point of fighting the advance of age with discipline. He exercised ferociously six days a week with a mountain bike, treadmill, and free-weight resistance training. When in Washington, he went for bike rides as long as two and a half hours at the Secret Service training facility outside the city. With a resting pulse rate of forty-seven beats per minute, a cholesterol count of 178, and a body fat percentage of 15.79, he remained in "superior" shape, according to his doctors.

The devotion to exercise and schedules seemed to stem from the same discipline Bush had summoned to quit drinking at age forty. "He's the first one to admit that he has an addictive personality, and he has to channel this addictiveness to constructive things," Dan Bartlett once observed. "He likes systems; he likes structure. It's interesting-for a personality that's so free-form, he does like structure." He kept a giant wooden jigsaw puzzle set up in the family quarters that he worked on regularly, making order out of the chaos of hundreds of pieces. "It's something you can solve," said Pamela Hudson Nelson, a longtime friend of Laura's. "They have a lot of coping methods." Bush also preferred to look ahead rather than backward. "When you're working for the president," Bartlett said, "you've always got to give him something to look forward to."

He especially looked forward to the long bike rides. He often invited others to join him but asked them not to ride in front of him so he could have the illusion of solitude, a rare sensation of freedom in the eternally scripted, perpetually surrounded life of a president. "Riding helps clear my head, helps me deal with the stresses of the job," Bush, soaked in sweat, said after an eighty-minute ride at the ranch that summer. Mark McKinnon, his consultant and frequent biking partner, said the intensity was directly tied to the burdens of the job. "The more pressure there was at the White House," he said, "the harder he rode."

Biking with the president often seemed to be an exercise in survival as much as serenity, particularly in the sweltering August heat of Texas, where he enrolled those who managed to keep up with him in his Hundred Degree Club. Tony Snow got roped into a ride after making the mistake of telling Bush once that he would enjoy riding with him sometime. "I was just, you know, trying to make nice," he said later. "I was trying to kiss up to the boss."