He continued, "People say Bush needs to see the world as it is. Well, I've been here six years now and I see the world as it is, maybe better than most." Aides later remembered Bush gesturing with each word. "The world as it is, that world needs America to lead. You know why? Because nothing happens if we don't lead."

For Bush, the Decider, there was no greater sin than giving into nothing happens. For three years, yes, he had passively deferred to generals and advisers, seized by his perception of Lyndon Johnson's mistake during Vietnam. But after the war deteriorated drastically, he finally asserted his own judgment over the commanders and made a decision that would determine the remainder of his presidency and the ultimate outcome of his Iraq project.

"The president himself was the guy who was the firmest on the surge," said David Gordon, an intelligence analyst who participated in the White House committee on Iraq. "For a lot of the others of us in the group, I think a lot of people came around to the view that you've got to do the surge before you can move to the next step. So a lot of people ended up, I think, supporting the surge less because they believed in it but more as a step to the Baker-Hamilton approach. But President Bush got it right."

INTRIGUINGLY, IT WAS the first and perhaps only time on a major issue in the second term when Cheney came out on the winning side while Rice was on the losing side. Yet Cheney was not the driving force behind the surge, the way he had been behind the initial invasion in 2003. Only when his friend Donald Rumsfeld was pushed out did Cheney feel liberated enough to exert himself again. By that point, Bush already knew where he was headed. Cheney proved to be a secondary player fortifying the president, not the author of action.

"Bush was very seriously in the driver's seat there," O'Sullivan recalled. "Cheney was part of the process, but this was a Bush-led process." Another official involved thought Cheney "was kind of a nonentity" at that stage in the administration. That is too strong, but it underscored the changing perception of the vice president in the halls of the West Wing. He was becoming more like a regular vice president.

Plenty of other issues were not going Cheney's way. Even as Bush raised the stakes in Iraq, he gave more rope to Christopher Hill to negotiate with North Korea. On January 16, Hill hosted a lavish meal in Berlin for a North Korean delegation, complete with boozy toasts, and the next day came up with the outlines of a deal that Rice called Bush to approve without running it by Cheney. The vice president was angry, wondering how they could toast an outlaw regime just three months after it set off a nuclear test.

Bush also decided to submit the NSA surveillance program to the jurisdiction of the secret foreign intelligence court, the same court David Addington joked about blowing up. And the president embraced an energy plan for his State of the Union calling for a 20 percent reduction in the projected use of gasoline over the next decade through a dramatic expansion of ethanol and tougher fuel economy standards for new cars. Cheney, the old oilman, "thought that was a mistake," deeming ethanol unrealistic given the required subsidy and undesirable side effects like food shortages, Neil Patel recalled. Cheney showed up at one meeting with a digitally altered picture of Al Hubbard, the president's economics adviser, driving a tiny Shriner car to show "what the U.S. auto fleet is going to look like if you approve this policy."

Then there was Scooter Libby, whose trial opened in federal court on January 23, raising tension in the vice president's office, where former colleagues watched with concern for him and for what it might mean for the boss. Among those on the defense team's witness list: Richard Bruce Cheney.

WHILE BUSH AND Cheney were in agreement on the surge, they were taking different approaches rhetorically. In the State of the Union address just hours after the Libby trial started, Bush reached out to opponents, appealing for support for the surge. With just 33 percent of Americans approving of his job performance, only twice before had any president taken the lectern in the House for a State of the Union in weaker condition in the polls-Harry Truman during the Korean War in 1952 and Richard Nixon in the throes of Watergate in 1974. Moreover, opposition to the troop surge had actually grown since Bush announced it, now reaching 65 percent.

Addressing the new Democratic Congress with the newly sworn-in Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sitting over his left shoulder, Bush pleaded for patience. "I respect you and the arguments you've made," he said. "We went into this largely united in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work."

Sitting over his right shoulder, though, was Cheney, who wanted nothing to do with the contrition strategy. The day after the State of the Union address, he went on CNN and pugnaciously rejected any argument that they were failing in Iraq-as the president himself had concluded.

"With the pressures from some quarters to get out of Iraq, if we were to do that, we would simply validate the terrorists' strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don't have the stomach for the fight," Cheney told Wolf Blitzer. He dismissed congressional resolutions opposing the surge. "It won't stop us," he vowed. "And it would be, I think, detrimental from the standpoint of the troops." Cheney went on to describe the Iraq War as a success because Saddam Hussein had been ousted.

"If he were still there today," Cheney said, "we'd have a terrible situation."

"But there is a terrible situation," Blitzer said.

"No, there is not," Cheney insisted. "There is not. There's problems, ongoing problems, but we have, in fact, accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime and there is a new regime in place that's been there for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off."

He added, "Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes."

He accused Blitzer of siding with cut-and-run Democrats. "What you're recommending, or at least what you seem to believe the right course is, is to bail out," Cheney charged.

"I'm just asking questions," Blitzer protested.

"No, you're not asking questions," Cheney maintained.

Blitzer had been in Cheney's doghouse since the previous October, when he interviewed Lynne Cheney and asked about steamy scenes in a novel she wrote that had been cited by James Webb, the Democratic Senate candidate in Virginia, in defending his own fiction. Lynne had angrily rebuffed Blitzer, and her husband later congratulated her for what he called "the slapdown."

Now Blitzer crossed another line as far as Cheney was concerned by mentioning that Mary Cheney had become pregnant. Did the vice president want to respond to conservatives who had criticized her for having a baby in a lesbian relationship?

"I'm delighted I'm about to have a sixth grandchild, Wolf, and obviously, think the world of both my daughters and all of my grandchildren," Cheney said. "And I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question."

Blitzer tried to defend himself. "I think all of us appreciate-"

Cheney cut him off. "I think you're out of line."

"We like your daughters," Blitzer replied. "Believe me, I'm very, very sympathetic to Liz and to Mary. I like them both. That was just a question that's come up, and it's a responsible, fair question."

"I just fundamentally disagree with you," Cheney retorted.

By this point, Cheney harbored little concern for what the Wolf Blitzers of Washington thought-and not much more for what the White House political operation thought. Speaking with another reporter on January 28, he evinced no worry about the damage to his reputation. "By the time I leave here, it will have been over forty years since I arrived in Washington," he said, "and I've been praised when I didn't deserve it, and probably criticized when I didn't deserve it. And there aren't enough hours in the day for me to spend a lot of time worrying about my image."

Asked about critical comments by onetime friends like the late Gerald Ford, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft, speculation that he had changed or gotten a fever about Saddam Hussein, Cheney just shook his head.

"Well, I'm vice president," he said, "and they're not."

THE TRUTH WAS that neither Bush nor Cheney was a particularly effective front man for the war effort anymore. Their credibility had been so sapped they were mostly talking to each other. So Bush pushed another figure to the fore, his new commander, David Petraeus.

The White House and other Republicans began describing the surge as "the Petraeus plan," exaggerating his authorship to tap his popularity among lawmakers. After the Senate voted 81 to 0 to confirm Petraeus's promotion to a fourth star so he could take over as commander in Iraq, Bush argued that it would make no sense to support the general but not his plan. One day, Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the strongest supporters of the war, planted Petraeus in an office off the Senate floor and one by one fetched fellow Republicans to meet with him.

Petraeus realized he was being lashed to the commander in chief in a way few other commanders had been in modern times. He visited Bush in the Oval Office after his confirmation hearing, and the two reflected on the mission he was about to undertake. The stakes were enormous and the odds of success daunting.

"This is a pretty significant moment," Bush said. "We're going to double down."

Petraeus corrected him. "Mr. President, this is all in."

As part of his confirmation, Petraeus agreed to return to Washington in September to update Congress on the progress of the surge, a commitment that irritated many in the White House. But it meant that Bush and Cheney needed to buy him time. On February 5, Bush sent Congress a $93 billion spending request to pay for the war. That would be the real test: Would opponents deny funding to an army in the field to force the president to begin winding down the war?

Bush knew the ground had cratered beneath him. The reinforcements he was sending to Iraq would take five months in all to arrive, meaning it could be a while until they achieved results, if any. Bush would have to hold things together until then.

"So now I'm an OctoberNovember man," Bush told the writer Robert Draper. "I'm playing for OctoberNovember."

31.

"I'm going to fire all your asses"

There came a moment, and it was only a moment, when the discussion in the office of the vice president turned to the possibility of a Cheney for President campaign. It was early in 2007, and for the first time since 1928 the country was looking ahead to a presidential election without an incumbent president or vice president in the race. Dick Cheney had made clear he was not interested in running in 2008, but a longtime friend showed up in the West Wing to try to change his mind.

"I've talked to a lot of people around the country," Wayne Berman, one of Washington's most prominent Republican lobbyist-fund-raisers, told Cheney that day, "and I think the money could be raised. I think there's a lot of support for you."

If anyone would know about raising money, it was Berman. A mainstay of Washington power circles, Berman may have been the one who first introduced Cheney to George W. Bush back in 1987 and later became a Pioneer, collecting more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney ticket in the 2000 election, and a Ranger, pulling in more than $200,000 in 2004.

His connection to the vice president went beyond political fund-raising. His wife, Lea Berman, had been Cheney's social secretary and later served as Lynne's chief of staff before becoming the White House social secretary responsible for organizing official functions and overseeing the mansion staff. The Cheneys and the Bermans got together occasionally for dinner and gossip about who was up and down in the capital's perennial political games.

Berman's visit in early 2007 came as the Republican field was only beginning to take shape. Senator John McCain was making another run for the White House, but he had considerable vulnerabilities within the party. Others looking at the race included the former mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York; the former governors Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas; Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; the former senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee; and Representative Ron Paul of Texas.

Cheney had steadfastly disavowed interest in running for president and had just begun building a retirement house in Virginia. After exploring the 1996 race, Cheney concluded he did not have the drive for an extended, two-year, all-out national campaign. As recently as the year before, he had told Bob Schieffer of CBS News, "I've taken the Sherman statement-if nominated, I will not run; if elected, I won't serve." Cheney regularly opened speeches by joking that "a warm welcome like that is almost enough to make a guy want to run for office again," then pausing before adding in classic deadpan, "almost." Besides, the notion of a Cheney candidacy would strike many as absurd; he had a trunkload of political baggage and an approval rating in the thirties.

Berman knew all that and realized the chances of changing Cheney's mind were slim. But he argued that someone had to carry the Bush-Cheney record into 2008 and defend it against attacks. McCain certainly would not, and, frankly, most of the others probably would not either. For all of Cheney's political problems, he remained popular with the conservative base that dominated the nomination process.

McCain had been recruiting Berman. "I'm going to go work for his campaign and do a whole lot of stuff unless you're going to run," Berman told Cheney. "If you're going to run, I want to work for you, if you want me."

"I'm flattered you came to see me-you've been a great friend of mine for a real long time," said Cheney, who seemed almost emotional to Berman. "For me to do what I want to do around here and finish strong and help the president continue to make sure we protect policies," he had to remain singularly focused on his duties.

Balancing that with frequent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, punctuated by endless fund-raising calls, would be daunting. "I can't do that, so I'm not going to run."

Cheney added, "McCain's a good man, and he's got a real record. He's an adult, and he's lucky to have you working for him if that's what you decide to do." Cheney then took Berman down to the White House mess for a fat-free hot dog. That wasn't quite what Berman had hoped to get when he arrived at the White House that day.

Cheney's status as a lame duck from the moment he took office made him unique in the annals of the modern vice presidency. For years, he argued it was an asset. He could focus exclusively on advancing Bush's policies without any of the sub-rosa competition that often emerged between presidents and their vice presidents. He had none of the fund-raising and other distractions of those eyeing the big chair. He could take the spears for Bush for controversial policies, becoming the one blamed for torture and spying and unfounded war.

Still, there was a cost. With no one in the White House with an electoral future, certain incentives were missing. "There were a lot of advantages of having a vice president who was not going to run for president himself," Michael Gerson said. "But one disadvantage was, as things worsened in Iraq, if we had a young vice president that was running for office to replace Bush, they would have been constantly pushing that things have to get better. 'This is going to kill my chances.' " What's more, the White House found itself in a campaign season without anyone to champion its record. "It constitutes a kind of a double lame duck," observed Dean McGrath, the longtime Cheney aide.

WHEN CHENEY TOLD Berman he would forgo a race partly to "protect policies," what he meant was that he was already in a fight inside the White House with those trying to reformulate the legacy of the first term. On interrogation and detention rules, on Middle East policy, and on Iran, Cheney was trying to guard against the wavering and equivocating of those around the president, and perhaps the president himself. On no issue was that battle more pronounced than North Korea.

Much to Cheney's chagrin, the six-party talks reopened in Beijing on February 8, and after a late-night session Christopher Hill emerged on February 13 with a deal. North Korea would shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facility, readmit international inspectors, and pull together a statement accounting for all of its nuclear programs. The United States and its partners would provide fifty thousand tons of heavy fuel as a down payment on a total of one million tons once all nuclear facilities were disabled. Washington would open talks aimed at restoring diplomatic relations with Pyongyang while removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the list of countries affected by the Trading with the Enemy Act. The deal touched off a backlash among Cheney's allies. Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser, fired off e-mails making clear he thought it was, as he later put it, "a disgraceful policy" and "Clintonism again." The next morning, he found himself in the Oval Office as Bush tried to convince him it was the right approach.

Cheney was no more persuaded and thought they were rewarding North Korea for bad behavior. He believed Rice-as well as Bush-was so eager for an achievement that she was willing to abandon the principles that had undergirded their policies in the first term. "We had a good relationship, so it wasn't personal at all," he reflected later. "I just felt that she was pushing very hard to get something of significance done vis--vis the North Koreans, but I thought she was heading in the wrong direction. I didn't agree with the policy." Stephen Yates, the vice president's deputy national security adviser until 2005, put it more bluntly. "North Korea policy was an absolute aberration in terms of the personality of George W. Bush and the instincts that guided the first term," he said. "The first-term president Bush would not have had any part of those shenanigans."

Rice regularly responded to Cheney's skepticism by asking what his plan was. It was true that the North Koreans had proved to be unreliable and manipulative, but what was the alternative to negotiations? "They never had an answer for that," Hill said. "It was sort of, we don't want you to negotiate with them, but, no, we don't have any better idea." While Cheney wanted to stick to a hard line, Hill said, Bush wanted to move beyond his first term. Bush "did not consider himself a warmonger, did not consider it fair that he be regarded in history as someone who always would reach for the gun," Hill said. "He was persuaded by Condi and other people that we should give diplomacy a chance." After all, Rice said, "Even before they exploded a nuclear device, we didn't have a military option." Bush framed it the same way. "I am not going to go to war with North Korea," he told aides. "So what is the alternative?"

Stephen Hadley saw it not as a rejection of Cheney but as an affirmation by Bush of his own judgment. "I don't think he had less influence," Hadley said of Cheney. "But I think what happened is that this president came into his own and he acted more decisively with more confidence." Rice agreed. "I just think he became a lot more confident," she said. By this point in his presidency, Bush was being briefed on North Korea and other issues by aides or CIA analysts who had less experience than he did. No one had to tell him about the North Koreans because he had been dealing with them for six years. "He had a lot of experience under his belt by then and more confidence in his own judgment," Cheney reflected. "And obviously he placed a great store in Condi's experience and her views."

As for Cheney, he seemed drained, politically and physically, "a spent force," as David Gordon, an adviser to Rice, put it. As a man with a weak heart, Cheney seemed on many days almost worn-out. "He looked tired for the last couple years, for sure," said Neil Patel, his aide. Schedulers tried to ease his load, and Patel told staffers to keep briefings concise to avoid overburdening the vice president. "He would just sort of gloss over half the time, and it's because he's got so much on his plate. You've got to keep it tight and especially in the last couple years."

From time to time, Cheney would even drift off in the Oval Office. "He fell asleep quite often," said one official, who thought Cheney's "energy level by the end was not so high as it had been at the beginning."

One day, after a meeting where Cheney dozed off, Bush and Dan Bartlett chuckled about it as the speechwriter Matt Latimer and others came in for the next meeting.

"Did you see?" Bartlett asked Bush with a big grin.

"Yes," Bush said merrily. "I couldn't look at him."

The two were laughing boisterously by this point. "I saw his head go down and he dropped his papers, and I didn't want to say anything," Bush said.

Latimer thought the two were "like students laughing mischievously at their teacher after class." But it was a sign of the changing relationship that Bush was willing to laugh at Cheney behind his back. Aides in the White House took their cue and were mocking the vice president in a way they never would have in the first term.

On North Korea in particular, Cheney could not stop what he saw as the backsliding, and he was reduced to calling Hadley to gripe without result. He was losing allies. Donald Rumsfeld was gone, and in January, just before the latest agreement, Robert Joseph, the State Department's nonproliferation chief, resigned in protest of Christopher Hill's negotiations. Joseph wrote a memo to Rice on his way out explaining that "as a matter of principle" he could not support the policies that were being pursued, especially dialing back interdiction activities and Hill's efforts to return the $25 million of North Korean funds frozen in Banco Delta Asia in Macao. "This was money traced to North Korea's proliferation activities, counterfeiting American super notes, drug-running profits," Joseph said later. "And we were going to facilitate the return of these illicit funds to the North Koreans?"

Hill had become a deeply controversial figure within the administration. He was a veteran diplomat who had been part of the team led by Richard Holbrooke that negotiated the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian War in 1995, and he had learned from his mentor the art of creative diplomacy, even if it meant having to outflank bureaucratic adversaries within his own team. Described by Holbrooke as "brilliant, fearless, and argumentative," Hill bridled at the restrictions Cheney and others tried to impose on his negotiations, maneuvered to talk with the North Koreans outside the stiff six-party format, and pushed for more latitude. He held back information from administration rivals and worked around them-doing to Cheney, in effect, what Cheney had done to others in the first term.

Hill made enemies who took his cleverness for dishonesty. "I don't think in my twenty-eight years I have ever met anyone who is as universally distrusted and disliked as Chris Hill," said one of his internal rivals. "He was a junior Holbrooke," said Michael Green, the Asia adviser on the National Security Council. "He saw working for Holbrooke that the bullying and the circumventing the process and all of that could work, and he did it not as effectively but pretty effectively." Rice recognized the dynamic. "I love Chris, and I made him my negotiator because he is creative and he is energetic and he is a go-getter," she said. But "he could be his own worst enemy sometimes."

THE INTERNAL STRUGGLES were overshadowed as 2007 progressed by a momentous showdown with Congress over Iraq. Fresh off their election sweep, Democrats squared off with Bush and Cheney to try to reverse the surge and begin bringing troops home.

On the afternoon of February 16, Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House 246 to 182 a resolution opposing the surge, with seventeen Republicans breaking ranks to join the majority. But it was a nonbinding resolution. When Senator Harry Reid tried to follow suit by convening the Senate the next day for a rare Saturday session, he failed to break a filibuster. The only way Congress could force a change in the war would be to use its power over purse strings, but Pelosi had already promised to "never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm's way."

Cheney left the Iraq battle behind that day for a trip to Asia, including stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan to press the governments there to do more to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Along the way, he got a resonant reminder that the Other War, as some called it, remained dangerous and volatile. After landing at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on February 26, Cheney was told that heavy snow made it impossible to fly by helicopter to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai. Several aides wanted to go through with the meetings with American military and civilian leaders at the base, apologize to Karzai for missing him, and then leave as scheduled. "No, this is important," Cheney said, deciding he would stay the night in hopes that the weather would clear by morning.

The next day, at around 10:00 a.m., Cheney heard what he described as "a loud boom" and soon found his Secret Service agents rushing into his borrowed quarters at the air base to tell him a suicide bomber had detonated himself at the main gate. Although Cheney was about a mile from the gate and never in danger, the agents moved him to a nearby bomb shelter until they were sure it was not the vanguard of a broader assault.

The Taliban later claimed they were targeting Cheney, but that seemed unlikely given the secrecy surrounding his visit and the change in schedule. Still, the vice president took it as another sign that Karzai was under siege. "They clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government," Cheney, unruffled as ever, told reporters later on Air Force Two after his rescheduled two-hour meeting with Karzai. "Striking at Bagram with a suicide bomber, I suppose, is one way to do that. But it shouldn't affect our behavior at all."

Cheney also briefed reporters about his meetings on background, meaning they could identify him in their reports only as a "senior administration official." Thus shielded, he took issue with media accounts suggesting that he was strong-arming Musharraf and Karzai into more robust action. "I've seen some press reporting says, 'Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them,' " Cheney told the reporters. "That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business."

WHILE TRAVELING AROUND the world, Cheney kept track of Scooter Libby's trial back in Washington. He was prepared to testify, but at the last minute Libby's lawyers decided not to call him or to put Libby on the stand. Instead, they argued that the case boiled down to nothing more than a difference of memories about whether Tim Russert, the NBC bureau chief, first told Libby about Valerie Plame Wilson as Libby claimed and Russert disputed. Even if Russert was right, the lawyers said, Libby could hardly be a criminal for remembering differently. Prosecutors pointed to all the conversations Libby had about Valerie Wilson before talking with Russert, calling it implausible to believe he simply forgot about talking with eight other people over a four-week period.

While Cheney did not testify, the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, put him at the center of the proceedings, declaring in closing arguments that "there is a cloud over the vice president." The jury in a largely Democratic city convicted Libby on March 6. Back from his trip, alone in his office, Cheney watched television reports of the verdict and took calls from Lynne and Liz Cheney. Afterward, he headed to Capitol Hill for the weekly lunch of Senate Republicans, several of whom came up to console him. For Cheney, it was a devastating blow.

Libby was not the only veteran of the Bush-Cheney White House in trouble. Alberto Gonzales was at the center of a full-blown political firestorm over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys over the winter. U.S. attorneys were political appointees serving at the pleasure of the president and could be fired at will; presidents routinely replaced them all with a change of administration. But ousting so many all at once in the middle of a term was unusual and raised suspicions of political interference. The new Democratic Congress smelled scandal, and perhaps opportunity, and immediately launched investigations. E-mails unearthed by investigators showed White House involvement and suggested political motivations. Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, resigned on March 12 after it was revealed that he had not told colleagues about his interactions with the White House regarding the dismissals. The next day, the attorney general acknowledged that "mistakes were made" and took responsibility.

The burgeoning political battle was a jarring wake-up call for the Bush-Cheney White House, which had grown accustomed to working with a Republican Congress for so many years. Now the opposition was in charge, complete with subpoena authority. While a Republican Congress did little oversight of a Republican president, a Democratic Congress would lean the other way, eagerly scrutinizing every possible instance of wrongdoing, especially with an unpopular president. The change was "something of a shock to the system here," Joshua Bolten confided to a writer at the time. "They can dictate what the conversation is about and when it's going to be."

With Bush's public standing at its lowest ebb, he suddenly lost perhaps the most energetic defender he had. At 7:00 a.m. on March 27, the president received a call from Tony Snow, his indefatigable press secretary. Snow told him the cancer he thought he had beaten two years earlier was back. He sounded upbeat, but Bush grasped the seriousness of the threat. Snow, whose mother had died of colon cancer, had long said that he "felt that cancer was stalking me," and now he would have to take leave to fight it again. Bush told him he was praying for him. Snow called his deputy, Dana Perino, at 9:30 a.m. to tell her just before she went into the briefing room for the morning off-camera "gaggle." At the podium, she lost control as she announced the news and began sobbing before finally postponing further questions.

Snow had been a complicated figure in the White House, well liked and admired yet also the subject of quiet dissatisfaction. He had become the face of the White House, a forceful and upbeat defender of an embattled administration and a popular figure in Republican circles, to the point of campaigning during midterm elections, something no predecessor had done. But privately, some in the White House worried he was too glib and not versed enough in the details of policy. Perino and others who worked for him at times resented that he left messes for them to clean up. Yet when his cancer returned, all of that was forgotten, and he suddenly became a popular symbol of defiant heroism in a White House battered in so many ways. His cheery optimism in the face of peril became inspiring. If Snow could confront death, some figured, they could certainly put up with the slings and arrows of political tribulations.

But the arrows kept coming. A few days later, on April 1, Matthew Dowd, the political strategist who helped steer Bush to the White House twice, broke with the president over the war. He wrote an op-ed article titled "Kerry Was Right," arguing that it was time to withdraw from Iraq, and although he could not bring himself to publish it, he gave an interview to Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, making the same point. He expressed disillusionment with the man he had helped elect, over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, and most important Iraq, where his own son was deployed as an army intelligence specialist. "I think he's become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in," Dowd said of Bush.

Former colleagues whispered that Dowd was bitter at the way Karl Rove had treated him and had descended into a dark place because of a divorce, the death of a premature daughter, and his son's deployment. But while they tried to explain away his defection, word got back to Dowd that it had deeply hurt the president.

It was a raw time for Bush. When Meghan O'Sullivan came to the Oval Office only weeks after the surge to tell him she was stepping down as his deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, she found herself "a little crying heap." She had spent the better part of a year arguing for a major shift in strategy; Bush did not understand why she would leave just as she had succeeded. She reassured him of her loyalty.

"Don't worry," she told him, "I'm not resigning to write a book."

"You should be the one to write a book," he told her.

AS BUSH TRIED to get a handle on Iraq, another challenge arose out of public view. In mid-April, Israel asked to show secret material to Bush, and Meir Dagan, the director of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, arrived in Washington. Aides diverted him to sit down instead with Stephen Hadley and Elliott Abrams. Cheney showed up as well. Dagan had startling news: Syria was building a nuclear reactor with help from North Korea. He had aerial images of the facility and pictures of North Koreans helping out-including none other than the North Korean negotiator sent to the six-party talks.

Shortly after the visit, Bush took a call from Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

"George, I'm asking you to bomb the compound," Olmert told him.

"Give me some time to look at the intelligence and I'll give you an answer," Bush replied.

Cheney had long suspected Syria of nuclear ambitions and now finally had proof. The next time he saw Michael Hayden, the CIA director admitted as much. He walked in, sat down on the couch, and said, "You were right, Mr. Vice President."

Bush wanted more information and options. A special task force was called "the Drafting Committee" on White House schedules so no one else would know its subject. Bush personally approved the list of officials who could be told about the situation. During one early task force meeting in the Situation Room, Bush dropped by unexpectedly and warned its members just how critical it was to keep quiet.

"If this stuff leaks," he told them, "I'm going to fire all your asses."

IN APRIL, CONFLICT with the Democrats over the surge came to a head. Bush had invited Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid to meet in the Cabinet Room on April 18, but there was no middle ground. Democrats were prepared to authorize the money Bush had requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if he followed a timetable for withdrawing troops. Pelosi pressed him to accept the deal.

To Reid, who had made little secret of his antipathy for Bush, the president looked "impatient and spoiled," while Cheney across the table "slumped in his chair, silent."

Reid pointedly told Bush that he was presiding over another Vietnam, where another president kept sending more troops just to avoid being known for losing.

"Mr. President, this war cannot be won militarily," he said. "It is wrong to continue to send soldiers into a war that cannot be won militarily."

Bush bridled at the comparison. "If you think this is about my personal legacy, you're wrong," he told Reid. "I strongly reject that. You don't know what motivates me."