By midnight Texas time, Bush had picked up West Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee-the first a state that had voted Democratic in fourteen of the previous seventeen presidential elections and the other two the home states of the incumbent Democratic president and vice president. If Florida held, victory seemed assured. If.

Just before 1:00 a.m. Texas time, Bush got a call from his cousin John Ellis, who had worked for network election units for years and this night was running the election desk for Fox News.

"What do you think?" John Ellis asked.

"What do you think?" Bush retorted.

"I think you've got it."

Not long after that, at 1:15 a.m. Texas time (2:15 a.m. East Coast time), Fox called Florida for Bush and Cheney, bringing them to 271 electoral votes, one more than needed. All other networks followed within five minutes.

About fifteen minutes later, Bush got the call he had long awaited.

"Congratulations," Gore told him, conceding the election.

"You're a formidable opponent and a good man," Bush said.

"We gave them a cliff-hanger," Gore said.

"I know it's hard, and hard on your family. Give my best to Tipper."

With that, Bush thought he had been elected president and called his running mate. At the Four Seasons, Cheney was as drained as Bush was restless and had ducked into the bedroom to lie down a few minutes earlier. He would later remember his daughter Liz waking him up. "Dad, you just got elected vice president. The president-elect wants to talk to you."

Mary Cheney remembered her mother being the one to wake Cheney, while Alan Simpson and Nick Brady each recalled being the one to rouse him.

"Get up, bastard!" Simpson remembered calling out. "You're the vice president of the United States."

Cheney, in this recollection, reacted cautiously. "It isn't over yet, Al," he said.

He emerged from the bedroom with his shirttail hanging out but enough presence of mind to tell his friend David Hume Kennerly, the photographer, not to take his picture when he was looking so disheveled. After Bush told him about the call from Gore, the Cheneys left for the Governor's Mansion. The Secret Service spirited them through the hotel kitchen for security purposes, and as they passed the cooking stations, Lynne Cheney noticed her husband was the only one not smiling.

"You've just been elected vice president of the United States," she said. "You could at least look happy about it."

"This just doesn't feel right," he said.

His instincts were on target. When they arrived at the mansion, everyone was calling Bush "Mr. President" or "Mr. President-elect." But they soon noticed Gore had not come out to publicly concede. At 2:30 a.m., Gore called Bush back.

"Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you," he started. "The state of Florida is too close to call."

Bush could not believe it. "Are you saying what I think you're saying? Let me make sure I understand. You're calling back to retract that concession?"

"Don't get snippy about it," Gore retorted. "Let me explain." He went on to say that if Florida did go for Bush, he would concede, but it was too early to be making statements with the final result still in doubt.

Bush noted that the governor of Florida was standing right there. "My little brother says it's over," he said.

"I don't think this is something your little brother gets to decide," Gore shot back.

"Do what you have to do," Bush said sharply.

Incredulous, Bush hung up. He went back downstairs, slipping through the kitchen to rejoin the others, and looked as if he were in a state of shock.

"He took it back," he said. "He took it back."

"Who took what back?" asked Kennerly.

"Gore just called and took back his concession."

Bush was not sure what to do now. Maybe, he suggested, he should go out to the crowd that had been waiting in the rain for hours and declare victory anyway. The numbers were on their side. Why should he have to defer to Gore?

Jeb talked him out of it. "George, don't do it," he said. "The count is too close." Don Evans went instead to address the crowd and put things on hold.

Finally, Laura Bush walked over to her husband and put her arm around him. She knew how exhausted he must be and wanted him to rest.

"Bushie," she said teasingly, "would you rather win or go to bed?"

He laughed. "Go to bed," he said.

NOT SINCE Rutherford B. Hayes squared off against Samuel Tilden in 1876 had the result of a presidential election been seriously contested. As lawyers for both sides flew to Florida in the early morning hours, Bush and Cheney woke to an uncertain future.

With Florida set to be a legal and political war, Bush turned to his party's greatest field marshal, James Baker, the close friend of his father and Cheney, to lead the fight. But Bush opted not to appear too involved personally and to proceed as if he really had won. He headed to the ranch, while Cheney spent ten days at the Four Seasons in an improvised war room before heading back to his house outside Washington. Bush affected a pose of quiet confidence and almost indifference to the daily machinations as lawyers in Florida argued over hanging chads and other ballot irregularities. He had no cable television and made sure his staff let it be known that he was reading a biography of Joe DiMaggio.

He also had time to get to know Andy Card, who would be his new chief of staff if he won, as they cleared brush, ate Blue Bell ice cream, and discussed what they would do in office. "We spent literally hours together talking about how would you like the White House organized? Who are the people you're comfortable with? Who are the people you're not that comfortable with but you want them in the administration just not that close?" Card recalled. Card considered it "almost a gift," because with attention focused on Florida, Bush had a chance to stop and think, and reenergize, in a way he would not have had after a clear election night victory.

When Bush returned to Austin to handle state business, he joined friends for a dinner of Chinese carryout one night but refused to open his fortune cookie. A friend opened it for him: "You are entering a time of great promise and overdue rewards." Laura Bush exclaimed, "You made that up!"

Bush of course was following developments in Florida. He and Cheney held a conference call each morning with Baker to review the latest, and he peppered his sister, Doro, and others with instant messages asking what was going on. He was constantly on the phone with his father. "We talk all the time," the former president wrote a friend. One day after an adverse decision by the Florida Supreme Court, Karen Hughes thought Bush "seemed worn down for the first time." When he saw Ari Fleischer at the ranch before sending the spokesman off to Washington, Bush sounded almost resigned to a fate beyond his control. "If they're going to steal the election, they're going to steal it," he said. "If they do, I'll get on with my life here." He was hardly a passive bystander, though. He authorized Baker to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the recount despite doubts on his team.

Baker and Don Evans tracked down John Danforth on vacation in Cancn to ask him to represent the man who had passed him over for Cheney just months earlier. But Danforth thought it was a fool's errand and said so.

"I just can't conceive that a federal court's going to take jurisdiction over a matter relating to state election law," Danforth said. "I just can't believe that." Bush was still a young man and could have a future if he lost. If he brought an unworthy case to court, "it could affect his reputation."

Baker asked him to do it anyway, and Danforth reluctantly agreed. Minutes after he checked out of the hotel, however, Baker called back. "It sounds like your heart's not in it," he said, "so we'll get somebody else."

Instead, the campaign tapped Theodore Olson, a well-known Republican lawyer, and he proved Danforth wrong. The court took the case.

While all this was going on, Bush told Cheney to organize the transition. No incoming president had ever delegated the construction of his administration to his vice president before. Cheney started in Austin by reaching for the only paper around, a Bush-Cheney news release on Palm Beach County ballots, flipped it over, and mapped out what had to be done in the ten weeks until the inauguration. After returning to Washington, Cheney with the help of Liz and David Addington based his operation at the kitchen table in his town house in McLean, Virginia, since the government would not hand over space for a transition office. His communications network consisted of three cell phones, which sometimes had to be taken outside to get a signal. For calls too sensitive for wireless phones, Lynne brought down an old beige Princess dial phone from the attic. Cheney had experienced five presidential transitions but never one like this.

In the early morning of November 22, just hours after the Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline for recounts, Cheney woke with discomfort in his chest and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital. At first, a heart attack was ruled out, which Bush conveyed to reporters. But as a stent was inserted to open up a clogged artery, further tests indicated he did have a heart attack. Doctors were sent out to brief the media, but they used technical terminology. Concerned that they had not said the words "heart attack," Karen Hughes ordered the doctors to go out and hold a second news conference so no one could suspect a cover-up.

This was Cheney's fourth heart attack, and it revived questions about whether he was up to the job. In the midst of the recount, perceptions mattered, and the last thing the campaign wanted was the image of a medically unfit would-be vice president. So Cheney called in to Larry King's show on CNN from the hospital.

"I feel good and everything's looking good," Cheney reported. "I should be out of here in a day or two."

"How about the stress?" King asked.

"Frankly, it may sound hard to believe, but I have not found this last couple of weeks as stressful, for example, as, say, the Gulf War."

Any doubt about doing the job should they win?

"No doubt about my serving," he insisted.

After a Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital prepared by Colin Powell's wife, Alma, Cheney returned to transition duties. The campaign rented offices in McLean, and Cheney began stocking the emerging government with people he trusted.

Uncertainty was growing. If the dispute could not be resolved soon, it was conceivable Inauguration Day would arrive without a president to swear in. The CIA began briefing House Speaker Dennis Hastert, next in the line of succession, in case he had to become acting president.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the matter. At about 10:00 p.m. on December 12, it ruled 7 to 2 in Bush v. Gore that recounts under way in selected counties had to stop because of inconsistent standards that violated the Constitution's equal protection clause; by a 5-to-4 vote, the court ruled there was not enough time to establish standards for new recounts before the deadline for Florida's electors to cast their votes. The complicated rulings confused television reporters who grabbed the copies and went right on the air without digesting the details.

Cheney was at his town house in McLean when David Hume Kennerly called. Kennerly had just left after a visit and heard that the court was issuing its ruling.

"Dick, the Supreme Court is going to give their ruling tonight," he said.

"Come back, come back over," Cheney said.

Kennerly was only a few blocks away drinking with a friend, Michael Green, an Associated Press photographer, so they rushed over to the house.

Lynne and Mary were upstairs fighting the flu, and Cheney was sitting alone in the kitchen watching the news when they arrived. He flipped around until he found Pete Williams reporting on NBC. "If anybody knows, it'll be Pete," Cheney said. Sure enough, Williams figured out the rulings faster than most: Bush and Cheney had won.

Cheney called James Baker.

"Hello, Mr. Vice Presidentelect," Baker said.

"Thank you, Jim," Cheney said. "And congratulations to you. You did a hell of a job. Only under your leadership could we have gone from a lead of 1,800 votes to a lead of 150 votes."

After hanging up, Cheney turned to his guests. "I'm going to open the good bottle of wine," he said. Soon after, Liz and her husband, Phil Perry, arrived with champagne. "It was not a wild celebration," Kennerly recalled. "He's a fly fisherman. That's a Zen-like thing."

Bush was at the Governor's Mansion already in bed when the ruling came out. The phone rang, and it was Karl Rove, who told him to turn on the television. Bush flipped on CNN, but its correspondents were struggling with the import of the decision and reading the dissent at the moment.

"Congratulations, Mr. President," Rove said. "This is great news."

"What are you talking about?" Bush asked. "This is terrible."

"What channel are you watching?" Rove asked.

Bush told him. Rove told him to switch to NBC.

Bush switched and watched for a minute, then hung up to call Baker for a legal opinion. Baker confirmed Rove's take.

Bush called his father. "I'm not a lawyer," he told him, "but I think this means I won."

Gore took the night to consider his options, then called Bush the next morning to concede, this time for good. "I'm not calling back this time," he told Bush.

After thirty-six frenzied days, it was over. The final tally showed Bush and Cheney winning Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast and winning the presidency with 271 electoral votes, one more than the minimum needed. The Florida recount had become a raw struggle for power as both sides abandoned long-held philosophical positions in a desperate bid to claw their way into the White House. Gore's campaign insisted on counting all ballots, but only in Democratic-friendly counties where they were likeliest to pick up votes; they were less interested in counting all ballots from military service members stationed overseas who were more likely to vote for the other side. Republicans insisted on following the letter of the law to exclude ballots that were even potentially questionable-except those from soldiers who should be given the benefit of the doubt. Liberals who had long championed an assertive federal judiciary argued for state sovereignty. Conservatives traditionally skeptical of equal protection claims and federal court intervention in state disputes were suddenly at the doors of the Supreme Court demanding it step in. Judges and justices who presented themselves as apolitical justified positions that just happened to suit their philosophical allies.

The process was so palpably cynical that it was bound to feel discredited no matter who won. The Supreme Court ruling was widely ridiculed by the Left, and Bush's critics deemed him an illegitimate president because the election was "stolen" by unelected conservatives in robes. But however reasoned or flawed its findings may have been, the Supreme Court did not elect Bush and Cheney; it stopped a recount process that would not have changed the outcome. Two extensive recounts conducted later by media organizations showed that Bush and Cheney would still have won even if the hand recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court or the more limited recount in four Democratic counties sought by Gore had gone forward.

Still, Bush understood that his victory would always come with an asterisk, and regardless of Florida it was true he had lost the popular vote nationally. The disputed nature of his ascension was like "pouring alcohol in an open wound" for those who did not support Bush, as Karen Hughes saw it. So Bush made a point of giving his victory speech on December 13 from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives, introduced by the Democratic Speaker. "Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent," Bush said. "We've had spirited disagreements. And in the end, we found constructive consensus." Bush praised Gore for a "spirited campaign" and expressed empathy with him for "how difficult this moment must be." He promised to work with Democrats to save Social Security and Medicare, improve schools, cut taxes, and produce a "bipartisan foreign policy."

"The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall," he added, "is what is needed in Washington, D.C. It is the challenge of our moment."

5.

"I'm going to call Dick"

Whatever spirit of cooperation George W. Bush saw in that Texas hall eluded Dick Cheney back in Washington. On the same day Bush accepted Gore's concession and delivered a conciliatory speech, Cheney was roaming the halls of Capitol Hill delivering a far different message: a new team was coming to town, and there would be no compromise.

If the chattering class thought the freshly anointed president and vice president would be chastened, abandon fundamental ideas, and hew to a centrist path, Cheney planned to disabuse them. "Our attitude was hell no," he later recalled. "We got elected. You don't now go for half tax reform. We're not going to leave half the children behind. No, it's full speed ahead." Cheney thought acting weak would make them weak. They should proceed as if they had a mandate and force Washington to accept their legitimacy.

Cheney had received a lunch invitation with five moderate Republican senators for December 13 in the hideaway office of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The Senate had split 50 to 50, meaning Republicans retained control through the tie-breaking vote of the new vice president. With the balance so close, Specter and the other moderates-James Jeffords of Vermont, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine-assumed they would play a vital role. But just as Cheney defied his recent heart attack by ordering fried chicken-polishing off the bird and even dropping a piece that stained the hideaway's white carpet-he defied any suggestion of retreat. Instead, he outlined a bold agenda to cut taxes, back out of the Kyoto climate change treaty, renounce the International Criminal Court, and abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia to develop a missile defense system.

"What really unnerved me was his attitude," Chafee recalled. "He welcomed conflict." Chafee wondered where Cheney got the nerve to come to the Hill and dictate results; he was issuing orders, not soliciting input.

"Our votes at this table are important," Chafee told Cheney.

Cheney dismissed the moderates. "Every vote is important," he said.

That was not just Cheney being pugnacious. Bush agreed. For all the talk of Texas-style bipartisanship, he made clear that his call for "constructive consensus" really meant forcing others to accept his ideas. Compromise was reserved for when it was really necessary. As Karl Rove argued, John F. Kennedy did not scale back his agenda after winning a razor-thin victory, nor did Bill Clinton after winning with less than a majority of the popular vote.

Nowhere was that more true for Bush than on taxes, the centerpiece of his campaign and the issue that helped sink his father's presidency. The federal government was projected to take in $5.6 trillion more than it would spend over the next ten years. Much of that would be reserved for Social Security and Medicare, but Bush thought it reasonable to return less than a third of it, $1.6 trillion, to taxpayers.

"How will this work?" Bush asked Nick Calio, his father's legislative affairs director, who would reprise the role in the new White House.

Calio described the state of play on Capitol Hill. Implicit was that at some point they would have to give ground.

Bush interrupted and leaned across the table. "Nicky," he said, "we're going to say $1.6 trillion. And when anybody says anything else, we're going to say $1.6 trillion. And we're going to keep saying $1.6 trillion. I'm not saying at some point we might not accept something else. But we're never going to say it. We're just going to keep saying $1.6 trillion. We're going to see how long it takes us to get it.

"You get that?" Bush asked.

"Yes, sir, loud and clear," Calio said.

With just thirty-eight days for a truncated transition, Cheney moved his operation to government office space and accelerated efforts to build a new team. He recruited Paul O'Neill, a Ford administration colleague, as Treasury secretary. Senator John Ashcroft, a former Rove client defeated for reelection by a challenger who died before Election Day, was picked for attorney general. The former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who worked with Cheney in the Nixon White House, would head the Environmental Protection Agency. While Bush wanted Condoleezza Rice for national security adviser, Cheney promoted his former aide Stephen Hadley as her deputy and recruited another, Sean O'Keefe, as deputy budget director. He eventually found positions for others like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Robert Joseph, all known as leaders of the most hawkish wing of the Republican Party. Cheney knew how to build an administration to his liking, and whispers were already spreading about who was really in charge. Bush was still figuring it all out. When Whitman asked whether she or the CEQ, shorthand for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would call the shots, Bush asked, "What's CEQ?"

Bush had already decided on Colin Powell for secretary of state, tapping one of the nation's most admired figures, but the retired general's expansive performance at the announcement overshadowed his putative bosses and only reinforced their instinct to find someone else for the cabinet who could counterbalance him. As Powell saw it, Cheney became intent on "keeping me on a much shorter leash than we had during" the first Bush administration. For a moment, Cheney toyed with the idea of serving simultaneously as secretary of defense. No vice president had headed a cabinet department before, but nothing in the Constitution barred it. There was even a precedent of sorts when Henry Kissinger served as both national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

But Cheney had been at Ford's side when he stripped Kissinger of his White House title to establish clearer lines of authority, and he concluded any such arrangement now would be unwise. A defense secretary was subject to Senate confirmation and oversight by Congress. He could be summoned to testify, his papers subpoenaed. Protecting executive privilege while serving in the cabinet seemed problematic. "To be in a position where you would have to step down in a sense and take off your constitutional hat and go up and be a cabinet member who has been through confirmation by the Senate, it really puts a strain on the system," Cheney said later.

Instead, Bush's first choice for the Pentagon was Frederick Smith, founder of FedEx, but he underwent emergency heart bypass surgery during the Thanksgiving holiday. Bush's second choice was the former senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who had the support of Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader. But when they met, Coats did not impress Bush or Cheney as forceful enough to handle Powell. So they went to the third choice, Donald Rumsfeld. In his memoir, Bush attributed the idea to Condoleezza Rice, but Cheney clearly played an important role. In late December, Cheney sent a car to bring Rumsfeld to the Madison Hotel in Washington, where he was slipped in through a basement to avoid witnesses. When the old friends sat down, Cheney told Rumsfeld he was thinking about him for Defense or CIA.

Rumsfeld flew to Austin to meet with the president-elect on Decem- ber 22. The same "awkward issue" that Bush identified in ruling out Rumsfeld for vice president loomed over a cabinet appointment too. "All I'm going to say to you is, you know what he did to your daddy," James Baker told Bush. But even if Rumsfeld had maneuvered his father out of contention for vice president a quarter century earlier, the younger Bush was no longer going to hold it against him. "I had no way of knowing if this was true," he later wrote, evidently choosing not to ask his father or, if he had, not taking his version on faith. "Whatever disagreements he and Dad might have had twenty-five years earlier did not concern me so long as Don could do the job." Rove also argued against Rumsfeld, warning that the appointment would feed impressions that Cheney was in charge. Bush brushed him off.

Four days later, Cheney called Rumsfeld, who had gone to New Mexico for the holidays. Rumsfeld started suggesting other possibilities.