Concerned that Bush or his people were going soft, Cheney did something the next day that he rarely did. At the weekly Senate Republican lunch, he stood up to press the caucus to stand by the president and the troop buildup. That night, several Republican senators joined him at the vice president's residence for dinner. Lott was there and reported that he thought they had enough votes to make it until September. Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Republican leader, came over as the dinner was breaking up to make the same point. That did not stop the House from voting two days later to pull most troops out by April 2008, but as long as Senate Republicans held firm, they could block a withdrawal.

Hadley and others thought Cheney misunderstood their concerns. "He thought we were going wobbly, which is completely nuts," Hadley said later. "What we were really trying to do was to use the surge to see if we had a chance of getting a bipartisan consensus on the Hill in support of our surge policy." Another official thought Cheney's interpretation of what was happening showed "that he really wasn't in the loop because nobody on that call was thinking of short-circuiting the surge or changing policy. It was really about what's our narrative that could help hold this Congress."

AMID ALL THIS, David Petraeus made a surprising proposal: he wanted to go to Syria to confront President Bashar al-Assad about the foreign militants crossing the border into Iraq to fight Americans. Intelligence agencies believed Syria was the main pipeline for Arab radicals, with as many as 80 percent flying into Damascus and then driving into Iraq. What, if anything, to do about that had been a sore point for months. At one meeting, Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser, literally pounded the table insisting on action such as bombing the Damascus airport and cratering its runways someday at three o'clock in the morning to stop the flow. But others resisted, unwilling to widen the war by bringing in another Muslim country.

Petraeus reported that Assad through intermediaries in the Iraqi government had invited him to visit. He thought it might be an opportunity to tell Assad there would be consequences if he did not shut off the flow of fighters. "I wanted to respectfully confront him on Syria being a transit location for al-Qaeda in Iraq," Petraeus said later. The message would be one of self-interest for Assad: "You're basically allowing poisonous snakes to have a nest in your country with the understanding they only bite the neighbors' kids and sooner or later that backfires and they end up biting your kids and then they do worse." Bush made clear he did not want Petraeus to go, but the general kept raising it. Finally, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, privately told him to stop asking. "Forget it," he said. "It's not going to happen in your lifetime in uniform, so there's no reason to bring it up again."

What Petraeus did not know at first was that Israel had already told Bush that it planned to bomb Syria to destroy its fledgling nuclear reactor. Having Petraeus in full military uniform chatting with Assad in the days or weeks before then could send mixed signals. On September 6, Israeli warplanes swooped into Syrian airspace and destroyed the nuclear plant under cover of night. Israel kept quiet about the operation, calculating that Syria would rather absorb the blow in silence than suffer the humiliation of publicly admitting that the Jewish state had successfully raided its territory. The Americans had assumed there would be an uproar in the Arab community. But it turned out the Israelis knew their neighborhood better. Syria kept quiet.

ON JULY 21, Cheney once again took over as acting president while Bush underwent a colonoscopy. Just as he had in 2002, Bush signed letters temporarily transferring power to the vice president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The letters were faxed to Capitol Hill at 7:16 a.m., and Fred Fielding called to inform David Addington, who in turn called Cheney at his weekend home in St. Michaels, Maryland, to let him know he was now in charge. A five-doctor team at Camp David led by Colonel Richard Tubb, the White House physician, removed five polyps from Bush during the procedure. The White House then faxed fresh letters from Bush at 9:21 a.m. reclaiming his powers.

Conservatives playfully imagined all that Cheney could do during his 125-minute presidency-National Review collected ideas online, like bomb Iran and pardon Scooter Libby-but the acting president spent his brief administration writing a letter to his grandchildren as a keepsake.

Dear Kate, Elizabeth, Grace, Philip, Richard and Sam, As I write this, our nation is engaged in a war with terrorists of global reach. My principal focus as Vice President has been to help protect the American people and our way of life. The vigilance, diligence and unwavering commitment of those who protect our Nation has kept us safe from terrorist attacks of the kind we faced on September 11, 2001. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the members of our armed forces, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies and others who serve and sacrifice to keep us safe and free.

As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations, and you will assume the important responsibilities of citizens in our society. I ask of you as my grandchildren what I asked of my daughters, that you always strive in your lives to do what is right.

May God bless and protect you, Richard B. Cheney, Acting President of the United States (Grandpa Cheney) A real Cheney presidency would certainly be different. The troubles in Iraq had clearly limited Bush's ability or willingness to use force elsewhere, or even to threaten it as a tool of coercive diplomacy, and Cheney bristled at what he saw as creeping passivity. When Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates visited Saudi Arabia on July 31, one of Cheney's contacts in the traveling party called him in alarm to tell him the defense secretary had forsworn the use of force against Iran. Gates and Rice had joined King Abdullah in Jeddah, sitting around a modest coffee table with bowls of candy. Abdullah was pressing to better understand Bush's strategy on Iran. But Gates shut down talk of a military strike. "The American people won't stand for it," he said. Abdullah started to respond when Gates added, "In fact, he will be impeached." Abdullah was furious, and even Rice was flabbergasted. By the time word got back to Cheney, he was both. He sent a message to the Saudis that the defense secretary was freelancing. But as long as Bush resisted any serious discussion of military options against Iran, Cheney's position did not matter much.

Gates was clearly not in sync with the vice president on many of the divisive issues of the latter part of the administration, whether it be Iran, Syria, Guantnamo, or other matters. "In terms of thinking about these kinds of problems, he was a lot closer to Condi than he was me," Cheney said later. With the ascendance of the two secretaries as well as Stephen Hadley and Douglas Lute, it was, in the words of Douglas Ollivant, an NSC official, the "revolt of the radical pragmatists."

In those steamy summer days, the changes in the White House seemed to be coming in rapid succession. In early August, Karl Rove told Bush he would be leaving. The last election was behind him, as was the CIA leak case. He kept in his desk drawer a picture of Scooter Libby clipped from the newspaper the day he was convicted, a reminder of the damage done-and of what Rove himself had avoided. His name was thrown around a lot in the U.S. attorney scandal because he had passed along complaints about some U.S. attorneys who got fired and helped install one of his proteges in one of the prosecutor slots. But that did not concern him much. He saw that as just more partisan noise, and after everything he had been through, he had pretty effective earplugs.

For Rove, it was time to move on. After so much time away, his marriage was in trouble, and he was ready to establish his independence financially and professionally. He wanted to be more than "the Bush guy," as he put it.

Still, he felt guilty. "I feel like I'm deserting you in a time of war," he told Bush.

ALBERTO GONZALES, ON the other hand, refused to leave. Gonzales's tenure as attorney general had become so tumultuous that it was distracting the administration-not just the furor over the U.S. attorneys, but his handling of disputes over the National Security Agency eavesdropping program. Recent congressional testimony by Gonzales on the surveillance program had been so unsteady, so marked by memory lapses and contradictions, that even some inside the White House worried he faced possible perjury prosecution. When White House lawyers asked, David Addington refused to confirm that Gonzales had testified accurately about events surrounding the NSA program.

Like Rove, Bush considered the controversy over the prosecutor firings partisan posturing. Rove kept telling him it was nothing more than a witch hunt, and Bush was not about to cave in to Democrats. Bush's loyalty to Gonzales mystified advisers, many of whom did not think the attorney general was up to the job even in better times. "That was the first time that I ever heard around the watercooler questioning the president's decision on something," one aide recalled, even more than the Harriet Miers nomination.

What bewildered many in Bush's circle was that Gonzales did not realize he should fall on his sword for the president. "I don't understand for the life of me why Al Gonzales is still there," a former top Bush aide groused at the time. Others thought it was time for Bush to recognize reality. "The president," a senior administration official said, "thinks cutting and running on his friends shows weakness. Change shows weakness. Doing what everyone knows has to be done shows weakness."

Only now, after months of painful hearings and headlines, did Bush finally conclude that Gonzales had to go. Questions about the attorney general's credibility on the NSA program struck at the heart of Bush's presidency, namely national security, and risked making it more difficult to win legislation to authorize the eavesdropping. Joshua Bolten raised the issue with him one day.

"We have a big agenda that the attorney general needs to carry for us," he told Bush, "and Alberto can't carry it anymore."

Bush was sad but did not resist. They both thought it was unfair to Gonzales. While he could have handled matters better, Bush thought, the Democrats had intentionally destroyed an honest man's career with no real justification.

Bush left it to Bolten to deliver the news. The chief of staff called Gonzales. He wanted to make clear in a gentle way that he had the president's authority. "Alberto, this makes us all heartsick," he said, "but the best thing you can do for the president right now is resign."

After all these years at Bush's side, it was a hard blow for Gonzales. He insisted on hearing directly from Bush. "I want to talk to the president," he said.

Bolten thought it was a matter of dignity and agreed to set up a meeting. Other officials who heard about it, though, were astonished. When the president sent his top aide to tell a cabinet official to resign, he should simply resign. But Gonzales went to the president's ranch outside Crawford on August 26. Advisers understood how difficult it would be for Bush. For all of his self-description as a decider, Bush hated firing people who had been loyal to him.

In this case, Bush was forced to confront a good friend. As they talked, Gonzales recognized that he had no choice but to accept the decision. If he harbored any illusion that it was not really Bush who wanted him to go, or that he could appeal to his old friend, that vanished. Gonzales flew back to Washington to announce his departure, suggesting the decision was his. Administration officials quietly put out the cover story that it was Gonzales who offered to resign in a phone call to Bush and that the president was reluctant and suggested he come down for a consolation lunch.

More bad news came on August 31, when Tony Snow announced that he too would resign. His cancer was too advanced to pretend that he would be able to return to the White House podium. Dana Perino stepped in, but a sense of grief pervaded the West Wing, both for the likable press secretary and for a presidency under siege on so many fronts.

BUSH AND CHENEY met that day with the national security team to think about the way forward in Iraq. David Petraeus and his civilian partner, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, were due back in town soon to report to Congress, and while everyone was nervous about getting too far ahead of themselves, it looked as if they might have begun turning the situation around.

After peaking at 126 in May, American military fatalities had fallen by a third, to 84, in August. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen from 2,796 to 2,384 over that same period. In Baghdad, the center of the violence and the key to creating enough space for political reconciliation, civilian fatalities had fallen by nearly half, from 1,341 to 738. Something was beginning to change on the ground. At least they hoped so.

Staring at the video screen on the wall, Bush and Cheney listened as Petraeus reviewed the situation and anticipated letting a marine expeditionary unit in Anbar go home in December without being replaced and sending the five army surge brigades in Baghdad home by July 2008. It was both an expression of confidence that they had turned a corner and a quiet recognition that the political environment back home required signs that the war was eventually going to end.

Bush pressed Petraeus to ensure it was genuinely his recommendation, not a response to pressure from the Joint Chiefs or his commander, Fox Fallon.

Petraeus assured him it was his own judgment.

"The plan should be this," Bush said. "Keep a boot on the neck and get us in place for the long term." He was in no rush, he said, to bring the troops home if that would endanger the tentative progress on the ground.

At this point, Fallon jumped in. He had been agitating to draw down forces in Iraq for weeks and offered the president a convoluted analogy about a fighter pilot taking more risk if an enemy had him in his sights. "That's our situation in Iraq," Fallon said. "The bogey on our tail is that the Iraqis still have not made any political progress. We need to force them, take on some more risk by drawing down our forces, force them to step up, take charge."

It was a repeat of the argument of Donald Rumsfeld, John Abizaid, and George Casey a year earlier. The question was whether enough had happened in the interim to justify returning to a transition strategy. Bush did not think so. "I'm not sure we're ready to take on more risk in Iraq," he said.

While Bush was gentle in rebuffing Fallon, Cheney interjected more directly. "Fox, the whole world's betting on our bugging out of Iraq," he said. "You know it. Everyone's watching, asking if we can sustain what's working. Decisions we make now will reverberate for years. And I'm afraid what you present here, to any reasonable person, will be read as surrender."

Fallon was undaunted. "The point is sending a message not to the world but to the Iraqis," he said. "Let them know that they need to step up. It's now or never."

BUSH TOOK ADVANTAGE of the Labor Day holiday to make another secret trip to Iraq, this time leaving from the White House. Rather than be confined to the airport or even to Baghdad, he planned to fly to Anbar Province, once deemed lost to the enemy. It would be a daring display of progress for the audience back home and a chance for the president to see the results of the surge.

First, he had to slip out of the world's most heavily guarded building without detection. Bush found himself in an unmarked vehicle heading to Andrews Air Force Base and stuck in traffic on an often-clogged exit ramp in Washington. For operational security, they posed as a regular vehicle, and no roads were cleared ahead of time.

Suddenly Bush's aides saw a panhandler collecting coins in a McDonald's cup making his way to each of the cars stuck at the traffic light. Bush was in the third one back. Any moment the man would reach them, peer into the window, and notice the president of the United States, blowing the secrecy of the trip.

"Get down," Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, told Bush.

"What?" Bush asked.

"Slide down in the seat," Hagin instructed.

Just then, a quick-thinking Secret Service agent in the car following the president's reached into his wallet, pulled out a few dollar bills, and held them out the window. The panhandler skipped right past the president's car to collect the donation.

After a long flight, Bush landed in Iraq on Labor Day, touching down at Al Asad Air Base to meet with Petraeus, Crocker, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. A furnace wave of 110-degree heat washed over his face as he emerged from Air Force One dressed in a casual dark blue short-sleeve shirt and dark pants. It was an invigorating moment. "They felt the elation of the surprise visit," Eric Draper, the White House photographer, remembered.

Bush met with sheikhs aligned with the Americans. Many of the sheikhs had been opposed to the new Iraqi government and worked in tandem with al-Qaeda but began switching sides before the surge in what was called the Awakening. The reinforcement of marines in Anbar Province had encouraged and accelerated a shift that was turning the region around. Bush was particularly taken with one young sheikh named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a dashing, daring figure. "He's sent from central casting," Petraeus remembered. "Very courageous guy, a truly inspirational leader."

Abu Risha's spirit was infectious. "My fighters will finish here and go to fight alongside you in Afghanistan," he told Bush exuberantly.

Bush was pumped up on his way home. Maybe this was going to work after all. Now he just had to convince Congress and the American public.

Petraeus and Crocker returned to Washington soon afterward for their report to Congress. Not since Vietnam had there been such an anticipated appearance by a general on Capitol Hill. The liberal activist group MoveOn.org welcomed the general back to America with a full-page ad in the New York Times accusing him in advance of cooking the books and dubbing him "General Betray Us." The inflammatory attack backfired by giving Republicans something to rage about and putting Democrats on the defensive.

Bush watched some of the testimony on September 10 from the West Wing as Petraeus told Congress that American forces "have dealt significant blows" to the enemy in Iraq and outlined his plan to draw down the surge forces by July 2008 while warning of "devastating consequences" of a more rapid withdrawal. Enduring tough questioning from Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Petraeus and Crocker proved impressive, and it quickly became clear they had bought Bush more time.

When he invited Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to the White House the next day, Bush seemed triumphal. "Of course, al-Qaeda needs new recruits," he said, "because we're killin' 'em." He smiled. "We're killin' 'em all!"

Reid was appalled; Bush, he thought, viewed the war "as if it were some kind of sporting event or action movie."

That, of course, was not the tone he could take in the national address he planned following Petraeus's testimony. By putting the general out first, Bush hoped that the timetable for withdrawing the surge brigades would be invested with Petraeus's credibility; had Bush announced it himself, it would have been seen entirely through the lens of how people viewed Bush. But Cheney read the draft speech and concluded Bush had gone too far the other way, especially by mentioning the Baker-Hamilton report as his ultimate goal.

"Mr. President, you can't refer to Baker-Hamilton," Cheney told him. "Our strategy is Petraeus-Crocker, not Baker-Hamilton."

Bush agreed to strike the reference. While Cheney was not the driving force behind the surge, he had become its most vocal guardian against backtracking.

BUSH WAS PRACTICING the speech in the family theater on September 13 when word arrived that Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the young Sunni sheikh who had impressed him in Anbar Province just ten days earlier, had been killed by an explosion-the victim, it was said, of his own bodyguard's betrayal. Bush was shaken. At this moment of progress, it was a cruel blow that one of the leaders of the turnaround had been taken down.

Bush worried it was his fault. "Did my visit endanger him?" he asked national security aides. "Did we consider that?"

Douglas Lute, the war coordinator, answered with resignation. "It's just a tough neighborhood," he said.

That night, Bush sat down at his desk in the Oval Office for his address to the nation. He portrayed an Iraq where "ordinary life is beginning to return" at long last. "The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is 'return on success,' " Bush said, adopting a new phrase coined by Ed Gillespie. "The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home." He added, "Some say the gains we are making in Iraq come too late. They are mistaken. It is never too late to deal a blow to al-Qaeda. It is never too late to advance freedom. And it is never too late to support our troops in a fight they can win."

Two days later, September 15, Jack Keane showed up on the porch of Petraeus's house at Fort Myer outside Washington. Petraeus was recovering from a weeklong blitz of congressional committees, White House and Pentagon meetings, and television interviews before heading back to Baghdad.

"I've got a message for you from the president," Keane told him.

"Okay, all right," Petraeus said.

"I was over seeing the vice president," Keane said, "and the president got word I was there and he came over to the office and he said, 'You tell Petraeus, don't let the chain of command filter out any requests. If he needs something, you just tell me. You get the word to me.' "

33.

"Don't screw with the president of the United States"

No way, President Bush said. The Boston Red Sox could not hit against John Lackey.

"What are you talking about?" replied a defiant Christopher Hill.

It was early one morning in the fall of 2007, and the president was in the Oval Office trash-talking with Hill, his North Korea negotiator. Bush had invited Vice President Cheney and a handful of other officials to breakfast to hear Hill describe how the talks were progressing. But first he and Hill were engaged in a lighthearted debate about upcoming play-offs between Hill's beloved Red Sox and Lackey's Angels.

Hill noticed Condoleezza Rice out of the corner of his eye staring at him with concern. Maybe "the hired help," as Hill liked to put it, wasn't supposed to argue with the commander in chief, even about baseball. But Bush liked his diplomat's brash fearlessness. The president saw him as someone who cut through the interagency morass.

That did not mean the president overlooked how much Cheney distrusted Hill or how the negotiator was playing his internal adversaries back in Washington to advance his cause, pushing right up against the limits of how far Bush was prepared to go to get a deal. One reason the president wanted to have the breakfast was to lay down his own priorities as they moved forward so that Cheney, Hill, and Rice would know directly what he wanted rather than arguing among themselves.

Bush led his guests into the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office. He sat at the head of the table, with Cheney to his left and Rice to his right. Hill sat next to Rice, and Stephen Hadley next to Cheney, with Joshua Bolten at the opposite end of the table from the president. Robert Gates was traveling, so Eric Edelman, a former Cheney aide now serving as undersecretary of defense, represented him. As the navy steward worked his way around the table taking orders, most of the officials stuck with a simple fruit bowl. Cheney, on the other hand, ordered bacon and eggs. Hill was struck that the vice president would order something so different when everyone else was going light, especially since he had had four heart attacks.

Hill had just brokered a deal in which Pyongyang would disable its nuclear facilities and provide a complete list of all its programs while the United States would remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the list of countries penalized under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as well as end the banking sanctions that had frozen its $25 million. After years of fitful negotiations and confrontations, resolution seemed possible. If Bush could salvage Iraq and rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons in his final stretch in office, it would go a long way toward shaping a more positive legacy. Cheney was not so optimistic. He saw it as one more ruse by the North Koreans, one made all the more cynical by the secret intelligence showing that Pyongyang had been helping the Syrians build a nuclear capacity, a discovery not acknowledged to the public. How could they make a deal, Cheney wondered, with a country that was double dealing like that?

Bush understood that taking North Korea off the lists would mean little since other sanctions still applied. For years, states had been left on the terrorism and trading with the enemy lists not because they met specific criteria but simply because they were seen as bad actors.

"What we really need," Bush said, "is an assholes list." That would be more accurate.

Edelman served as the most vocal skeptic in the room, pressing Hill about his strategy. "What are you going to do about the stuff they have already weaponized?" he asked.

"You ought to be worried about the loose plutonium," Hill shot back. "That is what could be used by a terrorist to blow us up."

Hill grew so agitated that Bush intervened. "Chris, calm down," he said. The president made clear he wanted to get hold of all of North Korea's weapons and fuel. "They have to give up their nuclear weapons," he said. "That is the whole deal here. It is open kimono. He gets to have his Qaddafi moment now."

Through most of the discussion, Cheney remained silent, as he usually did. Bush finally turned to him. "Dick, would you like to ask something?"

Cheney looked over at Rice and Hill. "Well, I'm not as enthusiastic as some people here," he said, dismissing the whole venture with understatement.

Hill was not sure whether Cheney was looking at him or Rice, but he took it upon himself to push back.

"Mr. Vice President," Hill said, "I want to make something very clear. I'm not enthusiastic about this. I'm simply trying to do my job and get home at night."

Bush interjected. "Oh, Dick didn't mean anything like that," the president said. "He's just concerned about whether the North Koreans will ultimately deliver."

Rice picked up the ball and began explaining the strategy again. No one was overestimating how much they could trust the North Koreans, she said. But they did not have many alternatives.

Cheney remained unconvinced. Had the North Koreans given up their missile program? he asked pointedly. He knew full well they had not and asked the question only to make the point.

Hill started to jump in again, but Rice put her hand across his lap to restrain him and answered herself.

Then Cheney asked, "How do we know they don't have another plutonium reactor?"

The others assured him that a plutonium reactor was much harder to hide than uranium enrichment or other nuclear activities.

No one walked out with their minds changed. "The president is being sold a bill of goods," Edelman complained to Bolten. But Bush had settled the issue for now by blessing Hill's mission. As long as the president was determined to explore diplomacy, Cheney would have to swallow it. But it was not the last time they would debate the matter.

WHILE THE PRESIDENT focused on a possible legacy, the rest of the country was already beginning to move on, tired of the Bush years and fixated by the race to succeed him. For Bush, it was an odd sensation. For the first time in more than thirty years, neither he nor anyone in his family was on the ballot or anticipating being on the next one. And yet it seemed everyone was running against Bush-even the Republicans.

At Republican debates, the candidates were climbing all over each other to distance themselves from him. "I'm not a carbon copy of President Bush," declared Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee, asked if he agreed with Bush's vision of democracy promotion, replied, "Absolutely not, because I don't think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government." On another occasion, John McCain declared that Bush's handling of the Iraq War had been a "train wreck."

Bush recognized that it was a promising cycle for Democrats and expected Hillary Clinton to succeed him. At times, he chortled at the notion. "Wait 'til her fat ass is sitting at this desk," he told aides at one point. But he respected her strength and leadership skills and hoped that, in a way, her presidency could vindicate his. Clinton, the wife of his predecessor, had staked out a hawkish position since joining the Senate in 2001, even voting for the Iraq War. While harshly critical of Bush's handling of it, she had refused to repudiate that vote despite pummeling from the Left. During an off-the-record chat with television anchors one day, Bush recalled how Dwight Eisenhower criticized Harry Truman's record while running for president in 1952, only to adopt the early Cold War containment strategy he inherited, in effect institutionalizing a bipartisan approach that would endure for decades. The way Bush saw it, Clinton could be the Ike to his Truman. Although she had bashed him on the trail, he felt confident she would continue the broad direction he had set.

Her main opponent for the nomination was a newly elected senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who even before winning his seat in 2004 had exhilarated Democrats with a stirring keynote address at John Kerry's convention declaring that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America." Bush admired the young senator's skill but seemed offended at his rise from nowhere with pretensions to the presidency. He told visitors that Obama's remark during a Democratic debate that he would be willing to send American forces into Pakistan to chase terrorists even without Islamabad's permission was "stunning" in its "naivete." On another occasion, after Obama attacked the administration, Bush arrived for a prep session for a speech fuming. "This cat isn't remotely qualified to handle it," Bush told aides. "This guy has no clue, I promise you. You think I wasn't qualified? I was qualified." Still, Bush was pleased that at a debate both Obama and Clinton refused to commit to removing all troops from Iraq in four years; the surge had changed the political dynamics enough to keep his would-be successors from boxing themselves in.

With time ticking down-Joshua Bolten had already given senior White House aides countdown clocks showing exactly how many hours were left to get things done-Bush was thinking about how to leave behind a war on terror that even a President Clinton could largely embrace. With Iraq improving by the month, he hoped to stabilize it enough so the next president would not feel compelled politically to pull out the remaining troops precipitously. He had already emptied the secret CIA prisons, negotiated for congressional authorization of military commissions for suspected terrorists, and pared back the harsh interrogation techniques that critics called torture. He was moving some prisoners out of Guantnamo in hopes of possibly closing it. He was also working with lawmakers to pass legislation explicitly legalizing the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program. "He was willing to cut loose some things that weren't going to survive and solidify things that could survive," Rice recalled. "And that was a really important part of the calculation for him."

STILL AT THE top of the list was Iraq. With the surge seemingly helping to turn the security situation around, the president focused on the political situation and pressed to formalize a new relationship between the United States and Iraq.

On the morning of November 26, he arrived at the Situation Room to sign a "declaration of principles" with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that would commit them to negotiating a strategic agreement before Bush left office-an agreement to make an agreement. Just reaching that point had proved problematic enough, foreshadowing difficulties to come. In fact, as Bush took out a pen and signed the document before him, he did not realize that Maliki on the screen from Baghdad was passing his pen over his copies of the papers without actually signing.

At the last minute, Maliki had decided not to sign because he said he had not read the final wording of the document, but no one told Bush that the Iraqi prime minister was faking. Brett McGurk, the president's Iraq adviser, was in the room in Baghdad and waited for the video image to disappear before accosting Maliki's security adviser.

"Don't screw with the president of the United States," he said with barely controlled anger. "Review them now and sign."

Later that afternoon, Maliki's office called and said he had finally reviewed the papers and actually signed them. An embarrassing debacle was avoided.