With Rice's help, Bush was also trying to make progress elsewhere in the Middle East in hopes of leaving behind a better situation for his successor. The next day, November 27, he climbed onto Marine One with Rice for the short flight to Annapolis, where they were convening the Middle East peace talks-not a "summit," but now a "conference" instead of a "meeting," to the irritation of the Israelis who thought it raised the stakes for the event. Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and a strong Israel supporter, had opposed the session, whatever it was called, fearing that Palestinian sovereignty would simply result in a terrorist state. But he had lost out, convinced that Rice had undergone a "remarkable change" in her approach because of disenchantment with Israel's handling of the Lebanon War.

As Bush settled into the helicopter that would take him to the conference, officials from about forty countries were on hand for the most intense foray into the thicket of Israeli-Palestinian politics of the Bush-Cheney administration.

"Do I have an agreement?" Bush asked Rice.

"No, you don't," she admitted. "I've got them close, but you're going to have to deliver it yourself."

Bush sat back in his seat. "I can do that," he said.

As the helicopter cruised toward the U.S. Naval Academy, Stephen Hadley was busy working out an elaborate orchestration to keep Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas in different rooms until Bush could talk with each of them separately. When he arrived, Bush shuttled between the two leaders, making clear they had to agree on a statement or risk failure. Near the end of the seventh year of his presidency, Bush found himself doing almost exactly what Bill Clinton had been doing in his final days in office.

By the time they came upstairs, everyone was ready to deal. Aides were sent to craft the final wording, and soon they had a joint statement pledging to negotiate a full-fledged peace treaty by the end of 2008 that would resolve long-standing disputes, "including all core issues without exception." It was yet another agreement to make an agreement, but one that, if fulfilled, would allow Bush to leave office complementing his legacy of war with a legacy of peace.

As he prepared to announce the agreement, Bush took a look at the final document, but the type was too small. "I can't read this," he said.

"Why?" asked an alarmed Rice, thinking he had a last-minute objection to something in the text.

"No, I really can't read this," he said. "I can't see it."

The next few minutes were a scramble as Hadley ran around trying to find a way to reprint the document in larger type.

Finally, Bush shrugged it off. "Forget it," he said. "They're waiting for us. I'll just use my reading glasses."

As Bush enjoyed the rare moment of accord, Cheney watched with concern. The goal was laudable, he thought, but unrealistic. He was not sure whether it was worth the investment of time and energy to pursue the same dream that had eluded presidents for decades. More significantly, the vice president was aghast that Syria had been invited to the conference. While President Bashar al-Assad had only sent a deputy foreign minister, the very presence of an outlaw state undercut everything they had been working toward. Less than three months after Israeli jets demolished a secret nuclear facility in Syria, the Damascus government was being welcomed to an international gathering with no consequence for its actions.

NOT INVITED AT all was Iran. The day after the summit opened, Bush and Cheney sat down with intelligence officials who briefed them on a new report on Iran's nuclear program that was about to radically alter their campaign against Tehran. After years of assuming that Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the intelligence agencies had made a startling about-face: the new report concluded that while Iran did have a program to develop nuclear weapons in the past, it was shut down in the fall of 2003 just after American troops overthrew Saddam Hussein next door in Iraq.

Bush and Cheney had received updates about this evolving assessment in the months during which the report was being prepared, but it was still shocking. Starting in 2006, Bush had been participating in what aides called "deep dive" sessions with Iran analysts, digging into what was known and not known about the Islamic republic's nuclear quest. By June 2007, the intelligence agencies had assembled a nearly complete draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear program still predicated on the judgment that it was actively seeking weapons.

Then, with Bush pressing for more information, the intelligence agencies came up with something new-a series of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, including some involving Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's preeminent nuclear scientist, complaining that his funding and work had been frozen by the government. Bush was told about the intercepts by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, during a morning briefing in August. Could it be? Bush asked if the intercepts could be an elaborate ruse to throw the Americans off track. But intelligence analysts went back and rescrubbed more than a thousand pieces of evidence while figuring out exactly what would be involved in creating a deception like that, only to conclude that the program really had been shut down. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, even convened a murder board to grill analysts about their data.

Why Iran would have halted weapons design in 2003 became a subject of intense debate within the intelligence community. Some officials credited the Iraq invasion, reasoning that with more than 100,000 American soldiers just across the border, the mullahs in Tehran must have been intimidated. But when Hayden voiced that theory to the analysts, he was shot down. "Sir, that is an interesting theory," he was told, "but there is no evidence." Instead, the analysts said it was likelier that Tehran shut down weapons design after an opposition group exposed to the outside world Iran's undisclosed nuclear facility in Natanz in 2002.

The final study presented to Bush and Cheney on November 28 reported that Iran halted its weaponization program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure" and that the intelligence agencies were "moderately confident" that "Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007." But it added that "we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." Sophisticated readers understood the report did not mean Iran had given up its aspirations for nuclear weapons. The bomb-making program was the least challenging part of the development of nuclear weapons and the easiest to resume. Iran was still working to master the more difficult science of enriching uranium, the real key to any weapons program; once it succeeded at that, it could restart the bomb-making program that would put the newly enriched uranium to use.

But the report was not written for the general public. Now Bush and Cheney were in a bind. McConnell and Hayden did not want to release the report on the principle that intelligence should remain classified, but if it were ever to leak, it would look as if the administration had covered up evidence undercutting its campaign against Iran. If released as written, on the other hand, it would shatter the international coalition even as they were poised to pass a third round of sanctions at the UN Security Council. Just five years after mistaken intelligence helped lead to war in Iraq, the credibility of American statements would be brought into question. Even after he had been told of the intercepts, Bush in October had publicly warned of the possibility of "World War III" if Iran's nuclear ambitions were not thwarted; this report would make it look as if he were again exaggerating evidence to wage war on a Muslim country.

Cheney suggested simply rejecting the report, but that was quickly dismissed as implausible. Rewriting the report, even just to clarify that the new finding did not mean Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment, would also be unthinkable because, no matter how clean the motives, it would be perceived as manipulating the intelligence.

"This is a disaster," Stephen Hadley told Bush. "I don't think we can make any changes to this NIE."

"You're right," Bush said.

Bush passed along the new report to Prime Minister Olmert while he was in town for the peace conference, and Cheney told Minister of Defense Ehud Barak. But they kept the bombshell news from other participants at the conference, not to mention their European allies, as they tried to figure out what to do. After a weekend of debate, the administration released a declassified version of the report's key judgments on December 3. An uproar ensued. "It was a huge blow, huge blow," Hadley recalled. Chancellor Angela Merkel had been planning to meet that very week with German industrial leaders to press them to stop doing business with Iran; as soon as she heard about the new American intelligence report, the meeting was canceled.

Bush tried to do damage control, calling other leaders in the coalition to make clear that the report did not change anything and to solicit support for more sanctions. On December 4, he reached Vladimir Putin. It was a measure of how deeply concerned Bush was about losing Russian support against Iran that he buttered up Putin about just-held regional elections that had been widely condemned as unfair.

"The results give us a reason to rejoice," Putin said of the elections.

"You are popular," Bush said. "People like you a lot."

"Other parties did well," Putin said.

"You're being modest," Bush said.

Bush turned to his real purpose in calling, the Iran report. "I'm worried people will see this and want to change policy," he explained. Bush noted a program that once existed could be easily reconstituted. He hoped Russia would send a firm message to Iran that there is a "better way forward."

Putin said he would. "In the waiting room, I have the new Iranian national security adviser," he told Bush. "I will take into account what you told me."

Bush reached Hu Jintao on December 6 and made the same argument. "A country that had one can restart one," he told the Chinese president.

Hu said the report demonstrated that the international community had been successful in pressing Tehran. "We will urge the Iranians to come back to negotiations," he told Bush.

AS WINTER SETTLED IN, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's many foes in Baghdad were plotting to push him out, and some White House officials agreed he should go.

Among them was Cheney, who said the idea "merits our consideration" and favored replacing him with Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite leader who had served as vice president and whose fluent English had helped make him many friends in the administration. Brett McGurk, who had watched Maliki fake signing the agreement with Bush, wrote a memo to Bush declaring Maliki "a significant impediment to our vital objectives in Iraq" because of his governing style and recommending that if his enemies moved against him, "we should not stop it."

But Gates argued against getting involved, foreseeing nothing but problems heading down that road. Bush agreed. "I know there are people in this room who believe Maliki needs to go," he told advisers in the Situation Room on December 17. "That's not our policy. We're in the middle of the damn surge. It took six damn months to choose Maliki and form a government. Something like that now would be totally destabilizing."

Instead, he sent Rice to Baghdad to tell Maliki to shape up while she blocked the move against him. Sitting down with the prime minister, Rice was as blunt as she had ever been. "You're a terrible prime minister," she told him. "Without progress and without an agreement, you'll be on your own, hanging from a lamppost." Then she met his adversaries and said a change in government would cost them American support.

Amid the international intrigue, Bush continued to fence with the Democratic Congress. He vetoed expansion of a children's health-care program and threatened to veto a bill passed by the House banning the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques. He refused to send top aides to testify about the U.S. attorney firings, prompting the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve contempt citations against Joshua Bolten and Karl Rove.

But in a rare bipartisan breakthrough, Bush and the Democrats came together on energy legislation that, while not as ambitious as many wanted, represented one of the most significant steps since the oil crises of the 1970s. The measure raised fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks to an average of thirty-five miles per hour by 2020, the first such increase in twenty-two years. It also required a dramatic expansion of ethanol production and began phasing out incandescent lightbulbs. While formulated differently, it tracked the goals Bush had set out in his State of the Union address. A bipartisan commission estimated the law would reduce projected oil consumption by 2.8 million barrels a day by 2020 and reduce projected carbon dioxide emissions by 4 percent. "The legislation I'm about to sign should say to the American people that we can find common ground on critical issues," Bush said at a signing ceremony on December 19, flanked by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. "And there's more we can accomplish together."

Bush headed to the Crawford ranch for the holiday satisfied with the victory and cautiously optimistic about his final year to come. Iraq was looking calmer, with just twenty-three American military fatalities in December, the second-lowest month since the invasion nearly five years earlier. North Korea might not make the end-of-the-year deadline for its declaration, but there was hope for progress. While Bush had gotten little of his agenda through the new Congress, he had used his veto to demonstrate he would not roll over.

But the year would not end without more trouble. Two days after Christmas, Bush woke up to the news that the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in Pakistan. Bush and Cheney had spent much of the past months managing the volatile political situation with the critical American ally. Bush had been fond of President Pervez Musharraf but found the Pakistani leader an increasingly problematic friend. Musharraf had declared a national emergency, suspended the constitution, and fired the chief justice with whom he had been feuding, precipitating a fresh crisis. Only after months of pressure from Bush did he finally agree to step down as army chief of staff and govern as a civilian. Amid the unrest, Bhutto had returned from years of exile and was campaigning to return to power when a suicide bomber detonated explosives blowing them both up.

Bush put on a suit and rode over to the Crawford Elementary School to address reporters. His face looked drawn and tired. "The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy," he said.

BUSH RETURNED TO Washington after the holiday to begin his final year in office greeted by more bad news, this time domestic. On January 2, 2008, he met with Henry Paulson, who told him that the economy had slowed significantly. For Bush, this chipped away at the one factor that had been a bedrock through international controversy. For fifty-two straight months, the American economy had added jobs, the longest uninterrupted period of job growth on record. But it was relatively weak job creation, and now a bursting housing bubble was beginning to ripple through the system.

Warning signs had been growing for weeks, and Bush authorized Paulson to go to Capitol Hill and take the temperature for a stimulus package that would provide a jolt to the economy. After Paulson's soundings in Congress, Bush on January 18 called for a $145 billion package. Cheney for once showed up to stand behind him during the announcement. With a surprising ease that revealed the degree of bipartisan economic anxiety, Democrats came to an agreement with Paulson and Bush within a week on a $152 billion package that ultimately would give $600 tax breaks to individuals or $1,200 per couple, plus $300 per-child credits and other tax relief for businesses. The package had come together in part because Bush pushed Paulson out in front while largely staying invisible himself.

The economic troubles were already transforming the race to succeed Bush. Where Iraq had dominated the political debate for the past few years, the growing success of the surge had alleviated some of the public anxiety about the war, and the rapidly deteriorating economy had surpassed it on voters' worry list. On the sidelines, Bush watched the vitriolic campaign unfold with a mixture of interest, disaffection, and relief. When Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, was called a racist for comments he made the day of the South Carolina primary, Bush sympathized, having been there himself, and called his predecessor to commiserate.

As it turned out, Bush had a little Clinton in him when he took the lectern in the House chamber a couple of days later, on January 28, to deliver the State of the Union address outlining the agenda for his last year. Gone were the grand dreams of remaking Social Security, immigration law, or the tax code. In their place were modest initiatives, like those Clinton used to propose, such as hiring preferences for military spouses. The confrontational foreign policy of old was replaced with talk of Middle East peacemaking and diplomacy with rogue nations.

Bush had taken office with so much derision for his predecessor that critics defined his approach toward governing as ABC, or Anything But Clinton. He would not play "small ball" with incremental policies, he declared, nor would he coddle North Korea or waste time mediating between Israelis and Arabs. But as the end of his tenure neared, Bush appeared to be adopting some of his predecessor's playbook. His ambitions consisted mainly in consolidating what he had achieved, such as pumping $30 billion more into his fight against AIDS in Africa, reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, and codifying policies that steered more federal funds to religious charities.

Hoping to cement his legacy, Bush appealed to lawmakers to set aside the contest already raging for his job. "In this election year, let us show our fellow Americans that we recognize our responsibilities and are determined to meet them," he said. "Let us show them that Republicans and Democrats can compete for votes and cooperate for results at the same time."

34.

"What is this, a cruel hoax?"

His advice discarded on Syria, North Korea, the Middle East, secret prisons, and other issues, Vice President Cheney found a new way to express his disenchantment with the direction of the administration that winter. The issue was gun rights.

The dispute concerned a case before the Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller, which challenged the constitutionality of a long-standing handgun ban in the city of Washington, D.C. A lower court had ruled that the ban violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and for the first time the highest court planned to decide whether the amendment applied to individual Americans or simply to militias as some had long argued.

Rather than weigh in on the side of gun owners, the Justice Department had decided to split the difference with a brief by Solicitor General Paul D. Clement arguing that the court should recognize the individual right but reject the categorical approach of the lower court and send the case back under "a more flexible standard of review" that would not invalidate a host of federal gun laws like the ban on machine guns. Joel Kaplan, the deputy chief of staff, heard of the Justice Department's plan only the night before and was aggravated. He scrambled to see if it could be changed, engaging in a heated discussion with Clement. Finally, he and Joshua Bolten took the issue to Bush.

"What do you want to do?" Bolten asked. "Do you want to let him file? If we try to step in at this point, there's going to be a big dustup."

Bush decided not to intervene, letting the brief be filed.

But Cheney was angry at the Justice Department's equivocation. So when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison came to him with a friend-of-the-court brief that pro-gun lawmakers were planning to submit and suggested he sign in his capacity as president of the Senate, he was intrigued. He talked with David Addington, who assured him that he would be within his rights. A couple of days later, Cheney called Hutchison and signed on without telling anyone else in the White House.

When Hutchison released the brief on February 8 with the names of 55 senators, 250 House members, and the vice president, the White House was caught off guard. Even though they too had been unhappy with the Justice Department brief, Bolten and Kaplan were were shocked to learn from news reports that Cheney had publicly taken a position at odds with the administration's. Kaplan called Cheney's adviser Neil Patel, "What the fuck are you guys doing?" he demanded.

Patel had no idea, having just heard about it from a National Rifle Association lobbyist. Patel called Addington, who told him he deliberately left the staff in the dark.

"I want to protect you so you can honestly say you knew nothing about it because the White House is going to be hot," Addington said.

The White House was indeed hot. "They were so angry it's hard to say how angry they were," said Patel.

Bolten went to see Bush and asked for permission to chastise the vice president.

"You can't have more than one administration position," Bolten said, "and the vice president can't have a position different from the rest of the White House."

Bush was more amused than angry and laughed a little. He gave Bolten permission to go see Cheney.

Bolten walked down the hall to the vice president's office and slipped in the door. He explained that the gun brief had crossed a line. But rather than confront Cheney directly, Bolten pinned blame on Addington.

"It's a process foul," he said, "and if I may, I'm going to speak to your chief of staff about it."

"I didn't know you weren't aware," Cheney said. "But I did it in my capacity as president of the Senate." With a half smile, Cheney told Bolten he was free to talk with Addington.

Bolten met with Addington to lay down the law.

Addington, unruffled and clearly confident of Cheney's support, reminded Bolten that he worked for the vice president, not the president's chief of staff, and that his paycheck came from the Senate.

"Understood," Bolten replied, "but if we have another episode like this, I will make sure that all of your belongings and your mail are forwarded to your tiny office in the Senate and you won't be welcome back inside the gates of the White House."

Addington got the point.

The issue went away relatively quickly, and Bush never raised the matter with Cheney, perhaps uncomfortable with a direct confrontation or perhaps regretting his administration's tepid position. Indeed, the same day the brief became public, Bush praised Cheney in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

"He's the best vice president in history," Bush said, repeating a line he had used in the past, even though it seemed to slight his own father.

Then, with a smile, he added, "Mother may have a different opinion. But don't tell her I said this, but my opinion is the one that counts."

Either way, Cheney's break with Bush on gun rights was seen in some quarters of the White House as a bold act of defiance and frustration by the best vice president in history. "Cheney's view was that all these items-we were not doing these things due to sincerely held policy beliefs but because they were just playing better from a PR perspective," said one White House official. "This was his just a little bit of an F-you to all that."

WITH ALL THE crises at home, Bush found a little respite abroad. On February 15, he boarded Air Force One for a final six-day, five-nation trip to Africa, where he had mounted an unprecedented campaign to fight AIDS, malaria, and poverty in some of the poorest corners of the world. The PEPFAR program he created had invested $15 billion in stemming AIDS on the continent, and Bush was trying to persuade Congress to double it. Another program he started called the Millennium Challenge Corporation had steered billions of dollars to nations that promised concrete progress toward reform. As counterintuitive as it might sound for a conservative Republican, Bush had arguably done more for Africa than any American president before him.

As he made his way across the continent, Bush was showered with appreciation. In Benin, it was proclaimed George W. Bush Day. In Tanzania, tens of thousands thronged the streets to greet his motorcade, and dancing women wore skirts and blouses with his face emblazoned on them. In Ghana, a major road was christened the George Bush Motorway. At his last stop in Liberia, where Bush helped push out President Charles Taylor in 2003 and sent marines and money to help stabilize the country after a fourteen-year civil war, they sang about him on the radio, crooning his name and warbling, "Thank you for the peace process."

Even as Americans back home were considering electing the first black president, the current president had a devoted following in Africa. "Of course, people talk with excitement of Obama," Jakaya Kikwete, the president of Tanzania, said with Bush at his side in the courtyard of his government headquarters in Dar es Salaam. But Kikwete added, "For us, the most important thing is, let him be as good a friend of Africa as President Bush has been." Little wonder. In Tanzania, Bush had spent $817 million to provide medicine and other care to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients. During his visit, the two leaders signed a $698 million, five-year Millennium Challenge contract to rebuild roads, expand electricity generation, and provide more clean water. Accompanied by Bob Geldof, the rocker-activist, Bush savored the interlude between crises and later called the trip "the best of the presidency." Condoleezza Rice thought that may have been the happiest moment of Bush's tenure. "He loved being in Africa," she observed. "The last trip was very validating."

Bush was not as popular back home, even at the campaign headquarters of the Republican hoping to succeed him. John McCain had sewn up the nomination and was stopping by the White House for the ritual blessing from the incumbent. But that did not mean either man was looking forward to it.

A misunderstanding sent the hates-to-wait president to the North Portico to receive McCain long minutes before the senator actually showed up on March 5. Bush kept his humor with the cameras on, even doing a playful tap dance for reporters, but aides afterward got an earful. When McCain finally arrived, the two went into the Rose Garden.

"I hope that he will campaign for me as much as is keeping with his busy schedule," McCain said.

Bush was more forthright. "If my showing up and endorsing him helps, or if I'm against him and it helps him, either way, I want him to win," Bush said.

While McCain calculated how to distance himself from Bush, the president turned his attention to awkward personnel issues. Tim Goeglein, the White House liaison with the religious conservative community, resigned after he was discovered plagiarizing columns for a hometown newspaper. Bush was pained and summoned Goeglein to the Oval Office. "Tim, I have known mercy and grace in my own life," Bush told him, "and I am offering it to you now. You are forgiven." Bush was forgiving as well of Admiral Fox Fallon, the head of Central Command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan, who seemed to suggest to Esquire magazine that he was single-handedly resisting a White House drive to war with Iran. But when Bush indicated he might let it pass, Cheney recalled his dismissal of General Michael Dugan during the Gulf War and urged the president to follow suit. "I'd fire him in a heartbeat," Cheney told him. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agreed and with Bush's permission went to Fallon to tell him to step down.

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS began to worsen dramatically the day after Fallon's resignation. Bush was scheduled to fly to New York to give a speech at the Economic Club on Wall Street amid an accelerating collapse of the housing market and increasing cash flow problems among major investment firms. Bush was going over the text of the speech in the Oval Office on March 12 when Henry Paulson noticed that it ruled out bailouts of any investment banks.

"Don't say that," Paulson cautioned.

"We're not going to do a bailout, are we?" Bush asked.

He was not predicting one, Paulson said, but they did not want to box themselves in either.

"Mr. President, the fact is, the whole system is so fragile we don't know what we might have to do if a financial institution is about to go down."

The next day, Bush got a phone call from Paulson letting him know that they were on the verge of just that scenario. Bear Stearns, one of the venerable investment houses of Wall Street, was about to go under. Bear had been one of the most aggressive players investing in risky home loans and now was paying the price with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market.

"This is the real thing," Paulson told Bush. "We're in danger of having a firm go down. We're going to have to go into overdrive."

Bush was initially reluctant. A free-market approach had to allow for even large institutions to go out of business if they made bad decisions.

But Paulson argued that Bear's failure would have vast consequences for the whole system.

On Friday morning, March 14, Paulson made clear that the government would have to intervene. "Mr. President," he warned Bush, "you can take out that line in your speech about no bailouts." By the time Air Force One landed in New York, Paulson and Ben Bernanke had orchestrated the takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, with the help of a $29 billion credit line from the Federal Reserve, effectively ending an eighty-five-year institution but averting a wider calamity.

"It seems like I showed up in an interesting moment," Bush said to laughter as he began his speech to the Economic Club of New York. He praised Paulson and Bernanke but also argued against a broader government action to turn around the housing market. "The temptation of Washington is to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in the housing market amounts to inaction," he said. "I strongly disagree with that sentiment."

He compared government economic policy to driving on a rough patch. "If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it's important not to overcorrect-because when you overcorrect, you end up in the ditch."

His critics were not persuaded. Before the end of the day, Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer of New York were already comparing the president to Herbert Hoover.

"We're going to get killed on this, aren't we?" Bush asked Paulson.

BUSH UNDERSTOOD THAT bailing out a Wall Street bank would not be popular, and a part of him was chagrined at that. Not Cheney. As the two of them progressed through their last year in office, their public standing had sunk so low that it had become almost like a badge of honor: what they were doing must be about principle, since it sure was not a political winner.