But there was a fine line between ignoring the fickle winds of popularity and losing the consent of the governed. Cheney skated near that line with defiance. On March 19, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, he traveled to the region to highlight the progress of the surge. During a stop in Oman, he gave an interview to Martha Raddatz of ABC News.

"Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth the fighting," she told him.

"So?" Cheney answered.

Raddatz seemed taken aback.

"So?" she said. "You don't care what the American people think?"

"No," he said, "I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."

The polls actually were not fluctuating; they were heading in one inexorable direction. Even with the evident success of the surge, Bush and Cheney had lost the American public on Iraq. As Cheney saw it, popular opinion should not stop them from doing what was needed to protect the country. "He believed that losing these wars was the worst possible outcome for the United States," said John Hannah, his national security adviser. "He was convinced that we had to win, and you got the sense that he wouldn't be swayed by bad polls or a lack of public support." As Liz Cheney put it, "Everything else was less important, and if it meant your reputation was damaged, that was what you had to live with."

A few days later, the situation in Iraq took a dramatic turn. Shiite militias had fled to the port city of Basra in the southeast near the Iranian border, the hub of the country's oil industry. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had received reports of women being beaten for failing to properly cover up and even mutilated if accused of sexual indiscretions. In a brash move, Maliki ordered the Iraqi army south to take on the militias, only informing David Petraeus after the decision had been made. Petraeus was stunned at the recklessness; without any preparation, there was no way for American forces to support such an operation. "It was very, very precipitous and arguably bordering on impulsive," Petraeus concluded. But Maliki disregarded Petraeus's advice, even traveling to Basra personally to oversee the operation. The American fears were well-founded; Iraqi units were ill-prepared and ran out of ammunition, fuel, and other supplies, and in some cases soldiers refused to fight fellow Shiites. Petraeus ordered Special Forces, Apache helicopters, and Predator drones to follow the prime minister and give him support, but with so little coordination "we couldn't figure out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys."

At the White House, the national security team was in a panic. Condoleezza Rice called Bush to tell him Maliki's government could fall. The CIA offered a grim prognosis. "Everybody here thought this was going to be a disaster," recalled Douglas Lute, the Iraq War coordinator. Lute thought Maliki had gambled everything. "If he doesn't get killed, he's going to cripple himself politically because he's going to be shown as unable to deliver."

But Bush did not see it that way. "Don't tell me this is a bad thing," he said, preempting Stephen Hadley and Brett McGurk when they arrived at the Oval Office to brief him. "Maliki said he would do this and now he's doing it."

For the first time, the Shiite prime minister was taking on Shiite militias as the Americans had asked him to do. Bush believed Maliki, however rashly, was finally showing leadership. While he did not say it out loud, there may have been a part of the old Texan who appreciated the cowboy nature of the move; Maliki was following his gut with bold action, just as Bush believed he did.

When he sat down for a videoconference with Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on March 24, Bush stood alone in his assessment.

"This has some potential to be dicey here," Petraeus said with understatement. While the Americans would of course provide support, he told Bush, "you've got to understand there are some serious risks involved here."

Bush said he understood the risks but saw the development as a breakthrough, not a debacle. They had to trust Maliki. "We have wanted him to step up and lead," he said. "Our job here is to support him, not to try to convince him not to do it." They had to make sure Maliki succeeded. "This is going to be a decisive moment."

His team on the ground was not so optimistic. In Baghdad, Crocker, a Bush favorite whose glass-half-empty reports had earned him the presidential nickname Sunshine, turned off the microphone so he could not be heard back in Washington. "I hope it's going to be decisive the way he hopes it will," he told Petraeus.

It very nearly was not. Maliki's headquarters was shelled and his personal bodyguard and childhood friend was killed in the bombardment. Shia militias in Baghdad likewise responded with force, peppering Crocker's palace headquarters in the Green Zone with rockets, nearly a hundred in a forty-eight-hour stretch. But in the end, Petraeus scrambled enough force and Maliki showed enough fortitude that the militias backed off. Maliki reasserted government control over Basra. Suddenly what looked like a breaking point became the moment he finally became a national leader. "He came back from Basra a different Maliki," Lute observed. Senator Lindsey Graham, who talked about it with Maliki afterward, agreed that the Iraqi prime minister was a "changed man" who "went from being docile to being John Wayne."

WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring, Bush was preparing to head to Bucharest, Romania, for his final NATO summit. He had presided over the expansion of NATO in 2004, when seven new countries joined the alliance, including Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, the three Baltic states that had once been part of the Soviet Union. Now the alliance was ready to offer membership to two more Eastern European countries: Albania and Croatia.

The real question was what to do about two other former Soviet republics aspiring to membership: Ukraine and Georgia. The issue was extremely sensitive. The so-called color revolutions that toppled calcified regimes and installed democratically elected leaders in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 had deeply alarmed Vladimir Putin, who saw them as American-inspired attempts to establish a ring of pro-Washington allies around Russia. Further integration with the West would only prove the point.

What the two countries were asking for was not NATO membership but a preliminary step called a "membership action plan" that would require them to spend several years upgrading their militaries and solidifying democratic institutions before any decision on actual membership. But even that was enough to become one of the defining foreign policy fights of Bush's final year. Bush found the idea enticing because it seemed to fit the freedom agenda. For once, Cheney was in agreement, though less out of romantic idealism than a hard-eyed geopolitical calculation that it was in the interest of the United States to keep Moscow from reasserting dominance over its neighbors. The louder the Russian opposition grew to Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO, the more convinced Cheney was that it was worth doing.

Germany, joined by France, opposed the idea, seeing it as unnecessarily provocative. Ukraine and Georgia were too volatile. Eastern European countries like Poland and the Baltic states, however, favored reaching out to the two former Soviet republics, mindful of their own years in Moscow's shadow. American intelligence experts briefed Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the national security team, pressing their assessment that European opposition was too great for the United States to succeed. The briefing seemed to rub the vice president the wrong way.

"So you're saying you're against freedom and democracy?" Cheney asked, with a wry look on his face. He was being humorous, and Bush stifled a smirk, but it was barbed humor.

"No, Mr. Vice President," replied Fiona Hill, one of the intelligence analysts. "We didn't say that."

Afterward, Cheney's aide Joe Wood summoned Hill to complain. He thought she was leaning so far forward in her analysis of the obstacles that she was effectively taking sides.

"You're not with the policy," she later remembered him saying.

"We're not supposed to be with the policy, are we?" she retorted. They were there to give their best professional analysis.

The issue came to a head during a National Security Council meeting. Rice and Robert Gates expressed caution, arguing that they did not have to do this now. Gates was hardly soft when it came to Russia; an old cold warrior, he had come back from his first meeting with Putin to tell colleagues that, unlike Bush, "I looked in his eyes and I saw the same KGB killer I've seen my whole life." But he did not see the virtue in provoking a confrontation. Instead, he and Rice recommended a halfway step that would encourage Ukraine and Georgia without another blowup with Germany and France.

Hadley, knowing the president was inclined the other way, called on Victoria Nuland, a former Cheney aide who was now ambassador to NATO. Speaking from Brussels on a video connection, Nuland argued that Georgia and Ukraine had done what they had been asked, conducting relatively clean elections, enacting political reforms, fighting corruption, and working to get their economies back on track. "If they want it and they've met the criteria, how can the United States be the ones saying no?" she asked.

Bush agreed. He wanted to push for the two countries. He hoped to make a deal with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, calculating that the French were following Berlin. "This is about me and Angela," Bush told aides.

But during a videoconference, Merkel refused to go along. Bush resigned himself to a fight in Bucharest. As he was about to hang up with Merkel, he told her lightly, "I will see you at the OK Corral."

As if the dynamics were not tricky enough, Putin further complicated them by inviting Bush to visit him in Sochi, a resort town in southern Russia, immediately following the NATO summit. That could be awkward depending on what happened in Bucharest, so Bush was reluctant. He also noticed the harshening of Putin's anti-American rhetoric; at an international conference in Munich a year earlier, Putin had compared the United States to "the Third Reich."

Bush called Putin to see if he could trust that the meeting would not be a setup. "Look, the only way I can come is if you don't pull a Munich on me in Bucharest," Bush told him, as he later described the conversation to aides.

Putin agreed, and Bush accepted the invitation.

Once he got to Bucharest, Bush ran into stiff resistance from Merkel. But leaders of several Eastern European countries defiantly surrounded her, arguing for a stronger statement. No one was more sensitive to Russian intimidation than those who had lived under Soviet domination for decades. In the end, while Georgia and Ukraine were not put on the official membership track, the Eastern Europeans won a formulation in the summit communique that actually seemed to offer more certainty: "We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." Will become, period, no caveats. Bush took that as a victory.

But the decision to split the difference ended up angering both Putin and his Georgian nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili, a young firebrand who aligned himself with the United States and went out of his way to provoke Moscow. Putin, invited as a guest to the NATO summit, surprised everyone by showing up in Bucharest early and crashing a dinner of alliance leaders. From Georgia, Saakashvili railed about Western fecklessness. Some back in Washington worried that a hornet's nest had been stirred unnecessarily. "The Russians were furious; the Georgians were furious," remembered Fiona Hill, the intelligence officer who had briefed Cheney. "They weren't listening to all the admonishments to keep a cool head."

After the NATO summit, Bush visited Putin in Sochi. It was their twenty-eighth and final meeting as presidents, with Putin preparing to step down in favor of his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, while taking up the post of prime minister. Some in Cheney's office later worried that Bush had not been firm enough in warning Putin not to take action against Georgia. Others came away from discussions with the Georgians fearing that Saakashvili had interpreted his talks with Bush to be a "flashing yellow light" subtly supporting him in any military confrontation with Moscow. Bush's staff sent further messages trying to disabuse anyone of such misimpressions, but in the dangerous international game of telephone it was unclear what was being heard.

WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring, the Bush and Cheney camps were wrestling over one last domestic initiative. Bush was itching to do something enduring on climate change, while Cheney viewed it as political pandering with disastrous consequences for the economy.

In the seven years since he renounced the Kyoto climate change treaty and disavowed his campaign promise to impose a cap on power plant emissions, Bush had rarely made the issue a cause. While investing billions of dollars in research and new technologies, he had resisted government mandates that environmentalists insisted were necessary. Bush privately bristled at what he considered sky-is-falling alarmism by the liberal, elitist Hollywood crowd.

But ever so gradually, his views had evolved. He found the science increasingly persuasive and believed more needed to be done. The end of his presidency loomed, and he did not want to be known as the president who stood by while a crisis gathered. Now he bristled not at the Hollywood types but at the notion that he did not care. In the past eighteen months, he had cited the danger of climate change in his State of the Union address for the first time, convened a conference of major world polluters to start working on an international accord to follow Kyoto, and signed legislation cutting gasoline consumption and, by extension, greenhouse gases. He even invited his old rival Al Gore for a forty-minute talk about global warming.

Advisers like Joshua Bolten, Henry Paulson, and Condoleezza Rice were now pushing for more aggressive action, possibly even a version of the so-called cap-and-trade system promoted by his critics, a system in which emissions were limited but polluters could purchase credits to offset them from more efficient energy producers. The White House staff had secretly developed models for a cap-and-trade system for discussion purposes. Jim Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and Bolten's brother-in-law, and Ed Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, were assigned to produce a policy that addressed the climate concerns without major economic damage. Their review came to be referred to as "Conazear."

Rice, for one, "wanted something more robust on climate change," especially since John McCain supported a cap-and-trade system just as his two Democratic opponents, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, did. "We were arguing that the U.S. is going to get into this in a big way in the next administration," said David Gordon, Rice's policy planning director. "They're going to take credit for it. Why don't we set the thing in motion? We won't get it all the way so you won't have to take too much on, Mr. President, but why don't you have part of your legacy being really setting this up?"

Bush concurred. In conversations with aides, he agreed to cap power plant emissions as he had promised in the 2000 campaign, in effect reversing his reversal in the letter Cheney had him sign in the early months of his presidency. But he wanted to structure it in a way that would not drive jobs overseas. Connaughton and Lazear, working with Keith Hennessey, the president's national economics adviser, developed what they called a hybrid model. The government would impose a market-based cap that would reduce emissions as far as possible without making the cost of compliance so expensive that firms felt compelled to relocate. Then, to get the rest of the way to long-term targets, the government would offer financial incentives to encourage industrial polluters to voluntarily curb emissions further. They called it cap and trade with a safety valve.

To Cheney, it seemed that Bush was reversing himself on cap and trade not out of a genuine reevaluation of the policy but out of concerns over legacy and politics. If the president really wanted to do something on climate change, Cheney aides said he should simply impose a tax on carbon emissions. While not enthusiastic about taxes, they argued that it would be the more economically rational way to approach the problem because it would motivate industry to clean up smokestacks without having the government effectively managing a major sector of the economy. And to the extent that a carbon tax would increase energy prices, the government could turn around and give it back to consumers through tax credits. "We had an extremely robust debate over it," remembered Neil Patel, the vice president's domestic policy adviser.

Others in the White House fought the idea too. Ed Gillespie thought that it was way too late in the administration and that the president was far too weak politically to make anything actually happen, but it would alienate the remaining base supporters they still had. He felt strongly enough to bring his concerns to Bush in a one-on-one conversation. But while Cheney and Gillespie could not stop the policy, they did not give up. Bush wanted the speech announcing his new strategy written in a flexible enough way that it would not simply prescribe a solution but outline principles and invite lawmakers to introduce their own ideas. That instruction opened the door to a complex drafting and editing process. Advocates of the new strategy like Connaughton wanted to use the phrase "cap and trade" in the speech, but Cheney and his allies managed to cut it out on the argument that it would close the door to collaboration with Republicans in Congress. "There were a lot of questions whether to say 'cap and trade,' and the reason we didn't is it was so specific as to a particular market-based approach as to not allow room or space for Republicans in particular but also the industrial-state Democrats to get involved in the design of a proper market-based approach," Connaughton recalled. "Maybe we were too intellectual about it, and there's some that clearly wanted to say 'cap and trade' and there's some that clearly did not want to say 'cap and trade,' but the reality is our proposal was based on the combination of a market-based mechanism and incentives."

The final draft of the speech had Bush call for a new national goal of stopping the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. But rather than outline specifically what needed to be done to achieve such a goal, the president would lay out broad parameters and describe "the right way" and "the wrong way" to proceed. "The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy," Bush said in the Rose Garden on April 16. "The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology, while increasing our energy security and ensuring our economy can continue to prosper and grow."

In the end, Cheney's office had muddied the language enough that no one even realized the president had agreed to a cap-and-trade system. "Most people looked around and had no idea what he just said because it was a big muddle," Patel said. "It was so embarrassing for the Bush folks that they just dropped it." Connaughton was among those who wished the words "cap and trade" had been in the speech. "Looking back, maybe we were too cute by half," he said. "But our intention was to create an opening for the conservatives to engage because that was the only way to get a bill through."

ON THE INTERNATIONAL front, Bush was also rushing to put in place what he could for his successor. He promoted David Petraeus to take over for Fox Fallon as head of Central Command and put Ray Odierno in charge in Iraq. After a furious debate, Bush agreed to go public about what the administration knew about the Syrian nuclear plant. Michael Hayden and other intelligence officials were "going fucking crazy" that they could not even tell Congress what they knew about North Korean involvement in proliferation even as Christopher Hill was closing in on a deal with Pyongyang.

On the Middle East, Bush learned from Rice that the Israelis were willing to make a major breakthrough proposal. While in Jerusalem, Rice had dinner with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who outlined a far-reaching plan to finally bridge the differences with the Palestinians. He would give the Palestinians 94 percent of the disputed land as long as they swapped some other territory, and he would agree that Jerusalem would be divided into an Israeli capital in the west and a Palestinian capital in the east. Israel would provide security for the holy sites and would accept the return of some Palestinians, perhaps five thousand. Rice was so excited as she listened she had to force herself to concentrate. Maybe the Annapolis initiative she and Bush had started would yield results.

"It sounds like he's serious-really serious," Bush said when she returned to Washington and briefed him in the Oval Office.

"Yes, he is," she said, "and he knows he's running out of time."

So was Bush. He took a short break from the White House to fly back to Texas for his daughter Jenna's wedding. The twin girls had outgrown their wild college days. Jenna had spent time in Latin America on a UNICEF internship, ultimately writing a book about an HIV-infected single mother she had met. Now she was marrying Henry Hager, a young former assistant to Karl Rove whom she had met during the reelection campaign.

She opted against a fancy White House wedding and for a simpler outdoor ceremony on May 10 at the Crawford ranch, officiated by Kirbyjon Caldwell, the president's minister friend who, as it turned out, was supporting Barack Obama to replace him. Cheney and the rest of the White House team were not invited. Rove, Hager's former boss, was the only boldfaced name outside the family who was present. The president walked his daughter down the aisle to the sound of a mariachi band playing "Trumpet Voluntary" and teared up as the young couple exchanged vows. The early-to-bed president stayed up until 1:00 a.m.

He returned to work shortly afterward and soon found himself on Air Force One to Israel, where he addressed the parliament, reassuring it of his enduring friendship for the Jewish state. He later flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort, where he planned to give a strongly worded speech on May 19 reaffirming the vision of his second inaugural address and pressing President Hosni Mubarak to loosen the reins. The speech named Ayman Nour, the opposition leader who had been imprisoned by Mubarak. But on the plane to Egypt, Bush had it rewritten. Mubarak had decided to sit onstage with Bush during the address, presumably assuming the president would be reluctant to challenge him to his face. Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Ed Gillespie wanted to keep the reference to Nour, but Rice argued to take it out. It came out, and the speech touched more lightly on the problems with Egyptian autocracy.

If Bush was wary of offending a longtime ally, he found increasingly that longtime allies were no longer wary of offending him. About a week after he returned to Washington, Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan published a book casting the presidency in a harsh light. He called the decision to go to war in Iraq "a fateful misstep" based on "ambition, certitude, and self-deceit" and a "divinely inspired passion" for a freedom agenda. The war would go down in history as "a serious strategic blunder," and he said Bush's White House had decided "to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

McClellan was hardly the first to turn on Bush, but it pained him nonetheless. McClellan had been part of the group that came up from Texas, once the most loyal of loyalists. Now he joined a line of disaffected aides and supporters speaking out publicly, including Matthew Dowd, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Lawrence Wilkerson, John DiIulio, David Kuo, Richard Haass, Kenneth Adelman, and Paul O'Neill.

By this point, so many friends had turned on him that Bush could hardly muster the outrage his aides felt at what they saw as McClellan's betrayal. When Dana Perino, who had been one of McClellan's deputies before succeeding Tony Snow as press secretary, expressed her indignation, Bush sighed and told her to find a way to forgive McClellan or risk being consumed with anger. Karen Hughes was struck by his evolution; the Bush of 1994 might have been mad, but he had grown more forgiving over the years.

Cheney's reaction to the book was one of resignation; he had seen it so many times he was hardly surprised anymore. Sitting at a table waiting for the president to arrive for a meeting shortly after the book came out, Cheney listened as some of the aides expressed their shock.

"The only reason I have the job I have now, or had the job before I have now," he said, "is because I didn't write a book about my last job."

IT WAS NO surprise that another prominent Republican also kept his distance. Having wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain made clear he wanted nothing to do with Bush, except to tap his fund-raising network.

For what would be their only appearance of the campaign together, McCain invited Bush to a fund-raiser in his home state of Arizona on the day after Memorial Day. What was supposed to be a high-profile convention center event was abruptly switched at the last minute to a private residence closed to journalists.

When advisers told him of the change, Bush snapped, "If he doesn't want me to go, fine. I've got better things to do." When an aide said McCain was having trouble generating a crowd, Bush was exasperated. "He can't get five hundred people to show up for an event in his hometown?" Bush could not believe it. "He couldn't get five hundred people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford." He shook his head. "This is a five-spiral crash, boys." After a few minutes, he returned to the topic. "What is this, a cruel hoax?"

In the end, the only public view of the two men together came after the evening news when McCain saw Bush off on the airport tarmac. The presidential limousine pulled up to the foot of Air Force One, and Bush and McCain emerged from opposite sides, circled around to stand side by side, and waved at the assembled cameras for a total of fourteen seconds. Bush then pecked the senator's wife, Cindy, on the cheek, shook McCain's hand, and sprinted up the stairs, disappearing into the plane. It would be the last time the president and the man running to succeed him would see each other for four months.

Obama, on the other hand, seemed to be growing on Bush. The day after the Illinois senator became the first African American to clinch a major-party presidential nomination, Bush raised the subject with aides in the Oval Office.

"What do you guys think about Obama?" he asked.

"He'll be formidable," Ed Gillespie said evenly.

Bush was struck by the history of the day.

"I think it's an amazing moment for America," he said. "Just an amazing moment."

Bush seemed to detect discomfort in Gillespie. "Hey, Ed, don't worry," he said. "Now we'll kick his ass."

ACTUALLY, IT WAS the Supreme Court that kicked Bush's ass. On June 12, the justices once again inserted themselves into the war on terror to rein in the president, rejecting part of the compromise Bush had forged with McCain in the Military Commissions Act. In Boumediene v. Bush, the court ruled 5 to 4 that foreign prisoners at Guantnamo Bay had a habeas corpus right to challenge their detention, throwing out the provision stripping federal courts of the jurisdiction to hear such complaints. The Constitution stated that the right of habeas corpus "shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." The court ruled it applied even to noncitizens held offshore. "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Bush's appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, dissented. The White House was so mad it sent out strident talking points for the State Department to use in making a public response; traveling in Paris, Condoleezza Rice agreed with her spokesman, Sean McCormack, that the talking points all but accused the justices of having blood on their hands and she refused to use them or let the department use them.

Bush received happier news when he turned on his television on June 27. North Korea had finally turned over the declaration of its nuclear programs, nearly six months late. It was a deeply flawed document, full of holes and questionable assertions. It did not disclose exactly how many nuclear bombs the country had, nor did it admit to having a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to its public plutonium fuel-making facility. But in Bush's eyes, it was progress. In exchange, he announced that he would follow through on his promise to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror. "We're just signing a piece of paper," he said repeatedly. Cheney's camp bristled. Eric Edelman, the Cheney aide now serving as undersecretary of defense, passed along a message to Robert Gates requesting not to be asked to testify before Congress on the deal because he would have to criticize it.

On that Friday, North Korean officials demolished the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear weapons plant. Christopher Hill had wanted to go in person, only to be overruled by Rice, who wanted to avoid alienating the Cheney wing by looking as if her side were taking a bow. A cooling tower is not the most important part of a nuclear program and can easily be rebuilt. But on televisions around the world the images of the conical tower disappearing in a puff of smoke served as a stark visual of change.

"Now that's verifiable," Bush said with satisfaction as he watched.

35.

"Our people are going to hate us for this"

President Bush leaned forward in his chair in the Oval Office, his face alive with irritation. It was his final summer in power, and he found himself besieged by a group of erstwhile supporters accusing him of selling out the principles of his presidency in a vain pursuit of posterity.

He was meeting with conservative scholars and thinkers who had been among his strongest intellectual advocates in the past. Now they were disillusioned and getting in his face about the turnaround they detected, in effect voicing the concerns that Vice President Cheney shared but did not directly confront Bush with, at least not in front of others.

A lot of people think you've changed from your first term to your second term, said Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"That's ridiculous," Bush interrupted.

Undaunted, Boot continued with the bill of particulars: Iran, North Korea, Egypt, Middle East democracy. Bush, it seemed, was settling for less than he once demanded. Surely, the first-term Bush would not have gone along with the false concessions of a deceptive North Korea the way the second-term Bush had. Surely, the president who envisioned the end of tyranny in his inaugural address would not accept backsliding by Arab autocrats.

Bush snapped back. "That's not true," he said, glaring straight at Boot. Bush seemed most angry at the implication that he was not as committed to his freedom agenda, which in his view had become the philosophical centerpiece of his presidency. "I've been fighting for this from day one," he said. "It's part of everything I do."

Boot remained unimpressed. He cited a column in that morning's Wall Street Journal by John Bolton, Bush's former ambassador to the United Nations and a Cheney ally, lacerating the administration for agreeing to lift some sanctions on North Korea in exchange for the incomplete accounting of Pyongyang's nuclear program. "Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse," Bolton had written.

Bush grew more agitated at the mention of his own former senior diplomat. "Let me just say from the outset that I don't consider Bolton credible," the president said bitterly. That was quite a statement. Bush, after all, had been the one who sent Bolton to the United Nations in the first place. He had defied the Senate when it refused to confirm Bolton and gave him a recess appointment. Now he was dismissing him as not credible, clearly resenting what he saw as betrayal. "I spent political capital for him," Bush said, and look what he got in return. The president went on to defend his North Korea decision, saying his "action for action" approach held the most hope of getting rid of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons.

Bolton had become something of a public spear-carrier in the private struggle between Bush and Cheney over foreign policy in the final year in office. A colorful figure with a distinctive bushy gray mustache, Bolton had been part of the recount team in Florida and was among the allies Cheney had sprinkled throughout the administration. Cheney urged Colin Powell to appoint Bolton undersecretary of state and later Condoleezza Rice to send him to the United Nations. At the United Nations, Bolton made a point of calling Cheney or his aides anytime he sensed backsliding in Rice's State Department.

Since leaving the administration, Bolton had become increasingly vocal in columns, speeches, and television appearances lambasting the president's second-term shift, although he generally blamed Rice for leading Bush astray. His barrage of criticism, seen by some in the White House as tacitly encouraged by Cheney, aggravated the president and his aides. Christopher Hill, a frequent target of Bolton's barbs, dismissed him as a fringe figure, calling him "Phyllis Schlafly with a mustache."

Bush did not view his policies as changing so much as moving to the next natural step in a continuum. He was acutely aware of the diminishing time left, calculating that it was worth making concessions he might not have made in the past in hopes of leaving his successor a better situation. North Korea was the classic example. "Do you really want to overturn the apple cart and confront the new administration with a crisis in North Korea policy in addition to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the long list of things?" Stephen Hadley recalled. "I was influenced, and I think the president was influenced, by the fact that probably not." Cheney disagreed. Bush's concessions to North Korea "seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I'd seen him make decisions in the past."

CHENEY COULD STILL assert himself on selected issues. More than anyone in the White House, he remained focused on the war on terror, and so while he would engage on other matters like climate change or Middle East peace from time to time, one friend said, "he was only going to fight to the extent that it didn't cost him when he needed to really try to get the president to remain steadfast" on what he considered the central issues.

One area where he called in chits was the warrantless surveillance program he had helped usher into existence after the September 11 attacks. Bush had decided to seek congressional authorization for the program, and lawmakers had already passed a short-term bill making clear it was legal. But as that measure approached expiration, the main sticking point remained immunity for the telecommunications firms that had cooperated with the government from the beginning.

In Cheney's view, it would be an act of treachery to expose companies that had done what their government asked to endless litigation. When some White House political advisers and lawyers at the Justice Department argued for backing off on immunity, Cheney fought even harder. "Cheney won that one, and he did it in a Cheney way," said the friend. "He had different people making different arguments in different places." On July 9, Congress passed the bill permanently authorizing the surveillance program and exempted the telecommunications firms from liability for past actions. Bush and Cheney actually won greater authority from Congress than they had claimed on their own. "On balance," said Michael Hayden, the CIA director, the new law gave the government "far more" latitude, confirming to some in the White House that they would have been better off going to Congress in the first place.

On another important decision in the terror war, Bush and Cheney agreed. For more than a year, officials had been developing a new strategy for the tribal areas of Pakistan where many Islamic militants were hiding. President Pervez Musharraf's deal with tribal leaders had collapsed, and the CIA was detecting signs that al-Qaeda was training a fresh class of terrorists, this time with American passports. To many administration officials, it was clear that relying on the Pakistanis was no longer a tenable strategy, especially with Musharraf embattled at home. The past year had seen little progress. "We have been 0 for '07," complained Hayden, overstating slightly for effect. "We're seeing a dangerous accumulation of breathing space for al-Qaeda," warned Juan Carlos Zarate, the president's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism.

As the national security team gathered one July day in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the residence, there was a powerful if largely unstated recognition that this might be the last chance to shape terrorism policy before Bush and Cheney left office-and perhaps their last chance to get Osama bin Laden. The plan called for a much more muscular decapitation campaign aimed at killing key al-Qaeda leaders using unmanned drones armed with missiles. Instead of waiting for Pakistani permission, the CIA would strike unilaterally, assuming it had gathered enough indications that there was a high-value target on the ground and that civilian casualties could be kept to a minimum. It would inform Pakistan either as the strike took place or afterward. Special Forces in Afghanistan would also be authorized to conduct raids across the border.

What would make the campaign more effective, Bush was told, was the development of much more intense surveillance of potential targets. Instead of relying simply on fragmentary information from informants or short-lived satellite passes, the CIA was now able to station drones hovering over a target undetected for days or even weeks at a time, gathering a complete picture of a suspected hideout and its occupants. The analysis of what CIA officials called "pattern of life," combined with what Hayden would call "a Home Depotsized warehouse full of detainee information" gleaned from interrogations, gave agency leaders and commanders a better understanding of the enemy than they had had since September 11. "You need human penetrations, you need signals intelligence, but finally that persistent, godlike stare, unblinking, builds up a level of confidence," Hayden said, referring to drone operations in general.

With so many drones occupied in Iraq, the al-Qaeda hunters until then had been having trouble getting enough to roam the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan. The strategy was not without risk; hit the wrong house, kill too many civilians, and Pakistan could erupt in an anti-American frenzy. As aggressive as he had been elsewhere, Bush had always taken a measured approach to Pakistan, and had resisted concerted pressure from the military to send troops over the border from Afghanistan for fear of destabilizing the Islamabad government. But with half a year left, Bush was willing to gamble. "We're going to stop playing the game," he told advisers. "These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I've had enough."

IN A NONDESCRIPT suburban office tower across the Potomac River in Virginia where John McCain based his campaign, the putative Republican nominee and his team were trying to figure out how to disinvite the president and the vice president of the United States from their own party's convention.

Bush was arguably the most unpopular president in modern times. His 69 percent disapproval rating in April was the highest of any president since Gallup began polling, surpassing Harry Truman at his worst at 67 percent and Richard Nixon at his worst at 66 percent. By July, as McCain was gearing up for his general election run, just 28 percent supported the president, and 81 percent said the country was on the wrong track. The "Bush Lied, People Died" mantra had been set in concrete for many. For some, normal political opposition had even evolved into deep loathing. By this point, two authors had written fictional books contemplating Bush's assassination, and a filmmaker had made a docudrama about the same scenario. Bush was regularly called a Nazi and depicted on protest signs with a Hitler-like mustache. Beyond the fringe, mainstream pundits debated whether he would go down as the worst president in history.

Democrats asserted that electing John McCain would amount to a "third Bush term," an ironic notion given that the senator had spent much of the previous decade at odds with the president. A USA Today/Gallup poll that summer found that 68 percent of Americans were concerned that McCain would pursue policies too similar to those of Bush. "He became an albatross," recalled Senator Joseph Lieberman, the independent Democrat who was supporting McCain.

So McCain and his team brainstormed how to do the unthinkable and keep the sitting president away from the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. "It wasn't fair," said Charles Black, a McCain strategist, "but the president was unpopular." Eventually, Black was deputized to suggest to the White House that Bush skip the convention in September and leave the country altogether. Perhaps he could go to Africa and beam in a televised message from there highlighting his work against AIDS and malaria, one of the indisputably positive aspects of his legacy.

The idea did not go over well at the White House, where Bush aides grew angry at the affront and thought it was a mistake for McCain to go too far distancing himself from a president who retained the support of a conservative base that distrusted McCain. The McCain staff was already riven between longtime loyalists to the senator and those brought in from the Bush years. "It was so ingrained in the McCain world to hate Bush, and Bush people," said Nicolle Wallace, the former Bush White House communications director who had gone to work for McCain. "I remember being sick at the thought of nickel-and-diming the president of the United States. He was going to be more beloved in the hall than we were. It was awful."