And if Bush was not welcome in McCain's world, Cheney was even less so. The vice president and the senator had clashed most recently over interrogation policy, and feelings were still raw. When McCain kicked off his presidential campaign a year earlier, he had said that Bush "listened too much to the vice president," whom he blamed for the "witch's brew" of a "terribly mishandled war." In hopes of keeping Cheney off the stage at the convention, Black was sent on a separate but parallel mission to ask the vice president whether he would be willing to stay away. "His attitude was, look, I want to help, I'm not sure you're right about this, but I'll think about it because I want to help you win," Black recalled. But in the end, Cheney decided to go to the convention.

While McCain barnstormed the country promising a new start, Bush stewed in the White House, railing about the campaign's undisciplined approach. Through much of 2008, the two men whose relationship had been so fraught for the past decade kept getting crosswise, intentionally or not. Bush was miffed when he hosted the leaders of Mexico and Canada for a summit meeting in New Orleans to show off its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, only to have McCain show up in the Lower Ninth Ward two days later denouncing the administration's response to the storm as "disgraceful." When the two both showed up in Iowa to inspect flood damage, they were just thirty miles apart but effectively undercut each other's effort to show concern. And the McCain camp was aggravated that Bush endorsed lifting restrictions on offshore drilling a day after the candidate did, fueling the "third Bush term" attack line.

Bush understood the treacherous terrain facing McCain and regularly told associates that if he were running as a Republican, he would keep his distance as well. "Republicans will be saying, 'Bush screwed it up,' " he told visitors one day. "If I were running, I guess I would say the same thing. You cannot, I don't care who you are, embrace George W. Bush." But understanding the approach intellectually did not mean he had to like it, and at times Bush thought McCain was taking it too far.

Cheney was just as aggravated at being muzzled. "Personally, I felt that a straightforward defense by the president and me would be better than no rebuttal at all from the White House," he later wrote, "but it was John's campaign and he deserved to run it the way he wanted."

While nursing his frustration, Bush received bad news. On July 12, he learned that Tony Snow had lost his battle with cancer. Five days later, Bush paid tribute to Snow at a Catholic service at Washington's National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, packed with more than a thousand mourners. "He had the sometimes challenging distinction of working for two presidents named Bush," the president said from the pulpit. "As a speechwriter in my dad's administration, Tony tried to translate the president's policies into English. As a spokesman in my administration, Tony tried to translate my English-into English."

Bush could have used Snow as he tried to cement his achievements and forestall a new crisis. With Iraq calmer, he was trying to negotiate a strategic agreement with Baghdad that would be the framework for American troops remaining after a UN mandate expired at the end of the year. In Baghdad, though, the pact was seen as an occupation agreement.

In a videoconference, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pushed for a withdrawal date. "Mr. President, it is in this garden of success that we can discuss a timetable," Maliki told him. "In the past, to mention a timetable was provocative because it meant enemies could wait and destroy Iraq. But now the enemies cannot defeat the state, so we should not be so sensitive to discussing a timetable."

Bush broke with five years of his own policy. "I agree with you," he said. "And if it's all right with you, I'll put out a statement after this meeting to say I agree with you. Is that all right?"

Maliki said yes. Just like that, Bush was working to seal an agreement that would effectively end the Iraq War. Just a year after it looked as if all were lost, now it seemed possible to negotiate an exit that, if not a clean victory, at least would not look like a retreat under fire.

It had been a long journey. Bush was not one given to reflection, at least not out loud. Yet one day after a meeting, he seemed in a rare introspective mood. Sitting in the Situation Room while waiting for another meeting to begin, the president looked at Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, who had succeeded Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and harked back to the critical days in 2003 before he launched the war that had become so problematic. "You know," he recalled, "when I made the decision on Iraq, I went around the room to everybody at that table, every principal. 'You in? Any doubts?' Nothing from anybody." For Bush, it was a rare moment of doubt. Was he ruing his own flawed judgment? Bitter that he had been led off track by advisers? Or both? He didn't say.

In the days to come, Bush signed two pieces of important legislation. One expanded his PEPFAR program another five years, allocating $48 billion to fighting AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, an extraordinary sum of money to be dedicated to the world's poorest continent. The other made tax dollars available to backstop the two government-chartered housing corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bush had fought to reform the two entities repeatedly over the years, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition in Congress. "It was literally like William Wallace fighting the British," said Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary who specialized in economic issues. "It was a slaughter." Now with a housing crisis in full flame, the question was whether it was too late.

A week later, John McCain began airing a new ad with a theme typically used by the party out of power. "We're worse off than we were four years ago," the ad said.

ON AUGUST 8, Bush was standing in a reception line in Beijing about to shake hands with President Hu Jintao marking the opening of the Summer Olympics when his deputy national security adviser, James Jeffrey, sidled up and whispered in his ear. Russian troops were marching into neighboring Georgia after the smaller country shelled a breakaway republic aligned with Moscow. Years of tension had finally exploded into full-fledged war. Caught in the middle was Bush, who had labored so long to keep a constructive relationship with Vladimir Putin but who had also taken great satisfaction out of the democratic revolution that had vaulted Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia.

As he absorbed the news, Bush noticed that just a few places ahead of him in the receiving line was none other than Putin. Although Putin in technical conformance with constitutional term limits had turned the presidency over to his protege Dmitry Medvedev and assumed the prime ministership, there was little doubt that he was still the country's paramount leader.

Bush chose not to say anything to Putin right then, reasoning that the ceremony presented the wrong venue for a confrontation over war. Besides, protocol demanded that he deal with Medvedev as a fellow head of state. So he waited until he returned to his hotel to call Moscow. He found Medvedev "hot," but "so was I."

"My strong advice is to start deescalating this thing now," Bush lectured him. "The disproportionality of your actions is going to turn the world against you. We're going to be with them."

Medvedev pushed back, comparing Saakashvili to Saddam Hussein and accusing the Georgians of killing fifteen hundred civilians in shelling the pro-Russian separatist republic of South Ossetia. (Later reports indicated only a fraction of that many were actually killed.) "I hope you're not saying you're going to kill fifteen hundred people in response," Bush said. "You've made your point loud and clear. I hope you consider what I've asked very seriously."

But Bush was dealing with the wrong man. While critics at home casually assumed Cheney was really pulling the strings in the White House, in Russia it was true that the number-two official was the real power. As the opening ceremony for the Olympics commenced, Bush found himself seated in the same row with Putin, so he had Laura and the king of Cambodia shift down a few seats so that the Russian prime minister could sit next to him. Aware of the television cameras focused on them, Bush tried to avoid causing a scene but told Putin that he had made a serious mistake that would leave Russia isolated if it did not get out of Georgia. Putin countered that Saakashvili was a war criminal who had provoked Russia.

"I've been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded," Bush told Putin.

"I'm hot-blooded, too," Putin countered.

"No, Vladimir," Bush responded. "You're cold-blooded."

The sudden war in the Caucasus presented a dangerous test for the president. He and his aides worried that Georgia was just the first stone to fall; if Moscow were allowed to roll over a weak neighbor, then it could next try to seize the Crimea region in Ukraine or even make a move in the Baltics, where it ruled until the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the last thing Bush wanted to do was turn a volatile situation into a Russian-American confrontation and spark a new cold war.

Meetings at the White House were unusually emotional. Saakashvili had cultivated supporters in the administration, particularly in Cheney's camp. When a junior aide suggested that the United States had to step in, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, interrupted.

"Look, I'm already in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. He did not want another, especially with Russia.

Mullen was virtually the only American able to reach his counterpart in Moscow. Most Russian officials were ignoring their phones, but Mullen had perhaps seven or eight conversations with General Nikolai Makarov, the Russian chief of staff, over the course of a few days, trying to keep the Russians from marching all the way to the Georgian capital. To avoid framing it as a Russian-American clash, Bush turned to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who held the rotating presidency of the European Union, and asked him to take the lead in negotiating a cease-fire. In the meantime, some in the White House kept looking for possible responses, even military ones. Among the options was bombing the Roki Tunnel to block any further Russian advance into Georgia. Cheney had received a call from a frantic Saakashvili requesting military equipment such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

The question came up at a meeting after Bush returned from Beijing. Cheney noted the Stinger request from Saakashvili.

"I need to give him an answer," the vice president said.

Condoleezza Rice thought there was "a fair amount of chest beating" and "all kind of loose talk" about a muscular response.

Finally, Stephen Hadley cut to the chase. "Mr. President, I think you need to poll your national security advisers as to whether they recommend to you putting American troops on the ground in Georgia," he said.

Bush looked at Hadley as if he were crazy.

"I think it is important for the historical record to be clear as to whether any of your principals are recommending to you the use of military force," Hadley said.

At that point, Bush got it. Hadley was protecting him, calling the bluff of Cheney and the other hawks. Were they really ready to go to war with Russia over Georgia?

Hadley wanted the principals to give their positions explicitly so they could not later write in their memoirs that they had disagreed with the president.

Picking up on that, Bush posed the question. "Does anyone recommend the use of military force?" he asked.

No one did. "It is a very serious matter, but, Mr. President, I think that would be a mistake," Cheney said.

The next day, August 12, Sarkozy reached a cease-fire agreement with both sides, but he had been snookered. The Russians had insisted on a fifteen-kilometer "exclusion zone" for their troops, but the French did not realize that was enough to encompass the Georgian city of Gori. The Russians took advantage and moved in even after the cease-fire. They were on the doorstep of Tbilisi, with regime change as their goal.

"I want to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Putin told Sarkozy.

"Hang him?" Sarkozy asked.

"Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein."

"But do you want to end up like Bush?"

"Ah," Putin replied, "there you have a point."

Bush decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He sent Rice to mediate and authorized humanitarian aid sent on military cargo planes to make a point. With American military planes on the runway at Tbilisi, he calculated, the Russians would be foolish to attack the Georgian capital.

Rice flew to Paris and confronted the French. "Did you look at a map?" she asked.

No, they had not.

Only after consulting their ambassador did they realize she was right and that Gori was within the "exclusion zone."

Rice then flew to Moscow and Tbilisi to broker a new agreement. Walking through the government building in Tbilisi, she and her staff noticed there were no pictures on the walls, just hooks; the Georgians were so panicked about approaching Russian troops they were on the verge of fleeing.

At Rice's instigation, Russia agreed to pull out of Georgia but not from its breakaway republics. The war was over, but the relationship between Bush and Putin that had started with soul gazing seven years earlier was broken. Russia suspended cooperation with NATO and later recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Bush shelved a civilian nuclear agreement he had spent years negotiating with Putin.

As soon as that crisis was resolved, along came another one. On August 18, Pervez Musharraf resigned as president of Pakistan to avoid impeachment, throwing the American war on terror into uncertainty. For years, Bush had stuck with Musharraf despite his undemocratic reign, tempering his commitment to his freedom agenda in the name of a seemingly loyal ally in the war on terror. But ultimately, Musharraf proved unreliable, never fully able or willing to clean out the tribal areas that remained a safe haven for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now Bush would have to find out whether he could work more effectively with Musharraf's untested successor, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto.

WITH TIME RUNNING out, Bush grew unusually reflective, and he watched the contest to succeed him with a certain jaundice. One summer day after a meeting, one of Bush's national security aides, William Luti, began chatting with him.

"What's the one thing that surprised you most?" Luti asked.

Bush answered without hesitation. "How little authority I have," he said with a laugh.

Then, turning serious, he added, "The other thing that surprised me-whoever steps into this office, whether it's Obama or McCain, they're going to learn there's a big difference between campaigning and governing."

Bush had no advance warning when John McCain announced his running mate on August 29, and as he happened across a television report, he thought he heard the announcer say "Pawlenty." Only after a moment did he understand that McCain had picked not Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, but Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.

While Palin initially energized many Republicans, the outgoing president was underwhelmed.

"I'm trying to remember if I've met her before," he told his staff. "I'm sure I must have." He added sarcastically, "What is she, the governor of Guam?"

Ed Gillespie told him that conservatives were enthusiastic.

"Look, I'm a team player. I'm on board," Bush replied.

After a few minutes, he directed the conversation back to Palin. "You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off that rose," he warned. "This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for. She hasn't spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let's wait and see how she looks five days out."

Cheney was no more impressed. McCain, he lamented to associates, had made a "reckless choice" at a time when leadership mattered for the country.

With both Bush and Cheney insisting on attending the convention, the McCain campaign told the White House to keep the president's speech to ten minutes. Go light on the Bush record and praise the nominee, the White House was told. Bush grew irritated. When he read a draft of the speech, he came across a line extolling McCain for seeing the wisdom of a surge in Iraq before Bush's own cabinet, which he took as a slap at Rice.

"You really want me to say that?" Bush asked aides.

Gillespie argued that it was important, but Bush took it out.

The final indignity came when a hurricane named Gustav threatened the Gulf Coast just as Republicans gathered in St. Paul for the convention, prompting McCain to cancel the first night-as it happened, the night when Bush and Cheney were to speak. After Katrina, the last thing any Republican wanted was to be politicking while another killer storm ravaged the American coast. In effect, weather had accomplished what McCain could not. When the hurricane passed with relatively little damage, McCain resumed the convention without Bush or Cheney anywhere to be seen. Bush still wanted to go in person, but the McCain campaign said he could appear via video. "From stem to stern, President Bush resented the fact that we used that as an excuse to knock him off," recalled Wayne Berman, the Bush friend who was working as a McCain fund-raiser. Bush took out one more line from his speech, one praising McCain for "not chasing the public opinion polls." As far as Bush was concerned, that would not be honest.

At 9:54 p.m. on September 2, before the broadcast networks began their one-hour live coverage, Bush's image was projected on a large screen above an empty stage with an empty lectern at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. The delegates greeted him politely as he became the first sitting president to miss his party's convention since Lyndon Johnson stayed away from Chicago in 1968. Speaking by satellite from the White House, Bush offered dutiful praise of the nominee and no celebration of his own eight years in office.

"My fellow citizens, we live in a dangerous world," he told the Republican crowd. "And we need a president who understands the lessons of September the 11th, 2001-that to protect America, we must stay on offense, stop attacks before they happen and not wait to be hit again. The man we need is John McCain."

He made light of McCain's maverick streak, but with a little bit of an edge. "John is an independent man who thinks for himself," Bush said. "Believe me, I know."

Eight minutes later, he was done.

Cheney did not speak at all.

Once Bush's image faded from the screen, none of the marquee speakers for the rest of the convention mentioned his name during the nightly prime-time hour. Indeed, overall, Democrats uttered the word "Bush" twelve times as often at their convention. On September 4, Republican delegates were shown a video about September 11 that included images of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Rumsfeld but none of Bush. In his acceptance speech shortly afterward, McCain thanked "the president," without naming him, for his leadership "in these dark days" and for "keeping us safe from another attack." But he made no further reference to Bush, and when it came to the turnaround in Iraq, McCain credited "the leadership of a brilliant general, David Petraeus."

After the Republicans finished partying without him, Bush took a quiet field trip to tour the battlefield at Gettysburg with some of his old Texas crowd, including Alberto Gonzales, Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, and Margaret Spellings. After taking solace in so many Abraham Lincoln books, Bush on September 5 made the pilgrimage to the site of the defining moment of Honest Abe's presidency.

In front of the Virginia monument, Bush listened as one of the tour guides, Jake Boritt, described how Lincoln saw Lee's strike deep into Union territory as an opportunity.

"Well," Bush asked sardonically, "did the president say, 'Bring it on?' "

"DO THEY KNOW it's coming, Hank?" Bush asked Henry Paulson.

"Mr. President," Paulson said, "we're going to move quickly and take them by surprise. The first sound they'll hear is their heads hitting the floor."

Their heads hit the floor on September 7. With Bush's authorization, Paulson seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two housing giants that were funding more than two-thirds of the home loans in America, and fired their chief executives and boards of directors.

The stunning move, at that point the most drastic intervention into the private financial markets since the Great Depression, caught much of Washington by surprise and underscored how rapidly the crisis spawned by the housing market was spreading. It also demonstrated how worried Bush was to so easily abandon a lifetime of free-market conservatism.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were government-chartered private corporations with the twin missions of making a profit for shareholders and encouraging home ownership for those who otherwise would find it beyond their reach. Trying to compete in an overheated housing market flooded with subprime mortgages, the two firms were overextended and having trouble raising capital; their shares were off by 90 percent from their highs in the last year. If they had to pare back, it could send mortgage interest rates soaring and push the economy even further to the brink.

The sweeping move by Bush and Paulson was not the end of the crisis, though. Within days, Paulson was back telling Bush that another storied Wall Street brokerage was on the brink of failure, this time Lehman Brothers. Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, plunged into a frenetic, all-hours effort to stop the bleeding and find a buyer, fearing that a Lehman collapse would be the string that pulled apart the whole fabric of the nation's banking system. By the end of the weekend, they were at an impasse. British regulators would not let Barclays buy Lehman, and Bank of America opted to buy Merrill Lynch instead. They had no choice but to let Lehman go down.

"What the hell is going on?" Bush asked Paulson when he reached him on Sunday, September 14. "I thought we were going to get a deal."

"The British aren't prepared to approve," Paulson said.

"Will we be able to explain why Lehman is different from Bear Stearns?" Bush asked.

"Yes, sir. There was just no way to save Lehman. We couldn't find a buyer even with the other private firms' help. We will just have to try to manage this."

Even as they dealt with Lehman's bankruptcy, the government had to make its largest intervention in the private sector to date, pumping a staggering $85 billion into the insurance conglomerate AIG on September 16 in exchange for 80 percent control. AIG was more than an insurance firm. It had ties to every major bank, and if it went down, so would the system.

"How did we get to this point?" Bush asked during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room that afternoon.

"If we don't shore up AIG, we will likely lose several more financial institutions. Morgan Stanley, for one," Paulson said.

Bush was baffled that a single firm had become so important. "Someday you guys are going to have to tell me how we ended up with a system like this and what we need to do to fix it," he said.

Events were moving at a head-snapping pace, each hour bringing more news pointing to a complete meltdown of the nation's financial system. Years of reckless decisions by everyone from unqualified home buyers to profit-hungry investment banks were coming to a head at the eleventh hour of the Bush presidency. "He was pissed off at the banks," Ed Gillespie recalled later. Bush had foreseen problems with Fannie and Freddie and tried to head them off. Still, his own regulators had sat back as Wall Street created ever more exotic and risky investment schemes. How much this was Bush's fault would be debated for years, but there was no question it was unraveling on his watch and he had to stop it.

The crisis came at a time when Bush, Cheney, and their teams were all but wiped out. Nearly eight years of terrorism, war, natural disaster, and scandal had taken their toll. Bush's Texas friend Charlie Younger noticed that Bush had "stopped saying he was glad to be president." Those last months, Younger said, "it got him and he did not enjoy being president." Bush himself later said he felt like "the captain of a sinking ship."

Still, Bush recognized that he was in a better position to confront the catastrophe than his successor would be. He understood by now the levers of government and, moreover, could do what was necessary without worrying about political fallout.

When Karen Hughes called one morning to offer consolation, he was stoic.

"Mr. President, what else can go wrong during your presidency?" she lamented.

"Well, it's a good thing we're here to deal with it," he said.

The economic anxiety had erased any goodwill Bush had earned by turning Iraq around. On September 17, as stock markets were tumbling and banks were failing, Bush welcomed David Petraeus back to the White House. Petraeus was about to take over as commander of the entire Middle East operations from Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida.

In the Oval Office, Bush gave Petraeus presidential cuff links and posed for pictures with his family. The two men started joshing about mountain biking and whether Petraeus could keep up. The president had triggered the general's hypercompetitive spirit.

"Mr. President, do you have a death wish?" Petraeus asked jokingly. "Do you realize who you're talking trash with here? If you weren't the president of the United States, we could provide a workout that you could write off on your income tax as education."

Bush gave as good as he got, boasting about how he had taken out Jim Zorn, the Washington Redskins coach, and left him in the dust. Before it was over, he had challenged Petraeus to a biking contest.

THE LIGHT INTERLUDE was short-lived. The next day, Bush was scheduled to make a fund-raising trip to Alabama and Florida but canceled it to meet in the Roosevelt Room with his economic team. Henry Paulson sat across from the president with Ben Bernanke to his right and Timothy Geithner to his left. Bush was flanked by Joshua Bolten on his left and Ed Gillespie on his right. A moment of truth had arrived. The time for piecemeal fixes was over, the advisers told him. Slapdash rescue efforts for this or that institution were no longer going to hold things together. The Federal Reserve on its own could do no more. Paulson and the others told Bush it was time to go to Congress for extraordinary authority to tackle the underlying problems. They had in mind an eye-popping $500 billion to purchase toxic assets from endangered financial firms.

"What happens if we don't?" Bush asked.

"We're looking at an economy worse than the Great Depression," Paulson said grimly.

Bush was taken aback. "Worse than the Great Depression?" he asked. "Twenty-five percent unemployment?"