"Can I talk to you a minute?" she asked.

They slipped away to the lodge's small presidential office with the sloped ceiling and wooden bookcases.

"Don't let this be a pall over your last days as president," she told him. "You deserve better and you've done so much and you've secured the country and you've done all these things, and this shouldn't be the way that you spend your last hours as president."

Bush nodded. He understood, but he could not help it.

Finally, it fell to his wife, Laura, as it often did, to ground him.

"Just make up your mind," she told him. "You're ruining this for everyone."

He and Laura returned to Washington that Sunday afternoon, January 18, and went to dinner at the spacious home of their friends Jim and Sandy Langdon in the Spring Valley neighborhood of the capital. They had visited any number of times over the past eight years, but this time an official photographer came along to record the evening, a sign of the impending end.

Jim Langdon knew of the president's struggle and interrupted dinner.

"I got this list of people that I need pardons for," he announced jokingly.

Bush laughed.

THE FIGHT OVER the Libby pardon was not the only drama shadowing the final days of the Bush-Cheney administration. By the weekend before the inauguration, intelligence agencies had picked up signs of a plot to attack Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony. A group of Somali extremists was said to be heading over the border from Canada intent on exploding a bomb on the Mall on Inauguration Day, "the manifestation of one of our worst nightmares," as Juan Carlos Zarate, Bush's counterterrorism chief, put it.

The Bush team briefed their counterparts in the emerging Obama administration, and together they confronted hard choices: An assault on the inaugural ceremony, literally the transfer of power, the most exalted symbol of American democracy, would be devastating, even if it failed to kill the new president. A scene of chaos on the podium could cripple a new commander in chief. What does Obama do if in mid-speech a bomb goes off? asked Hillary Rodham Clinton, the incoming secretary of state, when the two teams met together in the Situation Room. "Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see their incoming president disappear in the middle of the inaugural address?" she asked. "I don't think so." No one had a good answer.

The two sides agreed that Robert Gates, who would stay on as Obama's defense secretary, should be kept away from the ceremony to preserve the chain of command in case of disaster. As a sitting cabinet officer with the imprimatur of the new president, Gates was the logical choice to take over the country if everyone above him in the line of succession were to perish. Eventually, the threat turned out to be what intelligence professionals call a "poison pen," when one group of radicals plants a false story to get Americans to take out rivals. But Bush and Cheney could hardly have left their successors a more vivid demonstration of what they had been dealing with for more than seven years or a more fitting lesson in the murky nature of terrorism-distinguishing between what was real and what was not, tracking down where threats began, figuring out the right response, and finding a balance between acknowledging danger and projecting confidence.

On his last full day in office, January 19, Bush put on a suit and arrived at the Oval Office by 7:00 a.m. as usual. He was scheduled to make back-to-back farewell calls to thirteen world leaders, starting with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia at 7:00 a.m., Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at 7:10 a.m., President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea at 7:20 a.m., and so on. The talking points on the presidential memo consisted in their entirety of the following fourteen words: "Enjoyed working with you."

"We have accomplished a lot together."

"Wish you continued success."

The biggest debate was whether to call both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Protocol would usually have the president call only his formal counterpart, which would now be Medvedev. But Bush decided to call both; after all their time together, after all the moments of collaboration and tension, he wanted to say good-bye to "my friend Vladimir." Despite the rupture over the Georgia war, just five months before, Bush wistfully recounted the many visits they had made to each other, at Crawford and the Moscow dacha, in St. Petersburg. He recalled their cooperation on Iran, North Korea, the Middle East, terrorism, arms control, and economics. They had, Bush told Putin, "many fond memories."

Bush had one other final piece of business. At 11:00 a.m., he met in the Oval Office with Fred Fielding and William Burck, who reported to him on their meeting with Scooter Libby over the weekend. They had not changed their minds, they told Bush during a half-hour conversation. Moreover, they pointed out that Libby was not asking for forgiveness because he maintained his innocence. Bush took it all in. He signed clemency orders commuting the sentences of two Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting a Mexican drug dealer, a case that had become a cause celebre for conservative critics of illegal immigration who thought they were persecuted for doing their jobs. But when Bush put his pen down, that was it. No more clemency meant no pardon for Libby. He would stick to his decision despite Cheney's passionate opposition.

BUSH'S ASTRINGENT ENCOUNTER with Cheney was still fresh when the day came to hand over the Oval Office. On the morning of Inauguration Day, Bush showed up at the Oval Office as usual. His staff had left the office exactly the same as it had been, with all the photographs and paraphernalia still in place. But quietly, the president had given away his cigars, resolving to quit when he moved back to Texas. Bush slipped a handwritten note to the incoming forty-fourth president into a manila envelope marked "The White House" and attached a yellow Post-it note to the outside. He jotted down "44" on it and left it on the Resolute desk for Obama.

Bush was to host the Obamas before escorting them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony that would end his presidency after eight turbulent years. But as he waited for the appointed hour, he went wandering around the West Wing with Joshua Bolten. The place was a construction zone as crews rushed to put up more interior walls to make more cubbyholes for the new tenants. "The place was going condo," Bolten recalled. Bush walked past the workmen, who paid no attention to him. He was mellow and reflective.

Eventually, it came time to leave.

"Okay, I'm going over to the residence," he announced to his remaining staff. "Where's my coat?"

He put on his overcoat and cowboy hat in the reception area next to the Oval Office, stepped out the door, walked down the Colonnade in the morning chill toward the East Wing, and never turned back. There was no moment of hesitation to look around the Oval Office one last time.

Just before 10:00 a.m., he and Laura stepped outside the mansion onto the North Portico and greeted Barack and Michelle Obama warmly. They led them inside for the traditional Inauguration Day coffee, a comforting ritual of unity after a campaign season of division. That morning, there were two of everything-two presidents, two vice presidents, two first ladies, two Secret Service details. "It's like Noah's ark," observed Eric Draper, the outgoing Bush photographer.

Cheney showed up in a wheelchair, explaining that he had thrown his back out packing boxes at the vice presidential mansion over the weekend. "Cheney looked like hell," recalled Joel Kaplan, who saw him later in the day. It produced an odd, awkward scene, as if all of Cheney's efforts of the last eight years, all of the fights and the controversy, had finally taken their toll on a nearly sixty-eight-year-old body that had already endured four heart attacks.

"Joe, this is how you're liable to look when your term is up," Cheney joked to his successor, Joseph Biden.

Bush and Cheney separated as they left the White House, each joining his counterpart for the short motorcade to the Capitol. Bush blew a kiss to the White House as he left, then climbed into the armored car with Obama. As the two men settled into the cushioned seats and the tanklike vehicle began its slow, circuitous path past the barricades and out of the White House grounds, Bush took the opportunity to give his successor one last piece of advice.

Whatever you do, Bush said, make sure you set a pardon policy from the start and then stick to it.

In the midst of war and recession, what was on Bush's mind in the final hour of his presidency was his vice president.

When they arrived at the Capitol, Bush took his place on the platform on the West Front. Obama supporters in the crowd chanted, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey, good-bye." As Cheney was wheeled to his place, he too heard boos. Democrats buzzed about how the wheelchair-bound vice president had finally made the last transition into Mr. Potter, the cruel tycoon from It's a Wonderful Life.

Bush paid no attention. He found Obama's daughters and leaned over to say something to the younger one, Sasha, smiling as he got up close to her face. When he sat down in the big leather chair reserved for him, he and Obama leaned across the aisle separating them and exchanged words that made them both laugh.

Obama began his inaugural address with a note of gratitude for his predecessor. "I thank President Bush for his service to our nation as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition," he said.

But much of the rest of the speech added up to a repudiation of Bush. Obama criticized "our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age." He promised to "restore science to its rightful place." He rejected "as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." He assured the rest of the world "that we are ready to lead once more." All in all, it was perhaps the starkest inaugural rejection of a departing president since Franklin Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933.

Bush took it in stride. "That was a hell of a speech," he told Rahm Emanuel, the new president's chief of staff.

Then he headed back through the Rotunda of the Capitol to the marine helicopter waiting on the East Front.

"Come on, Laura," he told his wife, "we're going home."

He gave Obama a hug.

"We will brief you from time to time," Obama told him.

"There is no need for that," Bush said. "I have served my time, and I don't want you to feel like you need to waste a lot of time on me."

Bush was done with Washington. With a last salute, he boarded the helicopter. It was just him, his family, his aide Blake Gottesman, Eric Draper, and some Secret Service agents. Lifting into the air, Bush took Laura's hand and stared out the window at the Capitol and the throngs of people who had come to celebrate his successor's installation-and in effect his own departure. In his other hand, he clutched remarks he planned to give to former aides gathered at Andrews Air Force Base. But something changed in his demeanor on the short flight. Finally, after eight years of living every burden, shouldering every calamity, after all the triumphs and all the misjudgments, he was free. "He looked relieved, thrilled," Draper recalled. "You could see it on his face. His job was over."

At Andrews, Cheney was to introduce Bush during a private ceremony in the hangar. "Frankly, all of us were worried about what he was going to say because we all knew, the people close to the president, how bad and rough the last few days had been," said Joel Kaplan. But Cheney delivered a gracious speech extolling their eight-year partnership. Bush was relieved. After all the tension over the pardon, he had feared their friendship had been broken irretrievably. He took solace from the vice president's words. But it did not close the underlying rift. "George Bush's two terms were almost two different presidencies," David Addington observed. "The second term was rough on both of them, rough on their relationship."

After the two said their farewells, Cheney headed out. Obama had authorized the military to fly the vice president back to Wyoming on the jet he had used as Air Force Two. Once he landed in Casper, his friend Mick McMurry sent his private plane to fly Cheney the rest of the way to Jackson. "Nice plane, Mick," Cheney told him with his wry smile. "I used to have a nice plane."

That evening, Cheney joined friends and family at a welcome-home party. "He was in excruciating pain," his friend Bill Thomson noticed. Cheney refused to take painkillers to avoid a fuzzy head. "He was showing his wear and tear," McMurry said later. "But he seemed to enjoy the evening." Indeed, the taciturn former vice president relaxed. "For Dick, he was pretty talkative that night," McMurry said. "He was out of a job. I guess he could say what he wanted to." While he did not talk much about Bush, McMurry was convinced that "he probably has a firmer relationship with George senior" than with the president he had served the past eight years.

The younger Bush made his way back to Texas aboard one of the special Boeing 747 planes normally designated Air Force One but now just called Special Air Mission 28000. His parents were on board, as were many of the aides who had accompanied him on the journey, most from Texas, like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett, Margaret Spellings, Alberto Gonzales, Mark McKinnon, Joel Kaplan, and Israel Hernandez. They gathered in the conference room to watch a farewell video, including testimonials and tributes from the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of laughing, a lot of relief. "It was a nonstop party the whole way," Draper said. Bush posed for a picture with his mother, resting his chin on her shoulder. "He was very huggy," recalled one aide. "He was hugging everybody. A little weepy, but mostly just hugging people." The tone of Obama's speech produced some grousing among the loyalists, who resented that he had slapped Bush on the way out. But the now-former president did not join in, uttering "not a word" disparaging his successor, as Hughes recalled.

Seventeen hundred miles to the west, Bush landed back in Midland, where he had started his own inaugural journey eight years earlier. He was grayer and worn, now sixty-two years old, and in a sentimental mood. As he got off the plane, he kissed Gonzales on the forehead and said, "Just stay strong." The weather and the crowd were far more forgiving than in Washington. Warmed up by the Gatlin Brothers and Lee Greenwood, more than twenty thousand supporters waving red, white, and blue "W" signs greeted Bush in Centennial Plaza as the sun sank in the west. "There was a moment you got the impression that nobody liked him at all," recalled Hernandez, his longtime aide. "But then he got to Midland and there was a huge crowd. That was very emotional for him."

Bush made a few remarks to the crowd. "Tonight," he told them, "I have the privilege of saying six words that I have been waiting to say for a while-it is good to be home." He offered just a bit of defense of his embattled presidency. "Popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind," he said. "Character and conscience are as sturdy as our oaks. History will be the judge of my decisions, but when I walked out of the Oval Office this morning, I left with the same values that I took to Washington eight years ago. When I get home tonight and look in the mirror, I am not going to regret what I see-except maybe some gray hair."

EPILOGUE.

"There is no middle ground"

One day a couple of years after he left office, Dick Cheney sat down in a small library in the front of his new house in McLean, Virginia, sipped a cup of his favorite Starbucks coffee, and reflected on his time in power.

He was skinnier, his face hollowed out a bit. He was still recovering his strength from a heart attack he suffered after leaving office but had not yet undergone the heart transplant that would come later. He wore a blue Oxford shirt and khaki pants as well as a dark vest that covered the device attached to his chest that kept his weak heart running. He was feeling good, he said. Not running marathons, but going fishing. He spent four months a year in Wyoming, three in the summer, one in winter.

As he talked, Jordan, his black Labrador, lay sleeping nearby, while a yellow Labrador wandered in and out as if checking out the conversation. The off-white house behind a gate in McLean had been built during his last year in office, just down the street from Hickory Hill, the famed estate of Robert F. Kennedy. The Cheneys' retirement home had four bedrooms, six full baths, three half baths, and four fireplaces, large enough for the daughters and their partners and half a dozen grandkids to visit.

On the shelf in the library were the classics expected in a Washington house-Robert Caro, Michael Beschloss, and the like-plus plenty of military histories, including Rick Atkinson's account of the Gulf War, a Cheney favorite. Sitting unread at that point were memoirs by George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. But there were also some surprises, including books by critics like Ron Suskind and a volume called Dick: The Man Who Is President. On display was a brick from the house of Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Taliban leader, and another from the house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. There was, of course, a bust of Winston Churchill. On the wall hung a sword from his great-grandfather, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side.

"It was designed for the two of us. It is a great house," he said. "We can live on one floor. We were thinking about our old age, when we wouldn't be able to get around as easy, so we got a second floor, but we put an elevator in. Made it easy to get to that. We have an apartment over the garage that has been the book office for a lot of what we did this time around, but eventually we'll have someone live in it to look after us. So it has been a lot of fun living here. The only new house we have ever owned, the only one we ever built, and I would never do it again. Everybody always says that, but there are thousands of decisions-doorknobs, by God! It takes a lot of effort to put something like that together. Fortunately, I was an observer and check writer."

Now in retirement, Cheney had taken stock. He took pride in championing what he thought was necessary to protect the country and had no regrets about what others considered the excesses of Iraq, Guantnamo, and waterboarding. "We didn't capture al-Qaeda and say, 'Okay, bring on the water,' " he said. "That is never the way it worked. But as I say, some of our critics would lead us to believe that as soon as we captured these guys, that we started pulling out fingernails and toenails."

Did any part of him feel queasy about what was done in the name of security, even if it was perfectly justified? "No," he said with the calm certitude that marked his tenure in public life. "I firmly believe that it was the right thing to do. It worked. We haven't been hit for seven and a half years, longer than that now."

That was the calculation: means and ends. If the threat was dire enough, then getting rough with a handful of suspects seemed a small price to pay, especially Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the acknowledged mastermind of September 11. Whatever it takes.

"I wasn't concerned just about guarding against another set of airplane hijackings," Cheney went on. "That wasn't the threat. The threat was the ultimate-a possibility of nineteen hijackers armed with a nuke or a biological agent. When you put that out there as the threat that you are trying to guard against, then the question of waterboarding one guy to find out what he knows isn't cause for concern. Thank God we had him and had the ability to get him to talk to us."

As he reflected on eight eventful years, Cheney said he believed he had a "consequential vice presidency," thanks to Bush. "That is the way he wanted it. He is the one who made that possible, not me." He recognized that his influence had faded by the end. He betrayed no anger about that, only acceptance. "Over time, I think I was probably more valuable to the president in the early part than the later part," he said. "Part of that was a learning process for him. By the time we got down toward the later part of the second term, he was much more-well, he had the experience of having been president for all those years, and he relied less, I think, on staff than had been true earlier."

Their parting at Andrews Air Force Base that winter day in 2009 also represented a departure in mission. Bush retreated to Texas, where he quietly went about building a presidential library and developing a public policy institute, while Cheney emerged from his undisclosed location to become a fiery critic of the new president. While Bush resolutely vowed not to pass judgment on his successor, declaring that President Obama "deserves my silence," Cheney had plenty of judgment to pass and thought the country deserved his voice.

What set him off as much as anything was a decision by the new administration to reopen an investigation into CIA interrogations of terror suspects. In Cheney's mind, there could be no more serious betrayal. As he saw it, CIA officers operating under guidelines provided by the Justice Department to break captives and gain information to stop future terrorist attacks were now being treated as criminals. At one point, Cheney gave a speech on the subject on the same day Obama did, offering an unusual split-screen virtual debate between a sitting president and a former vice president. Obama argued for a middle ground between values and security. "The American people are not absolutist," he said in his speech at the National Archives, "and they don't elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems." Across town, Cheney argued that absolutism in the defense of liberty was no vice. "In the fight against terrorism," he declared, "there is no middle ground, and half measures keep you half exposed."

Cheney's outspokenness was striking after so many years of staying largely behind the scenes, but it was only a new phase in the same campaign of defending the policies he had helped institute in the first term. "Dick feels an obligation to say what really happened, at least from their perspective," said his friend Bill Thomson. Stephen Hadley thought Cheney was strongly influenced by his experience during Iran-contra, when he believed mid-level officials were sacrificed politically, and saw a parallel with the CIA officers. "Cheney thought that was shameful," Hadley said. "He went out and had an opportunity to throw his body in the way of that freight train." Liz Cheney said her father might have followed Bush's approach and remained quiet had it not been for the investigation. "Threatening to prosecute CIA officials was indefensible," she said. "It was just so far beyond what you could stay silent and watch."

Cheney's public battle with Obama, though, seemed almost like a proxy for his private battle with Bush. Out of deference and his deep respect for protocol, Cheney could say only so much as he watched Bush compromise again and again in their final years in office. But now he could lash out with a Democrat as the target, making the same argument to the nation that he had made in the Situation Room. "He'll never criticize Bush directly," observed David Gordon, an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, "but even the way he criticizes Obama, I think, is implicitly a criticism of the last couple of years" of the Bush administration. In Cheney's mind, the betrayal of the CIA officers became an extension of the betrayal of Scooter Libby. They were all men left behind on the battlefield. "Dick was terribly upset that he didn't pardon him, get him off the hook," recalled his friend Bernie Seebaum. "The man did what he was expected to do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue." Cheney felt almost unshackled. "The statute of limitations," he told associates, "has expired." And in the end, Cheney felt he had shifted the public debate; eventually, the Obama administration dropped the investigation.

SITTING IN DALLAS, Bush watched with interest and a little ambivalence. He quizzed visiting friends and former aides on what they thought of the vice president's public campaign but generally did not share his own opinions. He spent his days writing his memoir, building his presidential library, and establishing a public policy institute focused on six main areas: democracy promotion, global health, economic growth, education reform, military service, and women's rights. He gave dozens of speeches and traveled to Africa, expanding his work combating AIDS and malaria to target cervical cancer as well.

He was particularly engaged with veterans. He hosted injured soldiers for hundred-kilometer "wounded warrior" bicycle marathons and visited military hospitals unannounced. He showed up one day at a Texas airport to greet troops coming home from Iraq, a moment that would have gone unnoticed but for the phone cameras that recorded the event and uploaded it to the Internet. Iraq was never far away; he told one former aide who visited him in Dallas that he thought about it every single day. The attention to veterans was his way of grappling with the decision to go to war. "This is not the right word, but that absolves him of guilt," said one friend. "I don't think he feels guilt in any respect or remorse. I think he feels sorrow and sadness for what he's seen have been the consequences of war, but I think the relationship with the military families is a huge part of his life these days."

Bush was determined not to be dragged back into "the swamp," as he put it. No more politics. He told a group of visitors in Dallas that he felt liberated on the day of Obama's inauguration. "When I saw his hand go up, I thought, 'Free at last,' " Bush said. He stayed off the campaign trail during the 2010 midterm elections. When Karl Rove regaled a dinner party at the former president's house in Dallas one night with his analysis of the congressional contests, Bush paid little attention, cracking jokes instead with the wife of a guest sitting next to him. His entire involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign was to offer a four-word endorsement of Obama's Republican opponent when a reporter pursued him after an unrelated event. "I'm for Mitt Romney," Bush said simply as elevator doors shut.

Beyond the largely closed-door speeches and low-profile policy work, Bush enjoyed going to Texas Rangers games, took up painting much as Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill had done, and picked up golf again, years after giving it up out of deference to troops at war. "He's a golf-a-holic now," said his friend Charlie Younger. Bush often played with the first four people who happened to show up at a course, and the Bush family competitive gene kicked in. "I decided I was going to get better at golf, not just play golf," he told Walt Harrington, a writer and friend, one day, putting his golf-shoe-clad feet up on his desk and chewing on an unlit cigar. "I have gotten better. The problem is I'm never good enough. That's the problem with the game. It requires discipline, patience, and focus. As you know, I'm long on"-and he paused with a smile-"well, a couple areas where I could use some improvement."

Wayne Berman, who hosted Bush for dinner in Washington after he left office, was struck by his serenity. "I've never seen a happier, more relaxed man than George W. Bush since he left the presidency," he said. While Bill Clinton found departure from the White House a wrenching experience and often talked of how he wished he could have had a third term, Bush seemed to actually mean it when he disclaimed any longing for power. "I'm often asked, do you miss the presidency?" he told one audience. "I really don't." He explained it during a rare visit to the capital to unveil a collection of interviews with dissidents from around the world fighting for freedom in their countries: "I actually found my freedom by leaving Washington."

NEARLY A YEAR to the day after flying home to Texas, Bush returned to the White House. Arriving early, he roamed the halls and greeted the ushers and Secret Service officers by name, joking in a familiar, comfortable way. He had come in response to a request by Obama to team up with Clinton to lead the recovery effort for Haiti after a devastating earthquake. It was Bush's first time back in Washington, and Obama aides were nervous about seeing him, but within a few minutes he had put them at ease. "It was more like meeting an old friend," Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, said afterward.

And in a way it was. As much as Obama had run against Bush's legacy in 2008, he ended up embracing much of it in 2009. He kept Bush's defense secretary and many other top national security figures, and he decided to follow Bush's plan for a three-year withdrawal from Iraq. While he jettisoned the term "war on terror" and banned the harsh interrogation techniques that had been so controversial, Obama failed to close the Guantnamo prison, just as Bush had, kept the terrorist surveillance program, authorized the use of military commissions, and decided to hold some terror suspects indefinitely without trial, albeit with more procedural protections built into the process. He more or less adopted Bush's policy toward North Korea, only somewhat modified the approach to Iran, effectively copied the Iraq surge by sending more troops to Afghanistan, and expanded the drone campaign in Pakistan. Arguably, Obama validated some of Bush's most important decisions. By 2013, Ari Fleischer was claiming that Obama was "carrying out Bush's 4th term."

There were more pronounced differences over domestic policy, most notably Obama's expansion of health care and support for marriage and military service for gays and lesbians. But even at home, the new president preserved many of Bush's initiatives. Obama completed the financial and auto industry bailouts that Bush began, largely kept No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug prescription program, and built on his increases in fuel economy standards and incentives for renewable energy. While Obama ran against Bush's tax cuts, he ended up reauthorizing roughly 85 percent of them, reversing them for just the top 1 percent of American taxpayers. And Obama made one of his highest second-term priorities an overhaul of the immigration system, moving to complete Bush's unfinished mission.

The disparity between Obama's campaign trail rhetoric on national security and his actions upon taking office shocked some of his supporters but should have come as little surprise to anyone who watched the evolution of the previous administration. Obama essentially ran against Bush's first term but inherited his second. By the time Bush left office, he had already shaved off the harsher, more controversial edges of his war on terror, either under pressure from Congress, the courts, and public opinion or out of a conscious effort to put his policies on a firmer foundation with more bipartisan approval. He had emptied the secret CIA prisons, cleared out many of the prisoners at Guantnamo, approved no waterboarding after 2003, and secured the approval of lawmakers for military commissions, expansive surveillance, and other elements of his program.

Bush followed the historical pattern of governments in times of crisis or war, when presidents push the boundaries of the law in the name of protecting the country. Eventually, the system corrects itself and scales back the extremes. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that jailed opponents for their political speech. Andrew Jackson forcibly removed Indian tribes that resisted eviction from lands east of the Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and put American citizens on trial before military commissions even in areas not in rebellion. Woodrow Wilson allowed the imprisonment of a 1912 election opponent for speaking out against World War I. Franklin Roosevelt forced 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II for no other reason than their ethnic background. Bush and Cheney did not go as far as many of these precedents. Although hundreds of Muslims were swept up in the early days after September 11, largely on immigration violations, the wave of arrests paled by comparison to the Japanese roundup in the 1940s, and it subsided quickly. Bush made a point of visiting a mosque, hosting iftar dinners at the White House, and repeatedly making clear that he considered Islam a peaceful religion that had been distorted by a relative few radicals. The brutal interrogation techniques used by CIA officers were applied to no more than three dozen prisoners, and just three were waterboarded, although one of them was subjected to it a stunning 183 times. Political opponents were free to lambaste Bush and Cheney as vigorously as they wished without fear of imprisonment. "There's no doubt that whatever President Bush did to curtail civil liberties in the war on terror, a case can be made that a lot of what he did was far less than what other presidents have done in wartime," said Jay Winik, the historian who met with Bush on a few occasions. "In each case our system righted itself. With President Bush, he did respond over time and as conditions allowed."

Still, if history is a defense to an extent, it also is an indictment. Rather than learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, Bush and Cheney repeated them. The most controversial actions of American presidents have proved more durable when they obtained buy-in from other sectors of society, particularly Congress. Bush and Cheney preferred instead to operate on their own, reasoning that disclosure of some techniques would jeopardize security and asserting that the executive had vast, unchecked power when it came to guarding the nation. Congress and the courts would only get in the way. The threat was too serious.

Any number of Bush aides reached the conclusion that it was a mistake, from Jack Goldsmith, the Justice Department lawyer who reversed some of the most sweeping legal interpretations in the terror war, to Donald Rumsfeld, who argued after leaving office that the president would have been better off engaging Congress more. Eventually, Bush came around to the same view. "In retrospect, I probably could have avoided some of the controversy and legal setbacks by seeking legislation on military tribunals, the TSP, and the CIA enhanced interrogation program as soon as they were created," he wrote in his memoir, using the initials for Terrorist Surveillance Program, the administration's name for its warrantless eavesdropping. "If members of Congress had been required to make their decisions at the same time I did-in the immediate aftermath of 9/11-I am confident they would have overwhelmingly approved everything we requested." Or at least forced compromises that might have averted some of the worst abuses.

The unnecessary controversies combined with the devastating misjudgments in Iraq ended up detracting from what otherwise might have been a solid record for the forty-third president. Bush logged major achievements both at home and abroad. He pushed to make education better and saw test scores rise. He helped the elderly afford prescription medicine. He lowered taxes not just for the wealthy but for the middle class and freed millions of lower-income Americans from income taxes altogether. He helped spur a domestic energy boom in both traditional and renewable sectors that dramatically reversed American dependence on foreign oil. He expanded free trade and reduced the nuclear arsenal. He helped arrest the AIDS epidemic in Africa, saving millions of lives. He put two strong conservatives on the Supreme Court. He spoke out for democracy in the Muslim world at a time when others believed it impossible, then took great satisfaction in the Arab Spring that toppled dictators after his presidency. Perhaps most important, while any number of factors were at work, he and his vice president could reasonably claim to have protected the country following September 11.

Whatever the president's virtues, though, they remained unappreciated in his own time. To say that Bush was unpopular only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public in the years before he left office. He was arguably the most disliked president in seven decades. Seventy-one percent of Americans interviewed in a Gallup poll disapproved of his job performance during the worst of the financial crisis in October 2008, the highest negative rate ever recorded for any president since the firm began asking the question in 1938. And while Harry Truman and Richard Nixon at their worst had even fewer supporters-Truman once fell to 22 percent in his job approval rating and Nixon to 24 percent, compared with Bush's low of 25 percent-no president has endured such a prolonged period of public rejection. The last time Bush enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans was March 2005, meaning he went through virtually his entire second term without most of the public behind him. Academic scholars, generally more liberal and never fans of Bush's anti-intellectualism to begin with, ranked him among the five worst presidents in parlor-game polls.

Cheney fared even worse. In Gallup's tracking, which asked about the vice president much less frequently than the president, Cheney slipped into the thirties in 2006 and never recovered. His low of 30 percent found by Gallup in mid-2007 was actually higher than other polls found. At one point in 2006, shortly after the shooting accident, just 18 percent of those surveyed by CBS News approved of the vice president's performance, a number so profoundly low for a political figure of his stature that it became the source of numerous jokes at Cheney's expense, including by the president.

Cheney was unapologetic in the years to come. When he released his own memoir and did the requisite media tour, he gave no ground as he was pressed again and again on issues of torture, war, and surveillance. Asked if the decision to invade Iraq was still the right one given all the costs, he said, "Oh sure. I don't think it damaged our reputation around the world. I just don't believe that." He added, "It was sound policy that dealt with a very serious problem and that eliminated Saddam Hussein."

Bush, never much known for introspection, nonetheless was more willing to identify mistakes, whether it be not sending more troops earlier to Iraq or not acting more decisively to respond to Katrina. But he too stood by the most fundamental decisions, and professed serenity about history's judgment, noting that if George Washington's legacy can still be debated, then his own would not be settled until long after his death. "There's no need to defend myself," he said at one point. "I did what I did and ultimately history will be the judge."

He likewise rejected any suggestion that the myriad crises that confronted him on his watch had weighed him down. "The tendency in life is to feel sorry for yourself-like, 'Oh, man, why me?' You know?" he told an audience at a conference closed to the general public in March 2011. "And particularly when you're president, you know? And then you read about Abraham Lincoln, and you realize that he had a really tough presidency. And so, you know, it helps keep your life in perspective." Bush said he focused on history and tried to avoid the cable chatter. "I didn't watch any TV. 'You didn't watch the news?' I said, 'Hell, no, I didn't watch the news. You know, I was the news.' Abraham Lincoln motivated me a lot. He was a great president. Abraham Lincoln understood the president's need to stand on principle no matter how tough the politics might be. So he said all men are created equal under God. In 1863, you know, that wasn't necessarily a given. Lincoln made a great presidential decision in spite of the politics of the moment."

Bush's graceful post-presidency seemed to temper judgments. As he hit the television circuit in 2010 to promote Decision Points, his memoir, he found a country a little more open to him, and the book rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists. Most Americans still did not view him favorably, and many still reviled him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects, and presiding over the worst financial crisis in decades. He was still a punch line, to many a failed president, the source of today's economic and foreign policy troubles. Yet with his successor facing his own difficulties and "Miss Me Yet?" T-shirts with Bush's face on them for sale at Washington's Union Station a short walk from the Capitol, Obama's blame-Bush strategy did not stop voters from returning Republicans to power in the House and handing them more seats in the Senate that fall. By 2013, polls suggested a softening of opinion, with 49 percent of Americans now expressing favorable views, compared with 43 percent who saw him unfavorably, the first time in five years that he enjoyed a positive balance.

In part, that reflected disenchanted Republicans and conservative independents returning home, especially as they found Obama more unpalatable than Bush. There was also a certain newfound, if limited, appreciation among moderates and some liberals, who contrasted Bush's views on immigration, education, Medicare, and AIDS relief with the harder-edged Republican Party that suceeded him. Senator Charles Schumer, the liberal Democrat who compared Bush to Herbert Hoover in 2008, credited him in 2013 along with Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke with having "saved us from another Great Depression." Many presidents have been viewed more generously in later eras, like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon experienced moments of reassessment, their failures in Vietnam and Watergate mitigated to a degree by appreciation for the Great Society or the opening to China. Still, their disappointments seem indelibly marked in the history books, and it may be hard for Bush to shift the narrative as much as he would like. "Decades from now," he wrote, "I hope people will view me as a president who recognized the central challenge of our time and kept my vow to keep the country safe; who pursued my convictions without wavering but changed course when necessary; who trusted individuals to make choices in their lives; and who used America's influence to advance freedom."

ONE DAY IN his new office in Dallas, a visiting former aide asked Bush the question others never would.

"You're leaving as one of the most unpopular presidents ever," the aide noted. "How does that feel?"

Bush pushed back. "I was also the most popular president," he noted.

That true statement underscores a central dynamic of Bush's presidency, the sense of lost opportunity. From the months after September 11, when he reached the stratosphere in popular support, Bush at Cheney's urging pushed forward with a mission that ultimately frittered that away, heroically in the minds of his most fervent admirers, tragically in the minds of others. What might have been had Bush not chosen to invade Iraq?

In the years after he left office, Bush's former inner circle debated the issue, even to the point of questioning whether he would have launched the war at all had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction. Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer, among others, concluded that he would not have. "I just don't think he would have gone to war," said Fleischer. "I think he would have turned up the heat on Saddam, but I don't think he would have gone to war." Richard Armitage agreed. "I'm convinced that President Bush would not have done it absent WMD," he said. Others were not so sure. Rumsfeld, leaning back in a chair in a Washington office after the end of the administration, thought the war was still a worthy one. "I am very respectful of how ugly a war can be and so you say, 'Gee, do you wish it hadn't happened?' The answer of course is yes," he said. "But should it? Did the president make the right decision? Obviously, I thought so and still do. I mean, I think he was faced with a whole set of reasons which seemed to me to be persuasive then, and now."

One thing that is not debatable is that it consumed his presidency. His second-term Ownership Society domestic agenda aimed at overhauling Social Security, immigration policy, and the tax code foundered in large part on the shoals of Iraq. The country and Congress lost interest in anything else from the Bush White House. His hopes of reorienting the Republican Party did not survive his tenure in office, and he privately rued the rise of the populist conservative Tea Party movement after he left. "It breaks my heart that compassionate conservatism has gotten a bad name," Karen Hughes lamented. To the extent that is the case, Bush and Cheney bear responsibility. They rightly note that Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry also thought Saddam Hussein was a threat and voted for war, but in the end it was their decision. More than twenty-five million Iraqis were freed from Hussein's tyranny, but at the cost of more than four thousand American soldiers and perhaps a hundred thousand or more Iraqis by the time Bush and Cheney departed. The vast majority of the slain civilians died at the hands of insurgents and terrorists, not Americans, but they were forces unleashed by a White House that did not fully understand what it was setting in motion. "The first grave mistake of Bush's presidency was rushing toward military confrontation with Iraq," observed Scott McClellan. "It took his presidency off course and greatly damaged his standing with the public. His second grave mistake was his virtual blindness about the first mistake."

To understand it, it is important to remember the atmosphere in which the decision was made. The anthrax killings, the undisclosed biological scare in the White House, and the discovery of Pakistani nuclear scientists briefing Osama bin Laden created an environment in which the attacks of September 11 looked potentially minor by comparison to what could happen. If Hussein had such weapons, Bush and Cheney concluded, he could no longer be tolerated. "You can say he made a mistake," Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who broke with his party over his support for the war, said of Bush. "We will be debating that part forever. But I think he did it because he really thought it was the right thing to do." The what-ifs, however, haunt some of the war's authors. "If Iraq had gone well," observed Michael Gerson, "the president could have been a colossus in American politics." But it did not, and he was not.

Even to the extent that he salvaged a failing war through the surge after years of letting his generals call the shots, Bush could not ultimately salvage his presidency, thanks to an economic crisis the likes of which no one had faced since Franklin Roosevelt. His final months in office were absorbed by a bruising series of failures on Wall Street due to years of an overheated housing market and exotic, high-risk financial instruments. Bush recognized the syndrome from experience. "Wall Street got drunk," he once explained. "It got drunk and now it's got a hangover." But if Wall Street imbibed too much, Bush was among the bartenders who looked the other way. While it was Bill Clinton who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks and Democrats in Congress who helped shield Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they binged on unsustainable mortgages, Bush appointed the regulators who remained too hands-off and personally was slow to recognize the severity of the threat. His eventual response in the form of the TARP bailout was almost akin to the Iraq surge, decisively applying the overwhelming force of the federal government to intervene in the markets and prevent the country from falling off a cliff.

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, Iraq and the financial crash summed up the Bush presidency. Other than his response to September 11, Bush's two greatest moments in office were arguably his responses to those two crises, ignoring political peril and discarding ideology to do what was necessary to turn things around. Sending more troops to a losing war and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out irresponsible banks had to be two of the boldest and most politically unpopular decisions by any president in modern times. And in both cases, they proved to be critical to the country.

"You have to ask the question, why were they necessary? In both cases there was a long period of antecedent neglect out of which the crisis came, to which the president heroically responded," Frum observed. "Bush made crises through neglect and then resolved crises through courage."

Arguably, Hurricane Katrina fit the same pattern. After stumbling in the early days after the storm, Bush then demonstrated a powerful commitment to rebuilding the region, traveling there seventeen times and devoting vast sums of money over the objections of some in his party. Even Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000 and a New Orleans native whose family was displaced by the storm, praised the "intense, personal, dedicated efforts he made to revive and restore people's futures." Bush, in other words, was at his best when he was cleaning up his worst.

ON A BRIGHT, sunny day in the spring of 2013, more than four years after surrendering power, Bush and Cheney reunited for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. With thousands of administration veterans and supporters crowded outside the limestone building, Bush and Cheney emerged from the new center along with all the other living presidents and first ladies. But while Bush took a seat onstage along with his peers, Cheney stepped down into the audience to sit with the Bush children. Condoleezza Rice had a speaking role; Cheney did not.

This was only the second time the two men had appeared in public together since leaving office. The first had come when ground was broken on the library in 2010. Cheney was part of the program that day and hailed Bush. "Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were," he said that day, speaking of the verdict of history but perhaps also his own judgments of Bush. The former president returned the kind words. "He was a great vice president of the United States and I'm proud to call him friend."

For friends, though, they had had relatively little contact. Most presidents and vice presidents go their separate ways after office, yet no other tandem had worked as closely together in the White House and the new distance spoke volumes about the evolution of their partnership. So did the library that sprouted out of the ground. There were exhibits featuring the first lady and their daughters, videos featuring Rice, Andy Card, and Joshua Bolten, even statues of the presidential dogs and cat. But there was virtually no sign of Cheney. During an interview leading up to the library opening, Bush was asked about their relationship. "You know, it's been cordial," he told C-Span's Steve Scully. "But he lives in Washington and we live in Dallas." Perhaps recognizing the chill that suggested, Bush made sure at the subsequent ceremony to give a shout-out to Cheney. "From the day I asked Dick to run with me, he served with loyalty, principle, and strength," Bush told the audience, and then repeated his words from a few years earlier. "I'm proud to call you friend."