"Dick, here's an interesting idea," he said. "What if-"

Cheney interrupted. "Hold on, Don, I've got another call. Let me get back to you."

Cheney called back ten minutes later. "That was the president-elect calling. He told me to tell you he wants you to be secretary of defense."

"Actually," Rumsfeld interjected, "before we were interrupted, I was going to suggest you as SecDef."

Cheney did not seem surprised. "The president-elect had the same idea," he said, attributing the idea to Bush. But Rumsfeld was the choice.

To some around Washington, it seemed as if the old gang was getting back together. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, thought it was like the second coming of the Ford administration, where he had worked along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and O'Neill. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador from Saudi Arabia and man-about-town in Washington, thought it was more like the return of the first Bush administration, when he worked with Cheney and Powell to organize the Gulf War. "My God, talk about a replay," the prince said. It was "too good to be true."

Still, the new president was torn between the work-across-the-aisle instincts of Ford and his father, and the no-compromise resolve of his new vice president. Bush yearned for a Bob Bullock, a Democrat he could work with the way he did with the lieutenant governor in Texas. But a Texas Democrat was more like a Republican in Washington. Bush was looking less for someone to compromise with than a Democrat who would agree with him.

His search took him to the Capitol Hill office of Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. The two sat in front of a fireplace on a cold, dark January day, and Bush quickly cited Bullock as proof of his bipartisan spirit.

"We got to be very close," Bush said. "I'd like to see if we could do that too."

As Daschle weighed his response, Bush added, "I hope you'll never lie to me."

Surprised, Daschle replied, "Well, I hope you'll never lie to me."

Bush was edgier than Daschle anticipated. Then the president implicitly raised Cheney's role in his White House.

"I know there's been a lot of talk out there about who's in charge around here," Bush said. "There's not ever going to be any question about who's in charge. Decisions are going to come to my desk, and I'm going to be the one making them."

It struck Daschle as a little defensive, even insecure.

A LIGHT FREEZING RAIN fell on the Capitol on January 20, 2001, as Bill Clinton prepared to hand power to the son of the man he had taken it from eight years earlier. Bush and Cheney were both kept in their limousines as they waited for Clinton, ever behind schedule, to get ready to receive them for the traditional White House coffee that preceded the inaugural ceremony.

After an abbreviated visit, Cheney and Al Gore climbed into the limousine they would share to the Capitol for the ceremony. Gore noted that Clinton had been busy with last-minute pardons. "How many more do you think he can get signed before noon?" he asked sarcastically. After eight years together, Clinton and Gore were parting on sour terms, a president and a vice president ending their partnership in schism.

At the Capitol's West Front, the steps were narrower than Bush expected, and he forced himself to pay special attention to avoid falling. As he stared at the sea of overcoats, Bush focused on the cacophony of sounds and images and worried that the sleet might make it hard for him to read his inaugural address on the teleprompter. He took the thirty-five-word oath, then offered a vision for his presidency that suited the moment. "I will live and lead by these principles-to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, and to call for responsibility and try to live it as well," he said. Cheney watched from a leather chair several feet away. A tear rolled down Bush's face as he hugged his father.

It was a unifying speech at a time when many liberals viewed Bush as a usurper. Hendrik Hertzberg, who was President Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, called it "shockingly good" as a piece of writing, "by far the best Inaugural Address in forty years," and "better than all but a tiny handful of all the Inaugurals of all the Presidents since the republic was founded."

Like others, Kirbyjon Caldwell, the African American pastor from Texas who performed the benediction, took it as a sign that Bush would steer to the political center. "Had you closed your eyes, you would not have known if it was a Republican or a Democrat that had given the speech," he said. He buttonholed Bush afterward to ask about some policy-he later forgot the specifics-and was struck by the answer.

"Did you hear my speech?" Bush asked.

"Yes, I did."

"Well, that is where I am going to be."

Caldwell took that to be the middle of the road.

After traveling down the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route, Bush arrived in the White House for the first time as president. He looked around with a familiarity many predecessors did not have, but somehow it felt different. He asked someone to find his father, who had already settled into the Queen's Bedroom in the residential quarters and slipped into a hot bath to chase away the cold. Told his son wanted him, the elder Bush jumped out of the tub, dressed again, and raced to the Oval Office.

"Welcome, Mr. President," his son greeted him when he arrived.

"It's good to see you, Mr. President," the father replied, his hair still damp.

It was a mind-spinning experience for a onetime screw-up from Midland. It all took some adjusting. The younger Bush did not even know how to react when two men introduced themselves as his valets.

"I don't think I need a valet," he confided to his father.

The elder Bush smiled. "Don't worry," he said. "You'll get used to it."

FROM THE START, Bush intended to put his own mark on the White House. He kept the Resolute desk, built from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and sent as a gift by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes. He kept the bust of Abraham Lincoln. But he replaced the carpet, designing a new one with a sunburst pattern to send a signal of optimism, and he replaced the Andrew Jackson bust Clinton favored with one of Dwight Eisenhower. He also hung a portrait of Eisenhower in the Cabinet Room. In his private study, as an inside joke with his father, he put up a painting of John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a president to reach the White House. The two would come to call each other 41 and 43, after their order in the presidency, and the dining room would come to be called the "Johnny Q Room."

For the central piece of art in the Oval Office, Bush borrowed a painting from his friend Joe O'Neill called A Charge to Keep. The painting, by W. H. D. Koerner, showed a rugged cowboy racing a horse up a wooded mountain trail, followed by a couple of other roughriders, and rushing so fast his hat has fallen off. Bush thought it had been inspired by the Charles Wesley hymn of the same title, which began, "A Charge to keep I have, A God to glorify." He had hung the painting in the governor's office too, and described it to visitors as a portrait of a circuit rider spreading Methodism in the Alleghenies. He liked it so much he made it the title of his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep.

Later research, however, determined that the painting had no religious meaning and nothing to do with the hymn. In fact, it was commissioned in 1916 to accompany a Saturday Evening Post story about a horse thief escaping a lynch mob in Nebraska. It was later reprinted in another magazine to illustrate another story, titled "A Charge to Keep," about a son who inherits a forest from his father and must protect it from timber barons. Whatever its origins, much meaning would be attached to the imagery. While Bush identified with the heroic qualities he saw in the mysterious rider, David Gergen, who worked for four presidents and was once hired by Cheney, later wrote that critics saw "a lone, arrogant cowboy plunging recklessly ahead, paying little heed to danger, looking neither left nor right, listening to no voice other than his own."

For Cheney, the inauguration meant a return to the West Wing twenty-four years after he left. This time he took the suite down the hall and around the corner from the Oval Office, somewhat smaller than the corner office next door that he had occupied as chief of staff. His office had large bay windows, a mahogany desk, a deep blue carpet, and a series of flags, including one with the vice presidential seal. He hung portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first two vice presidents. During his second week on the job, as a sixtieth birthday gift, his daughters gave him a hand-painted map they had commissioned showing all the battles that his great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney had fought in on the side of the Union during the Civil War. That would hang on his wall for the next eight years.

Unlike the Bushes, who moved into their new quarters on Inauguration Day, the Cheneys remained at their suburban town house. The vice president's residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory was in need of renovation, especially the flooring. While some Republicans groused that Gore had run down the place, Cheney considered it nothing more than the typical wear and tear of a family with children, and he made no protest about the delay. For a while, he even still headed over to the supermarket in McLean to do his own grocery shopping, albeit trailed by Secret Service agents.

Both Bush and Cheney had ideas about how to run things, based on experiences with past White Houses. Bush wanted to return the West Wing to traditions observed under his father-always a coat and tie in the Oval Office, none of the casual, late-night, college pizza-party atmosphere that sometimes prevailed in the Clinton days. Yet he had his own fraternity-boy style; he delighted in those early days at popping into meetings to see aides jump to their feet, then leaving and popping back in a moment later to see them do it again. He eschewed formalities like state dinners. He preferred lunch from the White House chef to be a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, or a grilled cheese sandwich with Kraft singles on white bread, or a peanut butter and honey sandwich, with Lay's potato chips on the side. For dinner, he favored anything Tex-Mex, no soup or salad and no "wet fish," meaning poached, steamed, or boiled.

Organizing his staff, he took lessons from his father's time. He wanted a flatter structure, granting more access to more aides, a recipe for a relatively weak chief of staff, unlike the domineering John Sununu. But he also wanted a disciplined team that resisted being buffeted by outside events. His staff had laid out his first twenty-one days in office by the time he took the oath. He believed fervently in punctuality and obsessively worried about keeping others waiting, to the point of abruptly ending a meeting at its designated time regardless of where the conversation was. "It was probably the good breeding from his family," observed John Bridgeland, an aide. Others who did not share that Bush punctuality were quickly taught a lesson. When Colin Powell showed up late for the first cabinet meeting, Bush had the door locked. When the doorknob jiggled a few minutes later, the room burst out laughing. But the point was made.

Perhaps the most important lesson was the insistence on complete loyalty, with none of the freelancing by appointees out to puff themselves up that he saw in his father's White House. He surrounded himself with confidants from Texas, including Karen Hughes as counselor, Karl Rove as senior adviser, Dan Bartlett as communications director, Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel, Harriet Miers as staff secretary, and Margaret Spellings as domestic policy adviser. In tapping Andy Card as chief of staff, Bush was easing Joe Allbaugh out of the inner circle, making him director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Other campaign veterans transitioning into new roles included Ari Fleischer as press secretary, Michael Gerson as speechwriting director, and Joshua Bolten and Joe Hagin as deputy chiefs of staff. The twin poles in the inner circle were Hughes, who considered herself the champion of everyday Americans, and Rove, who viewed politics through a more Machiavellian prism.

Cheney likewise valued loyalty and brought several longtime advisers with him to the West Wing. He asked Scooter Libby to be his national security adviser; Libby asked to also serve as chief of staff, and the incoming vice president agreed. David Addington would be his counsel. Mary Matalin, a media-savvy veteran of the first Bush White House, would be his counselor. John McConnell, who helped write the convention address, would be his speechwriter. Cheney's focus on national security issues was clear when Libby sent him Cesar Conda to interview for domestic policy adviser. The session lasted no more than ten minutes, with a television on in the background, and the only question Cheney asked was if Conda had ever done anything that would embarrass the administration. "No, sir," Conda said, and got the job.

Most notable was how Cheney integrated his staff with the president's. Both Libby and Matalin also carried the rank of assistant to the president, making them equivalent to Card and Condoleezza Rice. McConnell would be part of Gerson's speechwriting shop also writing for the president. Addington would work closely with Gonzales, to the point of dominating the counsel's office. National Security Council aides were told to make their computer calendars accessible to the vice president's staff. "We said great, do we get to see their calendar?" recalled Michael Green, an Asia adviser. "The answer was no. At first people were a little bit intimidated by it." Green would sometimes put "Meeting with Vice President" on his calendar as a joke on Cheney aides.

But Cheney's efforts to establish himself as more than the typical vice president got away from him at times. Addington decided Cheney ought to chair cabinet-level national security meetings whenever the president did not attend. That was not unheard of; Richard Nixon had done so under Eisenhower. But in modern times, such meetings were typically chaired by the national security adviser.

Rice took the issue to Bush. "Mr. President, this is what the NSA does: convene the national security principals to make recommendations to you," she said. He agreed.

Her new deputy, Stephen Hadley, approached Cheney. "Mr. Vice President, your staff is pushing the notion that you should be chair of the Principals Committee," Hadley said, using the formal title for the group. "I don't believe that is what you want to do."

"That is exactly right," Cheney said, attributing the idea to overzealous aides. "I don't want to do that. That is Condi's job."

The episode was blamed on Libby, but in fact he was chagrined when he learned. The proposal had actually come from Addington, who had not cleared it with his bosses. Cheney and Libby said it was a stupid idea. Still, not everyone believed Cheney; at least one Rice aide saw a memo mentioning the idea signed by Cheney. Rice took it as an early warning sign that Cheney's staff "seemed very much of one ultra-hawkish mind" and "was determined to act as a power center of its own." For their part, Cheney's staff saw a red flag when Rice's intramural victory was leaked to the media, building her up at his expense.

While he would not chair the Principals Committee, Cheney made clear he would not sit quietly on the sidelines. He would attend meetings of the principals, even though he once believed Gerald Ford's vice president should not participate in meetings with advisers because his presence would warp the discussion. He got Bush to agree to have lunch once a week, and the new president told aides to invite Cheney to any meeting he wanted to attend. Bush's scheduling director would later estimate that Cheney attended 75 percent to 80 percent of Bush's meetings. Cheney even arranged to have the intelligence report known as the President's Daily Brief presented to him first in the library of his residence each morning at 6:30. Then, having already read the materials, he would join Bush for the official briefing at 8:00 a.m., led by the CIA director, George Tenet, a Clinton appointee kept on at the urging of Bush's father. Cheney expressed so much interest in intelligence that his CIA briefers began preparing a second part just for him dubbed "Behind the Tab" that the president never saw.

The extent of the vice president's influence proved sensitive from the start. When his press secretary, Juleanna Glover, suggested he conduct weekly background briefings for reporters, even without being identified, the White House staff rejected it. "I think those guys are always just a little more insecure about a strong force in the White House," observed Neil Patel, another Cheney aide. Cheney was fine keeping out of the spotlight, but he was not about to be locked into silos like Gore or Dan Quayle. When Joshua Bolten proposed that he take on three main subject areas-homeland security, energy, and the reinventing government project Gore had led-Cheney and Libby agreed to head a task force on the first but rejected the other two.

Indeed, when Quayle visited shortly after the inauguration, he was surprised to hear Cheney's description of the job. Quayle assumed he would be doing a lot of fund-raisers and funerals as he had.

"We've all done it," he said.

"I have a different understanding with the president," Cheney replied serenely.

"Well, did you get that directly from Bush?" Quayle asked.

"Yes."

THE DECISION NOT to move to the political center despite the close election was reinforced by a detailed study of the electorate. Matthew Dowd, the campaign strategist, compared the November results with those of five previous presidential elections and found that the long-sought-after "swing voters" were a vanishing breed in American politics.

Dowd reclassified voters who called themselves independents but actually voted reliably as Democrats or Republicans and determined that the fraction of the electorate genuinely open to persuasion had shrunk since 1980 from 22 percent to 7 percent. Dowd charted his findings in a memo to Rove, a memo that would profoundly shape the thinking behind the Bush presidency for the next four years. If compassionate conservatism had been aimed at independents, Dowd's numbers suggested they were not the decisive bloc. "You could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, 'Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters,' " Dowd said later. Just as important was motivating the Republican base and driving up turnout of those already inclined to support the candidate.

Yet Bush's instinct for unyielding principle, as he saw it, clashed with his self-image as a bridge builder. Among his first actions in office was to sign two executive orders pleasing conservatives, one limiting taxpayer money for organizations that promoted abortions overseas and the other creating a White House office of faith-based initiatives to help religious groups do charitable work. At the same time, on his second full workday as president, Bush invited Senator Ted Kennedy, the nation's most prominent liberal, to the Oval Office to talk about education reform.

Searching for his new Bob Bullock, Bush was in full courtship mode, showing Kennedy that he had chosen the Resolute desk that his brother had used as president. Bush "was eager and fervent and knowledgeable and caring," observed Sandy Kress, the former Dallas School Board chief who had followed Bush from Texas to serve as an education adviser. Bush described a more aggressive federal involvement in the nation's schools than ever before. The trade-off for more funding would be rigorous testing to hold schools accountable for results. But it was Bush's animated discussion about closing the achievement gap between white and minority children that really sealed the partnership. When Bush used a term of art, "disaggregation of data," to describe the importance of breaking out minority test scores so school districts could not hide their problems, Kennedy concluded this was a president who was serious.

As Kennedy got up to leave, Bush noted the reporters outside. "You know, Senator, they are going to ask you when you walk out of here about vouchers and other things that might divide us," Bush said, "and I just want you to know I want to do a deal with you, I want to work with you on this, I don't want any issue to keep us from working together."

Kennedy agreed. "I hear you," he said. "I won't let that happen." Speaking with reporters outside the building, Kennedy said there were areas of agreement and he was "interested in getting some action."

Bush, watching, concluded this was someone he could trust. "I don't think the two expected to like each other," Kress concluded, "but they did."

AS BUSH SOUGHT new allies at home, he made a series of introductory phone calls to American allies abroad. He was so unschooled in foreign policy that he was thrown off by the time differences of those with whom he spoke. He tried to cover for his lack of preparation with brashness.

On January 25, he was on the line with President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, who explained his "Sunshine Policy" of reaching out to the hostile and volatile North Korea.

Bush covered the mouthpiece with his hand. "Who is this guy?" he asked aides. "I can't believe how naive he is."

Charles Pritchard, a veteran diplomat listening to the call, couldn't believe how naive Bush was.

Kim, of course, understood the complexities of Korean politics a hundred times better than a rookie president five days on the job. Kim had spent four decades in Korean politics, mostly in opposition to authoritarian governments; he spent years in prison or under house arrest, survived several attempts on his life, and went into exile in the United States before helping to bring democratic reform to South Korea and winning the presidency in 1997 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Later that day, Pritchard was asked to write a paper for Bush about "who is this guy," which he did overnight. "It did not change the president's views," Pritchard concluded.

Others were trying to get Bush's attention in those early days. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator held over from Clinton, gave Condoleezza Rice a memo on the same day as the Kim phone call saying "we urgently need" a cabinet-level review of the fight with al-Qaeda. Using a different spelling, he wrote that "al Qida is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy," adding, "We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses." The CIA had put together what it called a "Blue Sky" plan for additional authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his cohorts more aggressively, and Clarke wanted the new president to sign off on aid to the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban rebel group in Afghanistan, and to neighboring Uzbekistan. Rice authorized him to develop a strategy, but no such meeting would be held for months. And the new administration did no more than its predecessor to retaliate for al-Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole the previous fall, deciding it would wait for its review rather than lob more cruise missiles ineffectually as Clinton had done during his presidency.

Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council at 3:35 p.m. on January 30 and made clear he was not letting Cheney chair such sessions in his absence. "Condi Rice will run these meetings," Bush announced. "I'll be seeing all of you regularly, but I want you to debate things out here and then Condi will report to me."

With that settled, the discussion turned to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict that had consumed Clinton in his final days in office. On the way out of office, Clinton had called Powell to vent angrily about Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader he said could not be trusted. Bush had watched as a deal eluded Clinton and had no interest in heading into that snake pit.

"We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict," Bush declared. "We're going to tilt it back toward Israel. And we're going to be consistent. Clinton overreached and it all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble. If the two sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force them."

Powell was alarmed. He agreed Clinton had overreached, but pulling back too far could be dangerous. It could give Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, a green light to send the Israeli army into Palestinian territories and escalate the situation. Cheney countered that Bush was right and should not waste his time.

The conversation turned to Iraq, where a decade after the end of the Gulf War, American forces still enforced two no-fly zones and the United Nations program of sanctions had been terribly corrupted. As Rice put it later, "Almost from the very beginning, Iraq was a preoccupation of the national security team." Official U.S. policy, set by Congress and signed by Clinton, called for regime change, but there was no obvious route to achieve that, and no one at this point was advocating war.

Powell suggested it was time to revamp sanctions to make them more effective.

"Why are we even bothering with sanctions?" retorted Rumsfeld. What mattered was finding and destroying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

George Tenet, the CIA director, unrolled oversized surveillance photographs on the table showing antiaircraft batteries around Baghdad and what he called chemical weapons factories.

Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill studied the photographs but was unconvinced. "Factories all over the world look like this," he said. "Tell me how you can tell this is a factory that creates weapons of mass destruction?"

Tenet cited what he considered telltale signs, and few others in the room seemed to doubt they were what he said they were.

Bush ended the meeting by instructing Powell to work on a better sanctions regime and Rumsfeld to review existing military options.

BUSH DECIDED TO make Mexico his first foreign destination, a sign of commitment to America's southern neighbor and a trip he could take without worry since his experience in Texas had left him with a working understanding of the place. He arrived on February 16 and greeted President Vicente Fox like an old friend, certain that a fresh era in Mexican-American relations would be a cornerstone of his foreign policy. But the reality of what his presidency would become intruded. About an hour into the meeting with Fox, Bush noticed that Rice had been called away from the table, then Powell and finally Karen Hughes. "What's going on?" Bush asked, clearly irritated. Rice whispered in his ear that something was happening in Iraq.

American and British warplanes were bombing radar and command-and-control facilities around Baghdad in response to what the military considered an escalated threat to aircraft patrolling no-fly zones. Bush was stunned. How had this happened without his knowing in advance? Heading to a news conference with Fox, Bush knew the questions would now be about Iraq. Aides advised him not to let on that he did not know about it and to use the word "routine" to describe it. Bush followed the advice, informing the world that "a routine mission was conducted to enforce the no-fly zone."

From there, the president flew to his Texas ranch. On television were scenes of bombing in Baghdad.

"I'm going to call Dick," the restless president said.

Cheney came on the line and told the president that this was a good action that would reinforce American resolve against Saddam Hussein.

Rice was struck that in a moment of uncertainty the first person Bush thought to consult was Cheney. "That said something to me, that he was sort of looking for reassurance," she said later.

The main partners in the strike were the British, and Bush was determined to make common cause with Prime Minister Tony Blair. A center-left Labour politician and fast friend of Clinton's, Blair was hardly the most natural partner for a conservative Republican from Texas. But Bush invited him to Washington so the two could take each other's measure.

It was an awkward opening. Before meeting with Bush, Blair was first asked to sit down with Cheney in the White House on February 23. Cheney struck the British as "relaxed while at the same time emanating tension," as Blair's adviser Alastair Campbell put it. The meeting "had a certain Soviet woodenness to it," thought Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, and Blair's team was chagrined that Cheney "did not seem to have been instantly felled by the prime minister's fabled charm." By the time Blair and his entourage flew to Camp David, they were wary enough that Blair's wife, Cherie, looked out the helicopter window to spot the Bushes waiting for them and muttered, "I don't expect that they are looking forward to this any more than we are."

But they were struck by the contrast with Cheney. Bush laughed easily and treated them as long-lost friends. "He was a curious mix of cocky and self-deprecating, relaxed and hyper," Campbell observed. "He liked to see everything in very simple terms, let others set out complicated arguments and then he would try to distill them in shorter phrases." Blair found him "self-effacing and self-deprecatory" with "a great sense of humor." Still, it was not a deep discussion; one American official noticed the president stuck closely to his note cards lest he wander outside his comfort zone.

After the meetings, the leaders met with reporters focused on the transatlantic odd couple. One journalist asked if they had anything in common.

"Well," Bush said, "we both use Colgate toothpaste."

As everyone laughed, Blair interjected with a smile: "They're going to wonder how you know that, George."

Then the two and their spouses and aides enjoyed a relaxed dinner. "Why don't we all watch a movie?" Bush suggested. He picked Meet the Parents, the decidedly lowbrow Ben StillerRobert De Niro comedy. Bush roared with laughter, particularly when it turned out Stiller's character was named Gay Focker, while Rice nodded off in her chair.

Not every early effort to make acquaintances went according to plan. After seeing the Blairs off, Bush returned to the White House, where he planned to host an overnight stay for Republican governors in town for the annual National Governors Association meeting. But as the evening wore on, no one showed up.

"Well, what did they say when you invited them?" Bush finally asked Laura.

"When I invited them?" she said. "I thought you did."

WHILE THE BUSHES got used to their new home, Cheney and his wife were finally moving into theirs. With the new floors finished at the vice president's official residence, the last of a hundred boxes of books and other belongings arrived on March 2, and the Cheneys spent their first night in the house after dinner with Liz, her husband, Phil Perry, and their three children. While the books included all the predictable volumes on history and national security, the ones Cheney would keep most accessible were on fly-fishing. A visitor later in his tenure would count thirty-seven fishing books on the shelves and forty-three more in the stacks.

Amid the unpacking, Cheney began to feel uncomfortable. The next day, March 3, he was getting off the treadmill when he felt a twinge in his chest. It did not last, and he did not respond to it. In fact, on the CNN show Late Edition the next day, he offered a good report on his health. "Well, I feel great," he said. "I am well-behaved. They've taken control of my food supply. So I'm trying to do all those things you need to do to be a responsible individual with a history of coronary artery disease and somebody who's sixty years old. So far, so good."

That afternoon, he felt another twinge, but went to a birthday party for Alan Greenspan and did not call his doctor until the next morning, when the pain returned more sharply while he was dressing. Even then, he headed to the White House for meetings without mentioning the pain to anyone. By afternoon, it had worsened, and he was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where doctors operated and found his artery clogged again. They cleared it out and allowed Cheney to go home the next morning.

Cheney planned to join the president the next day, March 7, for a meeting with Kim Dae Jung, the South Korean president Bush had scorned while on the phone in January. With Cheney's backing, Bush took a more jaded view of North Korea than Clinton, who negotiated a deal called the Agreed Framework to compensate Pyongyang for halting its nuclear program. But when Bush woke up that morning, he found a headline in the Washington Post that declared, "Bush to Pick Up Clinton Talks on N. Korean Missiles." It was based on a news conference by Colin Powell. No way, Bush thought. That was the opposite of his approach.

Bush picked up the phone and dialed Rice's temporary apartment, not bothering to go through the White House operator. It was 5:15 a.m., and she was still asleep.

"Have you seen the Washington Post?" he demanded.

"No, Mr. President, I haven't," the groggy adviser said.

"Go outside and get it," Bush ordered tersely.

Rice put on a robe and retrieved the paper.