"Well, so what?" Cheney snapped. "What would happen if I wasn't? Will you just not worry about me? Leave me alone and whatever happens happens. I can't think of a better place to die."

AS THE VICE president recovered his strength, the nation's intelligence agencies were collecting increasingly alarming reports suggesting a major al-Qaeda plot in the works. There was no hard information about where and when, but it was chilling enough that George Tenet later said it "literally made my hair stand on end." On July 10, he called Rice and asked to see her immediately. Tenet and a couple of aides raced to the White House and told Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Richard Clarke that a "spectacular" attack seemed likely in weeks or months.

"What should we do?" Rice asked.

"This country needs to go on a war footing now," said Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism chief.

Rice said she would take it to the president. In her own memoir years later, she remembered the warning more vaguely but said alerts were raised and efforts made to prod allies to help pick up extremists like Abu Zubaydah. Still, it would take another two months for new strategies against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to reach a point of decision. By then it would be too late.

IN JULY, BUSH made his first visit to see Tony Blair in Britain. As a gift, Blair had sent Bush a Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill for the Oval Office that the British government lent him for the remainder of his presidency. Realizing from their Camp David meeting that the president did not care for stuffy diplomatic formalities, Blair invited the Americans to Chequers, the sixteenth-century mansion used as a country getaway by British prime ministers. Intent on keeping the visit relaxed, Blair and his wife, Cherie, decided that while aides could join official meetings, only family would stay at the estate. When Rice asked to stay as well, the Blairs said no.

Cherie Blair was later surprised when the person running Chequers told her, "I've managed to accommodate Mr. Bush's doctor. I've put him in my room."

"What doctor?" Cherie Blair asked.

"Dr. Rice."

The Bushes arrived by helicopter on July 19. The president had doffed his tie, and the two leaders went for a long walk alone, then joined aides upstairs for a discussion of the Middle East. Over dinner, they were joined by their wives and the Blairs' children. One of the kids brought up capital punishment. As governor of Texas, Bush had presided over 152 executions, more at that point than any other politician since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Cherie Blair, a formidable lawyer, jumped in. The death penalty was inherently wrong, she argued. If a mistake was made, it could not be corrected.

"Well, that's not the way it is in America," she remembered Bush saying. "We take the eye-for-an-eye view."

A good-natured debate persisted through much of the meal; it was unusual for a president to be challenged so frontally at dinner.

"Give the man a break, Mother," said Euan, the Blairs' son.

BACK IN WASHINGTON, Rumsfeld was trying to force a broader reassessment of Iraq policy. In a four-page memo marked "Secret" that he sent to Cheney, Rice, and Powell on the afternoon of July 27, the defense chief proposed meeting to discuss three options: give up the no-fly zones and sanctions since they were no longer effective; approach "our moderate Arab friends" to explore "a more robust policy" aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein; or open a dialogue with Hussein to see if he was ready "to make some accommodation." Rumsfeld painted a picture of gathering danger.

"Within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons," he wrote. While he did not suggest direct military action, Rumsfeld concluded that "if Saddam's regime were ousted, we would have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere." But the meeting he sought never happened.

BUSH AND CHENEY were finding a good working rhythm. Cheney exercised his greatest influence in the weekly lunches with Bush and on other occasions when the two met alone. Cheney usually showed up with three or four items he wanted to talk about, and sometimes Bush came with something on his mind as well. "I always felt there wasn't anything that I couldn't talk about," Cheney said. "It was an opportunity, sometimes, to argue issues." The conversations ranged widely. "Sometimes it was family; sometimes it would be personnel matters related to the cabinet and the Congress," Cheney said later. "Sometimes it would be policy where he would tell me about decisions he had made." Whatever was said at those sessions, though, remained among the biggest secrets in the White House. Sometimes Bush or Cheney might share a bit with aides, but more often they did not.

How much Cheney was quietly steering decisions through those private meetings or by shaping choices before they were presented to Bush became a constant source of speculation in the West Wing. Cheney got three bites at any major decision: his staff sat on committees that developed policies, the vice president participated in cabinet-level meetings that debated proposals, and then he had a chance to talk with Bush about them alone. Sometimes his impact was clear; other times it was just assumed. "Cheney's role was like watching iron filings moving across a tabletop," said David Frum, the speechwriter. "You know there is a magnet down there. You know the magnet is moving. You never see the magnet."

The vice president's unparalleled influence, and more important the perception of it, bothered Bush aides like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, who chafed at the implication that the president was led around by the nose. But Bush at that point was not bothered. "He could care less," Ari Fleischer remembered. "It rolled off his back." Indeed, Bush pulled Hughes aside one day to reassure her. "You don't get it," he told her. "The stronger Cheney is, the better it is for me. It means we get more stuff done."

Cheney picked his battles. The ones he cared most about were no secret. He was intensely interested, for instance, in an environmental policy debate over what was called new source review. Power plants were required to install scrubbing equipment to clean up their emissions if they expanded but not during basic repairs. The industry naturally wanted the most expansive definition of what counted as basic repair. Under pressure from Cheney, Christine Todd Whitman's EPA was rethinking the aggressive approach the Clinton administration had taken. Cheney kept calling, even tracking her down on vacation in Colorado. "He was on me all the time," Whitman recalled. On other issues, like education and entitlements, Cheney did not engage. "The vice president didn't have to get involved in every issue. The president did," said Dean McGrath, Cheney's deputy chief of staff. "This afforded the vice president a little more freedom."

IN THE EARLY months of the administration, perhaps the toughest issue Bush faced was stem-cell research. For months, he struggled with whether federal money should be used to target the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's by experimenting on stem cells from embryos grown in a laboratory. No one was talking about banning such research altogether, only whether taxpayer money should pay for it. The tension between Bush's antiabortion convictions and the prospect of saving or improving the lives of millions weighed on him. He received a poignant letter from Nancy Reagan, who had become an activist since her husband's diagnosis with Alzheimer's. Yet many of Bush's conservative friends and advisers were deeply uncomfortable with destroying embryos. Where was the line?

Advisers sent Bush memo after memo, and he grew so engaged that he began calling Jay Lefkowitz, the aide assigned to lead the review, almost every day with follow-up questions or requests for information. He asked all sorts of people he encountered for their opinion-a doctor who showed up for an unrelated Rose Garden ceremony, the White House medical staff at a birthday party, junior aides at an event in Virginia. Lefkowitz brought a copy of Brave New World, the Aldous Huxley science fiction novel in which humans are bred in hatcheries, and read passages to Bush. "We have got to be really cautious," Bush responded, "because it is like stepping off a cliff. If you step off a cliff and you have made a mistake, by the time you realize it, you are at the bottom."

Andy Card set aside thirty-minute blocks of time for Bush to meet with ethicists and scientists. Doug Melton, a leading stem-cell researcher from Harvard University, told Bush that embryos were not alive, and while he agreed they should not "be treated cavalierly," he believed the research could make a world of difference to real people. He mentioned that his son suffered from juvenile diabetes.

"I'm committed to doing everything I can to help my son," Melton told Bush.

The president said he understood, mentioning his sister's death from leukemia.

On July 9, he met in the Oval Office with two bioethicists, Leon Kass of the University of Chicago and Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center, a research institution dedicated to bioethics.

"I must confess, I am wrestling with a difficult decision," Bush told them. "I worry about a culture that devalues life. I think my job is to encourage respect for life. On the other hand, I believe technologies and science will help solve many medical problems, and I have great hope for cures."

His guests sympathized. But unlike Melton, Kass viewed frozen embryos as living human beings, even if at a very early stage of development.

"We at least owe them the respect not to manipulate them for our own purposes," he told Bush.

But what about existing lines of stem cells from embryos that had already been destroyed?

Kass found no ethical compunction about that since "you are not necessarily complicit in their destruction," provided that Bush make clear he opposed such destruction and would not reward it in the future.

Maybe Bush had found the middle ground he was seeking.

As the meeting broke up, he stopped Karen Hughes. "Are you comfortable with this?" he asked.

She nodded, but uncertainly.

"No, you're not, I can tell," he said. "I want your opinion."

"I'm increasingly uncomfortable with additional destruction," she said.

"Me too," he agreed.

In late July, Bush summoned Hughes and Lefkowitz. He would allow funding for existing lines-he was told there were about sixty-but prevent federal money from being used to create additional lines. It was not universally supported inside the White House. "A number of people internally didn't like that idea, because they thought it would tick off everyone," recalled Kristen Silverberg, a White House aide. Conservatives would object to any federally funded research, while liberals would be unhappy that it was limited to existing lines.

It was a mark of the moment that Bush would give a prime-time address to the nation explaining his decision. Nighttime presidential speeches were usually reserved for war or national emergency, and this was, at its core, a policy decision-one fraught with difficult questions, but not on the same level as sending troops into combat. Yet after seven months in office, it was the hardest choice Bush had made. His staff viewed it as so momentous that Hughes wrote it herself, the only speech she would draft start to finish during her time in the White House.

At his ranch on August 9, Bush settled into a cushioned chair with a brown-and-white flower pattern in front of a window with an American flag to his right. Hughes hoped doing it from home would seem more natural, less stiff than in the Oval Office. Addressing the camera, Bush described his decision. "This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line, by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life." For a leader who prided himself on crisp decisions, he hinted at the doubt that still racked him. "I have made this decision with great care," he said, "and I pray it is the right one." As aides predicted, he made both sides mad. But in presenting his decision in moderate, reasoned terms, he had advanced what his speechwriter David Frum called "the most unflinchingly pro-life position ever expressed by a president before a mass audience." Frum considered it "a masterstroke-and Hughes's finest hour."

ON AUGUST 6, even as he was preparing the stem-cell speech, Bush received a memo in the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." For months, intelligence agencies had been picking up signs of danger, and "the system was blinking red," as George Tenet later described it. Bush had asked his CIA briefer whether there were indications that the American homeland was being targeted. This memo, just a little over one page, was the response.

The document would later become famous, or infamous, but on this morning it seemed maddeningly unspecific, offering information that was sketchy and mostly three or four years old. Nothing on the first page cited current intelligence. The memo said bin Laden had "implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998" that he wanted to attack the United States and in 1998 he had "told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington" for cruise missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan. It said al-Qaeda members "have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."

Beyond that, the memo said intelligence agencies had "not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting," including a 1998 report that bin Laden "wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release" of those convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Only on the second page did the memo hint at what was really going on: "Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." That sentence cried out for elaboration. What suspicious activity? What surveillance? It said nothing more about that and hardly constituted "actionable intelligence," the phrase used by security officials to describe information specific enough to guide a specific response. Bush was told the FBI was conducting seventy investigations throughout the United States related to bin Laden, although that was not completely accurate.

Looking back, Bush admitted that he did not react with the alarm he should have. He did not summon the directors of the FBI and the CIA. He did not order heightened alerts. Nor was any action requested of him in the memo. "I didn't feel that sense of urgency," Bush said. The thinness of the memo and his faith in the FBI lulled him into a false sense of security.

IN THE STEAMY Texas of August, Bush settled in for a relaxing few weeks at the ranch. He got a charge out of the heat and took a perverse pleasure inflicting it on others. He jokingly called himself a "windshield rancher," but the ranch was a refuge, the only place other than Camp David where he could wander around, go fishing, even drive a white pickup truck around the property. "I fell in love with it the minute I saw it," he said.

It was a sprawling, untamed piece of land, filled with trees and creeks and seven canyons, and populated by turkeys, doves, and the occasional cottonmouth water snake. Two experts from Texas A&M University came out that August and identified seventeen or eighteen different varieties of hardwood trees. The main house had been built with an environmentally friendly geothermal heating and cooling system: water was pumped three hundred feet into the ground to keep it at a constant temperature, allowing the house to use 75 percent less electricity than traditional systems. The ranch had been outfitted with a twenty-five-thousand-gallon rainwater cistern for irrigation. Bush had a second building that came to be called the Governor's House for guests like Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes. After his ascension to the presidency, a couple of double-wide trailers were brought in for staff to stay in during his long sojourns away from the capital.

Bush's days started early, and he was reading Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea and planned to dig into David McCullough's John Adams next. He still found Washington intruding, but the location made that bearable. The Joint Chiefs of Staff came for a daylong meeting, and he had briefings each morning. On August 25, for instance, he got up at 5:45 a.m., read his briefing books, went for a run at 7:00 a.m., returned to the house by 7:45 a.m., and then had his hour-long CIA briefing on the porch overlooking a lake, followed by another hour-long briefing with national security aides. By late morning, he decided to give a tour to the reporters assigned to wait out his vacation. Dressed in a brown T-shirt, blue jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, Bush seemed in no rush as he spent an hour and a half showing them the ravines and walking paths that animated him.

"What we're doing here, we're cleaning this out," he said. "We're making a trail from the top to come down over here. Do you all want to walk in here? It's kind of neat in here. These cliffs are pretty unusual, from this perspective."

He piled several of the journalists into his pickup truck and took off. His main occupation, sometimes three hours a day, was taking a chain saw to all the cedar, which took up too much of the property's water and was considered a plague on the rest of the wildlife, he explained.

He took them to the area he called the Cathedral and warned the photographers to look out for poison ivy. He showed them the waterfall he discovered one day after a run. ("It's a wonderful spot to come up in here and just kind of think about the budget," he joked.) He showed them the lake that he had stocked with black bass and the small boat he used to while away hot afternoons. He showed them the spots where his dog Barney would chase armadillo and the pool he built after much imploring by his young daughters and then dubbed the Whining Pool.

"What is it you like about coming out here?" one reporter asked.

"It is one of the few places where I can actually walk outside my front door and say, I think I'm going to go walk two hours," Bush said.

Still, a reporter noted, his friends were surprised such a social person would retreat to "the middle of nowhere and just kind of be by yourself."

"I guess they don't know what it's like to be the president," he said.

RECHARGED, BUSH RETURNED to Washington in September. His staff worried that his presidency was drifting. With the tax cuts behind him and education reform on track, they sensed a lack of purpose. "There wasn't any galvanizing issue," recalled Peter Wehner, a speechwriter. Michael Gerson was working on what he was calling a "character of communities" speech to frame government as a catalyzing force for civic institutions, although Wehner thought "it seemed awfully thin."

On national security, after months of study and delay, the administration was finally cranking toward consensus on issues of terrorism and Afghanistan. Rice gathered the cabinet-level principals on the day after Labor Day, September 4, to approve a plan to go after al-Qaeda, one that largely resembled the one waiting for Bush and Cheney when they arrived in office. Richard Clarke, the frustrated counterterrorism adviser, vented in a chilling memo he sent Rice that day before the meeting. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG," the Counterterrorism Security Group, "has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US," he wrote. "What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time."

Six days later, on September 10, Rice forwarded the al-Qaeda strategy to Bush, while her deputy, Stephen Hadley, convened the number-two officials of the national security departments to advance a separate but complementary plan to target the Taliban in Afghanistan by helping their opponents and devising covert action to topple the government from within and eliminate al-Qaeda bases. The meeting came the day after Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary Lion of Panjshir who led the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, was assassinated. Some in the room wondered whether they might be too late.

But if the warning lights had been blinking red over the summer, they were dark again in the season's fading days. In none of the morning intelligence briefings in the days after Bush returned from Crawford did George Tenet recall discussing a possible domestic attack.

Bush left for Florida to promote his education plans.

PART TWO.

7.

"Somebody's going to pay"

It was still dark but already a temperate seventy-five degrees when President Bush emerged in jogging clothes from his villa at the oceanfront Colony Beach and Tennis Resort outside Sarasota, Florida. It was 6:30 a.m. He wanted to run along the beach, but the Secret Service had nixed that. Too exposed. Instead, they drove him in a fourteen-car motorcade to the resort golf course, where he jumped out and began circling paths marked off and cleared in advance by agents. His staff had arranged for him to run with Richard Keil, a tall, affable Bloomberg reporter Bush had come to like during the grueling hours on the campaign trail.

"C'mon, Stretch!" the president called out, using his nickname for the journalist. "C'mon!"

With the sun peeking above the horizon that Tuesday, September 11, Bush and Keil powered along the paths, trailed by an agent running behind them and another riding a bicycle with an assault rifle. Keil was a college cross-country runner who was all-American in track, and Bush wanted to know how fast he thought they were running.

"Feels like we're going about 7:15, 7:20 a mile," Keil said.

"Really?" Bush asked. "You think?"

With no elections or other big events coming up that fall, Bush said he had resolved to step up his running so he was covering a mile in under seven minutes for a three-mile run.

Keil said he thought he would reach his goal.

Why? Bush asked.

"Because we're running almost that fast now and you're talking normally while you run, no wheezing or gasping," he said. "If you can converse now, you could run seven minutes a mile if you'd just be quiet for a little bit."

Bush laughed and then listened attentively as an agent called out a time when they passed a chalk mark. The agents had already marked out the course so that Bush could calculate his pace as he ran.

"What's that work out to?" he asked, then did the math in his head. "That's 7:15 a mile!"

By 8:00 a.m., Bush was back in the villa, showered, and dressed in his suit. His morning intelligence briefing included items on China, Russia, and the Palestinian turmoil. His staff filled him in on the upcoming education event-who would be there, what would happen when, how he should deliver his message. Bush nodded. Then instead of getting up to head to the motorcade, the famously punctual president did something odd: he began chatting idly with his advisers, including Sandy Kress, the Texas lawyer who had come to Washington to help out on No Child Left Behind. None of the talk would survive the passage of time, just stories about people in Texas, catching up on who was doing what. Bewildered at Bush's unusually languid state, Kress kept glancing at his watch-three minutes late, five minutes late, ten minutes late. Still, it was clear Bush was enjoying the moment, the only time Kress could remember him being relaxed and unprogrammed since arriving in the White House. "Those were the last carefree moments he had in his presidency," Kress recalled.

The motorcade pulled up to Emma E. Booker Elementary School at 8:54 a.m. As the president headed into the building, Karl Rove told him a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Bush assumed it was a small propeller plane. But then Condoleezza Rice called and said it was a commercial airliner. Thinking back to his days in the Texas Air National Guard, Bush assumed the pilot must have had a heart attack. "This must be a horrible accident," he said.

Bush entered a classroom accompanied by the principal, Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, and met the teacher Sandra Kay Daniels. He sat down, and Daniels led the students in a reading exercise. He was in a good mood, smiling, following along. But then he felt a presence behind him on his right. Andy Card was leaning down to whisper in his ear.

"A second plane hit the second tower," he said in his distinctive Massachusetts accent. "America is under attack." Then Card stepped back.

Bush's face tightened, his mouth narrowed, and his eyes hardened. A second plane meant this was no freak accident. This was an act of war.

For whatever reason, he did not jump up and leave the room. Acutely aware of the television cameras trained on him and the students in front of him, he remained seated as the mostly African American students read The Pet Goat, a children's story. Bush picked up a copy and opened it, but his eyes were staring at the back of the room. He forced a weak smile as the children read, but grew distracted, and his mouth curled up with an intense expression.

Bush could see reporters' cell phones going off in the back of the room. It felt strangely like a silent movie, he thought. Bush caught sight of Ari Fleischer, the press secretary, holding up a notebook on which he had written out in block letters: "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET."

Minutes passed as the students read and Bush focused on what was happening to the country.

"Whoo, these are great readers," Bush said, trying to stay in the moment. "Very impressive. Thank you all so much for showing me your reading skills."

He kept up the banter a few more seconds, asking if the children spent more time reading than watching television. Several hands went up. "Oh, that's great. Very good."

Then he signaled the end. "Thanks for having me. Very impressive."

The five minutes between Card's whisper and Bush's unhurried exit would become the most criticized five minutes of his presidency and the subject of endless mockery. Told that America was under attack, why did he not get up and leave? Critics found a metaphor for a president who did not know what to do. Bush later explained he wanted to maintain an air of calm, both for the children in the room and for the national television audience. But it was a moment of transition. Bush was a man who cherished order and structure; he believed in showing up on time and leaving on time, and he did not like disruptions to the schedule. It clearly took a few minutes for it to dawn on him how much his life, and his presidency, had just been turned upside down.

AT THE WHITE HOUSE, it had been a slow morning with the boss away. "Nothing much is happening," Peter Wehner, the speechwriter, e-mailed his boss, Michael Gerson. Vice President Cheney arrived at 7:57 a.m. for a typically full schedule of meetings. Sean O'Keefe, the deputy budget director, stopped by the vice president's office to talk about a spending issue. John McConnell, the speechwriter, followed him in to ask about an upcoming speech.

Cheney's secretaries, Debbie Heiden and Ashley Snee, had the television on in the outer office. When they saw the news about a plane hitting the tower, they called in to the vice president. "Turn on the TV right away," Cheney heard.

He flipped it on and saw the north tower of the World Trade Center billowing smoke. Like Bush, he assumed it was a small plane. "Boy, it's going to be a bad day at the FAA today," Cheney said. "This is a tragedy."

Cheney watched as the second plane smashed into the south tower, and it became clear this was no accident. He jumped up and marched to Andy Card's office next door.

"I want to talk with him when he calls in," Cheney told the chief of staff's secretary.

He returned to his own office and picked up the direct hotline. "I need to talk to the president," Cheney said, then hung up to wait for the call to be put through.

Others were gathering in his office, including Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Joshua Bolten, Richard Clarke, and Mary Matalin. They agreed to coordinate federal agencies from the Situation Room. On the television was Peter Jennings in shirtsleeves for ABC News. The phone rang and it was Bush, now in a holding room at the Florida elementary school. He was going to make a statement and then head immediately to Air Force One.

In the holding room, Bush pulled out his Sharpie pen and scratched out some words on a yellow pad. He was sitting at a student desk, back to the television. While everyone else stared at the images, Bush focused on the notepad. When the television replayed the footage of the second plane hitting the south tower, Dan Bartlett pointed and exclaimed, "Look!"

Bush, on the phone with Robert Mueller, the FBI director, turned and looked for just a moment, very matter-of-fact, before swinging back to work on his statement. He began reading it aloud.