But the conventional wisdom couldn't have been more wrong. Faced with tough, unequivocal demands from the Obamans-demands that many of his people considered beyond the pale-Bill said, fine. Publicly and privately, he vowed to do "whatever they want." There was no way he was going to let himself be cast as a stumbling block. Back-channeling regularly with Podesta, Emanuel, and Biden, he became the loudest and most ardent voice urging his wife to take to the job.

Hillary felt the pull of patriotism and the call of duty. She believed that when the president asked a person to serve, there was an imperative to say yes. And yet, after five days of tumultuous to-ing and fro-ing, she decided to decline Obama's offer. Her reasons were many and, to her, dispositive. Secretary of state, of all jobs, seemed designed to turn her life upside down in myriad ways-in particular, the constant travel and omnivorous jet lag. She felt protective of her husband, too, especially after the torching of his reputation in the campaign. No matter how willing Bill claimed to be, she didn't want to see his philanthropic efforts crimped, his important work helping the sick and underprivileged curtailed. And she kept coming back to the question of her debt. For some politicians, lumbering around millions of dollars in the red was no big thing. She considered it immoral; she wanted to be shed of the burden, and quickly. But how was she supposed to accomplish that as secretary of state? Her people asked the Obamans (again) for help, but the transition team refused. And then there was something that she told one of her friends: she had spent a lot of years working for one guy and had no desire to do it again.

On the morning of November 19, the top officials of Hillary's and Bill's staffs held a conference call to coordinate the rejection. To fend off charges that Bill's activities had thwarted the deal, they planned to send the full list of his contributors to Obama's transition office in Washington. Thousands of pages had to be printed out and rushed there that afternoon.

Hillary informed Emanuel and Podesta of her decision. She wanted to talk to Obama to put the thing to rest.

Emanuel and Podesta had a lot on the line. They'd been among Hillary's most forceful advocates internally-and now she was about to drop a heaping pile of public embarra.s.sment in Obama's lap. The advisers decided that they had no choice but to stall. The president-elect is unavailable for a call, they told Clinton. He's indisposed.

Hillary's staff tried to plan a time for the conversation. Again and again, it was pushed back. A 2:30 call was scheduled. At 2:17 p.m. Abedin sent around an email to Mills and others: "We hear that President-elect Obama will not do the call at 2:30. Instead, he wants her to talk to Podesta-talk to him in an hour, so 3:30." Hours later, Clinton had still not reached Obama. At 7:37, Abedin wrote: "The call has been scheduled for 10 P.M. Eastern." At 9:42: "G.o.d knows what's going to happen." At 10:27: "Call will not happen tonight."

Clinton was in New York for a reception at Chelsea Piers commemorating the renaming of the Triborough Bridge in RFK's honor. She flew back to Washington late on a charter flight, arriving at Whitehaven around midnight-and there, miraculously, she managed finally to reach the elusive Obama.

It's not going to work, an anguished Hillary told him. I can't do it. It was a long, hard campaign, and I'm exhausted. I have this debt to pay down, and I can't do that as secretary of state. I'm tired of being punched around; I feel like a pinata. I want to go home. I've had enough of this. You don't want me, you don't want all these stories about you and me. You don't want the whole circus. It's not good for you, and it's not good for me. I just can't do this.

Hillary, look, you're exactly right, Obama said. Those are all real concerns, they're all real problems, and it's fair and legitimate for you to raise them. And the truth is, there's really nothing I can do about them. But the thing is, the economy is a much bigger mess than we'd ever imagined it would be, and I'm gonna be focused on that for the next two years. So I need someone as big as you to do this job. I need someone I don't need to worry about. I need someone I can trust implicitly, and you're that person.

Hillary raised a matter far more intimate than her personal reluctance. You know my husband, she said. You've seen what happens. We're going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can't control him, and at some point he'll be a problem.

I know, Obama replied. But I'm prepared to take that risk. You're worth it. Your country needs you. I need you. I need you to do this.

For both Obama and Clinton, it was a strange and rare moment-one of almost incomprehensible candor and vulnerability. For nearly two years, Clinton's posture regarding her husband had been fierce and unyielding. Never once had she wavered in Bill's defense. Never once had she been anything but defiant in the face of his screwups. Only rarely had she ever acknowledged, even to her closest friends, the damage that he had inflicted on her candidacy. And yet now, here she was, laying down her guard with her former rival, admitting not only that her husband could be a thorn in her side, but, in effect, that she'd known it all along.

Obama's tacit admission was equally revealing. As a public figure and a private man, his signal characteristics were supreme self-possession and self-reliance. He needed no one, was better and smarter, cooler and more composed, than anyone around him. But here he was conceding to Clinton that her help was crucial to the success of his presidency. For the first time, after all the bitterness and resentment that had pa.s.sed between them as combatants, they had suddenly metamorphosed into different creatures with each other-human beings.

It was nearly one o'clock in the morning on the East Coast. I don't want this to be your final answer, Obama said quietly and in conclusion. I want you not to say no to me. I want you to keep thinking. I want you to sleep on it.

THE NEXT MORNING, HILLARYLAND prepared to announce Clinton's decision to the world. The previous day, she had signed off on a statement she would deliver before the cameras at a press stakeout site on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. It said: "I spoke this morning with President-Elect Obama to convey my deepest appreciation for having been considered for a post in his administration. It is not something I sought or expected. In fact, it took me by surprise when he first mentioned the possibility a week ago. . . . [I]n the end, this was a decision for me about where I can best serve President-Elect Obama, my const.i.tuents, and our country, and as I told President-Elect Obama, my place is in the Senate, which is where I believe I can make the biggest difference right now as we confront so many unprecedented challenges at home and around the world."

In Chicago, at the Kluczynski Building, Obama walked into Jarrett's office and told her where he was with Clinton. She said no last night, Obama reported-but she'd called him back that morning. "She's going to do it," he said.

Jarrett studied Obama. In the course of the campaign, their conversations had numbered in the thousands. She couldn't remember a time when he seemed prouder, more satisfied.

It was November 20. The election was sixteen days in the past. But today, Obama had pulled off the grandest game changer of them all. On the brink of great power and awesome responsibility, he and Clinton were on the same team.

Author's Notes

THE IDEA FOR THIS book arose in the spring of 2008 out of a pair of firm convictions. The first was that the election we had both been following intensely for more than a year was as riveting and historic a spectacle as modern politics had ever produced. The second was that, despite wall-to-wall media coverage, much of the story behind the headlines had not been told. What was missing and might be of enduring value, we agreed, was an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House: Barack and Mich.e.l.le Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, John and Elizabeth Edwards, and John and Cindy McCain.

The vast majority of the material in these pages was taken from more than three hundred interviews with more than two hundred people conducted between July 2008 and September 2009. Almost all of the interviews took place in person, in sessions that often stretched over several hours. We set out to speak with every individual named in the book; only a handful declined to partic.i.p.ate. Many also provided us with emails, memos, contemporaneous notes, recordings, schedules, and other forms of doc.u.mentation.

All of our interviews-from those with junior staffers to those with the candidates themselves-were conducted on a "deep background" basis, which means we agreed not to identify the subjects as sources in any way. We believed this was essential to eliciting the level of candor on which a book of this sort depends. To a very large extent, we were interviewing people with whom one or both of us had longstanding professional relationships, and thus a solid basis to judge both the quality of the information being provided and the veracity of the providers.

While we made great efforts to compare and verify differing accounts of the same events, we were struck by how few fundamental disputes we encountered among our sources. In part, this owes to timing. We conducted many of our interviews about the nomination fights in the summer of 2008, when the combatants were out of the heat of battle and ready to talk, but their memories were still fresh. And the same dynamic held true in the months after the general election, when we turned intensely to that topic. In most every scene in the book, we have included only material about which disagreements among the players were either nonexistent or trivial. With regard to the few exceptions, we brought to bear deliberate professional consideration and judgment.

With the help of the partic.i.p.ants, we have reconstructed dialogue extensively-and with extreme care. Where dialogue is within quotation marks, it comes from the speaker, someone who was present and heard the remark, contemporaneous notes, or transcripts. Where dialogue is not in quotes, it is paraphrased, reflecting only a lack of certainty on the part of our sources about precise wording, not about the nature of the statements. Where specific thoughts, feelings, or states of mind are rendered in italics, they come from either the person identified or someone to whom she or he expressed those thoughts or feelings directly.

No doubt some of our princ.i.p.al dramatis personae will find images of themselves in these pages that they would rather not see in print. But in every case, we have tried to tell their stories in two ways: as fairly as possible from the outside and as empathetically as we could from behind their eyes. In doing so, we have tried to address the mult.i.tude of vital questions that daily journalism (and hourly blogofying) obsessed over briefly and then pa.s.sed by, or never grappled with in the first place. How did Obama, a freshman senator with few tangible political accomplishments, convince himself that he should be, and could could be, America's first African American president? What role did Bill Clinton actually play in his wife's campaign? Why did McCain pick the unknown and untested governor of Alaska as his running mate? And who is Sarah Palin, really? be, America's first African American president? What role did Bill Clinton actually play in his wife's campaign? Why did McCain pick the unknown and untested governor of Alaska as his running mate? And who is Sarah Palin, really?

Although no work of this kind, lacking the distance and perspective of time, can hope to be definitive, we are convinced that some answers are more readily discovered in the ground that lies between history and journalism-precisely the spot that we were aiming for and believe this book occupies. Our first and most obvious debt is to our sources, who spent countless hours with us in person and on the phone. We would also like to thank their a.s.sistants, who facilitated many of the interviews.

We are grateful to our bosses, Adam Moss and Rick Stengel, the editors of New York New York magazine and magazine and Time Time, respectively, who granted us the s.p.a.ce we needed to take on this project; our agents, Andrew Wylie and Scott Moyers at the Wylie Agency and Jeff Jacobs at CAA, without whom we would have been lost; Richard Plepler of HBo, for his encouragement and perspicacity; our editor Tim Duggan, our publisher Jonathan Burnham, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins-Kathy Schneider, Tina Andreadis, Kate Pruss Pinnick, Leslie Cohen, and Allison Lorentzen-for placing a big bet on this book and laboring to make it a success.

A number of friends and colleagues in the journalism racket provided us support, including work from which we drew wisdom or memories that we tapped: Mike Allen, Matt Bai, Dan Balz, David Chalian, John d.i.c.kerson, Robert Draper, Joshua Greene, John Harris, Al Hunt, Joe Klein, Ryan Lizza, Jonathan Martin, John McCormick, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitch.e.l.l, Liza Mundy, Adam Nagourney, Bill Nichols, John Richardson, Michael Shear, Roger Simon, Ben Smith, Jeffrey Toobin, and Jeff Zeleny. In the closing phase, Aaron Kiersh contributed careful and timely research. And we were a.s.sisted throughout by an armada of transcribers, of whom two in particular deserve mention: Frankie Thomas and Steven Yaccino.

A special expression of grat.i.tude is due Elise O'Shaughnessy of Vanity Fair Vanity Fair, a gifted editor who came up with the book's t.i.tle and then performed miracles to keep the ma.n.u.script from turning into War and Peace War and Peace; we salute her poise under pressure and artful way with the scalpel. Another profound word of thanks is due Karen Avrich, whose tireless and brilliant work as a writer, editor, and researcher is evident on every page that follows.

FROM JOHN HEILEMANN:.

A panoply of pals provided me with less tangible, but no less invaluable, forms of aid and comfort: Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer; Chris Anderson; John Battelle; Lisa Clements; David Dreyer; Mike Elliott and Emma Oxford; Mary Ellen Glynn and Dwight Holton; Katrina Heron; Michael Hirschorn; John Homans; Jeff Kwatinetz; Kerry Luft; Kenny Miller, Rachel Leventhal, and my G.o.ddaughter, Zoe Miller-Leventhal; Neil Parker and Kay Moffett; Jeff Pollack; Robert Reich; Jordan Tamagni and Michael Schlein; Will Wade-Gery and Emily Botein; Harry Werksman; Fred and Joanne Wilson.

As ever, I am grateful for the example and support of my father, Richard Heilemann, which keep me on the straight and narrow (more or less), and for the memory of my mother, which sustains me in all my endeavors.

Finally, Diana Rhoten, my wife and salvation, deserves a bouquet the size of Botswana. Without her as a perpetual source of patience, rea.s.surance, and inspiration-not to mention the occasional dose of tough love and ample portions of homestretch home cooking-I would never have made it through intact.

FROM MARK HALPERIN:.

I send deep grat.i.tude to Josh Tyrangiel and my colleagues at Time Time and Time.com, as well as to Ina Avrich, Bob Barnett, Gary Foster, Kyle Froman, Gil Fuchsberg, Nancy Gabriner, Charlie Gibson, Debbie Halperin, Bianca Harris, Dan Harris, Andrew Kirtzman, Ben Kushner, and David Westin. I am grateful for the guidance and eternal inspiration of Peter Jennings. and Time.com, as well as to Ina Avrich, Bob Barnett, Gary Foster, Kyle Froman, Gil Fuchsberg, Nancy Gabriner, Charlie Gibson, Debbie Halperin, Bianca Harris, Dan Harris, Andrew Kirtzman, Ben Kushner, and David Westin. I am grateful for the guidance and eternal inspiration of Peter Jennings.

Getting the book done required the support and smiles of Megan Halperin, Hannah Halperin, Madelyn Halperin, Laura Hartmann, and Peter Hartmann. Thanks to their parents: RoseAnne McCabe, Gary Halperin, Carolyn Hartmann, and David Halperin. And also many thanks to Morton Halperin, Diane Orentlicher, Ina Young, and Joe Young.

Karen Avrich's awesome professional contributions are noted above. More important than those: almost all of what I have achieved in my work, and in my life, I owe to Karen. By her sense of adventure, her generosity, her strength, her grace, and her example, she makes me a better person.

About the Authors

JOHN HEILEMANN is the national political correspondent and columnist for is the national political correspondent and columnist for New York New York magazine. An award-winning journalist and the author of magazine. An award-winning journalist and the author of Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, he is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, Wired, and The Economist The New Yorker, Wired, and The Economist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

MARK HALPERIN is editor-at-large and senior political a.n.a.lyst for is editor-at-large and senior political a.n.a.lyst for Time Time magazine. He is the author of magazine. He is the author of The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President and the coauthor of and the coauthor of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008. He has covered six presidential elections, including during his decade as the political director for ABC News. He lives in Manhattan.

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