The Long, Hard Autumn of Dick Cheney

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One problem, according to former staff members, is the tightness of the Veep's circle. He relies heavily on his wife Lynne and two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, for advice on media and internal politics. Insiders took his decision to replace Libby with counsel David S. Addington as a sign that Cheney was circling the wagons rather than making peace with his detractors inside the government. They reason that Addington is a hard-liner who has made enemies around the West Wing with his unwillingness to cooperate or yield on troublesome issues like a court fight for access to records of Cheney's energy task force.

In the end, it's Cheney's steely certainty, a quality the President has so appreciated in the past, that may be most damaging to him now in this season of political reinvention, say people who have worked closely with the Vice President. While Bush has shown an ability to reverse himself in the face of heavy headwinds, suddenly embracing the 9/11 commission or campaign-finance reform, Cheney takes pride in not backing down. In March 2004, when Cheney was about to walk onstage to deliver his first formal excoriation of Senator John Kerry as being soft on Saddam, a frantic aide telephoned to urge him to tone it down. A suicide car bomber had just torn the front off a hotel in central Baghdad. Cable news was going crazy, and aides had nightmares of Cheney speaking in split screen with smoldering rubble. According to a person familiar with the incident, Cheney raised his right eyebrow, gave a quarter grin and shook off the advice. "The guy cannot be unnerved," the person said. A former Administration official put it this way: "If the VP isn't proven right until after he has kicked off, he's fine with that. The idea of being proved right before the end of his life is a false deadline in his mind. Right is right."

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Michael Duffy/Washington

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