Inside The War Rooms

WINGMAN: Senator John McCain with the Bush family

BROOKS KRAFT / CORBIS FOR TIME

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Bush: McCain — Who's Zooming Who?
The President was off mountain biking, leaving a political odd couple sharing a cup of coffee on the cool limestone porch of the Texas ranch. One was overnight guest John McCain, and the other was Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, the man who helped destroy McCain four years earlier in the South Carolina primary. Lately the Senator had been openly referring to Rove as "staff scum," a term of endearment he often uses for his own aides. Now the two discussed the political map and the previous day's events in Florida. Flying with Bush to Pensacola, McCain had told tales of his fighter days in that town. And once they landed, McCain was beside himself with excitement about the size of the crowds. "He kept turning to me and hitting me in the arm and saying, 'I've never seen anything like it,'" said Rove. "I thought I was going to have a bruise."

The summer romance between Bush and McCain was confounding to the Arizona Senator's friends and fans. Was this a true reconciliation based on shared principles in a time of crisis? Or was St. John, the famously pure, blunt, fearless crusader selling out in order to build up equity with his party for another run in 2008?

"I genuinely enjoy his company," McCain has explained in a pleading tone to skeptical friends. Aides say that after Bush spends time with McCain, the President's arguments for the war are sharper.

Those close to McCain say that at bottom he doesn't believe Kerry has the strength to face the tough business of war. McCain's views about Bush have been formed up close. After both visited families of dead and wounded soldiers at Fort Lewis in Washington State, they flew in silence on Marine One. The grief had been deep, and some of the relatives had had an edge in their voice as they talked to the President about the conflict that had taken their loved ones. As the helicopter climbed, McCain could see that the encounter had battered Bush. "I'm proud of you," he said, putting his arm on the President. He then promised Bush his full support, no matter what happened.

Before the campaign was over, Bush would travel more with McCain than with any other politician he was not kin to. Just after McCain squelched the rampant rumors that he might be John Kerry's running mate, the Bush team put him on the road with the President, making the Senator's mere presence a powerful political endorsement for the incumbent. McCain helped draw crucial moderate G.O.P. voters and independents to events where they could be registered and courted by the campaign. He let direct mail go out under his name to swing states. He recorded radio spots in New Hampshire, where he pasted Bush in the primaries in 2000, and agreed at the last minute to stump there the weekend before the election. At times, McCain's television appearances were scary duck-and-cover drills for the Bush message team, as McCain was perfectly capable of breaking ranks with the President on issues ranging from Iraq reconstruction to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. On the eve of the first debate, campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish drew the line: McCain was forbidden to go into the postdebate spin sessions and give praise to both sides. That would be a loss for Bush. "People see you as the referee," she said. "We need you to be for us." McCain grumbled about getting instruction. But he knew what he needed to do. By the third debate, Bush asked McCain to sit in the audience in his line of sight for moral support. But it was as much to be seen by the audience as to be seen by Bush.

After the debates, McCain amended his early public promise not to criticize his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Kerry, noting the candidate's inconsistencies and what McCain considers an unrealistic view of the powers of diplomacy. At the campaign's request, he even made a second visit to the press cabin of Air Force One to cry foul at Kerry's mention of the Vice President's gay daughter. "He was there whenever we needed him," said a Bush staff member days before the election, grateful that the alliance had held, "and thankfully, nobody lost any limbs."

Kerry: Return of the Clinton Team
You could count on Bill Clinton to run late, even when he was awaiting heart surgery. Hours after word spread that Clinton was being rushed to the hospital for emergency bypass surgery, Kerry telephoned him to wish him luck, and Clinton, alarmed at the drift of Kerry's campaign, suggested they make some time over the weekend to have a serious talk. The two made the connection around 10 p.m. the next day, a Saturday, an hour behind schedule. By the time they finished—Clinton mostly talking and Kerry mostly listening—it was nearly midnight. One message stuck. "If you're the issue in this campaign, you lose," Clinton told Kerry. "If he's the issue in this campaign, you win. Stay in his face."

Predictably, news of the call was all over the papers by Monday. And just as predictably, Kerry was furious. Four years before, Clinton had been shunned by his own Vice President, and more than a few Democrats believe that hurt Gore. But even so, there were dangers in flying too close to the Sun King now, not the least of which was how a gray presence like Kerry could disappear in the glare. There were those who believed that Clinton's real interest was less in helping Kerry win in 2004 than in clearing the way for Hillary to run in 2008.

But Kerry was smart enough to know something else. "You're the only Democrat who's been elected twice since F.D.R.," he told the ex-President. No one had been so tested as Clinton's team when it came to digging themselves out of a crater, and Kerry had already recruited some of the most combat-hardened of them out of retirement—former White House press secretaries Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, ex-Clinton aides Joel Johnson and Doug Sosnik, and Hillary's old chief of staff Howard Wolfson. Almost from the moment they arrived, Kerry's operation showed a new edge and agility. Less than an hour after the last chant of "flip-flop" echoed across Madison Square Garden, Lockhart engineered a midnight rally in Springfield, Ohio, where Kerry told a crowd of 15,000, "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq."

The rally barely made a dent in the news cycle—or in the bounce that Bush got in the polls after his convention. But it sent a shock through Kerry's dispirited troops. "They had gotten to the point where they had lost their ability to be aggressive," an adviser recalls. "But all that had changed, and the campaign finally was getting the message: You don't have to roll over. It was more a message to our own people that if they hit us, we'll stay up all night to hit them back."

There were other changes as well. Respected longtime adviser John Sasso moved from the Democratic National Committee to the campaign plane, where he cut through the clutter that had so often surrounded decisions that had to be made on the spot and offered the mature sounding board that Kerry had been missing. Kerry's traveling staff took to calling Sasso "the Wolf," after Harvey Keitel's fixer character in Pulp Fiction. The old hands like Cahill, Cutter and Shrum remained in place, leaving everyone to wonder how well the campaign would function with two camps vying to guide it through the final, most difficult phase of the race. But one thing was clear: it would be different from here on.

Kerry: The Midnight Conversion
When Lockhart reported for duty at Kerry headquarters, the first thing he did was pick a fight—the one the campaign had been avoiding for months. Kerry's shifting answers on Iraq had become more than a damage-control problem. When the candidate had fallen into Bush's August trap, the truth he had been trying to outrun since he slipped past Howard Dean in the primaries finally caught up with him: his position on Iraq was incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't a regular lunch guest at the Council on Foreign Relations, and it was getting more so every time Kerry tried to explain it.

Advisers like Shrum believed that Kerry's best course would be to turn to domestic issues, which polls suggested would ultimately decide the race. Kerry tried that approach for a bit, maintaining that the war's $200 billion cost would be better spent at home, but the commentariat found that laughable: Was Kerry, who had supported the war, now saying he wasn't willing to spend what it would take to win it? So Lockhart kept hammering: no one was going to listen to Kerry on anything else until he found his voice on Iraq.

It would take people who had longer histories with Kerry to bring the candidate around. On what happened to be the third anniversary of Sept. 11, three of the people Kerry trusted most—Cahill, Sasso and longtime adviser Michael Whouley—laid out the choice in its starkest terms at a meeting at Kerry's Georgetown mansion. He had to quit twisting himself in knots trying to defend the Senate votes that had put him on all sides of Iraq, and focus instead on making the case against what Bush had done there. He could no longer keep saying that he wouldn't have gone to war the way that Bush had. He was going to have to answer the biggest, most dangerous hypothetical question of all:

If John Kerry had been President, would he have gone to war at all?

Kerry was torn. He had once fought in a war, and knew what it was like to be bleeding in the field when people at home were calling what he was doing a mistake. What kind of message would he be sending to the troops who were in precisely the same position 35 years later? And if he said he would never have invaded Iraq, wasn't he admitting the point that Bush was making every day on the stump, that if John Kerry had been President, Saddam Hussein would still be in power?

Time was running out. If Kerry was to make that pivot, he would have to do it before the first debate, or the headline coming out of that contest would inevitably be kerry takes yet another position on iraq. But as late as 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 20, just hours before Kerry was to give the speech at New York University in which he would lay it all out, aides were still arguing all sides of the question around the dining table of his suite at the Sheraton in New York City. Some maintained he had said all he needed to say on the question of whether he would have gone to war. What would he get for answering yet another hypothetical—except more attacks from Bush? Finally, Kerry couldn't take it anymore. "This is a f______ war, and kids are dying over there. You'd have to be out of your mind to have gone to war knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction or ties to al-Qaeda," he told them. "The answer is no. Anything else is a bunch of crap." Said Cahill: "Then that's what you have to say."

Kerry's message that day was clear and sharp. "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," he said. "But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." As one of his top strategists later put it, "You could physically tell the difference between John Kerry before and after that speech. He was liberated to go run a presidential campaign."

Bush: CBS: A Gift That Kept On Giving
The president didn't know what to make of the National Guard documents his communications director Bartlett showed him that morning in early September in the Oval Office. They looked like fresh evidence that Bush had received preferential treatment and ignored a direct order to attend a flight physical. Bush had never seen the documents before and had never heard of them. He couldn't remember having a conversation with anyone about the flight physical (which he had admitted skipping), as the documents contended. What Bush did notice was that his address on the documents was not the one he used while he was in the service. But there was the whiff of truth in the documents. They could be real. Bush and his staff weren't sure, but they had to come up with a reaction quickly. 60 Minutes had just sent the documents over that morning, and the camera crews were arriving in three hours.

At another time, Bush and Bartlett might have challenged the authenticity of the documents. But stiff-arming the press had failed during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and after the tempest over wmd claims in the State of the Union address, so the last thing Bush wanted was a credibility fight. "We couldn't challenge their veracity because then people would challenge ours," says Bartlett. A softer defense was hatched: Bartlett would hint that the alleged new evidence was being pushed by the President's political enemies but would stick to the talking points: Bush had been honorably discharged.

The strategy worked better than the Bush campaign could ever have imagined. After the 60 Minutes piece aired, bloggers took up the campaign's cause. Suddenly the story was about superscripts and typewriters and Dan Rather's history of trouble with Republicans. Had the Bush campaign made the same charges, they would probably have fallen flat. But though the bloggers were in some cases even more rabidly pro-Bush than his own staff members, they nevertheless seemed like gumshoes going after the truth. Bartlett eventually stopped spinning and just let the bloggers take over. Questions about the President's service dwindled, and cbs was forced to endure the kind of treatment White House aides received every week. "This is the gift that keeps on giving," said Bartlett at the time. "It's fun being on the other side of it for a change and watching them do all the things we get criticized for: denial, spin and stonewalling." Eventually, Rather had to acknowledge on-air that the documents might be forgeries and apologize for vouching for them. cbs appointed a two-person panel—Richard Thornburgh, Attorney General under the first President Bush, and Louis Boccardi, former president of the Associated Press—to investigate what had gone wrong and report back after the election.