CONVENTION '96: SKUNK AT THE FAMILY PICNIC

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a blink. On Tuesday evening, returning to their suite at the Chicago Sheraton, Dick Morris' wife Eileen McGann noticed the blinking light on their bedside phone and checked their messages. It was the close of the second day of the Democratic Convention, and the Sheraton was the center of the universe, the off-white fortress where the White House inner circle lodged and the President would soon arrive. That made it the natural place for Morris, Bill Clinton's essential campaign adviser, fidgety genius and imponderable co-author of the election-year comeback. One of the messages was from the Star, a supermarket tabloid. Could Dick call back right away?

Cut to the end of the world. Morris didn't return that phone call. In the pit of his stomach, he may already have known what was coming: a major story about him and a $200-an-hour call girl. By Thursday morning, his friends and family were gathered in the hotel suite to hear him announce that he was resigning as the President's chief campaign strategist. But Morris, a New Yorker who had always been able to talk his way out of the most embarrassing jams, was so distraught he couldn't speak. A man at home in the campaigner's world of beeper, fax, phone and keyboard, he grabbed his wife's laptop. "He wrote a note on it for them to read that said how much he valued them," said his wife in an exclusive interview with TIME, "and how he hoped they would carry on."

Politics is full of stories about how quickly the movers and shakers become the moved and shaken. This one is different because Dick Morris wasn't merely an adviser to Bill Clinton. He was the keen, dry hemisphere of the President's brain, the man who put Clinton on the winning track by pushing him hard to the center on everything--budget balancing, welfare reform and above all the family concerns that dominated last week's Democratic Convention. For more than three decades, Democrats had ceded those to the G.O.P. Morris, who in recent years worked mostly for Republican candidates, had given Clinton a way to reclaim those issues. Under Morris' prodding, the President made this year a succession of family-friendly initiatives on school uniforms, V chips and teen smoking. As Bob Dole would say: Whatever.

The convention was the culmination of that Clinton-Morris calculation. The message was: We don't have parties, we have relatives, a big national family picnic. Which is why on the first day, politicians were banished from sight. Actor Christopher Reeve barely mentioned Clinton in his speech, and when he talked about government, it was to describe it as the benign paternalistic arm ready to embrace America's civic life as a mirror of the homes baby boomers grew up in. Sarah Brady, the gun-control advocate, brought her wheelchair-bound husband onstage to deliver another above-the-fray message: Guns kill kids too. And of course Hillary Rodham Clinton returned to center stage with a coolly effective defense of her own child advocacy, as the image of daughter Chelsea loomed large on the screen behind her. (Message to the Other Couple: We know about delivery rooms and tonsil operations.) Vice President Al Gore did his part in the family reunion, using the story of his sister's death from lung cancer to point out the ravages of teenage smoking.