2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

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Four days before the election, on his way to a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., Bush learned in his regular sunrise briefing that Osama bin Laden had delivered another video to al-Jazeera. It looked like the opportunity to ride the storyline the White House loved best--right through the final days. Whenever voters were reminded of terrorism, they had never failed to turn to the President. Kerry had been using the ghost of bin Laden for months, arguing that Bush had let him go. But now that the real thing was back on their TV screens, voters would focus less on what had happened in the past and more on which man could take care of the threat now. It would "bring the security moms back home," said a Bush adviser, describing the campaign's view of the political benefit.

Still, the President would have to tread carefully. Word went out from Air Force One that no one in the campaign or at G.O.P. headquarters was to make a political calculation within earshot of a reporter. While Bush spoke in Toledo in the late afternoon, his political aides discussed setting a trap for Kerry. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice briefed Bush throughout the day on the details of the tape, and Chase Untermeyer, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, tried to persuade al-Jazeera not to run it. Once aides were sure the video was being aired, however, Bush wrote down some remarks that included Senator Kerry. "We knew that Kerry couldn't resist responding more than he should on these issues," said a senior White House aide at the time. "He has to show that he knows better." So the President lured Kerry in a brief statement on the tarmac in Ohio: "Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this."

Translation of the tape came to Kerry's campaign during the afternoon by way of BlackBerry while the Senator was giving interviews by satellite in West Palm Beach, Fla. Shrum, who cannot type, dictated a brief statement to Josh Gottheimer, one of the campaign's young speechwriters, which they showed to the candidate in the limo on the way to the airport. Kerry deleted only one sentence, the first one, which referred to how bin Laden had castigated both him and the President.

"In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear," Kerry said when he delivered the statement at the airport. "As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians."