2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

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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