BROOKS KRAFT / CORBIS FOR TIME

WINGMAN: Senator John McCain with the Bush family

Five treacherous weeks stretched out ahead, weeks that many in the Kerry camp believed could sink the candidate before the fall campaign got under way. Vertigo was a sensation those around Kerry had come to regard as normal. More than once he had been written off for dead in this race. He had marched through the primaries, but only after a year of bad starts, restarts, setbacks, comebacks. Kerry had fired one campaign manager and mortgaged a house to raise money. And he had yet to convince voters that he really stood for anything.

The new danger ahead in August sprang from the combined vagaries of the calendar and the campaign-finance laws. Once Kerry accepted his party's nomination at the Democratic Convention on July 29, he would be bound by a strict spending limit of $75 million in public money—a straitjacket that President George W. Bush would not have to put on until his own convention finished Sept. 2. By early June, some of Kerry's media advisers wanted to change the game.

Inside Kerryland, it was called Operation Gutsball, chiefly because it would take a gritty determination to pull it off. Gutsball was a secret plan to supercharge the way Kerry would fight and finance his fall campaign. He would pass on the public dough altogether, not exactly a precedent that the avowed campaign-finance reformer would want to be the one to set. But the idea was tempting. And terrifying. A top Kerry fund raiser condensed the pros and cons of Gutsball in a memo and sent it round to the inner circle. Gutsball meant Kerry would try to raise $150 million in the final three months of the race. It meant diverting Kerry and Edwards at least 40 times to blue-state cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where money was plentiful but swing votes were not. And playing Gutsball ensured that Bush would opt out of funding too. On the other hand, the memo noted, if Kerry didn't opt out, Bush still might. And if he did, no one doubted Bush could raise $100 million without breaking a sweat.

To settle the matter, Kerry convened a virtual Cabinet meeting of top advisers one afternoon at the campaign's soulless McPherson Square headquarters in downtown Washington. He went round the big conference table and asked everyone in his inner circle what to do. And each time he got an answer—Do It or Don't—Kerry argued with it. The staff realized what was going on. Kerry was working through it. He argued passionately with both sides, telling the Do It crowd why it was nuts and then reminding the more reluctant side that it might work. It went on that way for 90 minutes. And when it was over, he said, "I'll let you know."

A week later the word went out: Kerry had decided against Gutsball. It would take him away from the battleground states when he could least afford it. But that meant August was still going to be a crapshoot, a five-week run through a gauntlet where Bush—or someone acting in his interest—would surely attack Kerry with a well-financed ad campaign. Kerry, meanwhile, would need to sit tight, take the hit and conserve his $75 million for the ad fight after Labor Day. "Opting in was an enormous calculated risk," said an aide. "It meant crossing our fingers. But we had to take that risk."

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