The centerpiece of the Bush administration’s case for an invasion of Iraq, the presentation that laid out the key pieces of intelligence the U.S. government had gathered about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his purported links to al-Qaeda terrorists, was delivered by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on February 5, 2003. It was a historic speech, and yet it was one that Powell, who had argued against the war for months, was probably far from comfortable delivering.

On Wednesday, January 29, a week earlier, Powell appeared in the doorway between his seventh-floor office at the State Department and that of his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, and handed Wilkerson a 48-page dossier that had been sent over by the White House.
The document, which the White House intended that Powell use as the basis of his speech, was a laundry list of intelligence gathered by the government about Iraq’s weapons programs. It had been cobbled together in Vice President Richard Cheney’s office by a team led by Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and John Hannah, the vice president’s deputy assistant for national-security affairs—both well-known administration hawks. A few days earlier, Libby had presided over a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which he laid out the case against Iraq, producing what one administration official called a “Chinese menu” of material.

“Go out to C.I.A.,” Powell instructed his staff chief, take whomever you need, and start work on the speech. By the next night Wilkerson, along with several staffers and a revolving group of C.I.A. analysts, was ensconced in a conference room down the hall from Director of Central Intelligence (D.C.I.) George Tenet’s office at C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. The White House supplied 45 more pages on Iraq’s links to terrorism and its human-rights violations. By the end of the first day, though, Wilkerson and the others did something surprising: they threw out the White House dossier, now grown to more than 90 pages. They suspected much of it had originated with the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.) and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi, a smooth-talking Iraqi former banker, whose family had fled Iraq in 1958, when Chalabi was 13. The I.N.C., an exile group based in London, had been supplying U.S. intelligence with Iraqi defectors whose information had often proved suspect or fabricated. The problem with the I.N.C. was that its information came with an overt agenda. As the I.N.C.’s Washington adviser, Francis Brooke, admits, he urged the exile group to do what it could to make the case for war: “I told them, as their campaign manager, ‘Go get me a terrorist and some W.M.D., because that’s what the Bush administration is interested in.’ ” As for Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda, Powell’s staff was convinced that much of that material had been funneled directly to Cheney by a tiny, separate intelligence unit set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We were so appalled at what had arrived from the White House,” says one official.

Instead, the group turned to the C.I.A. analysts and started from scratch. That night, and every night for the next several days, Powell went to Langley to oversee the process. In Tenet’s conference room, joined by the D.C.I. and at times by National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Scooter Libby, and C.I.A. deputy director John McLaughlin, the secretary of state demanded to know the sources and reliability of the information he had been given. For everyone involved, it was a tense and frustrating process. At one point, according to several witnesses, Powell tossed several documents in the air and snapped, “This is bullshit!”
The meetings stretched on for four more days and nights. Cheney’s staff constantly pushed for certain intelligence on Iraq’s alleged ties to terrorists to be included—information that Powell and his people angrily insisted was not reliable. Powell was keenly aware he was staking his credibility on the speech, and he wanted to include only solid information that could be verified. Cheney and his staff had insisted that their intelligence was, in fact, well documented. They told Powell not to worry. One morning a few days before the speech, Powell encountered Cheney in the hallway outside the Oval Office. “Your poll numbers are in the 70s,” Cheney told him. “You can afford to lose a few points.”

At two o’clock in the morning, hours before Powell was to give his speech, a call came from the C.I.A. to the operations center of Powell’s hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Powell had already turned in for the night, and Wilkerson picked up the phone. The message was clear enough: George Tenet, who was staying at another Manhattan hotel, wanted one last look at the text of the speech.

Tenet, the caller made plain, was worried that Powell’s staff had cut too much about Saddam’s supposed links to terrorists. Wilkerson was annoyed and baffled. Only a few hours before, Phil Mudd, the C.I.A.’s terrorism specialist, had come to the Waldorf, bearing a gift of Italian food. Then Barry Lowenkron, a senior Powell aide, had informed Mudd that they had tightened the terrorism part. Mudd read the section. “Looks fine,” he said, and he left around midnight.

Now the director of central intelligence was fretting and asking to see the speech in the middle of the night. It should not have been a complete surprise; Tenet served at the pleasure of President George W. Bush, and for days the White House, and Cheney’s staff in particular, had been trying to persuade Powell to link Iraq directly to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. They had pressed him repeatedly to include a widely discredited Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorists, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. At the last rehearsal of the speech at C.I.A. headquarters, Powell had thrown out the Prague material as suspect and unverified.

Lowenkron tracked Mudd down, woke him up, and asked what the hell was going on. Was there a problem? Mudd acknowledged he had reported to Tenet that Powell’s staff had tightened the terrorism section. Now it was clear why the C.I.A. chief was demanding to see the speech in the pre-dawn hours, and it was dispatched to his hotel.

The next morning at the U.N., Powell insisted that Tenet sit to his right and just behind him. It was theater, a device to signal the world that Powell was relying on the C.I.A. to make his case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.), which were a threat to the U.S. In the well of the Security Council, Tenet sought to make light of the pre-dawn escapade. “I’m going to kill Phil Mudd for getting me out of bed,” he said.

Cheney’s office made one last-ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam and al-Qaeda, and to slip the Prague story back into the speech. Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried unsuccessfully to reach Wilkerson by phone. Powell’s staff chief, by then inside the Security Council chamber, declined to take the call. “Scooter,” said one State Department aide, “wasn’t happy.”

Powell, for all his carping, delivered a speech that was close to what the White House wanted, describing mobile biological-weapons labs, ties to al-Qaeda, and stockpiles of anthrax. Much of it later proved to be untrue. His legacy and the Bush administration’s will be forever tarnished as a result. Yet the speech was only one of many low points in a series of historic blunders the U.S. made on its path to war. In 18 short months, from the morning after the 9/11 attacks to the dropping of the first bombs on Baghdad, George W. Bush presided over one of the most startling turnabouts in the history of world opinion. His administration took the unprecedented goodwill America enjoyed in September 2001 and squandered it by invading a country to replace a dictator who today seems not to have represented an imminent threat to the United States.

This article is an attempt to trace how it happened. It is—to be candid—incomplete. The White House and several key officials involved in the diplomatic and military preparations, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, declined to be interviewed. But many others agreed, including senior officials at the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. Some of the keenest observations about the evolution of the war effort come from top officials in the British government, whose pleas to stop a unilateral American invasion led the Bush administration to take its case for war to the United Nations.

When one talks with those involved in the lead-up to the Iraq war, one theme is repeated again and again. From the C.I.A. analysts who felt pressure to tailor their intelligence to fit the Bush administration’s aims to diplomats who felt steamrollered by the White House’s blinkered view that Saddam was hiding W.M.D., many officials felt nothing they said, no fact they could present, could possibly dissuade Bush from war.

II.

For a long time before American tanks dashed across the desert toward Baghdad, before Iraqi insurgents used car bombs and rocket- propelled grenades to kill young men and women from Kentucky and Texas and Arkansas, the invasion of Iraq was an idea. It took root after President George H. W. Bush’s decision to end the 1991 Gulf War abruptly, to pull back the troops that were slaughtering Iraqi soldiers by the thousands, and to end the headlong rush north toward Baghdad.

During the 1990s the notion of toppling Saddam’s regime was championed by a circle of neoconservative thinkers, led by Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan, and Paul Wolfowitz, an undersecretary of defense for policy for George H. W. Bush.

The neoconservatives first gained notice for their hard-line views on dealing with the Soviet Union during George H. W. Bush’s administration, in which Cheney served as secretary of defense. During the Clinton years, the neocons, quite a few of whom concerned themselves with hard-line defense policies for Israel, remained tied to one another and to Cheney through a number of right-wing think tanks and institutes. One of the most influential of them is the American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.), whose alumni include Cheney, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, Perle, Newt Gingrich, and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
In 1992, Wolfowitz’s office drafted a document called the Defense Planning Guidance, which said that the U.S. might be faced with the question of whether to take military action to prevent the use or development of W.M.D.—a precursor to the so-called Bush Doctrine, supposedly formulated by the current president. In 1998, Perle and Wolfowitz, along with Donald Rumsfeld and 15 others, sent a much-talked-about letter to President Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq and a more aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.

When Cheney became vice president, he remembered his neocon friends while making political appointments. In fact, the neocons’ influence is so great in the current administration that it has led those unsympathetic to their hawkish views to talk about the existence of “a cabal.” In addition to Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, who had been one of Wolfowitz’s top aides in the first Bush administration, became Cheney’s chief of staff, his national-security adviser, and an adviser to Bush. William Luti had been a military adviser to Newt Gingrich before working on Cheney’s staff and eventually shifting to the Pentagon as chief of Middle Eastern policy. Stephen J. Hadley, a former member of the George H. W. Bush administration, was made deputy to Condoleezza Rice. Douglas Feith, who had served as special counsel to Richard Perle when Perle was an assistant secretary of defense in the 1980s, was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, and David Wurmser, a close associate of Perle’s, became Cheney’s Middle East adviser.

As he entered the White House, Bush gave no signs of being the global adventurist he has since become. By all accounts, it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who brought about his transformation. The neoconservative world-view is summarized in An End to Evil, a recently published book co-written by Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Their dream, they write, is “a world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies.” It is how the neoconservatives hope to reach this post–Cold War utopia, however, that frightens many people. Perle and Frum believe such a world will be brought into being “by American armed might.”

Among many neoconservatives, removing Saddam became a kind of panacea for all the Middle East’s ills and a solution for dealing with the rise of Islamist terror and bringing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. But, others were quick to point out, given the hatreds among the three main groups in Iraq—the Sunni Muslims, the Shiite Muslims, and the Kurds—there would be serious problems with managing the power vacuum that deposing Saddam would create.

Even among Republican hawks, there were widely differing views about how to oust Saddam. In 2001, in the early months of the Bush administration, everyone had a plan. Colin Powell’s State Department favored a program of international pressure in concert with the U.N. and its weapons inspectors; Wolfowitz and his fellow neocons all but sneered at Powell and his dovish tendencies, ridiculing the U.N. as the do-nothing pawn of Third World nobodies and Euro-peaceniks. The C.I.A. considered what some called the “magic bullet” plan, that is, an assassination or coup d’état. The I.N.C. and Ahmad Chalabi floated their own plan, a partial invasion of southern Iraq that would supposedly lead to a popular revolution. At President Bush’s first National Security Council (N.S.C.) meeting, on January 30, 2001, a decision was made to formulate a coherent Iraq strategy.

For months memos flew among the State Department, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and the White House, but through a series of bruising meetings everyone stuck to his guns. The process swiftly became bogged down in bitter interagency disagreements. In such cases, it is the national-security adviser’s job to forge a common line. This, say numerous officials, is something Condoleezza Rice was unwilling to do. “She has no opinions of her own,” says an insider. “Her supreme concern is preserving her own relationship with the president. She’s a chief of staff, not an advocate, until she’s sure he knows what he wants to do.” The result, this insider says, is “there’s a tier missing in the foreign-policy wedding cake. A subject will get up to a certain level and then just stick until Bush decides.”

At first the president seemed in no hurry to deal with Saddam. “Faced with a dilemma, he has this favorite phrase he uses all the time: Protect my flexibility,” says the insider. Often, this person says, the president will ask by what date he needs to make a particular decision. “If, for the sake of argument, you say he needs to decide by November, he’ll turn round and say, ‘In that case, I’m not going to do it in May.’ ”

Powell spotted this weakness immediately and used it to his advantage, the neocons believe. “[Powell] is incredibly smart, the supreme courtier, brilliant tactically and strategically,” a former White House official says. “Bush would be breathing fire about something in the days before an N.S.C. meeting; he would even be raising hell spontaneously in private meetings with ambassadors. And then Powell would say to Bush, ‘Yes, I agree with you, this is terrible, but if we push it too vigorously it will upset our allies: let [the Department of] State handle this. We agree with you, but this isn’t the way to do it.” Again and again, Powell would win the argument.

It was, in the words of one former White House official, “a formula for gridlock.” Which is just where the Bush administration’s Iraq policy remained stuck when the World Trade Center fell.

On the morning of September 11 seven members of Rumsfeld’s neocon brain trust, officials who would wield enormous influence over Iraq policy in the coming months, were busy on unrelated missions in Europe and the Middle East. The next morning, Wednesday the 12th, they gathered in a light rain on the tarmac at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and boarded an air-force refueling plane that had been sent to ferry them back to Washington.

“Just about the whole Defense Department policy shop concerned with issues linked to international terrorism ended up on that plane,” says Douglas Feith, the 50-year-old undersecretary of defense for policy. A colleague of Perle’s since the Reagan administration, he is a staunch supporter of Israel and a longtime opponent of a Palestinian state. “We stopped for a while at the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall [in Suffolk, England], and [several of us] were standing round, discussing the fact that the president had already said things which implied we were at war. People forget what a big deal that was. If we were at war, who was the enemy? That’s the basic level of the questions we started with. What would be our war aims?”

As the KC-135 Stratotanker headed across the Atlantic, the Pentagon people began debating what the new war meant. “It was just a tanker, cold, dark, and crowded,” says William Luti, 50, who heads the Pentagon’s Near Eastern and South Asian section. “But right there on the plane, we took out our laptops and sketched out our strategy; we sketched out for Secretary Rumsfeld where we thought we had to go, what it meant to get things on a war footing.” Although no one had yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were prime suspects. Closing their havens by toppling the Taliban government of Afghanistan seemed the obvious first priority.

But to Feith, Luti, and their traveling companions, it also seemed that a war on terror could not end with Afghanistan. “Obviously we had Afghanistan in our minds straightaway,” Luti says. “That was our immediate concern. But we also thought we had to learn about the terrorist networks, how they connected to the states.”

That list of possibilities—states which might have unconventional weapons, and those which might be prepared to use them in support of terrorists—was not very long, and one nation loomed large in their deliberations. Iraq was not on the table as a matter of detailed military planning that day, but it was on the table as a concept.

Toward the end of the flight, the air-force plane flew over Manhattan, and the men from the Pentagon gazed at the site of the horror inflicted the previous day. Feith and Luti were still gathering their thoughts when the plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base a few minutes after five that afternoon. On the tarmac, Feith flipped out his cell phone. His first message was from Rumsfeld’s office: the president was due at the Pentagon at six. Scurrying through Washington rush-hour traffic, the group made it just in time to meet with Bush.

The president, accompanied by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, instructed the somber gathering to think in the broadest possible terms. “The president said that this was a war, and that it was the Pentagon’s responsibility,” Feith says. “He wanted it fought in the right spirit. People came away saying it was clear he wasn’t talking about half-measures.”

Three days later, on Saturday, September 15, President Bush gathered his closest advisers at Camp David to discuss the shape of the coming war. Much of their discussion dealt with Afghanistan. But during a session that morning, according to Bob Woodward’s 2002 book, Bush at War, Wolfowitz advocated an attack on Iraq, perhaps even before an attack on Afghanistan. There was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Iraq had been involved in 9/11, he argued, concluding that Saddam’s “brittle, oppressive regime” might succumb easily to an American attack—in contrast to the difficulties involved in prosecuting war in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Sitting across the table, Colin Powell was appalled. To attack Iraq without clear evidence of Saddam’s involvement in September 11 would drive America’s allies away, he argued. Much better to go after bin Laden’s obvious state sponsor, the Taliban. If that went well, it would only enhance America’s ability to oust Saddam later. In front of his advisers at Camp David, and in later interviews, Bush indicated that he supported Powell’s argument. During the lunch break, the president sent a message to Wolfowitz and the other neocons, indicating that he did not wish to hear any more about Iraq that day. But, according to Richard Perle, Wolfowitz had planted a seed. Bush told Perle at Camp David that once Afghanistan had been dealt with, it would be Iraq’s turn.

By that Monday, Wolfowitz and his neocon colleagues were already busy studying ways to justify an eventual attack on Iraq. The next day, Tuesday, September 18, Perle convened a two-day meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises the Pentagon. (Perle has since resigned, first as chairman, amid charges of conflicts of interest because he was representing a company seeking Defense Department approval of a sale to two foreign companies, and then from the group altogether.) The board’s meetings amount to a form of “organized brainstorming” with the defense secretary, his key lieutenants, and a group of well-informed outsiders, all of whom are cleared to have access to classified intelligence. The 30 members, appointed by the secretary of defense, have traditionally represented a broad spectrum of political beliefs. Under Rumsfeld, however, the board has taken a hard turn to the right, with several Democrats being ousted.

That morning the group gathered in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Washington. From there, one participant recalls, “we got into mini-buses and took off at about a zillion miles an hour. We had a full-blown police escort, motorcycle outriders, the works, and at the peak of the morning rush hour they had cleared the entire interstate across the 14th Street Bridge. It took almost no time at all to get to the Pentagon.… When we got there, it was like a war zone. You could still smell the smoke.”

They met in Rumsfeld’s conference room. After a C.I.A. briefing on the 9/11 attacks, Perle introduced two guest speakers. The first was Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, a longtime associate of Cheney’s and Wolfowitz’s. Lewis told the meeting that America must respond to 9/11 with a show of strength: to do otherwise would be taken in the Islamic world as a sign of weakness—one it would be bound to exploit. At the same time, he said, America should support democratic reformers in the Middle East. “Such as,” he said, turning to the second of Perle’s guest speakers, “my friend here, Dr. Chalabi.”

Chalabi’s presence at the meeting represented a triumph for his long-standing Washington adviser, Francis Brooke, who had spent years forging a large network of sympathetic contacts for Chalabi, among journalists and on Capitol Hill. Several of those around the table already counted themselves strong I.N.C. supporters, including Perle, Gingrich, and Professor Lewis, along with the Pentagon neocons who drifted in and out of the meeting—Luti, Feith, and Wolfowitz. Yet, while Chalabi had attracted powerful support, there were reasons to keep him at a distance. In particular, he had been convicted in 1992 of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from Petra Bank, Jordan’s third-largest, which he had started. (Chalabi denies the charge.) He fled the country before he could be imprisoned. When it came to discussing who should replace Saddam, State Department and C.I.A. officials soon came to use a brutal abbreviation: “A.B.C.—anyone but Chalabi.”

At the meeting Chalabi said that, although there was as yet no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, failed states such as Saddam’s were a breeding ground for terrorists, and Iraq, he told those at the meeting, possessed W.M.D.

During the later part of the second day, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld listened carefully to the debate. “Rumsfeld was getting confirmation of his own instincts … ” Perle says. “He seemed neither surprised nor discomfited by the idea of taking action against Iraq.”

In his new book, Against All Enemies, and in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator for Presidents Clinton and Bush, tells of a far stronger impulse to go after Iraq among senior Bush-administration officials in the days after September 11. Rumsfeld began pushing for retaliatory attacks against Iraq almost immediately, Clarke recalled. “We all said, ’ … No, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.’ ” At one point, Clarke said, “the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now, he never said, ‘Make it up,’ but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, ‘Iraq did this.’ ”
Clarke said that, together with C.I.A. and F.B.I. experts, he wrote a report that found no connection. When he submitted it to the president, he said, “it got bounced by the national-security advisor, or deputy. It got bounced and sent back, saying, ‘Wrong answer.… Do it again.’ ” Clarke doesn’t know if the president saw his report. “I don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t—wouldn’t like the answer.”

On Thursday, September 20, Tony Blair arrived in Washington for a meeting at the White House. Until now, many assumed his and Bush’s early talks had been limited to the coming war in Afghanistan. In fact, they also spoke of Iraq. At a dinner in the White House, attended also by Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and the British ambassador to the United States, Sir Christopher Meyer, Bush made clear that he was determined to topple Saddam. “Rumors were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq,” Meyer remembers. “On the one hand, Blair came with a very strong message—don’t get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Taliban. Bush said, ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ ”

As C.I.A. agents on horseback rallied Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to a routing of Taliban troops that autumn, Wolfowitz, Perle, and their neocon colleagues kept their sights trained on Saddam. For them, the holy grail became anything that might link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda, or any other terrorist groups. Wolfowitz, for example, remained intrigued by a theory, advanced by Laurie Mylroie, a former Harvard professor and American Enterprise Institute fellow, that Saddam had been behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center—though the idea had been dismissed by most experts, including those at the F.B.I. and C.I.A. In the wake of 9/11, Wolfowitz dispatched Jim Woolsey, the C.I.A. director from 1993 to 1995, to London to look for evidence in British intelligence files that might confirm her thesis.

Nothing came of Woolsey’s trip, but that didn’t stop right-wing pundits from aggressively trying to link Iraq to 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. The most controversial case involved the Czech intelligence report that Powell refused to include in his speech. The conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, for instance, seized on the report, terming it “the undisputed fact connecting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks.” Woolsey chimed in, too, citing the supposed Prague meeting in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in October 2001. Two and a half years later, the report has yet to be confirmed.

The advocates of regime change in Iraq realized that, for any American invasion to enlist support, both domestically and internationally, links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda needed to be proved. In October 2001, Doug Feith claims, he set up a small intelligence operation inside the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. It was tasked to comb the vast existing databases of the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) for evidence of links between Middle Eastern nations and Islamist terrorist networks, Feith says. Many media reports called this unit the Office of Special Plans and claimed that it had a far larger mandate and had been working for a year, but, according to Feith, this much bigger office was not established until August 2002, when the intelligence unit’s work was already finished. The Office of Special Plans’ job, he says, was policy planning for the war and its aftermath.

The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group’s first head was neocon David Wurmser, who wrote a 1999 book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, with an introduction by Perle. By the end of 2001, Wurmser was ready to make a presentation to Wolfowitz and other senior Pentagon officials in which he argued that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the loss of funding from the K.G.B., many of the most militant groups in the Middle East had begun to band together: the Palestine Liberation Organization; the Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalists, who had spawned al-Qaeda and bin Laden; Hezbollah; Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; and the radicals in Iran. All, Wurmser argued, had shown themselves ready to lay aside their doctrinal differences to work together against the United States. The natural place to attack this consortium, Wurmser argued, was the nation with which war could most easily be justified: Iraq. “To claim that Iraq would be a distraction from al-Qaeda is meaningless,” Wurmser said in his presentations. “It’s like saying the D-day landings in Normandy were a distraction from the war in Sicily and North Africa.”

Wurmser’s ideas were, needless to say, controversial, and met with fierce resistance at the C.I.A. and elsewhere, where analysts could see little more than nominal links among the terror groups he cited. The view inside the C.I.A. was that Saddam’s secular government would never have anything to do with religious fundamentalists who, after all, sought to topple secular regimes.

In early 2002, Chris Carney, a D.I.A. reservist and a political-science professor at Penn State University, took over the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and unearthed old reports which suggested that Iraqi intelligence agents had worked with al-Qaeda for more than a decade. In August, Feith says, he twice took Carney to the C.I.A.’s headquarters to make presentations to Tenet and a few of his analysts. According to Feith, Tenet bought some of his findings, and with his blessing they later found their way into speeches by Bush and testimony by Tenet to Congress.

But the C.I.A. analysts’ reception was chilly. They already knew the information and had weighed it in their intelligence reports. Most of it, they deemed, was not credible. Feith eventually put the information in a memorandum to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Although its contents were highly classified, they were leaked to The Weekly Standard, a journal closely associated with the neoconservatives. “If you don’t understand how intelligence works,” a Pentagon official told The New York Times, “you could look at this memo and say, ‘Aha, there was an operational connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.’ But intelligence is about sorting what is credible from what isn’t, and I think the best judgment about Iraq and al-Qaeda is that the jury is still out.”

Feith and his staff insist that the special Pentagon intelligence unit never dealt directly with information supplied by Ahmad Chalabi’s I.N.C., or debriefed any sources. However, much of the supposedly new intelligence which crossed the desks of Rumsfeld and Cheney originated with the I.N.C., a group the C.I.A. had long distrusted. In the fall of 2001, and for much of the next year, Chalabi’s people produced a series of men and women termed “defectors” from Iraq, and they were accorded disproportionate influence. At least two, who were interviewed by the D.I.A. and whose information was taken very seriously by the Pentagon and vice president, brought with them hair-raising stories of Saddam’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. The most important, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, claimed that Saddam had secret labs making biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons hidden in underground wells, under villas, and beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad; to date, no trace of such facilities has been found.

Beginning that winter, however, this and other stories achieved wide currency in the media; several would find their way into speeches given by administration officials. Unfortunately the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information from Chalabi’s defectors “was of little or no value.… Several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence” by the I.N.C. “invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program.”

The fall of Kabul in November 2001 unleashed a torrent of press speculation over where America would strike next. Terrorist havens such as Yemen, Somalia, and Syria were all named as candidates. Iraq was mentioned as well, but by Christmas, with no clear indication from the White House where the War on Terror would go, much of the talk began to die down.

Inside the White House, however, the focus on Iraq sharpened as staff members prepared President Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002. The president’s top speechwriter, Michael Gerson, gave David Frum, a Canadian who would actually write the speech, pointed instructions: “Make the best case for war in Iraq,” Gerson said, “but leave exit ramps.”

Gerson and Frum pounded out much of the speech in a downtown-Washington Starbucks, which had become a drop-in center for their ideological allies from the neoconservative think tanks and the Pentagon. Looking for ways to categorize the states believed to be active supporters of terrorism, they first decided to term Iran, North Korea, and Iraq an “axis of hatred.” By the final draft that had become “axis of evil.”

“States like these,” Bush said that night in January, “and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

Bush went on to suggest for the first time that his administration would, in certain circumstances, be prepared to launch pre-emptive wars: “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

As Paul Wolfowitz listened to Bush’s words, a single thought ran through his head: This president really gets it.

The countdown to war had begun.

In the beginning of February 2002, contingency planning for a second Gulf war began in earnest. The Pentagon, and the various military commands for which it is responsible, always keeps numerous basic war plans on its shelves, theoretical battle strategies against any nation which might conceivably become an enemy. The Iraq plan, code-named “1003 Victor,” had been drawn up in the early 1990s, and it envisaged a war very similar to the Gulf conflict of 1991: a period of intense aerial bombardment, followed by a ground invasion on an enormous scale—in 1991, the coalition forces had numbered some 660,000 troops. Under Rumsfeld, the commands had spent the past year reviewing all their old plans and had already begun to consider how to tackle Iraq. This now ceased to be a theoretical exercise.

Some of the more hawkish voices—including several members of Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board—urged that the military be ready to invade as early as the coming fall. In the ensuing months, there would be fierce debate among Rumsfeld, his top civilian officials, and the military men over how a war with Iraq should be fought. Rumsfeld’s inclination was to favor a lightweight approach, with the brunt to be borne by a relatively small deployment of special-forces troops, possibly as few as 75,000; the Department of Defense’s Central Command (CentCom) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted something much heavier and more traditional.

As planning progressed, the American media’s focus moved away from terror for a time and toward the Enron scandal and other domestic concerns. In the early months of 2002, only a handful of newspaper stories suggested Iraq might soon prove to be the next theater for war. Some administration hawks thought the White House was moving too slowly. More than a year after Bush and Condi Rice had made it clear to the N.S.C. that they wanted a plan to change Iraq’s regime, gridlock inside the administration was worse than ever. Not for the first or last time, Colin Powell was sounding tough in public while doing all he could when safely behind closed doors to blunt the edges of Bush’s bellicosity. Powell’s follow-up to the State of the Union address came on February 12, in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. There was no plan to start a war with Iran or North Korea, he promised, but “with respect to Iraq it has long been, for several years now, a policy of the United States government that regime change would be in the best interests of the region, the best interests of the Iraqi people. And we are looking into a variety of options that would bring that about.”

Afterward, unnamed senior administration officials told The New York Times, “There [is] a consensus within the Administration that he [Saddam] must be overthrown and that plans to do so are being drawn up. But there is no agreement as to how precisely that should be done or how long the United States should be prepared to wait for action.”

The next day, the Times described Powell’s tone as “unusually tough.” Unbeknownst to reporters, even as he testified, Powell was engaged in a fierce struggle with Rumsfeld over what—if anything—to do about what the defense secretary claimed was a flagrant Iraqi breach of U.N. sanctions. Within days of the president’s State of the Union address, says a senior U.S. arms-nonproliferation official, the intelligence community circulated a report saying that Iraq had found a way to modify trucks in order to make them strong enough to carry heavy weaponry such as tanks and artillery pieces.

Under sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq was expressly forbidden to own what the military calls “heavy-equipment transports.” Such trucks, the intelligence report continued, could be used either to move tanks around the country swiftly in the event of war or to import them from a friendly third country such as Syria—which was already pumping Iraqi oil worth $1 billion a year through a pipeline, itself illegal under the sanctions.

The dispute over what to do about the modified H.E.T.’s went to the top of both the Pentagon and the State Department and was conducted mainly through a bitter exchange of letters. “Rumsfeld was saying, ‘We’ve got to stiffen this up,’ ” says an official who saw the correspondence, “and State was saying, ‘Oh no we’re not.’ Rumsfeld was like, ‘We’re going to war with these fuckers and you’re letting them get equipment that they’re going to use to kill Americans?’ ”

The dispute highlighted the internal debates within the administration, as did the next formal step toward war. On February 16, after 13 months of interagency warfare, the N.S.C. at last ratified a quixotic National Security Policy Directive on Iraq, committing America both to examining ways of bringing about a C.I.A.-backed coup d’état by a friendly general and to providing military support for a popular insurrection, along the lines of the strategy advocated by the I.N.C. In practical terms, the strategy of regime change had not moved an inch in months.

III.

The Bush administration spent much of the first half of 2002 analyzing intelligence about Iraq. Part of the effort was directed toward figuring out how Saddam would respond to an invasion, what his biological- and chemical-weapons capabilities actually were, and whether he would use them against American troops. It was the second half of the intelligence process, one that came personally to involve Dick Cheney and his staff, that has spawned controversy ever since.

Beginning in early 2002, Cheney, sometimes accompanied by Scooter Libby, paid “approximately 10” visits to the C.I.A., a member of the vice president’s staff says, in order to speak directly with analysts. Senior C.I.A. officials attended the sessions, according to the Cheney aide, who said they covered other topics as well as Iraq. The vice president defended his visits on Meet the Press in September 2003. “I ask a hell of a lot of questions,” he said. “That’s my job.” To advise the president, Cheney added, he needed to “go into an arena where you can make the arguments about why you believe what you do based on the intelligence we’ve got.”

But vice presidents do not usually drop in at Langley, and, given Cheney’s strident public posture on the need for regime change, the message could hardly have been misunderstood by the analysts, who are, after all, in the business of interpreting events and drawing conclusions.

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, Kenneth Pollack, an intelligence analyst during the Clinton administration, recalled:

Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about [how the Bush administration handled the intelligence]. According to them, many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analyses that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq.… Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior Administration officials were subject to barrages of questions and requests for additional information. They were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence.… The Administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded; instead, they were beset with further questions about their own sources.

Mel Goodman, a C.I.A. analyst for 24 years and a frequent critic of the agency, said that Cheney “was holding forth on what he thought the situation was and why doesn’t your intelligence support what we know is out there? They assumed he was referring to [Feith’s] Pentagon intelligence unit that was producing stuff that was going right downtown and had much stronger claims about links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.”

Goodman lectures at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, and C.I.A. analysts attend his classes. “I get into the issue of politicization,” he says. “They don’t say much during the question period, but afterwards people come up to me, D.I.A. and C.I.A. analysts who have had this pressure. I’ve gotten stories from D.I.A. people being called into a supervisor’s office and told they might lose their job if they didn’t revise a paper. ‘This is not what the administration is looking for. You’ve got to find W.M.D.’s, which are out there.’ ”

A former C.I.A. analyst, talking about the politicization of intelligence, remarked, “They don’t have to tell us to do that—we know what they want.”

One incident illustrates how the analysts were influenced. The President’s Daily Brief is a highly classified and tightly held C.I.A. document that goes to the president and only a handful of close aides. Under George W. Bush, Tenet delivers the P.D.B. every morning and personally briefs the president. What is less generally realized is that the vice president also has a P.D.B. briefer. According to a former C.I.A. official, “One briefer annoyed Cheney and he asked that she be replaced. He asked for a new briefer. That sent a chill through the whole process. It sent out the message to the analysts, ‘Be careful with some of this stuff. Be careful what you say.’ ”

The most authoritative—and surprising—acknowledgment of pressure on C.I.A. analysts comes from Richard J. Kerr, a retired senior agency official who was brought back by the C.I.A. to conduct a classified internal review of its pre-war intelligence on Iraq and how it was used by the White House. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence and for a time acting director of the agency, headed the Directorate of Intelligence for three years. Although loyal to his former agency, Kerr is known as a straight shooter who says what he thinks. In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair, he spoke freely of the pressure C.I.A. analysts felt.

“There was a lot of pressure, no question,” says Kerr. “The White House, State, Defense, were raising questions, heavily on W.M.D. and the issue of terrorism. Why do you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing? … Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt there was pressure. We heard about it from friends. There are always some people in the agency who will say, ‘We’ve been pushed too hard.’ Analysts will say, ‘You’re trying to politicize it.’ There were people who felt there was too much pressure. Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but they were being asked again and again to re-state their judgments—do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again.”

Was it a case, then, of officials repeatedly asking for another paper until they got the answer they wanted? “There may have been some of that,” Kerr concedes. The requests came from “primarily people outside asking for the same paper again and again. There was a lot of repetitive tasking. Some of the analysts felt this was unnecessary pressure.” The repetitive requests, Kerr made clear, came from the C.I.A.’s “senior customers,” including “the White House, the vice president, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

But Kerr said that he considered questions directed at analysts “part of the process of intelligence. Policymakers should ask, ‘Why do you come to this conclusion rather than that? Why do you use this source rather than that one?’ I consider that part of the normal process. I assume policymakers are trying to make the strongest case they possibly can. You don’t go to the public to support your policy position by saying, ‘Gee, we’re really uncertain about this.’ You’re trying to get people to support your program.”

Former D.C.I. Jim Woolsey agrees. “Policymakers if they don’t like intelligence are always going to ask tough and sometimes hostile questions of the analysts,” he said. “It’s the D.C.I.’s job to protect them.”

Still, Kerr’s confirmation of the “repetitive pressure” on C.I.A. analysts by the White House and the vice president is the most candid on-the-record comment by any insider since the controversy erupted over the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. However, despite the pressures, Kerr said, analysts’ judgments were consistent over a long period of time, and reasonable, he thought, given the limited information available.

Kerr, who retired from the C.I.A. in 1992, began his internal review after receiving a call from the agency in February 2003, shortly before the war began. Rumsfeld had written to Tenet, suggesting the exercise. Kerr drove to Langley and conferred with Tenet. “I told him I wanted to put together a small team of retired C.I.A. people whom I knew, who were senior analysts and managers whom I had confidence in.” Kerr recruited three people: Tom Wolfe, a former chief analyst for the Near East and South Asia office in the Intelligence Directorate; Becky Donegan, who had been a senior analyst on terrorism; and Aris Pappas, a former C.I.A. military analyst.

“The project was called ‘Lessons Learned’—what can we learn from the intelligence analysis and what can policymakers learn from their use of intelligence?” The four-person team met once a week at Langley during the war and on into May. In this first phase of the study they looked only at the “finished intelligence”—memos, estimates, and assessments that the C.I.A. had sent to the White House, the N.S.C., State, the Pentagon, and other players.

Kerr turned in his report last June. “It was about 20 pages plus annexes—this was looking at a full range of finished intelligence.… What were the judgments made on whether and how the Iraqis might use the weapons?” Kerr concluded that the C.I.A. had erred because when U.N. inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 the agency’s sources of human intelligence dried up. “We had sources, human and technical, but we did not have the inspectors,” Kerr says. “After the inspectors left, they did not have firsthand information, firsthand access to documents.” Consequently, he said, there was “heavy reliance” by analysts on sources with less access to information. The C.I.A.’s intelligence out of Iraq became “more spotty and ambiguous.”

As a result the C.I.A. based its pre-war estimates far too much on dated intelligence. “On W.M.D., there was no question in our mind that earlier information derived out of the Gulf War, and reporting from the inspectors—they [the Iraqis] could not prove they destroyed the chemical weapons. All this combined led to the judgment. We carried those judgments forward into the 2000 period and gave them weight, perhaps too much weight, that the programs were continuing.”

Still, the Bush administration’s zeal to believe the worst about Iraqi capabilities was clear from the start, many officials involved in analyzing intelligence say today. That Saddam had nuclear ambitions was the key allegation the White House used to bolster its case against the Iraqi dictator. In late August 2002, Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, “Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon … and subject the United States and any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Later, in September, when President Bush addressed the United Nations, he cited the now infamous “aluminum tubes” in warning that Saddam could, with the right materials, have a nuclear weapon “within a year.”

The White House was absolutely convinced that the tubes were to be used as part of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program. But many people with technical expertise on the subject thought they definitely were not. For Greg Thielmann, who headed the State Department’s Office of Strategic Proliferation, the first harbinger of trouble came in the fall of 2001, when “Joe T.,” a tall, thin C.I.A. analyst, arrived at Room 6526, a small conference room at the department, to discuss a shipment of the tubes, which had been delivered from China and intercepted in Jordan en route to Iraq. Saddam, the C.I.A. man argued, wanted the tubes for centrifuges that spin uranium at high speeds to enrich it for use in a nuclear weapon.

Thielmann, a veteran foreign-service officer, was in charge of monitoring nuclear proliferation for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “I found the presentation to be unpersuasive,” Thielmann recalled. “He seemed far more a man on a mission than an objective analyst. He had something to sell.” A scientist from the Department of Energy’s (D.O.E.) Oak Ridge National Laboratory who attended the meeting also disputed Joe T.’s theory, and Thielmann’s chief analyst on Iraqi weapons was equally skeptical.

But at the C.I.A., George Tenet was absolutely certain that the tubes were meant for centrifuges. D.O.E. is not the only agency that has experts on centrifuges, he huffed—the C.I.A. had its own experts. Inside C.I.A. headquarters, however, other analysts believed Saddam wanted the tubes to modify artillery rockets like the Medusa 81s that Iraq had purchased from Italy in the 1980s. The dispute was vitally important because, if the tubes were really meant for centrifuge rotors, it was crucial evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear-bomb program.

The Pentagon, with the help of the I.N.C., decided to make its own attempt to resolve the matter. In the summer of 2002, Wolfowitz convened a secret meeting in his office with Francis Brooke, the I.N.C. adviser, and Khidir Hamza, a former chief of Saddam’s nuclear program, who had defected to America in 1994. Could the tubes be designed for use in centrifuges? Wolfowitz asked. Hamza looked at their specifications. He had never built a centrifuge, but he delivered his judgment anyway: Saddam was pursuing centrifuge research, and the tubes were adaptable. Wolfowitz circulated his conclusions to his administration allies. A few days later, the story of the “nuclear” tubes was leaked to The New York Times, where it landed on the front page.

The aluminum tubes were revisited in October 2002 when the C.I.A. assembled a 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (or N.I.E., the highest form of reporting by the U.S. intelligence community) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The aluminum tubes, the N.I.E. concluded, were “compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad’s nuclear weapons program.” The document did note that the D.O.E.’s experts didn’t think the tubes were meant for centrifuges, and the State Department didn’t, either. State thought the tubes were for use in artillery rockets and, in addition, did not believe that Iraq was rebuilding a nuclear-weapons program.

In June 2003, David Kay, the former arms inspector, was sent by the C.I.A. and the Bush administration to find what proved to be nonexistent W.M.D. in Iraq. In an interview with Vanity Fair he said that the aluminum tubes illustrated the whole intelligence problem. “We set out to answer it by asking, Was there a centrifuge program?” said Kay. “Because if there wasn’t, the tubes didn’t matter. And what we discovered was an amazingly primitive nuclear program. And nothing that looked like a centrifuge program. Then we looked at the tubes, which it turns out were for reverse engineering of Italian rockets.”

The mistaken characterization of the tubes is typical of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the key document that the Bush administration used to make its case for war. The document was unusual in that it resulted from a request by Congress—N.I.E.’s are typically requisitioned by the president, his N.S.C. staff, the State Department, the Pentagon, or the director of central intelligence. But with Bush’s request pending for a resolution authorizing war, Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote Tenet to ask for the N.I.E.

The N.I.E. would be a rush job—estimates often take months to draft—and it was approved by Tenet after a single review meeting. Officials from the C.I.A. delivered it to Congress during the night of October 1. It would be available for senators and members of the House of Representatives to read under security safeguards at the offices of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The main thrust of the N.I.E. was that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, including mobile labs in which to make them, and was building nukes. As usual, it included dissenting comments on its conclusions. For instance, the N.I.E. claimed Iraq was developing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (U.A.V.’s) probably capable of spraying deadly germs on targets; these drones could even reach the United States. But the air force dissented, saying the U.A.V.’s were most likely meant for reconnaissance.

The 90-page, classified N.I.E. was deemed insufficient for a Congress deliberating on war or peace. Legislators needed to refer to a public document, one that the American people themselves could read in order to decide whether Saddam posed an imminent threat. Graham asked for such a document, called a White Paper, which the C.I.A. handed over several days later. The paper, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,” was a declassified, 25-page condensation of the N.I.E., and it included an even further distillation of dramatic “Key Judgments.”

Unfortunately, the White Paper not only condensed but also distorted and manipulated the intelligence in the N.I.E. to paint an even worse threat. (See the sidebar on page 286 for a detailed comparison of the N.I.E. and the White Paper’s “Key Judgments” by intelligence expert John Prados.) Cautious evaluations were converted into assertions of fact, and conclusions were revised, not merely abridged, in order to make the strongest possible case for war.

On October 7, six days after the N.I.E. was delivered to Congress, Bush flew to Cincinnati to deliver a major speech on Iraq. But one or two days earlier, something very peculiar had happened. George Tenet called Stephen Hadley, principal deputy to Condoleezza Rice, several times. Take a reference to Iraq’s trying to acquire uranium from Niger out of the speech, Tenet advised. The report, it was later to be revealed, was based largely on crudely forged documents. The C.I.A. also sent over to Hadley two memos backing up Tenet’s advice.

Only six days earlier, the bogus Niger report had been included in the N.I.E., the crown jewel of the intelligence community. Now the C.I.A. director was saying, “Take it out.” Bush did not mention Niger in his Cincinnati speech, but he did say Iraq had tried to buy aluminum tubes for centrifuges “to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” And he added, “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

A mushroom cloud! This was scary stuff.

In using the phrase, Bush was echoing Rice, who had first invoked a mushroom cloud on CNN a month earlier. She had used almost the same words in speaking with Wolf Blitzer: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

On the same day that the president was talking about a mushroom cloud, Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee suggesting even more strongly than in the N.I.E. that Iraq would probably not attack America with chemical or biological weapons, or give W.M.D. to terrorists, unless the U.S. invaded. It was a fairly bold move by the C.I.A. director, since his words did not at all fit the White House game plan. Or perhaps he was simply hedging his bets.

On January 28, 2003, Bush delivered his State of the Union address, which included the infamous 16 words that were to become a major embarrassment for the White House: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

How did the bogus reference that had been deleted from the Cincinnati speech four months earlier manage to arise, phoenix-like, in the State of the Union address?

The original intelligence on the Niger-Iraq connection had been obtained not long after 9/11, when Italy delivered a report to the C.I.A. about the visit of an Iraqi official to Niger in February 1999 which suggested that his purpose was to buy enriched uranium. The report lacked details, but, in the fervor of collecting any evidence that might link Iraq with illegal weapons, it caught the attention of Cheney. Seeking confirmation, the vice president’s office asked the C.I.A. to investigate, and it in turn asked former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV to travel to Niger.

In Niger, Wilson spoke to the U.S. ambassador Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, who knew of the report and believed she had already discredited it. Carlton Fulford, a four-star Marine general, had also visited Niger to check out the story, and had returned satisfied there was nothing to it. Once in Niger, Wilson discovered that any such deal was improbable, if not impossible. Had an official transaction been made, any memorandum indicating as much would have borne the signature of Nigerois officials. There are only two mines in Niger that produce uranium, and they are operated by the French nuclear company Cogema. Any changes in production or transportation would have to have been approved by the company. Even if someone wanted to sell enriched uranium to Iraq in secret, it would have been virtually impossible to do so without alerting the French, due to the tremendous cost of mining extra products. Wilson returned to Washington and filed his report, which was circulated. Because he had been told the vice president’s office had made the original request for the report, Wilson assumed Cheney was informed of his findings: “There would have been a very specific answer provided … to the very specific question that he asked,” Wilson told Vanity Fair in January.

Wilson was shocked when Bush cited the Africa-uranium story in his State of the Union speech. He tried to get to the bottom of how the assertion had been included, but to no avail. He told journalist Seymour Hersh, “I gave them months to correct the record … but they kept on lying.” Finally, Wilson went public with his information. At a conference in Washington, Wilson revealed what he had discovered in Niger to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who got Wilson’s permission to print his findings in a May 6 column. In a June 8 appearance on Meet the Press, Condoleezza Rice finally responded, “Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.”

Wilson contacted people he knew in the government—he will not name them—and threatened to correct the record if Rice would not. She didn’t and he did, writing a July 6 op-ed piece in The New York Times called “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” and talking with Washington Post reporters Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus for a piece that appeared the same day. To discuss the two articles Wilson went on Meet the Press.

As the uranium hit the fan, Tenet accepted the blame, saying that he was “responsible for the approval process in my agency.” Yet he added that the C.I.A. had warned the National Security Council the intelligence was dubious. The White House continued to deny any responsibility. Rice told Face the Nation, “Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence … it would have been gone.” The next day, Bush echoed this statement: “Subsequent to the speech, the C.I.A. had some doubts. But when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared.”

But the C.I.A. would not go down all alone. On July 22, Stephen Hadley admitted that he “should have recalled” the two memos from the C.I.A. alerting the White House to the questionability of the Niger intelligence. While both memos were addressed to Hadley (one was addressed to Rice as well), Bush continued to express complete confidence in his national-security team. Hadley offered to resign, but the president refused.

Press Secretary Ari Fleischer by now had admitted, “This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.” And Rice conceded that “knowing what we know now we would not have put it in the president’s speech.”

Cheney’s office claimed to have no knowledge of Wilson or his report: “The vice president doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press,” said the vice president’s spokeswoman, Catherine Martin. Cheney’s position was supported by Tenet, who said Wilson’s trip was made on “the C.I.A.’s own initiative.”

Yet behind the scenes the administration mounted a nasty counterattack on Wilson, leaking to at least six journalists that he had been assigned to the Niger investigation merely because his wife, Valerie Plame, was a C.I.A. officer. Only conservative columnist Robert Novak printed the leak, citing “two senior administration officials” as the source. Apparently, however, they didn’t realize it is a federal crime for officials knowingly to reveal the identity of an undercover C.I.A. operative. A Justice Department investigation ensued; it produced no results for three months and didn’t get much encouragement from President Bush, who told the press, “I don’t know if we’re going to find the senior administration official.” But finally, on December 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation, and a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed. A grand jury was convened, and subpoenas to witnesses and for material have been issued. Reportedly, Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, told the F.B.I. (which is also investigating) that he discussed and circulated damaging information about Plame after the Novak column was published. The White House denied Rove had leaked her name. Incredibly, he allegedly claimed that the press campaign was a legitimate way to counter what he called a politically motivated attack by Wilson. Wilson says he will reveal the name of the leaker in his book, The Politics of Truth, to be published this month.

In the spring of 2002, talk in Washington of an Iraq war remained limited to behind-the-scenes discussions and a smattering of speculative newspaper articles. In London, however, talk of an American-led invasion was already widespread. Opposition was growing sharply, and loudly, in Parliament and in Tony Blair’s Cabinet. Though few in Washington dwelled on its importance at the time, Blair’s predicament would profoundly impact the Bush administration’s war deliberations.

In April, Blair visited President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where Blair made clear that he would back whatever America decided about Iraq. But, he said, any action against Saddam would need to proceed with the backing of the United Nations. Without U.N. support, Blair explained, there was little chance Parliament, much less the British public, would ever support an invasion. He said that U.N. weapons inspectors would need to return to Iraq and confirm the Bush administration’s fears about Saddam’s weapons programs before he would be in a position to support a war openly.

In Texas, Blair had discussed using the United Nations to force Saddam to re-admit weapons inspectors, with the sanction of war if he refused. The British prime minister did not yet understand that, in the era of George W. Bush, nothing was that simple. For the British government, dealing with the administration was a novel experience. “Usually, what the national-security adviser told one was gospel,” one senior British official says today. “What you got from Condi was ‘Hmm, that’s a good idea—we’ll talk about that. Let’s see what we can do.’ This put much more of a burden on the diplomatic staff to find out what was going on, who was up and who was down. And what we saw, more and more, was that power in the government swirled around the vice president and the Department of Defense.”

Blair, like many in the British media, may have assumed that his meeting with Bush in Crawford would soon be followed by an American-led diplomatic campaign at the United Nations, but nothing happened. Blair had not long been home when hawks in the Pentagon and in the vice president’s office began to do all in their power to reverse both of the concessions Blair’s staff thought he had secured: the commitments to go to the U.N. and to put pressure on Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the occupied territories and negotiate with Yasser Arafat.

“Our position, Bush’s position, was that Saddam was an outlaw,” says a senior official in Cheney’s office. “We already had all the U.N. resolutions we needed to go to war. We didn’t think we needed any more arguments to justify it, or its legality.” The hawks’ view, he says, was that by maintaining W.M.D. programs, whether or not the weapons were ready for use, Saddam was in clear breach of U.N. resolutions passed during the 1990s. All that remained was to issue an ultimatum and to attack when (as everyone assumed) he refused to comply. As Sir Christopher Meyer puts it, “They didn’t see why they had to prove what they already knew.”

Even then, in the middle of 2002, says the Cheney official, it was clear to the hawks that “taking the U.N. route” contained a potentially disastrous pitfall for them. To make the case for an international invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration would need to prove that Iraq was an “imminent” threat. The only way Hussein’s regime could be considered an imminent threat was if the world could be shown it had the capability to launch a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack on a Western country.

“The imminence of the threat from Iraq’s W.M.D. was never the real issue [for us],” says the Cheney aide. “W.M.D. were on our minds, but they weren’t the key thing. What was really driving us was our overall view of terrorism, and the strategic conditions of the Middle East.”

As the weeks passed with no evidence of any move by the Bush administration to engage the United Nations, Blair began to come under pressure. Within his Cabinet, the idea of supporting an American attack on Iraq without the backing of the Security Council seemed almost unthinkable. At the Cabinet’s first meeting after Blair’s trip to Crawford in April, several ministers warned that the consequences would be dire. The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, evidently told Blair that an invasion without U.N. support might break international law. Even with U.N. support, Goldsmith is said to have advised, Blair would need to demonstrate that the threat to British national security was real and imminent. That meant one thing: proving Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

With no word from Bush by the end of July, Blair decided to press once more for engagement with the U.N. When Blair wants to make a point about foreign policy, he has the habit of sending Bush crisp, personal memorandums. They are always couched in amiable terms: they begin with “Dear George” and are signed “Tony.” In late July, Blair sent one of the most important of these missives by diplomatic pouch, stressing the need to make progress over Israel, and again urging Bush to put Saddam’s breaches of earlier resolutions before the U.N.

Blair followed up by sending his chief foreign-policy adviser, Sir David Manning (now ambassador to the U.S.), to Washington to meet with Condoleezza Rice. Unexpectedly, while the two were speaking, Bush called Rice into the Oval Office. Manning followed and met with the president for about 20 minutes. “Manning reiterated the U.N. message very strongly,” says a senior British official. “He said, ‘This is very important to us, your main ally.’ ” Manning, in fact, warned that if Bush did not go the U.N. route Blair’s political position might become untenable.

This appeared to get Bush’s attention. Several days after Manning’s return to London, Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. It was a short call, about 15 minutes. According to a White House official who has studied the transcript of the phone call, “The way it read was that, come what may, Saddam was going to go; they said they were going forward, they were going to take out the regime, and they were doing the right thing. Blair did not need any convincing. There was no ‘Come on, Tony, we’ve got to get you on board.’ I remember reading it and then thinking, O.K., now I know what we’re going to be doing for the next year.” Before the call, this official says, he had the impression that the probability of invasion was high, but still below 100 percent. Afterward, he says, “it was a done deal.”

Still, Blair repeatedly told both the media and his own Cabinet ministers that no decision had been made. Clare Short, then Blair’s international-development secretary, kept a diary throughout this period. On July 26, she wrote, she raised her “simmering worry about Iraq” in a meeting with Blair. She wanted a debate on Iraq in the next Cabinet meeting, but he said it was unnecessary because “it would get hyped.… He said nothing decided, and wouldn’t be over summer.”

Blair, in fact, kept his top ministers in the dark for weeks. As late as September 9, Short’s diary recorded, “T[ony] B[lair] gave me assurances when I asked for Iraq to be discussed at Cabinet that no decision made and not imminent.” Later that day, she learned from the chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, that Blair had asked to make 20,000 British troops available for deployment in the Gulf. Still, she believed her prime minister’s assurances, but wrote that, if she had not, she would “almost certainly” have resigned from the government. At that juncture, her resignation would have dealt Blair a very damaging blow.

By the beginning of August 2002, it was clear to many of Bush’s top advisers that the president was committed to using any means necessary to remove Saddam from power. That, however, raised a host of new questions. Would the U.S. attack alone? Or with an international coalition, as Bush’s father had? Or with a group of select allies? Above everything hovered the specter of the United Nations. Unless Bush secured U.N. approval, Blair was warning, the British could not join the war effort.

After months of Blair’s hectoring, it was Colin Powell who finally forced the issue. On August 5, after dinner in the White House private dining room, Powell and the president adjourned to the president’s residential office. There Powell impressed upon Bush that international support was crucial both to legitimize the war in the eyes of the world and to lay the groundwork for postwar reconstruction. Furthermore, polls were showing that a majority of Americans favored seeking U.N. approval. Reluctantly, Bush agreed. Powell left the meeting pleased. He felt that U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan was a man he could work with; behind closed doors, he actually called Annan “my man Kofi.”

Meanwhile, Blair was putting pressure on his own intelligence apparatus to come up with Iraqi W.M.D. In Britain, the equivalent of the C.I.A. is called M.I.6, and intelligence is channeled through a body known as the Joint Intelligence Committee (J.I.C.), which has always operated in splendid isolation from politicians. Blair proposed to ignore this convention and publish his own dossier on Iraq’s W.M.D. based on secret intelligence. Blair’s loyal but irascible communications chief, Alastair Campbell, and the staff of the Downing Street press office were to have a huge influence on this project.

Their reactions to the J.I.C.’s draft report on September 9 were very critical. “Needs much more weight, writing, detail,” wrote special adviser Philip Bassett to Campbell, “and we need to find a way to get over this a) by having better intelligence material, b) by having more material (and better flagged-up), and c) more convincing material.” On September 11 an e-mail went around the intelligence community. The anonymous author wrote, “No. 10 through the Chairman want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence. This is therefore a last (!) call for any items of intelligence that agencies think can and should be included. Responses needed by 12.00 tomorrow.”

The M.I.6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, called on Blair at Downing Street. He had the answer to the prime minister’s prayers: a source inside Iraq saying Saddam had stocks of chemical and biological weapons which could be deployed within 45 minutes. There was no corroboration, and the source’s contact with M.I.6 was not direct: his claim had been supplied via one of the I.N.C.’s rivals, the London-based Iraqi National Accord. There had been no attempt to run the claim by the acknowledged intelligence experts on W.M.D. “You just never do this,” says one intelligence official. “It’s Rule No. 1.” Just once before that he knows of, the official adds, M.I.6. had passed raw, unanalyzed intelligence to a prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. On that occasion, British intelligence reacted with horror, and a memo went to all agencies saying this must never happen again.

However, the 45-minutes claim was mentioned in Blair’s 50-page dossier four times and was stressed in an introduction written by Blair. When the government’s W.M.D. experts saw it, they were appalled, but when they raised objections, they were told that M.I.6 had new information which refuted them, from a source so secret that they could be given no details.

The 45-minutes claim appeared in headlines around the globe. In the months to come, the dossier was cited time and again as the British and American governments argued their case through the media, to legislators, and at the United Nations. No one knew better than Tony Blair how much he had gambled on his belief that Saddam really did have W.M.D. In the late fall of 2002 a group of M.I.6 staff from Washington joined Sir Richard Dearlove for an evening meeting at Downing Street. As the participants were leaving, Blair shook Dearlove’s hand. “My fate is in your hands, Richard,” he said.

IV.

The United States has not been popular at the United Nations for a very long time. From his first months in office, in fact, George Bush and his neoconservative colleagues had made clear their administration had little use for the U.N., which Richard Perle called “the looming chatterbox on the Hudson.” (Actually, the U.N. is on Manhattan’s East River.) The White House began honing its isolationism in March 2001 when it pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 document ratified by 54 countries to limit the emissions that cause global warming. That was followed by the declaration in May 2002 that Clinton’s signature on the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) treaty was now null and void. These agreements had flaws, to be sure, but little effort was made by Team Bush to overcome them, indicating the issue was more about an antipathy toward internationalism, and especially the United Nations, its leading incarnation.

“These actions,” says the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke, “stem from a philosophical difference more profound than any difference since 1920,” the year the League of Nations was formed. “They did this because they believe that the weaker the U.N. is, the stronger the U.S. is.” The Bush administration, in fact, almost gleefully thumbed its nose at the U.N.; Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who had spearheaded the effort to ditch the I.C.C. in the Hague, has remarked that “if the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost ten stories it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

And so it was a momentous occasion when on September 12, 2002, President Bush rose to address the U.N. General Assembly. Despite his obvious ambivalence, the president managed to hit all the right notes. He announced that the U.S. would return to unesco (which it had left in 1984, citing poor management, corruption, and excessive spending). He singled out the plight of Palestinians. One by one, he enumerated the Security Council resolutions that Saddam had flouted, and called the U.N. “the world’s most important multilateral body.”

But Colin Powell, who used translator’s headphones even for English speakers, reportedly grew nervous as the speech wore on: he had yet to hear a critical promise that had been the cause of much hand-wringing the night before. Had Cheney changed Bush’s mind at the last minute? In fact, due to a glitch, the words never made it onto Bush’s teleprompter. But the president, in a rare moment of felicitous improvisation, managed to say the magic words: “We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions.”

It was a critical statement—the first time Bush had acknowledged the legitimacy of the U.N.’s role in a possible war against Iraq. The audience was impressed and took him at his word. “It’s not for us to mistrust the motives of a member state, certainly not a member state like the U.S.,” says Shashi Tharoor, Annan’s undersecretary-general for communications and public information. “So when the president made the statement, ‘We’ve got all these resolutions, Iraq’s been fiddling around for the last couple of years not allowing inspectors back in, they’ll either comply or we’ll act,’ the secretary-general and officials here welcomed that as a way of getting Iraq back into compliance.”

For the moment, at least, the fate of Iraq was in the U.N.’s hands. Annan went to work immediately, urging leaders of the Arab League to press Saddam to reinstate the weapons inspectors in Iraq, and helping Iraqi representatives draft a reply to the U.N. Four days later, on September 16, Annan stood before the microphones at the U.N. and announced he had received a letter from Iraqi authorities that said Iraq would allow inspectors access “without conditions.” Several blocks away at his suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, Powell read the text. In fact, it did not allow unconditional access, as Annan had said. Nowhere did it say “unfettered access,” which was understood to mean “anytime, anyplace.”

White House staffers flew into a rage. In their view Annan was giving Saddam the kind of wiggle room that would allow him to avert military action. Reportedly, later that night, Powell and Rice, in a conference call, chewed out Annan for taking matters into his own hands. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Negroponte, was dispatched to talk to the French. “Did you know about this letter?” he demanded of French ambassador Jean-David Levitte. Levitte replied, yes, the French were fully aware of it. People at the White House were beside themselves. It was bad enough their plan was in the hands of “my man Kofi.” Now it appeared the French were involved as well.

Relations between the U.N. leadership and the White House deteriorated in the following days as word of American military preparations seeped out. The Central Command timetable was already in place, and by September 21 the existence of a war plan that included targets for U.S. warplanes and missiles, the size of U.S. ground forces, and potential lines of attack was being leaked to the press. Bush’s U.N. strategy was becoming clear: the goal was not to get Saddam to disarm through peaceful means, but rather to get a U.N. stamp of approval for American military action as quickly as possible. Indeed, Bush’s speech before the General Assembly was soon seen by the delegates for what it was: a tell-‘em-what-they-want-to-hear spiel even though you don’t believe it.

In the following days, the administration worked steadily to undo what had just been done at the U.N. On September 19, Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that the current inspection team was weak, and that “the more inspectors that are in there, the less likely something’s going to happen.” Bush, meanwhile, told reporters that, “if the United Nations Security Council won’t deal with the problem, the United States and some of our friends will.”

This was not the kind of talk Kofi Annan or anyone at the U.N. wanted to hear, and it made the job of American diplomats at the U.N. far tougher. Their first order of business was negotiating a piece of paper, Resolution 1441, laying out the U.N.’s demands on Iraq. Among the many thorny questions to be dealt with was whether the U.N. would handle the matter in a single resolution—one that triggered war if Iraq’s response was deemed unacceptable—or in two resolutions, one setting forth the demands, a second that could authorize an invasion if Iraq did not comply. The White House, impatient with the process from the outset, wanted a single resolution. The French emphatically wanted two.

Resolution 1441 was to be negotiated among the 15 member countries of the Security Council, five of which—the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China—were permanent members with veto rights. The U.S. delegation was led by Negroponte, who as a former ambassador to Honduras had been at the center of the storm regarding support of the Nicaraguan contras. He had since earned a reputation as a patient negotiator with old-world civility. Representing Britain was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a man whose eloquence the 15-member group found wondrous, if a tad grand.

On the French side was the charming Jean-David Levitte, the son of a Russian father and an Anglo-Dutch mother, who worked diligently behind the scenes and often made unbearable experiences bearable. “Levitte was entirely at ease with negotiating with Anglo-Saxons,” says Greenstock, a close family friend. “Because of his upbringing and his broad diplomatic intelligence he hasn’t got a problem with that. He hasn’t got a drop of French blood in him.” Nevertheless, adds Greenstock, “you can’t tell that from his diplomacy and his policies, because he is 100 percent passionately French.”

It was clear that the Security Council’s mission would be Kafka-esque. From the first draft of 1441, prepared chiefly by the U.S., it was evident that Bush was chomping at the bit to get the diplomatic stuff out of the way. The draft included demands so Draconian that Saddam could never accept them, thereby creating a trigger for war. It stated, for example, that the inspectors may be followed around by representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council, as well as military forces from those countries.

“It was so remote from reality,” says Hans Blix, chief inspector of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (unmovic), who, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (I.A.E.A.) Mohamed ElBaradei, saw a first draft. “It was written by someone who didn’t understand how [inspections] function.” Seeing that it didn’t stand a chance of getting adopted, the U.S. finally abandoned the draft.

Returning to the drawing board, the U.S. and the U.K. hammered out a beefed-up inspection regimen with unimpeded, unconditional, unrestricted access to all buildings, including Saddam’s palaces, as well as interviews with scientists. The rest of the Security Council would eventually agree. The sticking point was that the French wouldn’t accept any resolution with a “hidden trigger,” leading automatically to war without a second Security Council discussion. The U.S. wanted just the opposite: the explicit right to decide, alone, if and when an invasion would take place.

According to a French diplomat, the U.S. attempted various amateurish maneuvers. For example, they would have the French look at certain paragraphs that spoke to the issue of an automatic trigger; the French would insist on deletions, which the U.S. would appear to accept; then the deletions would pop up elsewhere in the text. “We didn’t like it in paragraph four,” a French diplomat says, recalling the mind-numbing dialogue. “We don’t like it in paragraph two, either.”

No one held it against Negroponte. Everyone understood that he had little room in which to move—an impression underlined by the White House enforcers seen hovering around the U.N. hallways and lounges. One was Elliott Abrams, a top official at the N.S.C. who had pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information from Congress about the Iran-contra scandal.

“The U.N. Security Council was under close watch by the White House, by Condoleezza, and also the Defense Department,” says Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexican ambassador to the U.N. at the time. A fiery, combative force of nature, he recalls that nearly every meeting was attended by different American notetakers who were never introduced. “We were constantly told that there were certain positions that could not be changed, because the Defense Department or the White House will not allow this to be changed.”

Given the circumstances, Negroponte emerged as a sympathetic character. He started a running joke: “Sorry, guys, I have no more marbles in my pocket. I gave you what I got.”

“We were always joking, ‘How about your pockets, John? Look at your pockets,’ ” recalls Aguilar Zinser, who had been friendly with him since Negroponte’s days as ambassador to Mexico. “And John would say, ‘Sorry, I’ve got nothing in my pockets. I went to Washington, and I tried to bring something in my pockets, but I couldn’t … ’ We always got John to push back Washington and pressure for a little more.”

The toughest spot was reserved for Greenstock, who was caught in a tug-of-war between England and America. An impeccably controlled gentleman now serving as Blair’s envoy in Baghdad, Greenstock soberly recalls that the wrangling’s being funneled to the top levels “made it more difficult when it came to how to plan new language, and it made it more difficult to give any humble advice to the Washington system on how tactics should be played.”

By November 8, Negroponte and Greenstock had helped the Security Council assemble a draft of Resolution 1441 that everyone could agree on, for the sole reason that it included language that each side could cling to in order to support its point. Satisfying the French, the resolution stated that the council would meet for a second time, following the report from the inspectors, to “consider the situation and need for full compliance.” Satisfying the White House, it stated that 1441 was Iraq’s “final opportunity.” The resolution was a masterwork of obfuscation, leaving open the questions of the timetable and of how the council would judge Iraqi compliance.

Driving this point home, following the passage of the resolution, the ambassadors each made a statement clarifying their opposite reading of the document. In demanding two stages, the French asserted, the resolution validated the competence of the Security Council to handle this matter. Negroponte, meanwhile, in the same breath that he assured that the resolution contained “no hidden triggers” with respect to the use of force, stated that 1441 “does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq.”

How could these assertions exist side by side? Because French ambassador Levitte conveyed to both Greenstock and Negroponte “with a wink and a nod,” says one U.S. official, that the French understood this resolution was enough to give America and Britain legal cover for going it alone if they felt that the Iraqis had not complied to satisfaction. That, and that alone, was the only reason the U.S. agreed to 1441.

On December 7, the Iraqis, in perfunctory accordance with the resolution, issued a 12,000-page document that purported to account for the state of its weapons programs. With top-secret gravity, the all-important document was taken by two strong, young U.N. staffers from Baghdad to Cyprus to Athens to Frankfurt to New York. The report was a mess, a truckload of paper that not only repeated unverified information from previous declarations, but also repeated it in several places. The U.S. angrily asserted that the report constituted a “material breach.” But the Americans didn’t push it as a casus belli, mainly because the British were determined to give the inspectors a chance to prove, once and for all, that Iraq was lying about its weaponry.

And there matters stood for several weeks as the White House built its case that Iraq was in “material breach,” thereby justifying an invasion. But the U.S. effectively undermined its complaints by the issues it chose to make hay of. In particular, the State Department zeroed in on the fact that the Iraqi declaration failed to mention Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Niger. However, both the U.S. and British governments had refused to divulge any intelligence on the issue, something the I.A.E.A. had been asking for since September, when the Niger-uranium charges were first made, in Blair’s dossier.

“We’re begging the Brits and Americans for intelligence to help us do our job, thinking, presumably, it’s in their interest to give it to us, right? If we can uncover some good stuff, it helps make their case,” recalls Mark Gwozdecky, a senior official at the I.A.E.A. “But it’s not happening.” Of course, the world would learn later that the Niger claims were fraudulent and, further, that the administration had suspected as much before December.

The inspectors were the ones who could give the administration its casus belli; it made sense to be nice to them. Instead, the administration treated them like patsies for Iraq. Allegedly, as early as January 2002, Wolfowitz ordered a C.I.A. investigation into Hans Blix, the straight-shooting 75-year-old Swedish scientist, who’d been brought back from retirement by Annan to head up the new U.N. inspections regime. The hope was to establish that in Blix’s tenure as head of the I.A.E.A., during the 90s, he was a pushover when it came to the Iraqis. However, when the C.I.A. report showed that Blix had been sufficiently tough on the Iraqis, Wolfowitz “hit the ceiling,” according to a former State Department official. In October, at a State Department meeting, Wolfowitz mustered his best tough-guy act, taking it upon himself to inform the veteran inspector, “You do know they have weapons, don’t you?” (Wolfowitz says he never ordered an investigation of Blix, and only asked questions about Blix’s performance as the head of the I.A.E.A. During the October meeting, Wolfowitz says, he pressed Blix on whether he doubted the existence of the Iraqi W.M.D. program or whether he had begun with the conclusion of the unscom inspectors that there were unaccounted-for programs or weapons. Wolfowitz says he recalls expressing surprise when, he alleges, Blix said he had no opinion.)

Not long thereafter, Cheney followed this up by telling the inspectors that if their findings didn’t suit the administration “we are ready to discredit [you].” “It was brutal,” recalls Blix, “and I don’t think I would have ever put it in that form.”

In January, as U.N. inspectors began scurrying around Iraq searching for forbidden weapons they were largely unable to find, the consequences of the White House’s astonishing diplomatic ineptitude became painfully apparent. This occurred in the wake of a January 13 luncheon around the mahogany table in Condoleezza Rice’s White House office. The meeting was called by the French; in attendance were Chirac’s top adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and Ambassador Levitte, who’d just left his post at the U.N. to become the French ambassador to the U.S. The French wanted to discuss their country’s reservations about the war.

Gourdault-Montagne talked of the unrest that would no doubt erupt among Iraq’s many ethnic groups, and he warned of increased terror. Rice pooh-poohed his every objection. “Everything was dismissed,” says a French diplomat, recalling Rice’s reaction. “ ‘There is terror already in the world and the rest of the Arab world won’t feel resentment. If it does, the leaders of the Arab world will support the administration.’ … Every good reason not to go to war was irrelevant.” It was clear, says this diplomat, “that the decision to go to war was taken.”

According to highly placed American insiders on both sides of the political aisle, Levitte made the U.S. an offer it should have accepted. Hoping to avoid an open breach between the two countries, he suggested to Rice that if America was determined to go to war it should not seek a second resolution, that Resolution 1441 arguably provided the White House with enough cover, and that France would keep quiet if the administration went ahead. The solution wasn’t ideal, but it would allow France not to have to use its veto. It would maintain the unity of the Security Council, safeguard Franco-U.S. relations, and allow France to retain its “good cop” status in Arab eyes. It seemed a win-win. (Levitte’s spokesperson claims that this suggestion was put to Hadley, Rice’s deputy, a few weeks later.)

Afterward, the White House wrestled with the offer. Many argued that 1441 gave the U.S. sufficient cover to invade without the second resolution. Indeed, some believe there was ample precedent for doing so. In 1999 the U.S. and its nato allies initiated military operations in Kosovo without Security Council approval for the very reason that Russia had promised to veto. Then Madeleine Albright and Holbrooke had laid the diplomatic groundwork and cultivated allies—a key difference from Powell’s approach.

The problem, once again, was Tony Blair. Bush had already promised Blair he would seek a second resolution; Blair had said he had no chance to gain Parliament’s support without it. Not surprisingly, when the White House sought Blair’s opinion on the French overture, the British balked. According to Jeremy Greenstock, Blair smelled a trap.

“The French,” Greenstock says today, “wanted us to be very clearly in the wrong, and we didn’t accept that suggestion. There was an element of political trap in it. That we wouldn’t even try to get political legitimacy would put us even more in the wrong, and the French more in the right.”

In the end, hemmed in by Blair’s political limitations, the U.S. felt it had no choice but to reject the French offer. Instead, it set its sights on securing a majority vote at the Security Council when the second resolution came up for a vote. At worst this would be a symbolic victory, since a veto by one Security Council permanent member is enough to kill a resolution but is not considered collegial. At best the second resolution could be used to strong-arm France into agreeing. What no one in the White House apparently expected was the angry response of French president Jacques Chirac to the January 13 Washington meeting.

The French government dug in its heels against the war—and the French, as is their habit, did not do so quietly. A week after the lunch in Rice’s conference room, France’s frustration exploded in a display of pique that has gone down in U.S. diplomatic circles as “the Day of Diplomatic Ambush.” The messenger was the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, a six-foot-three silver-haired member of Chirac’s inner circle, who is not noted for his reticence or tact.

It was January 20, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Powell had several speaking engagements, all of which he canceled to go to New York for a diplomatic roundtable on the Iraq question. Before a lunch at the French ambassador’s residence on Park Avenue, de Villepin gathered a circle of reporters and announced in combative tones, “We will not associate ourselves with military intervention that is not supported by the international community.… There’s no point in choosing the worst possible solution—military intervention.”

The White House was livid at de Villepin’s attack. A major European nation’s public opposition to the idea of an invasion, even stated by as flamboyant a figure as de Villepin, erected a flag under which dozens of other, more timid countries might rally. Powell, who had perhaps been encouraged by the earlier French offer, took it the worst. His deputy Richard Armitage would later recall to the Financial Times that Powell “was very unamused. When he’s unamused, he gets pretty cold.… He puts the eyes on you and there is no doubt when his jaws are jacked.” But a member of the French delegation believed Powell was making them a scapegoat for his own defeat. “At that moment,” says the diplomat, “Powell had lost his domestic battle. He knew there would be a war with or without the United Nations.”

De Villepin’s outburst was splashed across front pages on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than attempt to head off the gathering opposition by finding a way to placate the French, the Bush administration did what it does best: it counterattacked. In the wake of furious denunciations of the French by neoconservatives, America erupted in a frenzy of French-bashing. Three cafeterias at the House of Representatives changed their menus to read “freedom fries” rather than “French fries.” In a memorable turn of phrase borrowed from The Simpsons, Jonah Goldberg, of the conservative National Review, likened the French to “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

In a vain attempt to recapture civility, French ambassador Levitte met with a group from the Bush administration, equipped with a list of recent insults directed at the French. The group didn’t get it and told him he was over-reacting, that “they are just jokes.” Veterans of the U.N. could only shake their heads. “If you had any other president in office, had it been Clinton or Bush Sr. or even Reagan or Carter,” says Richard Holbrooke, “any one of the other presidents since the end of the Vietnam War would have just picked up the phone and said to a French counterpart, ‘Let’s get this over with, because we can’t afford this.’ ”

But the White House, to the dismay of many in the diplomatic community, merely appeared energized by the whole spectacle. Rumsfeld eagerly jumped into the fray, deriding France and Germany as bastions of “Old Europe.” Administration officials seemed almost exhilarated to be further driving a wedge into the European community that had France and Germany on one side, Spain and Britain on the other.

Bruce Jackson, a freelance envoy to the former Soviet bloc, enlisted the critical support of Václav Havel for the so-called Letter of Eight, a statement of solidarity with the U.S. signed by Britain, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Italy, which was published in The Wall Street Journal. (The White House denied involvement in the letter.) Significantly, the letter did not mention the word “war” and instead simply stated that “we must remain united in insisting that [Saddam’s] regime is disarmed.”

The administration reportedly liked the letter so much it put Jackson to work producing the so-called Vilnius Ten letter, in which 10 Eastern European countries professed their support for the American effort. It didn’t seem to embarrass the administration that everyone in diplomatic circles knew the likes of Latvia and Estonia couldn’t say no to America; their admission to nato was to be decided by the Senate in three months.

French-bashing may have made the war’s proponents feel good, but it cost them dearly. Had matters remained civil, Monday, January 27, might have gone down as the day the U.S. got the U.N. to sanction its war. It was then that Hans Blix delivered his first report on what the inspectors were finding in Iraq. While Blix acknowledged that no W.M.D. had been found, he did point out that Iraq had failed to account for undetermined quantities of the nerve agent VX and anthrax, and for 6,500 chemical bombs. Blix castigated Iraq for providing its army with missiles that violated U.N. restrictions and failing to let the inspectors use U-2 surveillance planes. “Iraq,” he concluded, “appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and live in peace.”

However strong Blix’s message, it was all but lost in the din of diplomatic sniping. France’s position had been strengthened when Germany, its chief ally in Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe,” was voted onto the Security Council, thereby ensuring one more vote against the war. German diplomats and their French counterparts argued that the inspections were making progress and only needed more time. Certainly, that case was defensible. But it was plain to see that something else was coming into play: the view among many European nations that America was out of control.

Even the Spanish, the administration’s strongest ally after Britain, realized the Americans were shooting themselves in the foot. On a visit to Crawford, Spanish prime minister José María Aznar implored Bush, “We need a lot of Powell, and not much of Rumsfeld.” In the opinion of Inocencio Arias, the Spanish ambassador to the U.N., the administration’s aggressive behavior merely made the French more determined to pry the rest of Europe away from American influence.

“I think the French and Germans were honest in believing that the inspections could work,” Arias says today. “But at the same time, deep in the heart of the leaders of France and Germany was the idea that they resent the world becoming the domain of only one superpower.”

By insisting on a second resolution, and then alienating the very countries they needed in order to get it, the U.S. had painted itself into a very tight corner.

It was now or never: the U.S. had one chance to persuade the world that Saddam really was an imminent threat. “Privately,” says Jeremy Greenstock, “the French indicated that if we found W.M.D. in Saddam’s hands, then their view would change.”

On February 5, Bush wheeled out his Big Gun: Colin Powell, the senior American official who retained credibility with the U.N. community. With George Tenet sitting behind him, as Powell had insisted, the secretary of state gave his speech, the most dramatic American presentation at the U.N. since Adlai Stevenson’s during the Cuban missile crisis. For 75 minutes, he presented a long list of reasons to be afraid, very afraid. To illustrate Iraqi stockpiles of anthrax, he held up a vial. “This is just about the amount of a teaspoon—less than a teaspoonful of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001,” he said.

Powell’s bag of tricks was large, if not deep. He played scratchy recordings of intercepted conversations in Arabic: “forbidden ammo,” “remove,” “modified vehicle”—the scary words echoed throughout the chamber. They plainly revealed, Powell said, that the Iraqi government was attempting to thwart inspectors. “These are not assertions,” he told the audience, “these are facts.” The U.S. considered the speech a slam dunk. Indeed, the American press played it as a magnificent achievement.

Powell’s recitation of Iraq’s arsenal sounded frightening; despite his best efforts, he delivered the hard-line speech that the administration wanted. The C.I.A. had pushed to include a section on the supposed mobile biological-weapons labs. Not to worry, they assured him, there was not one but four sources. One source, though, was an Iraqi major known to be a liar, as Tenet later obliquely admitted to his chagrin in a speech at Georgetown University on February 5, 2004, one year to the day of Powell’s U.N. address. As far back as May 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a “fabrication notification,” a warning to other intelligence agencies to steer clear of the man; somehow the C.I.A. never saw it.

In describing the mobile labs in his address to the U.N., Powell relied heavily on another C.I.A. source, a chemical engineer who claimed to be an eyewitness “who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological-agent production runs. He reported that … production always began on Thursdays at midnight, because Iraq thought unscom [the U.N. inspectors] would not inspect on the Muslim holy day, Thursday night through Friday.”

What Powell didn’t know was that the supposed eyewitness was in Germany, and the C.I.A. had not even interviewed him. According to a high-level intelligence source, there were a lot of unanswered questions about the “eyewitness” and his story: “The Germans never gave us access to him. Until very recently the Germans would not even take questions, and, even then, only a limited number. The source appeared at a refugee camp in Germany, and his brother is a senior I.N.C. official. His whole story of how he got out of Iraq and into Germany was inconsistent.”

Even before the many errors in Powell’s speech were revealed, the Germans and French and others sensed who had determined its contents. In private, they were scathingly condescending about the spectacle of Powell, whom they viewed as a true statesman, being manipulated like a marionette by the White House.

“Everyone felt uncomfortable,” says a U.N. official, “to see a man saying these lies. You knew it was bullshit.”

Many of the administration’s friends were likewise unimpressed. Sir Christopher Meyer says, “I remember saying, ‘I do hope he’s got something really strong to say.’ And, of course, he didn’t.”

The battle lines were now drawn more clearly than at any point during the yearlong path to war: no concrete proof of Iraqi W.M.D., no U.N. backing. Powell insisted he had supplied such proof. But, just nine days later, on February 14, Hans Blix appeared once more before the Security Council, and his findings contradicted Powell’s. The trucks that Powell had described as being used for chemical decontamination, Blix said, could just as easily have been used for “routine activity.” He contradicted Powell’s assertion that the Iraqis knew in advance when the inspectors would be arriving. Mohamed ElBaradei of the I.A.E.A. weighed in as well, insisting that, at least on the nuclear front, there was no evidence Saddam had any viable program. Further, Blix said that Iraq was finally taking steps toward real cooperation with the inspectors, allowing them to enter Iraqi presidential palaces, among other previously proscribed sites.

Buttressed by Blix’s remarks, the French wasted no time in portraying the White House as warmongers willing to distort the truth to get the invasion they so badly wanted. “War is always the sanction of failure,” de Villepin told the Security Council after Blix’s speech. “This message comes to you today from an old country, France, from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation, and barbarity.” His oratorical flourish—and pointed barb at Rumsfeld—was greeted with applause, a rare occurrence at the U.N.

It was too much for Powell, who sat stone-faced in the audience. “Here is the report of Blix, seconded by the fact that de Villepin was getting so much applause,” one diplomat remembers. “In the middle of it, Powell was looking at his paper, and then he just pushed it away.” It was also painful for the White House’s allies. The next day, in cities all across the globe, millions of demonstrators marched through the streets, protesting America’s mad thirst for invasion. When Ambassador Arias returned home to Spain on holiday, he barely got to see his daughters—they spent all their time at war protests. “My blood pressure shot up to the heavens,” he recalls.

The damage Blix caused to Powell’s credibility would a few weeks later contribute to yet another aggressive counterattack from the White House—this time, astoundingly, aimed at the inspectors themselves, the only people in the world who were actually in a position to uncover the “material breach” that the U.S. badly needed to make its case for war. An assistant secretary of state, John Wolf, was dispatched to confront Blix in the Swede’s U.N. office, where Wolf dramatically tossed a sheaf of surveillance photos on his desk and demanded to know why the inspectors had not cited the discovery of an Iraqi U.A.V. drone and a cluster bomb for the delivery of chemical weapons as Iraqi violations. Blix replied that the drone had not yet been declared illegal. As for the cluster bomb, it turned out to be old scrap. When Blix asked where Wolf had gotten the pictures, Wolf refused to say.

“I resented that,” says Blix. “If the Security Council said, ‘We heard about this and could the council get to see a picture of the drone, or of the bomb,’ we would have done it immediately.” (Wolf alleges that Blix was simply unhappy to be learning of the drone and bomb from the United States and not his own staff.) The attempts to vilify the inspectors were taken to the press. The London Times ran a column with the headline blix should turn the smoking gun on his own head.

The White House was losing patience. On February 24, together with Britain and Spain, American diplomats proposed the long-awaited “second resolution” Tony Blair had been seeking. In it, the three allies declared that Iraq “has failed to take the final opportunity afforded it in Resolution 1441.” For Tony Blair, the support for force in his own country didn’t look good.

On February 26 a parliamentary debate and vote on a motion backing Blair’s efforts in the U.N. to disarm Iraq produced one of the biggest rebellions by a government’s own party members in British history. Though the motion passed, 122 Labour M.P.’s cast their votes against their leader. “The government’s case on Iraq and W.M.D. just didn’t seem to stack up,” says the M.P. and former Blairite Cabinet minister Chris Smith.

That his chief ally, Blair, was holding on by a thread didn’t stop Bush’s provocative swagger. In a prime-time news conference, he said it was time for the U.N. to decide, once and for all, whether it would back a U.S.-led invasion. “No matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote,” he said. “It’s time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.”

In the next breath, however, the president vowed to go ahead with an invasion no matter what the Security Council voted. “We will act,” he said, in words guaranteed to alienate Security Council members, “and we really do not need the United Nations’ approval to do so.”

Brazen words aside, the president still wanted Security Council backing. American diplomats and their French counterparts launched intensive lobbying efforts to sway the other member nations. As a member of the permanent five, Russia was the most crucial target. Although Russian diplomats had echoed French calls to give the inspectors more time, Vladimir Putin’s government hadn’t yet openly opposed the war. In fact, many in the U.S. government thought Russia would ultimately back whatever the White House decided to do. Putin had proved a reliable ally before, going along with the expansion of nato and the termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

According to members of the French delegation, American diplomats repeatedly warned them that the Russians “will let you down.” “We were sending messages to Paris saying, ‘Whoa, are you so sure of the Russians?’ ” recalls one French diplomat. “Because [in Washington] they seem to consider that one day or another Putin would come out and say he agreed with the American approach.”

Chirac had met privately with Putin to persuade him to come to France’s side. Putin, it turned out, was worried most about the war’s effect on Russia’s oil industry, which accounts for one-half of his country’s exports. Throughout the run-up to the war, Russia had reportedly been receiving a flood of oil-contract offers from Iraq, all based on the condition that it oppose the war. For Russia to side with the U.S., Putin told American diplomats, it needed assurance that it would be “taken care of” financially. But the White House, confident of its “special partnership” with the Russian president, did very little to compensate Russia in terms of promising postwar contracts and making up for the $8 billion Iraq owed the Russians. Instead, with the tin ear for diplomacy it had repeatedly displayed all through the U.N. process, the U.S. offered Putin what one insider called “peanuts.”

On March 7, the U.S. paid the price for its arrogance. De Villepin, in France’s most straightforward denunciation to the council to date, announced that “France will not allow a resolution to pass that authorizes the automatic use of force.” Russia, irked at America’s failure to address its concerns, quickly followed suit, as did China (which generally tucks in behind these two). It was at this point, faced by the open opposition of at least four Security Council nations, that the White House realized it had to do something that had previously been considered inconceivable: step up its lobbying of the six undecided members of the Security Council, the so-called U-6 nations. That group of diplomatic small fry consisted of Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea, and Angola, and they would soon come to be called by some British and U.S. officials “the Slippery Six.”

The U.S. had four votes for war on the Security Council: its own, Spain’s, Britain’s, and Bulgaria’s. To secure the nine votes it needed for a majority, five of the six U-6 nations had to be swayed. “It’s something they should have been doing behind the scenes from the beginning,” says former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who suspects that the White House’s unwillingness stemmed from its ambivalence at approaching the U.N. in the first place. Now, coming so late in the game, the American lobbying campaign appeared unseemly, like the hosts of a dinner party who suddenly realize that no one good is coming and they need to fill the room with B-listers. The French were appalled. “They had the impression that they had the nine votes on the Security Council,” says a French diplomat. “They were extremely certain.… It was so self-assured.”

It may have been a little late, but the White House applied a full-court press. Bush and Blair repeatedly telephoned Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, pleading for his support. Cheney cozied up to Angola’s president. Powell and Rice both played host to the Guinean foreign minister in Washington. The French were engaged in parallel efforts of their own. Historically, the 10 rotating Security Council members resent that they are often dictated to by the five permanent members. Now, as never before, they were sought after. But they knew they were being used as pawns in a political game of chicken.

“There were two sides, the French and the American,” says Aguilar Zinser. “The French are saying, ‘To hell with the U.S.’ The Americans are saying, ‘To hell with the rest of the world.’ What we felt was, if France cannot find a compromise in order to reach an accommodation with the U.S., and the U.S. can’t reach an accommodation with the other permanent members, then what is the permanent members’ purpose for? It was created for you to agree upon things. And if you don’t agree on things, you use your veto power. So why do you transfer this responsibility to us, the little guys?”

Munir Akram, the Pakistani ambassador, was equally annoyed. “We felt that the position we were being asked to take would serve no purpose,” he says. “Some that might have been inclined to vote in favor would be spoiling the relationship with the other country with no result.” He shrugs. “We are poor,” he says, “but we are important. Pakistan doesn’t respond very well to pressure.”

The one vote the White House felt certain of was Mexico’s. President Bush considered Mexican president Vicente Fox a strong ally, terming him “my good friend Vicente.” Throughout the U.N. process, however, Fox had wavered; he needed the U.S., but anti-war sentiment ran strong in Mexico. Rather than stroke Fox, however, the White House got nasty, singling out Mexico’s anti-war U.N. ambassador, Aguilar Zinser, for pointed criticism. They cast him as a mad nationalist, and, according to Aguilar Zinser, said that he was “a pain in the ass.” Throughout the negotiations, Aguilar Zinser says, Powell actually tried to have him removed from his post. (A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denies this.) Bush warned Fox personally that the ambassador could cost Mexico its dearest ally. The State Department invited to Washington several pro-war Mexican intellectuals who would later bash the ambassador to the press.

To Washington’s dismay, Fox seemed reluctant to play ball. Irked, President Bush all but threatened him. “The U.S. said, ‘Mexico has to be on my side, without any rewards,’ ” says Aguilar Zinser, “ ‘because it is not the rewards [that are at stake], it is the entire relationship.’ ” The U.S. played on a key fear shared by all of the Slippery Six: if their country was the only one that voted against the war, they would be diplomatically and economically punished. “It would have been quite difficult for Mexico to resist the pressure alone in Latin America,” says one council diplomat. “To face the Emperor Bush: ‘So you are the only one that is going to say no?’ ”

In the second week of March, Mexico got that partner. Chilean officials indicated they would not back the war, due in part to yet another huge embarrassment that the White House brought upon itself. When it came to lobbying the Security Council members, it turned out the administration hadn’t been satisfied with arm-twisting alone. It had resorted to espionage, bugging the offices of several U-6 nations. A British newspaper, The Observer, broke the story, reporting that the National Security Agency had mounted a surveillance “surge” aimed at undecided nations, and had urged Britain to follow suit. The N.S.A.’s purpose, as stated in an agency memo leaked to The Observer, was to gain “insights as to how the membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/dependencies, etc—the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.”

While news of the bugging memo failed to shock many of the Security Council members, who assumed the U.S. and others had been monitoring the U.N. for years, Chile was enraged. The Chileans are especially sensitive to dirty tricks by American intelligence services, which they hold responsible for the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. Chile demanded an explanation from the White House on the U.N. bugging, but the White House refused to confirm or deny the report. (Juan Gabriel Valdes, the Chilean ambassador to the U.N., would pay for his outrage. A few months later, because of pressure from the Bush administration, he was replaced with a former university classmate of Condoleezza Rice’s.)

Meanwhile, Annan pleaded with the Security Council nations for unity. Under pressure from Annan and several undecided nations, the British began drafting a compromise proposal. “The point,” recalls Greenstock, “was to have one last throw against the background of the Security Council that really wanted to find a way out of the black cloud that was gathering, or was, in fact, much closer, inside the horizon.” Beginning in the second week in March, the British ambassador worked round the clock to hammer out something that would make everyone happy, or, at least, happy enough. Based in part on a list of unresolved issues that Hans Blix was compiling, Greenstock’s draft proposal laid out six tests Saddam would have to pass to avoid invasion. These included having Saddam himself go on television and admit that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction.

Whether Iraq would go along was almost beside the point. With American troops pouring into the Gulf, the critical issue was the timing of the invasion. Several undecided countries argued that 45 days was a reasonable window to allow the inspectors to verify compliance with the tests. The U.S. demanded 7 days, 10 at the outside. U-6 members then compromised down to three weeks, but the U.S. wouldn’t budge: the Central Command timetable dictated that major combat needed to start before the end of March, before the weather got too hot.

By March 11, the efforts to come up with a compromise proposal were rendered all but moot. The night before, Chirac had gone on television and announced “My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote ‘no.’ ” The U.S. and Britain suddenly had a scapegoat. They blamed France—squarely—for the failure of diplomacy. British foreign secretary Jack Straw called Chirac’s vow “extraordinary.” President Bush said this proved that France would veto “anything that held Saddam to account.”

Emboldened, the Pentagon began cranking up its rhetoric. Answering a reporter’s question, Rumsfeld announced that the Defense Department was reviewing whether it would even need British participation. Tony Blair was stunned: after almost a year of supporting Bush—of staking his career on it—it appeared that it really wasn’t necessary! Twice, Blair telephoned Bush, who lamely explained that Rumsfeld was “only trying to help.”

The White House began moving toward war. On March 17, a day after a meeting in the Azores with Blair and the Spanish prime minister, Bush reneged on his commitment to seek U.N. approval whatever the “whip count.” All the bullying and braggadocio had failed. The emperor would have no votes (at least not enough). The U.S. and U.K. withdrew the second resolution and retreated to the claim that the earlier resolution, 1441, had provided them ample authorization for war. But their efforts to secure the second resolution had all but decimated this argument. “The mistake that we made,” says a U.S. official, “was that we should never have offered an additional resolution past 1441. On 1441, they gave us a wink and a nod. Our mistake was trying to drag them to be more explicit.” Sir Christopher Meyer says, however, “At the time, 1441 looked like a triumph. In hindsight, it was a trap.”

Blair was shattered. The day after the Azores summit, Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet and delivered a devastating farewell speech to the House of Commons. In media interviews, he accused Blair of having offered a “false prospectus” for the war. Clare Short says that had she known Blair would deceive her once again she would have resigned then. As her diary records, he repeatedly promised her that Bush had agreed it would be the U.N., not the coalition, which would lead the reconstruction of Iraq. On March 18, Blair won a Commons vote for war. The number of Labour dissidents had risen from 122 in February to 139, but he managed—just—to carry a majority of his own party’s backbenchers and was not forced to rely on the Tory opposition.

Still, a year later, Jeremy Greenstock says the effort to pass a second resolution was important, “in terms of the legitimacy that we got from 50 to 60 to 70 countries around the world.” But, he adds, “we weren’t persuasive enough and maybe still aren’t persuasive enough with some parts of our public opinion to show that it was really necessary to have a war at that stage. I’m still equivocal about it myself.”

The U.S., though, has yet to realize that the diplomatic breakdown at the U.N. came from something more than a tactical miscalculation on its part. It stemmed from its basic attitude toward the very idea of the U.N. “They can’t expect to have support from the I.A.E.A. or from the secretary-general when it just occurs to them, if they haven’t supported it all along the way,” says Madeleine Albright. “President Bush won a diplomatic victory when he got the inspectors back [into Iraq]. But then he didn’t allow them to really do their job, because there was some timetable that didn’t suit the American administration.… By undercutting somebody who had as good a reputation as Hans Blix, they robbed themselves of tools that I think would have later been useful.”

To Richard Holbrooke, this anti-U.N. ideology prevented the U.S. from making what should have been a persuasive case for regime change. “I thought the case against Saddam was a very strong one,” he says. “And if you cared about the United Nations, you had a man who had violated over a dozen Security Council resolutions. And if you cared about the U.N., you couldn’t let him do that with impunity. Yet, they couldn’t get people on board. Why is that? Because this administration is incapable of making the case I just made, because that would have suggested that the U.N. was important. So they threw away their strongest argument. If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had decided to do this—of course they would have done it differently, but if they had ever decided that we had to go to war, they would have used as Exhibit A the 15 resolutions that were being violated.”

The administration’s diplomatic ineptitude and arrogance had the most serious consequences. In the short term, it emboldened Turkey, from which the Pentagon planned to launch the northern prong of the Iraqi invasion, to reject the idea of basing troops in its territory, forcing the U.S. to invade Iraq from only one direction, the south. Undoubtedly, this cost American lives. The greater damage, however, was done to American credibility in the War on Terror. America needs the help of other nations to fight terrorism. Its behavior at the U.N. did little to inspire the trust of anyone, including its allies.

Multilateralism, Albright says, “is a way to maximize power, and if it’s done right, it’s a power magnifier, not a detraction. And I think especially with a problem like fighting terrorism with non–state actors and with so many countries involved—and terrorism obviously knows no borders—having more international support for fighting terrorism is a sine qua non. We isolated ourselves in the United Nations, and so we lost out on having a lot of public support, international support.”

V.

President Bush’s mood, darkened by the long weeks of wrangling at the U.N., improved markedly after the U.S. and Britain withdrew their second resolution, on Monday, March 17. After months of talk, war was coming, and he was ready. “It’s a totally different mind-set when you go from a diplomatic process to a military operation; you have more control of the terms,” a White House official told Time magazine the following week. “It’s no mystery this President likes clarity.”

American troops had been hunkered down in their tents in the Kuwaiti desert for weeks, and, in a teleconference on Tuesday, Bush gave their commanding general, Tommy Franks, the go-ahead to begin the invasion that Friday. Then, on Wednesday, came a surprising piece of intelligence from the C.I.A.—a reliable report that Saddam would be sleeping that night in a bunker near downtown Baghdad. Tenet and Rumsfeld urged the president to launch an air strike, effectively starting the war almost two days before they had planned. Everyone in Bush’s conference room agreed. If they could kill Saddam now, it could mean saving thousands of American lives. General Franks said he needed to have the go-ahead by 7:15 p.m. E.S.T. As a result, at 7:12, George W. Bush said, “Let’s go,” and the war began.

The invasion of Iraq was not a “cakewalk,” as one administration partisan had so memorably promised, but it ended the way everyone knew it would. What almost no one expected was that the W.M.D. the White House had so confidently said it would find simply weren’t there.

At least initially, Bush appeared unfazed. On the eve of a trip to Poland, on May 29, he declared, “We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories.… For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” But they hadn’t. Maybe, the White House reasoned, American troops weren’t looking in the right places.

On the weekend of June 8, David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector for the U.N., had taken his wife to Poplar Springs, a country inn and spa near Warrenton, Virginia, to celebrate his 62nd birthday when he got a call from Stuart Cohen, the vice-chairman of the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Council, which had issued the controversial October 2002 N.I.E. Would Kay be willing to take over the search for W.M.D.? Tenet’s office called on Monday, and Kay accepted the job. On Tuesday he was polygraphed, interviewed by a C.I.A. psychiatrist, and sworn in that afternoon by Tenet as his special adviser on Iraqi W.M.D.

Once Kay was in Iraq, it was almost immediately clear to him that what he was looking for wasn’t there. Early in July he e-mailed the bad news to Tenet. “Every weekend I wrote a private e-mail to the D.C.I. and the D.D.C.I. [McLaughlin], my unvarnished summary of where we were,” Kay told Vanity Fair. “I wrote that it looks as though they did not produce weapons.” At best, Kay speculated, Saddam’s policy may have been “to produce actual weapons only close to the time you actually need them.”

McLaughlin immediately telephoned Kay in Baghdad. “We have to be very careful how we handle this,” the C.I.A. deputy director warned him. Kay tried. When he delivered his interim report to Congress on October 2, he was as upbeat as possible. But his bottom line was “we have not yet found stocks of weapons.” When a reporter asked Kay if he had found any weapons of mass destruction, he replied, “I’ve barely found lunch.”

By December, after months of scouring Iraq, Kay was ready to quit. Tenet urged him not to. “He asked that I not come back immediately,” Kay recalls. “[He said], ‘If you resign now it will appear like we don’t know what we’re doing and the wheels are coming off.’ So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll wait.’ ” He lasted barely six more weeks, resigning on January 23. Five days later Kay made his now famous “We were almost all wrong” statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Kay’s admission forced the White House to name a presidential commission to investigate the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. The C.I.A.’s effort to find W.M.D. in Iraq continued under Charles Duelfer, Kay’s successor.

The war’s legacy won’t be clear for years. Whatever good comes of it, it was at a steep price, both in American lives and the incalculable blow it caused to American credibility, both at home and abroad. Will a democratic Iraq emerge as a shining example of Western-style values in the heart of the Middle East? No one knows.

Today, almost everyone who advocated the invasion of Iraq is in some way disappointed. Finger-pointing abounds, at the British, at the French. Richard Perle and his neoconservatives got the war they wanted, and they are despised for it. Those who planned the war, meanwhile, are left to ponder whether anyone will believe America the next time it wants to strike a nation believed to be backing terror.

For the C.I.A., the failure to find stockpiles of W.M.D. was a public-relations nightmare. For weeks the agency seemed paralyzed about how to respond. It allowed Stuart Cohen to write an op-ed for The Washington Post and to appear on Nightline to defend the October 2002 N.I.E. It leaked defensive tidbits to a few selected reporters, then unleashed Tenet to try to explain the limits of intelligence to a friendly audience at Georgetown University.

By then the C.I.A. director had let it be known he planned to leave after the election. Tenet had presided over a series of intelligence disasters: the agency had failed to anticipate India’s underground nuclear tests in 1998; a year later, based on C.I.A. target information, U.S. aircraft mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three persons; the agency did not see 9/11 coming; and then it trumpeted its erroneous estimate on Iraq.

Not all of the C.I.A.’s problems were attributable to Tenet personally, but, as the captain of the ship, any other C.I.A. director would have long since been dismissed. But Tenet had built a close relationship with George W. Bush—one of his first acts as D.C.I. had been to name the agency’s new headquarters building after the president’s father. Besides, the controversy over the intelligence on Iraq provided job security for Tenet; no president is likely to fire his C.I.A. director in an election year.

Republicans both in and outside Congress tended to place all the blame on the C.I.A. for the intelligence disaster, hoping to deflect criticism from the president. Democrats accused the White House of “cherry-picking” and hyping the intelligence it wanted, ignoring the caveats in the C.I.A.’s estimates in order to mislead the country into backing a war. In fact, there is truth to both arguments. The C.I.A.’s estimates were wrong in most respects, but the administration went far beyond what the C.I.A. had said, dropped the caveats, and used the intelligence to build the case for war.

On March 9, 2004, Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he did not believe the administration had misrepresented intelligence to strengthen its case. But he also said that in at least three instances, including the president’s reference in the 2003 State of the Union address to Iraq buying uranium in Africa, he had corrected Bush and Cheney for making misrepresentations of intelligence in their public speeches. Tenet said he also planned to correct Cheney for having referred to Douglas Feith’s disputed memo about Iraq’s connection to al-Qaeda as “your best source of information.” Some former intelligence officials, however, go much further in blaming the administration for cooking the intelligence. Greg Thielmann, a former State Department expert on weapons proliferation, said he thought that “the American public was seriously misled. The administration twisted, distorted, and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I’m not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a president distorting critical classified information.”

Strong words, but whether the voters will care about how America went to war on flawed or exaggerated intelligence, now that Saddam Hussein has been captured and his regime destroyed, is an open question.

At 10 A.M. on a Monday in October, the office of Vinyl Films, Cameron Crowe’s Santa Monica production company, looks just like what you’d expect from the creators of Almost Famous. Classic movie posters line the walls—Sabrina, Jules and Jim, Carnal Knowledge. There are Razor scooters in the corner, bagels stocked in the kitchen, intelligent conversations going on about pop culture, and no shortage of beards, baseball caps, and way-too-long shorts. Until 10:15.

It’s not just that Tom Cruise, the world’s biggest movie star, is entering the room. It’s that he’s entering it like Tom Cruise. Wearing a snug brown sweater, tapered black pants, and a precise two-day stubble, he takes off his sunglasses, cranks up his smile, and with a simple “Cameron around?” appears to make Gloria, the receptionist, feel like the most important woman working in film today. In fact, over the course of the next few hours, he will make everyone feel a little more important, a little funnier, a little sexier, a little more like they should be in pictures. He will affectionately roughhouse members of the Vinyl Films team; he’ll give out mini-massages just because; he’ll tease people about what they’re eating; he’ll find it hysterical when a baby squirrel that’s been rescued by a staffer leaps onto his sweater and clings for dear life. Never one to disappoint or give any less than 110 percent, he’ll even answer his interviewer’s questions (well, most of them at least) as clearly, and as cheerfully, as possible.
What does your face look like in Vanilla Sky?

He begins to respond, then jumps up and excuses himself, mysteriously. He re-appears a few minutes later and beckons, smiling knowingly, from the doorway. “C’mon.”

He has just persuaded Cameron Crowe, the director, to show a few scenes of the movie.
So what, you ask? Since the project began, those surrounding Vanilla Sky (which Cruise is also co-producing, with Paula Wagner) have been in Delta Force stealth mode. Partway through the movie, there’s some major facial disfigurement of its hero, and during filming, Cruise kept his appearance secret by using a cordoned-off path between his trailer and the set. Even Pat Kingsley, his trusted publicist, who usually knows what happens to Tom before Tom does, hasn’t seen the footage we’re about to screen, Cruise reports.

At the top, Vanilla Sky looks deceptively familiar. As in Cocktail, Top Gun, The Color of Money, All the Right Moves, Days of Thunder, and Jerry Maguire, Cruise’s character, we learn immediately, is the Best in the Business (in this case, the business is publishing), skateboarding through life on his easy talent, charming patter, and fantastic teeth. Needless to say, the ladies love him, and his ego is radioactive. He needs to be taken down a notch, but it will require only the right lady—the unimpressed one, naturally—to do it. (In this case, that woman is played by his real-life girlfriend, Penélope Cruz.)

Wait a few minutes and you’ll find yourself in uncharted Tom Cruise waters. The film was inspired by Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), a trippy Spanish melodrama which Cruise bought the rights to before producing Amenábar’s The Others (the stylish horror movie starring Nicole Kidman), and it is certainly the darkest project Cameron Crowe has taken on. (Friends of Crowe, a Billy Wilder nut, have joked that it is his Double Indemnity, Wilder’s classic film noir.) It’s also one of the most psychologically twisted for Cruise. After a near-fatal car crash, Cruise finds himself embarking on some major soul-searching and self-loathing, which leads him to a kind of madness. Known for doing concrete research for his roles—whether using a wheelchair or flipping martini shakers—Cruise went into hours of character analysis with Crowe for Vanilla Sky. Even today, he is still probing, prodding, putting questions out there about the inner life of his character, David Aames, who treats women like “fuck buddies” and lives out the consequences.

“What is the price we’re paying for having sex? Is there a promise that you make with sex? What is the responsibility of sex? Some people don’t feel it in their life. How does that accumulate in people’s lives? Do they do themselves in?” Cruise says, his voice nearing a whisper, his eyes boiling with late-night rapsession intensity. “You look at the World Trade Center. I think the World Trade Center has kind of ripped the social veneer off this country. I’m not comparing this character to the World Trade Center. I’m not saying it’s that extreme. But I think that you look at anyone in life, they have problems, they have things that are going on and things that don’t appear the way they seem.”

Those very words might be spoken about Cruise himself. As the world has recently learned, even Tom Cruise has problems. Not just movie-star problems, such as disappointing reviews or annoying tabloid reports, but normal-person problems. To wit, it’s been 10 months since Cruise filed for divorce from his wife of 10 years, Nicole Kidman, and four months since the divorce was finalized. The news stunned everybody, even those who never really cared about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the first place. After all, this was Tom and Nicole, who were never apart for more than two weeks at a time; Tom and Nicole, who groped each other like a couple of kids, at least when there were cameras around; Tom and Nicole, who starred together in Stanley Kubrick’s difficult movie about sexual jealousy, Eyes Wide Shut, and came out, they said, only more bonded to each other. Tom and Nicole, the one Hollywood supercouple, with two kids, who knew how to make it work.

As if the divorce weren’t tough enough, there’s collateral damage as well. A bitter legal battle has just been waged over the couple’s estimated $325 million fortune (which includes four homes, a Gulfstream, and two smaller airplanes) and the custody of their children, Isabella, eight, and Connor, six. (The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.) Cruise is now moving into life as a single father. For the first time ever, he appears to be getting some negative publicity: Kidman, said by friends to have been completely blindsided by the turn of events and eager to go into marriage counseling, has scored higher in the bid for public sympathy. Three weeks after September 11, there’s another nagging issue: being Tom Cruise in a world where, for now at least, Tom Cruise movies don’t seem as important as they once did.

After two decades’ worth of profiles on the man, only a fool could hope for Tom Cruise to start baring his wounds in public. Tom Cruise does not bare wounds. Nor does he sweat it, regret, kick himself, or kick others. It’s hard to imagine Cruise losing his grip, even having a fitful night of sleep. After all, you don’t get to be among the world’s highest-paid actors ($25 million per picture) and work with names such as Coppola, Pollack, Newman, Hoffman, Scorsese, Stone, Kubrick, Crowe, and now, with Minority Report, Steven Spielberg by behaving like a basket case. Famously controlled, the Platonic ideal of the “consummate professional,” as they say in the business, Cruise treats emotional challenges in the same way he does his latest character: he defines them, he does what he needs to do to master them, and he moves on. And so, when asked about his divorce, Cruise, while wanting to be the dutiful interview subject, also doesn’t want to dwell.

Why did you and Nicole decide to end it?

“She knows why, and I know why. She’s the mother of my children, and I wish her well,” he says curtly. “And I think that you just move on. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that with anything. Things happen in life, and you do everything you can, and in every possible way, and there’s a point at which you just sometimes have to face the brutal reality.”

You make it sound as if there were some event, which I think only piques people’s curiosity. Or perhaps you’re just telling me to mind my own business?

“No. I mean, she knows why, and she is the mother of my children, and I wish her well,” he repeats. “I don’t care if it piques people’s interest. Honestly, people should mind their own damn business. And get a life of their own . . . . My personal life isn’t here to sell newspapers.”
Has your thinking changed about Eyes Wide Shut?

“The experience was the experience. I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that way. I don’t. I’ve gone through everything. It was what it was.”

It’s not that Tom Cruise doesn’t have feelings. It’s that wallowing in them, he believes, doesn’t actually help—and help is the key word in the Tom Cruise lexicon. Not help as in charity or performing good works necessarily, although that’s part of it, but help as in contributing to the achievement of a given goal. When talking about virtually any topic that interests him—his movies, his family, his religion—he’ll eventually drop the word “help.” From his personal goals (“I’ve always just wanted to help people”) to the purpose of the entire human race (“I think people are as valuable as their ability to help”). In fact, as Cameron Crowe recalls, the now famous “Help me help you” scene in Jerry Maguire came about during rehearsal one day when Cuba Gooding Jr., “fucking with Tom,” decided to give him nothing. “Tom just got so frustrated,” says Crowe, “he started going, ‘Help me help you, help me help you.’”

There is, admittedly, something vaguely preachy about the word “help” upon its eighth or ninth mention. But ask anyone who knows Cruise and you soon learn that it’s more than lip service. Cruise is helpful, and everything else that implies—patient, generous, and nice to everyone around him. “He’s always had a sense of ‘What is this movie?’” says producing partner and former agent Paula Wagner, whose speech is as carefully measured as her designer pantsuit. “‘How can I best serve this movie? How can I help this movie? The director and the actors and I are in it together, and, you know, how can we make the best movie possible?’”

For Crowe, Cruise’s helpfulness while making Jerry Maguire simply set the gold standard for behavior on movie sets and has now spoiled Crowe for good. “It was really shocking to me after people said, ‘Oh, you’ve never worked with a really big staaar,’” recalls Crowe, going into a sing-songy “warning” voice. “‘You know what that’s liiike. They write books about this.’ And then I met this guy who said, ‘Every day I want to make your dreams come true.’ He always stood shoulder to shoulder with me and everybody else. . . . Then I go to make Almost Famous. I’m like, ‘O.K., I love this directing thing. Wait a minute! What happened to that guy?!’”

Among his fellow actors, Crowe adds, Cruise is “an ambassador of goodwill,” making everybody forget they’re in a Tom Cruise picture, and routinely letting others steal the scenes. “He made me feel like he was there to serve me,” says Cameron Diaz, whose performance as Cruise’s scorned, unhinged girlfriend in Vanilla Sky is a tour de force in fatal attraction. The film’s dramatic car scene (in which Diaz is driving) took two days to shoot, entailed ramming into branches and careening around pedestrians, and eventually made Diaz a little crazy for real. But, she says, “Tom guided me through my own hysteria. . . . Just by being so present, so dedicated, he was incredibly, I guess you could say, helpful.”

Cruise’s eagerness to help began when he was a kid, and the object, it seems, was himself. Growing up in a family of women (his parents divorced when he was 12), Cruise was dragged around to 15 different cities before the end of high school, making him, he has claimed, the permanent new geek, always wearing the wrong sneakers. His insecurity, he explains, was conquered by sheer feistiness. “I remember when I moved to Canada and I had figure skates and I wanted to play ice hockey,” Cruise recalls. “And my mother said, ‘Listen, you’re going to get your teeth knocked out,’ and just did not want me playing hockey. I ended up proving to her that I could. I would be out there at night, right after school, early in the morning, just teaching myself how to skate.”

By age 17, Cruise’s early determination to play hockey was replaced by the will to be an actor. Bagging high-school graduation to move to New York, he landed his breakthrough role in the 1981 military-school drama Taps, and that singular Tom Cruise zeal (or what Crowe jokingly calls Cruise’s “death march”) started taking shape. “I remember during Taps, I couldn’t sleep at night sometimes. I thought, O.K., I want to be an actor,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I want to learn about what acting is. I had this feeling of ‘Here I am 18 years old and this stuff is going on.’ This is what I wanted to do with my life.” Even with his next successes—such as Risky Business and Top Gun—Cruise never allowed one fiber of his being to sit back and enjoy the show. The only thing that got him jacked was the idea of bigger, harder, more difficult. “I thought, Do I have what it takes? . . . Am I up to this?” he recalls about making Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July back-to-back, in the late 80s. “I liked that, that test for myself. Can I do it?!” All the while, Cruise was obsessively seeking information from those around him—Martin Scorsese, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, even Curtis Hanson, who directed him in the 1983 sex comedy Losin’ It—and taking notes. “I’d sit down with these directors, like Sydney Pollack [The Firm]. I’d say, ‘What does this mean? The master shot? The close-up? How do you use these images to tell a story?’”

Given the young age at which Cruise achieved major stardom, and given the pitfalls that have plagued many of his contemporaries, it’s worth noting that Cruise has always been Cub Scout—clean. To the public’s knowledge, he has never had a drug or drinking problem, and never been treated for “nervous exhaustion.” He’s never made any embarrassing videos; he’s never bitten anyone, never publicly feuded with a contemporary about who’s the sellout and who’s the real deal. In fact, he’s never found himself in any remotely slimy Hollywood situation. But the jackals (and he won’t name names) were busy at work around him. “There are people out there who are so good at sucking blood that you don’t even realize it, you know?” says Cruise. “You think they’re your friends, and really they’re hanging on to your coattails, taking a ride. They can seem like the nicest people, but are they contributing to you as an artist? Or are they sucking off of you? . . . It’s subtle sometimes, the invalidation you get. It’s all done in the I’m just trying to be your friend,” says Cruise, going into his best Svengali. “I’m just trying to help you.”

How did you stay on the straight and narrow?

“Quite honestly,” he says after some time, “I have been a Scientologist for 15 years.”

Designed to make human beings more successful and spiritually evolved, Scientology has attracted a number of celebrities, including Cruise, his first wife, Mimi Rogers, John Travolta, Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis, and Jenna Elfman. Reasonably or not, journalists are reluctant to go near the subject for fear of years of litigation and other uncomfortable consequences. Cruise brings it up himself, perhaps because he sees that any genuine discussion of himself must involve it. “I was 26 years old, 27 years old. I mean, I was right in the heat of everything,” says Cruise. “I started reading books on it, and I thought, God, this makes sense.” Breaking it down for the layman, Cruise explains, “Scientology means knowing how to know, and I think as an artist, as anyone who’s trying to survive in life, you want”—he pauses, looking for the right word—“How about some tools to help me?” As for those who say that his religion is, well, a little creepy, Cruise dismisses them categorically. “You hear things, and then you ask someone, ‘Well, have you read anything?’ ‘Well, no, I saw it on the news.’ Well, my God,” he says, betraying a bit of disgust. “Or ‘I read it in a newspaper.’”

For Cruise, Scientology has provided the means to fix virtually any difficulty he has ever had or might encounter in the future. Dyslexic, Cruise reports that Scientology “helped me with my rehabilitating my own education.” Estranged from his abusive father—an electrical engineer whom Cruise remotely describes as “a very different kind of guy”—until his death in 1984, Cruise seems to credit the religion with helping him handle adversity. “Life pounds you—you know what I mean?” Cruise says. “You come across losses. All of a sudden something happens and now you feel like you cannot go forward or it invalidates you. People die. Things happen in life that make it very difficult at times to be happy or to overcome certain problems. Scientology has helped me be able to figure out tools to understand exactly what a problem is, and how to overcome those problems.”

Scientology, he says, has also helped him become a better parent. Mention his kids and Cruise will invariably sigh, shake his head, and launch into a cute story about their latest obsession. (These days, it is the trampoline and the Top Gun soundtrack.) They have often accompanied him onto the set. When they are apart, they have even communicated via satellite television. His schedule is so hectic and touch-and-go, both he and his personal assistant explain, mainly because of his children.

“Children want to feel like they’re part of a family, and that they’re contributing,” says Cruise, who, in step with “Scientology technology,” has set up an elaborate chart system that involves the checking off of duties, weekly rewards, and daily dialogues about helping. “When you’re around the house, they want to help. . . . Yes, I paid for everything, but you can contribute to me. You know, you talk about it: ‘How can you help me?’ And they say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I can’t do anything.’ I say, ‘Does cleaning your room help me?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, I guess cleaning my room is going to help you. I put my plate up after dinner—that kind of helps you, too.’” His methodical questioning of his kids extends into touchier issues, too, such as the gossip they might hear at school. (Rumors have swirled that Cruise is gay, that the Cruise-Kidman marriage was a sham, that a sex counselor was called in to help on their love scenes for Eyes Wide Shut.) “You have to say . . . ‘How do you feel about people who say stuff like that? How would you like it if someone says something that’s untrue about you? Now, what do you think about those people that do that? . . . You don’t have to sit there and listen to it. You can tell them you don’t want to hear it.’” (However, Cruise himself hasn’t been entirely able to drown out the noise; he recently sued an L.A.-based tabloid publisher and a gay-porn star for $ 100 million each for alleging that he was gay. “Paul Newman said [to me], ‘Do what you need to do,’” he explains. “Hence the legal action I’ve taken. You have to draw the line.”) For these reasons and others, Paula Wagner believes that Cruise “defines the rule book of what a good father is.” In fact, his children, Cruise claims, are the reason he’s acting in the first place. “I think, What am I doing this for?” he asks himself aloud. “For my kids.”

Scientology has also been a comfort to Cruise since the terrorist attacks of September 11. While admitting that “Hollywood has stopped and taken a breath,” he has turned the event into yet another opportunity to contribute. Impressed by the volunteer ministers from the Scientology church who showed up at Ground Zero (they were the ones wearing the SCIENTOLOGY VOLUNTEER MINISTER shirts), he’s helping in his own way, too, he says. First, there is his involvement with the World Literacy Crusade, a secular, nonprofit organization that uses some of the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. “People come in free off the street, and the miracles that happen there every day are astonishing,” says Cruise. “I mean, the stuff you see—where within 90 hours people jump three grade levels. ”

He’s also helping, he believes, just by being an actor. At the September 21 telethon for the victims of the attacks, in which Cruise answered phones alongside Penélope Cruz, he witnessed a few fellow actors having mini existential crises. “I went up to a guy,” Cruise recalls, “and said, ‘You know what? It is a relief to people in their lives to be able to see what you do.’ . . . Whether it’s just you have a cry, you have a laugh, you identify with something, or it’s just pure escapism, there is that release, or that hope, or that dream of having something in their lives, or an inspiration to be better, to do better. Because it’s never static,” he adds. “You’re either going backwards or you’re moving forward. It’s either a disintegration of communication or you’re furthering yourself.”

Perhaps the most visible way in which Cruise has been moving forward these days is in his love life. During the filming of Vanilla Sky, he began to fall for his co-star Penélope Cruz, who played the same role in the original version by Amenábar. On July 6, four months after Vanilla Sky wrapped, they danced together at Cruise’s 39th-birthday party; a week later they took off for the Wakaya Club in Fiji, to the resort where he and Kidman had made reservations before they separated. (Though she was in Australia at the time, Kidman was reportedly “in shock” that Cruise brought Cruz.) The next month, Cruise and Penélope kicked back with the kids at his home in Telluride, Colorado. In a rare unguarded moment, Cruise sounds like a kid intoxicated with love, blurting out fragments of romantic thoughts—“I thought, My God, I’m your boyfriend. You’re my girlfriend!”or “Cruise and Cruz!”—that send him into hearty guffaws. Generally, though, he’s careful not to appear unseemly and overeager, and valiantly talks about the acting stuff, too. “As a person and on film, she invites you in, and she’s incredibly romantic,” he says, quietly and seriously, furrowing his brow. “And yet real, you know? She’s beautiful. She’s a very skilled actress, but has an effortless quality about her. You look at Audrey Hepburn. She had that kind of elegance and yet was accessible.”

Seamless as it all may sound, Cruise admits that the months spent falling in love with Cruz, and falling out with his wife, were trying. “When all this was going on,” he says, “I was producing and acting in Vanilla Sky. I was meeting with Alejandro Amenábar after shooting all day, 15 hours a day. I was at meetings, only getting two hours of sleep, working on The Others, for [Nicole], and for Alejandro.” In addition, there was the pressure brought on by the looming actors’ strike, and the fact that Cruise was due on the set of Spielberg’s Minority Report. If Cruise was stressed, it never showed. “Tom was always the first guy there, going, ‘C’mon,’ ” Crowe says, now going into his mock chipper-tourguide voice. “‘Let’s take a look at the car we’ll be traveling around Manhattan in. We call it the Vanilla Float.’ I think I only heard him use the word ‘tired’ once, and it was probably about someone else.”

Nor did the pressures prevent him from delivering what may be his most complex performance yet. Challenging as many of his films have been—such as Born on the Fourth of July or Magnolia— Cruise says Vanilla Sky has been his hardest film ever, chiefly because he wanted to “tip my hat” to Amenábar, who goes for a kind of elegant obscurity, while making a film by Cameron Crowe, a man whose creative sensibility is, above all, humanistic, and sweet in the best sense of the word. “You see the tone that Cameron is [going for]. You feel the emotion, the tension, the humor,” says Cruise. “You go, Well, I don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s definitely the trickiest thing I’ve ever worked on, and probably ever will work on.”

But Crowe, who recently sat down with Cruise and watched Jerry Maguire, was floored—both by how far Cruise has come since their first movie together and by the balance he was able to strike. “He has really gotten these even richer, darker colors, along with light comedy as well,” Crowe says. “He’s the kind of guy Billy Wilder would have loved. Like William Holden in his prime, he could be light but also take you to that dark place.” And as in almost every Tom Cruise movie, in which he either masters some impossible physical feat (like rock climbing or flying F-14s) or spectacularly loses control, Cruise never forgets his No. 1 responsibility: the audience. “With Tom, the movie is anchored. You’re never going to get confused,” says Crowe. “It is the story of this guy. And even if you can’t see it because he’s making you feel comfortable on the set, you look at the dailies later that night and go, Holy shit. That’s Tom fucking Cruise.”

Just days after finishing Vanilla Sky, scenes of which were filmed in the offices of Vanity Fair, Cruise appeared on the set of Spielberg’s Minority Report. Based on Philip K. Dick’s futuristic story about policemen who arrest murderers before they kill, the movie casts Cruise as an officer who finds the system turning against him. Friends since the mid-80s, Spielberg and Cruise had long wanted to collaborate, but it was not until 1998 that they found the right project. Despite having worked his way through the roll call of A-list directors, Cruise is still wide-eyed when the occasion calls. “For me to say he’s a brilliant filmmaker is kind of redundant,” Cruise says about Spielberg, chuckling and flashing that familiar grin. “‘He’s brilliant.’ ‘Oh really? Tell us what he’s like.’ You know, he’s Steven Spielberg.”

Given the magnitude of Cruise’s résumé, not to mention the universal praise that’s heaped on him by his colleagues, it’s reassuring to discover that Cruise still feels he has things to learn as an actor. It has little to do with the fact that the Oscar so far has eluded him. He says, “If it doesn’t happen, I won’t be disappointed,” and he sounds sincere. Rather, it’s that somewhere, deep down, Cruise still seems to feel like that kid, studiously picking things up from the artists around him, rather than plotting his own masterwork. “I wish I had that great story of Clint Eastwood with Unforgiven,” Cruise admits. “He had this script, and he put it away for 10 years, and then went and directed this movie, and starred in this movie. And just had a culmination of an entire career.” He pauses, and thinks some more, his eyes far away. “How smart of him to recognize that, and have that there. That was just perfect for him. And so I don’t have that Unforgiven. I don’t have it.”

And then, being Tom Cruise, he makes a correction to that: “I don’t have it yet.”

It’s late December, and a group of anxious young parents are touring a sought-after pre-school in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, hoping against hope that all those damn siblings of the already enrolled don’t fill up every new spot. They watch the three-year-olds at work on fine-motor-skill activities and want it for their own children so much they get choked up: those tiny hands pouring water just for the fun of it, the focused tweezing of corn kernels, the careful washing of hands.

After observation, the tour guide lets them know that “Jim,” a parent at the school, will spend the next few minutes answering questions up in the music loft. Jim is introduced. He’s tall, bearded, with a head of small, brown curlicues. His long face wears a guarded expression.
Wait, he looks familiar … Isn’t that … No, it couldn’t be … Damn! It is! It’s James Frey, the guy Oprah shredded for faking his memoir.

The parents power through the shock—they are cool, downtown New Yorkers, after all—and they dutifully, nonchalantly ask questions.

Jim tries to ignore the looks, and answers the same questions he has been asked dozens of times this fall. His voice is a laid-back, dude voice. No, none of the children are expected to be potty-trained. There are changing tables in all the classrooms, and spare diapers are kept in each child’s cubby. Yeah, he understands the concern of those who get the afternoon spot instead of morning, but don’t worry—usually the children manage to adjust their nap schedules pretty quickly.

They half listen while they think about Jim: I wonder if he went back to being a drunk. I wonder if anything he’s saying today is true. I wonder what he’s doing here. Junkie, liar … P.T.A. dad?

He’s certainly a far cry from the badass image he once concocted for himself in his best-selling 2003 book, A Million Little Pieces—the guy who had a chick snort lines off his penis, who had amassed 14 arrests, who was wanted in three states, who’d assaulted a cop, who’d served real jail time, and who had likely beat a priest to death—all of which, we now assume, was highly embellished or false.

This isn’t to say that Frey isn’t tough. He was tough enough to kick a five-year drug-and-alcohol addiction. He proved his resilience again by surviving the past two years, after his bad-boy aspirations became too real and bit him on the ass. Oprah, the very arbiter of correct human behavior, destroyed him in public, and the walls came crumbling down around him.

The book world dumped him. Friends deserted him. He was stalked by the tabloids as if he were a Britney Spears–size train wreck. Readers told him they hoped he’d burn in hell, get hit by a bus, get “ass cancer.”

“I was a pariah,” he says today. “I was under no illusion that I was anything but that.” Each morning brought a crash of emotions—rage, bewilderment, panic, and shame—and Frey came close to drinking again. Instead, he did something shocking. He wrote another book—and not a lame apologia/self-justification such as The Fabulist, by Stephen Glass, or Burning Down My Masters’ House, by Jayson Blair.

Bright Shiny Morningis a sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams. Frey tells his story using four main narratives: a young, midwestern couple who have come to escape the cruelty and small-mindedness of their families; a Mexican-American housekeeper struggling to find self-worth; a Venice boardwalk drunk attempting to do something heroic; a vain, closeted movie star willing to do anything to get the man he loves. Interwoven with these compelling, cinematic tales is the story of just about everyone else. Compulsively, obsessively, Frey churns out sketch after sketch of L.A.’s every historical moment, every demographic, every institution, every neighborhood, from Skid Row to the Fashion District. He gives us gang members, porn-industry types, Asian sex slaves, artists, art collectors, gossip bloggers. He gives us lists of real L.A. facts and “facts” that are just made-up nonsense. At times, the randomness feels distracting—you wish Frey could rein himself in and return to the central narratives. But when the book works, it achieves the very essence of Los Angeles’s fractured, unpredictable, loopy nature. The stakes couldn’t be higher for him. It will test to what extent the public is willing to read James Frey the writer, and not, as he puts it, “James Frey the asshole.”

The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.

Now he would just as soon forget the whole mess. He fears and loathes the media. He has been press shy since his January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and doesn’t plan to speak to the press again after this interview.

“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated, after I pushed him on the subject of the scandal for the 16th time. “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book. It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”

Frey has fetishized breaking rules for as long as he’s been alive. On a casual level this makes him endearing. He routinely addresses women, even ones he barely knows, as “dude,” and he might break the ice with a stranger with “Yo, what the fuck’s up?” At the age of 38, he still makes prank calls. Sometimes he’ll call from the street corner and put on a high-pitched, crazy-old-person voice, drawing out every syllable of your name. Sometimes he pretends to be in an emergency, as he did the other day when he phoned his editor’s assistant:

“Allison, fuck, Allison, I need your help now! I’m on the corner of 56th and Fifth Avenue and a fucking bus just drove by and drenched me! I have two more meetings and I need you to go buy me some underwear and buy me some pants.”

He’s been known to show up at a Halloween party wearing nothing but a Speedo, and he’s not the sort who works out.

On a deeper level, breaking the rules has been part of a rich fantasy life for Frey. Since as early as he can remember, his heroes—whether literary, artistic, or fictional—were rebels. As a teenager growing up in Cleveland and suburban Michigan, the child of wealthy parents (his father was a business executive at Whirlpool), he became enamored of the works of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski, three icons of male debauchery and bohemianism. Frey romanticized their hard living and by about the age of 14 was drinking and smoking pot regularly. Eventually he was also doing crack, meth, and acid. It was not just the behavior described in those books that struck a chord with Frey; it was also their literary significance. (Rare editions by and memorabilia about his heroes are stacked exquisitely on the bookshelf at Frey’s sleek Tribeca apartment.) All three authors mingled fact and fiction, sometimes writing about themselves and their experiences, sometimes writing fantastic versions of themselves and their experiences.
“That’s what I always thought I would do,” says Frey, swiveling several feet away in his Aeron chair, sounding a bit defensive, “write about my own life in some way that, in the best-case scenario, would constitute art or literature. I’ve never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.”

Frey produced his first piece of real writing in 1994, after graduating from Denison College and post-rehab, when he was living in Chicago. It was the first small chunk of a novel, and preceding it was a send-up of an author’s note of the kind that had preceded many 19th-century and early-20th-century classic novels. Though overwrought, the note reveals Frey’s interests as a writer: “To play with genres,” he explains today, “to play with truth and reality, play with the rules people place on writing and art, which I wholly reject.” Claiming that all writing is, in fact, a form of autobiography, he ended the note with “and the events described did occur in some way or form, either during or before the composition of this work, and I have made no attempt to portray them as anything more than what they were, to me.” Prophetically, he noted that his literary interests might well end in “an expensive and terrifying web of litigation.”

Down and Out in Hollywood

Ultimately, Frey dismisses that first piece of writing as “a lot of nonsense,” and It went nowhere. Like many frustrated novelists, he decided to try screenwriting, and he moved to Los Angeles. He initially tried to write smart screenplays. When those didn’t pan out, he decided to write something salable. The result was the 1998 romantic comedy Kissing a Fool, starring David Schwimmer, which was called “pea-brained” and “moronic” by Roger Ebert. Frey tried his hand at directing—a small-budget film called Sugar: The Fall of the West, about a sex addict; it, too, was disappointing. Even though he was just starting out, it was hard for him to take the setbacks in stride. His newfound sobriety was fragile, and he was determined to make something of his life. “It was crushing,” he says of those failures. When not sweating it out in front of the computer, Frey lived up the rebel side, inviting both friends and homeless people to come over and watch boxing matches on TV and get wasted (he stayed sober). In his spare time, he volunteered as a mentor. “While we were all living in L.A., surfing and playing tennis,” recalls his friend Michael Craven, “he was hanging out with a kid who didn’t have a family.”

As is often the case with writers of best-forgotten movies, the assignments continued to come in. By 2000, Frey had decided he didn’t want to be just another hack screenwriter. It was time to return to his serious literary ambitions. He put the screenwriting aside, took out a second mortgage on his house, and threw himself into A Million Little Pieces, a book he had started a couple of years earlier, based on his addiction and recovery. Friends and his girlfriend next door, Maya (who would soon become his wife), thought he was nuts for blowing a perfectly fine career on something so indulgent. It came pouring out, and Frey easily found the rapid-paced, freewheeling style that would become his trademark—no quotation marks, no paragraph indentations, few commas, sentences that run on and on and go into the next. He took pride in its stylistic unorthodoxy. Early on, he showed it to someone who had an M.F.A. in writing. The reaction was the same one Kerouac got after he gave his editor On the Road, one crazy-long paragraph written on a paper-towel-size scroll. Frey recalls, “They sent back a note that said, ‘This is unpublishable. This would get destroyed in my workshop.’ And I was like, ‘Cool,’ you know? ‘Cool.’ ” (Even in his speech, Frey has little love of grammar. He often begins sentences with the word “me”—e.g., “Me and my buddy watched the Giants game.”) After just about a year, Frey had 525 pages and felt he was ready to shop it around to literary agents.

He landed a hot one, Kassie Evashevski, then at Brillstein-Grey, who worked with both books and films. As he tells it today, Frey, continuing to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes, sought to publish it as fiction. “I sent the book to Kassie as a novel,” says Frey. “I was pretty clear. It’s a novel. I didn’t tell her it was a memoir. I told her it was a novel. I’m not sure what else I needed to say.” Evashevski would not comment for this article, except to say that all of her views had been expressed in a 2006 Publishers Weekly interview, in which she said Frey had told her it was the true story of his addiction and recovery. She recalled, “James raised the issue of whether he could publish it as an autobiographical novel—only, he said, to spare his family undue embarrassment, not because it wasn’t true.”

According to Frey, Evashevski sent the book out to 18 publishers, and no one wanted it. But when told it was a true story, the industry said, Well, let’s talk. From Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes to Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, to Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, memoirs had become cash cows for publishing houses, while the sales of novels, especially first novels, had been languishing. According to Evashevski, in discussions with these interested parties, she told them that the book, as she understood it, was actually true. “The response was unanimous,” she recalled. “If the book is true, it should be published as a memoir.” One such interested party was Sean McDonald, a young editor at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. He showed it to his boss, the highly respected and upright Nan Talese (wife of legendary journalist Gay), who, surprisingly, was deeply impressed by the immediacy of the book and thought it would be invaluable to anyone with an intimate connection to addiction. She was ready to offer this first-time writer $50,000 for the memoir.

Evashevski came back to Frey with the news. Frey recalls the conversation he had with her. “We talked about what the rules of memoir were or were not.” He says he came away from that conversation believing that his book was staying within the bounds of what the publishing world called “memoir,” that if there were some factual discrepancies it was fine. He also believes that by having initially submitted the manuscript as a novel it was clear that he had changed more than minor details—he changed “a bunch of stuff.” This was not what he had meant by “playing with genres,” but at least he was getting his book published.

A Best-Seller Is Born

Frey began working with McDonald, known for his highbrow taste and intense, hands-on approach, in which he’d provide long, detailed memos of how he thought scenes should be shaped. They got to be close friends, talking on the phone daily, visiting each other on vacations, and going to boxing matches. Contrary to McDonald’s later claim that he had been deceived by Frey, it’s possible the editor enabled him. Two publishing sources say McDonald’s editing was aimed at heightening the drama, without questioning the veracity of the text. During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir. On an “author’s questionnaire,” a memo used for marketing and publicity that authors fill out a few months prior to publication, he wrote, “I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography.”

It made little difference. In April 2003, A Million Little Pieces came out as a memoir, and the praise was almost unanimous: “electrifying,” “incredible,” “mesmerizing,” “turbo-charged,” “unflinchingly honest.” He didn’t get the sort of serious literary reverence that Dave Eggers received, but he was hailed as a new, unique voice on the scene, one with a radical, screw-the-rules take on language and storytelling. Ten thousand copies sold, 25,000 copies sold, 50,000 copies sold, 70,000 copies sold. Frey, given his first taste of fame, played up his rebel soul for the media. He brandished his many tattoos for reporters: the ftbsitttd on his wrist meant “Fuck the Bullshit, It’s Time to Throw Down.” He said about Eggers, one of the most celebrated literary figures of his generation, “Fuck that, and fuck him.”

Unnoticed under the din of all the turbo-charged, unflinching, badass excitement was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which the reporter, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, raised questions about the plausibility of the book. She asked Talese about possible factual discrepancies, and why there wasn’t an author’s note if, as Frey had told reporters, names and identifying characteristics had been changed. Talese said, “It’s a total slipup that we didn’t have a disclaimer page. I’m embarrassed.” Two years later the disclaimer still hadn’t made it into the book. Such a disclaimer might have provided for a certain amount of wiggle room, and might well have prevented Frey from getting into so much trouble. But in this midwestern newspaper Talese’s comment went under the radar. Frey’s memoir was in its seventh printing, and it was about to be catapulted to the level writers and booksellers dream of.

Frey’s wife was at their beach house, in Amagansett, having lunch with a friend, Susan Kirshenbaum, when the call came. Oprah had just selected A Million Little Pieces for her book club. Maya called Frey immediately. He was ecstatic. Kirshenbaum said to him, “Write this day down because your life is never going to be the same after this.”

Bookstores couldn’t re-stock A Million Little Pieces fast enough. It seemed like anyone who’d ever been an addict, anyone who’d ever known an addict, anyone who’d seen one on television, had to read the book. All over the world people wanted it. It would be published in 28 languages by 30 different publishers. Hundreds of e-mails came pouring into Frey’s in-box each day, thanking him for helping them kick their alcoholism, thanking him for helping them understand their child’s drug habit, asking him for words of strength as they fought to stay sober every day. Suddenly, Frey was less Jack Kerouac and more Dr. Phil. The Doubleday publicity-department phones were ringing off the hook with requests for interview upon interview upon interview. Frey and Doubleday had succeeded in giving the world an incredible literary experience. Now they had to succeed in marketing it as Frey’s life story.

McDonald, by this point at Riverhead Books, which had just published Frey’s My Friend Leonard (a sequel of sorts to A Million Little Pieces), did his part. In an interview with The New York Times the day Oprah made her announcement, he said that during the book’s editing “I made sure that everything actually happened” and that when questions arose at the publishing house about the book’s veracity “James had to provide them with all kinds of verification.” (According to a source in the publishing industry, Frey did have many pages of documentation, but they didn’t really address the veracity of his book.)

Now it was Frey’s turn. Under the klieg lights of celebrity, he embraced the badass role he had written for himself. He now began standing by his book as straight nonfiction. He emphasized his honesty, saying on Oprah in October 2005, “If I was going to write a book that was true, and I was going to write a book that was honest, then I was going to have to write about myself in very negative ways.” And he elaborated on the fabrications, describing in an interview on the Barnes & Noble Web site his three months in jail that never happened: “There’s nothing to do there. You can go out to the yard and walk around or shoot hoops or lift weights. I didn’t really want to do anything, so I spent most of my time reading books.” He added that his reading list inside the slammer included Don Quixote, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov.

The Truth Hurts

Frey, at last, was the rule breaker he had always dreamed of being. There was only one problem: playing along didn’t feel good. At this point, Frey sought psychiatric help. “I didn’t enjoy the pedestal that I was put on,” he says. “I felt like this book that’s intentions were artistic had become something else.” There was every reason to feel uneasy. By December, just two months after his book was featured on Oprah, he had already started getting calls from the Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site that was looking for his mug shots. When those proved elusive, the site started probing further into his life. Panicked by their calls, he hired Martin Singer, an A-list Los Angeles attorney, whose clients have included Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears. By early January 2006, the nightmare was growing. The Smoking Gun was set to publish a 13,000-word litany of Frey’s fabrications. Shortly before, they sent Frey their findings. Over dinner, he showed the report to his friend the writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell and asked what he should do. Kilmer-Purcell tried to calm him down: “I was like, ‘I don’t see this going anywhere. It’s eight pages of little facts, you know, little things, and I don’t see it going anywhere.’ ”

Well, some were little—he never set a county record for blood-alcohol level, for instance. But some were not so little. Not only had the three months of jail time never happened, neither had the crime that led to it: a brutal confrontation with Ohio cops that ended with Frey getting beaten with billy clubs. In addition, he had invented a role for himself in an actual train accident that led to the deaths of two high-school girls.

The Smoking Gun story was beamed around the Internet and hit the mainstream. Frey dug in, writing on his Web site, “So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt. I stand by my book and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.” Three nights later, Larry King invited him on the show to defend himself. At least he still had Oprah on his side. She called in to the show, coming to his defense: “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me, and I know it resonates with millions of people who have read this book.… To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing.”

But two weeks later, it seemed the only thing resonating with Winfrey was the message she was getting from her fans: How can you stand by this liar? She needed to put together a program where she could reassure them that, as she put it, “the truth matters.” But according to Talese, there was nothing truthful about the way the show was presented to its prospective guests.

As Talese recounted at a televised publishing conference last July, the show invited her and Frey together. Talese initially resisted. Then they were approached with a new pitch. The topic was going to be “Truth in America,” and they wanted Talese on a panel with columnists Frank Rich, of The New York Times, and Richard Cohen, from The Washington Post. Given this scenario, Talese agreed. But when she and Frey arrived at Harpo Studios, in Chicago, they were told that the program was not, in fact, about Truth in America; it was about the James Frey controversy. Winfrey told Frey it would be rough, but said there would be redemption in the end. There was no redemption. From beginning to end, it was, according to Talese, “a public scourge.”

Oprah, who just two weeks before had stood by the “essential truth” of Frey’s story, now pounced on his every other word, while the audience booed him.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it and … ” began Frey, in a typical exchange.

“No, the lie of it,” snapped Oprah. “That’s a lie. It’s not an idea, James. That’s a lie.”

“I feel like I came here, and I have been honest with you,” he said at the end of the hour. “I have, you know, essentially admitted to … ” “Lying,” Oprah broke in.

A montage of columnists—The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, the Los Angeles Times’s Joel Stein, and cultural critic Stanley Crouch—chimed in via pre-recorded spots: “I would say that Oprah should kick James Frey’s bony, lying, nonfiction butt out of the kingdom of Oprah,” offered Dowd in a typically incisive analysis.

“He felt trapped and cornered,” recalls Talese today. A spokesperson for Oprah claims that “Truth in America” was always the topic for the show and that Talese had been informed of the full range of questions in the pre-interview. Talese maintained (as she still does) that memoirs have always been personal impressions, and didn’t seem to realize that, for better or for worse, the game was now up. She was disgusted at the spectacle Oprah was making, appalled at her manners and at what she allegedly told Frey after the show was over: “I know it was rough, but it’s just business.” Winfrey denies ever making such a comment. “Once again, the truth is not being served here,” she says in a statement to Vanity Fair. “In 22 years of doing this show, I have never said to anyone, ‘I know it was rough, but it’s just business.’ This was beyond business. This was about the trust I share with the audience who faithfully supports the Book Club and buys the books I recommend; and based on that trust, I thought we were owed an explanation about the truth of this memoir.”

By the time Frey got to O’Hare Airport, it seemed that everyone knew who he was and what he’d done. He collected countless stares on his journey back to New York and was finally able to breathe only when he got into the taxi to go home. “I have this vivid memory of coming across the Williamsburg Bridge, and the sun was going down and New York looked gorgeous. I was just happy to be home. I came home, and my wife gave me a hug. My kid was asleep, and I snuck in and kissed her.”

High and Dry

When Frey left the apartment the next day for coffee, reporters were staked out at the front entrance of his building, so he slipped out the back. Soon, the reporters caught on and waited at the back too. There were no colleagues to call for support.

“Literally, pretty much everybody I knew in publishing, with the exception of, I think, two people, cut contact off.” As Frey tells it, the first deserter was Evashevski, his literary agent, who told Publishers Weekly, “It became impossible for me to maintain a relationship once the trust had been broken.” Frey scoffs at the excuse. “Kassie Evashevski says that she could no longer represent me because doing so would somehow affect her integrity. It did not ever affect her integrity to the point where she stopped taking money from me.” (According to a colleague of Evashevski’s, she no longer receives any commission.)

Next to go was McDonald, whose publishing house dropped Frey’s two-book contract, which included a new novel, Bright Shiny Morning. Contradicting his previous claim that he had personally “made sure everything actually happened,” McDonald now said in a written statement that he had just been relying on Frey’s word, and that he’d found out about Frey’s deceptions “the same way and at the same time as everybody else.” Frey took McDonald’s abandonment particularly hard. “When you need somebody most, they’re gone. And that hurt a ton. It hurt a lot. That was one of the hardest things—people you trust and you feel like you can rely on, and you really can’t.” (McDonald did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Frey was hit with a slew of lawsuits from unhappy readers, including a social worker who allegedly recommended his book to those with substance-abuse problems and was seeking $10 million on behalf of consumers. According to a source with knowledge of the litigation, Random House stopped paying him, citing breach of contract, at which point Frey’s lawyers threatened to sue the publishing house, pointing out that Frey was contractually obligated only to write a book that was completely original and his own (i.e., not plagiarized), not one that was true. They also threatened to go to the media with the material they now had, including Frey’s author questionnaire, stating that he considered the book literature, not memoir, and McDonald’s editorial memos. The complaint alleged that the memos demonstrated that McDonald had directed significant embellishment. According to the source Random House quickly resumed paying him. (When asked for a response, a Random House spokesman says, “We have no comment on the particulars of their editorial relationship. However, for works of non-fiction, Random House editors are vigorously instructed to seek verification from authors of all statements asserted as facts, based on author’s careful research and investigation for accuracy.”)

A day didn’t go by when Frey wasn’t ridiculed by the press. Excrement metaphors proved especially popular. Frey’s book was a “pile of bullshit” (Gawker) or “horse dookie” (Liars’ Club author Mary Karr told Time), and Frey was “a lying sack of dung” (New York Daily News). Frey riding his bicycle was enough to make the kids at Gawker double over at the sheer hilarity. The New York Times covered or mentioned the scandal on a daily basis. Book editor Judith Regan wasted no time in cashing in on Frey’s embarrassment, slapping together a send-up called A Million Little Lies, by James Pinocchio. “I was a bad joke,” says Frey. Two other literary scandals were playing out around the same time. Augusten Burroughs was being sued for defamation by the family depicted in Running with Scissors as revolting and bizarre (the suit was subsequently settled), and cult favorite J. T. LeRoy, author of the autobiographical novel Sarah, about “his” time as a child prostitute and vagrant, had just been outed as a troubled woman in disguise. Neither got the attention Frey did. When Frey learned that Dick Cheney had shot his hunting buddy in the face, he thought the torture might be over. “I remember thinking … At least something in the news that’s going to take it away. It didn’t.” He routinely came home to reporters in his lobby wanting to talk to him, at least one pretending to be a friend of one of Frey’s closest friends. Opening up his e-mail was a stomach-churning experience. Many ex-fans told him they hoped he would die or become an addict again. “See ya on Skid Row, fuck face,” went a typical sign-off.

It was enough to make him feel like a leper, a man who would stigmatize anyone who had the bad luck to be connected with him. “I would worry that having me for a father would profoundly affect our daughter’s life in a very negative way,” says Frey. “It’s not a great feeling. I was worried she wouldn’t get into pre-school anywhere because of me.” Going back to drugs or drinking was a constant temptation. Every day he would think, “It would be great to just get bombed. It would be great to go to sleep for a week. It would be great to just not feel anything,” recalls Frey. When the urge got especially acute, he reached out to friends. His old friend Billy Hult recalls one such day. “He said to me, Wow, I really feel like taking a drink today, and I said to him, Well, you don’t—and I said it kind of firmly, and then he just kind of paused, and I said to him, you know, Is Maya there? Do you want me to come by?” Frey didn’t give in to temptation. “A lot of people would have been happy if I had gone back, if I had started drinking or using drugs. I wasn’t going to give anybody the pleasure of that.”

To his relief, many readers offered their support by e-mail or when they bumped into him on the street, and he still had a handful of close friends who stood by him. “You offer someone distractions and try to get them out of the hell [they’re in] for a little bit,” says Josh Kilmer-Purcell. But the collective Schadenfreude of the New York media and publishing worlds proved too cruel to tolerate. Frey found solace in opposite directions—Hollywood and Europe. Though the movie plans for A Million Little Pieces had been dropped in the wake of the scandal, Tony Scott, who’d hired him to write a screenplay about Hells Angels, had no intention of backing out of that deal. Frey had an assignment. Now all he needed was somewhere to be productive, a place where he wouldn’t be reminded of his loathsomeness. In March 2006, he took some friends up on an offer to come to the South of France and use their house. His stay there with his family provided him with temporary calm. He says, “It was nice to be James Frey, husband, father, guy writing a movie, instead of James Frey, notorious author.”

When Frey returned to New York two months later, however, nothing there had changed. Numerous lawsuits were still hanging over his head (most eventually would be folded into a class-action suit that was settled by Frey and Random House in May 2007 for $2.35 million), and his world was still out of control. He soon learned that there was one world he could control—the one he could make up at his computer. “When my world was collapsing around me in so many ways, the machine was a great comfort.” Frey zeroed in on the Los Angeles novel that had been brewing in his head for a year. Like an addict getting through recovery moment to moment, he started to write “one word at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time.”

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

By the summer of 2006, Frey fell in with Glenn Horowitz, a 52-year-old rare-book dealer, who represented a sliver of the literary world that viewed him with special interest and sympathy. Social and well connected, Horowitz, with his business partner, John McWhinnie, has been the archivist and seller of some of the papers of Norman Mailer, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, among others. “You could just see this was someone who could use a new friend,” recalls Horowitz. “And I was very admiring of the fact that, despite this not inconsiderable trauma that he was experiencing and would experience and at considerable financial expense, he was still at work writing a novel.” One day in Frey’s den in Amagansett, after looking through boxes of Frey’s papers, Horowitz offered to archive them. The moist environment was unsound, Horowitz explained. More important, Frey had a story that Horowitz wanted to save—a remarkable rise and fall in the age of celebrity and reality TV. He also saw that there was more to Frey’s story than what met the eye.

Through Horowitz and McWhinnie, Frey met two other artists of the rebel vein who not only accepted Frey for what he had done, but gave him their stamp of approval. The first was Richard Prince, whose “re-photographs” of advertisements have prompted much debate about what constitutes art, and who has played with changing personas, even faking an interview with British writer J. G. Ballard about his life. In January 2007, Frey was with Prince at his house in upstate New York when Prince began flipping through a recent issue of New York magazine. “I had been named the most highbrow despicable person of 2006 on the Approval Matrix,” Frey recalls. “And Richard looked, and he was like, ‘Dude! Check this out!’ And I sort of went, ‘Oh, dude.’ He was like, ‘What do you mean? That’s great! I wish they would call me that.’ ” Redemption was possible—at least for the sort of person who’d dreamed of being the next Henry Miller.

And then there was Norman Mailer—to Frey, the torchbearer of the rebel-genius tradition. A year before Mailer died, Horowitz took Frey to lunch at the writer’s Brooklyn Heights town house. Frey’s hands were shaking as he entered the house, famous for its endless view of the East River and Manhattan skyline. As the two of them recount, Mailer stood and introduced himself: “So, you’re the guy that caused all these problems. I wish I’d known you at the time that the problems began. If you would have called me, I would have explained to you how to get through all this mess!”

They sat down on the couch and talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”

Mailer welcomed Frey into the elite circle of bad boys. “For 40 years they stomped on me. Now you have the privilege of being stomped on for the next 40 years.” And he compared them both to boxers. “Every fight, boxers prepare to take their opponent’s best shot. You should prepare to take huge shots every time out because they’ll never stop The work has been controversial enough that you’re never going to be like one of the guys. You’re never going to be one of the ones that the newspapers love or that wins awards. [You’re] always going to take a beating publicly. And that’s endurable if you just focus on what matters, which is the work.”

The afternoon was unforgettable for Frey. “It made me feel like, Yeah, I’m going to be fine. I can deal with this.” Indeed, nine months later, he finished Bright Shiny Morning. For Frey, the manuscript was proof of his ability, once again, to triumph over adversity, however self-inflicted it may be. “The situation I went through was as difficult as any situation I’ve ever gone through in my life,” he says. “I was able to endure it. And deal with it. The same way I’ve endured and dealt with other situations.”

Horowitz, turning out to be something of a fairy godfather, introduced Frey to an agent, a top agent, actually, Eric Simonoff, of Janklow & Nesbit, who was compelled by Frey’s mix of machismo and bigheartedness—both in person and on the page—and wanted to take him on as a writer. Frey warned Simonoff that he was “a fucking pariah”—was he sure he wanted to represent him? But Simonoff didn’t see why Frey shouldn’t be given another chance.

After all, what Frey had done wasn’t so unprecedented. Lillian Hellman’s 1973 Pentimento included an account of a lifelong friendship with someone who later came forward to say they never met. Dave Pelzer’s 1993 best-selling memoir, A Child Called It, about the abuse he suffered as a boy, was disputed by family members. According to an upcoming biography, Bennett Cerf’s best-selling memoir about founding Random House, At Random, is filled with fabrications. Since the Frey scandal, David Sedaris has been accused of, and admitted to, making up some of his work for humorous effect. These were big books or big authors. Who knows how many other, smaller memoirs have had similar fabrications?

It now turns out that it was something of an open secret in the publishing world that the industry had been complicit in the scandal, and that Frey, though he was not an innocent, had become a whipping boy. HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, who ultimately bought Bright Shiny Morning, for an estimated $1.5 million, says today, “There was a gap between what people were saying in public and in print, and what they were saying to each other privately. Whatever the complicated issues were in the case of A Million Little Pieces, there were feelings of concern and surprise that such fury was being visited on this one particular case, where we all know that the genre of memoir is a uniquely strange one, where many writers have played with the truth or reshaped the truth or have their own vision of the truth which can never be judged in any final court. We, as a community, were a little perplexed by it.” Even book editors with no personal stake in Frey feel it was overblown. Judith Clain, who has edited numerous memoirs at Little, Brown, says, “I could see how he got swept away. I also thought that he had a big ego and he did get swept up in himself. But on every level I thought that it got distorted.” Where were such voices at the time, when so many articles were being written about Frey? Editors, as a general rule, keep their heads down, Clain says. She concedes, however, that “it’s probably true that no one wants to alienate Oprah.”

Though the publishing world may be softening toward Frey, the media have not lost their taste for hating him. He continues to be everyone’s favorite punch line—however outlandish the comparison may be. When it was revealed in February that the author of a Holocaust-survival memoir was a Gentile and spent the war safely in Brussels, she was called the new Frey. When the author of a memoir about L.A. gang life turned out to be a nice middle-class suburban white girl, she was the new new Frey.

At this point, Frey has built up his armor against the media. He says the last two years have put his life into perspective: “The entire experience was profoundly humbling. I realized how lucky I am to have a wife that stayed with me through that. It was awesome. To have this beautiful little girl who whenever things got really bad and I saw her smile or laugh or do something she hadn’t done the day before, it made everything else irrelevant. To have friends that were totally there, to have a family that was totally there I’ll never take any of those things for granted ever again.”

Would he do anything differently? Frey doesn’t apologize for his literary interest in screwing with the rules, and screwing with truth and reality, but he says, “My mistake [with A Million Little Pieces]—and it was a huge mistake—was not to be explicit about what I did and how and why.” Then again, he now has a legacy. “The enduring myth of the American memoir as a precise form is bullshit and needed to go away,” he says. “Although the experience was a nightmare, if I started the process of ending that myth, I’m perfectly fine with it. I’ve said all along that I never wanted my books published as memoirs.” It’s nice to be the dad who lends a helping hand at the pre-school, but it’s hard to let go of the boy who breaks the rules.

The emperor Caligula is said to have made his horse a senator. Pope Alexander VI made his illegitimate teenage son an archbishop. In Italy today, Silvio Berlusconi has given the post of a regional deputy for Lombardy (Italy’s wealthiest and most populous region) to Nicole Minetti, a 26-year-old super-babe currently charged with procuring prostitutes for the prime minister. They met a year and a half ago, when she was a dental hygienist in training and had just finished a stint as a velina (showgirl) on one of the three television channels Berlusconi owns, a job that required her to wear a micro-mini Catholic-schoolgirl skirt and flash her butt in front of the camera. She had civil servant written all over her.

Today, as evidenced by her grand entrance into the Park Hyatt hotel in Milan, she’s upgraded the uniform to suit her new position—oversize black sunglasses, tight jeans, open-toed snakeskin stilettos, enormous bored pout, two cell phones, and an entourage. Less Britney Spears, you might say, more Heidi Fleiss. As a member of the regional government, she receives 12,000 euros ($17,000) a month. Asked what are the areas in Italian life that need the most attention right now, she widens her eyes, pushes out her lips, and shrugs off the question as absurd: “I think Italy’s a great place to live in…; Can I just go to the bathroom for a minute?” She goes to the bathroom, summons one of her handlers for an emergency conference, then returns to the table to answer the question more fully: “It’s a lovely place to live. That’s because of the Berlusconi government. He’s doing a great job for our country.”

If it’s hard to say what Minetti has been working on policy-wise, maybe it’s because, if Italian prosecutors are correct, she’s had her hands full finding young women for the prime minister, managing their housing, and escorting them to his “bunga bunga” parties, which include striptease and light fetish and lesbian action, not to mention alleged hookups with “Papi Silvio” involving the exchange of money and gifts. “A harem,” as one paid escort described it. “Twenty women for one man … just one man with the right to copulate and that was the prime minister.”

“They were happy dinners,” insists Minetti, as if we Americans simply don’t know how to have fun. “They weren’t serious dinners, where everyone is sitting and eating and not talking.” Instead, Berlusconi, a former cruise-ship crooner, captivated guests with his singing in French and his many tales. “He has thousands of things to tell, his stories, and how he got to where he is, and he can speak of everything. He’s fascinating.” So what if he might have gone to bed with them at the end of the evening? So what if some girls got envelopes of money after the parties? So what if he bought them jewelry and paid for their apartments? It’s called generosity. “Berlusconi, if he wants to go to bed with a girl, he doesn’t have to pay the girl,” Minetti says, shooting me a rather haughty, knowing look. “I can assure you of that.”

While prostitution is not illegal in Italy, paying for sex with a person under the age of 18 is. And one of the girls, a runaway Moroccan belly dancer who goes by the stage name Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby Heart-Stealer), was only 17 when she began partaking in the festivities. The 56-year age difference didn’t stop Berlusconi from gabbing with her on the phone 67 times over the course of three months and allegedly paying for her sexual services on at least 13 occasions. Which may be why he was in a bit of a state on the night of May 27, 2010, when Ruby (born Karima El Mahroug) was picked up by the police after another girl accused her of stealing 3,000 euros. Who knew what she would tell the authorities under pressure? A flurry of phone calls ensued among the prime minister, Minetti, and a local prostitute with whom Ruby was living. The prime minister called the police station and “requested” that she be released to Minetti. The girl is the granddaughter of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he said, and Italy can’t afford an international incident! This piece of nonsense, pulled out of thin air, has landed him a second charge, in addition to paying for sex with a minor: abusing the power of his office. Minetti, mother hen that she is, took Ruby under her wing after they left the police station … by promptly dumping her back at the pad of the prostitute.

How is it that in France Nicolas Sarkozy is spearheading the efforts to oust Qaddafi, in Germany Angela Merkel is sorting out the European Union’s debt crisis, and in Italy Berlusconi is not just bedding young women left and right but flaunting it publicly and giving them high-profile government posts? More to the point, how is it that he’s still in office? True, he’s facing criminal charges, but Italians have come to accept that that doesn’t mean much. He’s been indicted more than 20 times (not including four or five current trials) and has managed to escape conviction each and every time. In any other Western democracy, a leader like this would have been pushed out long ago.

But this is Italy, where Berlusconi, as prime minister, controls the three public television networks and, as the force behind the $8.6 billion conglomerate Fininvest, owns the three largest of the country’s four private networks, the largest publishing house, and around 40 magazines—not to mention dozens of other companies ranging from advertising to bookstores, to interactive media, to the soccer team A.C. Milan. He also owns film and TV production and distribution companies, insurance companies and mutual funds, banks, radio stations, and his own corporate university. Imagine a President Donald Trump with the media holdings of Rupert Murdoch and the sexual tastes of an aging Charlie Sheen, and you’re approaching the idea of Berlusconi.

Still, someone in his own party might have said something about his scandalous behavior. Alas, he owns that too, as virtually all the members of his party, Popolo della Libertà, which he founded in 1993 under the name Forza Italia, owe their livelihood to him. And so they valiantly muster their outrage to claim that he’s being targeted yet again by a politicized judiciary. “To transform private habits, parties, and, how to say, erotic relationships with young women and private friendships. I won’t discuss [whether] it’s good, it’s bad, it’s good taste, bad taste. It’s private!” declares his former top aide Giuliano Ferrara, a hefty, 59-year-old charismatic powerhouse. He paces, chain-smoking, across the office of the right-wing newspaper he founded, Il Foglio, in which Berlusconi’s estranged wife owns a large stake. “To transform this into a prosecution is really the most biased and culturally perverse way of operating justice.”

Minister of Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna, whose job it is to look out for women’s rights, is equally appalled. “The center-left is not about propositions, ideas, or reforms, and so basically because they can’t defeat Berlusconi through the ballots, they want to defeat him through the judiciary,” she explains. And if anyone knows a thing or two about what’s good for women, it’s she. Like Minetti, she was a velina on one of Berlusconi’s TV programs, as well as a topless model, before he decided she had just what it took to help run the country. All she needed was a shorter haircut and a smart pantsuit.

As for Berlusconi, in trying to defend himself, he has fallen back on his two standbys: blaming the Communists (even though Communists haven’t been a major force in Italy for 20 years) and making off-color jokes. “I’m 74 years old and even though I may be a bit of a rascal … 33 girls in two months seems to me too much even for a 30-year-old,” he told reporters in March. Besides, he declared when the Ruby scandal broke, “it’s better to be fond of beautiful girls than to be gay.”

It’s alarming that Berlusconi and his supporters seem to be entirely unconcerned about the image his behavior is giving Italy. Then again, this is a man who didn’t get into politics because he loved Italy so much. He got into politics to keep himself out of jail and his business empire intact.

Prime-Time Politics

The son of a bank employee and a housewife in Milan, Berlusconi studied law, but his first love was music. For a time he played the bass in a nightclub band and sang on cruise ships. In the 1960s, he turned to construction and real-estate development and amassed his first fortune by the time he was in his 30s. As Alexander Stille reports in his 2006 account of Berlusconi’s career, The Sack of Rome, Berlusconi’s approach to doing business involved not only a lot of positive thinking (one of his pearls of wisdom was “Always carry the sun in your pocket!”) but also a certain chicanery, like making up quotes and attributing them to famous people, such as American tycoons. “People are totally gullible,” he told his employees. “They drink up quotations!”

He never had to bribe anyone in his rise as real-estate mogul, he boasted. Sure, maybe a little kickback here, a piece of the action there—but that was just the patented Silvio charm. Then, around 1980, he turned his energies to buying television stations and importing for them such American shows as Dynasty, Dallas, and Baywatch. “He knew what the audience wanted,” says Enrico Mentana, who anchored the news on Berlusconi’s Canale 5 for 12 years. “Berlusconi’s television was a paradise of entertainment, game shows, women.” He operated these stations only semi-legally, because in Italy private stations could broadcast only locally, not nationally. But he overcame these statutory hurdles easily, by cozying up to the then prime minister and head of the Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi. In 1984, when judges shut down Berlusconi’s channels, Craxi simply issued a decree that made his nationwide network of “local” stations legal. Much to the relief of millions of Italians, Wheel of Fortune and The Smurfs were turned back on. Some years later, it would emerge, Berlusconi’s Fininvest funneled some 21 billion lire (around $17 million) into Craxi’s secret offshore bank accounts.

When Craxi was out of power and the Italian Parliament demanded that clear rules for media be made, Berlusconi adapted by paying a $500,000 “consulting fee” to the man tasked with writing the new law, which would stipulate that no individual could own more than three networks—oddly enough, the very number that belonged to Berlusconi. The law did force one concession from him. It said that an individual could not own both a national television network and a national newspaper. So he turned over the newspaper Il Giornale … to his younger brother, Paolo.

Starting in 1992, however, the system of political bribery that Berlusconi apparently had mastered was mortally threatened when a group of courageous prosecutors in Milan launched Mani Pulite (Operation Clean Hands) to battle Italy’s endemic corruption. Berlusconi was not the only person giving out bribes to politicians in those days; it was practically a national industry. In total, the amount of money that went into bribes was estimated to be about $8 billion a year. The magistrates found corruption in all the political parties, but Craxi’s Socialist Party was the biggest recipient. Craxi was indicted on 11 counts, and fled into exile in Tunisia. Berlusconi’s Fininvest was found to be among Craxi’s biggest donors, and indictments were handed down to a number of Fininvest’s executives. As Berlusconi told the legendary Italian journalists Indro Montanelli and Enzo Biagi, “I am forced to enter politics, otherwise they will put me in prison.”

“Berlusconi feared a tragical destiny,” says his ally Ferrara. “Because in Italy we had many great tycoons who committed suicide from the [prospect] of arrest or others who committed suicide in prison after three months of pre-emptive detention. In this situation, he feared for his empire. And he decided to go into politics because he was very popular.”

Indeed, a poll taken among young people at the time showed that Berlusconi topped a list of best-loved public figures, ahead of Arnold Schwarzenegger (No. 2) and Jesus Christ (No. 3). “He’s full of charm,” says Mario d’Urso, a former senator from the center-left and a society fixture. “You can hate him in a way, but it’s very difficult to dislike him.” After all, he was the guy who brought the soccer matches into people’s living rooms, not to mention Italy’s first topless game show.
In 1994 he called upon all areas of his empire—television, advertising, financial services—to harness their love and put him in office. His top ad salesmen, despite their lack of legislative experience, were enlisted to become parliamentary candidates, and given screen tests and a training seminar at Berlusconi’s villa. “It was a blitzkrieg,” recalls the anchorman Mentana, who witnessed the transformation of his own news program, on one of Berlusconi’s channels, into a cog in the making of a prime minister.

While raising the specter of Communism, Berlusconi presented himself as a pure, glistening political outsider who would break with the corruption of the recent past and usher in a new “Rivoluzione Liberale,” opening up markets and bringing people the kind of miraculous success he himself had achieved. In keeping with his romantic, think-big mojo, he chose for his new party the name “Forza Italia” (“Go Italy!”), the rallying cry for the Italian national soccer team. In order to get the votes he needed, he formed a coalition with two disparate though equally distasteful groups: the Northern League—a kind of Italian Tea Party whose ultimate goal was secession from the poor, less developed South—and the ultra-patriotic National Alliance, whose leader famously praised Mussolini as “the greatest statesman of the twentieth century.” It didn’t matter that the two parties loathed each other—Berlusconi was a master at making promises he had no intention of keeping.

Thanks to peoples’ disillusionment with the corruption in the established parties, Berlusconi was victorious. Almost overnight, the parties that had ruled Italy for 50 years were replaced by a group of well-groomed corporate suits whose only experience was working in Berlusconi’s media empire, and whose only platform was Berlusconi. Fifty deputies came from his advertising company alone, dozens more from his other companies. “I’m like Prince Charming,” he said delightedly. “They were pumpkins and I turned them into parliamentarians.”

His model for governing was the “idea of the team, the football team, like [his] Milan football club, or an industrial team, and he is the owner,” says Ferrara, who left a job as an anchorman on one of Berlusconi’s channels to become his spokesman. “You have stakes in the company, and you can decide, because you are the owner.”

For all his confidence in his winning personality, for all the sunshine he kept in his pocket, Berlusconi had zero finesse in the political arena. “I tried to help transform him into a statesman. We didn’t succeed. It was impossible,” recalls Ferrara. “Politics is mediation, it’s unification of different sectors of society, of different cultures. He never wanted to learn that.” Tackling his one priority of saving himself, he came on like a bull in a china shop. When rumor spread that his brother, Paolo, might be arrested for having allegedly bribed tax inspectors to keep Fininvest out of the prosecutors’ investigations, Berlusconi issued a special decree that made it illegal for the judiciary to arrest people for political corruption and fraud. With the stroke of a pen, thousands of defendants who’d been arrested for corruption were suddenly free men. Throughout Italy, it became known as “the Save-the-Thieves Decree.”

But this proved to be a step too far. Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League, turned against Berlusconi, saying, “Instead of governing, Berlusconi is trying to keep his friends, relatives, and employees out of jail.” He split with the prime minister, taking with him enough deputies to bring the government down—just seven months after coming to power.

Before he was ousted, Berlusconi had mobilized his media to destroy the Clean Hands magistrates. His chief target was Antonio Di Pietro, the public face of Clean Hands, who was considered, at that point, a hero by the Italian people. Berlusconi’s media outlets began a campaign to slander him, trumpeting a number of bogus scandals, but one allegation—involving an interest-free loan of 100 million lire (about $80,000) that Di Pietro had received from a friend—hit home. It was perhaps more a case of bad judgment than anything else, but when Di Pietro was notified that an investigation was under way, he quickly resigned.

This kind of Swift Boating and character assassination became standard procedure for Berlusconi, even when he was out of power. When the girlfriend of a top Fininvest lawyer testified that another Berlusconi lawyer had bragged that “he had many magistrates on his payroll and that he was in a position to buy the third branch of government,” she was attacked in his newspapers as a “courtesan” and a crazy person who “claims to have had three babies who died.” (In fact, as Stille has reported, she had had three children who died of cystic fibrosis.) When a comedian did a show on one of the public stations exposing the long-standing Mafia ties of one of Berlusconi’s top lieutenants, the Berlusconi-owned news organizations attacked, causing him to lose his job. After the editor of Avvenire, a Catholic newspaper, criticized Berlusconi’s affairs with young women, Il Giornale printed excerpts from a supposed court document that suggested that the editor had a male lover and had been sued for harassing this man’s wife. Several months later, it became clear that the court document was a fake, cooked up as an intentional smear. By that time, the editor had resigned, exhausted by “a war of words that has wrecked my family.”

For Mentana, who had gone to Mediaset’s flagship channel, Canale 5, before Berlusconi turned to politics, trying to report the news honestly was a struggle. When he dared to report on a Mafia investigation, say, that touched on Berlusconi, he was hauled on the carpet by the Berlusconi cronies who were his bosses. They fired and rehired the popular anchor twice; eventually, unable to take it any longer, he left of his own volition.

In another favorite tactic, Berlusconi took to presenting himself as a victim. Far from entering politics out of self-interest, he’d done so on a mission to save Italy, and oh, the sacrifices he had to make. “I’ve had to give up a very pleasant life… . I suffer doing these things,” he told Vanity Fair in 1994. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” he later said. “I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

His electorate fell for it. In 2001, with the Northern League once more in his pocket, he was elected again—just in time to save Team Berlusconi. By this point, the Clean Hands prosecutors had discovered tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars controlled by Berlusconi in offshore bank accounts, and evidence of payoffs made in every direction, to judges, politicians, and the women in their lives; he and his close associates were slapped with dozens of indictments for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery. Berlusconi fought back by putting his own legal-defense team in charge of re-writing the laws of Italy. He put two of his criminal-defense attorneys up for Parliament and then installed them at the head of the Justice Commission. He made his personal tax lawyer minister of economy and finance. The three henchmen in deepest legal trouble he made members of Parliament.

Together, they would tailor the laws to fit their immediate legal needs. To wit: Berlusconi was still facing a serious charge of accounting fraud related to illegally transferring millions of dollars to Craxi. So Parliament decriminalized that kind of false accounting, rendering the charge moot. He stood accused of tax evasion. Suddenly there was amnesty for tax evaders. He was facing the charge of having bribed a judge: Parliament passed a new law granting immunity to Italy’s highest-ranking leaders. Soon, the immunity law would be struck down, but by the time Berlusconi’s trial resumed, he was saved by the statute of limitations. “All these decisions or proposals made by Berlusconi had the effect of blocking the real work of the Parliament,” says Giuliano Pisapia, the lawyer representing the opposing side in another bribery case against Berlusconi. But Berlusconi insisted this was the real work of Parliament. As he explained, “If I, in taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

Problem was, he hadn’t taken care of anyone else’s business. From his long list of non-accomplishments, the most glaring is what he hasn’t done to open up markets and competition—presumably because he has wanted to avoid competition for himself. When, for example, a new channel, La7, was about to be launched as a challenger to Berlusconi’s near monopoly of television, Telecom Italia, the fledgling station’s owner, suddenly backed down. Considering the amount of damage Berlusconi’s government could wreak on the phone company, it just wasn’t worth it. Berlusconi has similarly tried to hamper the growth of Murdoch’s Sky Italia, by doubling the tax its subscribers have to pay.

For a long time business leaders such as Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo, one of the pillars of Italian industry, gave Berlusconi the benefit of the doubt. La Rivoluzione Liberale was just what Italy needed, they believed. But it has turned out to be a hoax, says the dashing and elegant Montezemolo, 63. “In the last 17 years, we have had a country that instead of growth, instead of increasing competitiveness, instead of looking ahead, has been concentrated on these contingent problems,” he says, referring to Berlusconi’s many personal scandals. Like the owners of Telecom Italia, he’s discovered that the only business Berlusconi is interested in is his own. Currently launching a high-speed train throughout Italy, Montezemolo has seen the Berlusconi government try every which way to marginalize it, because the state owns the train system already and sees no benefit in changing the situation. “The political class has been without any kind of accountability,” he says.

Berlusconi boosters claim he has done much to free Italy from the powerful grip of organized crime. But Roberto Saviano, an Italian journalist who has lived under police protection since 2006, when his book Gomorrah, about the Naples Mafia, was published, says this is mostly spin. “What the Berlusconi government has done to combat the Mafias … has taken the form of a military repression—without really erasing the economic system by which the Mafias thrive,” says Saviano. “Today the Mafias in Italy remain the most prolific enterprises in the country and are the only ones that have an unimaginable amount of liquid cash. The businesses they control are extremely diverse, and they have the ability to win contracts in every sector.”

For artists and other creative types, it is the cultural degradation that’s so depressing. The architect Renzo Piano, who grew up in Genoa, has seen his beautiful image of Italy crumple. “It’s a humanistic culture. It’s the art of mixing things. It’s the art of lateral thinking,” says Piano, a bright-eyed 73-year-old, in his New York office, a few blocks away from his current project, the new, downtown Whitney Museum. “Suddenly we found out it’s not like that. This subtle capacity to explore what people say—it’s only for part of Italy. The other part is people who believe in Berlusconi My wife and I, we spend many evenings feeling profoundly sad about this.”

By the time Berlusconi had been elected a third time, in 2008—after the short, fractured stint of the center-left government of Romano Prodi—it seemed he had achieved all he had set out to. He’d outplayed enough key people to keep his monopolies intact. He’d grown his fortune to $9.4 billion. And he’d stayed out of jail. It seemed there was nothing left to do except … well … binge on girls.

Ladies of the Right

Even in his 70s, Berlusconi has fancied himself quite the stallion: “If I sleep for three hours, I still have enough energy to make love for another three.” He has a physical type: brunette Barbie, with almond eyes, small nose, voluminous lips, and prominent cheekbones. His second wife, Veronica Lario, looked like that once, when she was a B-movie actress. But that was many years ago, and there’s only so much plastic surgery can do.

Berlusconi might have taken the traditional mistress route, indulging his need for a newer model quietly, on the side, but he just couldn’t resist bringing his affairs into the public arena. Having sex with beautiful women was fun only if you could brag about it. As Stille recounts in The Sack of Rome, one of Berlusconi’s favorite jokes goes something like this: An Italian man is marooned on an island with Claudia Schiffer. Schiffer falls in love with the man and will do anything for him. He tells her he misses his buddies; will she dress up like Dominic and shoot the breeze with him? Schiffer obliges and dresses up like Dominic. He turns to her and says, “You’re never going to believe this, but I’m fucking Claudia Schiffer!”

His history in womanizing began years ago. But events turned alarming with the exquisite Mara Carfagna, now 35, who just a few years ago was still flashing her underwear on one of Mediaset’s programs and appearing half naked in the pages of Maxim. Rumors of an affair abounded, and Berlusconi put the velina up for Parliament, making no effort to hide his affection. “If I weren’t already married, I would marry you right now,” he said on television in 2007, prompting Lario to print a letter in the left-leaning newspaper La Repubblica, demanding an apology from him.

The promotion of veline who were “friends” of the prime minister’s continued. Michela Vittoria Brambilla, who hosted a television show about sexy nightclubs, was made undersecretary of tourism. Barbara Matera, a former Miss Italy contestant and television presenter, became a member of the European Parliament. What if a citizen didn’t particularly want to be represented in government by a showgirl? Too bad. In 2006, Berlusconi changed the law so that people vote for parties, not individuals, and the party bosses—i.e., him—make up the national lists. So what if a veteran politician felt diminished debating legislation with a lingerie model? As Berlusconi pointed out, “The left has no taste, even when it comes to women.” Soon, velina became the No. 1 career aspiration among girls in media-conscious Milan.

And the girls got younger. In 2009 it emerged that Berlusconi had attended the 18th-birthday party of aspiring velina Noemi Letizia, whom he later hosted for a vacation at his villa in Sardinia. “[I want to be] a showgirl,” she told an Italian newspaper. “I am interested in politics too I’d prefer to be a candidate for the Chamber, in Parliament. Papi [daddy] Silvio will take care of it.” This was the last straw for Lario, who filed for a legal separation and spoke out in another open letter, to an Italian news agency, condemning her husband’s behavior and his promotion of showgirls as “shameless rubbish … for the entertainment of the emperor.”

Then, in an act that can be seen as either hubris or tempting fate, he chose Ruby, the Moroccan runaway. It was his 79-year-old friend the anchorman Emilio Fede who, in 2009, singled her out on a televised beauty contest—and announced to viewers that she was 13 (“if I’m not mistaken”) and had come from a hardscrabble life in Egypt with no parents. According to Ruby, he referred her to Mediaset talent scout Lele Mora, and introduced her to the prime minister (allegations Fede has denied). Ruby and Berlusconi’s relationship might have remained under wraps had Berlusconi not butted in on May 27, 2010, when Ruby was brought into the police station in Milan after being accused of theft.

The revelation of his association with the belly dancer set in motion an investigation involving numerous witnesses and employing the all-important tool of intercepted cell-phone calls. For 15 years prosecutors had watched Berlusconi squirm out of one indictment after another. But this time may be different. In January, the Constitutional Court (the Italian version of the Supreme Court) scaled back the law that gave the prime minister immunity, theoretically making Berlusconi vulnerable again. He faces up to 3 years in prison for the juvenile-prostitution charge and up to 12 years for abuse of office.

As the 389-page dossier of the prosecutors—led in part by Ilda Boccassini, one of the Clean Hands “Commies,” whom Berlusconi had tried to tarnish in the media—makes clear, the crime and the subsequent cover-up could become Berlusconi’s Watergate.

“Now they basically know that I’ve been to Silvio’s and that I know Silvio,” Ruby told a friend on the phone in September 2010, after she had been brought in for questioning by the prosecutors in Milan. “I denied that Silvio knows I’m under-age. I told them that he believes I’m of age, because I don’t want to get him in trouble … [that] I’m of age, that I’m 24, but that I go there as a friend.”

The prime minister started to worry. As Ruby said to her friend, “My case is the most frightening one of all. It goes beyond the [Noemi] Letizia case [and] the [paid-escort Patrizia] d’Addario case, all of them.” He was willing to do anything to make it go away.

That, naturally, meant a payoff. The prosecutors’ dossier reveals a call in which Ruby said to her father, “Silvio told [the lawyers], ‘Tell her I will pay her whatever she wants. The important thing is that she keeps her mouth shut, that she denies everything. She can even say she’s crazy, but the important thing is that she leaves me out of all this.’” And to another friend: “He called me yesterday saying, ‘Ruby, I’ll give you as much money as you want. I’ll pay you. I’ll cover you in gold. But the important thing is that you hide everything, hide everything—don’t say anything to anyone.’”

Ruby warned that her silence wouldn’t come cheap. She said to a friend, “I spoke with Silvio, and I told him that I want to come out of this with at least something. I mean, give me five million.” And then to another: “What’s important is that he is going to be stuffing me with money.”

Berlusconi has denied it all, except for a cash gift of 60,000 euros (about $81,000)—to buy laser hair-removal gear so she could open a beauty salon. But prosecutors say they have evidence that he paid Ruby for sex on 13 occasions, and that she received $300,000 worth of gifts, including two Rolex watches, a $20,000 diamond necklace, and a $24,000 fox fur. (Ruby declined to be interviewed for this article after being told that the magazine would not pony up some money, too.) Beyond Ruby, the investigation has blown open the door to the inner workings of Berlusconi’s bacchanalias that took place at his villa in Sardinia, his Palazzo Grazioli, in Rome, and at Villa San Martino, his 145-room mansion in Arcore, outside Milan.

The women hailed from all parts of Italy, as well as Russia, Romania, the Ukraine, and South America. Regional Representative Minetti, newsman Fede, and Mediaset talent scout Mora seem to have been responsible for wrangling, shuttling the girls to and from, and wardrobe suggestions. As Mora told Roberta Bonasia, the recently crowned Miss Turin, “You’ll be the official nurse. You have to have one of those things for measuring his blood pressure, and you can wear the kind of blouse—” “That women doctors wear,” Roberta jumps in. “With nothing underneath, obviously.”

After a casual dinner during which the girls would be smoking and checking their cell phones, it was time for the “bunga bunga,” a type of wild harem party that Berlusconi learned from his good friend Qaddafi, Ruby told investigators. One by one, the girls would change their outfits, hit the stripper’s pole, and allow themselves to be fondled. Minetti, the queen bee, took part as well, according to more than one witness.

Patrizia d’Addario, who allegedly received 1,000 euros (about $1,350) to attend a party in Rome (and later slept with Berlusconi, she claimed, in a bed he was given by Vladimir Putin), described the scene in a tell-all: “He was on the couch and all of us, twenty girls in all, were at his disposal. The younger women were in fierce competition with each other as to who could sit closest to the prime minister.”

Following the bunga bunga, according to prosecutors, one or more of the lucky ladies would be chosen to spend the night with him. “I stayed there and slept over, obviously,” Roberta Bonasia told her brother on the phone the day after one tryst, adding, “I didn’t sleep at all.” She said she was given an envelope containing “the same as there was the other times,” which he said was to help her out with the shop she wanted to open. In fact, most were given some kind of party favor. One shocked girl, who never went back, told prosecutors that she was given an envelope upon leaving. “I opened the envelope, in the presence of Nicole [Minetti], and I saw it contained four 500-euro bills. I was surprised and embarrassed, and I asked Nicole to explain the gesture, and why I had received this money. Nicole explained that the prime minister knew about my studies and that the gift was intended to be a contribution to my studies. Minetti said that I had to interpret that gesture as a gesture of generosity.”

“I think that’s one of the most beautiful things a person can do: help people that are in need,” explains Minetti today. “If I have a rich boyfriend and I go to bed with him and he gives me money for the rent or for the car, that means I’m doing prostitution with him? … [Berlusconi’s] not afraid of believing in young people and investing on them. And that’s what he did with me. He invested on me.”

As the wiretaps show, others were less appreciative. Iris called Aris to say, “I just have to call him. Shit, I want to go back there because yesterday he gave me so little, I want something more.”

Aris texted Barbara: “Love, yesterday I ended up going anyway, but he didn’t give me anything. Some of the others, yes. Did he call you? He didn’t answer me. Oof!”

Another Barbara complained to Fede, “Now he prefers to invite the Cubans and the Venezuelans. You know that Maristhelle goes, and Iris goes. But I don’t give a damn If he wants to see me, he can call me, Emilio. I’m not someone who chases after people. If he prefers a bunch of retards who dance like mongoloid idiots—really, it makes me sick!”

It was all getting a little out of hand for the three wranglers (who are now all charged with aiding and abetting prostitution). Berlusconi kept expecting the shindigs to be thrown together at the last minute, and the girls were getting uppity—bothering him with things like who was getting a bigger apartment. Some were even flaunting their relationship with him. Fede had to pay off one girl with 10,000 euros because she had damning pictures on her cell phone. “They’re 300-euro blow jobs!” he told Minetti, exasperated.

“I’ve told the girls, ‘Look, I’m just the go-between,’” Minetti said to Fede. “‘I’m the contact, period. That’s all. I mean, do what I’m told, what he tells me to do. But not what you tell me to do.’”

It was enough to make two old-timers rue the day. “Eh, no one has any manners anymore,” Mora told his friend Fede.

The girls had become a pack of ingrates, never bothering to say thank you for the chance to party with the prime minister. According to Fede, a friend of his had suggested that “maybe it’s out of shyness.” He passed this tidbit along to Mora, saying, “Fuck that! Shyness?! You should know how to say thank you.”

“When they’re taking your dick they don’t seem to be overcome with shyness, right?” replied Mora.

“Exactly!” said Fede. “When they’re taking your dick, in exchange for money, right? Shit!”

“Oh, it’s crazy!”

How crazy? Two days later, the guys were still talking about it.

“They were really awful, the ones she brought Sunday,” said Mora.

“Oh, but the worst! The worst!” replied Fede.

“The absolute worst!”

“And this Cuban?”

“Mamma mia!”

“I mean, really. It’s incurable, this problem, incurable! And also the money that’s getting thrown around.”

“It’s so much! So much.”

“Ah! So much money! So much!”

“It’s terrifying. It’s really terrifying!”

“Terrifying! I tried to tell him I have to protect him in every way possible.”

“[You have to try] to take care of things. If not, it will become a really awful situation.”

“ … One was phoning from the bathroom—”

“Mamma mia!”

“Bah … ”

The End of Tolerance

For a long time, Italians tolerated Berlusconi’s behavior with women. After all, Italy, despite having had a robust feminist movement in the 70s, remains a macho culture, and a good chunk of his male electorate regards his conquests merely with envy. “Berlusconi is the prototype of the entrepreneur that fascinates the Italian people,” observes Roberto Saviano, “with his smile, his women, his bluntness in saying, ‘I am a man who works and who enjoys life. What’s wrong with that?’” The Catholic Church has remained mum, perhaps because Berlusconi has supported some of the issues that are important to it—such as blocking gay marriage and limiting assisted fertilization. But with Ruby, it seems, Berlusconi has finally gone too far. In February, hundreds of thousands of people (mostly women but some men too) took to the streets in 200 towns and cities across the country, chanting, “Italy is not a brothel,” and protesting the general sorry state of women’s rights in Italy—from their degradation on television to the fact that only 46 percent of women work. Of the 27 countries in the European Union, “we are the last in terms of women, according to any criterion you pick,” says left-wing senator Emma Bonino, a feminist who spearheaded the effort to legalize abortion, in 1978. “The situation is so pathetic.” One might imagine that Minister of Equal Opportunities Carfagna, in light of her job, would concede that the protesters had a right to be heard. Instead, she dismisses them with a haughty sound bite. “We’re talking about a very noisy minority against a silent majority,” she says. “These protests were exploited by the left wing to send Berlusconi home.”

The next elections are scheduled to take place in 2013. A recent poll shows that Berlusconi’s popularity has fallen to 33 percent. Former prime minister Massimo D’Alema, one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, insists, “The majority of our people understand that we have to liberate the country from Berlusconi, that Berlusconi is over I believe we can win.” He may be right. In May, Berlusconi tried to make the re-election of center-right candidate Letizia Moratti as mayor of Milan into a referendum on popular support for himself in his hometown. She was soundly defeated by Giuliano Pisapia, the center-left candidate. But political observers are quick to point out that among Berlusconi’s rivals there is still no one exactly oozing charisma. As Enrico Mentana puts it, “The left has many Kerrys and Gores, but no Obama.”

In spite of the evidence against Berlusconi, no one is counting on the Rubacuori case to bring him down. He certainly hasn’t given up his old tricks. On a recent trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa, which has been swamped with thousands of migrants from North Africa since the revolution in Tunisia, Berlusconi was in showman mode, promising to remove them from the island within 60 hours, to build a golf course there, to buy a villa for himself, and to nominate the islanders for a Nobel Peace Prize. His words were manna to the desperate crowds, who cheered and wept and applauded. And it made for great television, pushing aside the other news of the day: Berlusconi—who’s also facing charges for allegedly bribing his English lawyer David Mills to provide false testimony in previous bribery and financial-fraud cases—had just succeeded in getting Parliament to propose a law shortening the statute of limitations for first-time offenders. Remember all those convictions he escaped? Yes, Berlusconi qualifies as a first-time offender. It seems likely the bill will pass, which would allow him to escape conviction—again—in the Mills bribery case.

As for the prostitution case, he’s dancing as fast as he can. George Clooney was put on the list of defense witnesses, presumably to proclaim that prostitution did not occur at the bunga bungas. (Clooney has said he met Berlusconi only once, to solicit aid for Darfur.)

The trial began on April 6 in a Milan courtroom—without Berlusconi, whose lawyer said he was tied up with the Libyan crisis. The proceedings ran for 10 minutes, before being adjourned until May 31. Berlusconi’s Parliament has voted to ask the Constitutional Court to move the trial from Milan to a special tribunal for ministers in Rome. Meanwhile, Berlusconi is continuing to play it lightly with bad jokes: 79-year-old Emilio Fede accused of offering television jobs in exchange for sexual favors? Berlusconi joked that his old friend couldn’t find his penis if he tried. Whatever the outcome, this is for certain: One day, the whole saga will make a great premium-cable mini-series. Maybe that was Berlusconi’s plan all along.

At 80-something and with a weakness for needlepoint cushions, Slim Aarons, the photographer behind A Wonderful Time, a 1974 picture book about the Good Life, is not what you’d expect from the guru of 21st century cool. At his 1782 Bedford, New York, farmhouse—bought with the help of friends at Life magazine in 1953—you are greeted by an American flag and, at Christmastime, by a cardboard pinup of Charlie Brown. Inside, among the signed pictures from photographer friends Alfred Eisenstaedt and George Silk, you’ll come across straw hats propped against the wall, a stash of Canada Dry ginger ale, a small bowl of hard candy, and Currier & Ives prints he may have picked up at a New Hampshire auction. Settle into the sofa, fireside, and you’ll find yourself next to a tiny pillow that tells you, IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME I’M GOING WITH YOU.

“I can’t figure out why people love it so much,” Aarons says of the book he did three decades ago that has suddenly put him back in the limelight. As usual, the lanky, six-foot-four-inch, good-looking photographer is wearing a cheerful cotton ascot around his neck and a tidy cardigan. He has made contact with his memory, or what he calls his “IBM,” and is on one of his impressive monologues, delivered in an endearing bark. “Imagine, it came out in ’74! Now they’ve set up a whole thing on the Web! They have an auction [of copies of the book] every day—would you believe it?” A collection of photographs from Aarons’s work for Life, Holiday, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and Travel & Leisure, A Wonderful Time is an unabashed homage to a now bygone era of privilege and exclusivity. Popping into such resorts and enclaves as Newport and Palm Beach, Acapulco and Palm Springs, it introduced people to Barclay Warburton III at the helm of the brigantine Black Pearl; Mrs. William de Rham’s dancing class at the River Club, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; golf-club cozies knitted by the Duchess of Windsor; skiing picnics at Snowmass, Colorado; numerous “popular couples”; women with names like Brownie and Bobo; and various horses and hounds. While only a handful of people in 1974 thought A Wonderful Time was so wonderful, it has given Aarons a second career —starting with a new book, Once upon a Time—and has made Slim, a man who still talks about “gals”and “fellas,” the hippest name in fashion.

“I don’t think there’s any American designer who doesn’t have a copy [of A Wonderful Time],” says Michael Kors, chief dresser of the junior jet set. Designer Anna Sui calls it “the quintessential guide for good taste.” Rare-book dealers sell it for up to $2,000. Interior decorators leave copies open to a different page each day for inspiration. Top editors of glossy magazines won’t let it leave their offices. Art directors “borrow” it—permanently. “Vogue’s had and lost 47 copies!” Aarons reports.

Aarons began his climb to style swami at an unlikely place—a farm in New Hampshire. But, for all the weighty lineage he has photographed, his own childhood remains “a blur.” Raised by his grandparents, Aarons never really knew his parents, and he won’t talk about it, because he doesn’t want “crazies calling up, saying they’re long-lost cousins.” Instead, he’ll just exclaim, “I’m a simple farm boy!”

Like all New Hampshire farm boys in the early 1940s who wanted to see the world, Aarons enlisted in the army and talked his way into a job as a hypo dipper, the boy who dunks the developing prints in chemicals —“the lowest level in photography.” Soon thereafter he became a photographer at West Point, shooting military maneuvers.
“I was a big hero there,” says Aarons, “and I became very looked after by the sergeants’ daughters.” When the war started, he also charmed Hollywood director Frank Capra, who had been making a movie for the war effort, and who had come to West Point looking for people to work overseas on Yank, the weekly spin-off of the military newspaper The Stars and Stripes, which had such writers as Andy Rooney and Irwin Shaw on staff. “Capra got me out,” says Aarons. Before he knew it, the simple farm boy was on a Pan Am Clipper, headed for London. “Quite a thing for a kid like me,” he says. He can wax nostalgic about the good old days of early-airline luxury for an afternoon, uninterrupted.

Photojournalism was just beginning, and he was issued a Speed Graphic, a camera that required the insertion and removal of plates. Aarons promptly ditched it. “How can you even think of using it in a war?” he says. Instead he used a small Leica. “Cameras were nothing in those days. You had to be a photographer to take pictures in those days,” he explains. Aarons recorded brutal fighting at Monte Cassino, where, under mortar fire, he lost bowel control. The war also introduced him to two men, George Silk and Carl Mydans, who were taking pictures for Life, the magazine he had revered as a teenager. “We stayed together through the whole campaign in Italy,” says Silk, 86, who remembers the three of them liberating a German beer cellar, catching a chicken by the side of the road and making it dinner, and risking their lives on a daily basis. “He was scared to death, and so was I,” Silk adds. At one point, Aarons saved Mydans’s life by frantically telling him to retreat from some German gunners. Aarons himself was wounded during the invasion of Anzio, along with syndicated columnist Ernie Pyle, when the Germans blew up a dock along the Italian beach. “That’s how I got my Purple Heart,” Aarons says. “I gave it to a blonde I knew after the war. She said she liked the color.” Finally, the three rode into Rome together to see it fall to the Allies. Aarons recorded the day with a famous picture of a soldier holding a baby in a jubilant Mussolini Square.

But Aarons would tire of witnessing carnage and despair. “After you’ve seen a concentration camp, you really don’t want to see any more bad things,” he says, echoing the sentiments of many returning vets. For some, this meant a life spent grilling in the suburbs. For Slim, it meant recording for all the top magazines an exclusive world of elegance, wealth, and leisure— or, as he famously put it, “attractive people in attractive places doing attractive things.” While at Life (where he met his future wife, Rita Dewart, then an assistant on the photo desk), he went to Hollywood to shoot such rarefied events as the croquet match between teams headed by producer Darryl Zanuck and writer Moss Hart. When he returned to Rome, it was to photograph actors and actresses, and he embedded himself at the Excelsior Hotel, whose lobby was festooned with high-priced courtesans. At Harper’s Bazaar, he worked with art director Alexey Brodovich, an acknowledged master at turning magazine photographs into artistic presentations. By the time Life wanted him to shoot the Korean War, Aarons had decided, “I’ll only do a beach if it has a blonde on it.”

Aarons would subsequently get his fill of both blondes and beaches at Holiday magazine. Although Holiday had such distinguished writers as Faulkner and Steinbeck, its look had long been overly tidy and predictable. Then, in 1951, a man named Frank Zachary took over as art director and pumped new energy into it. Fresh from Portfolio (a cutting-edge design magazine that people still talk about, even though it came out only three times), Zachary enlisted a number of sophisticated illustrators and came up with a style of taking pictures he called “environmental photography.” There would be no closeups. Subjects would be seen in their milieus —their rooms, their gardens, with their books and their “goddamn dogs,” as Zachary would say. He set up a stable of photographers that included Arnold Newman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tom Hollyman, Fred Maroon, John Lewis Stage, and Aarons, which would become the backbone of the magazine. From the start, Aarons was the group’s most voluble member. “He was very exuberant,” Newman, 85, says decorously, recalling the group lunches at Gallagher’s Steak House, on West 52nd Street, during which the other men struggled to get a word in here and there. Aarons sometimes had them jumping through hoops at work too. Once, on assignment in Nairobi for an issue devoted to Africa, Newman discovered that Aarons had made him his assistant. “I couldn’t get out to do my own work until another couple of days,” says Newman.

Aarons never made a big thing about creating high art—which is why his friendn V.F. contributing photographer Jonathan Becker calls him the “Jimmy Stewart of photography” and why Aarons often reminds people that “it’s all bullshit.” His briefings with Zachary before assignments were to the point and usually ended with the words “Slim, bring back the snaps, and make sure it doesn’t look like Brooklyn.” Aarons would set off with a minimum of equipment and a beautiful assistant to distract subjects. (“They were all racehorses,” Aarons tells you—often.) Sometimes he and his girl Friday worked like tornadoes. New York magazine founder Clay Felker, now a senior lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley graduate school of journalism, recalls witnessing them getting the snaps for a story he was writing, and reporting on it to Zachary: “Slim and that girl were a guerrilla team. They went in, went out, without anyone knowing what hit them.”

Other times, Aarons might put in long hours of careful orchestration, persuading subjects to move, say, their entire bedrooms onto the lawn. Once, on assignment for a story about Venice, he spent days trying to get a gondolier to haul dozens of boats up onto St. Mark’s Square (he eventually succeeded by giving him $250). Determined not to include any pigeons in the photos, he waited one morning until 6:30, when the square was gleaming wet from being freshly cleaned, and pointed his Leica to shoot. “One pigeon appeared,” says Zachary. “It was perfect.” To photograph Madame de la Haye-Jousselin, a descendant of the Comtesse de Noailles, Aarons put her in riding habit, sidesaddle, in front of the magnificent gate of her château. “Slim managed to get the horse to raise his hoof. A real, honest-to-God, 17th-century portrait,” Zachary says.

But Aarons’s pictures were more than old-fashioned portraits of modern rich people. They made modern rich people sexy. His photos of banquets in Acapulco—including one with actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and designers Oscar de la Renta and Emilio Pucci—had the kind of effortless fabulousness that told viewers, Keep dreaming. The photographs of socialite C. Z. Guest at her pool in Palm Beach and of Babe Paley relaxing at the cottage in Round Hill, Jamaica, owned by her and her husband, CBS chief Bill Paley, had the kind of satisfied-ice-queen allure seen only in Grace Kelly movies. “He extracted everything that was cool and chic about [old money],” says professional stylewatcher Simon Doonan, a major Aarons follower. “He left behind all the dusty mumsiness of it and made it look incredibly crisp and stylish . . . because most rich chicks look kind of frumpy, mumsy, frowsy.”

In return, society made him an honorary member. “Everybody that he photographed— everybody—liked him. You couldn’t help but like him,” says Guest, who sums up the whole Slim experience in a clipped “fabulous.” Anthony Mazzola, his editor at Town & Country, recalls, “When we covered balls, we knew all the people, and Slim knew all the people, and when they saw him coming, most of the women would get up and embrace him.” At the annual Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute ball, Aarons would serve as an escort for Mrs. Douglas MacArthur. When President Kennedy drove by him in Palm Beach, he rolled down the window of his car and asked, “Was the girl from your story about Lake Como really that beautiful?” European aristocracy would vouch for him. During the Ascot races in London, when Aarons was knocked down by guards form lifting up his camera in the royal enclosure, he was rescued by none other than Prince Philip. “Slim, what the hell are they doing to you?” the prince asked.

Saving the flattery for his pictures, Aarons called it as he saw it, seeing fit to point out to John D. Rockefeller III the crabgrass growing on his lawn or telling Daniel Ludwig, the billionaire shipbuilder and environmentalist, who had asked Slim to pay the taxi fare, to take a hike. “I think of Slim as Tom Sawyer,” says his friend Mike Gallagher, the vintage-book-andphotograph dealer. “I can just picture him sneaking out of someone’s window.”

“People always ask me, ‘Why is everyone always so happy in your pictures?’”Aarons reports. “I say, ‘Because they like me!’”After he turned in a story on the Duke of Devonshire, his talent for access raised the bar at Holiday. Zachary recalls the hard line he developed with young photographers looking for work. ‘I’d say, ‘Suppose I gave you an assignment to shoot the Duke of Devonshire.’ They’d say, ‘Great, line it up and I’ll shoot it.’ I’d say, ‘No. You line him up.’”

It wasn’t just high society that embraced Aarons—it was anyone who had a taste for la dolce vita. In 1949, when Mob leader Lucky Luciano was banished from Rome and sent back to his hometown of Lercara Friddi, in Sicily, he sent the other photographers on a wild-goose chase and selected Aarons to be the exclusive chronicler of the journey. “His father came up and they kissed,” Aarons recalls of the Sicilian homecoming. “Lucky said, ‘Don’t take a picture of that. People will think I’m a sissy.’ . . . It was a real Italian festival, with cousins, cugini, whatnot. . . . The local boy who made good!”

When Aarons set off for Hollywood to photograph people such as Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall, he found that the moviemakers—in particular, Howard Hawks, Ring Lardner Jr., and Bruce Manning—wanted to put him in pictures. “All these short directors love tall guys. That’s why, the minute I came to Hollywood, everyone wanted to make an actor out of me,” says Aarons, who failed screen test after screen test. “I can’t be anything but me!” he says. “That’s the problem. That’s why I’m no good in the movies. I can’t play somebody else. You follow?” (In his famous Kings of Hollywood portrait, of Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart yakking it up at the Hollywood restaurant Romanoff’s, the source of their obvious amusement was his pathetic acting skills.) Alfred Hitchcock was so taken with him, says Aarons, that he decided to make the Jimmy Stewart character in Rear Window a photographer.

On a more intimate level Aarons charmed Jean Howard, the beautiful Hollywood hostess married to talent agent Charlie Feldman. Prickly when talking about his personal life, Aarons carefully constructs what he’d like to say about her: “She was my best friend and mentor in Hollywood, and was a very serious photographer. Serious enough to leave her husband and help me work around the world.” He keeps the camera lenses she left to him, after her death in 2000, on a special table.

While Aarons personally was becoming a smash hit around the globe, his pictures were quietly changing fashion. So evocative were they that the objects in them became imbued with all that was desirable. Guest’s swimming pool became the swimming pool everyone wanted, and many copied it. In 1968, after Aarons shot Peter Pulitzer in plain khakis, those khakis became the must-have pants. “The fashion magazines went ape after that,” Aarons says. “There was no such thing as a khaki craze until this came out.” But it was all unintentional, Aarons needs you to understand —he wasn’t “dressing” anyone. “See, this is what the guys wore,” he says, impatiently flipping through his pictures in a cluttered kitchen nook, after a lunch of smoked salmon and bouillon made with hot water from the tap. “This is what the women wore, what the dukes wore. They’re all wearing their own clothes. See the belt and whatnot? See how casual it was? In the country, you wore a blazer and white trousers! . . . See what the president wore, see that? How to dress properly!” And on and on. “I didn’t do fashion. I did the people in their clothes that became the fashion.”

There was hardly a movie star, a member of the Social Register, or a titled European whom Aarons had failed to get on film, and his Bedford attic was filling up. He and his good friend and neighbor, Buz Wyeth, an editor at Harper & Row, decided it was time for a book. A couple of names were tossed around for who might provide the text, but Cass Canfield, Harper & Row’s publisher and majority shareholder, who’d witnessed Aarons’s renowned stamina for holding court, insisted on Slim himself. “I don’t call myself a photographer,” Aarons explains. “I’m a storyteller.” For a year and a half he and Wyeth pored over thousands of pictures. “I can remember being cramped and having back pain and eyestrain,” says Wyeth, recalling the lowtech method of squinting at slides.

But 1974, the year that Nixon resigned, was not a good year for pictures of lawn bowling at the Newport Casino club. With a cover price of $35, the book sold only about 12,000 copies (and 8,000 more through the Book of the Month Club), then collected dust on the remainder shelf. “It wasn’t a runaway by any means,” says Wyeth. Indeed, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at The New York Times called it “repelling” and said that Aarons “manages to make even T. S. Eliot look decadent.” To those listening to Exile on Main Street, Slim’s world was filled with Grandma and Grandpa’s most appalling and uncool friends.

He continued taking pictures for Town & Country until about 1990, when Frank Zachary, who’d become its editor in chief, retired. “There was no point in staying after he left,” Aarons says. Around the age of 70, he also retired and supported himself by selling his pictures to various magazines around the world as the opportunities popped up. All that would change one day in 1997 when Mark Getty, having just launched the Getty Images photo archive, came knocking on his door. After realizing the young “fella” in the Windbreaker wasn’t the gardener, Aarons invited him up to his attic to look at his life’s work, and a deal was made on a handshake. Though Aarons won’t disclose how much he got for his pictures, he will say this: “He gave me what I call ‘Fuck you’ money. Remember—because this is important —you’re never free until you have ‘Fuck you’ money.”

By this time, the counterculture that so cringed at the contents of Aarons’s book had played itself out. Even members of the Rolling Stones were discovering the allure of manicured estates and private islands. Suddenly it was safe to look back. Drowning in tabloid culture—unattractive people in unattractive places doing unattractive things—style-conscious people became nostalgic for what they saw as an era of authentic style. The ugly truths of Aarons’s world—the “exclusivity” that meant no Jews or black people allowed—were forgotten in the rush to reimagine an antediluvian garden of easy-breezy privilege.

Those wanting to recapture all that attractiveness turned to Aarons. For magazines (such as this one) that ran pieces on bygone glamour, his pictures became a staple. “If you want to do a story about Old Hollywood, which picture do you open up with?” he asks. The answer he is waiting for—and he is correct—is Kings of Hollywood. “If you want to do a story about Palm Beach, which picture do you open up with?” Again, the right answer is his picture—of C. Z. Guest. “If you want to do a story about Capri . . . ” And so it goes.

By the end of the 1990s, fashion designers were re-creating the Slim look. Photographer Steven Meisel’s recent so-called Valley of the Dolls campaign for Versace, featuring models Amber Valletta and Georgina Grenville, bouffanted and Stepford-wifeesque, looks an awful lot like Aarons’s picture of two women sitting poolside at Richard Neutra’s famous Kaufmann house, in Palm Springs. Although Meisel denies any influence, others proudly admit that Aarons’s images have become iconic touchstones for them. “Whenever I see a new, blonde model, I’m like, Oh, she’s C.Z. in Palm Beach,” says Michael Kors. “Or: Oh, gosh, you’re thinking about new fur boots and suddenly you’re, Oh, the pictures from Stowe, Vermont . . . Virtually every collection I have is going to have a little bit of Slim in it.” Anna Sui based her last collection on his book entirely. “It was a perfect world that he put together,” she says, “so I thought with the way things are right now . . . this would be a great uplift.”

A handful have tried to do today what Slim did then. With her books Bright Young Things and Bright Young Things: London, Brooke de Ocampo, in an effort to chronicle the lifestyles of her gala-going friends, enlisted Jonathan Becker, who found in Aarons an unparalleled mentor and adviser. “Although Slim was always very appreciated in the world of magazines,” says Becker, “his work was never really taken very seriously until recently, for the great, original form of photography that is his own. He is an original.”

As much as Aarons appreciates the Slim renaissance—he even called Anna Sui to thank her for giving him a “second career” —the work is different today because society is different. “Today it’s all about celebrities,” says Zachary. He shrugs, depressed. “You want to see a picture of Jeremy Irons in his castle.” All those “top people” Aarons likes to talk about are gone forever. “Society doesn’t exist,” Aarons says, “so you can’t call it society.” And so, when he decided to capitalize on his new popularity, instead of picking up the camera again, he turned back to his enormous archive.

To speak of his “new book” doesn’t describe it, Aarons insists. “Next books, you mean.” Since putting together selections for Once upon a Time, Aarons has been opening drawers and scrapbooks, untouched for decades, and has found he has enough material for several more volumes. “I got stuff on Hollywood you wouldn’t believe,” he says, winding up the IBM and letting it do its thing. “If you see the ones on Acapulco I have with the top people wearing the stuff, Guinness and all of that . . . I just found it! Stuff that I’d forgotten. The Rothschilds in Acapulco having lunch . . . Alain Delon, wonderful picture of him on a horse. Every time I open something I find something new! I called [my editor] and said, ‘I hate to tell you, but look what I just found!’ How many times do you find a picture of Irving Berlin singing ‘I Like Ike’ at Madison Square Garden—see my point?” Indeed, for as long as Aarons continues puttering around the farmhouse opening boxes, his future looks bright.

Surely you’ve wondered: who was in the passenger seat when P.R. princess Lizzie Grubman backed into 16 people outside Conscience Point nightclub in the Hamptons? And how does this person spend this social season? The answer is Dori Cooperman, in Saint-Tropez, hammered, on some Arab gazillionaire’s yacht, waiting for Puffy.

“I saw him the other day,” says Cooperman, 32, a petite, hard-bodied brunette who speaks with a nearly incomprehensible gravelly New York slur. “I drank a lot, so I was like, I’m going onto a boat, and he’s coming off and he’s like, ‘Whoa, you drank a lot.’” She laughs, recalling Puffy’s witty repartee.

Cooperman is just one of the world’s Very Important People pulled in this July evening of 2003 by Mark Baker and Jeffrey Jah—two New York nightlife impresarios—to introduce a Saudi Arabian prince who goes by the name of Rascheed al Rusheed to the ways of Western high life. Dori’s friends Fabulia and Denise are there, too, lounging on pillows, dangling champagne flutes and Marlboro Lights. Lion-maned English party girl Tamara Beckwith, who has come with her teenage daughter, Anoushka, seems ready to scratch the eyes out of the bartender, who’s ignoring her. Ivana Trump is giggling like a nine-year-old with her strapping young Italian boyfriend, Rossano Rubicondi. Saint-Tropez party fixture Jim Goldstein, a gray-and-frizzy-haired Los Angeleno known for his Lautner house and love of snakeskin, is loitering by some Eastern European model types. He is eager to report on the incredible validation bestowed upon him by P. Diddy. “The other day Puffy came up to me and said, ‘Jim, you’re a living legend,’” he says, fishing out magazine clips on himself from his pocket. “Coming from him I appreciate that.” Although the scene doesn’t impress Dori’s pal Dino (“The joke is, no one even knows who Rascheed is”), there are about 200 people waiting on the dock, all in their best Roberto Cavalli, desperate to be a part of it. “It’s like they’re waiting to be thrown scraps of fish,” says Baker. He and Jah are doing their part to sustain the frenzy, by paying the police $11,500 an hour to ignore complaints about the noise.

Finally, like the rising of the sun, arrives His Puffiness. Tonight he’s wearing a rose suit and sunglasses, with cigar in hand and mouth open like a freshwater trout’s, and is surrounded by bodyguards, Amazonian women of all colors, and assorted Los Angeles Clippers. Cameras flash, the crowd parts, the D.J. pumps up the crowd, and the communal ass shaking begins. Proving just how “in” this crowd is, someone comes around quietly doling out top-secret red ribbons, key to the next, really exclusive portion of the evening, which will begin as soon as Puffy, Lord of the Dance, is ready.

Twenty minutes later, his flock follows him to the V.I.P. section of Papagayo, one of five nightclubs in Saint-Tropez. The V.I.P. section is exactly the same as the rest of the club, except it’s tiny and roped off. The Cristal bottles start popping, the Jimmy Choos get planted into the tables, and soon enough Puffy has broken into his signature solo swirl around the dance floor.

Not everyone in Saint-Tropez is feeling quite as spirited. Across the bay in Sainte-Maxime, wildfires have destroyed more than 20,000 acres of pine forest and killed four people. Actor Calum Best is recovering from getting punched out by Puffy aboard his boat, Southern Cross III. (Because “Calum’s good-looking, and Puffy’s not,” explains Beckwith.) Elsewhere at Papagayo, at least three partyers have found themselves temporarily paralyzed due to drinks spiked with drugs; one of them will later fall onto a car and smash her face in. But, for Dori Cooperman and friends, packed with Puffy behind the velvet ropes, all is well and good in Saint-Tropez.

For today’s jet set, a term used loosely here to describe the Bungalow 8 crowd—supermodels, top designers, First Daughters, Pakistani arms dealers, Russian prostitutes, C.E.O.’s, Harvey Weinstein—Saint-Tropez is just one stop on the yearlong circuit of seaside resorts, which include Ibiza, Sardinia, and St. Barts. All have breathtaking scenery and glorious water. But for wanton, Babylonian decadence, nothing beats Saint-Tropez.

On a typical night out, any self-respecting male can expect to part with between $3,000 and $8,000, though truly manly tabs run into six figures. One simply cannot get admitted to a club without a group of girls (who don’t bother carrying money), and each host must buy crates of Cristal, bottles of which range from about $400 to $30,000. Sometimes they drink it. Other times, in what has become a widespread Saint-Tropez tradition, they shake it up and spray it on friends. Artist and Saint-Tropez regular Peter Tunney chomps on a cigar and explains the inner meaning of this charming folk ritual: “‘I’m throwing money down the toilet. Now fuck me, bitch.’”

Beyond one’s ability to waste champagne, nothing says “Fuck me, bitch” better than a giant luxury boat. Each summer, thousands of tourists a day, over their $4 “Coca-Lights” at Café Sénéquier, on the Quai Frederic Mistral, can gaze into the gleaming boats lined up in the main port—such as the 446-foot Turkish Savarona, once owned by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic; the 355-foot Grand Bleu, owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, which reportedly has its own dry-cleaning plant; and the $100 million Tatoosh, owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who has been known to tear it up at the local nightclubs. (Allen’s new boat, Octopus, has room for two helicopters, a multi-car garage, and a basketball court.) A prime spot for a large yacht costs about $100,000 a week and is said to involve greasing the harbormaster’s palm. As Mark Baker puts it, “What’s the point of having a boat if you’re half a mile out at sea?” Most come equipped with Jet Skis (on which one might wear a white terry-cloth robe—the new trend in aerodynamics started by Puffy). But the real must-have marine décor these days is Russian escorts. De Beers European ambassador Emily Oppenheimer, who’s hosting Simon and Yasmin Le Bon at her family’s house in the hills of nearby Gassin, explains the local code: “If she’s not wearing a wedding ring, you can assume she’s a hooker.”

Saint-Tropez and marriage do not mix—at least not for very long. “I know of three marriages that have broken up over Saint-Tropez,” says fortysomething Joel Silverman, just one of many grateful houseguests of Jeffrey Steiner, the C.E.O. of the aerospace company Fairchild. Otherwise, husbands in Saint-Tropez are officially “in Milan for business,” or their wives have already thrown in the towel. “Most wives know their husbands have girlfriends here,” says Tunney. “Saint-Tropez is a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

In any case, there is little danger of soul-mating here. Consider the very typical day of Guido Orsi, a wealthy pint-size Italian shipbuilder with Brian Grazer hair, and his herculean sidekick, Luca, who has a shaved chest and wears a large wooden medallion. They are warming up their bodies against four young women (today it’s Swedes) on Orsi’s yacht Blue Ice. “How do you know Terese?” I ask Luca, referring to the woman whose butt he’s fondling. “Who?” he replies. Guido, meanwhile, is jamming his tongue down another Swede’s throat—in direct eyeshot of his daughter, Eva, a gorgeous 18-year-old in a tiny white bikini. Soon Dad’s friend Dan, a cigar-chomping Greek businessman shaped like a rhino, comes aboard from another boat to give booby massages and provide the knee-slapping entertainment. “My friend said this girl was perfect for me,” he says, pointing out a picture of his latest conquest in the Turkish version of Hello! magazine. “Fake tits, fake lips. She’s totally made! Huh, huh, huh!”

Saint-Tropez wasn’t always this way. Once it was another lovely, sleepy Mediterranean fishing village, whose charms drew the discerning. Guy de Maupassant, writing in his 1888 book, Sur l’Eau, called it “a charming and simple daughter of the sea.” The artist Paul Signac fell in love with its pines and dappled light, as did Henri Matisse, who painted Luxe, Calme, et Volupté here. For Colette, the most famous writer-in-residence, it was a time of fishermen’s dances and dinners of bouillabaisse and rosé with fellow artists. By the time she wrote Prisons et Paradis, in 1932, however, the forefathers of the Dori Cooperman crowd were starting to arrive, and the complaining began. “Saint-Tropez,” Colette noted, “is 200 fancy cars from 5 o’clock onwards, driving through the port. Cocktails and champagne on the quayside yachts.” Still, she maintained, “I know the other Saint-Tropez. It’s still there. It will always be there for those who rise at dawn.”

The revolution occurred in 1956, in the form of 21-year-old Brigitte Bardot, who’d come to Saint-Tropez with her husband, the director Roger Vadim, to shoot And God Created Woman. (During the war, Vadim had hidden from the Nazis here.) The film, about an unstable sex kitten and an obnoxious playboy, shocked France and prompted the Catholic Church to distribute flyers forbidding people to see Bardot’s movies. Around the world, And God Created Woman was a manifesto of sexual liberation, personal freedom, and seaside bliss. “Bardot changed the way of acting in life,” says Henri-Jean Servat, a friend of Bardot’s, and the author of the new book La Légende de Saint-Tropez. “She was taking men, she was throwing men, she was taking on another man. She gave to everybody the idea of liberty… That was a great revolution, not only for movies, but for the way of living in France.”

Patrice de Colmont—owner of Club 55, the most elegant of the beachfront restaurants—recalls being nine and watching the filming of the pouty-lipped, button-nosed, barefoot blonde, with hair like a haystack, making love on the shore. “It was my first vision of womanhood,” he says. Club 55—named for the year it officially opened—was transformed when Vadim, mistaking de Colmont’s mother’s beachside hut for a bistro, asked for, and got, 80 servings of roast beef for his crew. It was the first of many meals the de Colmont family would provide for visitors.

Bardot settled in a run-down house called La Madrague, which had everything she dreamed of: cacti, mimosas, wild purple bougainvillea, and the sea right outside the back door. Here, she would throw her “sand parties,” in which the guests would sit around a bonfire, communing with nature and getting it on. Soon her affairs in Saint-Tropez—with actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (her co-star in And God Created Woman), singer Sacha Distel, and German playboy Gunter Sachs—were chronicled in the pages of Paris Match as obsessively as Liz Taylor’s. Bardot’s life looked like paradise, and visitors flocked to experience it. But the attention gradually made Bardot miserable. In her autobiography, Initiales B.B., she recalls how on one trip to the famous clothing store Vachon the place became jammed with 200 onlookers within five minutes. “I’m scared of these people,” she wrote. “They are excessive and foolish. I decided never again to go out by myself.”

By the 60s, Saint-Tropez had officially arrived, complete with nightclubs and Jaguars; moody literary sensations, such as Françoise Sagan; groovy singers and songwriters, like Sylvie Vartan, Jane Birkin, and Serge Gainsbourg; Hollywood producers, such as Sam Spiegel, who threw parties on his yacht, the Malahne; and swinging music producers, like Eddie Barclay. A precursor of sorts to P. Diddy, Barclay, now 83, was (and remains) a nine-woman man (none of them over 35) with a love of gold chains and the color white. Each summer, he threw his “all-white parties,” which were attended by actresses like Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, and Barbra Streisand, and dozens of hangers-on in white. “You’d run into everyone you were trying to avoid during the rest of the year,” says Joan Collins. Singer Johnny Hallyday settled here, too. “He’d fill up the pool with champagne,” says Donatella Versace, who now rents his house for a reported $100,000 a month and last summer hosted Chelsea Clinton (“She’s an amazing girl, really fantasteek,” Donatella reports). By the start of the 1970s, Saint-Tropez had become a household name even in Middle America, synonymous with lust, excess, and deep-brown tans. In 1971, Mick Jagger and Bianca celebrated their wedding, in a fog of pot smoke, at Saint-Tropez’s Café des Arts.

Other resorts tried to catch up with Saint-Tropez’s sexual mores, but she was determined to stay in the forefront. In 1970, to the chagrin of all Europe, Margie Sudre became one of the first women outside the pages of National Geographic to walk around with her top off, at the beach club La Voile Rouge. (She’s now, naturally, a minister in the French government.) The look caught on instantly. “It was all bare breasts hanging into the vichyssoise,” recalls Collins. “Not a good look.” In the spirit of gender equality, La Voile Rouge’s owner, Paul Tomaselli, pioneered the fabulous G-string-for-men look, while his mother was in the restaurant’s kitchen cooking spaghetti and cheerily groping Sylvester Stallone. Finally, it was at La Voile Rouge where the champagne spraying began. A drunken, cross-dressing waiter started spilling it on guests for laughs. “Then it became two o’clock, four o’clock, and four matinees on Sunday,” says Baker.

Although Tomaselli is now in poor health and his voice is barely audible, his enthusiasm for La Voile Rouge has not dimmed—nor has its madcap energy. Today it brings to mind a Fellini cast party on Dexedrine and Viagra. Prince is blaring as waitresses in bawdy opera costumes—their nipples peeking out of the décolletage—trip over their dresses and drop plates of mussels. The 66-year-old Tomaselli, in a white ruffled shirt and a G-string, smiles wanly in his regular seat, situated below a delicate stucco penis with fanciful wings. “I’ve always had a fantasy of being surrealistic and sophisticated,” Tomaselli explains, gazing proudly at a couple dry-humping on his dance floor. “I had a dream.”

But the real action these days is over at Eric Omores’s Nikki Beach—a kind of Euro Girls Gone Wild where the participants believe they are the height of sophistication. The entrance is marked by automobiles of eye-popping classiness—a bright-orange Lamborghini, another that resembles a giant metal luge. At stage left, Peter Tunney is finger-painting on the bodies of naked models in the style of various artists. (“Are you Jackson Pollock?” one Russian human canvas once asked him, to which Tunney replied, “Yes, I am.”) Meanwhile, around the pool, to the gentle rhythms of D.J. Assault’s “Who’s Fucking Tonight,” five women are grinding and massaging various body parts of a chiseled, pumped-up, dreadlocked guy named Jeffrey B. “Jeffrey’s in the house! Jeffrey’s in the house!” he chants repeatedly, his eyes rolling to the back of his head in ecstasy, his hands clutching wildly at breasts and crotches. Onlookers hoot and holler and wave towels as if it were an Oakland Raiders game. One woman pours Cristal into Jeffrey B’s dreads and into his mouth. Another licks it out. Jeffrey B reaches for another bottle to pour onto himself, but it is empty. “Encore! One more, one more!” he barks to a waiter. The waiter rushes away and returns in moments with another bowl of champagne bottles, ready for Jeffrey B’s Act Two. “I went to Nikki Beach today,” Joel Silverman later reports to Jeffrey Steiner. “Fabulous… I’ve seen more boys here whose Bar Mitzvahs I went to. Now they have the most beautiful girlfriends!”

“I wouldn’t step foot in that pool,” says Steiner, coolly dragging on his cigarette, his every fiber dripping with disdain. For the truly rich—even those clouded by investigations into sketchy multi-million-dollar deals—the fun will come to them. Steiner owns Domaine de Valfere, a 25-acre estate in the exclusive area of Capon Pinet and the largest property in Saint-Tropez, worth an estimated $50 million. (It is just one of seven homes belonging to Steiner; the others are in Gstaad, New York, London, Paris, Southampton, and Virginia—a horse farm.) His favorite topic today seems to be the number of his houseguests, none of whom, he points out, are “paying guests.” “I was lucky to be able to keep my room,” says Steiner, whose generosity inspires a symphony of praise from his guests. (“You know the word ‘gracious host’? He invented the word,” one says. “Jeffrey is one of the best guys there ever was,” insists another. “This is the guy who has 17 houseguests,” another chimes in, and on and on.) In fact, he has so many friends, he has to throw a last-minute party for 150. “Every five minutes I have someone calling up, reminding me that they’re my best friend.” Naturally, his children have millions of friends, too, so Steiner did the only thing a Saint-Tropez parent would in the situation. He provided them their own house on the property, and a disco downstairs, where Naomi Campbell had a recent birthday bash. (Campbell’s party continued on Giuseppe Cipriani’s boat, and it was then on to the yacht of her ex-boyfriend Flavio Briatore, where spaghetti was served at seven a.m.)

But the apex of decadence is the Caves du Roy, whose energy has inspired Jenna Bush to guzzle a $250 bottle of vodka, Bruce Willis to strip off his clothes, and, according to the hefty D.J., called Jack E, Jack Nicholson to drink out of his shoe. The “Cahves,” as it is referred to, is located in the basement of the ultra-trendy Hôtel Byblos, where rooms start at about $600 and where Dori Cooperman personally knows 100 of the guests. Each night the Caves packs in about a thousand people—throbbing, sweating, tearing at clothes, and crashing into the laps of strangers. (That’s how Cooperman met her last boyfriend.) The table one is shown can make or break a man’s self-esteem. “I’ve seen rows break out over tables,” says one observer. “It’s like children fighting over a toy.” Getting a table in the V.I.P. section sometimes entails a bribe upwards of $3,000. “There are lots of guys with a zillion dollars who can’t get a seat,” says Tunney. “Why? Because there’s a hundred other guys with a zillion dollars!”

Here began the so-called champagne wars, which are accompanied by Star Wars music and sparklers and are given running narration by Jack E, who likes to announce the birthdays of celebrities—even when it’s not—as a way of showing they’re in the house. Jack E is especially proud of his trademark phrase—“Welcome back to Saint-Tropez!”—which he has been honing for years. (“Now everywhere I go in the world, everybody waits for me. I say, ‘Welcome back to Saint-Tropez!’ They go wild!”) Upon Puffy’s arrival in summer 2002, the Sultan of Brunei gave the mogul an official Saint-Tropez welcome at the Caves by sending him five Methuselahs (that’s 20 magnums) of champagne, at $20,000 apiece. (Although, to be precise, some people already knew Puffy was there—such as American Spectator columnist Taki’s son, John Theodoracopulos, who was slapped upside the head for accidentally brushing against him at the Byblos. Puffy spent the rest of the summer trailed by a manservant wielding a parasol.)

That same summer, the Crown Prince of Kuwait, who travels with an entourage of 60, squared off against two Pakistani brothers. “The Kuwaiti sent a bottle to the Pakistani table,” recalls Aram Sabet, a friend of the prince’s and co-owner of the Hamptons restaurant Pacific East. “They sent him back a jeroboam [two magnums] of Dom Pérignon. Then a jeroboam of Cristal. Then two jeroboams. It goes from 2 to 4 to 6 to 8 to 12, at, like, $75,000 apiece.” That night, the two Pakistani brothers set the record for spending in Saint-Tropez for one night: 390,000 euros, nearly half a million dollars. They routinely drop $150,000 a night.

But that’s just impulse spending. The Pakistani brothers’ party on the Savarona, which they rented that summer for about $3 million, was an exquisitely crafted extravaganza. Before the party, every last condom and jar of Vaseline in town seemed to disappear from the stores. Hundreds of beautiful women were corralled and their passports collected (the Tropezian way of ensuring a next date). Security guards were posted along the gold-trimmed staircase at the ship’s three levels, which got progressively more exclusive. One girl’s bare ass was used as a sushi platter. No one wanted to be left out of the fun. “People were hanging off the ladders,” recalls Naomi Campbell. “The sea police came, trying to pull up the ladders, saying, ‘No more people on this boat!’ It was like the Titanic.” After the party the brothers threw caviar leftovers into the sea.

You know it’s getting a little out of hand when it’s left to people such as Simon Le Bon to be the voice of reason. “It’s really quite sad watching these teenagers drunk off their asses,” says the father of three, who’s still sporting pants with zippers in weird places, over a boisterous Brit dinner at the hot-spot Asian restaurant Kai Largo. “Some parent should have been there to stop it.” Many parents don’t seem as worked up. “My kids are very down to earth,” reports Ivana Trump, aboard her yacht, My Ivana, decorated with ceramic ladybugs and frogs. “They studying, and they working like crazy.” Daughter Ivanka, she explains, is spending the summer hanging out with “a whole gang of Italians, young boys,” and taking evening jaunts by yacht to Monte Carlo. A night at the Caves du Roy is nothing to worry about, either, because, as Ivana explains, “the D.J. [Jack E] is my best friend.”

Families can get crazy all together at the so-called Gitane party—the social high point of the summer—thrown by Tony Murray, an 83-year-old businessman who found his fortune in fire extinguishers and has a taste for wigs. At the end of July he invites several hundred people to his estate in the exclusive gated community of Les Parcs de Saint-Tropez, overlooking the sea. There is no greater shame than to not gain admittance. “It’s mortifying not to be invited,” says Tunney. But swinging an invite is only the first hoop. Then you wait in single-lane traffic for almost an hour to pass through the community gates. Next you stand by the side of the road to wait for some other form of transport to take you to Murray’s house. There is a dim rumor that little navettes (shuttles) will be coming. Only no one seems to know where they are or which direction they will come from. The confusion, the humiliation, the pain of the Christian Louboutins—it is too much to bear. “Last year was bad. This one’s even worse!” says one guest. “He used to be classy, now he’s a jerk,” grumbles another about Mr. Murray. After an impossibly long 20 minutes, a single navette arrives, and roughly 50 guests—the women in stilettos and jangly evening gowns—beeline over like starving refugees, shoving one another out of the way. “This is ridiculous!” says an outraged middle-aged British man to a little teenage prince with golden slippers who has pushed his way onto the shuttle. “You’ve jumped the queue. I don’t know what you do in France, but we don’t do that in England!”

Finally, the payoff: the pool is gloriously decorated with candles, the overflowing banquet tables are courtesy of Christophe Leroy, Saint-Tropez’s most famous chef, the champagne is endless, and entertainment is provided by singer-comedian Pierre Palmade. Mike in hand, he wanders around and chums it up with Jeffrey Steiner and flame-haired nightclub legend Regine, weaving their names into schmaltzy jingles. At the pool is the blonde ex-wives club—Denise Rich and Ivana Trump and Diandra Douglas. Later on, Stephen Schwarzman, owner of what was until recently Manhattan’s most expensive residence, and his wife, Christine, are grooving to Palmade’s version of “YMCA.” Eddie Barclay, dressed in white, is eating in silence, completely oblivious, beside his ninth wife. Peter Tunney is trying to negotiate his hot date, his cigar, and his flop sweat. Jim Goldstein is basking in the shadow of a six-foot blonde named Eva. Dori Cooperman is ragging on Carson Daly—the ex-boyfriend of her ex-friend Tara Reid—for wearing a dorky scarf around his head. Puffy stops in for a photo op, and fireworks—coincidentally?—erupt in the background. Fun for some people, maybe, but these folks have seen it all before. Conversations eventually come around to how long the lines are for the bathrooms. “I’ve heard more whining in the past 24 hours than I have in 24 years,” says Tunney.

No one is doing more complaining lately than the woman who started the revolution—Bardot. She still lives in La Madrague, with nine dogs, 40 cats, horses, and husband Bernard d’Ormale, an executive in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front. Her love for animals is matched, it seems, only by her hatred for mankind. Bardot has said that she has “a shocking view of humanity, which at a global level I detest,” and that she especially detests Muslims. “You have to recognize that there’s been for some years a Muslim invasion of France. Islamists have a mania for throat cutting,” she told a reporter a few years back. Mention her name in Saint-Tropez and most people shake their heads, pitying the nutcase. Still, there can be no doubt that Saint-Tropez’s vulgarization played some part in her disillusionment. On her 40th birthday, a boyfriend of hers sold the details about the party to the tabloids. Roughly a year later, to mark the anniversary of the betrayal, she tried to kill herself. By 1989 she had decided that Saint-Tropez had become awash in a “tide of human filth… It has been taken over by yobs. It is Miami.”

Other old-timers maintain that the Saint-Tropez of Maupassant still exists. Rival luxury-good magnates Bernard Arnault and François Pinault are contentedly ensconced in their villas in Les Parcs de Saint-Tropez; they simply send the help into town as needed. For decades, screenwriter and director Danièle Thompson, the Nora Ephron of France, has been coming to her home in Capon, right beside that of her father, director Gérard Oury, where he lives with his wife, actress Michele Morgan. Here, secluded by the umbrella pines, Thompson’s ever expanding family is spending the holiday playing by the pool and having big Provençal lunches. “There are three groups in Saint-Tropez,” says Thompson. “The people whose village is taken from them for two months. The people who go to the parties and the clubs. The third is the families. We arrange our schedule to avoid the second group.” At their home, the only signs of Saint-Tropez’s modernization are the helicopters constantly dropping off and picking up Jeffrey Steiner’s guests.

Others have found their piece of heaven at Patrice de Colmont’s Club 55, Saint-Tropez’s last public bastion of decency. Thanks to de Colmont, a man of natural, unpretentious elegance, Club 55 manages to attract much of Europe’s royalty while remaining uniquely democratic. It is the restaurant’s code. When the King of Belgium came in 1957, he was told they were so backed up in the kitchen he’d have to wash his own dish before eating—which he did. Those who complain about the lone Arab selling beaded jewelry are asked to leave. Over luscious-looking dishes such as grand platters of crudités and, mercifully, no soundtrack, 55 is the center of gravity for everyone from erotic-art photographer David Hamilton to Queen Rania of Jordan. Today, on the last day of July, you will see 35-year-old boulevardier Cyril Karaoglan, Saint-Tropez’s newest social king, lovingly planning his next exquisite dinner party. It will be thrown under the stars at the Château Borelli, a historic building in Les Parcs de Saint-Tropez, where he lives with his parents. Louis Vuitton’s wildly chic accessory designer and muse, Camille Miceli—in traditional Tropezian sandals that strap up to her knee—is having a tête-à-tête with her three-year-old son, Romain. Ivana and Rossano are feeding each other oysters. And no one forgets his manners. When Barclay enters, those in his path stand up in respect. He settles in beside his wife. Joan Collins, the undisputed queen of the place, with her husband, Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior, steals a peek their way and lovingly pats Percy on the arm. “He’s 82 and she’s 25. That’s even more than you and me, dear.” A class act in her hats and powdered, lineless face, Collins has assumed the role of gatekeeper, delicately providing the social commentary—“It’s the spawn of Liz Taylor,” she says when a woman makes a grand entrance with a brigade of tiny dogs—and deflating the pomposity that constantly seems to come her way in Saint-Tropez. “Joan, have you been to [Michael Jackson’s ranch] Neverland?” asks one such eager-to-impress 55 customer after holding forth on his own visits with Michael. “No,” Collins replies. “I’m afraid I didn’t make the cut.”

For some, however, even the elegance of their favorite restaurant cannot save Saint-Tropez. “When my son is 14, we are finished with Saint-Tropez,” says Miceli, whose parents were married here and who valiantly fought to bring an end to the helicopter traffic. “There is so much vice. It is so much in your face.” For others, being so much in your face is precisely the point. “It’s just like Cipriani’s,” says Tunney, getting on his cell phone to make plans to hit the Caves for the 2,000th time. “The lines are too long, you can’t get a table, the food’s not very good, and I go back every night.”

People often ask me how to make conversation at dinner parties,” began Sally Quinn, star journalist, superstar hostess, and wife of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, in what would be her last “The Party” column for the paper, in February. “I always tell them to ask about their dinner partner’s family—once they get started, they won’t stop. Everyone has a dysfunctional family. Ours is no exception.” She needed to set the record straight on a family matter that, she insisted, had become public and messy. As it happened, she had scheduled the wedding of her 27-year-old son, Quinn, on the same day as that of Greta, Bradlee’s granddaughter from a previous marriage. It was all one big inadvertent screwup, the column explained—her fault, and, well, kind of her 88-year-old husband’s too. “Greta, the daughter of my husband’s son Ben Bradlee Jr. and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, planned her wedding last fall and sent Save the Date cards. I gave ours to my husband to put the date on his calendar, and he did not. A warning to wives everywhere!” Surely the woman who literally wrote the book on how to give parties (The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining, Simon & Schuster, 1997) could come up with a new date that wouldn’t conflict, right? Well … that wasn’t really the point. As the column went on to explain, “Over Christmas, Greta’s mother and I came to an understanding that, because of existing tensions, it would be best for all if none of us attended Greta’s wedding.” She added, “Happily, we did not have a single overlapping guest.”

Suddenly, a matter that no one even knew about got everyone talking.

Ben junior and Raddatz—the parents of the bride whose wedding, everyone now knew, would not be graced by the presence of her illustrious grandfather—contacted Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (the granddaughter of Kay Graham) and vented about the column, which had completely blindsided them. The paper’s readers gleefully threw themselves an online snarkfest that got so out of control that the Post shut the comments down:

“It’s time for an intervention, not only with Ms. Quinn, but with the powers-that-be at the Washington Post.”

“If the current management … has any sense at all they will sack her snotty, condescending, arrogant, and self important attitude 10 minutes after Mr. Bradlee is planted.”

“People often ask me how to make conversation at dinner parties. I usually spin my head around five times in rotation, bare my fangs, and then barf out an article for the Style section.”

“People often ask me how to make conversation at dinner parties. I always tell them how much I hate my husband’s pre-Sally spawn.”

“I laughed, I cried, I heaved … ”

“I did exactly the right thing,” Quinn maintains. “I Wrote That Piece To Protect My Kids. If somebody goes after my kids, look out.”

Five days later, the paper’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, announced that Quinn’s column, “The Party,” was over and that she would return her focus, fully, to her Web site, On Faith. Accurately or not, it was interpreted by some as an end not just to a career but to an era. By overseeing the paper’s coverage of Watergate and forcing President Nixon to resign, Bradlee had turned a once struggling local newspaper into arguably the most important newspaper in the country. Along with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he became one of the country’s pre-eminent celebrity journalists, and their heroic story would become the best-selling book and then the movie All the President’s Men. Sally Quinn, his glamorous third wife, dominated the Establishment’s social life, first as its sharpshooter in the Post’s Style section, then as Washington’s premier hostess. Together, they were the last link to the Washington of old, when grandes dames such as Perle Mesta, Lorraine Cooper, and Kay Graham hosted presidents, and politicians from both sides of the aisle mingled with conviviality in Georgetown drawing rooms. That Georgetown was fading, to be sure. Now its social arbiter had committed an unfortunate and perhaps irrevocable faux pas.

Still quite the looker at 68, pulled together in gray wool pants and a lavender cardigan, Sally is ensconced in one of the many sitting areas of her stately Georgetown town house as she sets the record straight. First, she would like to clarify that she wasn’t canned; the “Party” column had been intended only as a holiday-season offshoot of her On Faith Web site, and she’d started phasing it out anyway. Second, she feels no need to apologize. After the firestorm, she entered the concrete meditation labyrinth her husband had built for her on their country estate in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to think. When she came out the other side, she was clear. “I did exactly the right thing,” she says. The story of the “dueling” weddings had been out there, she explains, prompting all kinds of nasty online comments about her son and his bride-to-be. “I wrote that piece to protect them… If somebody goes after my kids, look out.”

“She is ferocious as a mother. She is a lioness,” says her friend writer David Ignatius. In part because Quinn has had no ordinary life. A disarmingly affectionate and outgoing young man, he suffers from Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, a congenital disorder that affects one in every 2,000 children. When Ben and Sally were told years ago by a psychiatrist that their son would need to be institutionalized, she refused to accept it, and fought with mind-boggling, heroic determination.

Sally’s ascent to social arbiter in the nation’s capital was done with similar determination—and flair. The daughter of a three-star general, William Quinn, and a quintessential southern belle, Bette, Sally came to the Post in 1969 to report on parties for the Style section. In her employment interview, Bradlee asked the 28-year-old if she could show him something she’d written. “Mr. Bradlee,” she told him, “I’ve never written anything. Not a word.” When he told his colleague editorial-page editor Phil Geyelin about this, Geyelin replied, “Nobody’s perfect.” Sally, who graduated at the bottom of her class at Smith, may not have written a word, but she had wit and irreverence and an obsession with who was up, who was down—something she picked up while accompanying her father at social functions and in her previous Washington jobs, including social secretary for the Algerian ambassador. “It was intoxicating to be around real power,” she would later write. “To have senators pay attention to you, sit across from famous administration types at little Georgetown restaurants, be invited by ambassadors to visit their countries.”

Though it was the lowest job on the Post’s totem pole, Sally made party coverage come alive. She had an eye for the mortifying moment, as when a congressman’s wife berated the help because the flambé wasn’t in flames, and an ear for self-immolating quotes, a talent she quickly brought to profiles of Washington personalities big and small. “She brought a new kind of energy and pizzazz to [the paper],” says Bradlee, still dapper in a Turnbull & Asser striped shirt. “And she just was on a roll! She was the best thing in the Style section for a while.”

But along the way to stardom she humiliated a number of subjects—many of whom were harmless, barely public figures—such as a life-of-the-party lawyer named Steve Martindale and wealthy ballet benefactress Teddy Westreich, the running theme being: Everyone in town thinks so-and-so is a tacky social climber. Vicki Bagley, who was the subject of one such profile when she was married to R. J. Reynolds tobacco heir Smith Bagley and working as a fund-raiser for Jimmy Carter, recalls turning Sally down for an interview and then getting phone-stalked by her for weeks. “She was getting more and more threatening,” says Bagley, who recalls hearing that Sally was looking into the lives of her children. “She called us all social climbers. Well, a bigger social climber will have never been…. Sally was the very person she was writing about…. We were all doing things. We were all working. Sally wanted what we had, and she wanted to destroy us because we had it.”

It was surprising to no one that Sally would fall for the boss, the dynamic and dashing Boston Brahmin, 20 years her senior, who was descended from Frank Crowninshield (founding editor of Vanity Fair in 1914), and who, as everyone knew, had been part of John F. Kennedy’s glamorous inner circle. He was married, alas, to his second wife, Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot (sister of Mary Meyer, who had had an affair with Kennedy and was murdered in 1964), with whom he had two kids, Dino and Marina, and four stepchildren. (He also had a grown son, Ben junior, from his first marriage, to Jean Saltonstall of Boston.) “I was completely dazzled by him,” says Sally. As she tells it, in the middle of Watergate, when the Post feared it was being spied on, she confided to a friend: “I said, ‘I’m just madly in love with Ben Bradlee and I don’t know what to do about it. I feel like I should tell him.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that or it will be a disaster. You have to put your country first.’ ” When CBS came looking for a new female anchor for its morning show to challenge Barbara Walters, says Sally, “I took the job because I felt that I needed to get away from Ben.” Before she left for New York, in June 1973, she asked him to take her to a farewell lunch, where she confessed her love. “That was the beginning of our relationship. We obviously didn’t want publicity, although he left home immediately.” (The chronology of the romance may not have been quite so cut-and-dried. A fellow reporter recalls how, a couple of years later, Sally jollily reminisced to another colleague over lunch: “Remember when I was sleeping with Ben and it was before I left for CBS and you said to me, ‘Sally, you’ve got to stop sleeping with Ben. The Post is in the middle of Watergate, and if Nixon finds out that Bradlee, a married man, is sleeping with one of his reporters, Nixon’s going to use it against you.’ ”)

By the time Sally returned to the Post from her disastrous stint as a television anchorwoman—which is chronicled in her very funny 1975 memoir, We’re Going to Make You a Star—their relationship was out in the open, and she moved in with him at the Watergate complex, just eight floors up from where Nixon’s henchmen had broken in to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee. “We bent over backwards so that it would never appear that I was being favored in any way,” says Sally. Still, her editor Shelby Coffey (now a close friend) could be heard singing in the halls, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” The mere fact of her relationship with Bradlee gave her power. “Whenever you’re sleeping with the editor, your power is exponentially greater than the task at hand,” says Nancy Collins, the Post gossip columnist at the time. “Ben has always been his own man, but she made her presence felt.”

Bradlee—whose wife, Tony, had found Washington journalism shallow and was getting increasingly swept up in the mysticism of the George Gurdjieff spiritual movement—found in Sally a soulmate of sorts. “She found the all-consuming nature of my involvement with the Post natural, even exhilarating,” Bradlee wrote in his memoir A Good Life. She brought in a whole new set of interesting friends from all over the world—from Hollywood producer Norman Lear to British writer William Shawcross—and they entertained small groups at their Dupont Circle house. If something delicious was happening in town, it was happening there—like writer Nora Ephron pouring a bottle of red wine over Carl Bernstein’s head after discovering he was having an affair with the British ambassador’s wife. Sally had tapped into something fundamental about Bradlee. “Ben is a true existentialist,” says Coffey. “That is, whatever went wrong yesterday, that was then, and he’s not going to worry much about tomorrow. He’s going to make today happen in as big a way as possible.”

Many felt abandoned—but none more than Ben’s son Dino, then in his early teens. With his mother getting increasingly into Gurdjieff, Dino found himself suddenly on his own. When his parents were still together, it had been one of Dino’s favorite father-son traditions to go to Redskins games; they’d sit in co-owner Edward Bennett Williams’s box, along with lawyer Joe Califano and columnist Art Buchwald. But when Sally came along, that stopped. Although Dino first laid eyes on her at a Redskins game, this time she was in that box next to Bradlee; he was far off in the stands, having been taken to the game by Bradlee’s colleague Geyelin. Dino naturally resented this blonde interloper, and, living with his mother, he had no contact with his father for a few years. The real problems would come later.

Ben and Sally married in 1978, at a small ceremony, which was followed by a party at home with 40 guests that turned out to be an early exercise in confronting dueling events. She and Bradlee wanted the party to be secret, so that the Post wouldn’t be scooped by The Washington Star. When Sally called her friends, half declined—they had been invited to a dinner being thrown by the British ambassador and his wife. “[I told] them in my sternest voice that I was calling in all my chits.” Everyone, naturally, bailed on the ambassador.

Sally had the dream job and dream husband, who had started out with family money and made plenty more with Washington Post stock awarded as a finder’s fee for the paper’s purchase of Newsweek, in 1961. Soon, she also began pursuing her dream homes. First she set her sights on the Hamptons, specifically on Grey Gardens, which was situated close to another set of scintillating literary friends, including George Plimpton, Nora Ephron, and journalist Ken Auletta and his wife, ICM agent Binky Urban. It was a raccoon-infested, beyond-decrepit wreck of a once glorious turn-of-the-century house that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy’s aunt “Big Edie” and cousin “Little Edie,” made famous by the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary bearing the house’s name. After visiting the place, Bradlee told Sally, “You’re out of your fff’ing mind.” Vile as it was, bananas as its most recent residents had been, it had a certain pedigree, and Sally rehabilitated it to its former grandeur.

When she decided they needed a larger house, in Georgetown, she zeroed in on another historic place, an 18-room N Street town house that had once belonged to Abraham Lincoln’s son, with an interior sprawl so magnificent “that if people saw it there’d be an uprising,” says MSNBC political commentator Chris Matthews. The seller was her former subject Vicki Bagley, who had had the house appraised at $1.2 million. She initially refused to consider any offer from Sally Quinn. After hearing from a mutual friend that Sally was frantic about it, she allowed Bradlee to come look—alone—and take pictures … and she jacked up the price to $2.5 million, about $5.4 million in today’s dollars. “You’re not really serious about that $2.5 million,” he asked Bagley on his visit. Bagley replied, “Ben, I have never been as serious as I am right now. Sally will never live in this house unless you pay a premium.” Bradlee paid the full amount—in 1983, one of the highest sums ever paid for a piece of real estate in Washington at the time. Among the decorative appointments, Sally hung two paintings of the Bradlee ancestors Josiah and Lucy Bradlee, done by America’s foremost Colonial portraitist, Gilbert Stuart. Well, not exactly done by. According to a Cambridge matron familiar with the provenance, Sally had to satisfy herself with copies. Bradlee’s older brother, Freddy, had the originals; Bradlee-family tradition held that the paintings would be handed down to the eldest son of each generation. Sally lobbied Freddy hard for them, says this source. When he declined, she had a painter camp out in his apartment to copy them, hoping he’d still cough them up. (Sally denies that she ever asked for them, saying she always understood they’d remain with Freddy.)

“To Sally, loyalty means going to war with someone on behalf of someone else,” says a journalist who saw her taking sides in one couple’s breakup.

From their enormous perch on N Street, Ben and Sally became the Bogart and Bacall of Washington. “They were our movie stars,” says David Ignatius. “I remember when [my wife] Eve and I were first invited to go to their New Year’s Eve party, it was like we’d won the lottery.” Each New Year’s Eve, the limos would snail up N Street, and the guest list might include Ted Kennedy, Kay Graham, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Colin Powell, Tom Brokaw, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron. “The New Year’s list was the ‘Honours List’ of Washington,” says Matthews. “They’re the reason Washington glows.”

Maintaining the Establishment—and her role at the top of it—wasn’t easy work. First Families came and went in the White House, and often didn’t realize, in Sally’s view, how Washington worked, a phenomenon she griped about in many of her articles during those years. “You come in from another community and you don’t know anything about the people,” she says, explaining why the Establishment is so critical to governance. “So you don’t know what perspectives they bring to something and what the relationships are and … who’s feuding and why…. And all of that is extremely important information for people in the White House to know.” She would go on to write vehement, controversial attacks on the Clintons, which many suspect were prompted by Hillary’s not being sufficiently solicitous of her when the First Lady came to Washington, a charge Sally denies. (“The Clintons did not make her their guide,” confirms Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary under Clinton and a Vanity Fair contributing editor.) More recently, she called for the resignation of Obama staffer Desiree Rogers, “an unlikely choice for social secretary,” wrote Sally in January, in part because she was “not of Washington.” (Rogers did resign in February.)

Just as Sally tried to orchestrate the Washington power structure, so she closely managed her relationships and those of her friends. “She’s a fierce lioness with her friendships,” says journalist Elsa Walsh, who is married to Bob Woodward. “It’s one of the hallmarks of her personality.” She didn’t take slights lightly. After Christopher Buckley referred to her 1986 Washington society novel, Regrets Only, as “cliterature” in Vanity Fair, Sally telegrammed her friend Tina Brown (then the editor of V.F.) a disinvitation to Ben’s 65th-birthday party. A journalist who observed her taking sides in the breakup of a high-profile Washington couple goes as far as to say, “To Sally, loyalty means going to war with someone on behalf of someone else.”

From Dino Bradlee’s perspective, something along these lines came to pass when he and Leslie Marshall divorced, in 1998. Dino, a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry, was struggling to make it as a developer, first for Donald Trump in New York, then on his own in Milford, Pennsylvania. His marriage became fraught, and then unsalvageable; in the late 90s, he had an affair. According to a source close to Dino, not only did Sally side with Marshall during and after the divorce, but they became the closest of friends, and once that alliance had been made, that “poisoned the relationship that Ben had with Dino.” Dino felt effectively banned from the various Bradlee-Quinn households. Both he and Ben junior (then deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe) began to feel that their father had been usurped by Sally, and co-opted into a glitzy lifestyle, which they happened to find repulsive.

In spite of the feathers she ruffled, Sally, at age 41, had achieved all she had set out to do. The only thing missing now was a child. In 1982, she gave birth to a son whose very name—Josiah Quinn Crowninshield Bradlee—connoted great expectations. When an interviewer from People magazine asked her if she wasn’t concerned about Quinn’s having two relatively old parents, she replied, “I think the advantages he’ll have by having us as parents outweigh the disadvantages of our age.” Very quickly, however, the other shoe would drop. Quinn had been born with a hole in his heart, and at three months experienced heart failure, which required surgery. The problems continued. At age two, he required speech therapy. Sally noted that when she read to him he couldn’t focus. When Quinn was four, Ben and Sally put him in kindergarten and hired a tutor to pretend he was a teacher in the classroom. It wasn’t working out, so the school suggested he go to the Lab School, for learning-disabled kids.

“I remember driving past the Lab School,” says Sally. “I just parked in front of it, and I just burst into tears. I just couldn’t believe it. You know, I just, it just seemed, this wasn’t what I envisioned.” He entered the Lab School, missing months of school for various illnesses—seizures, migraines, fevers—that no doctor could explain. Sally told The Washingtonian magazine in 1986, “It’s not a permanent condition. They expect him to outgrow it in a couple of years.” But when Quinn was eight, Ben and Sally had him tested by a psychiatrist, who told them that he would never finish high school, he’d never have a job, he’d never have a relationship, and that she had already reserved a space in an institution. “Ben literally had to carry me out of the office. I was hysterical,” recalls Sally. “I just wouldn’t accept it, because I knew him. I knew this was an incredibly special child.”

Refusing to give up, Sally sent him to every specialist on the globe and saw him through dozens of surgeries, while tackling one setback after another. At age 14, he was finally diagnosed with VCFS, a syndrome that affects his heart, facial structure, immune system, and ability to talk and comprehend. While the diagnosis was a breakthrough, it didn’t make it any easier. Her friends could only look on with heartbreak and amazement. Recalls Walsh, “Every time she’d think, Oh, hey, we solved this problem, then, oops, she’d get a letter from the hospital, saying, Oh, by the way, you’ve got to bring Quinn in for an AIDS test, because we’ve just discovered that the batch of blood we used during the period when Quinn had an operation was infected.… Bob and I visited them in Tuscany one summer. We drove up, and there was Quinn with big plaster casts the full length of both arms, from his wrists to his shoulders, almost completely immobilized from the waist up. He’d fallen off a fence and broken both arms.” But Sally was determined that Quinn not miss out on anything. In the summers, she’d hire a tennis buddy to play with him. Marshall recalls how Sally took Quinn to see the Christo Gates in Central Park right after he had had both feet operated on. “Of course it snowed that day. So there was Sally pushing Quinn through the park in a wheelchair so he could experience The Gates as well.”

At times, her protectiveness may have felt overbearing. On a trip to St. Martin, Quinn lost his virginity to a prostitute in a brothel bar. When he told his parents the next morning, his father essentially congratulated him. Sally, on the other hand, was hysterical. She dragged him back to the brothel, demanded to know who the girl was, and, with Quinn in tow, escorted her to a clinic to get tested for H.I.V. “I often think that Quinn would not be alive had it not been for Sally,” says Walsh.

Those were only the health concerns. Sally, understandably, also fretted about his social life. There was no party that made her more anxious to throw than Quinn’s birthday party. It broke her heart every time she saw him in a group of young people, completely on his own. Though he was at the Lab School, he didn’t socialize with those kids, mainly, Sally says, because everyone lived so far apart. So Sally and Ben became his best friends and took him everywhere they went. But in the company of all their dynamic powerhouse friends and their kids, Quinn often felt invisible. The pain got so bad that, on a trip to Boston to visit his brother Ben junior and his two younger children, he left a note under the phone, saying he was retarded and wanted to die.

“Ben is a true existentialist,” says former Post man Shelby Coffey. “Whatever went wrong yesterday, that was then, and he’s not going to worry much about tomorrow.”

The one child whose love Sally wanted most for Quinn was Ben junior’s daughter Greta—beautiful and, by all accounts, gracious, something of a golden child. In 1992, after Ben junior and Raddatz divorced, Raddatz moved with Greta, then about 12, to Washington, D.C. Raddatz, at this point, was not particularly eager to have much to do with the family of her ex-husband. But according to sources who have witnessed the family dynamics, Sally hoped Greta would take Quinn, two years her junior, under her wing. But Greta could never do enough, say these sources, and Sally often perceived slights in Greta’s behavior—in her body language, or how she arranged the seats around the swimming pool, say, when other friends were there. Around 2002, while Greta was attending Amherst, Sally met with her and didn’t hold back in expressing her rage at both her and her mother for not having helped Quinn sufficiently, an experience that traumatized the young woman.

With this, the rift between Sally and the older sons deepened. Now Ben junior, like Dino, felt banned from the Bradlee-Quinn households, which he would interpret as Sally, again, steamrolling over his father.

Sources close to Sally, however, dispute the idea that she got in the way of the elder sons’ relationship with their father. According to Leslie Marshall, Sally had been the one responsible for whatever time Ben senior spent with his older kids. “Sally has put together many all-family events, which, God knows, the rest of us weren’t going to do,” she says; once the rift started, it was Ben junior’s rage, she suggests, that made the situation intolerable. Inevitably, money disputes would enter the picture, too. For a time, Ben senior had been generous with his eldest children. In fact, he made a sizable loan to Dino for a construction business that went bust. Eventually, at the recommendation of Ben senior’s financial advisers, says a Sally confidante, those gifts had to stop. From the point of view of Bradlee’s daughter, Marina, who lives in Loudon County, Virginia, and is married to a shop teacher, her brothers have unfairly made Sally a scapegoat, and their rage is rooted somewhere deeper and more primal. “Their anger is coming from lack-of-mama-love syndrome,” she says, referring to the pain they experienced as kids. In Ben junior’s case, however, the only one absent was his father.
While the elder brothers may have been comparing themselves to the beloved Quinn, Sally couldn’t help comparing Quinn with other kids his own age. Having spent her life judging who was up, who was down, it was sometimes hard for Sally not to despair at his prospects. She recalls the day Quinn’s best friend heard he’d been accepted to Harvard. “All of our friends’ kids were all getting into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and Brown. I went to a screening that night and I ran into [documentary-film maker] Charles Guggenheim. He came up and gave me a kiss and said, ‘How are you?,’ and I burst into tears. He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I just said, ‘Quinn’s best friend just got into Harvard. And Quinn will never go to any college, and I just feel so defeated.’ ”

That same night, however, she returned home, and Quinn asked her, for the first time in his life, “Why do you think this happened to me, Mom?” Sally gathered up her strength and responded, “The only thing I can say to you is this: All of your friends are going to these fabulous schools and everything else, but you have something they don’t have,” she said. “You’re learning-disabled and they’re not, and you can do something with that. You can help people by using your learning disability by not being ashamed of it, by not being afraid of it, and by saying, This is who I am, this is what I am, and I’m going to talk about it. I’m going to tell people about it.”

With the steadfast encouragement from his mother and the encouragement of a family friend, book publisher Peter Osnos, Quinn embarked on a memoir, A Different Life. It wasn’t until age 26 that he really had enough to say. He told his story to Jeff Himmelman; the result was honest, heartbreaking, and inspiring. When it came out, last year, Quinn went on a publicity blitz, with Sally, to be sure, always by his side. She recalls his talking to a group of 600 people at the Learning Disabilities Association of America. “I cried all the way through it … and he was just so proud.” To say that she unlocked his potential is an understatement. She refused to take no for an answer when it came to giving him a life he—and she—could be proud of. Her journey with Quinn has led her to new places in her own career, say her friends, namely the On Faith Web site, which features online discussion of hot religious topics. The “life and death” struggle, observes Coffey, “would have a sizable part in her great interest in religion and what it does and what it means to people at the extremes.”

And then something even more wonderful happened to Quinn. He met Pary Williamson, who would become his first girlfriend. After an astrologer told Sally that Quinn would benefit from yoga, she had lunch with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who recommended her own teacher, Pary, whose students included David Gregory and Rahm Emanuel. Sally signed Quinn up for six sessions with her. “It was love at first sight,” says Sally. “She’s a magical person. It’s just a miracle.” They live next door to Ben and Sally, where Quinn had been living with roommates. “Both of them are very clear about not wanting to be each other’s caretaker.” While some observers question Pary’s motives—she seemed to appear out of nowhere and is said to have had a hardscrabble life—those who know her disagree. “She really is a very upbeat, very exuberant, sweet, nice person and believes in all the spiritual values of yoga and all that stuff,” says one of her students. “The whole idea of your life lived out in public is not her style at all.”

And yet, in spite of Quinn’s remarkable triumphs, it seems Sally could not forget the members of the family who she felt had let her down. Last November, when Greta’s fiancé’s parents threw them an engagement party at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., Sally and Ben didn’t attend, because, they said, they had houseguests at their Maryland estate. In the wake of that non-appearance, Raddatz and Sally spoke; it was made clear that Ben senior and Sally and Quinn would also not be attending the wedding. Then, in January, Sally moved up the Quinn-Pary wedding day from October 10 to April 10, the very date of Greta’s wedding, because, she explained, Pary was pregnant and that was the only day they could find. When Ben junior learned about the double booking, he was outraged. Not only would Ben and Sally not be coming to Greta’s wedding, it meant he and Dino weren’t welcome at Quinn’s wedding, either. Ben junior confronted his dad, who said he was outraged, too, and that he’d take care of it. He never did. Only after the column caused such a firestorm was the Quinn-Pary wedding moved back to October. Ben senior relented and went to his granddaughter’s wedding—without Sally.

Sally will not talk about her stepsons, except to say that “the column actually was a very healthy thing to do. I think it was like lancing a boil. And I think that it had a very positive outcome all the way around. Things are much better now than they were before.” Ben junior and Dino would strongly disagree—especially since last month’s publication of the memoir A Life’s Work: Fathers and Sons. Conceived by Sally, and dictated by Ben and Quinn to a small handful of journalist friends, the memoir talks about Ben senior working in the woods with his father after Ben senior was stricken with polio; it then skips ahead to Watergate and working in the woods with Quinn, with no mention of the families in between. While neither Ben junior nor Dino has ever had a serious illness, their omission, save for a token dedication, in a book called Fathers and Sons is rather jarring.

When Ben junior and Dino heard from their younger brother that a fatherhood book was in the works, they were appalled and tried to put an end to it. “The book is yet another cynical, fraudulent gambit conjured by Sally to aggrandize herself at the Bradlee-family expense,” says Dino, who now lives in Oklahoma and whose six-year-old twin boys Ben senior has seen only once. “Dad should have put the brakes on her long ago while he was still able.”
At my first meeting with Ben senior in his home, he reflected on his elder sons: “Earlier, with my other children, I was going up the ladder. I was working late day after day. I probably should have spent more time with them.” On another level, it seems he thinks they need to grow up. “I feel close to all my children, but they live in different states and have different lives,” he says, adding, “My children all know that Sally Quinn has made me enormously happy for 30-umpteen years, and that is more important to them than anything else, I think.” As for Sally, when asked about the absence of the other sons from the book, she says, “It would have to be a different book. Ben didn’t have that book in him.”

The book would likely have been greeted as a nice volume of sweet musings had it not been for that column—and to Sally it all seems so unfair. When she decided to publish the piece, she felt it was just the kind of fun, stir-the-pot column of yesteryear. “Compared to the olden days, where people were writing things like this all the time, it was nothing! It was the kind of thing people would read and say, ‘That’s Sally!’ ” It seems she didn’t expect that this time the eyebrows would be raised at her. It’s not something she or her husband seem to particularly enjoy. As this story was going to bed, Bradlee called, clearly frustrated, and asked, “This is news?”

What kind of woman spends $900 on a pair of four-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos with Swarovskicrystal straps? Is she a role model—accomplished, sexy, and independent, with an unapologetic appreciation for the finer things in life? Or is she a princess—a vain social climber who craves the spotlight and needs a rich man to buy them for her? The same questions might be asked about Tamara Mellon, the 37-year-old founder and president of the Jimmy Choo company and one of the most successful businesswomen in Britain. Consider how she got here. Once there was a humble Malaysian cobbler named Jimmy Choo, with a tiny, yet prestigious, operation in London’s East End until she—of the waist-length straight dark hair and zero body fat—came along, equipped with Daddy’s money, took Choo’s name, and turned it into a $200 million international glamour powerhouse that’s been given plugs on Sex and the City and in a Beyoncé Knowles song and whose shoes are now worn by many of the young leading ladies on the red carpet—a feat, incidentally, that was accomplished only with Choo out of the picture. Tamara would eventually pocket almost $100 million for herself from the sale of her majority shareholding.

The princess interpretation was given fresh life when she picked a husband, Matthew Mellon II, scion of the famed American banking family, who came along with 13 trust funds. They were married in 2000 in what tabloids invariably call a “fairy-tale wedding”—before 300 glittering guests, including Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, and 50 white doves.

The union turned into the most colossal fiasco since AOL and Time Warner. With the exception of an adorable daughter, all Tamara got from her American prince was trouble: coke binges, week-long disappearances, and a divorce lawyer nicknamed “Jaws,” determined to take a major bite out of her fortune. By the end of the ordeal, Tamara had proved what kind of Jimmy Choo woman she was.

To look at Tamara Mellon today you might think none of this had ever happened. She glides through London society as a kind of Henry James heroine for the bling generation. At her favorite restaurant, Cipriani, the maître d’ comes embarrassingly close to bowing when she clip-clops in, wearing her skintight jeans and revealing chiffon blouse. A few fellow diners stand, hoping she will remember their names. She is occasionally asked for her autograph. She has lately been sought after by four of the world’s raciest men—Girls Gone Wild producer Joe Francis, notorious international playboy Flavio Briatore, Europop sensation Robbie Williams, and hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams.

Her Chelsea town house—a temple to the color cream—is immaculate, thanks not only to a housekeeper in uniform but also to Elika Gibbs, whom Tamara calls her “housewife.” “She organizes my clean linen. She’ll go buy new towels,” explains Tamara, her voice posh but without airs. Gibbs also color-coordinates her closet and neatly arranges her 500 pairs of Jimmy Choos into “Closet A,” the one in her bedroom, and “Closet B,” a transformed guest room. There are corners of hero worship—a Warhol Grace Kelly lithograph and a photograph of herself flanked by Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti—as well as bohemian touches, like a pair of Moroccan “pouf” seats picked up on a recent jaunt, and a single instance of the ordinary: a regular old bath mat inside the front door, which is getting wet and dirty from the London weather.

There is nary a frizz in her hair, which she straightens using the thousand-dollar Japanese process. Also requiring maintenance are her plumped-up complexion and lips—work expected with a woman in her position. She rarely strays from her morning schedule. After waking up at seven, she has breakfast with her three-year-old daughter, Araminta—“Minty”—with whom she employs a special self-esteem parenting method. “Never attack somebody personally,” she says, explaining its tenets. “Never make ‘you’ statements to a child, like ‘You are very bad.’ You say, ‘I love you very much, but your behavior is not appropriate.’” Breakfast is followed by a session with a fitness trainer.

Her business sense is just as honed. At a meeting at Jimmy Choo headquarters, near Sloane Square, with a team of fragrance branders who are trying to woo her, she gently peppers them with such questions as “What went wrong with Patrick Cox?” (a shoe designer who tried to branch into fragrance) and “How do you feel about duty-free?”—not so much to get information as to conduct a subtle quiz. On a trip to Vogue House to meet with fashion director Lucinda Chambers, who’s styling tomorrow’s ad-campaign shoot by Mario Testino, she oversees the wardrobe choices to get the Kate-Moss-at-a-party look, and explains to Chambers that she’ll also need to be there. “I just don’t want the hairdresser to curl the model’s hair up,” she tells her, shuddering at the memory of a past ad shoot. Tamara has been known to personally feather-dust the display cases in Jimmy Choo stores.

Disarmingly, the discipline and the polish often seem completely at odds with her personality, which is unassuming, friendly, and patient in the company of tedious individuals. She often seems shy, and even insecure—which makes her all the more charming to those who meet her. If such a perfect creature accepts me, so the dynamic goes, then I must not be such a slob; I like her!

And so, despite the fact that she is now speaking to VANITY FAIR, she treads lightly when conversation comes around to her problematic husband.

“How’s Minty?” asks Mara, the tiny, elderly Italian proprietor of the fashionable Knightsbridge lunch spot San Lorenzo, settling in beside her. “Does she see her father?”

“Yes,” says Tamara, beaming and trying to sound positive.

Mara stares at her with pity.

The daughter of Thomas Yeardye, a self-made businessman, and Anne Davies, a Chanel No. 5 model, Tamara spent the first years of her life in a 500-year-old Tudor farmhouse, in the very English countryside of Berkshire. Always, she was obsessed with fabulous shoes. At age four, on a trip to Paris with her convent school, she begged one of the nuns to buy her a pair of cowboy boots. When Yeardye became the C.E.O. of the Vidal Sassoon designer hair-styling company, the family moved to Beverly Hills, where young Tamara thrived. She hung out at such snazzy clothing stores as Camp Beverly Hills and Fiorucci, drove around with older boys, and enjoyed the expensive grooming habits of Beverly Hills ladies. In 1983, after Vidal Sassoon was sold for $80 million, the family returned to England and sent Tamara, coiffed like a veritable Morgan Fairchild, off to Heathfield, the sister school of Eton. “They looked at me like this alien,” Mellon recalls of her classmates.

But the materialistic little rich girl was given a role model in her father, who was her best friend and hero until he died, in April 2004, never having gone a day without speaking with his daughter. As a young man, he possessed rugged looks, which landed him a job as stunt double for Rock Hudson, and he was briefly engaged to Diana Dors, the Marilyn Monroe of England. As much as his quasi-glamorous beginnings, what impressed Tamara were his tough, anti-Labour politics and unforgiving work ethic. “My father would say to me, ‘If you get a job, I will match what you earn,’” Tamara recalls. “‘If you don’t work, I’m not giving you anything.’” With that in mind, teenage Tamara set up shop in the Portobello market and began selling, at an impressive markup, old designer clothes her father had bought for her at a flea market.

When it came time to consider university, she did as many other wealthy English girls did: opted out and went to a finishing school, called Institut Alpin Videmanette, in Rougemont, Switzerland. For Tamara, it was a rigorous year of French lessons, skiing, and sneaking out to the local nightclub. As was the case with its most famous alumna, Princess Diana, Rougemont did not build a particularly confident young woman. “Everything about me I hated,” Mellon recalls of that period. “I thought I was ugly. I thought I was stupid.”

And whatever she learned about place settings at Rougemont was not readily apparent after she graduated. “We used to lie in the basement of her parents’ Chester Square house, one on each sofa, wrapped up in duvets, eating dips,” recalls her best friend, Vassi Chamberlain, now senior editor at Tatler, the British society magazine. “That was the only thing she ate until a couple of years ago. Salsa and guacamole. We would lie there watching TV, and her mother would come down and say, ‘Don’t worry, one day things will be all right for you two.’ We were slightly desperate.”

Like many well-off girls who love clothes but have self-esteem issues, Mellon got a job at British Vogue, where she worked as the assistant to fashion director Sarajane Hoare (a contributing stylist for VANITY FAIR). Though Tamara was shy, Hoare quickly saw that this quiet young thing had an obsession with shoes that was extraordinary even by fashion-magazine standards. On a trip to Nepal with photographer Peter Lindbergh, which required hiking for miles, Tamara was positively neurotic, says Hoare, over what boot would be best to wear. When it came to making pictures, her eye was exquisite. “She did have that wonderful attention to detail that a lot of people don’t.” To find the perfect gold Greek sandal, say, for a fashion layout, Tamara, like a few other in-the-know fashionistas, would visit a cobbler, Jimmy Choo, now 56, who worked out of a small garage in London’s East End and who had a few A-list clients, such as Princess Diana. He wasn’t a designer per se, but he could make anything and make it beautifully. Over the next couple of years, Tamara developed a close relationship with Choo. “He came across as a very sweet cobbler,” Tamara says. She eventually became British Vogue’s accessories editor, and she and Choo practically worked in tandem.

Just as the two were hitting their stride, Tamara was throwing herself into the role of “It girl,” nightclubbing alongside some of England’s most notorious rich party girls, including Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. She agreed to pose with them in an ad campaign for Pretty Polly, an accessories company, wearing nothing but stockings and strategically placed handbags. Perhaps the once shy young lady had lost her inhibitions because she was either drunk or high, or both. By May 1995, Tamara realized that alcohol and cocaine had become addictions and that she was nursing three or four hangovers a week. “I hated what I was doing,” she says, attributing her addictions to “a family illness.” “I couldn’t bear it anymore. I thought it was disgusting.”

No self-respecting daughter of Thomas Yeardye was willing to watch herself crumble; that month she left Vogue and soon checked herself into rehab. “When I went in, they said they’d never seen anybody with as much determination to get well,” says Tamara. Once drug-free, six weeks later, she wanted to strike out on her own. The natural thing to pursue—the thing that was hers—was this unique collaboration with Choo, and she saw a gap in the luxury shoe market, as Manolo Blahnik had virtually no competition. She went to her father, whose business track record spoke for itself, and showed him her plan. She would run the company. Choo, assisted by his niece, Sandra Choi, who’d studied fashion design at London’s Central Saint Martins, would design and make the shoes. Impressed, Yeardye invested about $250,000 and agreed to be chairman.

The business had the scrappy beginnings of many other future success stories. They worked out of a basement. There was no computer. But one problem was more serious. “[Jimmy] was totally incapable of designing a collection,” Tamara says. “He never produced one sketch.” Tamara and Choi panicked. “We’d sit there and suddenly realize, Oh my God, I’ve taken a lease on a shop—I have no collection. What am I going to do?” Tamara recalls. “So I said to Sandra, ‘You and I are going to sit down and design the collection.’” Unfortunately, neither had any experience. “I didn’t know how a collection should exist,” says Choi, her accent distinctly less upper-crust than Tamara’s. “I didn’t know if there’s a balance of different heel heights. We didn’t know whether we had to do a proportion in leather and a proportion for evening.” They decided to capitalize on the one thing they had that Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin and every other great shoe designer out there didn’t: a woman at the top—one with many occasions to wear high heels.

“I just did the shoes I wanted to wear myself … I am the customer,” Tamara says. “I know exactly what she wants to wear, what her lifestyle is, when she wants to wear it.” Quickly, they settled into their respective roles (which they still play today). Tamara came to Choi with ideas, big and small, gathered from her fabulous life. The less fabulous Choi designed and executed. The first collection, sold from their store in Knightsbridge, was a hit.

Tamara and her father were dreaming big—Gucci-big. “I remember that the late Mr. Yeardye told all of us, ‘In five years’ time, I promise you, we’ll own 35 stores in the world,’” Choi recalls. With this in mind, Yeardye infused the business with another $1.2 million; in three years, there were four Jimmy Choo stores, in London, New York, Beverly Hills, and Las Vegas. Choi was up for the challenge of fast growth, but her uncle Jimmy, who owned half the company, was reluctant, which she attributes to his working-class situation. “[Jimmy and I] were just trying to be sure that, whatever we’re investing in, we’re not going backwards,” Choi says. “To be fair, on Jimmy’s side, he’s got responsibility. He’s got family that he needs to bring up…. Whereas, on the other side, the Yeardye family, they’re all set up. To them, it’s a gamble, and it could go sky-high and everything could be wonderful, or it could be in shambles. But it doesn’t quite affect them.”

Tamara wasn’t as sympathetic. “I never really understood what was going on with him,” she admits, explaining that she’d often have seemingly agreeable meetings with Choo, which were then followed up by letters from his lawyer. “It’s very difficult to do business that way,” she points out.

Meanwhile, the press was beginning its affair with Tamara. The first story on her appeared in Tatler in September 1996.

“I remember you wore that white lace Gucci dress,” Chamberlain tells Tamara over lunch at San Lorenzo, recalling the photo shoot, “and I remember this is where Tamara started her long career with that camera face…. In those days it was the low chin.” A dozen or so articles followed over the next couple of years.

Tamara had perfected her public persona by 1998, in time to meet the next man who’d change the course of her life. Matthew Mellon, then 34, was the great-great-grandnephew of Andrew W. Mellon, a founder of the Union Trust Company, an owner of Gulf Oil, and one of the heads of the Mellon banking firm. But Matthew’s road to his vast fortune had not been a typical one. His parents, Karl and Anne Stokes, divorced when he was young, and he grew up with his mother, who told him that, although he was a Mellon, his side of the family was not to inherit a cent. There was no one to dispute this; his father, an avid fisherman, pianist, and manic-depressive, was absent from his life and committed suicide when Matthew was 18. However, when Matthew was turning 21 he received a call from his uncle, Jay Mellon, the family patriarch, who invited him to Pittsburgh to celebrate his coming-of-age. There, Jay brought him to the boardroom of the Mellon bank and informed him that, on that very day, he would be receiving $25 million, the first of 13 trust funds. His mother, Matthew then learned, had kept the truth from him so that he wouldn’t grow up a spoiled brat.

As it turned out, it was not too late for that. He managed to attend four colleges, landing eventually at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in Philadelphia. During that time he became a member of St. Anthony’s Hall, an exclusive “literary” fraternity reputed to be less about Tolstoy and more about partying. For good measure, he bought a 10-bedroom house up the street for after-parties. His single proudest achievement in college was buying the first BMW M5 in America. When not enjoying campus life, he could be found at the back of his speedboat, taking his frat buddies waterskiing. Following college, he moved to Los Angeles, where he bought a fleet of Ferraris and two gigantic houses in Beverly Hills and Malibu. Heidi Fleiss and her girls were regular visitors. As he told Tatler in 2003, “Eventually it got rough—people were showing up with handguns and drug stuff and it was just total madness.” His drug use was so out of control that he became the inspiration for the obnoxious “Julian” in Less than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel about rich kids and drugs in 1980s Los Angeles (Robert Downey Jr. played him in the movie). He was in and out of rehab several times, and he came close to dying twice.

When Tamara met him, in July 1998, at the wedding of Henry Dent-Brocklehurst (a fellow heir whom Matthew had met in rehab), all this appeared to be ancient history. Matthew was three years clean, but sobriety had not dulled his charm. The distinct gleam in his eye, which might look to some as slightly crazed, Tamara found exciting. “He will have you on the floor in stitches, laughing,” Tamara says of the initial attraction. “He should have been a Jay Leno or a David Letterman. And I thought he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen.” After the Dent-Brocklehurst wedding, to go back to London, he jumped into her car as it was pulling away. “I had two and a half hours to close the deal,” he said. “I knew that car journey would be the most important trip of my life.” He proposed seven months later, in a helicopter hovering above the Mellon mansions in Philadelphia, after reciting his own poetry, which had her in tears. However princess-y her image, friends claim the attraction to Matthew went beyond the money and the pedigree. “She saw a wounded bird that she wanted to love,” says Chamberlain, “because she had once been one herself.” According to Tamara, he promised he would never go back to using. If he did, she warned, she would leave him.

No expense was spared at the white-tie wedding, held at Blenheim Palace, home of the 11th Duke of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill. Her dress was by Valentino; 41 carats of Harry Winston diamonds hung around her neck. “Oh, Such a Perfect Day,” read the headline of the eight-page spread in Tatler, written by Chamberlain. (The wedding was also given a spread in American Vogue.) Privately, though, her friends were worried about the union. “We saw the whole thing very clearly,” says her friend Arabella Spiro. “There was no ‘Oh, maybe it will work out.’ It was ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ But you couldn’t say that to Tamara, because she looked really happy with him and wanted it so much. You’re kind of hoping that maybe you’re the one who’s seeing things not correctly.”

Matthew moved from Los Angeles to London, and the two settled into a beautiful Belgravia apartment, which was promptly photographed for House & Garden. As her friends expected, the problems started right away, stemming, initially, from a kind of culture clash. With the exception of stints in Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s press office and in Los Angeles as a “rap producer,” Matthew had never held a real job, nor was he seeking to find one in any serious way. And so, while he was accepted into London society, he had trouble talking to people, especially the men. “London is really a working city,” says Tamara. “You go out to dinner, and all the guys are in banking or doing the same thing you do…. Who knows what anybody does in L.A.? You could be a producer, and everyone is hanging out at a coffee shop.” Matthew often had nothing better to do but follow her around, like a bored child at a museum, to the shoe factories in Italy.

Regardless of his thin résumé, those around him found him increasingly pompous. He routinely mentioned that he was “American royalty.” On one occasion he told Glenn Spiro, Arabella’s husband, that he was “six-generations Ivy League.” (Glenn, who wishes Matthew only the best, places the blame for Matthew’s arrogance squarely on his family.)

The most important person in Tamara’s life—her father—grew to dislike his son-in-law. “He was not impressed,” Tamara says. Eventually, Matthew, having picked up a few things while at the shoe factories, worked on his own line of shoes, called Harry’s of London, named after his maternal grandfather, a rich dandy. It was not particularly time-consuming work, however; the shoes, appropriately, were rich-guy loafers, emblazoned with the image of a stork, the Mellon-family crest.

By the time Matthew hosted a yacht holiday, in December 2000, he was raw with vulnerability and primed to blow. The group included Tamara’s closest friends, and the plan was to sail from Nassau to Harbour Island, in the Bahamas. But partway into their journey, they saw a storm approaching. It was too late to turn back; the sea was churning.

“It was a catalyst, that storm,” Chamberlain recalls. “I remember I was very scared and nearly everyone was throwing up.” Matthew was running from deck to deck in an excitable, agitated state, asking why everyone was so scared. “I think he felt responsible because he was our host, and he had let us down,” Chamberlain says, “which of course he hadn’t; it was just a storm.”

They arrived safely on Harbour Island, but by that time his demons had gotten the better of him. All the girls stayed on board that night, and the boys went out to nightclubs. There, after more than four years of sobriety, Matthew lost control and gave in to his old habits. When he returned to the boat that night, he became paranoid and disappeared into the guest bathroom for two hours.

From that moment on, life with Matthew became unpredictable and terrifying. He’d shut himself in the kitchen, curtains drawn. He would go out for a carton of milk and not return for a week—he’d be in one of any number of cities, having hooked up with his local coke “fixer.” Her mornings at work were frequently spent placing calls to his family members, hotels, and various car services, trying to track him down. On at least one occasion, he used a pseudonym—Goldstein—to prevent her from finding him. Hotels would call her, saying that her husband had left without paying the bill, and she’d pick up the tab. It seems Matthew had run out of money. So “he’d spend all of Tamara’s,” says the feisty Arabella Spiro.

His fantasies were chilling. “It started as ‘I was up for four days straight on whatever,’” says a friend, recalling a sober conversation with Matthew about the images that would appear before him when high. “And I said, ‘You’re hallucinating,’ and he got very upset. He said, ‘If that’s what you want to believe.’ After that I said, ‘Fine, I’m going to bed. I can’t argue. There’s no point.’”

While Matthew continued his downward spiral, Tamara’s success was skyrocketing. In 2001, Equinox Luxury Holdings came along and bought Choo out for $25 million, relieving her of the other difficult man in her life. “Some people see him as the underdog,” Tamara says of Choo. “‘She came in and stole his name and did this and did that.’ He was very happy. He went away with a lot of money, and he was very happy. I made him wealthy.” (Choo is back to his bespoke business.) Liberated from Choo, Tamara was on her way to opening 30 Jimmy Choo stores worldwide and putting Jimmy Choos in 50 department stores.

As Tamara’s business got bigger, so did the emotional gap between her and Matthew. Nothing could compel him to take serious steps to get better—not even the upcoming birth of his daughter, due in April 2002. In March, her parents, who were staying at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, saw him there, and Mr. Yeardye pleaded with him to return to his wife in London. Matthew checked himself out of the hotel—and disappeared for eight days, landing, eventually, in a crack den. It took three attempts to get him onto the plane back to London.

“She’s in bed,” Arabella Spiro says. “This poor thing out of her mind with worry that her husband is in a crack den about to drop dead, and they don’t know where he is, and she’s not going, like you’re going, ‘I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill him!’”

Instead, forgetting the warning she says she had given him when they got married, Tamara stood by him and did her best to drill into his head what she had learned from her own experience with recovery—about the importance of going to meetings, of hanging out with other people who are in the programs, and of going to therapy, but she had little effect. “I wanted to support him,” says Tamara. “He was my daughter’s father, and I wanted her to have a dad, and have a dad that’s well and sober and is in her life.” She rarely even uttered a negative word to friends. On the rare occasion when she did speak to friends, says one confidant, she’d empathize with him. “If you’re an addict, you’re an addict,” she’d say, “and it doesn’t matter how shiny your life is.” In spite of the steps she did take to help him get better, looking back now, she sees herself as having been an enabler.

But after he went on a drug binge on Ibiza in August 2003, Tamara decided she could no longer make excuses for him. She and Matthew had rented a villa from fashion designer and international socialite Jacqueline de Ribes; guests included Elle Macpherson and fiancé Arki Busson, Jade Jagger, and Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, as well as a number of people in Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous whom Tamara had asked to come, in order to keep Matthew from going off the rails. The day was gorgeous, 90 degrees, and the group was sunbathing by the pool, a few of them in close reach of the “Big Book,” the Alcoholics Anonymous bible, in case they got the urge to fall off the wagon in drug-drenched Ibiza. Matthew, however, could not sit still.

“He wanted to go check out a club called Space,” recalls one of the houseguests. “That night, he was obsessed with Valentino. ‘We have to have dinner there. We have to do this. We have to do that.’ You could see the buildup…. It was like a volcano about to explode.” Matthew insisted on going out, so Tamara sent along Glenn Spiro, to baby-sit him. “They walk in. Everyone says, ‘Yeah!,’” recalls a source.

There was no controlling him; he tracked down his Ibiza fixer and scored his drugs. He disappeared from the house for two days. When he returned, in the morning, he was staggering about, drink in hand. “He was wired for sound, that one,” recalls Glenn. With Minty there, Tamara snapped into action. She promptly kicked him out of the Ibiza house, told him it was over between them, and called her father. “I said, ‘I’m leaving Matthew—find me a house. I’m back in 10 days.’” Matthew grabbed a wad of cash from the drawer. “There was a whole lump of it,” says Glenn. “He took it and he was gone.”

“She was such a lady,” says Arabella Spiro. “If you saw her behavior … That your husband’s behaving like that throughout the entire holiday, she just behaved like such a lady. My God, if my husband says one word to me that I don’t like, I’m on him like a feisty old cow!”

Truth be told, Tamara wasn’t a perfect lady. During Matthew’s Ibiza relapse, she gave in to her own physical impulses. The object was one of the N.A.-A.A. houseguests—a 22-year-old onetime party boy named Oscar Humphries (a former intern at VANITY FAIR), who is also the son of the cross-dressing performer Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna. Tortured, romantic, and smart, Humphries had been keenly tuned in to what everybody was going through.

“It’s been my experience that when I’m not sober,” Humphries says, “the things in my life that I value, my friendships and my relationships, they deteriorate because we put our addiction before everything else.” He became something of a confidant for Tamara. She also found him incredibly sexy.

For the next few weeks, the young blond boy with the jeans worn in just so remained the distraction she craved. But, for Humphries, it appeared the relationship meant more. In late September 2003, he wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph about his romance with an older, successful woman. He didn’t use her name and changed some of the details—the object of his love was a 40-year-old divorcée with two sons—but otherwise he was describing Tamara, and it was heartfelt. “I love the fact that she is a good mother,” he wrote. “I love the fact that she is humble and wise and has been successful at nearly everything she’s done.” With a touching, youthful glow, he wrote about “the wonderful trips we take together, the nights in bed and the wasted Sunday afternoons.” The phone started ringing. Tabloid reports soon outed the couple and suggested that the affair was the cause of her breakup from her husband. “It was out of control,” says Tamara, who’d had her share of drama. She ended the relationship almost immediately.

“Perhaps it was a slightly naïve decision to publish that article,” Humphries says now. “If it has caused her any problems, then I’m deeply sorry. That was not my intention.” Disappointed after the split, Humphries nursed his wounds in Australia for a year. But Tamara had to return to reality.

Since Ibiza, Matthew had continued his debaucheries, having chartered a private plane for himself and a bunch of fringe celebrities to go to Corfu for a week of hardcore partying. Once he had returned to London, she drove him to an addiction-therapy clinic and told him that she needed time to figure things out. Later, he flew to Los Angeles to check into Promises Clinic, in Malibu, and checked out a few hours later, telling friends that he was “misbehaving.” One of them demanded that he go to Arizona to see a specialist in childhood trauma and sexual addiction. He traveled by stretch limo, a six-hour journey, doing cocaine most of the way. The detox regime there, he said later, was “brutal.” In the middle of his stay, Tamara came to visit, and Mathew begged her to give him one more chance, offering to pay her a significant sum of money if he ever relapsed again. She refused.

When Matthew got out of the program, in November 2003, in time for the launch of his shoe line at Harvey Nichols, Tamara was by his side. While they were not living together, he still hoped they would work things out; that night, he told a reporter that “our marriage remains very much on.”

“He was not understanding,” says Tamara. “I went to the launch of Harry’s to be supportive, not with any intention of getting back together.” That same day, the Evening Standard ran a mea culpa interview he had given to his friend William Cash in an attempt to win her back. “I was crying every day,” he told Cash about his months in rehab. “Tears about what I had done…. What I did was a horrible thing to put one’s wife through. That is a guilt I’ll have to carry around for the rest of my life.”

Sitting in her kitchen, Tamara looks at the newspaper article, which she keeps in a beaded box, along with other press clippings. She is grateful, she explains, that Matthew corrected the misconception that it was Humphries who had broken up the marriage. But that’s all. “It’s quite sad,” she sighs, putting it away.

But worse was yet to come. In February, 10 months after the sudden death of her father, which was followed by what Tamara says was a flagrantly erroneous tabloid article claiming that he had been an associate of the gangster brothers known as the Krays, she was in for another shock. A couple of cops ended up at her apartment. They said they wanted to check the computers. Matthew was promptly arrested on suspicion of phone-tapping and computer-hacking offenses as part of an ongoing Scotland Yard investigation into a detective agency. He has denied any involvement. As for Tamara, she no longer uses her landline.

The crowning blow came when she received a letter saying that he was planning to sue her for joint custody and an unspecified sum of money, claiming that Jimmy Choo was built on the Mellon name.

“I was floored by that,” Tamara says. “He believes the Mellon name made Jimmy Choo…. People buy the shoes because of his name?” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s quite polluted.” She picks up another clipping from her box. There’s a picture of a rangy divorce attorney named Raymond Tooth, who has represented the underdog wives in the Eric Clapton—Patti Boyd and Jude Law—Sadie Frost divorces and who is nicknamed “Jaws.”

“That’s his lawyer,” says Tamara. “So it’s a fight.”

The trial is set for October. In one corner is Matthew, who’s been keeping company with Noelle Reno, a 23-year-old aspiring actress, who is said to have a thing for men with Learjets. He’s still got Harry’s of London shoes, but the Mellon name has not worked its magic with his own business in the way he believes it did with Jimmy Choo. The line is being sold at Harrods and Saks, but Harvey Nichols and Selfridges have discontinued it after one season. Recently, he mounted a photo exhibition, at his friend Tim Jefferies’s Hamiltons Gallery, of the feet of famous pals—Val Kilmer and Lionel Richie—wearing Harry’s shoes. This came a number of months after word got out about Tamara’s new book, Four Inches, featuring such famous women as Kate Moss and Sarah Ferguson in the nude wearing just Jimmy Choos, the proceeds of which will go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. As Matthew waits to learn whether he will be charged in the bugging investigation, his entire computer system has reportedly been confiscated. As for his drug use, Tamara says that she believes he is clean, but almost everyone else sounds less convinced.

Tamara, meanwhile, has put to rest the princess image for good. In spite of her rage, she still wants her daughter to see her father; she allows him to see her twice a week, in the presence of a nanny. One still even sees her instinct to protect him.

“She has behaved in an incredibly dignified way, given the extraordinary situation that has arisen,” says Nat Rothschild, a banking heir and a highly regarded member of the international jet set.

Arabella Spiro spells it out. “I don’t know one woman who’d say, ‘I don’t want anything. You have the house—I’m going to rent myself a place. I’m going to take care of our daughter. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ She doesn’t get anything. And then a few months later, the guy turns around and is suing her for her money.”

“She had a tough time, and it’s not like she sailed through it,” says another friend. “But imagine, many, many girls in her position would have made a huge meal of it.”

To this day, many insiders see her as overly forgiving, overly naïve, when it comes to Matthew. “She feels sorry for him,” says one who believes Tamara has underestimated how intense his response will be.

Whatever the case, she has never stood taller. Within the next two years, she estimates, there will be 50 Jimmy Choo stores worldwide as they break into the Asian market. She has just dropped a rumored $11 million on a house in Los Angeles. In her personal life, she has never been more sought after. Chamberlain recalls that last Christmas holiday in St. Barth’s, on Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s yacht, two famous men were pursuing her. Chamberlain and Spiro spent their time manning port and starboard, to give her a chance to talk to each. “It was like someone had sprinkled something on her,” Chamberlain says. “They were queuing up.”

Another of her suitors is Flavio Briatore, the 55-year-old managing director of the Renault Formula One team. “I adore him,” says Tamara, who claims that she is not dating him. She has also been hanging out with Joe Francis, the man we have to thank for the Girls Gone Wild videos, in which drunken American co-eds flash their breasts. “I adore him,” she says, explaining how “misunderstood” he is. With the possible exception of hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams and Brad Pitt, a crush she has yet to actually meet, the Matthew saga has clearly not tempered her attraction to racy, potentially bad-news guys. “My mother always said if there’s someone inappropriate within a hundred-mile radius, I will date him,” says Mellon. “That’s the chink in my armor.”

But a Matthew Mellon—type saga is not likely to happen again. “I’ve never been happier than I am today,” says Mellon. “Sometimes you don’t realize what you’re going through until you’re out of it. You don’t realize what you’re doing. You don’t realize where you find the strength to carry on. I feel now that I don’t want to get married again. I have the most gorgeous little daughter. I’d love to have another child, but I’m not really worried about having children. I’m completely financially independent. I don’t need anybody. It’s what I’ve always wanted. I feel very liberated and I’m having a ball.” And why not? Doesn’t every role model deserve to act like a princess once in a while?

Riding up an elevator in a no-frills office building at an unremarkable address, a short, middle-aged man looks up at the young guy in the backward baseball cap. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” the man asks, squinting his eyes. Bingo. “You’re that kid from Titanic.”

“Yeah,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, smiling awkwardly.

“Listen, I got a line of apparel. How’d you like to be the face
of the company?”

“Thanks,” says DiCaprio as the doors open and he heads toward his six-person production company, “but I really don’t do that kind of stuff.”

“Really? Why not?” the man asks, hands out, apparently mystified.

It’s little surprise that some people think of DiCaprio as the “kid from Titanic.” It’s been seven years since Titanic, the biggest blockbuster of all time, but DiCaprio, who is just turning 30 this month, has done only four films in the interim, not counting a cameo in Woody Allen’s Celebrity. The first two—The Beach and The Man in the Iron Mask—were critically skewered. The second two, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, strong as they were, didn’t amount to a one-two-punch comeback.

Who can forget that foremost trend of the late 90s, Leomania? On posters and Web sites, and in teen magazines and paperbacks throughout the land, Leo’s dreamy blue eyes came piercing out from beneath a floppy blond forelock. Wherever he set foot, Leo induced the kind of insane shrieking not heard since the days of the young Paul McCartney. Celine Dion’s epic crescendo—“Near, far, wher-ever you are . . . ”—wafted through every public space. “It was like a surreal Fellini film,” says DiCaprio with a sigh, this afternoon in the lush gardens of the Hotel Bel-Air. Then, inevitably, the backlash set in, and the New York Post gleefully reported that kids could be found logging on to www.LeonardoDiCaprioFullyBites.com. Dion retired, before taking up residence at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. DiCaprio was sharing an office building with apparel salesmen who didn’t know his name. The memory among film people of the great potential suggested by his films from 1993, This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, was beginning to fade.

No longer. With Scorsese’s The Aviator, a thrilling film about the early years of Howard Hughes, and Scorsese’s best since GoodFellas, DiCaprio has fulfilled the promise of 11 years ago and become the most compelling actor of the aging Hughes many people envision—“the hairy wolfman that sat up in his suite and overlooked the lights of Vegas,” as DiCaprio puts it—the film focuses on the young Hughes, a self-made, brash visionary, driven by the need to break all boundaries in his path, in aviation, filmmaking, and collecting the world’s most beautiful women. Which is not to say that we are denied a peek at the hairy wolfman. Throughout the film, Hughes’s obsessive compulsive disorder (not yet a recognized condition) increasingly takes hold, causing him, for example, to repeat phrases over and over and break down at the sight of a spot on another person’s suit. Toward the end, a buck-naked Hughes holes up for weeks in his screening room, where he conducts what amounts to a deranged art-and-science experiment with bottles of his own urine.

In scene after scene, DiCaprio balances the swashbuckling genius who seduces Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Jean Harlow with the freakish paranoiac, too frightened of germs to open the bathroom door, radiating such charisma it is impossible to take one’s eyes off him. “The young Howard Hughes played by the young Leonardo DiCaprio is very strong and attractive,” Scorsese says, in an understatement, recalling his gut feeling about the role. But the director becomes mystical when talking about DiCaprio’s performance. “There are ‘shape changers,’” says Scorsese. “People who can change shape. This comes from ancient folklore or sagas from the North where men change shape in battle. They’d become ferocious animals or something. . . . We found ourselves surprised at certain points of the picture when Leo would walk on the set. It was Howard, or at least it was our version of Howard . . . I hadn’t seen that happen for a long time in pictures.” For Scorsese, working with DiCaprio reminds him of his early days with another young Italian-American actor, Robert De Niro. “It is reminiscent of that process,” Scorsese says. “It’s an unrelenting process of probing and asking questions and trying things out.” He adds, “It makes me feel good. It makes me feel sort of complete, working as a director with an actor.”

DiCaprio has been working on this movie, in a certain way, since he was 21, almost a third of his life. “I read a book about Howard Hughes, by Peter Harry Brown, and I’d never known anything about the guy,” says DiCaprio, who is affable and easygoing but speaks with intensity, often locking eyes to indicate how important a topic is to him. Fascinated—and driven to read every book about Hughes out there—DiCaprio quickly realized there were two big hurdles in bringing Hughes’s life to the screen: first, in Hollywood, pictures about Howard Hughes were perpetually in the works; second, DiCaprio was too young to play him. Too young, at least, to play the old loon, entwined by his own fingernails. Then a notion dawned on him: there was a younger Hughes who hadn’t been explored. “He symbolized the changing of our country, the industrial-revolution pioneers who took amazing chances,” says DiCaprio. “He romanced all the women that there were to possibly romance. He had the balls to really finance films that were really groundbreaking. He made the first not just million-dollar movie but first $4 million movie in Hell’s Angels [a 1930 Jean Harlow film]. And he put his own money into it! That’s like one man financing, you know, Titanic or something!”

 

Equipped with this notion, DiCaprio went around to several
producers, landing, after some time, with Michael
Mann. Mann got John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai)
to develop the script. Fresh off Ali, Mann felt that he couldn’t
do another major biopic for five years and made the difficult
decision to drop out as director, while remaining attached as
a producer. But he would part with directing the project only
if it ended up in the right hands. That meant one person.

 

Scorsese remembers the call from Rick Yorn, his and DiCaprio’s
manager: “He said, ‘I think I’ve got something I want
you to read.’ I said, ‘What? What is it?,’ ’cause I was busy on
Gangs. He said, ‘I’m not going to tell you what it is.’ I said, ‘All
right, don’t tell me—just send it.’ So he sent it, and I didn’t know
anything about it. It was in my lap and it said The Aviator. Now,
I’ve been on record many times saying how much I’m not a fan
of flying. I’m fascinated by flying, but I have a serious problem
with it. So I opened the cover and I looked and it said, ‘John
Logan.’ I said, ‘O.K., I know him.’ So I started reading . . . ”
Logan’s script was remarkably complete, the narrative and details
so fully fleshed out that Scorsese could see that relatively
little needed to be reworked to take the project from page to
screen. In fact, the making of the film, which cost more than
$100 million and was mostly financed by Graham King, was
free of any big-budget-production nightmares.

 

DiCaprio is on an almost Hughes-ian mission to analyze the
film from every angle. He talks about a Django Reinhardt
tune he got in there by begging Scorsese. “You wouldn’t even
know what I’m talking about, but it’s my secret treasure,” DiCaprio
says. “It’s the most tense piece of music you’ve ever
heard.” He praises his co-stars, such as Alan Alda, who plays
Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, the man intent on bringing
Hughes down. “He’s more of a slimeball than anybody [who]
could play that role. He was perfect. . . . His giant hands that he
flips around like flippers.” He talks about his favorite scene, in
which Hughes, falling in love with Katharine Hepburn (played
by Cate Blanchett), offers her a sip from his milk bottle. “Nobody
could touch the rim of the milk that he drinks. And then
the one moment—he’s sitting there looking at the milk, staring
at it and wondering, Am I going to give over this part of myself?
And he pours it into her mouth.” He wants to know your
favorite scene. Name it and he needs to know why, and what
other scenes you liked. His Hotel Bel-Air surroundings send him
into an Aviator reverie. “Why don’t you dig up one of your bungalow
girls?” he says—a couple of times, actually—out of the
blue, quoting Ava Gardner, played by Kate Beckinsale in the
film. “There are 20 stashed in the Bel-Air.”

 

It’s not narcissism that has DiCaprio going on about his
new movie. He is as passionate, as curious and analytical,
when it comes to just about everything, particularly about
subjects that your average young movie star rarely considers.
His political activism, for example, far from being standard
Hollywood Bush-hate, is rooted in a genuine feeling for the
environment that he has had since he was a kid watching nature
shows. He is fascinated by history—not just the history
of human beings, but the history of the earth and its creatures.
He will talk about extinct lizards, brachiosaurs, Pompeii,
or a recent exhibition of human body parts in such long
stretches that you begin to feel you’re hanging out with an incredibly
precocious 11-year-old. In fact, the longer he talks,
the more DiCaprio emerges as a deeply sensitive and wildly
imaginative nerd-boy, whose massive fame and ability to get
laid as often as he wants seem like bonuses that he never
sought but that just happened.

 

As Meryl Streep, his co-star in the 1996 movie Marvin’s
Room, puts it, “Leo is possessed of the wild gene—unpredictability—which
makes his career seem
to defy categorization,
his life careen along the cliff edge,
and his work vivid and bright and exciting.”
Indeed, in a town obsessed with classifying
its young as either “movie star” or
“actor,” DiCaprio is the wonderful anomaly—both.
His trappings, certainly, are all
very “Hollywood.” He’s got the $20 million
price tag, the supermodel (Gisele Bündchen),
and the tight group of “homeys,”
who include actors Tobey Maguire and
Kevin Connolly (who plays the beleaguered
best friend–script picker to the Leo-esque
heartthrob movie star in the HBO show
Entourage), and he routinely calls people
“dawg.” But his mind is anything but.

 

You would be hard-pressed, for example,
to meet a Hollywood actor as eager as
DiCaprio to talk about his grandmother.
“Oma,” says DiCaprio, smiling broadly, referring
to Grandma Helene, who was the wife
of a coal miner and lives in the German
town of . . . “Ör-Er-ken-schwick,” Leo says,
savoring each syllable. “I love spending as
much time as I can with her because she is
literally gangsta. And I mean that with an
a.” Consider the private tour of the Musée
Picasso, in Paris, that she and Leo were given
by Picasso’s grandson Olivier. Though
thoroughly unimpressed by the Cubist’s
work, Oma heeded her grandson’s wish that
she not say anything negative in front of Picasso’s
relative. “She was being very good
up until he asked her opinion,” recalls DiCaprio.
“‘So what do you think of this
painting?’ She goes, ‘You could tell me that
was a snake, a flower, or a dog, and I would
say, “O.K.” You know why? Because it looks
like nothing.’” DiCaprio laughs proudly. “She
will tell people exactly what she thinks to
their face and look them in the eye. And
she knows you ain’t going to do shit, ’cause
she’s 89 years old.”

 

Oma is dear to DiCaprio also because
she saved the life of his mother, Irmelin,
during World War II, when she was a toddler,
after a broken leg had landed her in a
German hospital. “All these refugees from
the war and all the soldiers came into the
hospital,” he says. “She ended up contracting
five or six major illnesses and stayed for
two and a half, three years. My grandmother
basically came every day and nursed her
back to health because the nurses didn’t
have time. They basically left her for dead.
When you see a picture of my mother, it’s
heartbreaking. It brings tears to my eyes
knowing what she’s been through in her
life. I have a picture of her, her first photograph,
with this tiny little skirt, and she’s
emaciated, with a belly like this,” he says,
gesturing to indicate the size of a beach ball.
“She had a belly full of worms.” DiCaprio is
so over the moon about his mom and Oma
that he insists they appear as extras in almost
all of his movies.

 

Life significantly improved for Irmelin
when she moved to New York in the early
1960s and attended City College, where she
met an Italian-American hippie asbestos installer
and comic-book dealer named George
DiCaprio. “He’s probably one of the most
intelligent people I’ve ever met,” says Leo of
his father, who’s one of his chief guides in
picking projects and still has the same long
hair. After Irmelin became pregnant with
Leo, the couple decided to move to Los Angeles
“in hopes of the great western ideals of
a better life.” They ended up in Hollywood,
near the Waterbed Hotel and a major heroindistribution
area, and George and Irmelin
split up a year after their son was born.

 

It would seem an unlikely beginning for a
successful life, but thanks to his parents
DiCaprio received a remarkable education in
both mainstream art and the underground,
anti-Establishment variety. There were always
neat guys hanging around Dad’s house, such
as the iconoclastic cartoonists
R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar,
and a lot of “dressing up like
mud men—you know.” As for
Mom, DiCaprio routinely emphasizes
the sacrifices she
made to get him the best education,
at the specialized magnet
school called the Center for
Enriched Studies. “She drove
45 minutes there every day and
back. So she spent, you know,
every day, every weekday of
her life, three hours a day, to
make sure that I didn’t go to
just any normal school.” According
to Steven Spielberg,
“Leo’s humanity in all the
characters he’s thus far played
can be traced directly back to
how close he is to every single
member of his family.”

 

Still, young Leo spent a
good deal of time getting beaten
up by neighborhood bullies.
“I was small, and I was a
smart-ass. That’s a deadly combination,”
says DiCaprio, who spent the mid-
80s in silver pants, leather gloves, and a
punky haircut. He got his first performance
experience break-dancing. “I don’t want to
toot my own horn, but I was second place
in the Ör-Erkenschwick break-dance competition,
in Germany,” says DiCaprio. “One
out of 16 German children.” A couple of acting
gigs on Battlestar Galactica and Eight Is
Enough done by his stepbrother, Adam Farrar
(son of his father’s second wife), inspired
him to delve into the dangerous world of
child acting.

 

DiCaprio’s early experiences with the cutthroat
world of Hollywood seem indelibly
marked in his psyche, and he talks about
them so earnestly, it’s hard at first to know
whether he’s joking. He’s not. First, there
was his painful meeting with the casting
agent at age 11. “I remember them lining
us up like cattle. There were eight boys. A
woman comes up and says, ‘O.K., no, no,
yes, yes, no, no, no, yes. Thank you.’” Little
Leo was a “no,” and he was traumatized. “I
thought that that was my one chance into
the business and that the community was
now against me.” It took three years for the
wound to heal. At age 14, he picked up the
pieces and tried again, landing an agent and
a Matchbox-car commercial. But then the
offers dried up. “I hadn’t gotten a job in a
year and a half,” he says. “That’s like over a
hundred auditions. You get pretty disillusioned.
. . . One day I just decided I hated
everyone. I hated all these casting directors.
I hated them all. . . . I was ready to quit.”
Along came the chance to do a television
show called Parenthood, based on the 1989
Steve Martin movie. DiCaprio was up for the
role that Joaquin Phoenix had had in the
movie. He analyzed Phoenix’s performance
as if he were studying Olivier to play Richard
III, and landed the part. This led to no less
a role than Josh in Critters 3, a no-budget
science-fiction movie made in a warehouse,
and finally a recurring role on the television
show Growing Pains, as a homeless kid who
lives in a closet at Kirk Cameron’s school.

 

For many a child actor, the next step
might have been a coke addiction or
Laundromat robberies. DiCaprio, instead,
was led to Robert De Niro. He was up for
This Boy’s Life, about a kid abused by his
mom’s volatile boyfriend, who’s obsessed with
making a man out of him. All DiCaprio knew,
prior to the audition, was that De Niro was
really good in this movie Midnight Run,
and what his dad had told him when they
went to see it: “See this guy? Now, this guy
is cool. His name is Robert De Niro, O.K.?
You remember that name. He’s cool.” Seeing
how nervous the other kids were before
their audition with De Niro (among them
was Tobey Maguire), 18-year-old DiCaprio
understood he had to do something special
to stand out. “I just got up and screamed,
‘Nooooo!’ . . . I was right in front of his
face and, like, veins pumping. I’ll never forget
his face. He burst into hysterical laughter
. . . I thought I had bombed that ship.”
De Niro, who’d been inclined
to go with another boy, was
swayed.

 

For DiCaprio, the experience
of making the film was
a baptism of fire. “When [De
Niro] showed up on the set,
it was like the Pope showed
up,” recalls DiCaprio. “Everything
is on lockdown. ‘Shh,
shh, quiet.’” But Leo, meanwhile,
couldn’t help trying
to provoke his co-star Ellen
Barkin with wiseass little
barbs. “It was good for the
part,” recalls De Niro, who
looked on with amusement.
When it came time for the
two to do scenes together,
DiCaprio found himself totally
perplexed when his older
co-star, say, strayed from
the script. “I don’t know what
the hell is going on,” he says,
remembering his mind-set.
“If he says something that’s
not on the page, do I say,
‘O.K., that was wrong’? ‘Oh, Bob, you said
the wrong line’? See, no, I was supposed to
come back and say something. I had no
idea how it worked.” But De Niro was impressed
enough to let Scorsese know that
this was a kid to look out for. DiCaprio,
meanwhile, credits the film’s director, Michael
Caton-Jones, for guiding him through
every step and paving the way for him to
have “the ultimate trust [in directors], because
that’s how I was brought into this
movie world, by Michael Caton-Jones literally
taking me under his wing.”

 

By the time DiCaprio was working on his
next film, Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating
Gilbert Grape (1993), a subtle, moving drama
about a family burdened by a piano-size,
immobile mother, he was left to his own devices.
“Lasse didn’t really tell me anything
about actually what he thought I should do.
He just said, ‘Do what you think.’” So Di-
Caprio embarked on his first experience with
research—what he refers to as “doing your
homework.” He spent time at a home for
mentally challenged children and compiled a
list of “a couple of hundred little attributes.”
He dutifully went to Hallström to go through
the ones he wanted to try, and Hallström essentially
waved him off—fine, fine, fine. “It
was the most freedom I had ever had with
anything I’d ever done,” DiCaprio says.
Viewing the movie, many, including Scorsese,
couldn’t believe this kid wasn’t really mentally
challenged. But his performance was far
more than a really good imitation of a retarded
boy. Anybody who remembers Arnie’s
hopeless reliance on his brother, played by
Johnny Depp, or his heartbreaking realization
that his mother was not going to wake up
from her nap saw that here was an actor with
extraordinary vulnerability, serious chops,
and a face every bit as cute as Depp’s.

 

DiCaprio vividly remembers the actor
Brendan Fraser telling him that he was really
good in the movie, and how taken aback
he was at the compliment. The praise snowballed.
He earned an Oscar nomination for
best supporting actor. Magazines started
putting him on their covers. Suddenly, he
was the next Brando—and DiCaprio started
to believe it, too. “As soon as enough people
give you enough compliments, and you’re
wielding more power than you’ve ever had
in your life, it’s not that you . . . become an
arrogant little prick, or become rude to people
. . . but you get a false sense of your own
importance and what you’ve accomplished,”
says DiCaprio. “You actually think you’ve altered
the course of history.” (He notes that
he sees the same phenomenon happening
with some of today’s young actors. A pure
professional, he won’t name names.)

 

His father helped keep him in line and
reminded him that it was all about the
work. For his countercultural dad, that meant
work that was unusual. He guided him to
two projects, both about anti-Establishment
writers, The Basketball Diaries, based on
the junkie memoirs of Jim Carroll, and Total
Eclipse, about the tumultuous affair between
French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.
While The Basketball Diaries had a
kind of built-in cool that appealed to a young
actor, the latter required more convincing.
“Let me explain to you who this guy [Rimbaud]
was,” DiCaprio’s father said to him.
“He was a rebel of his time, he was the
James Dean of the poet world. . . . He was
a radical artist, and you need to pay attention
to this.” DiCaprio was sold by the antibourgeoisie
pitch. “It’s like, who wouldn’t
want to play Louis Armstrong?” says DiCaprio.
“Someone who came in when most
music in America was stepdancing and foxtrot
and ‘Grab your partner.’” He was less
enthusiastic about the make-out scenes with
Verlaine, played by David Thewlis, the somewhat
ostrich-like actor from Mike Leigh’s
Naked. “[It’s] one thing I have to pat myself
on the back for. I did not want to do that,”
DiCaprio says. “I’m not going to sit here and
be the artist who says, I pushed it—I grabbed
Thewlis by the back of the hair . . . ”

 

Playing a gay man, however, seemed to
do nothing to hurt his appeal to the girls.
His next film was Baz Luhrmann’s William
Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and at the
premiere DiCaprio’s manager, Rick Yorn,
saw the seeds of Leo-mania. “Leo and I were
walking in and . . . there were all these young
girls, kids, behind a barricade, and they broke
through,” recalls Yorn, an enthusiastic, excitable
sort. “He was like a Beatle. They’re
screaming and it was like, ‘Whoa . . . ’ That
hadn’t happened before. I had seen that
happen with other people, but not at that
level. . . . I called back to L.A. and talked to
some people, and I was like, ‘God, this is going
to be just a taste.’”

 

Yorn, wanting a major hit for his client,
brought him Titanic. “I was resisting it for a
long, long, long time,” DiCaprio says of the
movie. “He laughed at me and it’s like, ‘No
chance,’” Yorn recalls of DiCaprio’s reaction
to the script. There was no heroin, no angry
poetry writing, no mental retardation—nothing!
Except, that is, for Kate Winslet, whose
acting cred, like DiCaprio’s, was top-drawer.
“We were both having the same reservations,”
DiCaprio says. They finally decided,
If you jump, I jump, and made the movie.

 

There has been much speculation that DiCaprio
thought director James Cameron was
an arrogant jackass on the set and that they
often came to blows. But the actor deconstructs
the persona of Jim “King of the
World” Cameron with relative charity. “It
takes somebody with a general-like attitude
to storm the beaches of Normandy, to start
an epic battle, which is what this film was to
me,” he says. Reliving the details of the shoot
is exhausting for him. “You’re sitting in a fivestory
ship that has been re-created to scale
that’s on hydraulics. And the hydraulics are
pushing the bow of the ship into the ocean.
And a crew of 400 is sitting there as a wall
of water is shooting itself through one of the
floors directly at you. And there’s lights on
20 different cranes that are blasting down on
you, and the director coming in on another
crane through the window. I mean it, it was,
I mean it was—I can’t even describe it.”

 

But the real craziness came after the
movie’s release. The surreality of the
Leo-mania crystallized one day when he
was traveling in Europe and a 14-year-old
girl grabbed his leg and held on for dear
life. “I looked at her and she just pressed
her head against my leg,” DiCaprio recalls.
“And I said, ‘Hi . . . What are you doing,
sweetheart?’ And she kept clutching. There
was just a sort of obsessed look in her eye.
She wasn’t looking at me, though, [ just] my
leg, I guess. And I looked at her and I sort
of grabbed her face and said, ‘Hi, it’s O.K.,
no, you can, you can get off my leg. It’s fine.’
She kept saying, ‘No, no, no, no!’ I said,
‘No, no.’ I had to gently pry her hands off.”

 

Some girls got considerably luckier. According
to press accounts, he went through
a slew of models (Kate Moss, Helena Christensen,
Eva Herzigova, Amber Valetta, Bridget
Hall) and actresses, including Demi
Moore. (Bruce Willis’s reaction was, reportedly,
“He’ll be Leonardo DeCapitated when
I get home.”) DiCaprio won’t comment on
any specifics, but he’s not a total dodger. “I
had fun,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
He is quick to point out, however, that he
couldn’t sleep with every woman he wanted,
and that actually liking people is important
to swordsmen, too. “You always ask
yourself, [Could I be in love with this one?]
You’re always yearning for a partner in life.”

 

Perhaps. But, for the tabloids, 23-yearold
Leo’s night-crawling with a posse—that
then included Dana Giacchetto, the financial
manager who went to prison for embezzling
from his clients (including DiCaprio),
and David Blaine, the magician prone to
death-defying but annoying stunts—was an
irresistible opportunity to snark. They reveled
in the alleged episode in which Leo’s
pals beat up screenwriter Roger Wilson, the
boyfriend of Elizabeth Berkley, apparently
because Berkley had refused Leo’s advances.
(Charges were dismissed.) They informed
us that Leo was sighted drinking out of a paper
bag.

 

Even reputable magazines jumped on the
bandwagon, culminating in an inane piece
in Time headlined WHAT’S EATING LEONARDO
DICAPRIO?, in which writer Joel Stein, who’d
begged DiCaprio to let him tag along while
he bought groceries, decided to focus his
profile on what DiCaprio gets at Ralphs.
“He prints my grocery list. . . . It’s like,
‘Chuck steak, and deodorant, and broccoli,’”
recalls DiCaprio. “I seemed like the
most immature, juvenile punk in all of
these articles that were written about me.”
In spite of the great sex with models, the
whole post-Titanic chapter seems to make
him shiver. Today, he admits that he wishes
he had done Boogie Nights, which he turned
down for Titanic.

 

It didn’t help his public image that DiCaprio
took two years to choose his next
project. “Some people say to me, ‘Oh, you
were basking in the glory of being famous.’”
Instead, DiCaprio claims, “I wanted
to make sure that I was being chosen
for a movie for the right reasons. . . . [You]
wait for the ashes to settle, and regroup.”

 

After being sent thousands of scripts, and
reportedly turning down everything from
Spider-Man to American Psycho, DiCaprio
picked The Beach, based on the novel by
Alex Garland, about an American backpacker
in Thailand who falls in with a secret
Utopian community on an island
Shangri-la. While DiCaprio still considers
the work an important commentary on
such issues as globalization and the destruction
of primitive cultures, the film was
generally panned. “Empty-headed,” “seriously
confused,” a “Benetton take on Lord
of the Flies,” the critics said. DiCaprio was
disappointed. “I don’t think people really
gave it a chance . . . but I totally expected
whatever might follow up [Titanic] was going
to be looked [at] under a microscope.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, Asian environmentalists
accused DiCaprio and the
crew, quite ridiculously, of tearing up the
beach on which they had filmed.

 

All this was significantly softened by the
entrance into DiCaprio’s life of Martin
Scorsese. A die-hard fan of the director’s,
DiCaprio had been hearing of Scorsese’s
famed dream project about New York’s
Five Points district in the mid–19th century,
Gangs of New York, since he was 18. He
changed agencies just to get close to him—
and closer to the project. As it turns out,
Scorsese had been quietly staking out DiCaprio,
too, ever since De Niro had given
him the heads-up back in ’93. The call came
while DiCaprio was shooting The Beach. “I
remember eating my pad Thai and being
overjoyed.”

 

DiCaprio approached the role of Amsterdam,
a young apprentice thug, with the
kind of all-transforming intensity that Robert
De Niro brought to playing Jake La
Motta in Raging Bull. “I came in that
movie looking like a billy goat,” says DiCaprio,
who recalls the mangy mop of hair
growing under his chin and the fact that he
was bench-pressing 250 pounds. “I was
Johnny Protein Shake.” It served him well
for the fight scenes he had with Daniel
Day-Lewis, who played Bill the Butcher, the
man whom DiCaprio kills to avenge the
murder of his father. “We’d want to really
get into it, so we’d wrestle for five minutes
before,” DiCaprio recalls. “We’d beat the
crap out of each other and then really, like,
try to make these hits look real. And we’d
have tons of leather on, and straps, and
makeup. Blood bursting . . . blood caked
on our face and then the dirt getting in the
blood, and then our eyes. Doing this all
day.” In spite of some impressed reviews
for DiCaprio, it was Day-Lewis who stole
the movie and walked off with the bestactor
Oscar nomination. Scorsese lost out in
the best-director category to Roman Polanski
for The Pianist.

 

Like most serious movie fans, that Scorsese
has never received an Oscar—that his
direction of GoodFellas lost to Kevin Costner’s
for Dances with Wolves—DiCaprio believes
is a travesty of justice on a par with
Florida 2000. “He doesn’t care at this
point,” says DiCaprio, “but I want to see
him up there accepting an Oscar. I want
the film community to recognize him. I
really, really do.” The odds are good with
The Aviator. Unlike Gangs of New York, in
which New York of the mid–19th century
became a third character in the movie, the
new collaboration between Scorsese and
DiCaprio—two masters of their respective
fields—has a single, laserlike focus. “I wanted
to express . . . the obsession with speed,”
says Scorsese, who has been awed by the
World War I aviation fight scenes in
Hughes’s Hell’s Angels ever since he first
saw the film, in William K. Everson’s class
at N.Y.U. in the 1960s. “Speed, speed,
speed, always being faster, faster, doing five
films at once . . . seeing a thousand women
at once. This voracious appetite for speed,
this is what interested me in the picture, because
the bottom line, underneath it all he’s
destroying himself ultimately.”

 

Recalling the main sequence of Hughes’s
breakdown in the screening room, Scorsese
reveals the grueling, exacting, almost scientific
approach he and DiCaprio followed
during filming. “[The sequence] took about
two weeks of shooting, and Leo had to go
through seven hours of makeup a day. . . .
Every gesture you see there, every move of
his body, even the blinking of his eyes, was
worked on way in advance and ultimately on
the set.” He might do as many as 20 takes,
“each one slightly different in terms of the
intensity of the disorder—including with a
nervous cough, twitches, touching his knee,
as I say, eye blinking. Soft version, soft readings,
stronger readings, stranger readings.”

 

Cate Blanchett describes just how immersed
DiCaprio had become in Hughes’s
madness. “It was through the voice that
you hear the history, the pain, the psychology
of the character,” she says, recalling the
scene in which her Hepburn speaks with
Leo’s Hughes from the other side of the
screening-room door, without laying eyes
on him. “Just hearing his voice through the
door, I found it heartbreaking. That’s when
I really knew that he’d been transported or
that he’d journeyed somewhere that he had
never been before, because there was no
trace of Leo at all.”

 

DiCaprio, a major basketball fan, and
not one to dwell on craft, compares it to being
“in the zone.” “There’s moments when
you’re acting wherein something comes over
you where you all of a sudden feel as if the
entire set and the director aren’t there. . . .
It’s almost like a weird, trance-like state you
get in. . . . Everything is a hundred percent
eliminated.” To the point where DiCaprio at
times felt he was nearly going mad himself.
In one scene, for example, Hughes goes on
an obsessive-compulsive roll, frantically repeating,
“Show me all the blueprints, show
me all the blueprints, show me all the blueprints,
show me all the blueprints, show
me all the blueprints . . . ” “After the 24th
take, I just stopped and said, ‘I am losing
my fucking mind.’” He confesses that the
making of the film has re-awakened in him
a mild form of O.C.D. that he had as a
child.

 

DiCaprio’s next project is The Good Shepherd,
about James Jesus Angleton, one
of the original officers in the O.S.S., the
World War II–era spy agency, which became
the C.I.A. It will be directed by Robert De
Niro, whose choice of DiCaprio as a star
was a given—even a necessity. “He’s an intelligent
person,” De Niro says, “and, especially
for this part, I need somebody who
doesn’t have to do much in certain ways in
order to convey that. I think with certain
people in the movie, I might not even have
wanted to do the movie.”

 

Meanwhile, DiCaprio has formed his
own production company, Appian Way.
While he could have chosen any of Hollywood’s
hottest young producers to head it,
instead he plucked 30-year-old Brad Simpson
from Killer Films, a tiny, boutique operation that is widely seen as the smartest,
edgiest production company in New York,
responsible for Boys Don’t Cry, Happiness,
and Far from Heaven. Following the trajectory
of DiCaprio taking on muscular roles
based on real people, Appian Way is developing
the new book Public Enemies, about
the crime wave that launched the F.B.I.,
with director Michael Mann (the book is by
Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough),
and a film about the life and death
of bear expert Timothy Treadwell, whom
DiCaprio knew (based on a Vanity Fair
story by contributing editor Ned Zeman).
Appian Way’s first project after The Aviator
(in no way connected to Vanity Fair) is a
low-budget movie called The Gardener of
Eden, which will be directed by Kevin Connolly
and will star another actor friend of
DiCaprio’s, Ethan Suplee. “It’s a dark comedy,”
DiCaprio explains. “Taxi Driver–esque.”
Should there be any further doubt that.

 

DiCaprio has totally fallen for Scorsese’s
film-nerd cool, one might take a look around
the Appian Way office, which is covered
with dozens of old movie posters that DiCaprio
has collected over the years: a German
Apocalypse Now poster, a French Buster
Keaton, a Polish Midnight Cowboy. As Brad
Simpson says, “He’ll go over to the stinky,
funky New Beverly and watch a double feature
of The Parallax View, 3 Days of the Condor,
or The Leopard and another Italian film
back-to-back with just the people from the
office.” In a scene that could be straight out
of Entourage, a 25-year-old junior agent saw
DiCaprio at the Golden Globes and boldly
called out, “Hey, Leo, when are you going to
sign with me?” Leo laid into him with a list
of movie questions—“Who directed The Leopard?
Who directed The Bicycle Thief ?”—
all of which had the poor guy stumped.
Well, that answered that. (Correct answers:
Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.)

 

It remains to be seen whether a film
made by, starring, and about obsessive compulsives
will become the Christmas
blockbuster. In any case, no one besides
Scorsese and DiCaprio is making films that
aim higher artistically and have all the
resources of Hollywood at their disposal.
And with a third collaboration in the
pipeline, DiCaprio has become, for all intents
and purposes, Scorsese’s new De
Niro. He begs off addressing the comparison
himself—“I have no comment, nor
could I”—with reference to the work. “It’s
a really obvious thing to say, but the more
people know too much who you really
are—and it’s a fundamental thing—the more
the mystery is taken away from the artist,
and the harder it is for people to believe
that person in a particular role.”

Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000, two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were joking about the photo finish in Florida. Wouldn’t it be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them? And how, if it did, the Court would split five to four, as it so often did in big cases, with the conservative majority installing George W. Bush in the White House? The two just laughed. It all seemed too preposterous.

Sure, friends and relatives predicted that the case would eventually land in their laps, but that was ignorant, naïve talk—typical of people without sophisticated legal backgrounds. A majority of the justices were conservatives, but they weren’t partisan; mindful of the Court’s fragile authority, the justices had always steered clear of messy political spats. Moreover, the very jurists who’d normally side with Bush were the ones most solicitous of states’ rights, most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the Constitution’s “original intent”—and the Founding Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress, not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. To top it off, the Court rarely took cases before they were ripe, and the political process in Florida was still unfolding. “It was just inconceivable to us that the Court would want to lose its credibility in such a patently political way,” one of the clerks recalls. “That would be the end of the Court.”

The commentators agreed. The New York Times predicted that the Court would never enter the Florida thicket. A law professor at the University of Miami pegged Bush’s chances before the tribunal at “between slim and none, and a lot closer to none.” As Thanksgiving 2000 approached, the justices and their clerks planned their vacations and scattered, leaving a skeletal staff—generally only one of the three or four clerks assigned to each chamber—behind in case the impossible happened. There was just no way, Justice Stephen Breyer remarked over the holiday, that the Court would ever get involved.

It all turned out very differently, of course, and the Court, by the very margin that the incredulous clerk envisaged, put George W. Bush in the White House. Now out in the working world, the two clerks, along with most of their colleagues who worked for the four liberal justices and the occasional conservative justice, remain angered, haunted, shaken, and disillusioned by what they saw. After all, they were idealists. They’d learned in their elite law schools that the law was just and that judges resolved legal disputes by nonpartisan analysis of neutral principles. But Bush v. Gore, as seen from the inside, convinced them they’d been sold a bill of goods. They’d left their clerkships disheartened and disgusted.

The 2000 election in Florida shook Americans from all walks of life and of all political persuasions. Many were left wondering about the viability of America’s democratic system. Much has changed since the election’s frenzied aftermath, in which hordes of reporters jammed the streets of Tallahassee, Palm Beach, and Miami, chasing ballots and lawyers for 36 days before the presidency was called by a margin of 537 votes out of the six million cast in Florida. But Florida is a state with a history of disenfranchising blacks—a legacy that seemed all too current in 2000. And the president’s brother is still governor.

Could it happen again? “Butterfly ballots” are gone, so there will be no more accidental votes for fringe candidates such as Pat Buchanan. Chads—dimpled, hanging, pregnant—are history, for the punch-card machines that used them have been decertified. In their place are sleek, new electronic voting machines, known as D.R.E.’s (direct-recording electronic voting machines). An estimated half of the state’s voters will be using them this November—including those in the three largest Democratic counties.

The D.R.E.’s look and work reassuringly like A.T.M.’s. Yet unlike A.T.M.’s, touch-screens provide no paper receipt—no proof at all that a vote has been cast as the voter intended. Touch-screens have been plagued around the country by serious questions about their security and their accuracy in registering votes. In Florida, however, the story is more disturbing than in most states. The company that sewed up most of the key counties with raw political clout has installed machines that have confounded poll workers and voters alike and led to problems that the state, in its embarrassment, has tried to minimize again and again.
The state has been equally disingenuous in its attempt to bar ex-felons from voting. For the 2000 election, a notorious ex-felon list, composed of more than 50,000 names, was compiled and the appropriate sections were sent by the state to the elections supervisors of Florida’s 67 counties, along with a directive to purge those confirmed as felons from the rolls. It turned out, though, that the list had been swollen with an estimated 20,000 names of possible innocents, wrongly included. Roughly 54 percent of those on the list were black, while blacks make up just under 15 percent of the statewide population. In Florida, some 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic. Surely, the embarrassment would prevent the state from attempting another high-tech felon hunt in 2004. But no. In May, the local elections supervisors learned that there was a new list. Only in July, when flaws were again revealed by journalists—flaws that would once more favor Republicans—did the state throw out the list. While there will no longer be an electronic list used to keep former felons from voting, the recent events have led to disturbing new questions. What did the state know about the flaws? How was mass disenfranchisement almost caused again?

Florida 2000 was so bizarre, so surreal, and, for a large number of Americans, so patently illegitimate that they can’t imagine the likes of it ever happening again. They may be wrong. Should the election come down to another statistical tie—and to date the polls suggest the state is still a toss-up—an all too similar kind of chaos seems likely to shroud Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, this November.

I.
At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”

Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative 16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.

As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.

By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”

Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:

“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.

Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.

“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”

Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.

Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections), in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch. Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole, however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.

Klain and Baldick soon learned of other irregularities. In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?

None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.

By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, another ex-secretary of state, dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”

Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.

While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.

According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call, Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”

In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.

In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. Stipanovich appealed to Harris’s grandiosity. (Her e-mails replying to Bush supporters later revealed that she had begun identifying with Queen Esther, who, in the Old Testament, saved the Jews from genocide. “My sister and I prayed for full armour this morning,” she wrote. “Queen Esther has been a wonderful role model.”) He told her that nothing less than the course of history rested on her shoulders. “You have to bring this election in for a landing,” he repeated again and again.

Later, Stipanovich, in an interview with documentary-film maker Fred Silverman, would proudly describe his routine, which began two days after the election and continued throughout the aftermath. “I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators,” he said, “and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.”
On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?

In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.

Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.

At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.

That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)

Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, then 48, a widely respected jurist who in his leisure time played pickup basketball and wrote legal thrillers, rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27.

James Baker, the Bush team’s consigliere, issued a public threat after the Florida Supreme Court’s maddening decision. If necessary, he implied, Florida’s leading Republican legislator, incoming House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November 21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush—no matter what. Since both the state House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could pass a bill to do that.

In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”

On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers.

Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do with the protest, only with the realization that the job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline of November 26. Yet the board had seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred within hours of the protest.

For all the tumult in Miami-Dade, both sides had realized that the presidency might well be determined not by hanging chads or overvotes but by absentee ballots. Republicans seethed with rumors of ballots by the bagful coming in from Israel—all, presumably, from Jewish Democrats. Democrats envisioned thousands of ballots coming in from military bases abroad—all, presumably, from Bush fans in uniform.

Katherine Harris sowed confusion by issuing her own modification of the Florida law that specified absentee ballots could be accepted up to 10 days after a general election—in this case November 17—as long as they were sent from abroad and postmarked by Election Day. “They are not required,” Harris declared, “to be postmarked on or prior” to Election Day. Apparently, Stipanovich had decided there were more Bush votes than Gore votes to be harvested among the absentees, especially in the military.

Mark Herron, a Gore-team lawyer in Tallahassee, inadvertently made matters worse for his own side. On November 15, he sent out a long memo on rules governing absentee ballots to the Democratic lawyers positioned at each of the 67 county canvassing boards. A copy of the memo somehow found its way to a Republican law firm across the street from Herron’s office. Next thing he knew, the Republicans were quoting his careful recitation of Florida election law to support their claim that Democrats wanted to disenfranchise brave Americans in uniform.

Panicked, the Gore team put Joe Lieberman on the Sunday television talk shows to declare that the Democrats would never do that, and that he, for one, thought the most liberal standard should be applied to all incoming absentee ballots. Herron was appalled when he heard that: he knew that the western Panhandle counties were thick with U.S. military bases. By letting any post-election absentee votes count, including those with late—or no—postmarks, the presidency might well be lost.

For Pat Hollarn, the elections supervisor of Okaloosa County, the next days brought a kind of bedlam she couldn’t believe. A deep-green Panhandle county, Okaloosa has no fewer than six military bases, including Eglin and Hurlburt Air Force bases and an Army Ranger camp. And so the county’s four-story government building, nestled within a highway strip of stores such as Mr. Cheap Butts, became ground zero for the lawyers on both sides assigned to the fight over absentee ballots.

Both parties were pushy, obnoxious, and sometimes almost hysterical. The Bush lawyers argued passionately that the rules should be eased and all absentee ballots included. “I told them not only no but hell no,” says Hollarn, a centrist Republican, who prides herself on being a nonpartisan supervisor. (At the same time, in the more Democratic counties, Bush lawyers were arguing just as passionately that rules should be strictly adhered to and any questionable ballots put aside.)

In Santa Rosa County, next to Okaloosa, elections supervisor Doug Wilkes did his best to restrain the vying partisans as they fought over some 20 late absentee ballots. He held the line on postmarks until a Florida Supreme Court ruling said absentee ballots should not be rejected for minor “hypertechnical” reasons. Then he gave up. “I said, Hey! If the Supreme Court tells me I’m supposed to take this if it has a minor technical problem, and I can’t read this smudge [of a postmark], and it may have been dated [before the election], then O.K., I feel now that I can say we’re going to count Seaman Jones’s ballot.”
In all, the Republicans gained a net increase of 123 votes from this last-minute push.

II.
The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had degenerated into a “circus,” it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly technical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. The second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida legislature’s exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers claimed, too, that the selective recounts violated constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection—meaning the different criteria for recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to all voters.

Bush’s petition for certiorari—that is, for the Court to take the case—went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law.

When Kennedy’s memo circulated, one flabbergasted clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the phone. Under the Court’s rules, Kennedy needed only three votes beside his own for the Court to hear the matter. Quickly, the four others who make up the Court’s conservative block signed on: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O’Connor. In an unsigned order the day after Thanksgiving, the Court agreed to consider the two more technical arguments, spurning the equal-protection claim, and set down an extraordinarily expedited calendar. Normally, arguments are scheduled many months in advance. Now briefs were due the following Tuesday, with oral arguments set for December 1—only a week away. Clerks and justices scotched their vacations and stuck close to the Court; Scalia’s clerks ended up having Thanksgiving dinner together. The clerks for the liberal justices watched the events unfold with dismay. To them, the only hopeful sign was Kennedy’s skepticism about Bush’s chances. “We changed our minds every five minutes about whether the fix was in,” one clerk remembers.

As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore’s lawyers didn’t really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the Court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four. But the liberal clerks were more pessimistic. Why, they asked, would a majority of the Court agree to consider the Florida ruling unless they wanted it overturned and the recount shut down?*

Certainly, that was what the justices who’d opposed taking the case believed. Convinced the majority would reverse the Florida court, they began drafting a dissent even before the case was argued in court. It was long—about 30 pages—and elaborate, written principally by Justice Stevens, then 80, the most senior of the would-be dissenters and, largely by default, the Court’s most liberal member, even though a Republican, President Gerald R. Ford, had appointed him. With the assistance of Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stevens laid out why the Court should never have accepted the case.
Meanwhile, events in Florida took their own course. On Sunday, November 26, the Palm Beach canvassing board sent an urgent request to Katherine Harris, saying that in order to complete its manual recount it needed two additional hours beyond the five P.M. deadline she had chosen to enforce, rather than the Monday deadline the Florida Supreme Court had offered her as an option. Harris conferred with Stipanovich and answered no. As a result the county’s entire recount effort was deemed null and void. That afternoon Harris certified the election, claiming that Bush had won by 537 votes, a total that appeared to include Bush’s net gain in absentee ballots, but none of the recounted votes from Palm Beach or Miami-Dade. Gore’s lawyers promptly contested the certification.
At the Supreme Court, the liberal clerks handicapped the case pretty much as the Gore camp did. At issue, as they often were in crucial cases, were Justices Kennedy and O’Connor. But were both really in play? At a dinner on November 29, attended by clerks from several chambers, an O’Connor clerk said that O’Connor was determined to overturn the Florida decision and was merely looking for the grounds. O’Connor was known to decide cases on gut feelings and facts rather than grand theories, then stick doggedly with whatever she decided. In this instance, one clerk recalls, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” Blithely ignorant of what view she actually held, the Gore campaign acted as if she were up for grabs. In fact, the case would come down to Kennedy.

At this point, the clerks had been at the Court only two months, but, for many of them, Justice Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan after the Senate had spurned the arch-conservative Robert Bork, was already a figure of ridicule and scorn. It was not a matter of his generally conservative politics—despite Clarence Thomas’s public image of smoldering rage, most of the liberal clerks had found him quite personable. But Kennedy, they felt, was pompous and grandiloquent. His inner office was filled with the trappings of power—an elaborate chandelier and a carpet with a giant red star—and his writing, too, was loaded with grandstanding flourishes. The clerks saw his public persona—the very public way in which he boasted of often agonizing over decisions—as a kind of shtick, a very conspicuous attempt to exude fairness and appear moderate, even when he’d already made up his mind.

Conservatives, however, were not always happy with Kennedy, either. They had never forgiven him for his votes to uphold abortion and gay rights, and doubted both his intelligence and his commitment to the cause. Convinced he’d strayed on abortion under the pernicious influence of a liberal law clerk—a former student of the notoriously liberal Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who was representing Gore in this case—they took steps to prevent any reoccurrences. Applicants for Kennedy clerkships were now screened by a panel of right-wing stalwarts. “The premise is that he can’t think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school,” one liberal clerk explains. In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the Federalist Society, the farm team of the legal right. “He had four very conservative, Federalist Society white guys, and if you look at the portraits of law clerks on his wall, that’s true 9 times out of 10,” another liberal law clerk recalls. “They were by far the least diverse group of clerks.”
For all their philosophical differences, the nine justices had learned to live together; they have, after all, served together since 1994. For their clerks, though, a chasm ran through the Court even before Bush v. Gore. The conservative clerks read different newspapers, went to different movies, ate different kinds of food. Their hair was shorter, their suits more solemn and sincere. Far more of them were white men, screened rigorously for political reliability. Apart from a few group activities—the basketball games in the Court’s top-floor gymnasium, the aerobics and yoga classes Justice O’Connor had arranged—the two groups rarely interacted. Rather than sit with the conservatives in the same lunchroom, the liberals dined outside, in the area reserved for staff.

It was unusual, then, for a conservative clerk to visit the chambers of a justice on the other side. But that is what Kevin Martin, a clerk for Scalia, did on November 30 when he stopped by Stevens’s chambers. Martin had gone to Columbia Law School with a Stevens clerk named Anne Voigts; he thought that connection could help him to bridge the political divide and to explain that the conservative justices had legitimate constitutional concerns about the recount. But to two of Voigts’s co-clerks, Eduardo Penalver and Andrew Siegel, Martin was on a reconnaissance mission, trying to learn which grounds for reversing the Florida court Stevens would consider the most palatable. They felt they were being manipulated, and things quickly turned nasty. “Fuck off!” Martin finally told them before storming out of the room. (O’Connor clerks paid similar exploratory visits to various chambers, but those ended more amicably.)

On December 1, lawyers for the two sides argued their cases before the Court. Laurence Tribe, an experienced and highly respected Supreme Court advocate, seemed flat that day and off his game; the justices appeared to chafe under what they considered his condescending professorial style. Bush’s lawyer, Theodore Olson, who later became solicitor general in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, was more impressive, but then again, he was playing to a friendlier audience. Rehnquist and Scalia hinted that they favored the claim that the Florida Supreme Court had encroached upon the Florida legislature’s exclusive turf. Both O’Connor and Kennedy also voiced irritation with the Florida court. It did not augur well for Gore.

Once the arguments were over, the justices met for their usual conference. At the poles were Stevens and Scalia—the one wanting to butt out of the case altogether and let the political process unfold, the other wanting to overturn the Florida Supreme Court and, effectively, to call the election for Bush. But neither had the votes. Eager to step back from a constitutional abyss, convinced the matter could be resolved in Florida, the Court punted. Rehnquist began drafting a ruling simply asking the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its decision: whether it had based its ruling on the state constitution, which the Bush team had said was improper, or had acted under state statute, which was arguably permissible.

By December 4, all nine justices had signed on to the chief justice’s opinion. The unanimity was, in fact, a charade; four of the justices had no beef at all with the Florida Supreme Court, while at least four others were determined to overturn it. But this way each side could claim victory: the liberal-to-moderate justices had spared the Court a divisive and embarrassing vote on the merits, one they’d probably have lost anyway. As for the conservatives, by eating up Gore’s clock—Gore’s lawyers had conceded that everything had to be resolved by December 12—they had all but killed his chances to prevail, and without looking needlessly partisan in the process. With the chastened Florida court unlikely to intervene again, the election could now stagger to a close, with the Court’s reputation intact, and with Bush all but certain to win.

On Friday, December 8, however, the Florida Supreme Court confounded everyone by jumping back into the fray. By a vote of four to three, it ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes: the more than 61,000 ballots that the voting machines, for one reason or another, had missed. The court was silent on what standard would be used—hanging vs. pregnant chads—and so each county, by inference, would set its own. As they watched televised images of bug-eyed Florida officials inspecting punch-card ballots for hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads, the Supreme Court clerks knew the case was certain to head back their way.
Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately, even before receiving Gore’s response. Gore had been narrowing Bush’s lead, and his campaign expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered his own partisan agenda.

Scalia’s wish was not granted. But at his urging, Rehnquist moved up the conference he’d scheduled for the next day from 1 in the afternoon to 10 that morning. In the meantime, the conservative justices began sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush’s favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the conservatives had already decided the case and were merely auditioning arguments.

This time, there would be no papering over the divisions. Arrayed against the five conservative justices wishing to stop the recount were their four colleagues, who’d voted initially not to hear the case. Justice Stevens would write for them; so eager was the majority to stop the recount, one clerk recalls, that Stevens had to plead for more time to complete his dissent. What he wrote—that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm”—so provoked Scalia that, as eager as he was to halt the recount, he delayed things by dashing off an angry rejoinder, largely reiterating what he’d told the justices the previous night. “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires,” he argued, forecasting that a majority of the Court would ultimately rule in Bush’s favor on the merits.

Even some of the justices voting with Scalia squirmed at how publicly he’d acknowledged the divisions within the Court. To the liberal clerks, what he had written was at least refreshing in its candor. “The Court had worked hard to claim a moral high ground, but at that moment he pissed it away,” one recalls. “And there was a certain amount of glee. He’d made our case for us to the public about how crassly partisan the whole thing was.” Scalia’s opinion held up release of the order for an hour. Finally, shortly before three o’clock, the Court granted the stay. No more votes would be counted. Oral arguments were set for the following Monday, December 11.

Gore and his team were crushed, but neither he nor his lawyers had given up. Even at this late date, Gore naïvely defended the good faith of the justices. “Please be sure that no one trashes the Court,” he instructed his minions. His lawyers still hoped that Kennedy or O’Connor or both could be won over; perhaps they could be peeled away from the conservative bloc as they had been several years earlier to preserve Roe v. Wade. At a meeting that Saturday, Gore decreed that David Boies, and not Tribe, would argue the case on Monday, partly for fear that the more publicly liberal Tribe might antagonize those two swing justices, partly because Boies, the famed New York litigator who was the government’s chief lawyer during the Microsoft anti-trust case, had been representing Gore in Florida and was, therefore, better able to assure O’Connor of the fundamental fairness of what was happening there.

But to the liberal clerks it was all over. They placed their dwindling hopes not on anything that would happen in the Court on Monday, but on the press. The brother of a Ginsburg clerk, who covered legal affairs for The Wall Street Journal, had learned that the paper would soon report how, at a party on Election Night, O’Connor was overheard expressing her dismay over Gore’s apparent victory. Once that information became public, the liberal clerks felt, O’Connor would have to step aside. When, on the night before the Court convened, she sent out a sealed memo to each of her colleagues, those clerks hoped this had actually come to pass. In fact, she was merely stating that she, too, felt the Florida Supreme Court had improperly usurped the state legislature’s power. Gore’s lawyers, who also knew about O’Connor’s election-night outburst, toyed briefly with asking her to step aside. But they demurred, hoping instead that she would now lean toward them to prove her fairness. Things were that bleak.

When Gore’s lawyers came to the Supreme Court for oral arguments on the morning of December 11, they felt that the Bush team’s jurisdictional argument, that the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, was a loser because it emasculated one appellate court more than any other appellate court would ever want to condone. And, though they didn’t know it, Justice Kennedy agreed with them. In a memo circulated shortly before he took the bench, he endorsed what O’Connor had written the night before, but declared that it would not be enough: to carry the day, he argued, the conservative justices needed to assert that evaluating ballots under different standards in the various counties violated the equal-protection clause.

Up to now, this argument had received scant attention from the clerks, the litigants, or even the justices—and understandably so. Even in the best of circumstances, voting procedures were riddled with inconsistencies, beginning with the use of systems of wildly varying reliability, such as punch cards and optiscan machines, in different jurisdictions. Voters, often poor or black, in counties with older machines were far less likely to have their votes counted than those in wealthier jurisdictions, and nobody ever heard a peep from the Supreme Court about unconstitutionality. Moreover, the Rehnquist Court had always stingily construed the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to protect freed slaves, applying it only when discrimination was systematic, blatant, intentional, incontrovertible. It was not surprising, then, that the Court had originally declined to hear arguments on the point, or that, when they returned to the Court, Bush’s lawyers had given those arguments only 5 pages in a 50-page brief.

But here was Kennedy dusting it off. And not as some academic exercise, but as the very basis of the Court’s decision. “We read the memo and thought, Oh, we’ve lost Kennedy,” one liberal clerk recalls. In the star-studded audience awaiting the arguments that morning, someone spotted Al Gore’s daughter Karenna—praying, he thought. It wouldn’t help. The Court already had its majority. Now it had its rationale.

As the lawyers prepared to argue, the clerks pondered Kennedy’s motives. Perhaps, they speculated, he found an appeal to fairness, even when it was inapt or unpersuasive, more winning than a hypertechnical argument about jurisdiction; perhaps it offered him a chance to sound moderate and wax eloquent. The oral arguments began, with a question to Theodore Olson from . . . Justice Kennedy. “Where is the federal question here?” he asked, sounding almost baffled, as if still genuinely wondering why the Court was hearing the case at all. In the corner of the courtroom where the liberal clerks sat, there were snickers, rolled eyeballs, nudges in the ribs. “What a joke,” one said to another. Kennedy went on to denigrate the argument about the Florida court’s jurisdiction, then cued Olson to what really mattered. “I thought your point was that the process is being conducted in violation of the equal-protection clause, and it is standardless,” he told Olson. Olson, a keen student of the Court and canny reader of its moods, naturally agreed.

O’Connor railed against what she suggested was the stupidity of Florida’s voters, who were too dumb or too clumsy to puncture their ballots properly. “Well, why isn’t the standard the one that voters are instructed to follow, for goodness’ sake?” she asked. “I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.” Boies tried to explain that for more than 80 years Florida’s courts had in fact focused on the intent of the voter rather than the condition of his ballot, but this was one instance for the Rehnquist Court in which deference to the states, and precedent, didn’t matter.

Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. An affable and engaging man, Breyer has long been the moderates’ most effective emissary to the Court’s right wing. But the politicking went both ways; at one point, Kennedy stopped by Breyer’s chambers and said he hoped Breyer would join his opinion. “We just kind of looked at him like he was crazy—‘We don’t know what you’re smoking, but leave us alone’—and he went away,” a clerk recalls.
The encounters between the two men must have been extraordinary: with the presidency of the United States hanging in the balance, two ambitious jurists—each surely fancying himself a future chief justice—working on each other. And for a brief moment Breyer appeared to have succeeded. At the conference following the oral argument, Kennedy joined the dissenters and, at least temporarily, turned them into the majority. The case would be sent back to the Florida court for fixing; the recount would continue. But the liberal clerks never believed that Kennedy had really switched, and predicted that, having created the desired image of agonizing, he would quickly switch back. “He probably wanted to think of himself as having wavered,” one clerk speculates. And, sure enough, within a half-hour or so, he did switch back.

Who or what sent him back isn’t clear, but during that time, Kennedy conferred both with Scalia and with his own clerks. “We assumed that his clerks were coordinating with Scalia’s clerks and trying to push him to stay with the majority,” one liberal clerk says. “I think his clerks were horrified, and the idea that he would even blink for a moment here scared them,” says another. “They knew the presidency would be decided in their chambers,” a third clerk—working for one of the majority justices—recalls. “They would have fought tooth and nail—they would have put chains across the door—to keep him from changing his vote.” Another clerk for another conservative justice puts it a bit differently. “Kennedy would not have voted the other way,” this clerk says, “but had he been tempted, the clerks could have dissuaded him.” Breyer lamented that he had Kennedy convinced, only to have his clerks work him over and pull him back in the other direction.

Given the approaching deadline, Rehnquist decreed after oral arguments that any decision to send the case back to Florida had to be handed down immediately; were the Court to reverse, time would cease to matter, and the decision could wait a day. Stevens banged out a one-paragraph opinion, remanding the case to Florida, and sent it around. “It seemed like a Hail Mary to me,” recalls a clerk in one of the conservative chambers. There were no takers. The Court was going to reverse, and throughout Monday evening and into Tuesday morning the two sides drafted and circulated their proposed opinions. Rehnquist was writing what he thought would be the majority opinion, reversing the Florida court on both the jurisdictional and equal-protection grounds. Stevens was drafting the principal dissent; it would reiterate what he’d written in the unused dissent from the first round, but shorn of all legalese, in order to be easily understood by ordinary people. It chastised the Court for holding the justices of the Florida Supreme Court up to ridicule. “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear,” it stated. “It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

The other dissenters would join Stevens, but had their own points to make. Because they, too, believed the case would hinge primarily on the autonomy of the Florida legislature, they dealt only secondarily, and peripherally, with the equal-protection argument. Stevens and Ginsburg denied that it applied at all. For better or worse, Ginsburg wrote, disparities were a part of all elections; if there were any equal-protection concerns at all, she wrote, they surely applied more to black voters, noting a New York Times report that a disproportionate number of blacks had encountered problems voting. Though racial questions already hung over the Florida vote, hers was to be the only reference to race in any of the opinions, and it was relegated to a footnote. But to the liberal clerks, these issues needed to be acknowledged, and a footnote was better than nothing at all.

Neither Breyer nor Souter had suggested initially that the recount had triggered any equal-protection questions. But each of their draft opinions voiced such concerns; whether they’d come to believe that judging ballots under different criteria was really unconstitutional, or were still chasing after Kennedy, was never clear. Ultimately, Breyer conceded that the lack of a uniform standard “implicate[d] principles of fundamental fairness,” while Souter wrote something a bit stronger—that they raised “a meritorious argument for relief.” But for both the remedy was clear: send the case back to Florida. It was not to stop the recount altogether.

Late Tuesday morning, it became apparent that Kennedy and O’Connor would not join Rehnquist’s opinion on jurisdiction, and would decide the case strictly on equal-protection grounds. Nowhere did O’Connor explain why she had abandoned what she had written on the jurisdictional matter in her memo the night before. To clerks on both sides of the case, what appealed both to her and to Kennedy about invoking equal protection was that it looked fair. “It was kind of a ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ kind of thing,” one liberal clerk theorizes. Or, as a conservative clerk puts it, “they thought it looked better to invoke these grand principles rather than Article II, perhaps because it makes them look better in the press and makes them look like heroes.” Their opinion, written by Kennedy, was joined by the other three conservative justices. And it would go largely uncontradicted: with time running out and the dissents nearly complete, the losers had no chance to explain, in any coherent way, why equal-protection concerns should not be allowed to stop the recount.

As the drafts began circulating, tempers began to fray. In an unusual sealed memo—an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the clerks’ prying eyes—Scalia complained about the tone of some of the dissents. He was, he confessed, the last person to criticize hard-hitting language, but never had he, as the dissenters were now doing, urged the majority to change its decision based on its impact on the Supreme Court’s credibility. He charged that his opponents in the case were inflicting the very wounds to the Court that they had supposedly decried. As Jeffrey Toobin first reported, he objected in particular to what he called the “Al Sharpton footnote” in Ginsburg’s dissent: her comment on Florida’s disenfranchised black voters. Whether out of timidity, collegiality, or affection—Scalia was her closest friend on the Court—Ginsburg promptly took it out. “It was the most classic example of what kind of bully Scalia is,” says one clerk, who called Scalia’s complaint “an attempt to stifle legitimate discourse worthy of Joe McCarthy.” As for Ginsburg, this clerk says her response “showed a lack of courage.”

Kennedy, too, sent around a memo, accusing the dissenters of “trashing the Court.” Eager to suggest to the outside world that the Court was less divided than it appeared, he charged that the dissenters agreed with the equal-protection argument more than they were willing to admit. Shortly before his opinion went to the printers, he inserted a new line making substantially the same point. “Eight Justices of the Court agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy,” he wrote. Souter and Breyer had said so explicitly, he reasoned, while Stevens had done so implicitly by signing on to Breyer’s opinion.

Stevens’s clerks, who stumbled over the new phrase, reacted apoplectically. Shouting over the telephone, they told Kennedy’s clerks that they had deliberately misrepresented Stevens’s position and demanded that they change the language. When the Kennedy clerks refused, Stevens promptly uncoupled himself from that portion of Breyer’s opinion, and Kennedy no longer had a choice: “eight Justices” became “seven.” Later, as they handed in their respective decisions, Eduardo Penalver, the Stevens clerk, ran into a Kennedy clerk named Grant Dixton and told him that what the Kennedy chambers had done was disgusting and unprofessional.

In the Breyer chambers, too, there was unhappiness over Kennedy’s addendum. But it was too late to take issue with it. Thus, Kennedy’s point stood uncontradicted and would be picked up in the next day’s press, including The New York Times, which printed a graphic illustrating how the justices had voted. On the equal-protection claim, it had seven voting for, and only two against. Breyer, a member of the Gore team later lamented, had been “naïve”; in his efforts to win over Kennedy, he’d “been taken to the cleaners.”

Despite their loyalty to their justices—a striking, filial-like phenomenon among most clerks—several concede that the dissenters in Bush v. Gore were simply outmaneuvered. Never did the four of them have the votes to prevail. But first by endorsing a decision suggesting that the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, then by appearing to buttress the majority’s equal-protection claims, the dissenters had aided and abetted the enemy. “They gave just enough cover to the five justices and their defenders in the press and academia so that it was impossible to rile up the American people about these five conservative ideologues stealing the election,” one clerk complains. The tone and multiplicity of the dissents didn’t help. While Stevens’s rhetoric was impassioned, even enraged, the other dissents were pallid.

The Court’s opinions were issued at roughly 10 o’clock that night. The only one that mattered, the short majority opinion, was unsigned, but it bore Kennedy’s distinctive stamp. There was the usual ringing rhetoric, like the “equal dignity owed to each voter,” even though, as a practical matter, the ruling meant that the ballots of 60,000 of them would not even be examined. The varying standards of the recount, Kennedy wrote, did not satisfy even the rudimentary requirements of equal protection. Although six more days would pass before the electors met in their states, he insisted there was too little time for the Florida courts to fix things.

There were two more extraordinary passages: first, that the ruling applied to Bush and Bush alone, lest anyone think the Court was expanding the reach of the equal-protection clause; and, second, that the Court had taken the case only very reluctantly and out of necessity. “That infuriated us,” one liberal clerk recalls. “It was typical Kennedy bullshit, aggrandizing the power of the Court while ostensibly wringing his hands about it.”

Rehnquist, along with Scalia and Thomas, joined in the decision, but Scalia, for one, was unimpressed. Whether or not one agrees with him, Scalia is a rigorous thinker; while the claim that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds had some superficial heft to it, the opinion on equal-protection was mediocre and flaccid. “Like we used to say in Brooklyn,” he is said to have told a colleague, “it’s a piece of shit.” (Scalia and the other justices would not comment for this article.)

Sharing little but a common sense of exhaustion and Thai takeout, the clerks came together briefly to watch the news. As reporters fumbled with the opinions—the final line of Kennedy’s opinion, sending the case back to Florida even though there was really nothing more the Florida court could do, confused many of them—the clerks shouted imprecations at the screen. The liberal ones slumped in their chairs; some left the room, overcome by their own irrelevance. “We had a desire to get out already and see if journalists and politicians could stop what we couldn’t stop,” says one. They contemplated a variety of options—holding a press conference, perhaps, or leaking incriminating documents. There was just one problem: there were none. “If there’d been a memo saying, ‘I know this is total garbage but I want Bush to be president,’ I think it would have found its way into the public domain,” one clerk recalls.

Gore’s lawyers read him the ruling. At last he concluded that the Court had never really given him a shot, and he congratulated his legal team for making it so hard for the Court to justify its decision. Kevin Martin, the Scalia clerk who’d tangled earlier with Stevens’s clerks, informed his colleagues by e-mail that Gore was about to concede. To some, it seemed like gloating; Eduardo Penalver asked him to stop. “Life sucks,” Martin replied. “Life may suck now,” Penalver responded, “but life is long.”

There were reports that for some time afterward Souter was depressed over the decision. According to David Kaplan of Newsweek, Breyer told a group of Russian judges that the decision was “the most outrageous, indefensible thing” the Court had ever done, while Souter complained to some prep-school students that had he had “one more day—one more day,” he could have won over Kennedy. But such comments were quickly disavowed, were out of character for each man, and appeared inconsistent with the facts. The clerks, for instance, believed Souter had spent most of the last few crucial days in his chambers brooding over the case rather than working any back channels.

Fearful, perhaps, of the appearance of a quid pro quo, neither of the two justices most frequently rumored to be leaving, Rehnquist and O’Connor, has in fact left during Bush’s presidency—perhaps, some theorize, because of how it would look to let the man they anointed select their replacements. “The justices who ruled for President Bush gave themselves, in effect, a four-year sentence,” said Ron Klain.

O’Connor confessed surprise at the anger that greeted the decision, but that seemed to reflect naïveté more than any sober second thoughts. On her 71st birthday, in March 2001, she was sitting in the Kennedy Center when Arthur Miller, the playwright, denounced what the Court had done. Around Washington, a few people stopped shaking her hand, and Justice Scalia’s too; the consensus has since grown that because of Bush v. Gore, he can never be named chief justice.
The experience left scars on those who lived through it. “I went through a lawyer’s existential crisis,” one of the clerks recalls. “People afterwards said, ‘It must have been very exciting,’” says another. “It was not that exciting. What I felt was beyond anger. It was really a profound sense of loss.” But a conservative clerk insists that when the records are opened and the histories written, the architects of Bush v. Gore will be vindicated. “When everybody’s dead and they read it all, it won’t be embarrassing,” he predicts.

Ultimately, only the five justices in the majority know how and why they decided the case as they did and whether they did it in good or bad faith. Perhaps even they don’t know the answer. An insider was asked if the five would pass a lie-detector test on the subject. “I honestly don’t know,” this insider replies. “People are amazing self-kidders.”

While the Supreme Court was pondering the case, a calm settled over the canvassing boards around Florida, as the manual recount continued. Judge Terry Lewis, assigned by the Florida Supreme Court to put its order into action, had called on the counties not to announce any results until the work was done. In the meantime, Bush’s lead had diminished to 154 votes.

In midafternoon on Saturday, December 9, one of the few still-partisan observers in Pat Hollarn’s Okaloosa warehouse of vote counters got a call on his cell phone. “He slams it down and says, ‘Stop! Stop!’” Hollarn recalls. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, what’s your problem?’ He said, ‘I just found out that the United States Supreme Court says you’re supposed to stop.’ I said, ‘We’ll have to have something more definitive than your phone call.’”

After several hard hours of sorting, Hollarn’s staffers had nearly finished separating the undervotes from the rest of the ballots and were about to start counting them. Now Hollarn’s own phone rang. On the line was Clay Roberts, Katherine Harris’s director of elections. “He says, ‘I’m calling to tell you that you have to stop your process right now.’” Minutes later, a fax from Roberts’s office confirmed the news. So much time had been put into counting by what seemed a fair method at last. And now, with stunning suddenness, it was stopped.

“Everybody was hugging each other and taking each other’s phone numbers and addresses,” Hollarn recalls. “They helped me clean up all the stuff. We put everything away and everybody went home and that was the end of it.”

A year after the election, a consortium of newspapers examined the ballots and reported that had the Supreme Court not intervened in the recount, Bush still would have won the election by the slimmest of margins, a headline that gave comfort to Democrats and Republicans alike. There was only one problem. The newspapers had looked at only the undervotes, which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to be examined for the recount. But there were also more than 113,000 overvotes. Later examination by the same papers of the overvotes—which Judge Lewis says he would have been inclined to consider—determined that Gore would have edged out Bush had they been considered.

III.
Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold—the one in the footnote that Scalia had asked Ginsburg to delete from her dissent. In fact, thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.

Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn’t vote because she had voted absentee—even though she hadn’t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who’d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn’t on the rolls. She was moved to the “problem line”; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.

U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn’t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. “We put them on buses,” she says, “took them down to the supervisor’s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!” Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn’t vote because he was a felon—even though he wasn’t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. “What happened that day—I can’t even put it in words anymore,” says Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. “It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.”

For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ’94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. “Probably nothing,” he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb’s office. “[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,” says Meek. Jeb wasn’t moved by their presence. “Kick their asses out,” he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996
Election Day itself felt like payback. Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy. Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe. Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony. In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.

Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election—from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.

Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida’s poorest counties. African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state. Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.
“He thought things were ‘fine as they were,’” says the extra-large and jolly Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner, strolling down the town’s nearly empty main drag in an enormous basketball jersey. “He never advocated for anything.” Hutchinson’s uncle had been supervisor before him. Denny, though he was a Democrat—a virtual prerequisite for election in Gadsden—spoke openly about giving money to George Bush, according to a source. When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn’t budge. “He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll,” says Dixon. “In the only county that’s a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”
In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson’s deputy, a soft-spoken African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office. After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.

How had this happened? Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail. The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the “on” position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review. After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off. “I have no idea why he would do that,” says Knight. Seeing how many ballots never got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again—this time with the sorting switch on—but he resisted. Hutchinson was finally overruled by the Gadsden canvassing board. They looked at the rejected ballots. Sure enough, they were overvotes—and for good reason.

Gadsden had used a variant of the caterpillar ballot, in which the candidates’ names appeared in two columns. One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others. The next column listed two more candidates—Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips—as well as a line that said, “Write-In Candidate.” Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote “Gore” in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed.

In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot. But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake. Roberts and Harris should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.

Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county’s “automatic recount,” giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count. Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren’t as lucky.

Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden. Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.

During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican. “I asked John Stafford how many under- and overvotes there were, and he said, ‘Oh, just a few,’” recalls Langton. Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.

Today, Stafford remains silent about what happened four years ago. His assistant, Dick Carlberg, will speak, but only in the presence of his attorney. He claims he sent an e-mail to the state’s Division of Elections two days after the election—before the deadline to ask for a manual recount—informing the Division of Elections of the thousands of overvotes. “I was told, ‘O.K.,’ and that was about it,” Carlberg says.

If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people—many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran—went to the polls and were informed that they couldn’t vote, because they were convicted felons—even though they weren’t.

“The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,” says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn’t a felon.
“I’ve never been arrested before in my life,” Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn’t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. “She brushed me off and said, ‘Hey, get to the side,’” recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993—when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Steen wasn’t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn’t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.

The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. “Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it’s not discussed, no one cares,” says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.”

How the state ended up with the “felon list” in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history. In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.

In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”

Meanwhile, black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. Wilson recalls one such proposal that was smacked down by Republican state senator Anna Cowin, head of the Ethics and Elections Committee. “I literally begged her, ‘Please just agenda it,’” says Wilson. “She would not agenda it.”

“I philosophically did not believe that felons should automatically get their rights restored,” says Cowin, “and neither did the governor nor the leadership.” She adds, “It makes elections very expensive too, because you have all these thousands and thousands of people—I mean tens of thousands of people—to send literature to. . . . The people don’t come to vote, anyway. So I think people need to go through a hoop.”

James Klinakis, who, like many ex-felons in Florida, is a recovering drug addict, has had some experience with what Cowin calls “a hoop.” For the past five years, Klinakis, the operations director for a drug-rehab program called Better Way of Miami, has been invited by Governor Bush to the annual drug summit, where he advises Bush on drug issues. For 10 years he has been applying to have his voting rights restored, a process that has included everything from a one-page form to a college-application-size package, complete with references, letters, and soul-searching essays. Like thousands of others, Klinakis has seen no movement on his case whatsoever. While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who’d served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.

The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people “voted,” as did 105 felons. Seventy-one percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats. Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that “the division shall annually contract with a private entity” to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated “mentally incompetent” to vote, and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998, 1999, or 2000.

When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up. One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000. After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner. In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job. “There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project,” DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail. “The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help).” The little bird was correct.

Exactly what kind of company was hired to clean up Florida’s rolls of felons, or “dirtbags,” as one DBT employee referred to them? DBT supported—and was highly praised by—a now defunct conservative advocacy group called the Voting Integrity Project (V.I.P.). Touting “voting rights,” V.I.P. sprang into action in 1996 in response to the national “motor voter” law, which passed in 1993. The law had increased voter registration nationwide by an estimated seven million, with minorities constituting a disproportionate number of those new voters.

While some members of the Division of Elections were appalled by the price tag, Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, according to a source formerly inside the division, nursed the felon list along as her pet project. Ethel Baxter, the director of the division under Mortham and a civil servant for 30 years, working under both Republicans and Democrats, was reportedly skeptical of the idea. But Mortham, according to this source, instructed her to sign on to it. (Mortham says that she had no investment in the project, and that, regardless of how Baxter felt, they were obligated to fulfill a legislative action.)

From the start, there were questions about the felon list. “We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,” says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office. “We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls. Boy, did that cause a firestorm.” One of those letters was sent to Sancho’s friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon. “Very few felons,” Sancho points out, “are members of the Florida bar.”

Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it. Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, the Division of Elections’ assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people. “Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem,” recalls Sancho, “that it was the vendor’s [DBT’s] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it.”

James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite. “Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match,” says Lee. “Because after the first year they weren’t getting enough names.”

And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases. Middle initials didn’t need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah—same thing. Nicknames were fine—Robert, Bob, Bobby. The spelling of the last name didn’t have to be exact, either. The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O’Steen.

DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in “false positives” (i.e., wrongly included people). Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state’s position: “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.

In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas. But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren’t guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem. How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place? Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.

According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who’d had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida. Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states. In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida. Janet Modrow, the state’s liaison with DBT, wrote to Mitchell, “On the good side, we can add all the [states] that do have automatic restoration because they will have to get Florida Clemency. On the bad side, you will still have to check with those [states] that formally give clemency for each hit as before.”

Not that the clemency data was complete. Some of the clemency information had not been computerized, and existed only on three-by-five note cards in what looked like shoeboxes, says Sancho. This included the thousands of Florida ex-felons who’d had their rights automatically restored under Governor Askew, between 1975 and 1978.

Information from the F.D.L.E.—the starting point for DBT’s “data mining”—was even less reliable. This was a database of arrests, not convictions. Thousands were designated as “adjudication withheld”—meaning no conviction. Others were only misdemeanors. In sum, says Sancho, “they pulled up the entire universe of all potential felons that they found in everybody’s database.”

When the “corrected” list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it. In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons. As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list. Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking. “We went for a five-for-five match,” says Sancho. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”

Other elections supervisors did no such investigation. In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value. Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor, “it was pretty much a done deal.” In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal. If he didn’t hear back from them, these names were simply struck. Throughout the state, many of these letters came back “undeliverable.” Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.

A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens’ advocates. In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list. If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls. Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person. “We were going back to the state and saying, ‘This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,’” Iorio recalls. “‘He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he’s been employed here and done this.’ Twice they said, ‘No, that’s incorrect.’ In writing. . . . And he never voted in the 2000 election.” Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong.

Why was the state prepared to pay $4 million for such shoddy work? A class-action suit brought by the N.A.A.C.P. and a number of African-American voters in 2001 accused DBT, Harris, and several individual supervisors of disenfranchising black voters. Beyond the unreliable matching criteria the state had demanded, beyond the flawed data it had provided from the Office of Executive Clemency and the F.D.L.E., evidence and testimony from the suit suggests that the state had failed to properly monitor whether DBT was fulfilling its contract. For example, the 1998 contract stipulated “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” But DBT vice president George Bruder testified, “I am not aware of any telephone calls that were made.”

The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future. The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from “automatic restoration” states. DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida’s elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn’t have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000—more than a third of DBT’s May 2000 list. The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.

More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush’s government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida’s rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way. In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to “re-evaluate.” No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.

Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names. But others have put it aside; as of June, more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it. (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-sent the list.) In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names. Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.

These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list. But in Florida, it seems, there’s always another angle. Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list. This list came to 48,000 names. Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process. For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm. “I asked my staff, ‘Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?’ They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren’t felons,” Sancho says, storming about his office.

At least the list hadn’t been generated by DBT. But, incredibly, despite a mandate from the embarrassed legislature that no private company should ever again undertake such work for the state, the new list had been prepared with the help of Accenture. Formerly known as Andersen Consulting, once the consulting arm of Andersen Worldwide, the former parent company of Arthur Andersen, Accenture has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials. Its address in Bermuda has prompted some members of Congress to question if the company is dodging taxes. (An Accenture spokesman says that the company pays taxes in the U.S.)

In 2001, in the wake of the DBT debacle, the legislature, with the support of elections supervisors, passed a law making the association of court clerks responsible for the database used for any and all felon information. After all, the clerks of the courts were independent officers and the only source with actual conviction data. But the state ended up ignoring the law, claiming their services were too expensive. According to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a recently uncovered e-mail showed that, in fact, the clerks of the courts had agreed to meet the price the state wanted. “The Division of Elections wanted control,” concludes Sancho. So it farmed out work to Accenture—for at least $1.6 million. Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, defends the state’s action in hiring Accenture. “Accenture was brought in to help develop the database,” she says. “They do not operate it, own it, or maintain it.”

This time, Sancho wasn’t the only elections supervisor fed up. “Why did we wait until the presidential year for this?” Linda Howell, of Madison County, asks. “I don’t think it’s our place to have to clean up the state’s problem,” says Bob Sweat, of Manatee County. And so, in mid-June, the supervisors, many of them grandmothers with colorful pantsuits and orangey hairdos, gathered in the Key West Hilton hotel for the twice-yearly supervisors’ conference to give Ed Kast a piece of their collective mind. Beverly Hill, of Alachua County, stood up to announce she had found a half-dozen people on the new list who had erroneously appeared in 2000. “They’re back on the list!” Kay Clem, of Indian River County, reported that among the first 20 names examined “one has no record! The other has a pending disposition!” As if the supervisors weren’t already alarmed enough, they had just been advised by Cathy Lannon, of the attorney general’s office, not to speak to any of the potential felons on the telephone, in order to avoid off-the-record interactions.

Kast seemed to let the chaos wash right over him. What did he care? He had resigned as head of the Division of Elections 24 hours earlier to “pursue other interests.”

For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000. On May 12, in one of Kast’s last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature—even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections,” says Sancho. (Kast could not be reached for comment.)

As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction. In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list. Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.

It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.

Then, on July 7, an investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed a startling, new twist. Of the 48,000 names on the list, only 61 were Hispanics—that’s one-tenth of 1 percent. In Florida, Hispanics make up 11 percent of the prison population, 17 percent of the population at large, and mostly vote Republican. Why were so few Hispanics on the felon list? Because the voter-registration application identified Hispanics as such; the F.D.L.E. database did not, so when the two failed to match, the Hispanic ex-felons were excluded from the purge list. Given the snowballing problems, the state understood it couldn’t possibly get away with using the list. On July 10, it was scrapped.

The Department of State spokeswoman, Nicole de Lara, has claimed that the glitch was “unforeseen” and “unintentional.” But according to Jeff Long, a veteran F.D.L.E. official, starting in 1999 with the preparation of the 2000 purge list, his office informed the secretary of state’s office how the F.D.L.E. matched for race. “We provided an extract of what’s in our criminal databases, which included the categories for race,” says Long. “The extract listed five categories for race. Those codes do not include an ‘H’ [for “Hispanic”].” Asked who was in receipt of this information, he cites Janet Modrow and voting-systems chief Paul Craft, both of whom are still working in the secretary of state’s office. James Lee of ChoicePoint told Vanity Fair that DBT and state elections officials had actually discussed the glitch. He, too, cites Modrow as well as Bucky Mitchell. (Modrow, Craft, and Mitchell could not be reached for comment.) The matching flaw was discussed yet again, in 2001, at state voter-file meetings, according to Chuck Smith, elections-supervisor employee in Hillsborough County, who attended them. As for Accenture, whatever flaws emerged were not their problem, claims Meg McLaughlin, president of Accenture’s “eDemocracy Services.” “Accenture’s contract in no way says that we are to validate the data,” McLaughlin said at a recent hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “The only thing Accenture was asked and contracted to do was to build the tool.”

In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November.
No one is more frustrated than the ex-felons seeking a restoration of their voting and other civil rights. About 15 percent of the thousands of clemency applicants in the backlog can have their rights restored without a hearing. The majority must wait to stand before Governor Bush and his cabinet, and plead with him to exercise his “Executive Grace.” These clemency hearings take place just four times a year, and the governor invites between 60 and 130 applicants each time.
On a steamy June day in Tallahassee, one of the lucky few invited to plead her case at the courthouse is Beverly Brown, a black Miamian, who has been applying for seven years.

“Thank you, Governor and Cabinet,” she says, her voice trembling as she looks up at Jeb Bush, in a beige suit, and three of his cabinet members, seated above her on the dais. “I’m a graduate patient-care technician, and there’s nothing more I’d like to do than to utilize my skills to help others.” She has been lucky enough to have had some private health-care jobs; recently she cared for a young quadriplegic. But what she’d really like is to get a state license—something she can’t do unless her civil rights are restored. Her convictions, all drug-related and nonviolent, date back almost 20 years, except for a more recent conviction for having been caught with pot.

“Since when have you been drug- and alcohol-free?” Jeb asks flatly, looking up from her file.

“About nine years,” says Brown.

“O.K., in 2001 there—you were convicted of marijuana possession?”

“I had—yes, it was in my possession, but it didn’t belong to me. Someone left it in my car.”

“I have another question,” Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher later asks, looking at her file. “What is ‘wailing rock cocaine’?”

Brown shifts nervously. “O.K., sir, that is not my charge.”

“I just want to know what is ‘wailing rock cocaine’?” he asks.

Brown’s face flushes with panic and confusion. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Bush gives her file another once-over and delivers his verdict. “I’d like to take this case under advisement.” It’s not a no, but it’s not a yes either. Over the next couple of weeks, Brown will try to find out why the case has been on hold, but she’ll get no answers; Bush is not required to give any.
Nonetheless, to prove his magnanimousness, Bush announces that same day that since June 2003, when the backlog was 38,606 ex-felons, the clemency office has gone through more than 30,000 names and restored the rights of 20,861. Why the sudden progress? Could it be that he has recently been overcome by the idea of redemption?

The figure, civil-rights advocates believe, is deceptive. Bush failed to say that the backlog contained an additional 124,000 names. According to a legal challenge led by the Florida Caucus of Black State Legislators, between 1992 and 2001, 124,000 people had been denied their rights-restoration paperwork and assistance upon leaving prison. Ordered by a judge, finally, to take a look at these cases, the Executive Clemency Board restored the rights of 22,000 of them. The figure is similar to the 20,861 Bush claimed he restored from the “backlog.” When pressed, his press secretary, Alia Faraj, admits, “Some of those may cross over. Absolutely.”

Meanwhile, people like James Klinakis, who have paid their debt to society, who have gone on to serve in society, but who have no say in society, have feelings that go far beyond Bush v. Gore and what happened in 2000 and what might happen in November. “I believe the president of the United States would have been different, some years ago, if some people were allowed to vote. I don’t know—that’s only an opinion,” says Klinakis. “But I do know this, that I would like the opportunity to be able to vote—for county commissioners, for mayors, and the governor and the presidency. Whether it’s going to change something or not, I don’t know, but, at least, I know I had the opportunity to do it.”

IV.
Even if no voters are turned away at the polls in November, will everyone’s votes actually be counted? Floridians who use the new, electronic touch-screen voting machines will have good reason to wonder.

How Florida’s largest counties have lurched from hanging chads to paperless voting machines after the 2000 election, and what consequences this change will bring, is an extraordinary story of well-meaning government officials—from state legislators to county commissioners—courted by local lobbyists and out-of-state salesmen. It’s a story of machines too complex for poll workers to operate reliably, resulting in unrecorded ballots, of touch-screens with no paper trail that stir fears of vote manipulation, of systems far more expensive to purchase and maintain than previous ones. It’s a story, most disturbingly, of machines billed as infallible that turned out to be flawed.

The irony is that after the 2000-election mess, Jeb Bush himself had expressed confidence in optiscans as a worthy system to replace punch-card machines. On a plane from Atlanta to Tallahassee, Bush ran into Mark Pritchett, who was about to oversee a blue-ribbon panel for the governor on electoral reforms. “He said those optical scans seem pretty good, and reasonably priced,” recalls Pritchett, executive vice president of the nonprofit Collins Center for Public Policy. But a power greater than the governor’s own would soon prevail: the power of the marketplace.

On March 1, 2001, Jeb’s bipartisan blue-ribbon panel submitted a report with 35 recommendations. Many were adopted in the state’s sweeping Election Reform Act that spring. But not all. The reform act, which sailed through Florida’s House and Senate, did set clear new rules for recounts. If a margin was one-half of l percent or less, an automatic recount would be done; if the resulting margin was one-quarter of l percent or less, then a manual recount would be done of the undervotes and overvotes.

Other changes were just as specific. For a would-be voter who could not be found in the register or, say, who was deemed an ex-felon when he said he wasn’t, provisional ballots would be provided. If the board found the voter was eligible, that ballot would be counted—assuming the Election Day margin was close enough to make the exercise worthwhile. Absentee voting would be easier: Florida would embrace convenience voting, by which anyone could vote by absentee ballot. For overseas ballots, postmarks would no longer be an issue: any ballots received within 10 days of a general election would be accepted.

Most dramatically, the act prohibited punch-card voting machines. No more hanging chads! Out, too, were “central” optiscans: the ones hooked up to a central county server. So many of the overvotes in 2000 had gone unnoticed because the optiscans in those mostly poor, black precincts failed to spit back an overvote ballot for a voter to revise; instead, the overvotes were silently rejected on the central server. Now the 24 punch-card counties and 15 central-optiscan counties would have a choice: join the bunch that had precinct-based optiscans, or try touch-screens, which had just been certified in the state as an alternative, thanks in part to a huge lobbying push by vendors, and because the large counties never wanted to deal with paper ballots again.

The blue-ribbon panel made clear its own preference. Though touch-screens were said to be reliable, it observed, they had a higher error rate than optiscans. With a nod to the U.S. Supreme Court’s equal-protection logic in Bush v. Gore, the panel suggested Florida voters would not be treated equally if some used a system that had a higher error rate than one used by the rest. Perhaps because touch-screen technology was evolving so quickly, the panel overlooked a more glaring inequity. The fine new standard for manual recounts could be applied to optiscans, because they produced paper ballots that could be inspected for over- and undervotes. But how would it work with touch-screens, which produced no paper receipts?

All of the big counties up for grabs, however, would soon go with touch-screens, and most of those would go with a machine made by an Omaha-based company called Election Systems & Software, or E.S.&S., which had the good political sense to hire Sandra Mortham, former Florida secretary of state and implementer of the ex-felon-purge campaign by DBT, as its chief lobbyist in the state.

Big money was at stake—tens of millions of dollars—and so, tragically, the push for clean elections with new voting machines became a classic exercise in murky politics. Shortly before signing on with E.S.&S., Mortham signed on as a lobbyist for the Florida Association of Counties (FAC). On June 21, 2001, the association formally endorsed E.S.&S.’s iVotronic and began urging the state’s undecided counties to buy it.

In return, E.S.&S. promised the association a commission on sales. By year’s end, E.S.&S. would win 12 counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, for overall sales of about $70.6 million. According to the agreement, FAC would earn about $300,000 in commissions. If the association looked bad, Mortham looked worse. She was taking commissions from E.S.&S. while on contract with the association that endorsed E.S.&S. In at least one county—Broward—Mortham received a 1 percent “success fee” of $172,000 for the county’s $17.2 million purchase of E.S.&S. touch-screens. If that rate applied across the state, noted the Sun-Sentinel, then Mortham would have earned $706,000 in all from E.S.&S.’s total sale of $70.6 million.

That summer of 2001, Mortham set up a network of lobbyists for each county in contention. If she did anything else, the county commissioners of Miami-Dade and Broward, her two biggest prospective customers, are unable to recall what that was. They never saw her. (Mortham declined to elaborate to Vanity Fair on her arrangement with E.S.&S.)

Miami-Dade was a key county for E.S.&S. to win: more populous than several states, it had about 912,000 registered voters. Also, a bit disconcertingly, it was a county with 64 languages, 3 of which—Spanish and Creole, in addition to English—are spoken widely enough to require representation on all precinct ballots. The company advised elections commissioners that it was applying for certification of a “minor enhancement” to meet the requirement.

“There was no mention by E.S.&S. [in their presentation] of any delays in boot-up time to accommodate multiple languages,” recalls Theodore Lucas, the county’s procurement-management director. Or, he might have added, any intimation that disaster lay ahead. On January 29, 2002, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to spend $24.5 million on 7,200 E.S.&S. iVotronic touch-screens. A new era had begun.

For E.S.&S., Miami-Dade was a cakewalk. But in neighboring Broward, nearly as large and important a prize, it had a problem: the county’s first-ever black elections supervisor, Miriam Oliphant, had come out early on for Sequoia, one of only two other touch-screen vendors certified to sell in Florida at that time. She’d gone to Riverside, California, to see how Sequoia machines worked in a big metropolitan area, and liked what she saw. So E.S.&S. did what it felt it had to do. It hired lobbyists who were very, very close to Broward’s commissioners. The head lobbyist had served on the finance committee of one commissioner’s last campaign and had held fund-raisers for a number of the other commissioners. Another lobbyist had been finance chairman for another commissioner’s campaign.

Not surprisingly, Broward’s commissioners went with E.S.&S. Forty-eight hours before doing so, E.S.&S. fulfilled a county goal to steer l0 percent of the $17.2 million contract to minority businesses by bringing in Dorsey Miller, an African-American former school-board administrator who’d started a company, D. C. Miller & Associates, to win minority contracts for distributing custodial supplies—to his own school district.

First, as The New Times Broward—Palm Beach reported, Miller tried to steer $908,000 of the $l.7 million earmarked for minority contractors to D. C. Miller & Associates by arranging for it to supply voting booths and voter education. Unfortunately, Miller had no means of manufacturing the booths and no warehouse space to store them. This, as county staffers could see, would make Miller, in the argot of municipal contracts, a “pass-through” for the white business that did the real work. (Miller declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)

Instead, Miller steered the business to an Asian-owned company called American Medical Depot, from which he received a monthly stipend, and bonus checks, to help it drum up business. Usually with E.S.&S., the booths were assembled in Kansas and sent directly to E.S.&S., which combined them with its voting machines before sending them on to its clients. This time, the booths would be sent to A.M.D., which would earn its $878,000 by buying, storing, and testing them. A.M.D. won approval for the minority contract, in part by claiming to be an independent entity, not a pass-through, but, as Broward’s assistant state attorney John Hanlon later determined, E.S.&S. sent checks regularly to A.M.D. A day or two later, A.M.D. would send a check for exactly the same amount to the Kansas manufacturer of the booths. The maneuver was slippery but not illegal. “We have the money movement,” says one person involved with the investigation, “but we didn’t have a crime.”

If Miller had lost the big prize, his company still managed to receive a reported $175,000 to $225,000 of the E.S.&S. minority-contract money for “voter outreach,” which meant staging 93 demonstrations of E.S.&S.’s iVotronic, for, he estimated, 4,000 to 5,000 people in all—which comes to about $35 to $45 per person.

So E.S.&S. had the business, but could it deliver on its promises? Going from two to three languages on its machines, E.S.&S. soon discovered, demanded the addition of a memory chip, which led to a longer boot-up time, about six minutes for each machine. Unfortunately, multiple machines at one polling place couldn’t be started at the same time. A special supervisor cartridge had to be placed in each machine for six minutes, then transferred to the next machine. Some polling places had as many as 28 machines.

The disastrous implications of that became all too clear on September 10, 2002. This was the primary in which former attorney general Janet Reno was pitted against fellow Democrat Bill McBride for the privilege of taking on Jeb Bush in his bid for re-election that November. In Miami-Dade that morning, many polling places opened late. Workers were flummoxed by the machines. Some never did get them operating correctly: after a whole day of voters’ going in and out, the touch-screens at Precinct 519 recorded no votes cast. Some polling places had no electrical outlets, so workers had to run the machines on their backup batteries, which soon died. At the end of the day, some of the county’s iVotronics were shut down incorrectly, leaving their votes uncounted. “It was a perfect storm,” rued Miami-Dade’s elections supervisor, David Leahy, who had pushed hard for E.S.&S.

In Broward the night before, dozens of poll workers had quit, overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with the new machines, so Oliphant herself had raced around the county distributing the bags of tools that polling supervisors needed in each precinct. Yet two dozen polling places opened late, one after noon. At least 34 of Broward’s polling places turned away voters before the polls were due to close. Results, as in Miami-Dade, were scrambled or lost.

Early results showed that McBride had won by a margin of about 8,000 votes out of more than l.3 million cast. As reports of irregularities began coming in, Janet Reno called for a statewide recount. Tallahassee told her she was too late. Though final tallies in Miami-Dade and Broward shaved the margin by nearly half, Reno grudgingly conceded.

For that November’s election, Miami-Dade and Broward pledged to spend whatever it took to thwart another crisis. This time, the machines were booted up the night before—and guarded all night by police on overtime. More than a thousand county employees were commandeered to help, too, and so in both Miami-Dade and Broward the election came off with hardly a hitch—at a cost, in the two big southern counties, of well over $l0 million.

Jeb Bush won re-election by far too large a margin for any talk of voting-machine irregularities. Another winner that day was Katherine Harris, who ran for U.S. Congress in her home district in central-west Florida. From her first day in office as secretary of state, in 1999, Harris had known she would have just one term. A state rule change enacted by the preceding Democratic administration had decreed that Harris would be the last elected secretary of state. Thereafter, the position would be an appointed one.

So Jeb Bush now had the luxury of appointing a secretary of state to oversee the challenge of getting Florida’s new touch-screens to work as promised. The governor formed a transition team, which included Miguel De Grandy as chief counsel. De Grandy, a Republican lawyer who had done all he could to block Miami-Dade’s recount in 2000, had been recommended by Sandra Mortham to be hired as E.S.&S.’s lawyer-lobbyist in his county. Now this same E.S.&S. lobbyist was chief counsel of the governor’s transition team. The next secretary of state and her director of elections would oversee the certification process for all upgrades to E.S.&S. machines. De Grandy sees nothing untoward about the arrangement because, he says, he did not advise the governor personally on whom to choose for secretary of state.

Bush’s choice was Glenda Hood, a centrist Republican and then mayor of Orlando. Hood vowed that there would be smooth and fair elections in Florida, and felt fully confident in E.S.&S.’s iVotronic machines to help make that happen.
She would find the electoral waters a bit choppier than expected.

E.S.&S. had promised to shorten the long boot-up time for Miami-Dade’s iVotronics created by the trilingual ballot. But when the company submitted a new and improved Version 7.5, the state informed E.S.&S. on May 7, 2003, that it would not be certified, because of numerous “anomalies and deficiencies.” E.S.&S. says these were minor, and that the following month, when Version 7.5.1 was certified, it included a fix for the trilingual ballot. No longer would the machines have to be booted up serially. Yet even now, as one Miami-Dade County insider observes, each machine “takes just as long to boot up.”

As E.S.&S. was struggling to resolve those “anomalies and deficiencies,” Miami-Dade’s inspector general issued a blistering report. After listening to tapes of E.S.&S.’s presentation to the county the previous year, he wrote that E.S.&S. had deceived the commissioners outright. The company had said nothing about the longer boot-up time. The I.G. cautioned the county not to believe E.S.&S.’s promises, and wrote that “if this situation does not improve, the County should consider scrapping the current system.” (An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the company did not mislead the county about its products or services.)
At 54, Florida secretary of state Glenda Hood has the handsome, weathered look of a woman who has spent a lot of time in the Florida sun and doesn’t mind that at all. In person, she projects an odd mix of authority and detachment, perhaps fitting in a job that puts her in charge of Florida’s elections but gives her limited power to affect them.

Hood’s message to the out-of-state reporters tramping through her Tallahassee office in ever growing numbers is how much has changed. “Everything has changed,” she says. “And everything needed to change.” Since the primary calamity of 2002, Hood stresses, scores of local elections have gone off without a hitch. “I think it does a huge disservice to live in the past, to say ‘what if?’ You could go through these ‘what if?’ conspiracy theories from now until the end of time.”

Much has been done, and so Hood’s frustration with skeptics is understandable. Still, a series of problems through the spring and early summer have been troubling. In a January runoff among Republicans in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, touch-screens produced 137 blank ballots while recording a 12-vote margin of victory for the winner. As a result, U.S. Congressman Robert Wexler, a Democrat, stepped up his call for the state to require printers for touch-screen voting machines. The printers could generate paper “receipts,” much as A.T.M.’s do. When a voter confirmed that the touch-screen had registered his vote as he cast it, he could put the paper receipt in a box; in a close race, the voter-verified paper ballots could be used for manual recounts. In his home county of Palm Beach, Wexler filed two lawsuits—one in state court, one in federal court—declaring, among other things, that touch-screens violated the state’s own election laws because they don’t allow for manual recounts. The state suit was dismissed on appeal in August. The federal case was due to be heard late that month.
Such lawsuits, Hood says, are so much fearmongering. “I think there are a lot of individuals who are trying to erode voter confidence,” she declares. “The fact is that we haven’t had malfunctions with any of our equipment.” The blank ballots in Broward and Palm Beach’s runoff, election officials said, were easily explained. Voters had simply gone into the voting booth and chosen not to vote. As for Wexler’s call for a paper trail, Hood says, “not one of [the vendors] have fully developed any type of paper printer. And the reason they haven’t . . . is because there are no standards.”

To further discourage the paper-ballot movement, Hood turned to Republican senator Anna Cowin, the legislator who had blocked attempts to have ex-felons’ rights automatically restored. Hood gave Cowin a bill to file, which would render Wexler’s lawsuits moot. “A manual recount may not be conducted of undervotes on touch-screen machines,” the bill declared.

The point, Hood explains, was that no recount is needed, because touch-screens don’t allow overvotes: if a voter tries to select a second candidate, the second choice replaces the first. Nor do they allow undervotes: if a ballot is left blank, the machines notify a voter two or three times that he has not made a selection. Yet, as activist Sandy Wayland of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition points out, “If you say recounts are illegal with touch-screens, that would make it difficult for any future generation of machine that did have a paper trail to get certified.”

When a young, first-time Democratic state senator named Dave Aronberg succeeded in thwarting the bill last Easter, Hood quietly enacted the ban as a new state rule. By the time most legislators learned of this stealth move, a 20-day public comment period had ended, and the rule acquired the force of law. Late last spring, Hood was still grumbling over the calls for a voter-verified paper ballot to accompany touch-screens: “Some of the advocates . . . I’m not sure that they’re aware that there actually is a paper audit record that is one of the backup systems.”

The audit record is intended to be used only after votes are tallied, as a kind of backup check to see that the machines have worked as intended. But it could be used for manual recounts, Hood suggested, on a statewide basis, if needed. Ed Kast, then the director of Florida’s Elections Division, had said more specifically in state hearings of May 2003 that the audit record generated “actual paper records as well as ballot images,” thus rendering any other paper trail superfluous.
Unfortunately, as Constance Kaplan was about to learn, the audit-record system was flawed.

Kaplan, 55, the new Miami-Dade elections supervisor, has big blond hair and likes to drape herself in lots of southwestern turquoise jewelry. A 33-year veteran of Chicago’s elections system, she came to Miami in July 2003 because she thought the job would be fun.

Shortly before her arrival, Orlando Suarez, a Miami-Dade technology specialist, reported in a memo that when the audit report was downloaded from the various voting machines of a polling place, the serial numbers of the respective machines could be garbled or lost. As a result, the votes taken from machines A, B, and C might all appear on the audit record to have come from an unknown machine D. No votes were lost, Suarez observed, but, as an auditing device, he said, this was unacceptable.

“Initially, E.S.&S. denied that a problem existed,” Kaplan wrote to Aldo Tesi, the president and C.E.O. of E.S.&S. Then, as Kaplan explained, the E.S.&S. project manager for Miami-Dade suggested a temporary solution, which proved to be time-consuming and expensive. E.S.&S. assured Kaplan that the company’s upcoming, new and improved version would soon be finished and certified, solving that problem and others. But months passed, and no solution appeared. An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the company did come up with a fix by mid-2003, but Florida declined to certify it. A county insider has a different view: “Basically they . . . didn’t do a thing about it until their feet were held to the fire and they were being trashed by the media.”

In mid-July, at last, E.S.&S. won state certification for a fix of the audit glitch. The company would pay all costs associated with the fix. So the problem, as Hood declared, was solved. The company’s new Version 8.0 was still nowhere in sight, but an E.S.&S. spokesperson says its timing “is not relevant” because the fix was done. Yet the fact remained that E.S.&S. had been promising for nearly two years that a cure-all version would be arriving soon.

No sooner had the fix been announced than another embarrassment emerged. Twice in 2003, Miami-Dade’s computer system had crashed, apparently destroying the county’s electronic records of a number of 2002 and 2003 elections. The loss of some of these voting-machine records was actually a violation of Florida law, which requires counties to keep race returns for set periods of time.

The crash had occurred on county computers, not on iVotronic voting machines. But the county could not find backup records. A frantic search ensued for random copies of the results that might exist on one hard drive or another. Finally, copies were found. Governor Bush himself professed to be “pleased” at the retrieval. But again the state’s Division of Elections was left seeming ham-handed.

Even if no further flaw emerges before November, Florida voters will be left to wonder just how accurate their touch-screens are, thanks to a jarring report in early July from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Reporters sifted the results from last March’s Democratic presidential primary in Florida. They looked only at precincts where the primary was the sole race on the ballot. Here was as pure a sample group as one could hope to find: only Democrats could vote in that primary, and they knew before they walked into the voting booth who the choices were. How many such voters would go into the voting booth and then fail to vote? Yet the Sun-Sentinel found that of the 200,836 votes cast on touch-screens in those precincts, 1,648—or about 0.8 percent—were recorded as undervotes. That was about six times as many undervotes as recorded on optiscans in other one-race precincts for that same primary.

“That one line has been repeated, but it’s not true,” says Hood’s press secretary, Jenny Nash, of the six-times-greater rate of undervotes on touch-screens. “On touch-screens, the undervote rate is a slight bit higher because if you don’t make a decision in a specific race the touch-screen prompts you two or three times, but eventually you can cast your ballot that way. On an optiscan, if a voter decides to do that, a blank ballot, when it’s fed into the tabulator, is spit back out. Because the poll worker can’t look at how the voter voted, he would say, ‘Go fix it.’ That can be intimidating.”

Unpersuaded, one of Miami-Dade’s commissioners has begun to ask if the county should just admit it erred and get rid of its touch-screens altogether. “The issue is not the paper trail,” says Jimmy Morales, a Cuban-American who is running for mayor of Miami-Dade county this fall. “The issue is these machines don’t work.”

Yes, Morales says, a paper trail would be reassuring. But at what cost, added to all these other costs? “For the cost of re-doing the software, adding the printers, not to mention the ongoing supplies—paper, ink, all that stuff—it’s more expensive to do that than to scrap them and buy the optiscan system.”

Governor Bush, asked recently what’s changed from 2000 about his state’s demographics, said, “Everything.” Overall, the state’s population has grown by more than 1 million—to 17 million—since the last presidential election. “We have the largest number of people moving in, the third-highest number of people moving out,” said Bush of how his state compares with the other 49. “We have a pretty high birthrate. We have a lot of young people who are becoming first-time voters. And we have a lot of people going on to see their Creator.”

Yet, of the state’s 9.4 million voters registered in 2003, the party-line split is still right up the middle: 42 percent Democrats, 39 percent Republicans, with 17 percent claiming no party affiliation and 3 percent members of minor parties. Nick Baldick, who was John Edwards’s presidential-campaign manager, says even that small majority of Democrats is deceptive. “Florida has a registration majority of Democrats, but not a presidential voting majority of Democrats. A lot of registered Democrats in the South may vote Democratic for state representative or governor, but may not vote Democratic for Senate or president.”

In the crazy quilt of Florida demographic groups, Cuban-Americans have been staunchly—passionately—Republican since John F. Kennedy’s bungled Bay of Pigs. This time, believes Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox, the bloc may not be so monolithic. “George Bush has broken promises,” he says. “He promised to end the wet-foot, dry-foot immigration rule—that if you’re a Cuban and you’re caught in the water, on a raft, they send you back to Cuba, whereas if you get a foot on land, then you stay in America. He has not fulfilled that promise.” And Cuban-Americans are dubious, he suggests, about all the American lives spent to remove Saddam Hussein from power when “we have a dictator that has just as bad human-rights violations within 90 miles off our coast.”

Ultimately, says Baldick, Kerry will need to win by the same formula Clinton won by in 1996. In the big southern counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—he’ll have to win big. Then, Baldick explains, he’ll have to break even, or come close, in the I-4 corridor: the now fabled mid-state region, the spine of which is Interstate 4, between St. Petersburg and Daytona, whose voters are the state’s major swing factor. Clinton did carry the I-4 corridor—just barely, but that was enough. “Then, in North Florida,” Baldick observes of the state’s most conservative counties, especially in the Panhandle, “a Democrat has to not get blown out of the water.”

That’s the theory. But more than one new variable this year may yet confound it.

Convenience voting, suggests former Gore lawyer Kendall Coffey, could be a killer for Democrats. “Just as Democrats have historically done better with recounts, Republicans have always been favored by absentees,” he says, and convenience voting is simply absentee voting made easy. “The funny thing is that it was packaged in with all the touch-screen voting reforms in 2001, and the Democrats never saw it coming.” But Scott Maddox sees an upside there. Convenience voting, he says, “is going to be a major push of the Florida Democratic Party because that is the one place now [where] we can have a paper trail.”

Earlier this year, minority voters in Orlando’s mayoral election showed strong interest in absentee ballots—apparently enough for Democrat Buddy Dyer to avoid a runoff. Now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which ultimately reports to Jeb Bush, has begun an investigation into those ballots that has, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it, “the vile smell of voter suppression.” Dressed in plain clothes, gun-toting investigators showed up at the homes of elderly black citizens in Orlando and told them that they’re part of an investigation into Mayor Dyer’s campaign workers, including Ezzie Thomas, 73, president of the Orange County Voters League. Many of those confronted were members of the mostly volunteer organization which encourages minority voting. Thomas sees the investigation as nothing less than an attempt to intimidate Florida’s black voters. “It’s because of the presidential election coming down the pike,” he told the Orlando Sentinel.

Military absentee ballots will be even more of a factor this year than in 2000 because of the obvious: 135,000 American troops in Iraq, not to mention those in Afghanistan. And now that any overseas ballots can be received without a postmark up until 10 days after the election, who can say what schemes might be hatched in that grace period after a close election? Mark Herron, the Gore lawyer whose memo about absentee ballots backfired so badly in 2000, adds that “there’s also a provision in here that’s probably going to come into play that says that the Elections Canvassing Commission can extend overseas absentee ballot receipts if the armed forces of the United States are engaged. So the 10-day thing may not be 10 days.” It may be more than 10 days.

The greatest new variable this year, to be sure, is the voting machines themselves. Will they perform without mishap after all? Will the presidential election in Florida be the anticlimax that members of both parties should fervently hope it will be: a clean election with a winner undisputed by all? In dozens of local elections across the state, there is indeed cause for that hope. In poor, black Gadsden, the county with the highest spoilage of votes (12 percent) in 2000, the error rate in 2002 dropped to less than 1 percent. Shirley Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, credits new, precinct-based optiscans for that success—along with her own emphasis on stringent, relentless voter education.

Yet even if the machines appear to work, who’s to say they won’t have been hacked? While elections officials in Florida seem to take on faith the security of their E.S.&S. machines, the state of Ohio isn’t so sanguine. In 2003, Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell commissioned a Detroit-based computer company to test his state’s voting machines. The results were not encouraging. In the E.S.&S. machines, the review discovered one potential high-risk area, three medium-risk, and 13 low-risk areas. Instead of multiple passwords that could be set at each polling place to enhance security, E.S.&S. had made two of its three passwords for each machine “hard-coded,” or immutable, so that the same two passwords were used for every machine manufactured. The review also concluded: “There is no use of encryption on the iVotronic or on the data transferred to and from the iVotronic. There is a risk that an unauthorized person could gain access to the data.” An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the iVotronic does have its own form of encryption, and adds that the study’s programmers were assigned to hack into each system, and proved unable to breach the iVotronic, proof the iVotronic is secure. But Blackwell was unpersuaded. Speaking about all the touch-screen systems tested, he said, “I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected and system security is bolstered.” (E.S.&S. says it’s in the process of enacting design or programmatic changes to comply with Ohio’s requests.)

Heeding critics’ concern over touch-screens’ lack of a paper trail, the G.O.P. issued a glossy flyer in July urging Republicans to shun them in favor of absentee ballots. An embarrassed Governor Bush quickly disavowed the flyer, but the point was made: for all his own secretary of state had done to talk up touch-screens, the problems of the last months had stirred doubts in both parties that Florida’s election of 2004 would be any cleaner, or clearer, or more conclusive than the nightmare of 2000.

“Having spent lots of money, passed lots of laws, made lots of speeches, held commission hearings and the like, if anything, we’re worse off than we were four years ago,” says Gore lawyer Kendall Coffey, “in that [in] some of the key counties that could hold not only the key to Florida but the key to the nation’s future you do not have a legitimate recount vehicle. Because they have touch-screens without a paper trail. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that makes hanging chads the good old days, but that’s the reality of the 2004 elections in Florida.”

The Court’s proceedings are shrouded in secrecy, and the law clerks, who research precedents, review petitions, and draft opinions, are normally notoriously, maddeningly discreet. In addition, Rehnquist makes them all sign confidentiality agreements, then reiterates the point to them in person. A surprising number of clerks talked to Vanity Fair for this article, however. They all drew clear limits on what they would say. They would not discuss conversations with their respective justices, nor disclose any documents they might have retained. “In this administration, the F.B.I. is likely to come after us,” one explains. To the inevitable charges that they broke their vows of confidentiality, the clerks have a ready response: by taking on Bush v. Gore and deciding the case as it did, the Court broke its promise to them. “We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk says. “Our secrecy was helping to shield some of those actions.” Furthermore, the clerks’ story is admittedly skewed. Even under normal circumstances, they see only a fraction of what goes on at the Court. The justices always discuss and decide cases behind closed doors, without anyone else around; their clerks learn only what their bosses care to tell them. That was particularly true in Bush v. Gore,* whose momentousness and haste ensured shorter paper and gossip trails than usual.

The clerks’ attention was not distributed evenly. Unfairly perhaps, their accounts, and their vitriol, focus more on the “swing” justices purportedly in play—Kennedy and O’Connor—than on those who were seemingly more partisan, but managed to be unobtrusive: Rehnquist and Thomas. But if this account may at times be lopsided, partisan, speculative, and incomplete, it’s by far the best and most informative we have. Journalists and academics who follow the Court rarely venture beyond its written opinions, as if there is almost something impertinent about doing so. Eventually—one scholar put it at around 2019—historians will dip into the papers of the justices, but until then it’s unclear how much of what they did they committed to print.