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The inauguration went off well enough. Gore’s team congratulated itself for avoiding
a potential controversy after the Reverend Jesse Jackson began not so subtly lobbying
to deliver one of the inaugural prayers. Instead, they chose a far less controversial
figure, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, from one of Chicago’s most politically potent
African American churches. Reverend Wright brought laughter when he reminded God that
“we march to different drummers,” and then—mid-prayer—mimicked the steps of marching
bands from white and black colleges.

And the inaugural speech itself, written largely by the president himself, reached
for poetry more than prose, as he paid tribute to “the babies, who will someday travel
to distant stars, to those who will teach those children in crowded rooms, to those
who work the fields and feed our bodies, to those who preach the sacred words that
feed our souls … We are in the first moments of a new day, so let the day begin.”

With the ceremony ended, the Gores escorted Bill and Hillary Clinton down the steps
of the Capitol’s East Front, where the
Marine One
helicopter waited to take the Clintons to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, for
the flight up to their new home in New York.

“The weather seems to be taking a toll on Tipper,” CNN’s Judy Woodruff noted. “She’s
clearly feeling the chill.”

After the briefest of embraces, the Clintons climbed into
Marine One;
as it lifted off, Tipper turned away from the waiting cameras and muttered to her
husband, “I feel like a huge shadow has just disappeared.”

Not quite.

As the Gores moved into the Capitol for the traditional lunch with the Congress, the
former president and his wife arrived at Andrews, where the 747—no longer
Air Force One,
since Clinton was no longer president—was waiting. Tradition held that the ex-president
and his spouse would depart quietly, without ceremony, leaving the stage to the new
leader. But ceremony was exactly what was waiting for Clinton: a band, an honor guard,
and a bank of microphones and cameras. By the time the choreographed troop review
was done, it was time for the new president to address the congressional luncheon,
and Gore’s team had prepared a surprise: an announcement that each month he would
go to Capitol Hill to meet with leaders of both parties, as a signal that the chief
executive understood the coequal role of the national legislature.

But as Gore rose to speak, former president Clinton was at his microphone, acknowledging
the cheers of the boisterous crowd.

“You see that sign there that says,
PLEASE DON’T GO
? I left the White House, but I’m still here! We’re not going anywhere!” he said,
and launched into a lengthy celebration of his tenure: “Twenty-two million new jobs!
… More college opportunity than ever in history. … Five trillion dollars in surpluses.
… ”

The crowd loved it. The TV cameras loved it. The producers in every network control
room in America loved it—and stayed with it, splitting the screen to show images of
the old and new presidents.

The new White House communications chief, Chis Lehane, did not love it. He was on
the hotline phone to ABC’s Roger Goodman, who was directing the pool coverage.

“Roger! The President of the Fucking United States is making a major fucking policy
announcement! That’s where your fucking coverage should be!”

“Not my call, Chris,” Goodman said. “We just send out the feeds; the networks take
what they want. And they want … Bubba.”

“Let it go,” President Gore said later when Lehane slipped into the glass-enclosed
reviewing stand during the Inaugural Parade and briefed him on Clinton’s upstaging.
“I’m sure it won’t be the last time we’re going to be frustrated.”

It wasn’t long before that turned out to be an unhappily prescient observation.

While President Gore and ex-president Clinton were competing for the attention of
millions, a small group of men, casually dressed in slacks and sweaters, were gathered
at a townhouse nine miles northwest of the capital, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The
host and his guests were exiles of a sort; but for a few thousand votes in Florida,
they would have been preparing to guide the foreign policy of the United States under
President George W. Bush. Now, with President Gore assuming power, they snacked on
cold cuts as they engaged in a blunt assessment of how best to use the considerable
political resources at their disposal to pursue their shared highest priority. And
with them, elegantly dressed in a beige sport coat with blue pinstripes, was the one
man who had done more than any other to shape that priority.

For the top foreign- and defense-policy stars of the Republican Party, the Cold War
and the power balances among nation-states had been the defining reality of their
professional lives. They had been a part of the Reagan administration when that fifty-year
struggle with the Soviet Union had come to an end. They were part of the first Bush
administration when the president had rallied an international coalition to drive
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait; many of those at midlevel posts had bitterly
regretted the decision not to send the Third Army straight into Baghdad, ridding the
world of a psychopathic butcher once and for all. And for the eight years of the Clinton
administration, they had worked in political exile to argue for “regime change” and
had rallied the Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, forcing President Clinton
to sign the bill, making it the official policy of the United States government to
depose Saddam.

And now that they were facing four more years away from the center of military and
diplomatic power, they were determined to make the removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein a reality.

Their host that evening was Richard Perle, a twenty-five-year veteran of Washington
and a relentless advocate for what had come to be known as neoconservatism, the core
belief of which was the forceful use of American power and influence to challenge
the legitimacy of America’s foreign adversaries. With Perle were such luminaries as
Doug Feith, John P. Hannah, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz—the last two having
been key figures in the Defense Department of George H.W. Bush.

After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Wolfowitz had dismissed the idea that a
self-financed terror group could have pulled off such an audacious attack on its own;
a nation-state had to have been behind such a strike, he reasoned, and that nation-state
almost certainly was Iraq.

One of the neocons’ allies, an academic named Laurie Mylroie, not only argued that
Saddam had been behind the World Trade Center strike; she also saw Iraq’s hand in
the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, for which Timothy McVeigh
had been tried, convicted, and executed. The consensus among the intelligence community
was that Mylroie’s notions were fanciful if not deranged, but the arguments were given
credence in political journals, op-ed pages, and the halls of Congress, on both sides
of the aisle. And the force behind that momentum, sitting now in Chevy Chase with
Perle and his colleagues, was a man whose intellectual gifts and instinct for how
to use and influence power were nothing short of astonishing.

Ahmed Chalabi had been born into wealth and power fifty-six years before in Iraq.
His father was the wealthiest and most influential citizen in the country. But in
1958, a bloody coup drove the Chalabi family into exile in London—and fueled in Ahmed
a passion to avenge his family’s humiliation by returning to Iraq and ending the long
suffering of the Shiite majority at the hands of the Sunni minority.

In his quest, which now spanned some four decades, one of Chalabi’s key assets was
his sheer brilliance. His was a polymath, fluent in several languages, who could lecture
on subjects ranging from Marxism to literature. But beyond cognitive intelligence
was an instinctive, almost feral ability to
persuade
. With the judicious use of money and favors, with protestations of loyalty and support
that were, to put it charitably, “contingent,” Chalabi had, over a quarter-century,
convinced powerful Americans that the removal of Saddam was an urgent national interest.

He had also made contacts inside the CIA, which provided him with funds to organize
the Iraqi National Congress in 1991—a group whose leadership he swiftly assumed. He
had connected with men like those who held high rank in the Reagan and Bush administrations,
who were gathered here on Gore’s inauguration day in Richard Perle’s townhouse. Perhaps
most significant, he had allied himself with key members of Congress—Republicans like
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jesse
Helms, and Democrats like House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chair John Murtha,
who controlled the purse strings of America’s military and defense machines, as well
as Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman and Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey.

Now, on the first day of Al Gore’s presidency, Chalabi and his influential supporters
were determined to keep the pressure on, using the tools of persuasion that Wolfowitz
and Perle had employed from their first days in the halls of power: flood decision
makers, journalists, and think-tank players with memos and intelligence reports from
dissident Iraqis; spotlight the undeniably murderous cruelties of the Iraqi regime;
and use the investigative power of the Republican majority to hold hearings and its
power of the purse to bend the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA
to a more assertive stance.

“Our mission,” one guest said, “is to make the case that Saddam is not only a tyrant
but that he poses a direct threat to United States security because he is very likely
compiling a stockpile of weapons—chemical, biological, nuclear—either to use or to
put in the hands of his terrorist allies; and that his continued existence in power
is a sign of weakness that encourages our adversaries to believe that we’re a paper
tiger.”

It was a disciplined, politically potent message, but one that would face stiff resistance.
The State Department and the CIA—notoriously risk-averse in the eyes of the neoconservatives—would
caution against the reliability of the intelligence. The Department of Defense would
warn of the commitment needed to overthrow Saddam—not a handful of dissident Iraqis,
but the kind of force that had driven Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991: half a million
troops on the ground. That, even Chalabi acknowledged, would require a highly dramatic
attack on American interests—or lives—that would create a demand for action.

And on this damp, wet January day, no one could imagine what such an event might be.

No one but a handful of men, dispatched from the other side of the world.

“Mis-tah Speak-ah … the President of the United States!”

President Gore strode into the House chamber as the senators, representatives, cabinet
members, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of staff, and a gallery of notables stood
and cheered. It was February 27, 2001, and the new president would be making his first
appearance at a joint session of Congress since presiding over the counting of Electoral
College votes that had made him president seven weeks earlier. He had come here with
a message, and a presentation, designed to put him squarely within the broad middle
of American politics.

The president’s box was dotted with “Skutniks,” guests the president could point to
as living representatives of the points he was making. (They were so named because
in 1982 President Reagan had invited Lenny Skutnik, who had rescued one of the passengers
of an airplane that had crashed in the Potomac River, to sit in the gallery during
the State of the Union address.) Some had served the same purpose during Gore’s 2000
acceptance speech at the Democratic convention: Jacqueline Johnson, from St. Louis,
burdened by the cost of prescription drugs, and Mildred Nystel, who left welfare for
a job, aided by the Earned Income Tax Credit. Others were new faces: Jeffrey Wigand,
the tobacco executive who had blown the whistle on the industry’s efforts to hide
the impact of cigarette smoking, and one more person, whose identity was not disclosed
until the speech itself and who would shortly come to symbolize the Gore administration’s
most singular, least celebrated achievement.

Most of Gore’s speech was a study in caution. The president proposed a half-trillion-dollar
tax cut, directed at the business community and all but the wealthiest; another half-trillion
from the impending surplus went to shoring up the Social Security and Medicare trust
funds; four hundred billion more went to paying down the national debt. (This last
triggered a dustup among Gore’s economic team, with chief economic advisor Paul Krugman
warning, “If we wipe out the debt completely, we have no lines of credit; you guys
need to go back and see what Alexander Hamilton had to say about that.”)

The president proposed a health-care policy that was distinctly small-bore, lowering
the age of Medicare eligibility to sixty-two—God knows he could afford that, with
trillions of dollars in surpluses incoming in the next decade—and if Ted Kennedy was
caught by the cameras grumbling to Senator Chuck Schumer about “another damn Eisenhower
Republican posing as a Democrat,” well, that was just fine with Gore’s political team.

And, just as he had promised members of the Congressional Rural Caucus, there was
a $10 billion down payment to make broadband a national reality.

“My dad was the chief Senate sponsor of the Interstate Highway System,” Gore reminded
the Congress, “and I intend to be the champion of the Interstate Information Superhighway.
Maybe I didn’t invent the Internet, but I darn well intend to improve it.”

It was toward the end of his speech when Gore turned to a subject that had not been
mentioned in the daylong briefings given to prominent journalists by White House staffers.