What It Took

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Straightening out the controversy was hard because so few people knew where the bottom really was--knew if, when or what kind of drugs Bush had ever used. There were some senior-staff discussions about getting out the truth, whatever that was, but no one inside the Iron Triangle of strategist Rove, spokeswoman Hughes and campaign manager Joe Allbaugh agreed with that strategy. Bush had made it clear that he wasn't going to go down the road of admitting anything. "We're not going to do it," Rove told a Washington Republican. "Everyone's going to have to live with that."

Rove also assured jittery Republicans that the truth was not nearly as bad as they feared. Bush had never used cocaine, Rove told them. He might have been in a room a few times where cocaine was present. And he might have tried some other, less serious things. Though Rove wouldn't specify what "things," some people came away from those conversations believing the Governor must have at least smoked pot a few times.

"I'm going to tell people I made mistakes and that I have learned from my mistakes," Bush said. "And if they like it, I hope they give me a chance. And if they don't like it, they can go find somebody else to vote for." And with that, the week of agony ended just as suddenly as it had begun. Reporters ran out of leads and into something else: a public that resented journalists for probing politicians' past. Americans were burned out on scandal. Call it Bill Clinton's gift to George W. Bush.

Wolf Packs It In
Gore's secret consultant, the one no one would talk about, wanted to fight back. Just a few days before, TIME had reported that the Gore campaign was paying gender theorist Naomi Wolf $15,000 a month to provide the Vice President with everything from wardrobe tips to big-picture theories of the race--specifically, that Gore must challenge Clinton if he was to become the "alpha male" in the presidential contest. The revelation that the Vice President harbored a feminism expert on his staff gave the late-night joke writers a month of material and sent the Gore operation into a deep, dark funk.

In part because she enjoyed the support of Gore's eldest daughter Karenna Schiff, Wolf sat in on strategy meetings, looked at speeches and ad copy, reviewed scripts and attended primary-debate preps. It was Wolf's idea to have Tipper keep talking about how sexy Gore was. It was Wolf's idea to encourage Gore, who was angry with Clinton anyway, to distance himself from the President.

Karenna thought the whole thing was just so right, said a consultant, who added that he and his colleagues would attend meetings with Wolf and Karenna and just "roll their eyes" at the pair's ideas. One even took Wolf to lunch just to see how many academic buzzwords she could drop. Eskew, at least, felt she understood women voters. But he was pretty much alone. "The whole family," said a longtime Gore retainer, "their instincts are, to a person, wrong, just bad." But what could they say to the Veep? Fire your daughter? "I don't think so," he added. Besides, to some Gore seemed infatuated with Wolf. Even Coelho, who thought Wolf was silly, couldn't shut it down. What worried him and others was that the 37-year-old author had written that adolescents should practice mutual masturbation rather than rush into sexual intercourse.

When the TIME story broke, Wolf, who thought she was being vilified, wanted a chance to explain everything, to go on the Sunday-morning talk shows and defend herself and her ideas. The Saturday before, Coelho vetoed the idea; sorry, he told her, the less said about you the better. But Wolf didn't listen; she appealed to Karenna for a second hearing with the Veep himself. And so Al, Tipper, Karenna and the secret consultant all conferred. Wolf said she deserved a chance to explain herself. And Gore said O.K.

Campaign aides would have found out Sunday morning as they choked on their croissants, except that the wake-up calls came much earlier, and repeatedly, as TV producers from other networks starting calling around and demanding to know why Wolf was appearing on ABC's This Week and not on all the networks. From Coelho on down, people were furious. Karenna would later apologize, searching out some aides with multiple calls to various places, and claim she hadn't meant to buck the system.

"WE HAVE TO GET IN HIS FACE" "I got my ass kicked," Bush told a friend over the phone the day John McCain beat him by 19 points in New Hampshire.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Having lots of money is great, but only if it buys what you need, which in Bush's case was a tractor trailer big enough to ferry his entire party, from Clinton-hating conservatives to freedom-loving libertarians and everyone in between. But no sooner was the shiny new rig bought and paid for than Bush drove it straight into a snowbank called New Hampshire. Bush and Rove had been watching Steve Forbes closely, with his huge war chest and his flat-tax plan, worrying about a sideswipe from the right. But real terror is what you don't see coming, and it was the Straight Talk Express bus with McCain at the wheel and all those swooning reporters on board and his message of reform and renewal that upended the Bush campaign.