FITS AND STARTS

John Kerry didn't want to get on his own campaign bus. It was just after Labor Day 2003, and the day before, Kerry had formally launched his candidacy with a forgettable speech, delivered while standing in front of an aircraft carrier in Charleston, S.C. Now, as he was preparing to leave a rally in Manchester, N.H., Kerry strongly objected to the slogan plastered on the side of the bus: COURAGE EQUALS KERRY. He was traveling with his Vietnam buddies, and combat veterans didn't like advertising themselves that way, he protested. Real warriors--men who have actually been shot at--don't care to brag, or even much talk about it. Kerry was in a funk. He stood outside the bus, refusing to get on while he complained about the posters advertising his personal courage. "You have to get on the bus," quietly insisted his top adviser, Bob Shrum. "I'll get on the staff bus," Kerry pouted.

His handlers had seen it before. Kerry did not like to play the brave war hero. His pollster, Mark Mellman, had tested a theme line--"John Kerry has the courage to do what's right for America"--and voters seemed to like it. But Kerry didn't. He was uncomfortable with showy displays of any kind, but especially ones that glorified his combat record. Jim Margolis, his paid media man, was eager to make ads using the almost three hours of film footage Kerry had shot with a handheld super-8 camera in Vietnam. The catch was that only about 15 seconds showed Kerry. "Goddammit, John, didn't you want to send anything home to your parents, for God's sake?" Margolis complained. Kerry answered, "No, that isn't what I was trying to do." He had wanted to capture his experiences--the countryside, the Vietnamese people, the ravages of war. Not to show off himself.

Kerry didn't want to talk about the war. And yet he seemed to talk about it all the time, constantly reminding voters that he (unlike most other politicians, including George W. Bush) had fought for his country. Evoking his war record had been his trump card at critical moments in his political career. (In his hotly contested '96 Senate re-election campaign, his opponent, popular Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, criticized Kerry's opposition to the death penalty. Kerry gravely intoned, "I know something about killing...") Chris Heinz, Teresa Heinz Kerry's 31-year-old son who enjoyed a teasing, macho relationship with his stepfather, bluntly warned Kerry that the press was beginning to view Kerry's frequent evocations of his Vietnam service as a tired cliche. To some of Kerry's aides, the senator seemed almost bipolar about his war record: on the one hand, the strong silent type; on the other, living proof that the Vietnam War will never end.

To show off--or not? To be proud--or humble? To strut--or self-deprecate? Sometimes Kerry seemed torn by conflicting impulses, and not just about his war record. Like every politician, he yearned to be noticed. The wise guys of the Massachusetts media and political establishment made fun of Kerry for hogging the limelight: they called him "Live Shot." As a legislator he was not a backroom dealmaker. He liked to be out front, conducting high-profile investigations of hot topics like allegations of drugrunning by the CIA. And yet he was capable of small acts of modesty and decency, of giving credit to others, and he often seemed uneasy before a camera or a microphone.

Kerry's ambivalence helps explain why he is not a natural politician. Kerry cannot sit still. He must always be up and doing, and he has been running for president, depending on whom you believe, since he was 14 years old, 18 at the latest. He was mocked for his ambition ("JFK," it was said, stood for "Just For Kerry"). Yet his more perceptive schoolmates always sensed that he was listening to some inner voice, telling him not to give in to the siren song of self-promotion. It is the same stern, patrician voice--preaching modesty, humility, duty--that whispered into the ears of generations of privileged youth of the old WASP ascendancy, including generations of Bushes. "I do not want to hear the Great I Am," Dorothy Walker Bush, mother and grandmother of presidents, had scolded her son George if he bragged too much about his sporting triumphs as a schoolboy in the 1930s and 1940s.

Though Kerry liked to play down his elitist side--his accent, pure Thurston Howell III as a young man, became less plummy over time--he never shed all the trappings of his social class, or tried to. To his classmates Kerry had been a bit of an outsider, the fruit of some Brahmin seed (a Winthrop and a Forbes on his mother's side, but he learned only late in life that he was part Jewish on his father's side), and he was never as well off as most of his classmates. They thought he tried a little too hard to show that he really belonged and, by striving, betrayed his insecurity. The WASP ascendancy was beginning its decline when Kerry graduated from the poshest of the New England prep schools, St. Paul's, in 1962, but its gentleman's code of muscular Christianity was still strong. Episcopal Church schools like St. Paul's tried to teach the virtue of humility, the sin of pride, the value of quiet service to others...

That is, up to a point. Ruling-class sons were supposed to compete hard--but not sweat too much. To get (or stay) ahead--but do so gracefully, even effortlessly. To wear the mantle of wealth and power lightly, coolly. The style had been set by an earlier generation of swells who had fashioned certain unwritten, strict yet ambiguous rules of decorum. It was all very complicated, a tricky, delicate business of flaunting it, but subtly, and John Forbes Kerry, at least in the critical eyes of his classmates, never seemed to get the balance right. While other preppies had been perfecting their slouches on the greenswards of country clubs, Kerry had been grimly learning a more Puritan code, like how to navigate a small boat in the fog off the New England coast, doggedly trying to please his dour and secretive father. His mother sweetly preached the duty to serve and the old-time virtue of choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. (Her last words to her son, says Kerry, were "Integrity, integrity, integrity.") Their son was a good boy at school, a striver and serious, delivering a speech on "The Plight of the Negro" and founding a debating society. But he was too earnest, too obvious for the cutups, who mocked the faint air of superiority that Kerry wore, mostly as a defense.

Kerry's revenge was to do better, to excel, to leave his detractors behind--but not to boast! Never to gloat! Unless, of course, boasting was absolutely necessary to get ahead. There was something a little desperate, but admirable, about Kerry's determination. He would do what it took to get where he wanted to go.

In New Hampshire that day after Labor Day 2003, he got on the bus.

Kerry had been assured that the nomination was his, almost, as it were, by right. A memo drafted by his campaign manager, Jim Jordan, in November 2002 assured him that he would be "the first one out of the box" in the upcoming campaign and that he would raise the most money "because you're the best candidate." He would establish himself as front runner, soak up endorsements and contributions and march inexorably to the nomination.

It was all myth. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, blunt and down to earth (especially in comparison with the lordly Kerry), had burst from the pack with a grass-roots Internet-fueled campaign and huge outdoor rallies on his Sleepless Summer tour in August. The establishment press swooned over the anti-establishment candidate. Kerry was deemed a hopeless stiff, his campaign written off as moribund.

Kerry was nonplused by it all, a little hurt that Dean had run as the "movement" candidate against Kerry, the tool of the Washington status quo. Kerry had been in the Senate for 20 years, but he still saw himself as the reform-minded antiwar protester who had come from Vietnam, tossed away his ribbons and defied the Nixon administration. (Dean had fun with Kerry's self-righteousness; at his private debate prep, he would pose as Kerry, sticking his nose up in the air and mimicking Kerry: "I was in Vietnam; I don't take any PAC money.")

Kerry didn't know what to do about Dean. His own advisers were divided. Most of the pros, his paid political consultants and campaign manager, wanted to go negative. The philosophy of Chris Lehane, one of his media advisers, was "You either hit or you're being hit." The hawks wanted to go at Dean from the left, to convince voters that Dean was not a true liberal. "We didn't want to rip the guy's face off," said Jordan, "but he wasn't going away, and we had to strip at least a third of his liberal support away."

On the other side, leading the so-called pacifists, was Kerry's most important adviser, Bob Shrum. Shrum is the brand name among big-money Democratic campaign consultants, the most-sought-after hired gun, brilliant and fluent but also insecure. He was Kerry's friend, his peer; everyone else was Kerry's employee. Staffers crossed Shrum at their peril. Edgy and superstitious, Shrum prefers, in tense moments, to wear a fuchsia scarf given to him by Washington superlawyer Robert Bennett--even in the middle of summer. He had forgotten to take his lucky scarf to Nashville on election night 2000, and he wasn't going to make that mistake again. Shrum had worked on the successful political campaigns of a third of the U.S. Senate. But when it came to presidential politics, his luck had generally not been good. He was 0 for 7 (his past clients included Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Bob Kerrey, Dick Gephardt and Al Gore).

Shrum was a gifted wordsmith, the inheritor of the Sorensenian mantle, crafter of lofty phrases and speeches filled with the lift of a driving dream (which, after a time, started to sound alike, no matter whose lips uttered them). He had written Ted Kennedy's famous "Sail against the wind" speech in 1980, and politicians had lined up ever since, hoping that Shrum could make them eloquent, too. Shrum wanted to ignore Dean and take the high road with a series of "Great Speeches" about the future of the country. It was somewhat uncharacteristic for Shrum to argue against slashing attacks; he was known for taking a "people against the powerful" populist line. But his intuition told him that by demol-ishing Dean, the Kerry camp would only open the way for a late surge by Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, a young but honey-tongued populist with a seemingly boundless future. (In the so-called Shrum primary, Kerry and Edwards had vied for the services of the superconsultant; Shrum had initially leaned toward Edwards.) When Team Kerry met in the summer and fall of 2003, Shrum acidly undercut the hawks who wanted to trash and burn Dean. "What do you want to do?" he asked. "Elect Edwards?"

For months, as Kerry sank in the polls and Dean soared, the argument rattled on inside the Kerry camp. Campaign manager Jordan had worked for Kerry for five years, serving as staff director of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee when Kerry was its chairman. A soft-spoken but hard-nosed operative from North Carolina, Jordan admired Kerry, but he was weary of his indecisiveness. "The world around Kerry is a lot of white males talking," he groused. Every time Jordan decided something, the person who lost out went behind his back to appeal to Kerry, who spent inordinate amounts of time on his cell phone not resolving various disputes. Kerry was known for being deliberative--he was proud of it--but Jordan despaired that Kerry had been turned into a caricature of the U.S. Senate. Kerry's didactic, overlong speeches, his insistence on explaining every nuance of his rational thought process (while not revealing much of his true feelings), reinforced his image as a windbag. Jordan was blunt with Kerry, telling him that voters in focus groups said "they don't understand you, you won't shut up, you sound like a politician."

For the Labor Day announcement speech, the hawks presented a draft meant to be sharp and punchy, with lines like "Spring training is over" and "My mother was an environmental activist before it was cool." Shrum dismissed the speech as "sophomoric." At midnight before the speech, Shrum arrived at Kerry's house in Boston--he had taken a two-hour cab ride from Cape Cod--to insist that his speech be used, untouched. Kerry ended up giving Shrum's speech--"flowery bulls--t," according to Jordan. The reception was at best ho-hum.

Kerry was fading fast. The press got wind of the infighting and began joking that Kerry's campaign was like Noah's Ark--two of everything--as Kerry straddled the advice given him and tried to please everyone. "I couldn't get the man to make decisions," said Jordan.

By November, however, Kerry was finally getting ready to make one decision: to fire Jordan. As early as July, Kerry had approached his political mentor, Ted Kennedy, and asked his advice about replacing Jordan. Kennedy told him he thought a change was long overdue. Kennedy was an avuncular figure to Kerry. In an interview with NEWSWEEK in June 2004, Kerry went on and on about how he had studied Kennedy, a legendary storyteller and schmoozer, trying to learn from the senior senator from Massachusetts (40 years in office) that in the end it was "the people" that mattered, not so much one's policy views. But Kerry was uncomfortable with personal confrontation. He kept giving Jordan more rope. In the end, Jordan hanged himself.

The campaign manager's first mistake was to underestimate the Internet revolution of the Deaniacs. "There are no votes on the Internet," Jordan had said back in the spring of 2003. At a meeting of top staffers and advisers at Kerry's house on Nantucket over the Fourth of July, Kerry asked for a show of hands. How many thought Dean had crossed over from fringe candidate to serious contender? Only two or three people had raised their hands. One was Kerry himself. The candidate may not have been a natural politician, but he was able to spot the power of the Internet, particularly as a fund-raising tool, before most of his advisers did.

Jordan's second fatal error was more personal. He alienated the candidate's family. Kerry is something of a loner; unlike most presidential candidates, he does not have a longtime political consigliere or friend who regularly travels with him on the plane. His only consistent adviser was his brother, Cameron, a Boston lawyer, a low-key figure who was devoted but not politically savvy. Jordan did not have much use for Cam. "He's no Robert Kennedy," said Jordan, and to Kerry, bluntly: "Keep your brother out of my way."

Kerry bridled at Jordan's impertinence, and he was especially protective of his wife, Teresa, who often clashed with Jordan. Teresa could be an earth mother, warm and funny, sometimes in an oddball way, and embracing to her friends and family. She liked to hand out her recipe for "Mama T's brownies" (she has 26 godchildren, who call her Mama T). But, in the manner of the very rich, she had an air of entitlement, a sharp temper, and she was known for keeping people, including her husband, waiting. The staff regarded her as something of a hypochondriac, and she canceled three trips in October--to Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Mexico--at the last minute, usually for what was described to aides as a "nonspecific malady."

Kerry seemed to be walking on eggshells around Teresa. He wanted her to be happy, in part because she was much more trouble on the campaign trail when she was unhappy. Teresa had a way of letting everyone know that Kerry was her second husband, and that she still loved her first, Sen. John Heinz, who died in a plane crash in 1991. (The portraits of the two Johns hang side by side in her Georgetown mansion.) Teresa above all valued her own candor. She wanted to be able to talk about her Botox injections and yak with women reporters about her views on reincarnation and the pros and cons of hormone-replacement therapy. She did not want to hear about "message discipline." Indeed, her frankness could be refreshing. Some crowds responded with "you go, girl" enthusiasm when she made fun of her husband and voiced a strong opinion on the trail. But others wondered why the slightly eccentric woman introducing the candidate was prattling on about herself in a difficult-to-understand accent. She was not one for the plastic, adoring smile of the traditional candidate's wife. On the other hand, Kerry's handlers wondered, did she have to look sullen?

At one point in the summer, as Dean was starting to pull away, Teresa called Jordan and demanded, "I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean." Jordan was less than diplomatic in telling her it was a crazy idea, and he had a little too much fun sharing the moment with other campaign officials. Jordan's e-mails trashing the candidate's wife, or word of them, inevitably reached his rivals--including Bob Shrum. An old friend of Teresa's from the Georgetown chattering-class party circuit, Shrum understood her moods and saw her importance to Kerry. Teresa and Shrum enjoyed drinking vintage wine together and commiserating about Jordan, sealing his fate.

Late-night comics liked to joke that Kerry had married Teresa for her money to pay for his presidential race. (Jay Leno: "[Kerry] once raised $500 million with two words: 'I do'.") But, in fact, Kerry had signed a prenuptial agreement that kept almost all of Teresa's fortune (inherited from her first husband, the Heinz ketchup heir) in her hands. Under the campaign-finance laws, Teresa could give the Kerry campaign no more than any other donor--$2,000. True, the system is full of loopholes. Teresa could have found a legal dodge to use her vast fortune to help Kerry--she could have established some kind of trust in his name--and, indeed, she had vowed to spend her money if Kerry's opponents tried to destroy his character. But the "optics" of such a move, as the media consultants liked to say, would be terrible. It would vindicate all those late-night jokes about Kerry as a kept man.

Kerry would have to find some other way to raise the money to pay for his campaign. He had been virtually broke when he married Teresa. He was confined by the campaign-finance laws, which matched what a candidate could raise by private sources up to $18.7 million, but put a cap on spending in each primary state ($729,000 for New Hampshire, $1.3 million for Iowa).

Kerry had been a strong supporter of campaign-finance reform, but like any presidential hopeful, he envied George W. Bush--who, as a candidate in 2000, had raised so much money he didn't need matching funds from the Feds. A candidate could opt out of the campaign-finance system--"bust the caps," in campaign jargon. With his Internet money machine, Howard Dean was on track to raise more than $50 million before the first primary, and in November he decided to abandon the federal campaign-finance system so he could spend it all. On Nov. 6 and 7 he held a laughable Internet "plebiscite" to get permission from his faithful Deaniacs (most of whom were pro campaign-finance reform but were willing to put aside their scruples to win).

Jordan had been trying to conserve Kerry's money so that there would be enough left to buy ads after the primaries began. Shrum was agitating to spend more money on TV advertising, and he wanted to bust the caps. Shrum's partner, Tad Devine, put it to Kerry. Devine, a seasoned political hand who had effectively run the Gore campaign in 2000, was known for being willing to speak truth to power. In late October, Devine told Kerry: get out of the campaign-finance limits or get out of the race.

Kerry seemed to be "hand-wringing and dithering," said Jordan. "John's not an instinctive politician. He doesn't understand the rhythms of a campaign. He's a very gifted man in ways that are more analogous to being a good president than a goodcampaigner."

In fact, Kerry was following a familiar path on the campaign trail. A lackluster beginning--and, just as it seemed to be almost too late, a hard charge for the finish line. On Saturday, Nov. 8, he summoned Jordan to Boston and fired him. Kerry started by flattering Jordan, but then he insisted that Jordan resign and tell people it was his idea. Jordan refused, and the frustrations bubbled up. ("We did plenty of screaming at each other, and toward the end the 'f--- yous' got kind of loud," said Jordan.) The same day, Kerry opted out of federal financing and began the arduous business of trying to raise tens of millions of dollars and to resuscitate a campaign that was widely regarded as doomed.

First came some discipline. Ted Kennedy's no-nonsense chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, took over as campaign manager. (She had been watching the campaign, she said, with a "horrified fascination.") Cahill, white-haired and matronly in a steely sort of way, shut off the back channels to Kerry by turning off his cell phone and letting it be known, like a nun rapping knuckles, that she would not tolerate any more petty bickering.

Then came a marked improvement in the candidate. Kerry's speechwriter, Andrei Cherny, had been trying to think of a way to convey that Kerry was ready to go toe to toe with President Bush on national security, the Democrats' weakest front. The expression "Bring it on" popped into his head. He wrote the line into a Kerry speech to be delivered to the Democratic National Committee in October, but Shrum crossed it out. "Bush-type bravado," he sneered--too undignified for Kerry.

But with the press reporting his campaign in meltdown, Kerry needed to do something to change his soporific style, and at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines on Nov. 15, he used Cherny's "Bring it on" line. The crowd loved it. (Kerry later apologized to Cherny for not using the line earlier. "I was wrong," he said. But a few weeks later Cherny was purged by Shrum as a Jordan holdover whose punchy style did not suit the candidate.)

Strong, crisp--and presidential--Kerry was a hit at the JJ dinner, an important annual rite and showplace for the candidates. Kerry's campaign packed the crowd with supporters chanting "Real deal," Kerry's latest slogan (the real deal: that is, a candidate who could win in November, unlike Dean). It was a sign, if anyone had been looking, that Kerry should not be counted out. There were other omens that the race was far from over. Before the dinner, a curious event took place. The Dean campaign, eager to show off its vast army of Deaniacs, took reporters out on the skywalk in downtown Des Moines to watch 40-plus yellow schoolbuses rumble into town--shock troops in the Dean onslaught to get out the vote for the January Iowa caucuses, the first electoral test on the road to the nomination. One of the reporters noticed something odd. "Is it just me, or are they empty?" asked Liz Marlantes of The Christian Science Monitor. The other reporters tried to peer through the tinted-glass windows. All they could see was row after row of empty seats.

But in New Hampshire, Dean's polls continued to soar, while Kerry's remained flat. The press had already begun to look for someone else to play the role of spoiler to Dean, maybe Gen. Wesley Clark, who had entered the race late (in September), stumbled about as a campaign neophyte, but still held allure for Democrats paranoid about their own perceived weakness on national security. The capture of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 made Democrats despondent. Iraq was looking like a worthy cause after all; the violence seemed to be abating there. Bush looked invincible. Actually, Saddam's capture was good news for Kerry: it helped remind Democrats that in the end the nominee had to be electable, and that Dean was too far to the left and Clark was unready for the national political stage.

All this would become clear--in perfect hindsight. On Dec. 9 Al Gore showed the political fingertips that lost him the 2000 election. He endorsed Howard Dean, probably at the precise moment when Dean had peaked and was about to head down. Gore's endorsement came as a blow to Kerry, who had thought Gore was his friend, or at least his political ally. When the Kerry camp heard the rumors that Gore was endorsing Kerry's opponent, Kerry tried to call the former veep to find out if it could be true. Kerry had Gore's cell-phone number and called him. "This is John Kerry," he said when Gore answered. The phone went dead. Kerry tried to call several more times and never got through. He was hurt. "I endorsed him early. I was up for consideration as his running mate," he complained to an aide.

Kerry's revival was underway, slowly--imperceptibly to the press and the political establishment. Back in September he had made the brave--and difficult--decision to bet most of his resources on Iowa, not New Hampshire. Kerry had been expected to do well in his neighboring state, but he was getting drubbed by Vermonter Dean. (One poll showed Dean at 45 percent in the Granite State, Kerry at 10 percent; nationally, Kerry was about even with Al Sharpton.) He needed to do something to change the dynamic. He needed to win somewhere else.

Polling for the Iowa caucuses is notoriously difficult: it is hard to measure whether people will actually show up in the middle of January to spend two or three hours to cast their votes. But Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, had begun to notice that on a comparative basis, Kerry was doing better versus Dean in Iowa than in New Hampshire. The only way to come back in New Hampshire, he reasoned, was to create a slingshot effect, to pick up enough momentum in the Iowa caucuses to convince New Hampshire voters, who went to the polls a week later, that Kerry was the only electable candidate. "Iowa is the key to New Hampshire," Mellman told the Kerry team.

That meant shifting the campaign's limited resources to Iowa--in effect, to bet it all on the quirky Iowa caucuses. There was really no choice, argued Mellman. "There are two things we could do in New Hampshire," he argued at a strategy meeting in September. "One, we could save a drowning child in the Merrimack River [which runs through southern New Hampshire]. Second, we could have him [Kerry] do well in Iowa. The second is easier to arrange."

Kerry was persuaded, but barely, and by December he was having second thoughts. Losing New Hampshire would be a painful humiliation for him. "We need to be in New Hampshire," he would say. He was gambling more than his name. He had taken a $6 million mortgage on the house in Boston to bring some desperately needed cash into the campaign. (Under the prenup, Kerry had part ownership in one of Teresa's five houses.) His brother, Cam, worried that Kerry was betting his daughters' inheritance in a game he could not win. In early January, Kerry's best friend from school days and his former brother-in-law, David Thorne, called Shrum and asked if Kerry really had a chance of winning. "If it looks hopeless," said Thorne, "let's talk about it so he can stop spending his own money."

Shrum knew it wasn't hopeless because he knew Kerry. He understood that at just such moments Kerry had a way of rallying, of rising to the challenge, of even enjoying the sensation of risk and trying to control the uncontrollable. The staid, buttoned-up Kerry concealed a more passionate, audacious side. Shrum, a romantic, had been drawn to the Kennedys as a young theology student/law graduate turned politico. Kerry was not JFK--Kerry's own idol as a teen--but the similarities were more than superficial. Both JFKs liked fine and stylish people and things, thought deeply about history and the world--and were not afraid of risk.

Kerry does not like the daredevil label. He emphatically rejected it in an interview with NEWSWEEK, saying that he avoided really dangerous sports (he mentioned bungee jumping) and was always in control when he took on scary-seeming physical challenges, like kite boarding (a kind of airborne windsurfing). But control is a relative thing, and Kerry clearly likes to look for the edge. For instance, he said he performed aerial stunts only in a plane above 5,000 feet, so that if something went wrong, he'd have time to parachute.

Before Christmas, Shrum drove back to Boston from New Hampshire with John and Teresa and stayed at the house on Louisburg Square, the one Kerry had mortgaged, an elegant brick mansion in the old Brahmin quarter of Beacon Hill. It was snowy outside, and the old friends opened a bottle of wine and began reminiscing. They recalled an earlier crisis, in the fall of 1996, when Kerry had been faltering in his Senate re-election race against Governor Weld. Kerry had invited Shrum to dinner and asked him to take over the campaign. He had shoved a poll across the table and said, "We're behind in 14 of the 15 internals"--the important polling benchmarks on questions like "Who do you trust more?" and "Who is a better leader?"

With Shrum's help, Kerry had rallied in the '96 Senate race, as he always had, and beaten Weld cleanly. "I've been in tougher situations than this before," Kerry said that snowy evening, as he, Teresa and Shrum sat around sipping their good wine in front of the fire. Shrum knew that Kerry was thinking about Vietnam. "When he's in a tough situation, he thinks at least they're not shooting bullets," says Shrum.

Shrum had taken some more tangible comfort from his friend the pollster Stan Greenberg, who believed that the voters of Iowa would inevitably take a second look and ask: Who is presidential? Who can take on Bush? Kerry needed to be there, front and center, because the answer would not be Howard Dean.

Few people knew it at the time, but the Dean campaign was imploding. The Deaniac movement had been in large part a creation of political grass-roots mastermind Joe Trippi. A creative genius, Trippi did not sleep and appeared to live on Diet Pepsi, consuming at least a dozen a day. Pepsi cans were strewn around his office and arrayed along his desk, where the empties were used as receptacles for wads of Skoal chewing tobacco. ("This campaign is all about getting me a gig as a Pepsi spokes-man," he quipped to a reporter.) He had once fallen asleep while standing and hit the floor with such force that he cracked a rib. Trippi's caffeinated rages, fueled by his off-the-charts blood sugar (a diabetic, he was dangerously careless about taking his medications), reduced his assistant to tears. Once, after he overturned his desk, she fled out the door and did not return for three days.

Dean was in some ways the accidental candidate. Truth be told, he wasn't really the red-hot revolutionary of the Deaniacs' fevered hopes. He was a moderate, fiscally conservative small-state governor who had been swept up in a wave not entirely of his own making. He and Trippi never worked well together. Dean was a micro-manager who refused to give Trippi control of the campaign checkbook. Management was not Trippi's strong suit; the campaign, badly run, burned through its $40 million war chest. By October, Dean and Trippi were speaking to each other only when they had to, and Trippi was threatening to quit.

The closer Dean came to actually winning the nomination, the more he seemed to misstep, to blurt out something that the gaffe hunters in the press could hang around his neck. Dean had always been a loose cannon. In the summer of 2002, his aides had been relieved that no cameras had captured the would-be Democratic nominee, in full cry at a gay fund-raiser on New York's Fire Island, shouting out, "If Bill Clinton could be the first black president, I can be the first gay president!" But now the press was circling, and he seemed to recoil. In December, Trippi told his aides, Dean had come to him and tearfully confessed that he had run only to shake up the Democratic Party and push for health-care reform, that he never cared about being president and never thought he could win. ("That's a figment of Joe's imagination," Dean told NEWSWEEK. "I mean, Joe just made that up out of whole cloth.")

By then Trippi's loyalty really lay less with Dean than with the cybermovement he had built. Dean was irritated by Trippi's celebrity (the campaign manager was often wired for a CNN documentary and had to be reminded to turn off the mike when he went to the bathroom). By early January, Trippi was in a deep gloom, and so were his closest campaign associates. One senior aide compared the Dean campaign to the novel "Flowers for Algernon," the story of a seriously retarded man who, put through a course of radically experimental treatment, lives for a few months as a genius--then regresses rapidly to what he had been before the experts remade him: a moron.

Trippi was planning on retiring to his farm in Maryland after the New Hampshire primary. Still, he wanted to take one last shot, to "bet it all" on Iowa and New Hampshire, knowing that in a protracted fight Dean's candor would kill him. "It's probably a f---ing miracle we're even sitting where we're at," he said, utterly despondent. He fell silent for a while. "The guy," Trippi said suddenly, referring to Dean, "is not ready for prime time. I mean, he's just f---ing not ready for prime time, and he never will be." There were 11 days left before the Iowa caucuses.

Dean's plan in Iowa was to flood the state with an army of volunteers, in jaunty orange caps, to knock on doors and personally escort voters to the polls. Kerry's Iowa organizer, Michael Whouley, was appropriately skeptical of the Dean approach in small rural towns where out-of-state college kids were regarded as aliens. A legendary political figure who avoided most reporters (thus enhancing the legend), Whouley was patient and quiet, but he had an aura of confidence. On the Friday night before Christmas he gathered 80 field staffers in a Unitarian church in downtown Des Moines and told them, "It's never a guy with the early momentum. It's the guy with the late momentum, and that's us."

As he crisscrossed Iowa, Kerry was a much more engaged and relaxed campaigner. He seemed bemused and affectionate with Teresa, not quite so nervous about her mood. "C'mon, General, let's go," he said, patting her on the back and marching her onstage at a campaign event in Iowa in early January. He told the women in the room that he wouldn't see his wife again until after the caucuses; the ladies made an "awww" sound. Teresa smirked and made a "no big deal" gesture.

The traveling press continued to have doubts about Teresa. After one particularly disjointed speech at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in early January, press aide David Wade paced nervously while reporters snickered that the candidate's wife was on medication. But the press was warming to Kerry. He had begun traveling with an old friend from his antiwar days, Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. Kerry had played bass in his prep-school rock-and-roll band, and to relax he liked to strum a guitar and sing along with Yarrow. The old folkie seemed to make Kerry nostalgic and remember his roots as an authentic movement figure. (When Yarrow played "Puff the Magic Dragon," a CBS camera caught Kerry playfully miming that he was toking on a joint.) On one frozen night, heading down desolate Route 63, an exhausted Kerry and his staff and the traveling press passed out cold Budweisers and chocolate cake. "Pedro," Kerry said, "get your guitar." Late into the songs, Yarrow played "Carry On My Sweet Survivor":

"Was the struggle worth the cost?" Yarrow asked Kerry. "Yes, Peter, it was," said Kerry softly. Even the most jaded reporters sat quietly for a moment.

Despite Kerry's uneasiness over playing up his war exploits, the campaign had been airing an ad showing one of his old Swift Boat crewmen, Dale Sandusky, saying that Kerry's boldness and decisiveness had "saved our lives" in Vietnam. Here was the way to get around Kerry's reticence: have his crewmates speak for him. The ad was a success. Iowa voters who had seen the ad favored Kerry by almost 20 points.

The best testimonial came by pure luck. In Oregon in early January, a retired policeman named Jim Rassmann was in a bookstore and noticed a book about Kerry's Vietnam experience by historian Douglas Brinkley, "Tour of Duty." Rassmann had been a Special Forces soldier who had fallen off Kerry's boat during a fire fight in the delta. Kerry had swung his boat around and come back to rescue Rassmann. His arm injured, Kerry himself had pulled Rassmann out of the water. Rassmann thumbed through the index of "Tour of Duty" and saw his story. On a whim, he called the Kerry campaign and said he'd like to help. The receptionist, Jackie Williams, had the presence to get hold of the campaign's veterans coordinator. Rassmann was in Iowa the next day, flown there by the campaign. (Briefing Rassmann, a Kerry aide asked if he'd ever been in front of cameras. "Yes, usually after somebody's been killed," the ex-cop drolly replied. He had worked as a homicide investigator.)

Kerry was genuinely surprised to encounter Rassmann, whom he had not seen since 1969. Their reunion, a warm hug, was on television all over the state. The caucuses were only two days away.

On caucus night, as they were riding in a darkened bus in Des Moines, a Fox News producer handed Shrum the entrance polls. Kerry 29, Edwards 21, Dean 20, Gephardt 15. Shrum later recalled that he felt like crying. He showed the numbers to Kerry, who extended a wordless high-five.

The race was, for all practical purposes, over. The Dean scream, uttered a few hours later as Dean tried to rally his crestfallen troops, was mostly theater; the damage had been done. Dean had finished with 18 percent of the vote at the Iowa caucuses. The press, and most Democrats, wrote him off. Edwards would make a good showing in the primaries ahead, but he didn't have the money or the presidential gravitas to overtake Kerry.

Kerry was in the shower the next week when he won in New Hampshire, the state that had seemed so hopeless only a month before. With the campaign short of funds, he had been staying at the Tage Inn in Manchester, a bare-bones establishment, and on some mornings the showers had run cold. On primary night the hot water was working, and Kerry was enjoying it, leaving the bathroom door ajar so he could hear the television. Shrum and Teresa were in the room watching when ABC called New Hampshire for Kerry. There was a shriek from the shower. "Oh, God, I've won the New Hampshire primary!" he yelled. For once, Kerry let himself gloat.