As he sat down with The Observer in his D.C. office suite last week, Robert Novak was still a bit guarded.

“I’m not going to tell you my darkest secrets,” he warned.

But he finally seemed completely at ease talking about the impact the most famous column he’s ever written has had on the the city, and on himself.

He started writing his memoirs in 2003 – around the time the Plame story broke – although the process actually began in earnest months before he realized how big an impact the affair might have on his legacy.

“I started writing because I’m old,” he said. “I wanted to tell my story while I was still cogent. While I could still remember what happened. … I’m worth a few million – I didn’t have to write this book. I just always knew I would do it, and I knew now was the time.”

But despite his denials, it’s clear the lingering Plame fallout, coupled with his advancing years, played a big role in his motivation to release his memoirs now.

“There’s no question if you walked out of here and I dropped dead, my obit would probably have [the Plame affair] in the lede," he said. "I don’t have too many years left, so that’s probably what it’ll be. The idea that that’s my legacy is unfortunate, but that’s the way it turned out.”

Perched in an armchair in a tiny, windowless study in his D.C. office suite – just down the hall from Newsweek’s Washington bureau and block from the White House – a shirt-sleeved Mr. Novak said he “didn’t do anything wrong” in revealing the name of the former C.I.A. operative.

His floor is littered with old typewriters, relics from an earlier phase of his career. Rows of angelic-looking grandchildren beamed from photos on the bookcase lining the wall behind him.

“People just jumped to conclusions – a couple of years ago, most of the stories they wrote about me were pretty punk. But I don’t blame them; I wasn’t talking, so they had to make stuff up. And they did… People are lazy now, and they write off of Nexis. If a fact is wrong in one story, then it’s wrong everywhere. … I broke no laws. [The Plame column] was good journalism” that became, because of passions over the war, a sort of political Rorschach test.

This week, Bob Novak is fully emerging from bunker mode for the first time since the leak investigation began – answering questions that have been circling him ever since the former C.I.A. agent’s name appeared in his column four years ago this month.

Later today, he’ll discuss his new memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, on "Meet the Press," and a book-pegged Q&A in The New York Times Magazine hit doorsteps this morning.

He just taped two C-Span specials (including an hour-long sit-down with Brian). Later this week, he’ll start making the cable show rounds, including a sitdown with his old "Crossfire" colleague and fellow CNN exile Tucker Carlson, and chats with FOX’s "Hannity & Colmes," and CNBC’s Larry Kudlow.

It’s a familiar milieu for the veteran journalist. Starting in the Reagan years, Mr. Novak was the Law & Order of political talk-television; if you turned on your TV any given day of the week, you had a decent shot of seeing him onscreen. For a quarter-century, his home base was CNN; the network's TV fortunes and his rose and fell almost in sync.

Since his bitter divorce from the network two years ago, at the height of the Plame controversy (following a dramatic on-air tiff with one-time source James Carville) he’s entered friendlier ideological territory, signing on with FOX News. But over the past few months, even those appearances have been tapering off. The journalism world, said Mr. Novak, has begun to change in ways he’s baffled by. He believes the appetite for the sort of scoop-driven analysis he’s trafficked in since the Eisenhower administration may be disappearing.

“All the programming I really liked on CNN, most of the shows I was on, they’re all gone," he said. "'The Situation Room' doesn’t have the same quality as what it replaced. The present executives don’t care about politics – they care about Paris Hilton. It’s the same at FOX. They get very invested in all these stories I’m just not interested in at all. That poor girl in Aruba – what was her name? Yes, Natalee Holloway. There’s a war on, and that’s what gets put on the air?”

But the self-described workaholic isn’t exactly disappointed. Mr. Novak the journalist may express outrage over the latest network developments; Mr. Novak the senior citizen admits he’s feeling just a bit relieved.

“I would certainly never want to go back to the schedule I was doing," he said. "I’m 76 years old.”

And then: “Of course, nobody’s asking me.”

There are other signs Mr. Novak, still powerful, may be starting to lose--or is it relinquish?--some of the unique power he’s wielded in Washington since he first teamed up with Rowland Evans in the early 60's.

Every year, Mr. Novak hosts pricey insider lunches popular with Washington insiders, featuring big names like the Speaker of the House, or a senior presidential advisor. This spring, political superstars stayed off the dais, and ticket sales lagged. It was the Washington equivalent of the Stones failing to sell out an arena show, and the blogosphere took notice.

“Mr. Novak’s a little less popular this year than he has been in any other year in his long history of being a raging prick,” wrote Wonkette editor Alex Pareene, mocking the slow sales. “While in olden days he could count on the brightest stars of both parties to attend his box social, this year he’s got… Newt 'Gringo' Gingrich. And some GOP pollster.”

Mr. Novak told The Observer that he’ll probably never retire.

“I may die at my desk… I’ll stick it out as long as I can function," he said. "Probably a few more years.”

But in the course of a half-hour interview, he mentioned his own mortality, mostly offhandedly and unprompted, several times.

Over the years, he’s survived a medical textbook’s worth of maladies, including a brush with meningitis, multiple bouts with cancer, and two fractured hips. The second break came on the campaign trail in 2004 – a traumatic incident still fresh in his mind (last week, he relayed again the harrowing scene he also describes in his memoir – when he crawled naked and alone on his hotel room floor, blinded with pain, to summon help). Now, for the first time since Kennedy-Nixon, he’s entering a presidential campaign season without plans to cover it full-time.

A few weeks ago, he marked five decades in Washington with a wistful column recalling his arrival in the city in 1957, and bemoaning the changes since. But not all of his recent strolls down memory lane have been draped in such gauzy-eyed nostalgia.

Despite his denials, his new book offers a painstaking accounting of 50 years worth of personal and professional feuds – an advanced exercise in below-the-Beltway score-settling. (The first draft weighed in at 1,400 pages before being slashed to a less-brutal – if still bloody – 600-plus.) It begins – as did this interview – with his anger over the Valerie Plame affair.

“I really resented the treatment I got” from many media superstars, he said.

And in the bookk: “The blood of ideological solidarity was stronger than the water of journalistic togetherness,” he writes. “Bill Safire came out of retirement to write this – just this mindless column that took me to task," he said. "A ridiculous piece of work. And of course he’s friends with Judy Miller – he took her to the Correspondents’ Dinner. I saw them together, and I went to him and said hi. Didn’t say anything, though. No point in whining.”

Who's whining?

With patrician reporting partner Rowland Evans by his side, Mr. Novak completed his rise from AP regional reporter and Wall Street Journal Senate correspondent to Washington journalism superpower, developing an unparalleled network of sources through sheer will-power and dogged shoe-leather reporting.

Despite his increasing conservatism, he found willing contributors on both sides of the aisle.

His column may have been the source of the controversial “acid, amnesty and abortion” tag that helped sink George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid – but the source of that anonymous quote was none other than the South Dakota senator’s one-time running mate, Thomas Eagleton.

Everyone talked to Mr. Novak.

Mr. Safire isn’t the only press figure to come up short in his recent estimation.

“Do you think you’d be a blogger if you started out today?” The Observer wanted to know.

“I don’t think so," he said. "Bloggers, it seems to me, don’t really care what the facts are.”)

Of the Associated Press when he started, and today: “I’m glad I started there … but the AP is different than it used to be," he said. "Not as closely edited. Facts, language make it in that – I wouldn’t have dreamed of using when I worked there.” And the employees at his other alma mater, The Journal, don't fare much better. Asked whether the Dow Jones union's contempt for the Rupert Murdoch bid to take over the paper made any sense, he was dismissive:

“Not really. The union’s response – I love it – has just been completely absurd."

If Mr. Novak’s enemies take some fire in the book, some former friends and co-workers tend to fare even worse.

"Capital Gang" cast-offs like Mona Charen and early colleagues like John McLaughlin are in for particular scorn in Prince of Darkness. (Mr. Novak famously told the Jesuit-turned-political talk icon to “fuck off” at their last meeting, at the New York Times party in Boston during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.)

In a recent interview he repeated, with a smile, the characterization of McLaughlin he gave PBS’s Ben Wattenberg a few weeks ago: “The closest thing on this planet to pure evil.”

He’s no longer in contact with most of his former TV colleagues, though he still works with Al Hunt and Margaret Carlson on Bloomberg broadcast projects.

Mr. Novak said he still doesn’t care what any of them think about the Plame case – and he isn’t trying to change their minds with his account. “One thing is a matter of age – at a certain age, it just doesn’t matter what people think of you.”

Still, he admits he reads his own press.

“Well, yeah. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

And a quick check of the comment thread attached to one of his recent stories on the Washington Post Web site unsettled him; he included a sample of particularly unnerving hate mail in his book.

Some of his insider fans – on both sides of the aisle – are equally passionate.

“Deep down he has a heart of pure mush,” said longtime friend and fellow conservative Mr. Wattenberg. “He has a more complicated personality than meets the eye. Part of what he does is shtick. We all have to project a personality, and this is a character he’s playing. There’s a little showbiz in all of us – I think he just embraces that side of himself a little more. But he’s just a lovely human being.”

It’s a softer version of the classic Washington take on Bob Novak, which allegedly originated with Michael Kinsley: “Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.”

It’s difficult to tell whether or how Mr. Novak’s "Prince of Darkness” image will be affected by his tendency to point to the “inner peace” that has followed his late-life conversion from non-practicing Jew to Catholic. But even Mr. Novak’s spiritual quests have been controversial in some quarters.

“I think Deb Solomon (his interviewer for today's Times Magazine) was really bothered by this – it was how she asked me about it, and kept coming back to it," he said. "I’m used to that kind of reaction. A lot of people resent my confession, especially Jews and fallen-away Catholics. It really makes them crazy … even though, yes, I still consider myself Jewish. Socially, ethnically, culturally. That will never change.”

According to a throwaway line late in his book, Jews displeased with his religious evolution include many members of his own family.

That minor personal controversy is a pale echo of the raging professional drama that has accompanied Mr. Novak for decades.

“... I have been a stirrer up of strife – for half a century,” he writes in Prince of Darkness. “But I was not merely causing trouble for trouble’s sake.

"I’d like to think I emulated Bertrans de Born in stirring up strife but not in wreaking havoc," he writes a little later, referring to a medieval monk and schismatic, "so that I will avoid an eternity in purgatory with my head in my hand.

"At least I hope so.”

“These same people wrote off John Kerry in October of ’03—‘dead,’ ‘broke,’” McCain strategist John Weaver told The Politico last week. “He won the nomination basically three months later.”

Certainly, they’re similar: Both are Vietnam veterans and longtime Senators who entered the primary season as front-runners.

But it isn’t hard to see grimmer likenesses: a revolving door of campaign consultants, a chronically disappointing cash haul and a media story line mostly centered on process-related chaos. Mr. McCain now finds himself barely clinging to top-tier status, having spent most of the spring trailing in some major polls of G.O.P. primary voters—by double-digit margins in many, placing as low as fourth in one recent Rasmussen poll—and confronting dismal fund-raising numbers.

Like Mr. Kerry in 2004, Mr. McCain is being written off by activists within his party. And like Mr. Kerry, John McCain is counting on New Hampshire to rescue his run.

“We feel very good about the work we’ve done in the early primary states now. We feel good about the ground game,” says McCain communication director Brian Jones. “Certainly the campaign has had to deal with some issues over the past month, over the past few months, that have been very challenging in some respects. But people who write off Senator McCain do so at their own peril.”

Over the past few weeks, the campaign has seemed at least to stabilize itself. After losing a spate of high-profile staffers and consultants—along with more than a third of their staff in budget-mandated cuts—a predicted exodus of major donors and talent to Fred Thompson’s nascent effort hasn’t yet happened.

Now McCain staffers are trying to get some buzz back by plugging details of their mid-summer campaign strategy. This isn’t their first comeback attempt—it isn’t even their first comeback attempt this quarter. But their agenda, which follows the outlines of John Kerry’s ’03-’04 battle plan, is by far their most ambitious effort yet.

The spring reorganization of Mr. McCain’s fund-raising apparatus—a makeover designed to end their money woes by making the effort look a lot more like the Bush machine—will be followed by a marathon nationwide fund-raising sprint, they say. The campaign’s new “systems of accountability” include a multi-tiered finance strategy—a pyramid-shaped donor chart that tops out with 15 “national co-chairs” who have pledged to raise more than a million dollars for the Senator, including New York Stock Exchange C.E.O. John Thain and Cisco Systems C.E.O. John Chambers, with tiers for the McCain 200’s (who have pledged to raise at least $200,000 each) and the McCain 100’s (at least $100,000 each).

As this structure grinds into gear, the campaign is planning at least three dozen fund-raising events over the next month. The Senator will be making a new push on the front end as well, planning a dizzying series of policy forums and town halls on Iraq and energy issues. He’s been preparing exhaustively for a tight schedule of summer speeches, town hall forums and primary debates.

And his campaign has stepped up its attacks on Mitt Romney, whose gains in the polls and among the party establishment have come largely at Mr. McCain’s expense. “In October or November, this kind of back-and-forth can backfire. Voters look for a third candidate to support,” says the University of Virginia political-science professor Larry Sabato. “If they’re going to do it, they can’t do it in six months. They have to act now.”

The campaign had little choice but to play up the upcoming blitz, making the summer strategy into an all-or-nothing gambit. “They’ve ratcheted up expectations—putting all their chips on the table, I guess you could call it,” said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. “If the fund-raising numbers are still disappointing after this, if poll numbers continue to slide, if Fred Thompson skyrockets when he gets in the race, the bad buzz will just become overwhelming.”

In other words, if Mr. McCain is to achieve the sort of comeback victory that Mr. Kerry managed in the 2004 primary, he’ll have to show signs of long-term viability that, for the moment, he’s sorely lacking.

“Success breeds success and failure breeds failure,” observes Democratic strategist Steven Elmendorf, who was deputy campaign manager for John Kerry in 2004. “Primary voters want someone who can win, and John McCain doesn’t look like he can.”

It also experienced one of the biggest internal battles to rock the site since the 2000 election of George W. Bush -- a tumultuous campaign year that nearly tore the site apart, as its founder and chief administrator first cleansed commenting ranks of Bush supporters, then, later, rallied to his support.

At the heart of the latest controversy: the fight over the conservative bona fides of Rudy Giuliani.

Over the past few weeks, chaos has reigned in the “Freeper” community as members sympathetic to the former mayor's candidacy claim to have suffered banishment from the site. They were victimized, they say, by a wave of purges designed to weed out any remaining support for the Giuliani campaign on the popular conservative web forum. Another significant chunk of commenters have migrated away from the controversial site over the action, according to a number of former site members and conservative bloggers who have been tracking the situation.

In a plaintive post on the blog “Sweetness & Light,” exiled commenter Steve Gilbert, who says he does not support the former mayor’s campaign, blasted the site’s new “anti-Giuliani, anti-abortion jihad.” Since George W. Bush was elected president, he wrote, “there haven’t been any large scale [Free Republic] purges to speak of – until now.”

The fight began one month ago, when site founder Jim Robinson posted an anti-Giuliani manifesto titled: “Giuliani as the GOP presidential nominee would be a dagger in the heart of the conservative movement.” Then the virtual ax started to swing. Longtime posters to the freewheeling discussion threads, used to serious no-holds-barred web etiquette, were still stunned by the intensity of the anti-Rudy activity; conservative blogs buzzed with the development.

“Jim Robinson has been going on a tear demonizing Rudy Giuliani, because Rudy (agreeing with the vast majority of Americans), is personally opposed to abortions on a moral level…” complained a user on the GOPUSA Web site. “Anyone who posts any support for Giuliani at the site, if it's at all forceful, will be banned.”

(“Normally, we don't allow complaints about other conservative forums,” chided the moderator, but “…because it is being discussed all over the Internet, I'll make an exception.”)

Just a few months ago, Rudy Giuliani placed second in an early Free Republic straw poll; now, his support on the site has been virtually eliminated. “After the ‘April Purge,’ I don't think there are any Rudybots left around here,” noted Free Republic commenter “upchuck” in one recent post. “And if there are, they're not posting pro-Rudy stuff :).”

The forums weren’t the only venue for the Free Republic’s new antagonism toward Mr. Giuliani, which coincided with a wave of comments expressing similar sentiments from other corners of the conservative movement. A few days after Mr. Giuliani’s equivocal Roe v. Wade comments at the Republican presidential debate on May 3, a new “STOP RUDY NOW News & Information Thread” was featured on the site, and a newly-created stand-alone category debuted via a link from the homepage: “The Giuliani Truth File.” (So far this campaign season, Mr. Giuliani is the only candidate – Republican or Democratic – to be singled out for that level of scrutiny from the Free Republic.)

Why Rudy? Why now? Some conservative bloggers and former commenters contacted for their view of the continuing controversy say they believe that site founder Jim Robinson holds ideologically middling Republicans like Mr. Giuliani responsible for the GOP’s congressional loss and current woes. (They asked that their names be kept out of this story for fear of antagonizing the famously frisky site regulars.)

Others claim that the former mayor’s top-tier status is spurring frantic site administrators into action.
Finally, one popular theory holds that the Free Republic is secretly hoping for another Clinton presidency that would send its Alexa ratings soaring back to levels it hasn’t experienced since its halcyon days of the Clinton impeachment, when a since-soured relationship with blog pioneer Matt Drudge and overwhelming anti-Clinton sentiment in Republican ranks helped make Free Republic one of the hottest Web sites in the nation. It hasn't recovered that luster since the Bush administration took over.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s an observation,” said one blogger, who describes himself as a half-hearted Mitt Romney supporter. “They’ve still got a brand name that means something, but they’re not what they were in terms of real-world impact. A Hillary presidency would get them there.”

Robinson himself could not be reached for comment, but his original post laid out his case against Mr. Giuliani – a graphics-heavy presentation of some of the former mayor’s most damning moderate quotes in mainstream media venues, along with a color-coded report card tracking his less-than-doctrinaire positions on abortion, immigration, gays and guns.

Robinson, it should be noted, famously blasted George W. Bush’s presidential candidacy back in 2000, before a dramatic late-campaign about-face that saw him emerge as one of the GOP ticket’s biggest supporters. But whether or not Free Republic experiences a similar election-year shift this cycle, the site’s current campaign is spreading a dangerous primary-season meme of Rudy Giuliani as big-city liberal – and turning one of the most influential web forums in conservatism into an exclusive gathering place for those who share that view.

A conservative Catholic P.A.C based in a key swing state is planning an anti-Giuliani “multimedia effort” for a June debut. A national network of politically savvy Catholic activists is creating a heavy-hitting Web site—patterned after the controversial Catholics Against Kerry effort in 2004—scheduled to appear around the same time. And earlier this month, a disabled vet working out of his home in Blytheville, Ark., launched an invitation-only “Stop Rudy” social-networking site, where Giuliani-haters from across the nation have begun to meet and coordinate real-world planning from behind the protection of a members-only log-in.

“We’re not going to hide,” said Joseph Cella, executive director of the conservative Catholic advocacy group Fidelis. “We just want to influence the conversation.”

The emergence of the groups at this point in the campaign seems to have been motivated in equal parts by Mr. Giuliani’s worst moment as a Presidential candidate and his best. His painfully equivocal answer to a question about Roe v. Wade at a May 3 Republican debate angered them. His subsequent dramatic recovery at the next debate on May 15—at which the former Mayor turned in a winningly aggressive performance on the subject of Sept. 11—scared them into action.

Fidelis America, the political-action committee of Fidelis, is arguably the best-established of the anti-Rudy organizations, and it’s certainly the most open about its overall strategy. A Michigan-based Catholic organization cleverly designed to navigate the tangle of federal campaign-spending restrictions, the group’s various arms have been registered as political-action committees, independent-expenditure committees and nonprofits.

The organization, whose executive director previously headed the Ave Maria List, a nonprofit political entity founded by Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, is perhaps best known for alleging bias when CNN refused to run one of their issue ads featuring Mother Teresa, but later ran a spot by the pro-choice group NARAL. Fidelis promptly launched an e-mail campaign that crashed the network’s servers within hours.

Fidelis also claims credit for spearheading the development of WithdrawMiers.org, a site that registered more than two million hits during the ideologically moderate former White House counsel’s failed bid for a Supreme Court slot.

Mr. Cella says that the organization will try to provide a comprehensive, Web-based “clearinghouse” of issue-based opposition research, and that it will also engage in the distribution of more traditional negative literature, as when the group recruited a handful of volunteers to network and pass out its anti-Rudy materials at the South Carolina debate earlier this month.

“More is afoot—not just from us, but others,” said Mr. Cella, who has also served as an editor at the popular conservative Web site Redstate.com. “It will be edgy. Creative. Hard-hitting.”

A separate effort from another group of Catholic activists—to operate under the admirably straightforward title of Catholics Against Rudy—will also take aim at Mr. Giuliani’s record on social issues. It’s the brainchild of Georgia lawyer Steve Dillard, best known as the formerly anonymous voice of Southern Appeal, a conservative Catholic legal blog that drew a wide-ranging, fiercely loyal audience until Mr. Dillard outed himself and subsequently retired the site five months ago.

Mr. Dillard, along with other bloggers, commentators and activists who are planning to participate in the effort, are modeling their project on the headline-grabbing Catholics Against Kerry site that targeted the Democratic nominee three years ago. (Organizers say that none of the individuals involved in that operation are principals in the new effort.)

“It’s not a vast right-wing conspiracy,” said Mr. Dillard, “but if you’re active on these issues, you build up networks of people who share your concerns, who are very involved, and who have very significant followings. These aren’t just ‘likely voters’—these are very serious, die-hard activists. And they all have readers and supporters.”

Visitors to the new site, he said, will find themselves at a one-stop shop of anti-Rudy messaging, material and merchandise, including anti-Rudy bumper stickers, T-shirts and other assorted items. (They will be sold at cost to avoid any kind of potential profit—and the F.E.C. scrutiny that would undoubtedly bring.)

It’s a tightrope situation for the Giuliani campaign. No matter how hard-hitting the Web sites prove to be, their target readership will be a critical element of the Republican base. John Kerry’s general-election campaign in 2004 demonstrated the dangers of ignoring such attacks. But a sharp response would likely elevate their profile, and might risk alienating a broader number of socially conservative primary voters.

And there’s no road map for Mr. Giuliani. Experts interviewed for this story said they couldn’t recall a Catholic candidate who’d ever faced such a dilemma in a primary situation before.

The Giuliani campaign, for now, is treading carefully.

“Mayor Giuliani has always been straightforward about where he stands on the issue,” Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella told The Observer. “The Mayor is going to speak to the issues like he always does. He will continue to be straightforward about where he stands.”

The publicity goals for the various campaigns are relatively modest. They are not aiming for massive national followings, huge fund-raising hauls or major media exposure. Their overriding objective is to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of conservative Catholic voters, particularly Reagan Democrats in key swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania—precisely the kind of voters who would be most expected to identify with, and be drawn to, Mr. Giuliani’s working-class Catholic roots. They say they are looking to reach 2 to 3 percent of the electorate—to peel off just enough voters to doom a Giuliani candidacy.

And they will be hard to track. The organizers behind several of these “Stop Rudy” groups, including more than one anonymous effort, say they’re not planning to register as P.A.C.’s or 527’s, or to file reports of any kind with the F.E.C. The Internet provides a haven for these activists, particularly those seeking to preserve their anonymity; they are careful in their description of the infrastructure they are developing.

As long as they remain in isolated groups of “friends and acquaintances” volunteering their time and expertise—as long as they do not openly fund-raise, or create an official hierarchy or public leadership structure—they will likely be able to avoid federal oversight. The most reclusive of them hide behind proxy administrators and refuse interviews entirely.

“We don’t have a precedent, but these efforts could theoretically make a big difference in the primaries, simply because there may still be several candidates in the mix. You don’t have to influence a lot of people to change the result,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life. “And if there were a close general election, this kind of activism can really matter—particularly in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.”

“At the funeral, I went over to him, and he was obviously just drained,” recalled Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee. “And he said to me, ‘I’ve just lost my heart for [public] service. I’ve lost my heart.’”

So, like his fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, Mr. Thompson wound up nursing his psychic wounds in Hollywood’s warm embrace. And he married again, this time to Jeri Kehn, then a 35-year-old political-media consultant for Verner Liipfert in Washington; the couple now has two young children and a gorgeous home in the well-heeled Republican suburb of McLean, Va.

It’s a story that helps explain both his exit from and return to the national political stage in a tidy, family-friendly package—a parable of loss and restoration, with the hero rescued by the role of a lifetime, the love of a good woman and a return to domestic bliss. (The Barbara Walters special, as one political consultant noted, practically scripts itself.)

But it doesn’t quite explain the mystery of how and why the 64-year-old mid-level actor suddenly finds himself a news cycle or two away from joining the top tier of Republican Presidential candidates.

Right now, the former Senator is everywhere and nowhere—a man whose screen presence is ubiquitous, but who is, for the moment, rationing out major media interviews like a late-era Brando. Ever since he told Fox’s Chris Wallace on March 11 that he was contemplating a Presidential run—“I’m giving some thought to it. I’m going to leave the door open”—Republicans have been obsessively parsing his handful of public statements for clues to his intentions.

“Draft Thompson” Web sites appeared and exploded overnight—one site run by a 27-year-old salesman from Memphis received thousands of visitors in its first week alone. And Mr. Thompson’s home-state surrogates, former Senator Howard Baker and Mr. Wamp, flooded the airwaves with Thompson boosterism, racing through dozens of media requests.

(“I have a very good feeling about this,” Mr. Wamp said, juggling a cell phone in a Senate elevator as he squeezed in one last interview on his way from a hearing back to his office. “Very good.”)

Spurred by the flawed Republican line-up of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney, conservative pundits and opinion journals fanned the flames. In late March, a National Review headline read, “Run, Fred, Run!” And in a column on April 2, Robert Novak called the former Senator a front-runner for the role of conservative “messiah.”

Meanwhile, the national press plunged dutifully into the Thompson-linked frenzy, with The Washington Post and USA Today leading a procession of inevitable “Law & Order candidate” headlines.

And Mr. Thompson’s every move across town is, suddenly, news, from his chummy lunch with Romney consultant Alex Castellanos at the Alexandria watering hole Landini’s, to his marathon Mayflower Hotel meetings with former R.N.C. chair Ed Gillespie and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

The buzz has been meticulously cultivated. In addition to the yeoman press work done by his surrogates, Mr. Thompson has now hired former Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo to handle national press. And his planned return to Washington later this month is being plotted with the precision of a military campaign. One advisor says there will likely be an official announcement of some kind within the next two months, if not sooner.

“[Thompson]’s not new at this game,” said Republican consultant Rich Galen. “He just wiggled his nose like that lady on Bewitched, and people swooned. They’re still swooning.

“I think it’s fascinating,” Mr. Galen added, “that by merely, in essence, verbally raising an eyebrow, he goes from not on the [Presidential] list at all to 12 percent.” (He was referring to the latest Rasmussen poll, which has the former Tennessee Senator in third place for the nomination.)

But Why Now?

So why Fred Thompson, and why now? Part of it, certainly, is cosmetic: Mr. Thompson’s craggy visage, comforting demeanor and, of course, considerable camera presence have inspired comparisons to Ronald Reagan from even the most level-headed G.O.P. operatives.

Most of Mr. Thompson’s acting roles have played like slickly produced Presidential auditions: the tough-but-fair military man, the tough-but-fair F.B.I. agent, the tough-but-fair prosecutor—even a President. Law & Order, in which Thompson plays a conservative Southerner who somehow managed to get elected Manhattan D.A., has functioned as an hour-long campaign commercial beamed into the nation’s collective cerebral cortex for the past five years.

“More people will watch Fred Thompson on Law & Order next week than will vote in both parties’ [super] primaries on Feb. 5 next year,” Mr. Galen said.

But the reason given most often by Republican activists and elected officials is simply that they are dissatisfied with the current crop of G.O.P. candidates.

“His success will be largely dependent on whether the current front-runners can somehow broaden their appeal and lock up the nomination early,” said American Conservative Union president David Keene, who said that “right now, there’s no evidence any of them can do that.”

Even Republicans who’ve already publicly pledged their support to one candidate or another seem to share the same grim outlook for the current field. Six in 10 G.O.P. primary voters are dissatisfied with the current crop of candidates, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll.

“McCain’s day has passed,” said one consultant who, six months ago, predicted victory for the Arizona Senator. “He hasn’t been able to make the transition from 2000 candidate to 2008—he hasn’t been able to lock up public support. I think he has a real problem.”

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to be catching on either; in the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, his support drops sharply, from first-tier candidate to asterisk-worthy 3 percent. “You spend millions on infrastructure, all for 3 percent?” Mr. Galen asked. “You are barely a serious candidate.”

And no one stands to be more immediately affected by a Thompson candidacy than Rudy Giuliani, who has so far gotten a pass from Republicans on his liberal social positions and complicated personal background because of a sense that he is the most “electable” candidate in the field.

Mr. Thompson’s prospective entry into the race resulted in an immediate double-digit drop for Mr. Giuliani in the USA Today/Gallup poll.

“It’s possible that none of those guys, regardless of their financial advantage, can put together the kind of support they need to get a majority of the delegates,” said Mr. Keene, talking about the pre-Thompson front-runners. “Then the common wisdom—that if you don’t have $100 million at the starting gates, you can’t win—may be wrong. Someone can come along and jujitsu the thing.”

Back to Reality

But still. Mr. Thompson is a candidate without an exploratory committee, a campaign war chest or a full-time staff. Apart from a few close friends, Mr. Thompson has, as yet, no real inner circle and no coterie of trusted advisors guiding his campaign.

At a time when most G.O.P. Presidential hopefuls are putting as much distance as they can between themselves and the Bush administration, Mr. Thompson has made a point of fund-raising for Scooter Libby’s defense fund.

And in terms of his actual policy positions, Mr. Thompson is hard to identify. He has supported drilling for oil in the Arctic, and is a supporter of gun-owners’ rights. But in other ways, he takes after moderate Republican Howard Baker, his old boss on the Congressional committee that investigated Watergate.

He supported campaign-finance reform and opposed tort reform. He doesn’t support gay marriage, but would still leave the issue up to the states rather than banning it outright. His position on abortion, while officially pro-life, can best be described as a work in progress.

And he supports some immigrant guest-worker programs.

It’s too soon to know whether his ideological squishiness will be a problem. But given the irrelevance of actual details this far into Mr. Thompson’s cinematic Presidential bid, maybe it won’t matter.

“Fred Thompson—well, he’s not Ronald Reagan,” said Mr. Keene. “But he’s done enough, and is well enough liked. He’s a fallback.”

The perfect role.

The venue had been changed to accommodate the mass, but some were still left out of the packed hearing room; the Gore nostalgia along the line was palpable.

"I wish he'd get in [to the presidential race]," said Martin Apple of the Scientific Society Presidents.

Mr. Apple said that he first met Gore when he was a young Senator so worked up over climate change that he jumped on a conference table and waved his arms, in a particularly wonky sort of Tom Cruise moment.

"We need him," he said wistfully. "The country needs him."

It was an impressive turnout for an afternoon hearing that didn’t involve subpoenas or indictable offenses; at least three dozen journalists lined the sides and back of the cavernous hearing room.

When Mr. Gore appeared – in a distinctly un-Presidential grid-patterned shirt and powder-egg blue tie – an excited buzz rose from the room.

"I can imagine a time in the future when our children and grandchildren will look back at us here in 2007 and ask us one of two questions," said Mr. Gore during his testimony, his voice rising. "Either they will ask, ‘What were you thinking?’"

He paused, as the room went silent.

"Or they will ask, ‘How did you find the moral courage to cross party lines and solve this crisis?’"

Oklahoma Senator and global warming arch-skeptic Jim Inhofe – the environmental committee's chair when the GOP controlled the Senate – launched into his allotted question time with relish, pressing Mr. Gore to pledge that his own home would use less energy than the national average within a year. (It was a follow-on the controversial story in The Tennessean about Mr. Gore’s personal energy use that that shared airtime with his triumph at the Oscars).

"First of all, Senator – thanks for your question," said Gore dryly.

The back rows barely stifled their laughter, and a smattering of applause in the mostly sympathetic audience was audible.

Perhaps sensing he was losing the crowd, Mr. Inhofe tried to hold Mr. Gore to straight yes-or-no answers, prompting a testy response at one point from Senator Barbara Boxer, who waved her gavel at him and reminded him that he wasn’t in charge anymore.

The Gore supporters in the room exploded.

But a small but vocal chunk of the audience, sporting anti-Gore stickers, spurred Mr. Inhofe on. “From now on, I’m going to ask you to respond in writing,” insisted the clock-watching Oklahoma senator, who had 15 minutes to grill the former vice president.

“If I respond to you verbally here, I hope it’s okay, too,” responded Gore.

Ms. Boxer stepped in to referee, with the air of a patient fifth grade teacher pushed to her limit. “Senator, I will stop the clock, and allow Senator Gore to speak please.”

A half-dozen teenage girls in Steve Madden shoes collapsed in laughter. A middle-aged woman in a pink sweatshirt and pearls stood and cheered.

Mr. Rushing is heading back to Iraq today, roughly four years after his last trip, and nearly three years after his big-screen debut in the documentary Control Room—Jehane Noujaim’s surprise hit that explored Al-Jazeera and the dynamics of the media war during the chaotic early days of the Iraq invasion. His star turn made blue-state audiences swoon and marked him as a matinee idol for the nervous new century: a U.S. Marine, clean-cut, thoughtful, culturally sensitive.

These days, the blue eyes and Texas drawl are the same, but the new vest won’t be the only change from his last trip to a war zone. His hair is longer now; the combat boots are long gone. And this week, when Mr. Rushing joins a team of American military advisors headed to northern Iraq to help train the Iraqi Army’s Second Infantry Division, he will be an embedded observer, not an officer. “This is my first time ever to enter a combat zone not armed, and not with other Marines, and that—it feels like going to prom in your tighty-whities,” he said. “It feels very naked for me.”

Mr. Rushing, 34, is making his way across uncharted terrain, as one of only a handful of Americans—and the only former military officer—to go to work for the controversial, Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera. Still, he seems so confident in his new path—so at ease with his choice—it’s easy to forget that he initially debuted as an unwitting, and unwilling, media star. He first heard of his role in Control Room via a voicemail from an anonymous stranger shortly after the movie’s film-festival debut: “You don’t know me, but I just saw your movie at Sundance, and I wanted to say thanks.” The veteran public-affairs officer hadn’t signed a release to appear in the documentary; he barely remembered chatting, just once, with a few film students from the American University in Cairo during a single afternoon at CENTCOM. Heart thudding, he headed for the Web. “I Googled ‘Sundance’ and ‘Josh Rushing,’ and there I was,” he said.

Even for a veteran flack like Mr. Rushing, the media learning curve that followed was breathtakingly steep. As his story made its way from the entertainment section to the front page, he found himself muzzled by the Pentagon, his 14-year military career essentially over. As it happened, Mr. Rushing had already started to imagine life outside uniform. “I left [the military] because it occurred to me that I finally had a platform to say something that only I could say,” he said as he perched on the edge of his chair, sleeves rolled up, just a few feet from the buzzing Al-Jazeera newsroom. The bureau is housed on several floors of a nondescript K Street building just a few blocks from the White House; Mr. Rushing’s sunny office is dominated by Longhorns paraphernalia and family snapshots. “Only I could—because I was the only one who had that vantage point. And also, I had the right background where I could go onto Bill O’Reilly’s show and tell him that he should reconsider Al-Jazeera, and he couldn’t dismiss me as some lefty from somewhere.”

Now Al-Jazeera English has given Mr. Rushing a permanent platform—albeit one that’s still virtually unavailable on U.S. cable systems (“Thank God for YouTube,” he said). The network went live less than five months ago, but Mr. Rushing has already churned out an impressive stream of investigative pieces—reports on rural America and foreign child soldiers, the mechanics of military training and Hollywood’s portrayal of Arab characters; soon after he gets back from his embed, he’ll be heading to Moscow to report on a special on the weapon of revolution, the AK-47. “Josh is a natural,” said Joanne Levine, an AJE executive producer and Nightline vet, who puts Mr. Rushing in the same category as other high-profile news personalities she’s worked with, like Peter Jennings and Bob Woodruff. “He has that charisma—a presence that pops just off of the screen.”

BUT MR. RUSHING'S APPEAL AND APPROACH aren’t quite that of the traditional broadcast newsman; his method seems inextricably linked with the audience’s perception of his persona and story—the political as personal as political. One of his early projects for the network was Spin: The Art of Selling War—a mea culpa of sorts, where he systematically debunked talking points he’d spouted in his former career (the special featured a parallel penitent appearance by a regret-wracked Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff). After an innovative, extended series of cuts from press-conference footage of President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to eerily similar Gulf of Tonkin–era remarks by Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Rushing steered the special to unusual territory for a foreign-policy piece: the reporter himself. As a result, the broadcast—a scathing j’accuse directed at administration policy—wound up in a place far more raw than traditional, objective journalism, with Mr. Rushing as a sort of Al-Jazeera Anderson Cooper: the same earnest emotiveness, the same blue-eyed magnetism. The production values were top-of-the-line, the reporting rock-solid—but clearly, for good or ill, 60 Minutes this wasn’t.

In an early draft of his upcoming book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World (coming later this spring from Palgrave Macmillan), Mr. Rushing keeps up that balancing act, trying to reconcile the advocate he was and the journalist he’s become into some crusading combination of the two. “This is a strange time for America. Everywhere it seems people are seeing things through a prism of their own fears and stereotypes,” Mr. Rushing wrote, adding that he was “trying to practice a form of journalism that is skeptical and challenging in a news environment that seems increasingly less so.” The book chronicles his journey from a teenage Marine out of small-town Texas to the public face of Al-Jazeera English, including a behind-the-scenes look at CENTCOM’s press operation during the early days of the conflict, and a bracingly candid account of his growing disillusionment with the war on terror. “I [often] find myself traversing the battle lines of American’s struggle with the worst of itself,” he wrote. There have been no terror attacks since 9/11, but “reports from the front lines of America’s greater jihad—the struggle for our soul, for what is best in us—are much more grim.”

For the past few months, Mr. Rushing has been edging his way back to the battlefield, feeling around the margins of the story that helped define Al-Jazeera: the Iraq War. If Mr. Rushing is his network’s own Anderson Cooper, then this is his return to the Big Easy. “I feel personally responsible for what’s going on there [in Iraq],” he said last week. “Not that I did all of it, but anyone, I think, who was involved in the beginning and believed in the reasons we were doing it and thought we were creating a better situation for these people—now, clearly, it’s not a better situation—has to feel some sense of personal responsibility and desire to some way be involved in trying to make that right. And if my way of making that right involves asking the right questions, the tough questions, and examining what we’re doing there, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Mr. Rushing’s wife Paige, he says, is “nervous as hell” about his embed. He pauses. “Um, I don’t blame her …. I think there was some sense she had that when I got out of the Marine Corps, she was like, ‘Whew, we made it through; we’re done.’ And now the fact I’m going back—she thought she was done with that, and, of course, we’re not. We’re not done with that.” His son Luke is nearly 15; baby Ethan Coltrane is getting close to his first birthday. Meanwhile, back in Lone Star, Tex.—where his father is a volunteer firefighter and his mom works for the city council—his supportive parents are already dealing with the fallout from their son’s new line of work. “I feel for them in many ways, more than anyone, because—it’s easy for me being in Washington and taking the heat. But they have to explain to their friends on the fire force … to their friends at church, who—it’s not the same kind of international crowd as here,” he said quietly. “And it shouldn’t necessarily be their burden to have to explain. But, of course, they do. So I really feel for them, because in many ways they have the tougher fight to fight than I do.”

This resistance to Mr. Rushing—less to the man himself than to the ideas and ethos he has come to represent—has, at times, gotten in the way of his reporting. His recent attempt to join U.S. forces in Iraq wasn’t his first try at an embed slot. In the months before Al-Jazeera English’s official launch, he made a futile bid to join U.S. forces in Iraq—but, he says, U.S. officials in Baghdad told him that military policy prohibited Al-Jazeera from participating in the embed program. (Actually, the Arabic-language network was given permission to embed in the early days of the war, before its relationship with the Pentagon soured completely.)

IN THE IRAQ WAR'S EARLY DAYS, relations between the administration and the Arabic-language network famously fractured over the latter’s editorial leanings. Now, new leadership in military public affairs is trying to change the way the coalition deals with Al-Jazeera and the rest of the Arab media. (This reassessment of existing policy extends to American reporters as well—recently, a Defense Department representative embarked on an informal listening tour of major broadcast bureaus in New York and Washington, sounding out producers and correspondents on ways the military might alter the evolving embed program, among other issues.) It’s still a work in progress, but the changing attitudes are part of what made Mr. Rushing’s journey possible.

Meanwhile, although the Marine Corps may not have come around (“The Marine Corps [and I are] a bit like a bad relationship,” Mr. Rushing said. “They haven’t quite gotten over the breakup. ”), large swaths of the officer corps in the other services have quietly embraced the former captain. At least once or twice a month, Mr. Rushing is invited to address large military gatherings on bases nationwide. He’s made repeat appearances at West Point and Annapolis—including the former’s counterterrorism training center—and spoken at the commencement ceremonies of most of the military’s freshly minted public-affairs officers. In the months before he left for Iraq, he addressed the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, as well as the National Defense University. “There’s a sense, if you’re doing the right thing, that you have nothing to hide and you want everyone to see it—particularly those who accuse you of not doing the right thing,” Mr. Rushing said. “So I think [military officers] see in Al-Jazeera an audience that they would very much like to see what they’re doing here, because they believe in what they’re doing.”

He understands the military’s mission, he said, and he supports it. But he no longer views it as his own. “I’m at a point in my life where the questions are more important than the answers,” he said. “It’s a new way of approaching things for me …. I started out with all the answers, and now I’ve worked my way back to the questions.”

Usually, that event doesn’t hit its stride until well into the night. This year, it was barely 9 p.m. when organizers began herding tipsy state reps and starry-eyed college students out into the warm Washington night.

Still reeling from last fall’s epic losses in the House and Senate, the conservatives who showed up weren’t in a particularly festive mood. (Appropriately, perhaps, the biggest news story out of the gathering was the unfortunately timed re-emergence of Ann Coulter, who suggested that Democrat John Edwards was a “faggot.”)

In fact, only one person seemed to come out of the weekend with much to celebrate: Rudy Giuliani, whose strong second-place showing in the CPAC straw poll on March 2—along with a simultaneous photo-finish second-place win in a straw poll in conservative South Carolina, and an enormous lead in a new Newsweek survey—seemed to solidify his surprising position as the man to beat in the G.O.P. Presidential sweepstakes.

But even as Mr. Giuliani scored a symbolic victory with his strong showing at the conference, it was clear that the feelings toward him weren’t so much enthusiasm as resignation. Consistent with a deep distrust of the twice-divorced former mayor among the country’s most prominent social conservatives, activist after activist at the conference lamented that there were just no good options this year, and that Mr. Giuliani simply looked like the most likely winner in an election against Hillary Clinton.

“He’s the only one that can beat her,” said one West Coast radio host, nursing a scotch in the hotel bar after the Norquist party dissolved. “He’s not perfect, but he’s the best we can do.”

Out of Mr. Giuliani’s trifecta of weekend triumphs, last weekend’s CPAC vote was arguably the most important. Sure, straw polls are a fairly meaningless exercise—the D.N.C. had a staffer surreptitiously circling through the national press area at the event with a helpful list of previous “winners” including names like Gary Bauer—but you couldn’t beat this year’s vote for sheer symbolism.

Northeastern social liberals have not traditionally done well in this particular beauty contest. But while CPAC attendees may not have been in love with Mr. Giuliani—their hearts belong to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, and Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado—they seemed, at least, to be fond of his prospects.

“He can win,” said 24-year-old Ember Bishop, who had previously seen the former Mayor during his recent visit to Gainesville, Ga. “He may be the only one who can. And we have to win.”

Of course, it may have helped Mr. Giuliani that his main rival in the polls, Senator John McCain, wasn’t there.

(According to a number of sources involved in organizing the conference, Mr. McCain’s campaign planned to skip the event, then tried to book space at the Omni Shoreham after learning that Mr. Giuliani was attending, then skipped the event anyway. The campaign disputes this account, pointing to the Senator’s prior commitment to attend a fund-raiser in Utah.)

And despite Mr. Giuliani’s strong showing, the conference this weekend served to illustrate some of the logistical shortcomings of his campaign, which only recently hired its first full-time staffer in the crucial primary state of Iowa.

Visitors couldn’t go five feet in the bowels of the Omni Shoreham without running into a smiling volunteer for CPAC straw-poll winner Mitt Romney. The Giuliani campaign didn’t do any visible campaigning at all.

Yes, the light footprint was, at least in part, deliberately contrived. Having no visible organization on hand meant that a strong showing would look a lot like victory. It worked for the national media, which generally took the results as a win for Mr. Giuliani and a loss of sorts for Mr. Romney.

But the hands-off approach left fervent Giuliani supporters at CPAC high and dry, and well-connected converts, in essence, standing at the altar.

The former Mayor’s only visible grassroots effort came from Martha Stamp, a Rhode Island grandmother who spent the weekend sporting a homemade “RUDY” sign taped onto her wide-brimmed straw hat, and from a handful of college students in off-the-rack suits who met on a Rudy Giuliani fan club on Facebook. The group carried handmade signs—“Red Sox Fans for Rudy” and “Ladies ❤ Rudy”—in an epic, vain effort to meet the former Mayor, who was already gone by the time ABC reporter Jake Tapper tracked them down just after his speech.

(“Now, we’re going to turn the camera on—and when I say the Mayor’s name, that’s when you cheer,” he said. “If you want to cheer, of course.”)

“You know how many R.N.C. delegates are here?” asked veteran conservative activist Paul Caprio, as volunteers from rival campaigns tried to out-shout each other outside the exhibit hall and a man in a “Flip Romney” dolphin suit wandered past. “Easily 200 to 300—maybe more. You need to give them a way to get involved. But Rudy has no real grassroots operation just yet. And time is running out.”

Mr. Giuliani was also the only visiting candidate who didn’t make himself available to the talk-show hosts and bloggers based down in the riotous exhibit hall of the hotel, an oversight that had most of them grumbling behind their laptops. “It’s not rocket science,” said conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, surrounded by a sea of rapturous fans. “If you’re trying to win the base, you might try talking to them.”

Then there was his speech. The buildup was promising, with the venue at full capacity. But unfortunately for Mr. Giuliani, he followed National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, whose rousing, us-against-the-world speech had the crowd on its feet.

By comparison, Mr. Giuliani—fresh from the 8 a.m. Acela—seemed tired, almost distracted. And his speech, heavy on qualifiers and careful distinctions, low on culture-war references, seemed to suck all the energy out of the room. He slipped in and out of the conference so fast that many attendees didn’t even realize he’d shown up until hours later. (Writer George Will, who introduced Mr. Giuliani, seemed dynamic by comparison.)

Shortly afterward, down in the exhibit hall, Mr. Caprio was grumbling to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. “We need a new guy in the race,” he said. “The ones we have now just aren’t cutting it.”