Edmund Morris, the authorized biographer, famously spent years trying to understand Reagan and wound up not simply adopting the techniques of fiction writing, but actually writing fiction—another guy who didn’t get it.

Although I’ve read a few of the 900 or so books about Ronald Reagan, I’m not deeply enough immersed in Reaganania to be able to say whether or not Mr. Reeves has succeeded where others have failed. But as a student of Mr. Reeves’ previous books on John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, I can say that he has successfully applied his formula to Reagan, which means that this book, like Mr. Reeves’ others, is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the man and the times.

This is not a biography; it’s a study of a Presidency, one of the most important Presidencies of the 20th century. And while Mr. Reeves acknowledges that he doesn’t share Reagan’s political ideology, his portrait of this President is devoid of ideological sparring. The author is interested in how power works, in how and why events unfolded as they did. He’s not looking to score debating points on issues most of us have forgotten.

As he did in his studies of the Kennedy and Nixon Presidencies, Mr. Reeves organizes his chapters to coincide with noteworthy dates. And so Chapter 2, for example, is entitled “March 30, 1981”—the day Reagan was shot. The technique sometimes leads to confusion, because some chapters seem to suggest a theme but wind up reprising months of backstory. The narrative thread remains intact, however, a credit to Mr. Reeves’ storytelling abilities.

The Ronald Reagan who emerges from these pages is a good deal more engaged, at least during his first term, than popular myth would have it. Mr. Reeves shows him working over Congress, especially Democrats, to get his agenda through. The President kept notes: After charming a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, Ron Mottl, Reagan wrote on a card: “Says he’s with us. Says he & I are going to be ­real friends.”

Mr. Reeves understands politics, which means he understands that this kind of touch can make the difference between a successful Presidency and a failed one. For an example of the latter, see Jimmy Carter, who, as the author points out, kept even his fellow Democrats in Congress at a distance.

There are more than a few cringe-inducing passages, particularly when Mr. Reeves is writing about the last couple of years of the Reagan Presidency. Readers inclined to believe that Reagan was little more than a front man, slightly daft and out of touch, will have their suspicions confirmed. For example, when CBS reporter Lesley Stahl arrived at the Oval Office with her husband and child for a courtesy visit in 1986, she was shocked by the President’s appearance and state of mind (or lack thereof): “He looked shriveled to her,” Mr. Reeves writes. “His skin was like paper, his hands dotted with age spots …. His eyes seemed milky and she wasn’t sure he actually knew who she was.” Press secretary Larry Speakes bellowed out her name and network affiliation, apparently to no avail. But when Ms. Stahl mentioned that her husband was a screenwriter, Reagan came alive, sat down with him and talked movies.

That’s the Ronald Reagan of his critics’ imagination. Yet for every story about Reagan’s short and sporadic attention span, there are others like this one, from the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. Mr. Reeves notes that the military officers conducting a final briefing believed the President wasn’t paying attention. But when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, was about to leave the Oval Office, Reagan took him aside and asked him how many troops would take part in the action. “Vessey gave him the number,” Mr. Reeves writes; the general was then startled to hear the commander in chief order him to double it. By way of explanation, Reagan reminded Vessey that if Jimmy Carter had used 18 helicopters rather than nine during the ill-fated hostage-rescue attempt in Iran, “you’d be briefing him now instead of me.”

That’s a glimpse of the real Ronald Reagan. He was not a ninny, nor was he a master of policy detail. But he had terrific political instincts.

There are hundreds of similar Reagan anecdotes which feel new or are worth revisiting. Even when Mr. Reeves is dealing with familiar issues, his use of diaries and conversations show his subject doing more than simply following stage directions—though he was pretty good at that, too.

What separates this book from so many others is that Mr. Reeves very subtly has written a post-9/11 assessment of the Reagan Presidency. The landing of Marines in Beirut in 1982, the capture of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro, the administration’s debates over pre-emptive action against terrorists—all this resonates in ways that it wouldn’t have six years ago.

The gang’s all here: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Reeves notes without comment the roles they played. There’s Mr. Rumsfeld, secretly arranging an American alliance with Saddam; there’s Mr. Perle, trying to block any negotiations with the Soviet Union as it nears its collapse; and there’s Mr. Wolfowitz, co-producing a drama (literally) on Middle East affairs for the President’s edification.

Much of this book focuses on Reagan’s forays into international affairs, from Central America to the Philippines (where he backed the odious Marcos regime until the bitter end) to, of course, the Soviet Union. Mr. Reeves notes—almost in passing—that it was during these years that the deindustrialization of America took place, an economic calamity for millions. I’d have liked to read more about Reagan’s complicity in that disaster, if only to figure out why so many steelworkers wound up voting for him in 1984.

Putting together a narrative of a much-chronicled Presidency is not for the faint of heart. Richard Reeves, one of the finest journalists of his generation, is made of sterner stuff, and our understanding of Ronald Reagan is the better for it.

Terry Golway, city editor of The Observer, is co-author, with Robert Dallek, of Let Every Nation Know: The Oratory of John F. Kennedy, to be published in April by Sourcebooks.

Edmund Morris, the authorized biographer, famously spent years trying to understand Reagan and wound up not simply adopting the techniques of fiction writing, but actually writing fiction—another guy who didn’t get it.

Although I’ve read a few of the 900 or so books about Ronald Reagan, I’m not deeply enough immersed in Reaganania to be able to say whether or not Mr. Reeves has succeeded where others have failed. But as a student of Mr. Reeves’ previous books on John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, I can say that he has successfully applied his formula to Reagan, which means that this book, like Mr. Reeves’ others, is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the man and the times.

This is not a biography; it’s a study of a Presidency, one of the most important Presidencies of the 20th century. And while Mr. Reeves acknowledges that he doesn’t share Reagan’s political ideology, his portrait of this President is devoid of ideological sparring. The author is interested in how power works, in how and why events unfolded as they did. He’s not looking to score debating points on issues most of us have forgotten.

As he did in his studies of the Kennedy and Nixon Presidencies, Mr. Reeves organizes his chapters to coincide with noteworthy dates. And so Chapter 2, for example, is entitled “March 30, 1981”—the day Reagan was shot. The technique sometimes leads to confusion, because some chapters seem to suggest a theme but wind up reprising months of backstory. The narrative thread remains intact, however, a credit to Mr. Reeves’ storytelling abilities.

The Ronald Reagan who emerges from these pages is a good deal more engaged, at least during his first term, than popular myth would have it. Mr. Reeves shows him working over Congress, especially Democrats, to get his agenda through. The President kept notes: After charming a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, Ron Mottl, Reagan wrote on a card: “Says he’s with us. Says he & I are going to be ­real friends.”

Mr. Reeves understands politics, which means he understands that this kind of touch can make the difference between a successful Presidency and a failed one. For an example of the latter, see Jimmy Carter, who, as the author points out, kept even his fellow Democrats in Congress at a distance.

There are more than a few cringe-inducing passages, particularly when Mr. Reeves is writing about the last couple of years of the Reagan Presidency. Readers inclined to believe that Reagan was little more than a front man, slightly daft and out of touch, will have their suspicions confirmed. For example, when CBS reporter Lesley Stahl arrived at the Oval Office with her husband and child for a courtesy visit in 1986, she was shocked by the President’s appearance and state of mind (or lack thereof): “He looked shriveled to her,” Mr. Reeves writes. “His skin was like paper, his hands dotted with age spots …. His eyes seemed milky and she wasn’t sure he actually knew who she was.” Press secretary Larry Speakes bellowed out her name and network affiliation, apparently to no avail. But when Ms. Stahl mentioned that her husband was a screenwriter, Reagan came alive, sat down with him and talked movies.

That’s the Ronald Reagan of his critics’ imagination. Yet for every story about Reagan’s short and sporadic attention span, there are others like this one, from the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. Mr. Reeves notes that the military officers conducting a final briefing believed the President wasn’t paying attention. But when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, was about to leave the Oval Office, Reagan took him aside and asked him how many troops would take part in the action. “Vessey gave him the number,” Mr. Reeves writes; the general was then startled to hear the commander in chief order him to double it. By way of explanation, Reagan reminded Vessey that if Jimmy Carter had used 18 helicopters rather than nine during the ill-fated hostage-rescue attempt in Iran, “you’d be briefing him now instead of me.”

That’s a glimpse of the real Ronald Reagan. He was not a ninny, nor was he a master of policy detail. But he had terrific political instincts.

There are hundreds of similar Reagan anecdotes which feel new or are worth revisiting. Even when Mr. Reeves is dealing with familiar issues, his use of diaries and conversations show his subject doing more than simply following stage directions—though he was pretty good at that, too.

What separates this book from so many others is that Mr. Reeves very subtly has written a post-9/11 assessment of the Reagan Presidency. The landing of Marines in Beirut in 1982, the capture of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro, the administration’s debates over pre-emptive action against terrorists—all this resonates in ways that it wouldn’t have six years ago.

The gang’s all here: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Reeves notes without comment the roles they played. There’s Mr. Rumsfeld, secretly arranging an American alliance with Saddam; there’s Mr. Perle, trying to block any negotiations with the Soviet Union as it nears its collapse; and there’s Mr. Wolfowitz, co-producing a drama (literally) on Middle East affairs for the President’s edification.

Much of this book focuses on Reagan’s forays into international affairs, from Central America to the Philippines (where he backed the odious Marcos regime until the bitter end) to, of course, the Soviet Union. Mr. Reeves notes—almost in passing—that it was during these years that the deindustrialization of America took place, an economic calamity for millions. I’d have liked to read more about Reagan’s complicity in that disaster, if only to figure out why so many steelworkers wound up voting for him in 1984.

Putting together a narrative of a much-chronicled Presidency is not for the faint of heart. Richard Reeves, one of the finest journalists of his generation, is made of sterner stuff, and our understanding of Ronald Reagan is the better for it.

Terry Golway, city editor of The Observer, is co-author, with Robert Dallek, of Let Every Nation Know: The Oratory of John F. Kennedy, to be published in April by Sourcebooks.

A standing-room-only crowd in the wood-paneled library at the House of the Redeemer got plenty of insight. But in the end, the friendly banter over political tactics and mores gave way to hard talk on the same issue that divides Americans lower down the political ladder.

"It’s amazing how this damn campaign keeps focusing," said the moderator, Presidential biographer Richard Reeves. "No matter where you jump into the funnel, it comes out Iraq."

The group’s two Republicans, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld and G.O.P. strategist Kieran Mahoney, did depart from their party’s line to criticize President Bush for failing to reach toward the middle.

"I think Bush’s biggest misstep was not to think there’s a center in American politics and to try to appeal to the people who elected this guy governor of Massachusetts and George Pataki governor of New York," said Mr. Mahoney, gesturing to Mr. Weld, who was seated to his right at the Oct. 11 event.

"I’d go with what Kieran said on the President reaching the middle," Mr. Weld agreed.

But if politics used to stop at the water’s edge, that’s where the hardball started among the panelists—former Governor Mario Cuomo, Mr. Weld, Democratic lawyer David Boies, political analyst John Ellis, Pataki advisor Mr. Mahoney and Democratic National Committee advisor Howard Wolfson. Genial debate over the Electoral College and the mechanics of polling quickly slipped into sharp attacks on President George W. Bush and quick parries by his defenders.

"He took a lot of lives that maybe he didn’t have to take," Mr. Cuomo said.

Mr. Boies, who is promoting his recent memoir Courting Justice, sparred with Mr. Ellis over the effect of the Iraq invasion.

"I don’t see how anybody can deny the fact that our invasion of Iraq has stimulated additional hostility, additional recruitment [to Al Qaeda], additional danger. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth going in. But you can’t say that we’re safer today because of Iraq. You can hope that we’ll be safer 10 years from now," Mr. Boies said.

"I think you can say that we’re safer today," responded Mr. Ellis, who is also a fellow at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, and who made a stronger claim than even Mr. Bush typically does. "I think the U.S. is out of the equation for them now," he said of Al Qaeda and associated groups.

Mr. Mahoney was also unfazed by the prospect of tangling with one of the nation’s top trial lawyers, accusing Mr. Boies of indulging in hindsight. "If you suggest in advance that the negative outcome would take place [if] you do something, that’s an interesting argument and a political twist, but it’s not a substantive remark about what’s going on in Iraq," Mr. Mahoney said.

"Let’s stick with what we know is a mistake, O.K.?" Mr. Boies responded, listing false American prewar assumptions and concluding, "Now it may still be that people think it was the right thing to do to go into Iraq, but I do not believe that we would have gone into Iraq if we’d known those things in advance."

Two of the participants also offered an unusually close view into the two Presidential candidates and how they make their decisions. Mr. Ellis, who is the nephew of former President George H.W. Bush and the first cousin of the current President, said the notion of an isolated executive in his "bubble" is a cliché.

"If you have a large network of friends and sort of informal advisors and so on and so forth, you do have a lot of people coming at you every day with advice and jokes and stories," Mr. Ellis said. "In this President Bush’s case, he has a network of people who sort of present him with other ideas and things to read and so on and so forth."

Mr. Weld, Senator Kerry’s antagonist in the 1996 Massachusetts Senate race, said he thought the real John Kerry had finally emerged.

"I think that the John Kerry you’re seeing right now, the anti-war John Kerry, that’s the real John Kerry," he said. "The vote where he was standing on one leg and craning his neck a little bit, I think, was the vote to authorize the use of force before the second [Persian Gulf] war."

If there was anything the two sides of the table agreed on, it was the difficulty of predicting the outcome of the Nov. 2 balloting.

"Millions of new voters in swing states—no one knows who’s going to get these folks out, whether they’re going to come out, what motivates them," Mr. Wolfson said. "I don’t think anybody here would venture a guess as to what that will do to polling models going forward."

Mr. Mahoney concurred.

"I believe both parties are flying a little bit blind on this one," he said.

RICHARD REEVES: With Governor Weld representing the incumbent and Governor Cuomo representing the loyal opposition: Is this the election of our lifetime, or is this just business as usual?

WILLIAM WELD: Well, it’s the election of our lifetime in terms of political theater. I mean it’s been obvious since March, I think, that this is a pay-to-get-in type of contest. Not only because it’s so evenly matched, but because the candidates are so totally different, not only in their ideology, but in their approach to the election. As I look at the debates, the contrast in style could not be more obvious.

I think that John Kerry, as I know too well for my sins, is the most articulate debater in American public life active on this stage to this day. The gentlemen to my right would give him a run for his money, but aside from that, I don’t really think of a lot of other company in that crowd.

I had a problem when I was debating John in that I didn’t listen closely enough to what he said, the middle of the ripostes back and forth. And they were well-written paragraphs that could have been drawn from a tractatus. He really is amazing in that sense and I think will have the upper hand in the debates. At the same, I think the President has laid down some pretty good markers which are going to come back at Senator Kerry in the final analysis, and perhaps just as voters are going to the booth.

How are you going to assemble a coalition of allies when you’re against the whole thing and say it’s a grand diversion? And that’s sort of maybe a hit below the water line in my estimation. But I wish the airwaves were not so rife with Bush-bashing and Kerry-bashing. I live in New York City, so I have to keep my mouth shut when I go out to dinner. I spend a fair amount of time in the investment business in the Midwest, and the laughter there in the coffee shops is in the opposite direction. I don’t think it should be so. I’ve known both nominees pretty well since every election since 1988, and there’s not a loser in the group. But that’s hard to prove in these degenerate days.

CUOMO: First of all, as to the nature of the debate—I think it’s awful, actually. How do we get our information in this campaign? Principally from three sources, all television. One is a couple of hundred million dollars worth of 28-second ads which in their nature have to be distorted; they’re so tight, they’re so small, and the subjects are so big.

And then two conventions, which are both exercises in political narcissism, which is you describe whatever is good about you and your candidate, you exaggerate it, [and] you omit anything that’s commendable about your adversary and exaggerate their faults. That was done better by the Republicans than the Democrats this time around, which accounted for them doing so well. And then the two debates or three debates. The best of the three possibilities.

Why not have an unconventional convention, three days of debates—Biden debates Colin Powell; have Clarke debate Rumsfeld, have Robert Rubin debate Snow on the deficit, etc. And then have the candidates debate. But not 30 seconds to answer the questions. I don’t measure the possibility of making an excellent President by glibness and memory, which is what these debates are, or theatricality if you’ve got the Clinton flair for theatricality. If you have President Bush’s great strength, that impressionism, he creates wonderful impressions with the way he moves and sounds—his utter sincerity. Even Ralph Walden Emerson’s "foolish consistency" you can convert into a virtue—you say "hard work" often enough and you might even be fooled into thinking he’s working hard. So all in all, there are better ways to do it, and I wish we could think about that.

KIERAN MAHONEY: Frankly, in a historical context, the Reagan-Carter election was much more momentous because it was dealing with Communism and the Cold War, which was frankly a larger issue, if perhaps less politically acute than how you deal with terrorism. And I think that the fundamental questions with regard to how to conduct that war are in fact the largest albatross that hangs on the Kerry Presidential campaign at the moment.

REEVES: This is the greatest democracy in the world—250 million people—how did two guys who went to school together end up running against each other, if our system is as diverse as we like to think it is?

JOHN ELLIS: I think because it’s not as diverse as we like to think it is, and you know a big thing about running for President today is that you have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and so people who have those networks, and are able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, are the ones that emerge as the nominees. Bush raised $180 million; Kerry raised roughly the same amount. Equal amounts have been raised for both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, so you’re talking something like $550 million. You need wealthy networks to build that kind of wealth.

MAHONEY: The real question is what does it take to be the nominee of either party? And I don’t think its bequeathed exclusively to Yale students, but you need—if money nominated people, Howard Dean would be the nominee, and Bush with all the structural advantages of being an incumbent governor of Texas damn near lost to McCain, who raised most of his money through the Internet after an upset victory in New Hampshire, where he was underfunded, and I think that the modern American political dynamic is in fact much less hierarchical and much less money-oriented to become the nominee. Once you’re the nominee, obviously, the interests of both parties align behind you.

HOWARD WOLFSON: Just a quick thought on the explosion of Internet funding. It’s cheaper to raise money over the Internet, and it speaks to how engaged and interested people are in this election. They’re giving over the Internet. And Democrats have essentially raised as much as Republicans, despite expectations that we would not.

REEVES: I grew up in Jersey City, across the river, so the honesty and integrity, etc., of elections …. But I thought that was over. I think, like most Americans, I was shocked at the thought that dishonesty—electoral dishonesty—hadn’t kind of died with Mayor Daley, and anyway the Republicans were stealing votes in the south of Illinois, so you thought this is a great country. Are our elections honest?

DAVID BOIES: I think our elections are basically honest. I think that what has happened relates to how sharply divided the country is—and I don’t know if this is the most important election we’ve ever had, but in my lifetime it is the most sharply divided election we’ve ever had. There were differences obviously between Carter and Reagan, Goldwater and Johnson, but the country was not as sharply divided as it is here. Here you have probably 40 percent of the country that is not only not going to vote for the [other] candidate, but despises that candidate.

Part of that has to do with the negative advertising, part of that has to do with the nature of the issue involved. That division I think has led to much more partisan treatment of the elections. I think that in terms of stuffing ballot boxes and out-and-out fraud, I think there’s probably less of that than there used to be. But what you find—and, for example, what from my perspective you found in the last election in Florida—I think is different than what we have seen in prior cases. I don’t think that has to do with the fact that the people involved are less honest or less good; I think it has to do with how sharply the country is divided and how everybody is pushing for an advantage of what they think is the right side.

REEVES: Would you be surprised if one candidate or the other wins by six or seven points?

MAHONEY: I would be astonished if a candidate wins by more than five in this race. I just think, to David’s earlier point, we’ve been doing research for 30 years, we’ve never seen the polarization there is. Pew Research says that as well. Everybody I speak to in the business, and I speak to lots of people in the business, been around for a long time … the delta that’s largely created by Bush—not by the Democrats; it’s a reaction to Bush, fundamentally—is as large and deep as it’s ever been in American politics. You talked about Reagan playing to the middle. This is a President who has no interest whatsoever in doing that, and it’s really had a profound impact on both parties.

WOLFSON: We’ve had the largest increase in new voter registrations in a generation, if not ever, this last cycle. Both parties—more on the Democratic side, but also on the Republican side. You’ve got these 527’s, these independent organizations, mostly on the Democratic side, the progressive side. Millions of new voters in swing states—no one knows who’s going to get these folks out, whether they’re going to come out, what motivates them. So when pollsters attempt to look at these numbers, it’s very confusing, and I don’t think anybody here would venture a guess as to what that will do to polling models going forward.

REEVES: You agree with that?

MAHONEY: Professionally, I believe both parties are flying a little bit blind on this one, because it just never happened before and every situation’s new and unique now.

WELD: Let me ask Howard—I was struck by the answers that the two candidates gave to an abortion question in the second debate. President Bush said ‘No, we’re not going to have financing for abortions,’ and he talked about the partial-birth ban. Senator Kerry said, ‘I’m going to be President of all the people.’ You couldn’t really prove whether he was pro-choice or pro-life from that answer. I wondered, when I heard that, are the Democrats prospecting for voters absolutely in the middle there who might be turned off by a declarative statement there, and are the Republicans playing more to the base?

WOLFSON: Well, I do think Republicans are playing more to the base. But I don’t think there’s any confusion about Senator Kerry’s position on the issue of choice. I think voters in this country will know and do know that he’s solidly pro-choice. BOIES: In terms of the answer, though, he also said in that same answer that he did not think that people who could not afford that choice ought to have the money to pay for it. And he explicitly said that he was in favor of funding abortions for those who couldn’t afford it.

I also think that he made that very clear when he talked about the importance of the Supreme Court in this election, saying that this election can determine a woman’s right to choose more than any other election that we’ve had. This is an election that’s going to set the character of the United States Supreme Court for the next two and maybe two and a half decades, and if you think of the kinds of issues that are out there, from affirmative action to a woman’s right to choose and those kinds of issues, that is, I think, a lot of what is dividing the country, and I think Kerry was quite clear on where he stood on that.

REEVES: Bill, you’ve been in this business for a long time. I happened to have dinner last night with a guy who had run for President and began to talk about how debilitating it was. I said, ‘What is the worst thing about running for President?’ And he said, ‘The amount you have to lie.’ He said that you have to go to Michigan and lie about what you really believe about auto emissions, as Senator Kerry has backed off his positions because of Michigan. You have to go to Florida and say we’re going to sink Cuba into the sea whatever happens. You have to go to New York and, if people ask about Israel, you can’t tell them what you actually believe, you have to tell them what they want to hear. Is lying more acceptable today in politics than when you started, or in the whole society itself?

WELD: I really don’t think it’s more acceptable in politics, and of the three professions I’ve been in—politics, law and business—politics is the one where it’s most important to have your word be good. You get caught out absolutely dead if your word is not good, in my view. You know, I’ve been known as something of an enfant terrible in the Republican Party, and one of the things that that means is I have not gone out of my way to shade what I may have thought. I may be a prominent liberal on social issues and a prominent right-winger on crime and taxes issues, but I’ve always had fun with that, and I’ve as a result not found the process of standing for office to be draining.

REEVES: Is lying acceptable now in our society, even if you get caught?

CUOMO: It depends. There are a lot of things you can do with lying. For example, you can use the Jesuit definition: Lying is the withholding or distorting of truth to someone who has the right not to be deceived, and you can get exquisite about that. I think Bill is right.

MAHONEY: There’s a simple reason—it’s efficacy. I tell my candidates that if you say 20 things and one of them’s not true, that makes you a liar, and if you say three things and they’re all true, that makes you a truth-teller. And you have to realize that when you’re running in politics, it’s a theatrical piece, and one of the pieces of theater is, are you credible?

You were probably having dinner with a Democrat, because the Democratic Party frankly is out of step with the national electorate—more so than Republicans are. Kerry obfuscates, in my opinion, because if he were to tell the truth—the unvarnished kind of liberal truth—he would receive the base Democratic vote, which would leave him 20 points short of being the President of the United States.

REEVES: Can you give us examples of the unvarnished truth?

MAHONEY: Yeah, sure. He’s had four different positions, by my count, on Iraq.

CUOMO: Which one of them was wrong?

MAHONEY: The last two. When he said that he would have voted to go into Iraq regardless of the fact that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. He played that out for a month, it didn’t work, and then said it was the wrong war at the wrong time.

WOLFSON: That’s not what he said. He would have voted to give the President the authority, which is different from actually going into Iraq, as you know.

MAHONEY: But Howard, with all due respect, that vote was tantamount—and was well understood to be tantamount—to giving the President authorization.

WOLFSON: That’s not what the President told us. He gave the President the authority, and he said he was going to wait for the weapons inspectors to come back and work with the U.N., neither of which he did. So you know that’s not what happened.

MAHONEY: With all due respect, Howard Dean was against the war and Kerry was for the war at one juncture. He decided that he needed to trim his sails on that, and I think it was an appropriate decision, and I think that is a burden, frankly, that the Democrats generally have right now: that on those issues they tend to represent a minority opinion in the United States, and in particular in the swing states that are in play right now. And that leads to more dodging and weaving—which I think he’s excellent at, and I commend him for it.

CUOMO: On the question of truth-telling and the war, there’s two things that amaze me about the current discussion—really amaze me. How the $87 billion issue keeps coming up, Howard, and nobody ever says what Joe Conason said once in The Observer, and that is President Bush threatened five times to veto that bill. Which means that five times he said, ‘If you take it out of the pockets of the rich, I veto the bill.’ With that single stroke, he would have killed it. Kerry voted knowing that he wasn’t killing it, knowing that he was allowed to take a position for a point. And say, ‘Look, I’m against it because it should come out of the pockets of the rich—you’re giving them one trillion dollars over 11 years.’ That’s never been mentioned.

REEVES: Do you mean to say the President voted against it before he voted for it?

CUOMO: He did indeed. And here’s the other thing.

If you look at pages 125, 126, and 127 of Bob Graham’s book—and remember, Tommy Franks wrote his own—he quotes Tommy Franks specifically 14 months before Iraq. Now, Paul O’Neill says that President Bush brought up Iraq at the first meeting of the cabinet that he was at.

But here’s Tommy Franks—who later endorsed him, of course—saying the following to Bob Graham, on the question of how he’s doing in Afghanistan. He says, ‘We have the Army, the Army’s good, but the Army’s going to take a long time before we catch Osama. They have us on a manhunt now, that’s not what we do well. And now they’re taking forces from us for an action in Iraq, and that’s a mistake, because the European nations know more about the weapons of mass destruction than we do. Our intelligence is very bad. And when we are finished here, we should go to Somalia and Yemen, where we know Al Qaeda is, and deal with them before we go to Iraq.’ What about that? Is the President lying when he says that he didn’t get advice to the contrary?

ELLIS: First of all, German intelligence, French intelligence, Russian intelligence and Chinese intelligence all thought that there were weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological and nuclear, in Iraq. We were not the only intelligence service that thought this. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is the President had a strategy going into the war against terror. The first was to attack Al Qaeda, which is the spearhead, the intellectual and ideological spearhead, of the Islamic jihad movement, if you want to call it that. And the idea was to do as much as possible to destroy the client/franchisee relationships that came down from Osama and his lieutenants to the various cells, which we did successfully in Afghanistan. We killed every single member of the 007 brigade—all 5,000 members of Osama’s private army. We have captured or killed roughly two-thirds of the Al Qaeda leadership. And it’s the belief of many people in the intelligence community that Osama’s dead. So we have done an excellent job militarily of disrupting the Al Qaeda networks.

WOLFSON: Why’s there a greater threat today than there was then?

ELLIS: There’s a greater threat because we are aware of the change in circumstances, I think. Once somebody drives a plane into the World Trade Center, then you begin to think ‘Gee, they could put chemical and biological agents in the subway.’

BOIES: That’s clearly part of it. But I don’t see how anybody can deny the fact that our invasion of Iraq has stimulated additional hostility, additional recruitment, additional danger. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth going in. But you can’t say that we’re safer today because of Iraq. You can hope that we’ll be safer 10 years from now.

ELLIS: I think you can say that we’re safer today. I think that the strategy of Al Qaeda has changed. I think that the strategy of the franchisees has changed. I think the U.S. is out of the equation for them now.

REEVES: John, I want to switch gears on something which you probably know more about than anyone here. I was amazed in the second debate by one small incident. That was the President saying to Senator Kerry that ‘You saw the same intelligence I saw.’ Now my experience—I don’t know Lincoln as well as I know modern Presidents—is that no one has as much intelligence as a President has. That’s what "eyes only" means. The President generally decides what intelligence Congress sees, and certainly what intelligence the American people end up seeing. I don’t know how close you are to your cousin, or whether you spend time there. But how isolated does a President—any President get—once they’re inside? Is your cousin the boy in the bubble?

ELLIS: I think every President is to some degree in the bubble. It was certainly the case of my uncle when he served from ’89 to ’93, and I think it’s certainly the case of President Bush, George W., partly just because of the increased security and so on and so forth. But if you have a large network of friends and sort of informal advisors and so on and so forth, you do have a lot of people coming at you every day with advice and jokes and stories and, in this President Bush’s case, he has a network of people who sort of present him with other ideas and things to read and so on and so forth.

CUOMO: Dick, I think the discussion about Iraq stops a little bit short. If you take the President’s rationale—‘O.K., I was wrong about weapons, I was wrong about complicity and I was wrong about imminence, but I was right that this guy’s bad and he might someday have had a nuclear weapon, and he killed his own people and we’re better off without him’—then that’s the end of the argument.’ And so presumably, if we say, ‘Yes, we are better off without him,’ then he was right.

But the real question for the American people is: If he had come to you and said to you, the President of the United States, ‘I’m going to go after Saddam. Now we know he doesn’t have [W.M.D.] now, but he might get them some day. And we know Al Qaeda’s not there now, but someday he might do business with Al Qaeda. And so I’m going to bring him down, because that will be good for the American people and the world. It will cost me at least a thousand of your sons and daughters. It will cost many thousands more wounded. It will take 25,000 innocent Iraqis and kill them. It will cost us $200 billion. We will antagonize much of the world. And we will be stuck not knowing what to do next in Iraq …. Do you agree I should be authorized, John Kerry?’

REEVES: David, I want to ask you a question. Where would the world be, where would the U.S.A. be, where would this campaign be, if we had not gone into Iraq?

BOIES: I think the country would be stronger, I think Bush would be stronger. Because the country clearly is safer because of what this administration did in Afghanistan. Regardless of what you think of the Iraqi war, the war in Afghanistan was the right war at the right time for the right reasons. And it has helped make this country safer. I agree with everything that you say about the attacks on Al Qaeda and the success in getting at Al Qaeda the way it existed. So I think that if you’d stopped at Afghanistan, you’d not gone into Iraq—and I agree, if we’d known, if we had realized there’s not weapons of mass destruction, there would not have been the urgency to go in; if we had known that there was not the complicity with Al Qaeda, there would not have been the urgency to go in. Remember what the French and the Germans were asking for. They were asking, ‘Give us some time to put more inspectors on the ground and see if we can solve the problem that way.’ And if we had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no complicity with Al Qaeda, I think everybody would have been in favor of doing it. I think that if that had happened, I think that this would not be a close election. I think Bush would be stronger, he would still be fighting the war on terror, he could still portray himself as a War President, but it would be a much more successful War President.

Now I think that he has divided the country on Iraq as much as he’s divided the country on domestic issues. And part of the division is that, while I think that the overwhelming majority of this country supports supporting the troops once they are in Iraq, I think that the argument where he says, ‘I was wrong on weapons of mass destruction, I was wrong on Al Qaeda connections, I was wrong that the mission was accomplished, and yet I would do it all the same,’ I think is a vulnerability that he didn’t have to have.

MAHONEY: All the stipulations by my Democratic friends—if we knew there were weapons of mass destruction, if we knew it was a mistake … that’s an interesting argument and a political twist, but it’s not a substantive remark about what’s going on in Iraq.

BOIES: Let’s stick with what we know is a mistake, O.K.? We know it was a mistake that there were weapons of mass destruction.

ELLIS: No, not quite correct. Wait, wait—we know that there are no nuclear weapons, or at least we think, we’re 99 percent sure, that there are no nuclear devices. We do not have that level of certainty on C.B.W. [chemical and biological weapons].

BOIES: Well, first of all, I think that most people have that level of certainty, but everybody has that level of certainty with respect to nuclear weapons, and the President of the United States said that was a threat. We know that was a mistake. We know that it was a mistake to have the allegations about the complicity with Al Qaeda that the President announced before we went to war. We know it was a mistake to say that the mission was accomplished in the May after the invasion. We know those things are mistakes, and I don’t think the American people think that those are not substantive.

Now, it may still be that people think it was the right thing to do to go into Iraq, but I do not believe that we would have gone into Iraq if we’d known those things in advance.

ELLIS: We probably would not have gotten in the vote if he had known those things in advance. But let’s be clear about some things here. One, Richard Preston who writes about chemical and biological warfare for The New Yorker and probably knows as much about it as anybody, said in the most recent book, Demon in the Freezer, that the Iraqis basically confessed to a chemical/biological warfare program in 1994. So you have a situation where what we now believe to be the case was that there was no nuclear program—that that was disabled after the first Gulf War for financial and other reasons—but that they’re sort of 50-50 split on whether there was a major C.B.W. program. Second, the President never said that Saddam Hussein was in concert with Osama Bin Laden. Every single person who worked for the President said that they were rivals for leadership roles in Iraq.

WOLFSON: That’s not what Dick Cheney said.

ELLIS: I beg to differ on that. But third, the West Point speech made clear what the strategy was: First, strike Al Qaeda, then strike an enabling state, O.K.? States that enable terrorism, states that are part of a network of terrorism—you can’t just strike Al Qaeda, you need to strike an enabling state. The West Point speech is clear on that. One of the reasons I think the President says he would do it over again is because he believes—you may not believe—but he believes that it’s important not just to get at the terrorist network, but to get at the enabling states.

REEVES: It’s amazing how this damn campaign keeps focusing. No matter where you jump into the funnel, it comes out Iraq.

QUESTIONER FROM THE FLOOR: I’d like to know what advice each side would give to their respective candidates on the third debate.

MAHONEY: Let me first of all suggest that in the course of our conversation here, we’ve focused exclusively on President Bush, and what I would suggest that President Bush do in the debate is focus almost entirely on Senator Kerry—and I think that was the strength of the Republican convention and the strength of his second debate experience. Because Senator Kerry has an historic record with regard to national-defense issues that places him among the most liberal in the United States Senate. He voted against the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and had a history of invading his neighbors and had occupied—he voted against that. He consistently voted against defense spending throughout the decade. You raised the lack of body armor, and the fact of the matter is, there is a clear difference on national-defense issues. President Bush has been consistently supportive of increased funding for national-defense efforts, and Senator Kerry has been consistently in favor of lesser funding for national-defense efforts. This is a candidate who has had a decade, 20 years in the United States Senate, to show a consistent position on foreign policy and a campaign to do the same. He’s failed miserably in both things, and I think that the President of the United States needs to make the debate about Kerry and his failure in terms of consistency.

WOLFSON: Let me just respond to Kieran. He opened up with a line of attack on Senator Kerry’s record, which is the latest line of attack from the Republicans against Senator Kerry. It is interesting and I’ll be curious to see if they continue to do this that for the better part of a year they’ve been attacking Senator Kerry for being a flip-flopper and now they’re attacking Senator Kerry for being a committed lifelong liberal, and I’m not sure how exactly you square that circle, but I’ll leave that to the professionals on the other side.

REEVES: What should Kerry do in the third debate?

WELD: Well, I would advise the President to go after the points of substance that I think may constitute land mines for Senator Kerry between here and the end of the election, and that’s not who says what in debate, that’s not palaver—it’s how are you going to marshal a great coalition of allies when you’ve called this "a grand diversion" and it’s "the coalition of the bribed and coerced" and it’s "the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time." It’s very hard to see how he’d command the entry of many new allies into the fray, and yet he says that’s the cornerstone of what he’s going to do in Iraq. I do think—and I like Senator Kerry, and I know him well, and I’m not a Kerry-basher—I do think that you’ve got to twist a little bit to have his position on the war on Iraq not seen as in some degree inconsistent. I think that the John Kerry you’re seeing right now, the anti-war John Kerry, that’s the real John Kerry. The vote where he was standing on one leg and craning his neck a little bit, I think, was the vote to authorize the use of force before the second war. I mean, he voted against the first war when you had an actual invasion.

CUOMO: Look, after all this discussion, after all the quibbling about how wrong everybody else was, there’s another question for the practical people: He was wrong. He took a lot of lives that maybe he didn’t have to take. He killed a lot of innocent people. Do you want to give him a second chance to do it? What guarantees you that he won’t be wrong again? What guarantees you that he won’t make exactly the same kind of mistake? What guarantees you that with a full heart he’s not saying to himself, ‘Now Syria is next—and maybe we should do this again’? All I know is, at the very best, we have had one of the most grotesque mistakes in the modern history of the Presidency, and now he’s saying ‘Give me another shot at it’—and that’s before you get to domestic issues.

REEVES: Remind me not to run against you. … I want to ask, can you tell us in one sentence, by the way everybody I think gulped and blinked when you said Kerry’s biggest mistake was picking Edwards, why do you think that?

ELLIS: I think the difficulty for the Kerry campaign has always to be on parity on national-security issues. And so I thought if he had chosen, say, General Zinni of the Marine Corps, that he would have been able to achieve a sort of instant parity on national-security issues. And Edwards is going to lose his home state and is a non-factor in this election.

Artists of all stripes have taken a crack at him. Countless biographers, historians and armchair psychiatrists have tried to explain him-but still we demand more. Could any other politician inspire such fascination? No: George Bush (I and II), Ronald Reagan and even Bill Clinton are stick figures by comparison. Brilliant and vicious, tyrannical and weak, visionary and petty, spiteful and pitiful, Richard Milhous Nixon is our tragic hero, our Richard III, our Oedipus, our Lear.

Time (distance) has given him depth, dimensions we could not appreciate at first. Twenty-seven years after that August day when he summoned the strength for his final, absurd smile and double V-sign wave, the cartoon figure of R.N. as comic foil or sweaty, thick-browed villain will no longer do. The Nixon saga is too rich for that, a blend of high tragedy and low comedy, all with a weird psychic overlay. He is so many American stories all at once, he consumes so much of our culture: the poor kid who made good; the bad kid who got caught; the momma's boy denied his father's love; the loser who won; the winner who lost; the kid who never fit in. He cared nothing for politics; he cared for nothing but politics. He straddled the Cold War and Vietnam, political realignments we live with today. Crazy in patches but cool in crisis-and tormented, tormented, tormented.

Are we drawn to him because of the allure of the dark side, of villainy? Because of guilt for hating him so? Or is it because we are not handsome Kennedys or privileged Bushes or movie-star Reagans or slick, smart Clintons? We would not confess to cutting down the cherry tree. Could it be that we are Richard Nixons? That's unanswerable. What we do know is that with Richard Nixon, artists' depictions will not suffice. No novel or movie could capture him all. His truth was too strange to pass for credible fiction. With Richard Nixon, we need evidence. We must leave it to historians to tell his tale.

Richard Reeves' compelling new book, Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House , provides a wonderful centerpiece to our ever-growing Nixonian epic. Our mad king has never been madder, or more beguiling, than in Mr. Reeves' capable hands. He gives us a fresh take on the story; he recreates the Nixon White House from the inside, how it felt to be Nixon. Meticulously researched from newly uncovered materials-interviews, transcripts, diaries and memos (many written by Nixon himself)-Mr. Reeves sets up a camera in the Oval Office and allows us a peek at R.N.'s daily thoughts and doings, occasionally panning out to scenes beyond the White House walls for context, or to foreshadow events to come. We gaze over Nixon's shoulder as he scrawls, on his beloved yellow legal pads, goals for himself ("Restore respect for office") or memos to Pat and his daughters, instructing them to tell reporters of his "warm, human" qualities. We are reminded of his vindictiveness (he orders certain states be deprived of federal aid to punish them for electing unsupportive Senators), his pettiness (he commands the destruction of a White House tennis court because it's frequented by a cabinet secretary he dislikes), his criminality (in exchange for a $2 million contribution to his slush fund, he raises federal price subsidies for milk-at a $100 million cost to the government), his anti-Semitism ("the fucking Jews" are blamed for a host of problems), his racism, his deviousness, his paranoia, his depressions-why we hated him so. Nixon's cunning, instinctive political genius would make Karl Rove gape in awe. An example: To inflame his anti-antiwar "Silent Majority," he provokes and spotlights antiwar hecklers. "We wanted some confrontation," Bob Haldeman writes after protesters toss rocks at the President's car, "[we] made a huge incident and we worked hard to crank it up, should make a really major story and might be effective."

We are reminded how lawless Nixon and his administration were, how history did him a favor by tagging him with Watergate, a mere smattering of his lesser crimes-Al Capone's tax fraud. It does not surprise us when Nixon instructs Haldeman to "break into the [Brookings Institution] … I want the … safe cleaned out ." Or when he orders illegal wiretaps on the home phones of columnists and suspected leakers. Or when, after the C.I.A. concludes that Chilean General René Schneider stands in the way of a military coup to overthrow Allende's democratically elected Marxist government, Schneider is shot dead. Mr. Reeves documents a plethora of sinister examples that should, one hopes, shut up once and for all those apologists who insist that "Nixon did what they all do; he just got caught."

But Richard Reeves' Nixon is not simply evil; he is far more complex. We first meet him in January 1969, hours after he's sworn in, asking for his dog-who, we soon learn, will only approach his master if led by a trail of biscuits. From there, Mr. Reeves tracks Nixon chronologically, focusing on patches of key days until April 1973, when the President is left thrashing about-helplessly, tragically-in the fatal net of his own making. Before the Watergate crescendo, we see Nixon parrying and thrusting with the Soviets, the Chinese, the Middle East tinderbox, the counterculture, the press, his Cabinet, Kennedys (dead and alive), Vietnam and Cambodia. His mind vacillates from paranoia to exhilaration, the trivial to the grand: One minute the President obsesses about where to fit his pool table, or how to secure the George Wallace vote without appearing overtly racist; the next he makes history in China. Domestic policy, to him, was "building outhouses in Peoria"; so long as the economy rolled by re-election time, he wished to be left to play geopolitical chess, alone or with the equally scheming Henry Kissinger. Somehow, on occasion, he's able to conjure up, out of his petty madness, the imperial resolve needed to function, often deftly, on the world stage.

The story Mr. Reeves tells is ultimately one of withdrawal and isolation. Nixon cuts himself off from those he does not trust-most everybody. Haldeman keeps all but Mr. Kissinger from intruding on the king. The result is an American tragedy, and a personal one. In a last bid to save himself, Nixon demands the resignation of Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, tearfully saying, "This is like cutting off my arms"- and for once, we believe him. When Nixon's house of lies crumbles around him (somehow the story retains suspense despite our knowing it), we can't help but feel sympathy for the man. Perhaps that's because the Nixon Mr. Reeves presents is a man, complex and multifaceted. We have never had more reason to despise him, but Mr. Reeves makes us feel compassion, too.

The book's flaws are few and minor. Mr. Reeves asserts that Nixon "believed that one day there would almost certainly be" a global race war, but provides insufficient documentation for the claim. And although Mr. Reeves provides a gem when Nixon asks Henry Kissinger for a brief paragraph "on the reason we intervened [in Vietnam] in the first place"-and adds, amazingly, "Is it possible we were wrong from the start in Vietnam?"-it's frustrating that we never hear Mr. Kissinger's response, or even whether there was one.

In all, the book is masterfully constructed, and its numerous astonishing stories of Nixonian excess, pathos and spite paint a richly detailed portrait of this extraordinary man and his extraordinary times. Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House is required reading for anyone with an interest in our history or one of its most fascinating figures.

Jonathan Lowy is the author of the novel Elvis and Nixon (Crown) .

Whether or not Mr. Bush gets to preside over a cabinet remains to be seen. If he does, the country will be in the hands of a modern Warren G. Harding, the genial small-town newspaper publisher whose good looks and seductive charm recommended him to the Republican bosses of 1920 (and to Nan Britton, his young mistress). Mr. Bush would become the second member of his family to depart from the norms of standard American English in the course of defeating a Democratic smarty-pants whose emotional intelligence could, to paraphrase Fred Allen's summation of sincerity in Hollywood, fit into a flea's navel.

And yet, or perhaps as a result, the George W. Bush who co-stars in Newsweek's quadrennial backstage-at-the-campaign summation is an engaging and very human character who has John Kennedy's ironic detachment but none of his intellectual curiosity. He is all E.I. (emotional intelligence), and, like many a Republican candidate before him, he disdains I.Q., analysis and intellectual pretension. He is pleased to note how well he is doing with what he calls, affectionately, the "double-width vote," the trailer-park crowd. In the same issue of Newsweek, Al Gore, author and pedant, comes across as a conniving, programmed, nasty creature of the modern era's meaningless partisanship. These are not insignificant insights; in fact, they go to the heart of this inconclusive campaign's dynamic. "Emotional intelligence is the basis of leadership ability of every kind," said writer Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence , when asked about the election. "It's being able to … persuade people, being able to articulate a shared vision so people feel passion, too."

The reporters who followed George W. Bush around the country for 18 months couldn't help themselves; they got a little bit of a crush on him, even if they didn't fall in love the same way that a previous generation had fallen in love with John Kennedy in 1960-including, as Richard Reeves has pointed out, Richard Nixon. "Men fell in love with him," Mr. Reeves has said of his biographical subject, President Kennedy, "women fell in love with him, Richard Nixon fell in love with him. It was this ease that Nixon resented so much."

As for George W. Bush, said Mr. Reeves, "he's way behind Kennedy in charm. The man has charm because he was compared to Al Gore. There were great similarities between 1960 and now. But George Bush is no John Kennedy. He has the discipline of the ignorant, and so much so that he never, never said anything specific, and he was never questioned on anything specific. And there was some brilliance in the way that was set up.

"I'm not sure it ever took smarts to be President," said Mr. Reeves. "If the Presidency were about being smart, Herbert Hoover would be the greatest President we ever had. Politics is for the best second-rate minds. In the end, each President is judged on judgment, not on smarts. I don't think raw intelligence is the best test-it'd be nice. I personally thought Bush wasn't too dumb to be President. I thought and kind of hoped that he was too dumb to get to be the President."

Al Gore, a man blessed with a good marriage, a happy family and a reputation as an intellect, couldn't figure out how to make even his supporters love him, and seemed annoyed that the other guy was getting so much action.

Then, in the last few days of the campaign, Al Gore and his surrogates raised the issue that obsessed the Vice President's most rabid supporters-the dope factor. Gore supporters suggested that George W. Bush may be easygoing and charming for a guy so enamored of state executions but, damn it, he was no … George H.W. Bush. Senator Lieberman stepped up to bat and, without much subtlety, said that George Bush wasn't "ready to be President. Not now, not this time. Maybe later." The poor, dumb, I.Q.-challenged fellow simply wasn't up to the task at hand, the Gore people said. "I voted for Gore, not because I had the hots for Gore, but because I don't think the Presidency should go to a certifiable dumbbell," said historian Stanley Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate .

Of course, similar things were said about Ronald Reagan, both Roosevelts and even the young John Kennedy. Walter Lippman dismissed F.D.R. as an ordinary man who wanted very much to be President; Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that F.D.R. had a "second-class mind." Intellectuals also complained that Harry Truman was a haberdasher, and that Dwight Eisenhower read Zane Grey novels.

The intellectuals, of course, are almost always wrong about these things-the difference with George Bush is that so many men and women on the street feel the same way. The task at hand, however, is to forget the Presidential I.Q.'s and think about their P.Q.-Presidential Quotient. Mr. Reagan and the two Roosevelts rank among the 20th century's most effective presidents, and Kennedy might well have had he served two terms-particularly if he had gotten his wish and run against Barry Goldwater in 1964. They had, as Holmes observed of F.D.R., first-rate temperaments.

Presidential Quotient may have very little to do with actual, raw, testable intelligence, and more to do with some ineffable combination of street smarts, raw smarts, E.S.P., human sensitivity, narcissism and theatricality.

"Ronald Reagan is a perfect example," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who just published the first volume of his memoirs, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings. "He didn't know what the hell was going on. And he was one of our most successful Presidents." High P.Q. By contrast, two of the century's smartest Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, seemed to know everything-from nuclear submarine technology to Soviet ideology, from who was using the White House tennis courts at any given time to how best to stonewall a federal investigation. And yet, add up their P.Q.'s: both high on intelligence, both disastrously low on coming to terms with their surrounding landscapes.

"I'm sure Bush is a nice fellow," Mr. Schlesinger added. "But he's not my type. Maybe I'd like him if I met him. But I doubt that he's read many books."

How much does that matter? In times of prosperity, Mr. Schlesinger noted, "likability" can be "more important than ability." The Bush in Newsweek is comfortable enough with himself to reassure campaign staff that there will be no mass firings, no campaign shakeups, after his disastrous defeat in New Hampshire. His grateful staff was ready to shed blood for him. The well-read Mr. Gore sees bad polling data and decides that he must reinvent his themes, his image. Psychobabbler Naomi Wolf had the answers to his problems: He must change his wardrobe and his persona, and she'd tell him how-for $15,000 a month. Al Gore may be smart, but on two counts, Americans didn't think he was: 1) Americans don't think it's smart to be snookered, and 2) Americans think it is really smart to know who you are. Among the 20 characteristics that make up emotional intelligence, Mr. Goleman said, is self-awareness.

Emotional intelligence ought to be part of the liberal agenda, for just as multiculturalists preach that there is no one set of ideas and customs, E.Q. asserts that there are other forms of intelligence worthy of respect. "There are different formulas for star performance and outstanding leadership," Mr. Goleman said, "but there's no one way to be a great leader." Nor, perhaps, is there any one way to be a great student. Progressive school districts throughout the country are attempting to apply the tenets of emotional intelligence in the classroom, hoping to gain insight into students who might, in a less enlightened time, be burdened forever by a low I.Q. score. And if it works there, it could work at the White House. In fact, it has almost every time. Remember Jimmy Carter's slogan-"Why Not the Best?"-and its promise not only of moral but meritocratic superiority? But the liberal and academic elites have little reason to acknowledge the power of E.Q.; indeed, they always dismiss it. Who knows (and no one does) how the great intellectual paradigms among Presidential candidates-Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, Mario Cuomo-would have done in the White House (although we suspect they would have left us beautiful journals)?

But there is little question that modern politics and media value personality and biography at the expense of substance, and prize the qualities enshrined in E.Q. dogma. That may not always be in the best interests of the Republic. "Emotional intelligence," Mr. Goleman said, "may at least give the semblance of being competent as a leader, even if you're not actually."

But it's the actually that counts.

Charm is a wonderful thing on television, at a debate, in New Hampshire pancake-flipping contests, on Saturday Night Live and on the stump while doing passable imitations of the impassioned scenes from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But rewards for empty geniality and vacuous charm can hardly be cited as evidence of the depredations of postmodern politics. Because finally, you've got to make up your mind, and you've got to know what you think. "In the end," Mr. Reeves said, "each President is remembered for two or three big things. Nobody remembers whether Lincoln balanced the budget." Yes, American history is filled with leaders whose dyspeptic public demeanors would render them unelectable today: either member of the Adams family, for example. But personality and image, too, have always been part of the electoral dynamic, which is why Abraham Lincoln's handlers played up his log-cabin roots and backwoodsman Andrew Jackson delighted in tormenting the Eastern elites and their high-minded institutions.

Democrats are the party eternally in search of the philosopher-king-Stevenson, Cuomo. Republicans run against pointy-heads, even-remember Woodrow Wilson-when it's to their disadvantage. The intellectual community is part of the cultural elite which Republicans, including conservative thinkers, love to loathe. With good reason: the great political turnaround of the last 32 years has seen the Republican Party-the traditional party of business and country clubs-converting their Hoover-era elitism and the anger of their dispossession from power during the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society into populist denunciations of the era's new elite, the chattering classes. That's why they were so undone and infuriated by Bill Clinton. President Clinton, said Mr. Reeves, "has intelligence like radar-he seems to understand what those people out there think and want and know. At his best, Al Gore has the intelligence of a scholar. An introvert. I don't know much about emotional I.Q., but that's what Clinton has."

George W. Bush talks with easy familiarity about trailer-dwellers in the Bible Belt. When a Democrat well-respected for her intellect came to New York in search of a Senate seat, she first toured the state to see how ordinary people live.

Of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton may well have learned more about New York than George W. Bush has about double-wides. But neither of them has nearly as strong a visceral sense of the Presidency or the American voter as the man whose P.Q. is practically off the charts, and the man who is most likely to be George W. Bush's opponent in 2004, Bill Clinton.

Additional reporting by Ian Blecher and Greg Sargent

There can be little quibbling with Mr. Reeves' observation. Indeed, one of the reasons why American politics seems so dreadfully irrelevant is because electoral campaigns during a time of peace and prosperity can't compete with the joys of personal finance. As spectator sports go, tracking your 401(k) seems a great deal more important than reading the details of Al Gore's latest pronouncement or watching George W. Bush submit himself to Tim Russert's questions.

But the global consensus that has been 20 years in the making and seemed poised to become the new century's founding narrative may not, after all, be as universally accepted as we all were led to believe. Of all the unlikely scenarios, the National Guard was called out to patrol Seattle, a city made for the new global order, to protect the World Trade Organization's negotiators from the forces of resurrected politics.

It turns out that there are some people out there who believe that trade devoid of principle, of politics, is unacceptable. Labor union leaders and environmentalists took to the streets to insist that trade must be linked to other issues, like worker exploitation and ecological damage. And, using the old-fashioned politics of mass protest, they managed to turn trade talks, that staple of the financial pages, into front-page news.

The advocates of unrestrained commerce insist that trade agreements should pay no attention to such irrelevancies as working conditions in a given nation or its record on industrial pollution. "What does exploitation have to do with trade?" they ask.

For some time, those who have been exploited or who fear the consequences of exploitation have had no answer to the soulless free trader who would reshape the world not for the common good but to maximize profit. In Seattle, however, those who provide the goods and services to be traded in a conscience-free marketplace finally found their voice.

Mr. Reeves himself doesn't think the protests will amount to much. "I'm looking at Roll Call [a Capitol Hill newspaper], which reports that Anne Bingaman, who used to be the head of the [Justice Department's] Antitrust Division, is lobbying for a firm called Global Crossing, based in Bermuda, and was paid $2.5 million in the last six months," he said. "How can government compete with stuff like that? Without a war or some other calamity, there is no doubt that politics will continue to be a subdivision of money, in part because of the way it is being financed."

Mr. Reeves pointed out, rightly, that the Seattle demonstrations will be discounted in part because of the violence of those loonies who hijacked the protests for their various causes. Like, for example, the chorus line of knee-jerkers who used the trade summit to rant about the great injustices perpetrated against convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.

Still, the demonstration served to make a point. The men and women who would control the new economy can and will be held to account by those whose lives, livelihoods, health and well-being are in the hands of the unelected masters of the economic universe. The century that is about to expire saw the rise of a consensus, at least in the developed West, that even the sacred marketplace had obligations, and that government could and should act as a monitor and a leveling agent. As Ric Burns reminded us in his epic television history of New York, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire inspired government to take an active role on behalf of ordinary people otherwise at the mercy of an unregulated market.

For years, the tale of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire served as a parable about the progress we have made as a society. Now, however, the revisionism inspired by the triumph of late-century laissez-faire capitalism would have us believe that things weren't so bad in that infamous sweatshop, that the young women who worked, and died, there were free to work somewhere else if they thought they were being ill used. Ah, if only the doors hadn't been locked! Perhaps they could have taken advantage of garment free-agency.

It appears that it will take that sort of calamity to remind us of the human cost of unregulated commerce.