Back From the Dead

In a phone call in August, Schmidt asked McCain, "What do you really think is happening in Iraq?" McCain answered, "I think things are getting better. I think the surge is working." Bending to the political winds, McCain had lately become a little equivocal about Iraq in his public comments, but privately he continued to believe that surrendering in Iraq would send a signal of weakness to Al Qaeda and the rest of the world, and that defeat would break the spirit of the U.S. military.

Schmidt understood that this was the character the public needed to see—defiant, passionate, willing to sacrifice his political career for his convictions. This was the candidate who could win in New Hampshire, a state that liked mavericks and did not want to be told whom to vote for by The Washington Post.

"Sir," said Schmidt, who treated McCain with military respect (though he had not served himself), "we need to stop hedging on Iraq. You believe in this. You don't think things are getting better; you believe we are winning the war, sir. We need to tell the voters that." He told McCain he needed to get a bunch of his old POW buddies together and travel across the country in the campaign bus McCain had loved so much. Start in San Diego (a Navy town) and end in New Hampshire. Stay in crappy hotels, Schmidt said. Get out some lawn chairs and sit outside and drink a couple of beers with the buddies at night. After all, there was nothing left to lose. "You're a fan of literature. You're a fan of the movies. Plays have three acts. Movies have narrative arcs. Your campaign is dead," said Schmidt. "There is only one narrative left—the comeback. You have no choice, sir."

Schmidt touched McCain's mad-as-hell, romantic streak at just the right moment. In September, McCain embarked on the "No Surrender Tour." (Most of his advisers—the same ones who had wanted him to back off on Iraq—were unenthusiastic; his New Hampshire staff warned, as one of them put it, "Don't bring that bus up here.") McCain's sometime traveling buddy was Senator Graham, who shared his streak of black humor. An avid newspaper reader, McCain took a kind of grim pleasure reading his political obituaries. "We've got 'em right where we want 'em!" he would chortle to seatmate Graham. At some stops, the crowd was composed mostly of aging veterans. "Here's the good news," Graham told McCain after one such event. "The 90-plus crowd is with us. The World War II vets are ready to go back in!"

The campaign continued its rickety path through the fall. At one point, Mark McKinnon, a media adviser who had worked for Bush-Cheney '04, described the difference between the Bush campaigns he had worked on and the McCain campaign as the difference between the Royal British Navy and Capt. Jack Sparrow's ship in "Pirates of the Caribbean." McCain loved the comparison. He began making guttural pirate noises, punctuating his jokes and one-liners with "Aaarrgh" and occasionally greeting reporters with this oddly cheerful growl. PIRATES FOR MCCAIN T shirts (complete with skull and crossbones) eventually sprouted on the backs of campaign volunteers and even a few reporters. The Straight Talk Express revived; network producers began napping on the bus and watching TV in McCain's seating area when the candidate was busy.

Along about Thanksgiving, reporters began to notice a change. The size of the crowds was increasing, and McCain began to creep up in the polls, especially in New Hampshire. He was blessed by the quality of his opponents. In the grim days of summer, when a NEWSWEEK reporter had asked why he shouldn't join the rest of the press corps in reading the last rites for McCain's presidential aspirations, Rick Davis had responded with an incongruously cheerful smile. Nothing personal, he said; our opponents are all good men, some of them are my friends—but politically speaking? "Look, at the end of the day," he said, "the rest of these guys suck." However crude, his judgment was not off base. Ex-businessman Mitt Romney seemed to treat the campaign as a management-consulting project, as if he were selling a product and trying to increase market share. He had no fingertips as a politician and came off as a phony, even when he was perfectly sincere. Rudy Giuliani seemed to be building a cult of Rudy, constantly talking about his performance on 9/11 to a nation that wanted to forget about the terrorist attacks, and he badly miscalculated by believing that he could wait until the Florida primary in late January to make his move. Former senator Fred Thompson seemed old and half asleep. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas was emerging as an engaging showman and a lively dark horse—but as an evangelical minister with no foreign-policy experience, he almost certainly could not win.

Like a lot of fighter pilots and old sea dogs, McCain was notoriously superstitious. For some mysterious reason, he insisted on sitting in the fourth row of his JetBlue charter plane, as a hapless advance staffer found out when the candidate told her to change seats. In New Hampshire, McCain told his staff to book the same room in the same hotel he'd stayed in during his stunning upset victory over George W. Bush in 2000. He also wore the same lucky green sweater from that night and carried a lucky penny and an Indian feather. On Jan. 8, the day of the New Hampshire primary, McCain was uptight and testy. There was no more joking around. He sharply hushed a couple of well-meaning friends who told him, "Hey, you're going to win."

He won easily. "Mac is back!" went up the raucous chant. Later that night, after his speech, McCain adviser Steve Duprey filled his pockets with the confetti that had showered over the victory crowd. Knowing McCain's superstitious nature, Duprey wanted to make sure he had some lucky confetti on hand at every remaining primary day.

McCain lost Michigan to Romney on Jan. 15, largely because Romney pandered to his boyhood home state by promising to bring back jobs long gone. In South Carolina on Jan. 19, McCain was on edge and his wife, Cindy, even more so. This was the place where the dirty tricksters had slimed the McCains in 2000, and Cindy could not shake off a sense of dread. The weather in Charleston was awful—sleeting rain—and McCain seemed caged, cooped up with his friend Lindsey Graham, who was annoying him by trying to "visualize" victory. By 7 p.m., Cindy and Graham were ready to "jump out the window," Graham later recalled. McCain's 95-year-old mother, Roberta, tried to lighten the mood by cracking jokes about how she wanted to marry Lindsey. The phone rang. It was Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press, telling Schmidt that the AP was about to call the race for McCain. Excited relief spread through the room; some aides began to cry and hug each other. All eyes turned to the TV set, waiting for the cable networks to bring the news. Two minutes passed, then five, then 10 minutes. The phone rang again. It was Sidoti saying the AP had decided to hold back. The projections from its computer model weren't satisfying the analysts—it looked as if Huckabee was closing the gap. "See, Lindsey? This is because of you," McCain said, only half joking.

The excruciating vigil resumed. "We're up, boy, we're up," Graham murmured softly when the numbers turned. "Boy, we're down," McCain replied moments later. (McCain and Graham often call each other "boy," another obscure McCain bonding ritual.) The agony finally ended at 9:20 p.m., when Sidoti called back to say the AP was about to officially declare McCain the winner.

Mark Salter would recall that he had never seen McCain so happy as that night. The 71-year-old torture victim bounded onstage, a little creakily, and Cindy was glowing and regal in a purple suit and pearls. Grinning mischievously, McCain couldn't resist a reference to the 2000 debacle in South Carolina. "What's eight years among friends?" he chortled to the crowd. When his mother drew a roar, McCain walked over and kissed her on the cheek. "Thank you, Momma," he said. He exited the stage as Abba's "Take a Chance on Me" played. He stayed up late into the night, talking with his buddy Graham about how far they had come and what lay ahead. Only bad luck could deny him now.

By late February, Salter had finally stopped waking up each morning with thoughts of a potentially ruinous story racing in his mind. In December, he had felt sure it was coming. The New York Times was calling around, asking about McCain's relationship to an attractive lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. In 1999, she had often been seen around McCain's office at the Senate commerce committee, where he was chairman. Friends were calling Salter and asking about the rumors. Was the Times about to run an exposé of an extramarital affair between McCain and a lobbyist, for whom he was alleged to have performed legislative favors? Salter had spent hours (including Christmas Day) locating records in an effort to prove that the story was not true. But the rumor mill was grinding on the campaign trail. When a New York Times reporter, talking to Romney's press secretary, knocked down gossip that the story would be on page one the next day, Romney joined the conversation and asked, "It's not running?" It was pretty clear that Romney hoped the story would run sometime before the New Hampshire primary.

But weeks passed, and the article did not materialize. Salter heard that the Times's editor, Bill Keller, had spiked the story twice. Salter began to believe the article would not run. Salter could be standoffish, and he was often ironic and sometimes angry. But he was also a romantic, one reason why he was such an effective alter ego for McCain. Salter wanted to believe that the Times editors were "grown-ups," as he put it to Schmidt. The accusations were too flimsy and the Times was too reputable. "I know them," he told Schmidt. "They're adults. They're not going to hurt a Christian family with no reason."