THE VETS ATTACK

Kerry felt alone and isolated. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. His father had been a Foreign Service officer stationed in Berlin. As a boy, shipped off to a severe Swiss boarding school by his remote yet demanding father, Kerry had to take a night train through communist East Germany. The cold war had been at its coldest and darkest in Germany in the early 1950s. Recounting his memories to a NEWSWEEK reporter in the summer of 2004, Kerry could vividly picture himself clutching a piece of paper with directions written out by his parents--a somber, long-faced boy, traveling alone across a forbidding landscape, fearful but determined not to show it.

When Kerry was alone and feeling the unfairness of things, he sometimes lashed out and blamed others. He would call his advisers at all hours of the night. On a Saturday evening in late August, Tad Devine, Bob Shrum's partner and fellow media man and strategic adviser, was studying for an appearance on "Meet the Press" the next morning when Kerry called him. Devine was weary and in no mood to talk to the candidate. Kerry offered to call back later. "The most important thing is that I get a good night's sleep," the blunt-spoken Devine told his client. "Don't call me." Kerry had been ostensibly phoning to offer advice, but he blurted out what was really on his mind: the attack of the Swift Boat veterans. "It's a pack of f---ing lies, what they're saying about me," he fairly shouted over the phone.

Kerry blamed his advisers for his predicament. He had wanted to fight back; they had counseled caution. His honor was being dragged through the mud, and now he was being mocked for not standing up for himself. He wanted to turn on someone. Not a few staffers and advisers in the badly frayed Kerry camp believed that the candidate should blame his well-paid media consultants. Surveying the damage in late summer, a Democratic strategist privately scorned the media consultants for the narrowness, if not the selfishness, of their vision. Shrum and Devine were in the advertising business, this strategist said. All they really understood was the air war. They put their faith in (and fattened their pocketbooks with) paid political ads. When the Kerry campaign opted not to abandon the campaign-finance system and instead to stick with its allotted $75 million in federal funds through the November election, the decision effectively meant no money for ads in August. Remembering how they had run out of money in the Gore campaign in 2000, Devine and Shrum wanted to save their limited war chest for a media blitz in late October--at the end, when it really counted. But that left little or no ammo to shoot back at the Swift Boat vets in August.

Shrum would later insist that he saw the need to take action soon after the Swift Boat ads began cutting into support for Kerry in August. Still, the media men lacked a certain imagination, or at least gumption, about pushing back. In late August the campaign finally made a small media buy to answer the Swifties, but it was like using a fly swatter against an elephant.

Kerry was unhappy with Devine and Shrum, but he was not about to fire them. Shrum was his old friend, his peer; besides, Kerry procrastinated for as long as possible before firing anyone. As he fretted and moped, his eye fell on other, less independently powerful figures in the campaign. He was particularly annoyed at Stephanie Cutter, the communications director. In a crowded press room, Cutter was easy to spot with her dirty-blond hair, short skirts and high boots, as she lectured some sheepish or irked newsperson. Cutter had been the object of endless complaining by reporters and campaign staffers. She was considered too slow and too controlling, not nimble or clever. Tired of watching her berate interns and alienate reporters with vituperative e-mails after the most mildly critical stories, Kerry staffers snidely made a verb of her e-mail name (scutter@johnkerry.com). "To Scutter" meant to try to control or dominate. Its second meaning was cruder, "to f--- something up." In March reporters had begun to vent about Cutter to campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill. By May they were taking their grievances to Kerry himself. In July Kerry said to Cahill, "I'm tired of hearing complaints about Stephanie. Fix it."

Cahill had already moved Cutter out of headquarters and onto the campaign plane. The idea was to marginalize her by confining her duties. But Cutter was a skillful bureaucratic infighter. She managed to keep sway over communications at headquarters in Washington and at the same time run the press operation on the plane. If anything, she was expanding her empire. She insisted that everything--all campaign communications--had to go through her, effectively slowing down response time to a crawl.