THE VETS ATTACK

During the Republican convention Kerry repaired to Teresa's house on Nantucket. He had bounced around between his marriages, renting small apartments, bunking on the couches of friends. Teresa had called it her husband's "homeless period." Of Teresa's five houses (Washington, Boston, Sun Valley, Pittsburgh, Nantucket), Kerry seemed to feel most at home at the heiress's weathered, shingled "cottage" with its wide porches overlooking --Nantucket Harbor. He went windsurfing, inviting along press photographers. This was a mistake: he was effectively providing the Republicans with more ammunition to portray him as effete and overprivileged, indulging in rich man's play (and--even more devastating--affording the perfect video of Kerry symbolically tacking back and forth in the political winds). But mostly, in the last days of August, he disappeared inside, away from his staff. A silence descended over the candidate, a disturbing, distant quiet. His aides looked at his stony stare and tried to read his mind. They wondered, was he back in Vietnam?

Teresa just seemed fed up. According to her carefully cultivated image in the press, Mrs. Heinz Kerry had been initially reluctant to see her husband run for president. "First Lady?" she would coyly ask. "No, thanks!" Then, according to this script, she had felt the call of duty and history and rallied to her husband's cause. The truth, as her family and close friends were well aware, was more like the opposite. She had always coveted the White House, and had hoped that her first husband, Sen. John Heinz, might get her there. She had been an active and aggressive strategist in Kerry's campaign. That is, she had tried to be. But too often, she found, her ideas went unheeded.

At least Bob Shrum had been polite about it. The ever-courtly Shrum had flattered her and seemed to listen before rejecting her advice, and then did so ever so gently and almost never directly to her face. But Mary Beth Cahill lacked Shrum's tact or subtle gifts. With her unvarnished manner, Cahill appeared annoyed by any meddling from the candidate's wife. Teresa, for her part, decided that Cahill was arrogant, and the two strong-willed women clashed, most openly when Cahill rejected Teresa's nomination for a new press aide in June. Kerry was caught in the middle. If he sided with his staff, as he usually did because he had more regard for their advice, he risked an unpleasant argument with his wife. All through the disastrous "Sea to Shining Sea" tour in July and August, he and his wife had squabbled. Now, as the campaign entered the fall stretch, Teresa was visibly tired of it all. She still badly wanted to beat Bush, she told her close friends and family. But she was looking forward to getting away from politics and spending time with her kids.

Kerry was brooding, pondering a move. He didn't want to fire Cahill or Cutter, in part because it would set off another round of Kerry-campaign-in-disarray stories and feed the impression, already starting to take hold in the press, that he was a poor manager. But he was at last ready to shove Cutter to the side, and to undercut Cahill's authority.

Kerry was still stewing over Cutter's blunder, unrecognized and unreported by the press, at the Grand Canyon on Aug. 9, when he had disastrously affirmed that he would have voted to give the president the authority to invade Iraq, WMD or not. At the time, adviser Jamie Rubin had taken the fall. But it had actually been Cutter who urged her boss to give a one-word "yes" answer to the question they had known was coming. Other top aides had debated the question, but in the end Cutter had acted on her own authority. Because cell phones couldn't reach into the Grand Canyon, the traveling campaign had been cut off from Washington headquarters. Conveniently overlooking his own responsibility, Kerry blamed Cutter for the consequences--the Republican ads crowing that flip-floppin' Kerry was now backing the president on Iraq.

It was Carville who led the charge against Cahill and Cutter. Carville had been feeling guilty, fretful that he had not directly confronted the Kerry campaign with its failings. On the last weekend in August, the old Clinton alumni gathered in the backyard of a former embassy off 16th Street to celebrate the wedding of Gene Sperling, Clinton's former economic adviser. After a few drinks, the celebration veered toward becoming a wake for the Kerry campaign. Carville, in particular, was in a high state of agitation, going around telling anyone who would listen what a mess the campaign had become.