FITS AND STARTS

Before Christmas, Shrum drove back to Boston from New Hampshire with John and Teresa and stayed at the house on Louisburg Square, the one Kerry had mortgaged, an elegant brick mansion in the old Brahmin quarter of Beacon Hill. It was snowy outside, and the old friends opened a bottle of wine and began reminiscing. They recalled an earlier crisis, in the fall of 1996, when Kerry had been faltering in his Senate re-election race against Governor Weld. Kerry had invited Shrum to dinner and asked him to take over the campaign. He had shoved a poll across the table and said, "We're behind in 14 of the 15 internals"--the important polling benchmarks on questions like "Who do you trust more?" and "Who is a better leader?"

With Shrum's help, Kerry had rallied in the '96 Senate race, as he always had, and beaten Weld cleanly. "I've been in tougher situations than this before," Kerry said that snowy evening, as he, Teresa and Shrum sat around sipping their good wine in front of the fire. Shrum knew that Kerry was thinking about Vietnam. "When he's in a tough situation, he thinks at least they're not shooting bullets," says Shrum.

Shrum had taken some more tangible comfort from his friend the pollster Stan Greenberg, who believed that the voters of Iowa would inevitably take a second look and ask: Who is presidential? Who can take on Bush? Kerry needed to be there, front and center, because the answer would not be Howard Dean.

Few people knew it at the time, but the Dean campaign was imploding. The Deaniac movement had been in large part a creation of political grass-roots mastermind Joe Trippi. A creative genius, Trippi did not sleep and appeared to live on Diet Pepsi, consuming at least a dozen a day. Pepsi cans were strewn around his office and arrayed along his desk, where the empties were used as receptacles for wads of Skoal chewing tobacco. ("This campaign is all about getting me a gig as a Pepsi spokes-man," he quipped to a reporter.) He had once fallen asleep while standing and hit the floor with such force that he cracked a rib. Trippi's caffeinated rages, fueled by his off-the-charts blood sugar (a diabetic, he was dangerously careless about taking his medications), reduced his assistant to tears. Once, after he overturned his desk, she fled out the door and did not return for three days.

Dean was in some ways the accidental candidate. Truth be told, he wasn't really the red-hot revolutionary of the Deaniacs' fevered hopes. He was a moderate, fiscally conservative small-state governor who had been swept up in a wave not entirely of his own making. He and Trippi never worked well together. Dean was a micro-manager who refused to give Trippi control of the campaign checkbook. Management was not Trippi's strong suit; the campaign, badly run, burned through its $40 million war chest. By October, Dean and Trippi were speaking to each other only when they had to, and Trippi was threatening to quit.

The closer Dean came to actually winning the nomination, the more he seemed to misstep, to blurt out something that the gaffe hunters in the press could hang around his neck. Dean had always been a loose cannon. In the summer of 2002, his aides had been relieved that no cameras had captured the would-be Democratic nominee, in full cry at a gay fund-raiser on New York's Fire Island, shouting out, "If Bill Clinton could be the first black president, I can be the first gay president!" But now the press was circling, and he seemed to recoil. In December, Trippi told his aides, Dean had come to him and tearfully confessed that he had run only to shake up the Democratic Party and push for health-care reform, that he never cared about being president and never thought he could win. ("That's a figment of Joe's imagination," Dean told NEWSWEEK. "I mean, Joe just made that up out of whole cloth.")