Evan Thomas

Soldiers in the war on terror have learned much since 9/11. So, too, has the enemy. How the London plot was foiled--and where we are in the five-year struggle.

Brooke Astor had always been a paragon of dignity—until her relatives began squabbling over her care.

Brooke Astor had always been a paragon of dignity—until her relatives began squabbling over her care.

The Americans had come close to killing him before, but he'd managed to escape. Not this time.

Weinberger was called "Cap the Knife" for slashing social programs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He became "Cap the Shovel" as Ronald Reagan's secretary of Defense, raising the defense budget by some $2 trillion.

He peppered a man in the face, but didn't tell his boss. Inside Dick Cheney's dark, secretive mind-set--and the forces that made it that way.

When conservative Washington lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court talk about "the Greenhouse Effect," they don't mean global warming. The Greenhouse in question is Linda Greenhouse, the longtime and esteemed Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times.

After 9/11, Bush and Cheney pressed for more power--and got it. Now, predictably, the questions begin. Behind the NSA spying furor.

The lowest moment, Michael Chertoff recalls, came at about 2 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 1, three days after Katrina struck. An NPR interviewer asked the secretary of Homeland Security what he was doing about the thousands of people stranded at the Convention Center.

Hurricane Katrina was less than 24 hours away. The Category 5 hurricane threatened to overwhelm the dikes surrounding the city, much of which sits below sea level.

He has a tight circle of trust, and he likes it that way. But members of both parties are urging Bush to reach beyond the White House walls. How he governs--and how his M.O. stacks up historically.

Randall (Duke) Cunningham has never been shy about his exploits. When he first ran for Congress in 1990, the former naval aviator wore his leather bomber jacket to campaign rallies and referred to his opponent as a "MiG." Cunningham told audiences that the "Maverick" character played by Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" was based on him, claiming credit for the "hit the brakes and he'll fly by" maneuver depicted in the movie and the scene in which Cruise flies upside down over a Soviet fighter.

Right after 9/11, Cheney said, 'we have to work...the dark side if you will. '

For many intellectuals, the ideal of Blind Justice, impartially weighing her scales, went out the window about 80 years ago. At Yale Law School in the 1920s and '30s, a highly influential group of scholars called the Legal Realists argued that the law was not a set of fixed, unchanging rules--"not a brooding omnipresence in the sky," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it.

The vice president and his chief aide often shared bits of secret information, so perhaps it was unremarkable that on June 12, 2003 (according to the indictment handed up last week), Dick Cheney told Scooter Libby that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the Counterproliferation Division in the CIA's secret Directorate of Operations, also known as the Clandestine Service.

The Lower Ninth was going under, again. Floodwaters from Hurricane Rita had breached the levee along the Industrial Canal, inundating the poor New Orleans neighborhood that is, or was, home to 40,000 African-Americans.

This time, President Bush was not going to be caught out of position. He had flown to Colorado to the headquarters of Northern Command, the military nerve center for protecting the continental United States. "Northcom" is just across an air base from Cheyenne Mountain, where cold warriors had once watched for Soviet nuclear-missile attacks.

The government's response to Katrina was a failure of imagination.

Day after day of images showed exhausted families and their crying children stepping around corpses while they begged: Where is the water? Where are the buses?

Rehnquist's wry aside, which broke the tension, was typical of the man affectionately known to his fellow justices as "the Chief." Rehnquist was quick and funny, and he made his job look easy.

True believers on the left and the right, hoping to rouse their armies for a showdown over John Roberts, immediately trumpeted two "facts" about President George W.

ON THE TRAIL: A MASSIVE WORLDWIDE HUNT BEGINS TO CATCH THE LONDON KILLERS.

THE SWING VOTE: SHE'S A COWGIRL FROM SAGEBRUSH COUNTRY, A PIONEER WHO DEFIED THE ODDS. THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF A MODERATE JUSTICE.

UNDERSTANDING DEEP THROAT: WHY A SOURCE TOOK ON A PRESIDENT THEN, AND HOW NIXON'S FALL SHAPES US EVEN NOW.

In the City of Leaks, it is astonishing that the secret of Deep Throat lasted as long as it did. But now that the word is out, the scramble is on to cash in.

By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting "Protect our Holy Book!" burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces.

LLOYD CUTLER, 87Calm and sage, superlawyer Cutler was for many years a gray eminence in Washington. Two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, brought Cutler into the White House to help deal with crises and scandals, and drug companies and automakers beat a path to his door. But Cutler also won landmark legal victories for the NAACP and Greenpeace, and he was known as a consensus-maker who could rise above partisanship--a rare breed in the nation's capital these days.

George Kennan, 101In February 1946, George Kennan, a young American diplomat in Moscow, was feeling sickly and slightly sorry for himself. Stalin's Russia seemed ever more threatening and paranoid, so Kennan wrote a fevered cable to the State Department, arguing that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force." The Long Telegram, as it became known, electrified Washington. "My official loneliness came to an end," Kennan later...

Henry Grunwald arrived at Time magazine as a part-time copy boy in 1944 at the age of 22. He was a Jewish immigrant with a thick Austrian accent. In that era, Time was staffed by Protestants who had gone to Yale, or at least it seemed that way.

THE EARTH SHRUGGED, AND MORE THAN 140,000 DIED. A STORY OF UNIMAGINABLE TRAGEDY AND HEROISM