Evan Thomas

Paul Nitze, 97During a lifetime of public service, Ambassador Paul Nitze never held a cabinet-level job. But he did as much as anyone to win the cold war.

BUSH SCRATCHES THE FOUR-YEAR ITCH

A SOBER VIEW: O HE PARTIED HARD, THEN DRIED OUT AND FOUND A FIERCE DETERMINATION. HOW GEORGE BUSH WAS SAVED--AND NEVER LOOKED BACK.

Around Bush-Cheney headquarters, they are known, respectfully but also with a certain amount of eye-rolling, as The Family. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne, and daughters Liz and Mary can be intense, insular and prickly as they protect their man, his reputation and his place on the GOP ticket.

The story of Ronald Reagan's last decade is at once grim and tender. The personal history of how Nancy coped with his Alzheimer's.

Three blocks from the White House, tucked away in an odd little brick building, is a small (50-member) men's club known as the Alibi. It was once a haven for spy masters.

WILLIAM MANCHESTER, 82 Manchester was a great writer of narrative history cursed by his own talent. He wrote thrilling, moving, graceful portraits of great men, yet academics patronized him as a "popular historian," not a real one.

With Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff And John Barry In Washington, Rod Nordland, Melinda Liu And Babak Dehghanpisheh In Baghdad, And Christopher Dickey In Paris

He Leaned Forward, Changing The Way America Fights Wars And Shaking Up A Staid Bureaucracy. But His Culture Of Intimidation Alienated The Brass--And Helped Pave The Road To Abu Ghraib. Donald Rumsfeld's Journey To The Brink

What made Lynndie England, patriotic, pixie-ish tomboy who joined the army reserve to pay for college, become the poster girl for sexual humiliation and degradation at Abu Ghraib?

It was Monday, Jan. 13, 2003, and President George W. Bush had just told his secretary of State, Colin Powell, that he was going to war in Iraq. "You know you're going to be owning this place?" inquired Powell.

The swift boats, like the one John Kerry captained, were sitting ducks. Hiding in the dense jungle along the riverbanks of the Mekong Delta, the Viet Cong could open up on the Americans with machine guns, mortars and rockets--and vanish before the Americans could effectively shoot back.

PAST AS PROLOGUE: IRAQ FILLS THE HEADLINES, BUT FOR PRESIDENT BUSH AND SEN. JOHN F. KERRY, VIETNAM MAY BE THE CRUCIBLE THAT MATTERS MORE. HOW TWO SONS OF PRIVILEGE CONFRONTED THE CONFLICT--AND THE WAYS THOSE CHOICES HAVE COLORED THEIR DIVERGENT PATHS

Is Dick Cheney a drag on the ticket? As President Bush's rating dips below 50 percent, some prominent Republicans are beginning nervously to wonder. "The chatter on Cheney has increased in the last two weeks," says Republican strategist Scott Reed. "Cheney has moved into the Bush world; you either love him or hate him." The charge that the Bush administration hyped the WMD threat from Iraq has thrust the vice president into the spotlight, a place he generally prefers not to be.There was a time...

The question seemed perfectly innocuous. A student at a small gathering of college Democrats in Lacey, Wash., asked Teresa Heinz Kerry why her husband had waited so long in the Senate (almost two decades) before deciding to run for president.

In the 1996 U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, the wise guys in the Boston media and political establishment toasted Gov. William Weld and made fun of incumbent Sen.

Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political strategist, is known for hamming it up, whistling, humming and occasionally breaking into song. But he seemed especially jolly last week at a dinner, held at a PGA golf-and-spa resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., for about 40 Republican heavy hitters.

Like all American soldiers in Iraq, the men and women of the Third Squad, First Platoon, B Company, 1/124 Infantry of the Florida National Guard were elated over the capture of Saddam Hussein. "It felt like complete victory," wrote one squaddie, Sgt.

'Don't Shoot,' The Bearded, Submissive Man Said To The Soldiers. He Was Saddam Hussein, Hiding In A Hole, The Man The Pentagon Called 'High Value Target Number One.' The Story Of His Capture--And What's Next

In the movie "Master and Commander," Jack Aubrey manages to find the single enemy ship for which he's searching the vast Pacific. During the real age of fighting sail, commanders were not so lucky.

True Confessions: Limbaugh Built An Army Of Admirers With His Hard-Right Rants. But Off-Air, He Was A Lonely Man Who May Have Broken The Law To Feed His Addiction. The Real Rush.

Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is known for his brusqueness with the press. But for Rumsfeld to be snippy with reporters about national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice was, to say the least, unusual and noteworthy.

Gen. Wesley Clark likes to say that he loved all 34 of his years in the U.S. Army except for two days: the day he was shot (four times) in Vietnam and the day he was fired as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, effectively ending his military career.

Know thine enemy is an old rule of war and geopolitics, but one that often cannot be obeyed, especially if the enemy is a totalitarian state and hard to spy on.

Iraq may be spinning out of control, but in the Bush administration, the spin was strictly controlled. From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development.

THEY HOARDED MONEY. AND THEY HUDDLED IN FEAR. INSIDE THE FLIGHT PATH OF SADDAM'S SONS. THE RAID THAT GROUNDED THEM--AND THE HUNT FOR THE ACE OF SPADES

First to take the fall was CIA Director George Tenet. He apologized for not stopping President Bush from declaring, in the State of the Union, that the Iraqis were trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa, a claim based on thin or fraudulent intelligence.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor got her job through affirmative action. It was obvious to officials in the Reagan Justice Department, as they searched for a Supreme Court justice in the summer of 1981, that she lacked the usual qualifications for the high court. "No way," Emma Jordan, an assistant to the then Attorney General William French Smith, recalls thinking. "There were gaps in her background where she had clearly been at home having babies.

In A Landmark Decision, The Supreme Court Affirms Gay Privacy And Opens The Way To A Revolution In Family Life

The vice president's chief of staff and national-security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, wants to be anonymous, but his personality sometimes gets the better of him.