Evan Thomas

The evidence against Lotfi Raissi seemed pretty damning. The Algerian pilot had allegedly given flying instructions to four of the suspected hijackers in the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

In the skies and across the nation, the worst terrorist strike in U.S. history is a story of horror, heroes and the resolve not to give in to killers.

It was a date that will live in infamy. Just as Dec. 7, 1941, was the day upon which all Americans realized that they are not free from foreign attack, Sept. 11, 2001, will live on in the collective consciousness of the American people as the day they learned they were not safe from terrorism.

Katharine Graham 1917 - 2001

Gary Condit learned how to project an image of purity and innocence at a very young age. As a little boy he would stand atop a tree stump at his father's tent revival meetings and sing, in a clear, sweet voice, "Amazing Grace." Then his father, Adrian, a Baptist minister, would step up and deliver a fire-and-brimstone sermon about hell and damnation.

Katharine Graham, who died today at 84, was, for many years, arguably the most powerful woman in America. She was the first woman to be a true media mogul, running The Washington Post Company (which owns NEWSWEEK) for more than three decades.

If Karl Rove has his way, the GOP--the Grand Old Party--will become the POG--the Party of God. Since the early '70s, the actively religious have been migrating to the Republicans.

Good thing the founders didn't rely on pollsters. At the time of the Revolution, the American colonists, John Adams recalled, were "about one third Tories"--loyal to the British crown--"and [one] third timid, and one third true blue." Adams was true blue. "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I am with my country from this day on," he told a friend in 1774. "You may depend on it."By the summer of '76, as Adams cajoled his fellow delegates to the Second Continental Congress in...

It was a private tutorial for the president, in the living room of the White House residence. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national-security adviser and chief tutor on foreign policy, had already trooped a procession of heads of state and foreign ministers through the Oval Office to contribute to the education of George W.

Gone are the double-breasted suits and the copy of the Renaissance painting on the wall. Gone, too, is most of the $10 billion fortune, as well as roughly half of the 2,400 staffers he once employed.

The handshake is vicelike, the stare hard. He owns a Walther PPK pistol--the 1960s James Bond's handgun of choice--and practices martial arts. He smokes pre-Castro Cuban cigars and once, while scuba diving with some macho buddies, he says he punched a great white shark in the jaw, just to show that he could.

James Wire, ship fitter third class, couldn't imagine that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor. Reflecting the racial views all too typical of his time, he regarded the Japanese as incapable of such a bold affront.

Sen. Bob Kerrey, Vietnam War hero, Medal of Honor winner, often came across as a brooding figure. His friends attributed Kerrey's melancholy streak to his long suffering in a veterans' hospital after part of his leg was blown off by a Viet Cong grenade in 1969.

It was week one of President George W. Bush's first foreign-policy crisis. The cable-TV news networks were blaring on about "the showdown with China." Talking heads were asking when the 24 American crew members "detained" on Hainan Island were going to be called hostages.

For many years, Naval Academy graduates who wanted to sail in submarines had to endure an interview with Adm. Hyman Rickover, the arbitrary, irascible father of the nuclear Navy.

Deborah Courtney wanted to sail on a warship after she graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1990. It took a while: Courtney had to bide her time as an admiral's aide until the rules barring women from combat duty were changed in 1994.

Bonnie Wauck married alleged Soviet spy Bob Hanssen more than three decades ago, said her sister Liz Rahimi, because "he treated her like a queen." The parents of six children, Bob and Bonnie "were the picture of a perfect family.

"We are here to keep Catholics from living double lives," says Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest. In the case of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent accused of spying for the Russians, Opus Dei apparently failed spectacularly.

Exclusive: To His Neighbors, Robert Hanssen Was A Devout Dad. To His Fbi Colleagues, He Could Be Controlling And Moralistic. To The Russians, He Was 'B' And 'Ramon'--A Long-Term Mole In The American Government. His Mind And Motives.

Crew members of the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru had just finished lunch when they felt a jolt, then two explosions. Plunged into darkness, they scrambled on deck as the water rushed in and their 191-foot ship began to founder.

Bill O'Reilly makes more than a million dollars a year, but he's damned if he'll spend $3.50 on a cup of coffee. "I will not go in a Starbucks," he says. He prefers a coffee shop in Manhasset, Long Island, where cops and firemen hang out.

Restoration: With A Solemn Speech, George W. Bush Ends The Age Of Clinton. He's Striking The Right Notes, But Still Faces A Divided Nation

The War For The White House Rages On In Overtime

CAMPAIGN 2000 A Mole Hunt on the Trail Was it a harmless political caper--or a mole? In mid-September, when an adviser to Al Gore received an anonymous package containing what appeared to be George W.

At St. Albans, the tony prep school he attended in Washington 35 years ago, Albert Gore Jr. appeared, at least from a distance, to be a prince among princes.

Bobby Kennedy Seems Frozen In Myth. But The Real Rfk Was Complex, At Once Idealistic And Devious. The Inside Story Of The Cuban Missile Crisis--Where He Found A Way Out, And Grew Up.

On one morning last march James Kimsey, as a member of the National Gallery's Collectors Committee, helped choose between a half-dozen art works the museum was seeking to acquire (Kimsey voted for a Warhol).

Religion, wrote Lenin, is a "vile contagion of the most abominable kind." But it was useful cover for the Kremlin's spies. Revived during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler in 1943, the Russian Orthodox Church was controlled by the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.

The first hints of something wrong at Potomac Elementary came from the kids. Whispering to one another in the hallways and on the playground, then telling their parents after school, a few fifth graders began describing the peculiar behavior of their principal, Karen Karch, as she supervised the state assessment tests in mid-May.

There was the planning team, the intelligence team, the surveillance team, the break-down-the-door team, the snatch team, the perimeter-security team, the neutralize-the-neighbors team, the air wing and the Navy (a fast boat, in case the helicopter couldn't take off).