Paul O'Neill looked up from his legal pad and out the window of USAir Flight 991 from Pittsburgh as it made a panoramic descent into Washington's Reagan National Airport.

God knows how many times he'd traveled this northwesterly arc high across the Potomac, an ideal angle to glimpse the Mall's Elysian symmetry of white marble and green expanse from the Capitol dome to Lincoln's Memorial. It still thrilled him, this confected balance, as it had when he arrived as a young, working-class kid, with a wife, two babies, an economics degree from unremarkable Fresno State College, and a few years working as a self-taught engineer. He'd landed a job working in the Veterans Administration by filling out an application for federal internships he'd picked up at the post office. Three hundred thousand applicants went on to take a federal standardized test. Three thousand were summoned for an oral review, where they were interviewed in groups of ten. Three hundred were offered jobs. It was 1961. Kennedy was President. The start of everything, really.

Now, thirty-nine years later, he had reasons, good ones, why he shouldn't come back. They were on the yellow legal pad, neatly lined and spaced, resting on the tray table. He checked it one last time, a list that covered three handwritten pages, then considered what had been said thus far and what would be expected of him in a few hours at his first meeting with the President-elect.

His old friend Richard Cheney -- quiet, poker-faced Dick -- had done almost all the talking thus far, starting with a mid-November call to Paul's cubicle at Alcoa's headquarters in Pittsburgh. The call was courteous and cool, like Dick. Always holding something back, making you wonder about the interior workings. He'd known the inscrutable westerner since the Nixon days, when O'Neill was assistant director of the newly created Office of Management and Budget (OMB) -- a senior management team, of sorts, that Richard Nixon created to solve a growing crisis of scale: the increasing inability of one elected man to make so many complex decisions in a responsible way.

OMB became the stop-and-think shop, where all major issues were studied and distilled into briefs about choices and consequences for the President. It was the spot to be, and O'Neill -- nearly a decade in the government at that point -- was a rising young man of his day, a budget wizard who became a deep driller on what was known and knowable in a wide array of policies. Dick Cheney was a twenty-eight-year-old Ph.D. student brought into the Office of Economic Opportunity -- a policy sidecar headed by an ambitious ex-congressman named Donald Rumsfeld -- which was charged with carrying forward Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Rumsfeld, as a department head, was someone an OMB honcho like O'Neill regularly dealt with, and Dick was always at Don's side. A few years later, when everyone had moved up -- Rumsfeld to chief of staff under Gerald Ford, with Dick as his deputy (Cheney took the top staff job when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense) -- Dick started introducing Paul, then OMB's deputy director, as "the smartest guy I know." Still did, or at least so Paul had heard from a few of their mutual friends -- they had about a thousand of those.

That first call was just a "heads-up." Speculation had swirled in the press about O'Neill being tapped for OMB director, for Commerce Secretary, or -- in a late October column by The New York Times's William Safire -- for Secretary of Defense. As someone who'd met George W. Bush -- although only in passing, and although he'd never contributed to the campaign -- O'Neill had managed to surface on plenty of lists. He was viewed as a favorite of the former President Bush, as a serious policy innovator among traditional Republicans, and as someone George W. Bush would need at his side, in some capacity, if he were to become President. That last issue was very much in question in mid-November 2000, as the Florida election results were still in dispute, but Dick wanted to lay down a marker.

"I don't know how this all will sort out, Paul, but you're at the top of our list," Dick had said on the phone.

"That's very flattering, Dick, but I don't think I want to go back to the government."

Dick pressed on, talking in general terms about Commerce or OMB and the challenge of getting talented people to serve. Paul let that sink in for moment and then said, "No, I don't think so, Dick. But thanks."

Three weeks later, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Bush v. Gore. The justices announced on Saturday, December 9, that they would examine the previous day's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, which had mandated a manual recount of all ballots cast in the state. The Florida ruling had been a reprieve for the Democrats, the restart of a process that they were sure would level the playing field, with oral arguments on recount procedures scheduled for Monday. But the Supreme Court's Saturday halt to the recount -- essentially taking the issue away from Florida's courts -- shifted the betting line from even money to advantage Bush.

The next afternoon, Sunday, Paul was watching his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers lose 30-10 to the New York Giants, effectively knocking the hometown team out of the playoffs. The phone rang. He jumped up, grabbed it in the kitchen. Dick again.

"Soon I may have to call you Mr. Vice President."

"Maybe so, Paul. We've got our fingers crossed."

Fine, on to business.

"We really need you here in Washington."

"Dick, I'm really not interested."

Then he heard what he thought was Dick's suppressed, Sydney Greenstreet snigger. "You need to let me tell you it's Treasury."

Paul smiled. He could hear Dick smiling on the other end of the phone line. Yes, Treasury is the oldest -- the first appointment made by George Washington himself -- and the most venerable of the cabinet offices. It was and is a public trust, literally. Alexander Hamilton, one of the great geniuses of his era, sat in the chair first, a special chair.

"Well, yes, I suppose Treasury is a little different. I'll concede that." He paused a moment. "Okay, I suppose we can at least talk about Treasury."

"We'll be in touch," Dick said.

Paul hung up the phone and walked back into the living room. His wife, Nancy -- levelheaded, resilient Nancy -- was on the couch, looking hard at him. The novel she'd been engrossed in was closed on her lap.

"My God, Paul. We are not really going to do this!" she said. "You always said you're not going back there."

"Don't worry, we're not," O'Neill said, and sat back down in the lounge chair. "Don't worry." He flipped to CNBC. He could feel Nancy still staring at him. He had been excited to hear Dick's voice -- he was sure she could pick that up, even from a room away. It was flattering, after all, to be asked. Especially about something as august as Treasury.

"Right," she said more softly, after a moment. "Hurry up and get down here so everyone can kick you around. Everything has become so nasty down there now. Come on, honey. You're not a politician. You know what it'd be like."

After forty-five years of marriage, they both knew everything. They'd been together, after all, since they were eighteen. Grew up together. A pair of small-town kids, made good. Paul was never the kind of American achiever who believed he was evolving, anxious thereby to match each success with fresh start accoutrements like new wives and dazzling possessions. Neither of them, in fact, felt they'd changed all that much since she saw him walk into her English class senior year at Anchorage High School in Alaska, the new boy who lived out on the military base. Yes, she'd since read press clippings that said he was God's gift to corporate America, or a messiah of good government, but to her he was just Paul, gentle, quirky, polite, loyal to a fault when that loyalty is earned, and if he were a garbage collector or doing construction in Alaska -- his career choice before he chanced into the Claremont, California, Post Office -- she'd still be at his side.

Not that there hadn't been struggles, as in any marriage, and, God knows, sacrifices. Plenty on Nancy's end. During the sixteen years in Washington -- most of their first two decades together -- she raised their three daughters and son by herself. Paul worked nearly seven days a week, seventeen hours a day, at a salary that went from subsistence to barely adequate. At the beginning, they couldn't even afford a phone. She made the kids' clothing herself. He loved to work; some men do. As he hit his stride in those seven years at OMB, he worked every day but Christmas and a short summer vacation. Things changed a bit after Gerald Ford lost and Paul took an executive job in 1977 at International Paper Company in New York City -- at least there was money. That helped some; they started to enjoy a few of the rewards. Pittsburgh, though, had been their best stop: thirteen years at Alcoa, where Nancy built a life around Paul's blossoming success -- scores of friends, leading roles in the community for them both -- even while his days were still long, scheduled to the minute, and took him out of town, on average, once or twice a week. It was an extraordinary run, a legendary turnaround: a battered and beaten Aluminum Company of America went from $1.1 million in earnings, on sales of $8 billion, when Paul took over in 1987, to $1.5 billion in earnings, on sales of $23 billion in 2000, a year when Alcoa -- now the world's largest aluminum producer -- was the New York Stock Exchange's best-performing stock. Clean victories on every front. And soon, he'd go out on top. He had passed the CEO's job on to his handpicked successor in 1999. As for the chairmanship, he was due to retire at the end of this very month.

Just twenty-one days! There were already plans galore, curtain-raisers on a long-awaited valedictory chapter of their lives, with $60 million in the bank and, soon, all the time in the world. In an office nook off the kitchen, Nancy had a folder with maps and brochures for a once-in-a-lifetime journey across America, just the two of them. They were going to spend months driving across America's back roads. Paul had even picked out the car. They'd drive the blue highways in a Bentley.

Nancy turned back to her novel. Paul switched to football highlights. He's not going to do it, she thought to herself. He just wouldn't.

A week later, Paul silently gathered papers and his briefcase and slipped into his black cashmere overcoat on a snowy, dark Monday morning. He's an early riser, up at 5 a.m. most days and gone by 6. Nancy will usually sleep to a sane hour, seven o'clock or so. But not this morning.

She appeared in her pink satin bathrobe, her bare feet lightly clapping across the kitchen's Italian tile floor.

He turned, surprised.

"You're up early."

"I wanted to see you off."

Of course, Paul could figure out why she was padding about in darkness. "Listen, I'm just going down there to talk about it. It's a joint decision. We'll decide together."

She knew this was trouble. He was going to see Dick and the President-elect. They'd be persuasive. They'd say whatever he wanted to hear.

"Don't you go down there and tell them you're going to do it."

"Don't worry." He kissed her. "You know me better than that."

* * *

A light rain fell in Washington on December 18, 2000, President-elect George W. Bush's first morning in Washington. The dam of Florida press conferences and hanging chads, a prim, pained Supreme Court ruling, and an Al Gore concession of unexpected grace was beginning to recede beneath a quotidian tide of news cycles.

Every hour was being covered as an event, as an onrushing measure of forward motion. The President-elect's first date, at 8 a.m., was an hour-long breakfast meeting with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan at the Madison Hotel -- about five blocks from the White House -- where Bush was staying in a suite and holding court. It was followed by a brief press advisory at the hotel, where he said, "I talked with a good man right here." He then turned to Mr. Greenspan and patted him on the shoulder. "We had a very strong discussion about my confidence in his abilities."

Next stop, Capitol Hill, for a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with congressional leaders from each party, followed by a press availability in a chandeliered, wood-paneled, squash court-size room on the second floor of the Capitol. The President-elect stood on a threadbare Oriental rug beneath a life-size painting of George Washington and spoke like a therapist after a successful session.

"I made my rounds to the leaders here on the Hill," Bush said, standing shoulder to shoulder with his four conferees of midmorning: Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle; House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, a barbershop quartet of bipartisanship. "I want to thank all four for their hospitality and their gracious reception of the newly elected President. I made it clear to each that I come to Washington with the intention of doing the people's business, that I look forward to listening and occasionally talking, to work with both the Republicans and the Democrats."

Bush paused and looked side to side, as though he might call for a group hug.

"I told all four that I felt like this election happened for a reason" -- reporters hung on the word "reason," a natural segue to the thing they were waiting for: an assessment of how the brokered, litigated presidential election would now define the act of governing--"that it pointed out the delay in the outcome. It should make it clear to all of us that we can come together to heal whatever wounds may exist, whatever residuals there may be."

Bush dodged it -- the what-exactly-is-my-mandate-now issue -- but this "heal whatever wounds may exist" line, it was instantly clear, would be the day's lead quotation on television and radio and in tomorrow's newspapers.

"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's okay. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

That capped it: a startling turn of self-deprecation and bluster from a man who shrugged at questions of his legitimacy. The disputed, dead-heat election of 2000 -- concluding a presidential contest in which both candidates sanded off their sharp edges in a race for the political center -- had finally delivered a historically halfhearted mandate: a charge that solutions in the coming months, of whatever shape or color, were expected to be unearthed from middle ground. A fifty-fifty split in the Senate, a modest, nine-vote Republican advantage in the House, and a President who assumed office after losing the popular vote meant that the public's grant of power was almost legally conditioned on the centrist ideal. The President, after all, is the principal elected representative of all the people. The vox populi, in sum, spelled middle.

The only dissonant chord was at that point barely audible, a comment the day before by Dick Cheney on CBS's Face the Nation: "As President-elect Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed; it's his program and it's his agenda and we have no intention at all of backing off of it.... The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs I just think is silly."

To be sure, that was a kind of pregame interview, the day before George W. Bush arrived in town. When the President-elect spoke this morning, backed by congressional leaders of both parties, it carried the weight of authority. A commitment to the humble search for common ground.

After fielding a few questions from reporters, Bush gazed at the bipartisan assemblage and said, somewhat dreamily, "It's amazing what happens when you listen to the other person's opinion. And we began the process of doing that today."

* * *

This ecumenical ideal -- as of this morning, duly noted across America by mildly engaged voters, seasoned talk-show pundits, and dispirited ideologues of both parties -- informed O'Neill's midmorning cab ride into the buzzing Capitol. It gave him confidence that it was worth seriously investigating whether the rest of his life ought to start with a return to Washington.

O'Neill was a believer in the middle ground. Not in compromise, so much. Or horse trading. He was never much on any of that. It was the fresh, unaffiliated idea that enlivened him. Across four decades of search and study in and near government, he was sure he'd spotted a staid, stoic truth beneath the heat lightning of political rhetoric: that on matters of policy there are answers -- right answers -- that eventually assert their primacy over political posturing. These right answers fall indiscriminately, here and there, along the left/right political axis, or create new territory not yet charted. An idea's first conceptual mold tends to form through plodding rigor, from a clear-eyed examination of available evidence and an open-minded -- and sometimes humbling -- assessment of opposing views. Fierce, frank dialogue commences; choices and consequences take shape. And, if everyone is honest about what they all know -- and about what they've learned in this roiling process -- an answer, a best remedy, emerges. Illusion will have its moment, but there is, in fact, a discernible underlying reality. It may take a while, but in the end that reality becomes visible and undeniable. In the end, it's all about process, O'Neill believed. Trust process and the ends take care of themselves.

Washington was ruled at this moment by a pragmatic, multi-sectarian community. Among the array of denominations -- from battle-fatigued former radicals to fresh-faced seekers of "third way" innovations to tough-minded brokers who believed in cutting "a fair deal for all" and then breaking for cocktails -- a true believer in the old church orthodoxy of good process would be viewed with a wary good humor, like a circuit-riding preacher who'd stir things up but be gone by morning. Mostly, though, O'Neill was granted that funny-hat catchall "maverick" -- for someone who has a passport to various camps but doesn't neatly fit anywhere.

The pragmatists had been in charge, for the most part, since the end of Ronald Reagan's first term, when the reality of deficits began to temper Reagan's ideological zeal on tax cuts. Reagan -- like the liberal Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone or the conservative Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich or the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist -- was widely considered to be part of a surrounding army: the ideologues, animated by a sweeping philosophy and the ideas that happen to support it. Such men are not inclined to seek a middle ground so much as build a fortress at one pole or the other, hoping to create a place that will attract adherents until the midpoint, wherever it came to rest, ended up in their front yard. Only they, the ideologues attest, are truly driven by ideas. Big ideas that tend to explain history and human behavior and the way things are. They tend to stick with their own, find information that supports a wider view. As for their view of pragmatists, a succinct summation was first uttered in frustration by Representative Dick Armey of Texas in the late eighties, when Republicans were the long-standing minority in Congress. Fatigued from being enticed into conference, time and again, by the Democratic majority and leaving with little to show, Armey murmured that such encounters were not love, not sex, and not natural. "Bipartisanship," he was overheard saying, "is another name for date rape." Now, the same "date rape" line had been embraced by ideologues-in-waiting, like Norquist, in a boast about how the new one-party government would be able to have its way. The consensus, though, was that neither party would have a clear advantage. And, in the central focus of O'Neill's coming engagement -- economic policy -- a sanctuary had been well mapped. Fiscal prudence, once the province of Republicans, had been thoroughly colonized in the 1990s by Clinton Democrats. Now, everyone stood, somewhat uncomfortably, on this slender territory.

It was a peace won through sacrifice, starting with the price paid by George H. W. Bush, who had grown larger over the last decade in the eyes of the pragmatists. O'Neill had been a friend of the senior Bush since they had spent significant time together in the Ford administration. Bush was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and O'Neill worked with him to implement harsh, post-Watergate sanctions recommended by the commission chaired by Nelson Rockefeller -- and still preserve the agency's effectiveness. It was a tough task, and largely unsuccessful. But O'Neill was impressed by Bush. He was just back from being head of the U.S. Liaison Office to China, where he "dove completely into the task of understanding China, of mastering the intricacies of this new relationship... he was, fairly quickly, a top-drawer internationalist," O'Neill said, looking back. "He was more inquisitive than he at first appeared. He not only wanted to know what you thought, he needed to know how you got there." They instantly clicked: two men who share a thorough-going, set-your-course-and-follow-through style, both note writers. They stayed in touch from that point forward.

Just after Bush was elected in 1988, the new administration approached O'Neill to consider the job of Secretary of Defense. O'Neill had just started at Alcoa -- he said he couldn't leave so soon -- and recommended his old friend Cheney, who ended up with the job. President Bush soon convinced O'Neill to chair an advisory group on education that included Lamar Alexander and Bill Brock, moderate Republican heavyweights of that era, and Richard Riley, who would eventually be Clinton's Education Secretary. In large measure, though, it was an excuse to get O'Neill to Washington to talk about a wider array of issues. They met several times to discuss foreign affairs, military preparedness, health care, and the economy. O'Neill was part of the group of pragmatists, including domestic policy chief Roger Porter and OMB director Richard Darman, who believed the President should break his "Read my lips" pledge against raising taxes and halt the growth of deficits. He did, of course, suffering what may have been a fatal political wound.

The ideologues' view was that Bush should have tried harder to trim spending and shrink deficits. They say he was timid, when he needed to be firm, that he second-guessed himself after listening to the counsel of "honorable men," like those Mark Antony mocked at Caesar's funeral. Bush broke with Reagan's bold, winning mandate, they said, and got little in return. He received no credit from the Democrats for this step in their direction and drew the ire of core Republican constituencies, who felt abandoned by this shift and stayed home on election day. Their case lacked evidence, moderate Republicans countered, asserting that Bush would have prospered in the 1992 election by moving even more forcefully, and candidly, toward the political center. The former President, confusing the issue further, said in his convention speech in 1992 that he regretted breaking his pledge, but then, in interviews after he left office, appeared to backtrack from that apology.

An array of mavericks and hard-nut pragmatists -- such as O'Neill, Greenspan, former senators Sam Nunn of Georgia and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, members of the centrist Concord Coalition, and most of the men around the first Bush -- saw the broken pledge and its aftermath as vindication: proof positive of how "right answers" can germinate and grow, even on a dry, partisan terrain. They said that by repealing a portion of Reagan's tax reductions, President Bush saved his predecessor's core principle and made it work effectively, much as Nixon -- another hero of the policy pragmatists -- is credited for smartly honing and targeting some of Johnson's liberal initiatives. More important, Bush started the government on a path of fiscal prudence. That meant not just talking about the virtues of a balanced budget but taking a courageous, rather-right-than-reelected stand, especially after the irresistible promise of supply-side economics -- that tax cuts would create economic growth that would boost tax revenues and eventually shrink deficits -- was shown to be hollow.

Because Bush acted against type by not defending the ideology of tax cuts, he gave Bill Clinton an opportunity (or "permission," Republicans like to say) to do the same with his mirror-image dilemma. Rather than carrying on as a so-called tax-and-spend Democrat, President Clinton became a fiscal hawk, often suffering the ire of the left. In the late nineties, the federal budgets came into balance and then showed surplus. Interest rates dropped and it became clear, year by year, that receding federal deficits were a prime reason. Income that once went to interest payments became found money in countless kitchens and corporate suites. Debt became cheap. The equities markets surged, lifted on the clasped hands of productivity gains from technological innovation and a historically low cost of capital. The economy grew an average of 3.8 percent a year between 1996 and 2000.

To be sure, some of this might have happened no matter who was in the White House. But, across a decade of often angry partisanship, an answer somehow took shape: Fiscal prudence works. A balanced budget means that the government won't be out borrowing billions and, thereby, driving up interest rates. What's more, long-term rates started to be reined downward toward short-term rates, which the Federal Reserve controls with the discount rate and federal funds rate that it charges banks.

As Greenspan advised, and Clinton acknowledged, as far back as 1992, sellers of long-term debt tucked a significant premium, a safety cushion, of several points into interest rates, because of their bleak certainty that ongoing budget deficits and inflation would make tomorrow's dollar less valuable than today's. Balance the budget, while keeping inflation in check, and that premium will all but vanish. They were right. Long-term rates dropped to 7.6 percent by 2000, falling closer in line with short-term rates. In a nation with so much household and corporate debt -- where children grow up fluent in the lexicon of interest versus principal -- low rates have been embraced as an American version of virtue.

* * *

As the cab made its way along the Potomac toward Washington, O'Neill took a last run through his three beloved morning reads -- The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post -- a forty-year-long, phone-book-size addiction.

Along with a story about weakening Christmas sales, the Times front page was dominated by stories about the President-elect's early appointments -- most notably Colin Powell as Secretary of State designee and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser -- together with a lead news story in column 6, datelined yesterday from Austin, about all the appointments. It was the largest mention yet of O'Neill.

Mr. Bush is expected to move swiftly on the appointments to top economic slots, but his lunch with Mr. O'Neill was said to be an opportunity to get to know the aluminum executive, who has a master's degree in public administration from Indiana University and has also done graduate-level work in economics.

Although there are other candidates, Mr. O'Neill "ended up ahead of the pack because the more traditional Wall Street candidates lacked a strong public-policy background," a Bush adviser said.

"He has the right combination of skills, experience and personality to navigate the rough political waters of an aggressive tax-cutting proposal and the vagaries of the international financial market," this adviser said.

Not bad, O'Neill thought, figuring that the "adviser" must be Cheney -- sounded like Dick, though Dick hated to talk to the press. The front-page story jumped to A21, the Times's National page, alongside a news story about the administration's policy plan that began: "The incoming Bush administration signaled today that it would make education its first legislative priority after taking office next month, and pledged to move rapidly on the other main pieces of its campaign platform, including a big tax cut and overhauls of Social Security and Medicare."

These issues represented core competencies for O'Neill. He'd headed councils on education reform both nationally and in Pennsylvania since the late 1980s. He helped design the basic architecture for Medicare financing in the 1970s and then pioneered innovations for corporate health care financing while at Alcoa. And overhauling Social Security? He was early -- maybe first -- into that tent, ever since his friend George Shultz, former Secretary of State, had testified before Congress in 1973 that the aging baby boom generation would eventually bankrupt the system. Paul had briefed Shultz for that testimony.

Suddenly, it felt like familiar terrain under his feet, a continuation rather than a Rip Van Winkle return. The President-elect, who seemed to work well with a Democratic legislature in Texas, must be seeking top officials who can navigate the middle ground, who can ask the hard questions of both sides. After all, he, Powell, and New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman -- who news media said was being considered for EPA -- were all known as centrists, arbiters of fractious debates, closely aligned with the first President Bush.

O'Neill wondered if the President-elect's father would come up in today's lunch. Clearly, he figured, it was part of the mix of reasons that he'd been summoned. He was uniquely qualified to finesse this delicate and defining relationship -- an occurrence with only one precedent, in John Adams and John Quincy Adams -- where you have a President whose dad was President, too. If he were Treasury Secretary, the top domestic official of the government -- with the ecumenical Powell as the top official in foreign policy -- the President's seniormost appointees would both be centrists who remained integral to his dad's wise, pragmatic crowd. That gang -- Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker, Larry Eagleburger, and Roger Porter -- included some of O'Neill's closest friends.

On the plane, O'Neill had fussed over whether to include his advice to break the no-tax pledge -- and his public efforts to lead CEOs in a ringing endorsement of Bush Senior's tough-on-deficits stand -- on his list of why nots. He had decided against it, realizing that he was uncertain where the son actually stood on deficits. The matter hadn't come up much in the campaign. In fact, as the cab snaked through downtown, O'Neill realized he wasn't sure where the President-elect stood on a wide array of issues. He knew most of the one-line policy positions. But he didn't know the way the man thought.

Copyright © 2004 by Ron Suskind