One day he was being courted as John Kerry’s running mate; another day he was rumored to be replacing Dick Cheney on the Bush ticket. On many days he was defending his [#image: /photos/54cbf9a85e7a91c52822fd29]Democratic friend against the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; at the same time, he was campaigning side by side with his newer friend, the president, once even hugging him and getting a kiss on the forehead in return. Both candidates have used his image to their advantage in their TV ads.

And with nearly every report about Senator John McCain and the unprecedented tightrope he’s navigated, there’s been a reference to the ugliness of four years ago—the South Carolina Republican primary of 2000, the do-or-die battle of George W. Bush’s political life to that point.

McCain says “it’s over,” he’s buried the hatchet, it’s no longer worth revisiting. But the evidence of this political year says otherwise: the ghosts of South Carolina—the power of going negative and the quandary of how to respond to it; the role of consultants and of surrogate groups; the question of a candidate’s responsibility—just won’t go away.

So I went there, to try to find out what really happened and why. Was it really as bad as accepted wisdom has it? Who did the dirtiest work? How did they get away with it? And how does it relate to the walk in the political gutter that we’ve witnessed the last few months?

As you drive south, the first thing you notice is that the roads aren’t as well paved as farther north and that there are fewer state troopers. Budget cuts have made the odds of getting caught speeding in South Carolina among the lowest in the nation. People there want government to stay out of their pockets, and their lives.

In Columbia, you see the Confederate battle flag flying smack in front of the State House and wonder: Wasn’t that problem resolved?—only to learn that the solution was to take it off the capitol dome and plant it where it was far more visible. I happened to be there on Confederate Memorial Day, and it was like the elephant in the room: not one word about it in the Columbia paper. Government offices were shut, streets emptied, while a few overheated old-timers in gray wool did holiday duty around their flag.

South Carolina is overwhelmingly conservative, and even the taste in barbecue is party-weighted; a poll last year found local Republicans prefer mustard-based sauce by a two-to-one margin over the Democrats’ pick, made with ketchup.

But the real political taste is for blood. South Carolina is where Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the Dark Prince of negative campaigning, spent his childhood and learned his craft, and where he is now buried. There’s barely a political operative in the state who didn’t either work with him or go to school on his tactics. Reviled in much of the nation, he is all but universally revered at home. I was there to find out about dirty politics, I’d say. Over and over, that provoked pride: “You’ve come to the right place!” Politics don’t get any bloodier than the kind Lee Atwater practiced.

On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush. In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative. Bush had resisted. His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.

Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead. With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” Warren Rudman, the 74-year-old former New Hampshire senator and one of McCain’s national chairmen, told me. “When you look at a lot of campaigns, not just that one, when front-runners suddenly fall behind, their campaign consultants just go off the deep end.… People going down for the third time, they grab on for anything they can get ahold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”

At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time.

“I always knew that if Bush got in trouble he’d push the doomsday button,” a respected Washington figure with solid ties to the religious right told me, asking that his name not be used. He said he’d been told the strategy called for an “underground campaign” by all the heavyweight groups of the Republican and Christian right, a campaign that would be modeled on Ralph Reed’s infamous, Atwater-like boast about his Christian Coalition work: “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until Election Night.” Luckily for Bush, the source said, the showdown was in South Carolina, where the Christian Coalition had its greatest strength. They’d work through word of mouth in the evangelical community, and it’d never be picked up by the media. “Reed had pledged to Rove that he could deliver. Ultimately, it was all about power. They were all attaching their fates to Bush.”

If Bush had everything at stake, the religious right had nearly as much. From a power high after the 1994 Gingrich revolution, it had been humbled in the ’98 elections for going overboard with the Clinton sex scandal. In 2000 the key leaders passed over one of their own, Gary Bauer, and put their money, literally, on Bush. Lee Bandy, of The State newspaper, who has seen it all in 43 years of covering South Carolina politics, told me, “I’ve never seen the Christian right so energized.”

History was on Bush’s side. And, in a way, so was Lee Atwater, nine years after his death at 40 from a brain tumor. Stopping an insurgent like McCain was just what the master strategist envisioned when, in 1979, he persuaded the South Carolina G.O.P. to abandon its presidential-preference convention for an early and open primary that would be the gateway to the South. The next year, he directed Ronald Reagan’s landslide there over George H. W. Bush. Later, the South Carolina primary became known as the “fire wall” for the party establishment. In 1988, after Vice President Bush (with Atwater in his prime, steering his national campaign) lost in Iowa to Bob Dole and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, he managed to turn it around in New Hampshire. But it was only after his romp in South Carolina that he was home free.

In 2000, George W. Bush was the clear choice of the state’s bosses—known as “the Campbell machine,” after Carroll Campbell, governor from 1987 to ’95 and still popular. It could as easily have been “the Atwater mafia,” since Atwater and Campbell, as a team and starting virtually from scratch, had all but achieved one-party rule for the G.O.P. in South Carolina.

Besides Campbell himself, the Bush team was chockablock with Atwater debtors: Senator Strom Thurmond, who owed him his tough 1978 re-election; local strategist Warren Tompkins, who had been friends with him since the fourth grade; and communications czar Tucker Eskew, who’d apprenticed under him. From the religious right there was Robertson, who’d gone to Atwater’s hospital bedside shortly before his death in 1991 to try to clear up any bitterness left by the ’88 race. (He believed Atwater had been behind the leak of the sex scandal involving fellow TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart; it broke days before the South Carolina vote and damaged Robertson by association.) And there was Coalition executive vice president Roberta Combs, an old South Carolina pal, and Reed, who used to say that all he ever really wanted to be was a “Christian Lee Atwater.” In 1997, Reed left the Coalition for Enron. (It’s been alleged that Rove arranged it, to keep him loyal to Bush; both Reed and Rove deny this.) He then set up his own political-and-corporate-consulting firm in Atlanta, which in 2000 had a multi-million-dollar contract to mobilize voters for the G.O.P. (Reed declined repeated requests to be interviewed.)

Even Texans Karl Rove and George W. had their own quirky Atwater histories. In 1973 a 22-year-old Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for chairman of the College Republican National Committee. And in Dad’s 1988 race Junior had been assigned to Atwater as a sort of family watchdog and sidekick (“It turned out they were on the same wavelength,” said a mutual friend), giving him a front-row seat as the hatchet man engineered the destruction of Michael Dukakis with the notorious Willie Horton racial-scare campaign.

Given all that firepower—plus a big money advantage: Bush’s side, unfettered by federal limits, reportedly had as much as $8 million, while McCain, who had capped out in the state, had less than $3 million—some experts, even some McCain backers, are convinced Bush would have won no matter what.

But nothing was left to chance.

McCain’s deputy campaign manager, Roy Fletcher, told me that by the morning after the New Hampshire vote “we had all kinds of stuff coming into the Washington headquarters. They were already spreading all this crap about McCain.… We knew right then we had a problem: These guys are gonna go nuts. … It was pretty obvious they’d laid a plan for South Carolina, to start immediately. Just boom! Go at him as hard and as vicious as you can.”

Nancy Snow drove all night from New Hampshire to volunteer in McCain’s office in her old hometown of Greenville. Then an assistant professor of political science at New England College (she’s now at Cal State Fullerton), Snow had invited John and Cindy McCain to speak at her school and was sold.

“We were starting to get wind that this was going to be a very different campaign,” she said from her parents’ home in Birmingham, Alabama. “There was this sense that everything was turning negative. People were walking into the office with copies of this particular e-mail and asking us about it.… It was so revolting.”

The “revolting” e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—was from Richard Hand, a professor of the Bible at Greenville’s Christian-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2. With the school’s ban on interracial dating still in effect then, the veteran political reporter Curtis Wilkie told me “he might as well have gone to a goddamned Klan rally” as go to B.J.U.

Bush came under attack for it, mostly from Democrats and commentators. McCain said little. (It wasn’t until nine days after the primary that he declared that the G.O.P. is “the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson … the party of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones.”) But Danielle Vinson, an associate professor of political science at Greenville’s Furman University, who studied the primary in depth, told me that what the media didn’t grasp is that “B.J.U. people are very active, very political; they’re a great campaign resource.” As it turned out, Wilkie said, “Bush knew what he was doing going to Bob Jones”—shrewdly “pandering” to the evangelical vote, just as called for in the Reed game plan.

“This whole thing, it was orchestrated by Rove, it was all Bush’s deal.… It was pretty rank,” said Fletcher, “and they had an institution that was peddling all that shit, and it was a university, Bob Jones University. I’m telling you, if there was a campaign headquarters in South Carolina, there it was. Hand was part of it, but Hand wasn’t the only one.”

Mark Carman, who owns the Capitol City News & Maps store, told me of going to a candidates’ debate in Columbia, “and when we got back to our car, there was a flyer under the windshield wiper saying something about McCain having a Negro child. My wife is African-American—she just tore it up.”

State representative Jim Merrill, a political operative in 2000 who’d backed Dan Quayle before moving to McCain, told me, “We caught a couple of kids red-handed putting flyers on cars outside a seniors’ center in Hilton Head. One of the kids said a guy had paid him 50 bucks to do it.” Who was that guy? He had no idea.

Kevin Geddings, a prominent South Carolina Democratic consultant now based in North Carolina, told me someone had faxed him “a kind of cheesy Kinko’s pamphlet” with a photograph of the McCain family. “It was just so obvious,” he said. “It was one of the few shots you’ve ever seen of the McCains that so prominently featured that particular girl.”

The girl in question is Bridget. In 1991, when Cindy McCain was on a relief mission to Bangladesh, she was asked by one of Mother Teresa’s nuns to help a young orphan with a cleft palate. Flying her to the U.S. for surgery, Cindy realized she couldn’t give her up. At the Phoenix airport, she broke it to her husband, and they eventually adopted the child. But few people knew that story. In the words of McCain’s national campaign manager, Rick Davis, a smear doesn’t have “to be true to be effective.”

McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”

Almost daily, the ugly buzz grew. Another prominent rumor was that Cindy was a drug addict. In 1994 she’d admitted that she had a prescription-painkiller problem and blamed it on two spinal surgeries and the stress of her husband’s role in the Keating Five scandal. (He was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a disgraced financier.)

There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. (There was then, and still is, a wacky Web site devoted to those last theories. The former Green Beret behind it, Ted Sampley, is back at it today with a savage “Stop Hanoi John Kerry” diatribe; he also supports the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Beyond Sampley, most anti-McCain vets in South Carolina opposed the senator on political and/or veterans’ issues—not for his war service. A top McCain aide told me he didn’t think the vets’ antagonism was nearly the factor that the more personal attacks were.) For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.

“One of the dilemmas of the campaign,” *The Washington Post’*s Howard Kurtz told me, “was whether to denounce some of these sleazier allegations and risk spotlighting them for people who hadn’t heard them in the first place.”

McCain, in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For, wrote (without going into much detail), “There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about the subterranean assaults on my reputation except to act in a way that contradicted their libel.”

The rumors were spread through push polls—“really not polls” at all, according to Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and president of the National Council on Public Polls, but “more of a telemarketing device, where you’re actually calling people in the guise of a poll and you’re not gathering information as much as you’re disseminating it.” A push poll is further defined as solely intended to spread false, damning information; a pollster who asks your opinion about something negative but true in a candidate’s record is not push-polling. Tige Watts, a Columbia consultant and pollster who considers push polls unfair and doesn’t do them, said he understood some of the calls went like this: “They’d ask who you’re voting for. If you said Bush, they’d say, ‘That’s great. Be sure to vote.’ ” You’d hang up thinking it was just a normal get-out-the-vote (G.O.T.V.) call. “But if you said McCain, they’d ask a litany of questions: ‘Would you vote for McCain if you knew … ?’ Basically, they just threw the book at him.” Watts could tell when the calls peaked—about a week before the vote—“because everybody started talking about it. It was like a waterfall.”

Push-polling is cheap and easy to get away with. Watts estimated it runs “about a 10th of the price of a truly scientific” poll—as little as 25 to 30 cents a call—since what the voter says isn’t recorded or tabulated. “I doubt they even train the interviewers,” added Warren Mitofsky of the highly respected Mitofsky International polling firm. “They give them a script and tell them to read it.” Some states have laws regulating push-polling, but to little effect, and the American Association for Public Opinion Research investigates public complaints but can rarely trace who’s behind it. People who get push-polled seldom ask who’s calling or get a call-back number, and, Mitofsky says, “none of the campaigns ever admit” to push-polling.

According to Watts, most jobs are done by big telemarketing or phone-bank firms, or possibly even by smaller boiler-room operators. Roy Fletcher said that at the height of the race he actually located a boiler room in a Columbia strip mall. As people left, he’d ask casually, “What’re y’all doing in there?” “Calling for Bush” and “Trashing McCain,” he was told. But Fletcher said that “we were never able to find out who rented it, and we never did know if it was just some bogus operation that was using Bush’s name to peddle crazy shit.”

Twenty-two years before the Bush-McCain battle, another South Carolina contest was marred by one of the earliest uses of political push-polling. Mark Shields, of CNN’s The Capital Gang and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, says the 1978 race featured “the same modus operandi, the same vile, the same just plain hate politics” as the 2000 primary.

And, perhaps not coincidentally, at least two of the same players.

Shields was a top political consultant then, and one of his clients was the two-term mayor of Greenville Max Heller, a Democrat running for Congress in an area that, with much of the South in the wake of Richard Nixon’s race-polarizing “southern strategy,” was trending Republican.

Heller was about to turn 85 when I met him. Stately and gracious, he told me how he had fled Austria in 1938 and that he and his wife had lost 90 relatives in the Holocaust. By 1946, he had started his own clothing business in Greenville.

“Here’s a guy,” Shields told me, “who had been enormously popular, enormously successful as mayor, but beyond that he had just been the ultimate employer. When he sold his factory, he spent all his time making sure that all his employees were placed.… I was doing several other races that year, [but] there was nothing that engaged both my heart and my spirit as much as Max.”

His opponent was Carroll Campbell, a young state senator who’d earlier led an anti-busing march but whose blow-dried looks reminded Atwater of Robert Redford in The Candidate. Although his main task that year was getting Strom Thurmond re-elected, Atwater was there as an informal adviser; an ex-partner, Sam Dawson (who in the 90s served as executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee), was the campaign manager. Tompkins was also involved.

Early on, Campbell commissioned a poll (one that remained secret for years): Are you more or less likely to vote for, among other choices, “a native South Carolinian” or “a Jewish immigrant”? And which characteristics best describe the two candidates: “a. Honest; b. A Christian man; c. Concern for the people; d. A hard worker; e. Experienced in Government; f. Jewish.”

“Max started to pick it up at plant gates as he was campaigning,” Shields recalled. “ ‘Gee, Max, I didn’t know you didn’t believe in Jesus.’ That was the tip-off. The best we could reconstruct, it was push-polling.”

Five days before the vote, with Heller up an estimated 14 points, an oddball independent, Don Sprouse, new to the race, announced that religion was the “hush-hush” issue in the campaign. Heller wasn’t qualified, he said, because “he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ.”

Campbell and Atwater denied links to Sprouse, despite some claims to the contrary. (Recruiting a wild-card entry to jolt a race was something Atwater did that same year for Thurmond, when he reportedly invented a whole third party to rip his rival.) As for push-polling, Atwater was already quite taken with the idea that a phone bank could gather information and put it out. Blease Graham, who taught him in a doctoral program at the University of South Carolina in the late 70s, recalled him talking about the tactic, “not so much in the Heller race per se, but how important it was. His famous phrase was ‘taking the bark off the other guy.’ ”

The election was turned on its head; Heller lost by six points. “A lot of worse things have happened to me,” he told me. “I’m not bitter. Hatred eats you up.” About current politics, he said, “Compared to today, you’d just shrug your shoulders at what happened then.… There is no limit today. Can anybody say how far it will go? It’s not the consultant but the candidate who’s responsible. [If] you do it to me, should I do it to you? It’s probably not even the politicians who are to blame as much as the public. Where’s the outcry? Why don’t we vote against them?”

John McCain, so loose, easy, and open in New Hampshire, never got his footing in South Carolina.

He got all tangled up in the Confederate flag, a fiery issue, with the N.A.A.C.P. launching an economic boycott of the state at the time. Advised to stay neutral, as Bush did, he let slip, just once, that it was “a symbol of racism and slavery.” Much of the South Carolina portion of his 2002 memoir was devoted to his flag problem; that was his conscience speaking, he wrote, and by stifling it, he suggested, he actually deserved to be hit by the estimated 250,000 letters that the Keep It Flying pac flooded the state with the week before the vote.

On a religious-right key issue, Bush was far more explicit about his pro-life views than he’d been up North, and he managed to run to McCain’s right, no small feat given the senator’s own staunch pro-life voting record. A National Right to Life pac mailing featured a photograph of a Gerber baby–like newborn and warned that pro-choice Republicans had “overwhelmingly” preferred McCain in New Hampshire. A Christian Coalition mailing told of “10 Disturbing Facts About John McCain,” warning that he was too liberal on abortion and fetal-tissue research and that he favored casino gambling and “the taxation of certain contributions to churches and charities.” Lois Eargle, who after the primary resigned in protest as head of the Horry County Christian Coalition, told me she felt the national body had so distorted McCain’s position that “it was almost like we were going to be living in a Communist country.”

McCain ran, but quickly pulled, a TV ad charging that Bush “twists the truth like Clinton.” Nancy Snow remembers being horrified: “Oh, no! In South Carolina, that’s like mentioning the Antichrist. That really helped Bush, because you don’t put Clinton and Bush in the same category.” One consequence was that it allowed reporters to balance their stories: McCain blasts Bush for push polls; Bush blasts McCain for ad. To most readers, that’s a wash.

McCain’s overall strategy relied heavily on the state’s 400,000 veterans and military retirees’ siding with the war hero, and on his appealing, as he had in New Hampshire, to independents and liberals. He thought a high turnout in the open primary would favor him.

The turnout on Saturday, February 19, was huge—573,000 voters, more than double the previous high in a primary—but Bush still won by 11 points, 53 to 42. (Alan Keyes got a little less than 5 percent.) The veterans’ vote split evenly; Bush was buoyed by a two-to-one margin among Christian conservatives, a third of total voters. McCain outpolled him only in the more liberal coastal counties. Remarkably, a majority of voters saw Bush as the one who had run the more positive campaign, despite the attacks from pro-Bush groups.

Lee Atwater’s state had spoken.

An odd wrinkle to the campaign was that one of McCain’s local strategists, Richard Quinn, was one of Atwater’s old allies from the 70s. When he was editor in chief of The Southern Partisan Magazine, which is rabidly devoted to the South’s Confederate heritage, Quinn wrote a eulogy for Atwater, explaining how his friend had learned from the South that people are most likely to vote when “they feel good about one candidate and bad about the other.… The greater the sense of menace, the greater the desire for victory.”

I did 75 interviews for this story, virtually all on the record, with many people revealing information for the first time. But McCain declined to talk, as did some of his top aides from 2000 and many of Bush’s. With an election in progress, and with McCain doing a high-wire act between Bush and Kerry, revisiting South Carolina’s internecine warfare carries obvious risks. John Weaver, a Texan, a onetime ally of Rove’s, and McCain’s political director in 2000, was so disenchanted that he defected from the Republican Party two years ago; according to some published reports, Rove had blackballed him from G.O.P. jobs. (Weaver, who has remained close to McCain, was being courted earlier this year by the Kerry campaign; at that point, Rove had an olive-branch meeting with Weaver to pave the way for McCain to start campaigning with the president. Rove declined to comment.)

Two key Bush figures who did talk either denied or downplayed the push polls. South Carolina’s Speaker of the House, David Wilkins, a Bush campaign state co-chairman, said he had no “firsthand knowledge of any negative implications” in the race and “I do not know about a push poll.” Carroll Campbell’s son, Mike, speaking for his father, a Bush-family friend (the former governor announced in 2001 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s), conceded that push-polling “was going on.” But, the 36-year-old aspiring politician said, “I think it was overblown. [And] it wasn’t part of a master plan.” Others wrote it off to an “overzealous” few and “fringe” groups. Bush, at the time, adamantly denied having anything to do with it.

But there is real evidence that the calls happened big-time.

Beyond the individuals I spoke to who actually got nasty calls, two legitimate pollsters told me they were continually butting up against the pushers’ work. One of them, Dick Bennett of the American Research Group, in New Hampshire, said that as his interviewers called South Carolinians many would tell them they’d just gotten a call—and repeat what had been said. “It wasn’t a question of a few calls,” he said. “It was blanket coverage,” and it made life difficult for his pollsters because people were “afraid that as soon as they say who they’re for, they’re gonna get whacked.”

And radio talk-show host Michael Graham said his lines at WSC, in Charleston (he’s now at 630 WMAL, in Washington, D.C.), were swamped those whole two weeks. “It was the first time I ever saw direct evidence of people repeatedly quoting the same phone calls to me, all of them push- polling.”

Nothing has ever been turned up, however, tying the Bush team to an underground-smear “master plan.” Identifying who ordered push-polling in a campaign “is like nailing Jell-O to the wall,” as Howard Kurtz put it. But I did find intriguing hints that at least one outside group in the Bush circle seemed to be on the same page as the elusive push-pollers, using the same script.

Eargle, the Christian Coalition leader who quit the group after the primary (she’s the Horry County auditor and former legislator who, at 68, knows how politics are played), told me that, beyond misrepresenting McCain’s record, the national group’s “scare tactics” included disseminating personal information about Cindy McCain. I wanted to ask Roberta Combs, who in 2001 replaced Pat Robertson as the Coalition’s president, about Eargle’s allegation, but she didn’t stay on the phone long enough. Before begging off, she said, “I make a lot of things happen behind the scenes and under the radar.… It doesn’t matter who gets the credit, the main thing is just winning. But, yeah, we had some fun during that primary, and we did play a major role in South Carolina.” Combs later told me, “Cindy was never even involved in the picture as far as the Christian Coalition was concerned.… That’s just far-fetched. That’s just not our tactics at all.”

Said Dan Schnur, the McCain communications director for the 2000 campaign, “I’m willing to believe that Governor Bush and the people closest to him had nothing to do with [the push-polling and the flyers], but I do believe that their allies in South Carolina—who believed they were acting in his best interests—were actively involved.”

I also unearthed one incident where the caller didn’t even bother being anonymous. The call was received by Neal Thigpen, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, in Florence, South Carolina, who said the caller told him, “ ‘I understand you’re for McCain,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ … and he proceeded to tell me that Cindy was a drug addict and all this kind of stuff. He said he was on leave from Governor Tom Ridge’s staff in Pennsylvania and down here working on the Bush campaign.” Thigpen later met the man; he was, in fact, an official in Ridge’s administration at the time. Was he just freelancing? He never returned my calls.

Reporters say they, too, were being fed the smears, but more directly. A national correspondent covering Bush that year told me that campaign operatives, “in a very off-the-record setting, would say something like ‘I don’t know if this is true or not, but, of course, you know McCain just doesn’t seem sane, does he?’ They’d kind of plant the seeds that way.”

But several experienced consultants I talked to who’ve been part of crazy campaigns themselves say that the people at the top simply don’t have to soil their own hands.

“The message to the hard-core Republican precinct captains and county chairmen, who had an investment in the Bush campaign in terms of their own political power,” said Democrat Kevin Geddings, “was ‘You’ll have whatever resources you need, and you do whatever is necessary. If we don’t stop McCain here, Bush loses.’ ”

Rod Shealy, who calls himself a “reformed bad guy” compared with who he was during his early days as yet another of Atwater’s partners, monitored the 2000 primary closely and told me, “The value of having this whole network of people who all come out of the same influence [is that] you don’t have to tell them [what to do]. You don’t have to say, ‘You know, wouldn’t it be a great thing if that happened?’ ”

Bill Carrick, a native South Carolinian who had been a key adviser in Dick Gephardt’s presidential campaigns, agreed: “I think the Bush people probably [O.K.’d it] with a wink and a nod.… [But once] you unleash all these forces, you can’t put them back in the bottle.… There’s no accountability. The actual people doing it don’t report to anybody.” The Bush people, he added, “got amnesia the day after they left South Carolina, like they weren’t even there.”

“There’s no doubt to me,” said Mark Shields, who went back to South Carolina for the 2000 primary, “that it was a below-the-radar hate campaign against John McCain. Whether it was encouraged, orchestrated, condoned, whatever, it was not criticized or condemned by the Bush campaign or the candidate.”

George Bush has a phalanx of Atwater disciples from the South Carolina battleground around him this year—Reed, Eskew, and Tompkins, as well as Heath Thompson, the state director in 2000. Reed and Thompson have a hefty charge: delivering the South, particularly Florida, for the G.O.P. A key role is also being played by one of the few native South Carolinians with an Atwater past who missed the action against McCain—45-year-old adman Scott Howell. From around 15 years ago as a self-described “little Atwater” at the R.N.C., Howell went on to become political director of Karl Rove’s Austin firm and now has his own media shop in Dallas. As part of the Bush-Cheney ’04 media team, he produced the controversial ad earlier this year that included 9/11 footage.

Atwater “was a piece of work,” Howell told me. “He didn’t mind a firefight. He had this line where his goal was ‘You create chaos and then you swim through it.’ ”

It was exactly when Bush’s back was most firmly against the wall again this year—in early August, after slumping in the polls in the summer—that chaos broke out. And chaos had a name: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “Believing they were acting in his best interests,” to paraphrase Dan Schnur, someone had again pushed the doomsday button.

This time, the smears flew right out in public—TV ads and a book—whereas the blitz against McCain was guerrilla-like. But the effect was similar: Kerry seemed immobilized in the chaos, just as McCain had puzzled over how to fight back.

“When someone hits you,” the McCain campaign’s South Carolina strategist Richard Quinn told me, “you have to respond within 24 hours or else the negative begins to work.”

McCain’s top aides were “all trying to find ways to respond, to be just as aggressive,” he said. But their candidate believed “it’s not worth winning if you have to behave in ways you’re not proud of. I admired him for that position, but at the same time we didn’t fight back as hard. I guess we didn’t want it as much.”

“There used to be a little bit of a code,” Quinn went on. “I’m 59, I remember from the early days [with Atwater], we went negative, but we always struggled to be able to defend what we were going negative on so we could at least justify it. There was a line you just wouldn’t cross. But I think that line has become very blurred these days. I think winning has become so important that there are no brakes, there’s only an accelerator.”

Former president Bill Clinton, no stranger to the politics of political destruction, was referring to the attacks against both McCain and Kerry when he issued this simple verdict August 9 on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: “I think people do it because they think it works … until we stop them, they’ll keep doing it.”

How to stop them—even how to pinpoint responsibility—is more than problematic. In August, Kerry’s campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the Bush-Cheney campaign had “illegally coordinated” with the Swift Boat Vets. (The Republican National Committee, similarly, asked the F.E.C. in May to probe alleged ties between the Kerry camp and Democratic surrogate groups which have churned out anti-Bush ads.) While the F.E.C. has the power to conduct a tough investigation, with depositions under oath and subpoenas of records, the agency itself admits its resources are “limited.” It’s unlikely any probe could be concluded before Election Day.

Rather than “nailing Jell-O to the wall” by trying to establish whether Bush or Karl Rove was actually behind the Swift Boat ads (or behind the South Carolina push-polling), turn the question around: Would any of these things have happened if the candidate and the consultant didn’t want them to? Would people allied to them, who shared the goal of getting their candidate elected, have acted as they did if the message was somehow relayed to them that their efforts would damage rather than help that candidate?

An old-time South Carolina Republican politico—an active insider in the McCain campaign in 2000 who relishes Atwater-style hardball and now supports Bush—offered to give me his view of Rove, but only if we spoke off the record. “Listen,” he finally said, “Karl Rove is the meanest son of a bitch in the world. Oh, man … there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to win a campaign. Winning is all that matters.”

Like Max Heller, McCain denies being embittered by his brutal loss. On August 12, Don Imus of the Imus in the Morning show, on radio and MSNBC, talked with him about the Swift Boat vets’ attacks and later remarked, “After what they did to you in South Carolina, which I’m to this day convinced that if the president had a hand in that—he certainly never apologized, to my knowledge, to the American people or to you for all that—and I just don’t know how you’ve been able to put that behind you.”

McCain said he and Bush had long ago “ironed out our differences,” and went on: “A lot of bad things happen to people in life, and you gotta just move on.… Did I like it? Did I like it? No, of course not. But it’s over. It’s over.”

“I’m encouraging you to adopt my philosophy,” said Imus—that “before you move on you get even.” McCain just laughed, said a few things about how “I’m still a work in progress,” and abruptly changed the subject.

Investigative journalist Richard Gooding has spent 30 years as a New York newspaper editor.