6th January 2003
'Angry white male? It's meaningless pap'  

Why is Rush Limbaugh - the Right-wing radio presenter - considered 'the most dangerous man in America'? Toby Harnden finds out  

"THE most dangerous man in America" takes a contented puff on his Fuente Fuente Opus X cigar, shuffles the papers on his desk and leans into the microphone. "Testing, testing," he purrs, like a racing car revving up. "Yep, there we go. Greetings, my good friends and welcome.

"I'm your host - the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, all-important, all-concerned Maha Rushie, firmly ensconced here in the prestigious Attila the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies."

Rush Limbaugh III is broadcasting to more than 600 talk radio stations across "the fruited plain" - his term for the United States. It's midday and time to settle down to three riotous, Right-wing hours of funny voices, parody and trenchant political analysis as he baits, mocks and smites bleeding hearts everywhere. With an audience of nearly 20 million a week, Limbaugh is an American institution. He may be reviled as much as he is revered, but he has never once been ignored since his syndicated show went national in 1988.

In 2001, he signed an eight-year syndication contract worth pounds 180 million - with a pounds 25 million signing bonus - and it is no exaggeration to say that one cannot properly comprehend George W Bush's America without listening to Limbaugh in full flow.

His "35 Undeniable Truths" include the observations, "the most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down" and "feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society". Another is, "I am not arrogant", though he delights in boasting that he performs "with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from God". He has described himself - with a degree of accuracy as well as irony - as "a man, a legend, a way of life".

He broadcasts from a skyscraper above Penn Station in New York, and his studio is decorated with a large oil portrait of himself sent in by an avid Dittohead (the term for a Rush fan), a neon replica of his signature and blown-up magazine covers with his image on the front.

Having slimmed down to 15 1/2 stone (he once weighed more than 23), Limbaugh, with his slicked back hair and devilish grin, now bears a passing resemblance to Jack Nicholson rather than being the Benny Hill lookalike of old.

He is supposedly the prototypical angry white man, but there is no pick-up truck, gun rack or red neck in sight. Dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and yellow tie, he conducts our interview from behind a desk in his office, which is stuffed with books and political memorabilia.

So how does he feel about being routinely portrayed as racist, ignorant and full of hate? "What, not sexist and homophobic as well?" he says, feigning disappointment. "Those are all the stereotypes. I will lay you 10 to one that the people who have said those things have never listened to my programme.

"I'll tell you, I am hated by more people for what I think than I would have the capacity to even dislike. Nobody that's filled with the kind of hate that I'm described as having can prosper in the American media like this.

"Hate does not attract and grow an audience and maintain it. When I started, 14 years ago, this stuff bothered me because throughout my life nobody ever hated me and nobody thought I hated anybody. I get on the radio and I start telling people what I think, and all of a sudden I'm a hatemonger."

Limbaugh, 52 this month, is certainly not short of detractors on the Left. Linking Right-wing talk radio with the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, Bill Clinton urged Americans to speak out against "purveyors of hatred and division" and "loud and angry voices" who "leave the impression, by their words, that violence is acceptable".

Clinton once complained, during an interview: "After I get off the phone with you, Rush Limbaugh will have three hours to say whatever he wants and there's no truth detector." Al Franken, a Left-wing polemicist, published a book called Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.

Al Gore, the former vice-president, recently named Limbaugh as part of a "fifth column" in the media, "financed by ultra-conservative billionaires". Tom Daschle, Democratic leader in the US Senate, complained that "when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public", threats "go up dramatically, on our families and on us".

Limbaugh, whose audience increases every time he is attacked by a senior Democrat, laughs out loud at the charges. "The genuine hate and the phobia are on the Left." And it is the Right, he insists, which provides solutions, rather than just lofty sentiment.

"It's the most gutless choice you can make in the world, to be liberal," he says. "It's the easiest thing in the world to do, because all you have to do is feel. All you have to do is say you care and express sorrow for somebody's plight. You don't have to do a damn thing to fix it."

Mention of the "angry white male" label starts him almost spitting with derision. "It's meaningless pap," he barks directly into my tape recorder. "It is liberal drivel and I learnt long ago that I've got to look at these things as badges of honour. And since the liberals cannot counter the substance of what they hear on my programme, or choose not to, they say: 'Oh, he's angry, he's full of hate, he's inciting this or that'." But he fights fire with fire. When his enemies compare him to Hitler, or accuse him of being a mean-spirited zealot, he hits back by calling them "feminazis" or tree-hugging wackos.

With President Bush, whom Limbaugh supports staunchly, under fire from many in Britain as he limbers up for war with Iraq, the talk show host is happy to launch a broadside or two against the Euroweenies.

"I have the luxury of not really caring what the Europeans say about American policy," he says cheerfully. "All I know is that Europe, as it exists, wouldn't if it weren't for the United States."

As well as failing to win the Second World War on our own, he avers, we have substandard lavatory facilities. "You go to European countries that have been around for thousands of years and you will find just basic human services that are centuries behind, such as bathrooms and toilets and automobiles and roads."

Anti-Americanism or antipathy to Mr Bush is based on little more than envy, he says. "There's anger that we are the superpower. There's anger at our economic prosperity." Jealousy and resentment are "just normal human emotions" that nations have, just like people.

"A lot of Europe looks at America and says, 'Well, yeah, but they used their muscle and they run around the world and they steal other nations' resources and they use it up for themselves and deny everyone else; they're irresponsible and they're profligate'.

"I look at America as just the opposite. I think we feed the world, we lead the world technologically, we improve living standards and conditions for our own people and people around the world.

"And in places that are underdeveloped economically, it's not the unequal distribution of resources that's the problem, it's the unequal distribution of capitalism. America is still the land of opportunity and the number of people trying to get into this country proves it. I just wish more people in Europe and around the world understood it, instead of being resentful of it."

He exempts us Brits from much of this criticism and suggests that ordinary people don't necessarily believe all they read in the Left-wing press. "When I'm in London, I read the papers and see all this hatred for America and see all this criticism, but I get in a cab or I talk to people in a pub and I don't hear it.

"I'm sure it's there, but I go to my favourite cigar shop, Desmond Sautter's in Mayfair, and I don't hear any criticism of America. In the hotels where I stay, I don't hear much. France is different. Last time I was in France, it was scary."

Limbaugh's success in life did not come quickly or easily. He dropped out of university, has twice been virtually bankrupt and has been fired six times by radio stations and other employers. He once said that "when I hear women are interested in me, I don't believe it". He met his third and current wife, Marta, in 1994, four years after she e-mailed him, asking how to stand up to a Reagan-bashing history lecturer at the University of North Florida, where she was a student.

About 18 months ago, an autoimmune attack left Limbaugh deaf for three months. Following a cochlear implant - an electronic device which stimulates nerves in the inner ear - his hearing is much improved, though still impaired. Now, during each show, a stenographer types out what every caller says so that he can read their words on a computer if his ears fail him.

"A one-on-one conversation like this is easy," he says. "But this air-conditioning unit - you can probably barely hear it - sounds like a jet engine to me. I don't hear enough of the high frequency spectrum to be able to detect a melody any more. I thought my career might be over and I wasn't ready to quit. I had been taking for granted that I could get up every day and do this, and now it was about to be taken away. It rejuvenated me, gave me a 16-year-old's type of energy and enthusiasm."

Despite all the bravado about "serving humanity simply by opening my mouth", in person, Limbaugh is affable and seems almost bewildered by his popularity. The setbacks and struggles have left him with a streak of vulnerability that is endearing and also gives his shows an edge.

Although arguably one of the leading conservative thinkers of his generation, he still cannot quite believe the company he finds himself in. "Lady Thatcher is a historical figure and it's a thrill for me to be able to count her as a friend. She's still the Iron Lady and I am just this little kid from Missouri talking to her about world events."

Part of him still has an almost childlike desire to be liked. "When my mother was alive, I'd call her every week, sometimes every day, and she'd say: 'How was your day?' And I'd say: 'Oh Mom, it was great - half the people who heard me hate my guts'. That's a tough measure of success.

"They call me 'the most dangerous man in America' [a term he rejoices in], because I'm able to make people agree with me. Very few people ever take issue with the substance of what I say. They call me a big fat idiot or they say I didn't go to college or whatever."

In America, conservatism is currently king and the desperation of his foes is as great an accolade as Limbaugh could hope for. "When you're in this arena and you're telling people what you think and being honest about who you are in the process, you're going to be a threat. And I like being a threat." 

   

31 December 2002
'Black is not the only thing I am'

Republican Congressman Julius Caesar Watts could be the first black American vice-presidential candidate. Toby Harnden meets him  

THERE is a flash of anger in the eyes of Congressman Julius Caesar Watts as he uses his big hands to shape a pair of inverted commas in the air. He is tired, he says, with being asked what it's like to be "the only".

Once the only black kid to play quarterback for his high school American football team, he is now the only black Republican on Capitol Hill, and the only black conservative elected to a national leadership position in the United States.

"I say this respectfully, with all due respect," he tells me slowly. "We have been so programmed - and I think the press, the international press has been so programmed - to the point that when the black Republican leaves the US House of Representatives, it's an issue. I will get that question. "So don't ask me," he warns, wagging his finger, before adding more softly: "You know, my father raised me to be a man. He didn't raise me to be a black man. There's some that would try to confine me to just working on what they see as 'black issues' because I'm black. And I don't accept that."

Watts's office in Norman, on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, is bare. The bookshelves have been cleared and the pictures taken off the wall. Not yet 46, he is stepping down after eight years in Congress, the last four as a Republican leader and power broker.

Although Watts says he has no future ambitions in politics, he is widely expected to run for the American Senate or for the governorship of Oklahoma before he is 50. That would place him in pole position to become the first black vice-presidential candidate.

Some even tip him as the "great black hope" for the White House. His age and campaign experience make him a more plausible future president than either Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.

If the liberal American press in Washington and New York had its way, though, Watts says, he would talk about nothing other than being black. "I'd never get to talk about education, poverty, health care, national defence or jobs. It's because I am 'the only' and because so many people see everything through the prism of race."

Like a black Conservative in Britain, "J C" - as he is universally known - is a rarity. Fewer than 10 per cent of blacks voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and Watts is viewed by some of his political enemies as a traitor to his race for switching from the Democratic Party some 13 years ago.

A Baptist preacher, he has been called an Uncle Tom, an Oreo (a biscuit that is black on the outside with a white centre) and, of course, what he terms the "grandfather of racial epithets" - a nigger.

Even his family initially took pot shots at him for becoming a Republican. "A black person voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders," his father, Buddy, once commented. His Uncle Wade, a civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King, said: "They have brainwashed him real good."

Watts takes all this in his long stride. Both men, who have since died, had a sense of humour, he says. Rather than a denial of his background, his political philosophy is rooted in the conservative values of self-reliance, hard work and fear of God that his father instilled in him. "Most black people don't think alike, most black people just vote alike."

Just as Watts refuses to be treated as "the only", he will not accept that blacks have "only" certain choices in life, nor that they must subject themselves to what he calls an "ideological apartheid" that means their votes have to go to the Democratic Party in America or the Labour Party in Britain.

"Martin Luther King fought for civil rights and he fought to tear down barriers. The segregationists were saying: 'No, you can only live right here in this community. You can only go to this school. You can only go to this movie theatre.' And now we have put a de facto segregation on ourselves by saying: 'You can only live in this neighbourhood. If you move out, you've forgotten where you come from'."

He dismisses the notion that it is impossible to be both black and conservative. "I understand what it is to be a black man," he says, emphatically. "I understand what it means to be discriminated against and not be able to sit in the bottom of the movie theatre with my white friends but only go in the balcony."

An early brush with racism came at high school, when some white team mates walked off the field after Watts - who would later become a household name in Oklahoma as a star American footballer - was made quarterback of the Eufaula Ironheads team. There was an awkward moment, too, when, as captain of the football team, he had to perform the role of homecoming king. The homecoming queen was white and the tradition was that the two senior students should kiss. "No big decision had been made," he recalls. "We just didn't do it."

It was at this time that Watts encountered what he describes as "the most difficult and significant experience of my life". At the age of 18, he got two girls pregnant. One was black and one was white.

Two daughters were born within a week of each other and it seemed young J C's dreams of football stardom were doomed. Tia, whose mother was white, was adopted by Watts's Uncle Wade, five days after her birth. Two years later, Watts married Frankie, the mother of his other daughter, Kesha; they have since had four more children.

For years, Tia's parentage was a family secret and Watts will still do little more than acknowledge the bare facts of what happened. "We've navigated through that circumstance, and I think everybody today has gone on." But the episode provides an extraordinary insight into the extended Watts family and the racial crosscurrents of the South over the past quarter-century. 

Tia Watts, who has gone on to graduate from the University of Oklahoma, her father's alma mater, with a masters degree in petrochemical and geological engineering, was to prompt a remarkable change of heart in Johnny Lee Clary, an Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Clary was pitted against J C's uncle Wade Watts, a Baptist preacher and state chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, in a radio debate in 1979. Afterwards, Rev Watts beckoned the racist over, pulled back a blanket and showed him a baby.

"I could tell the baby was inter-racial," Clary says. "Wade said to me: 'This little baby's parents were teenagers. The father was black and the mother was white. The boy's family said they didn't want to raise no white baby and the girl's family wouldn't have no black baby in their home. So I adopted her. I didn't see a black baby or a white baby. I saw a baby that needed a father. Tia is my daughter now. Mr Clary, how can you hate this baby?' I looked at the baby and she smiled back."

Clary responded by burning the Rev Watts's church down, dumping rubbish on his lawn and burning a cross near his home. But the memory of that baby never left him. "She was beautiful and she became the seed of doubt in my life." A decade after the radio debate, Clary repented, renounced racism and was "born again". When he preached at Rev Watts's new church in 1991, a young teenage girl was one of those who came forward to be saved. "She just threw her arms around me and said: 'I want to know the Jesus you know'. There were tears streaming down Wade's face and he told me that the girl was Tia."

Clary, who is now an ordained minister, became a godfather to Tia Watts, who recently married a police officer and became a mother herself. "For years, I was sworn to secrecy about J C being the father because that could have ruined his political career," says Clary.

In the meantime, the racial wounds healed. "Buddy [ Watts's father] changed over the years," says Clary. "I preached in his church, too. Then one day, around 1996, it came out on the news. J C had made it public because his Democratic opponent was going to use it against him.

"J C really wanted to reach out to Tia but she told him: 'I love you and you'll always be my Uncle J C, but my daddy is Wade. He's the one who raised me'." Clary adds that Tia had been teased at school because she was of mixed race, but she had eventually come to terms with who she was.

Her natural father's own struggle to cope with racism during his childhood reached a turning point when Gen Chappie James, the first black four-star officer in the US military, spoke at a football banquet Watts was attending.

"At that time, every time somebody said something to me that I didn't like, I was ready to fight. And I usually did. And didn't lose many of them, either." But Gen James dispensed some advice.

"I used to have people call me a nigger," Gen James said. "My father taught me that you keep doing what you know is right to do, you keep plugging away.

"That street corner where they were calling you those names? You'll go back to that street corner some day and find those same people are still there."

Watts took the advice and the street corner in Eufaula where he used to hang out is now the corner of J C Watts Street, renamed in 1981 in honour of his footballing exploits. The McGuire brothers, who used to chase and beat up Watts and other black children, ended up in jail.

As he leaves Congress, Watts believes much more effort is needed to persuade blacks to vote Republican. "You know, our image as conservatives is not very good," he says, as we walk to his car, the heels of his snakeskin cowboy boots clicking in the corridor. "We often come off as hard and insensitive and not caring. I don't care if it's your political party or if it's your church. If people come to my church and say: 'You know, I liked the pastor's message but the people were not friendly', then they won't come back."

A fit and powerfully built man who remains remarkably youthful, Watts's departure from Congress certainly seems more like a time out than a retirement. And despite his sometimes fiery comments, he seems to be accepting that the "only" status is something he will have to live with for some time to come.

"If I run for a leadership role in the Republican party and I win, it's because I'm black," he says, with a shrug. "And if I lose, it's because I'm black."

What Color is a Conservative? by JC Watts, published in the US by HarperCollins, is available from amazon.com

24 October 2002

'It's the power, it's intoxicating'

Few people understand the mind of a sniper like Ed Kugler, one of the US Army's most prolific and deadly marksmen. He tells Toby Harnden why the Washington gunman is not just another serial killer

By Toby Harnden in Big Arm, Montana

Raising his Winchester rifle to his shoulder, the young Marine sniper fixed the head of his quarry in the centre of the vertical crosshair of the scope.

"Hang in there, little guy," he said to himself. "I've got one with your name on it." He breathed out and squeezed the trigger just as he'd been taught in training - "soft and gentle, like you'd touch your girl's nipple". Nearly a mile away, his victim crumpled to the ground.

More than 35 years later, Sergeant Ed Kugler, US Marine Corps (Retired) reflects that the sniper terrorising the suburbs of Washington is displaying some of the same skills and attributes he drew on that day as a 20-year-old in Con Thien, Vietnam.

"His hit rate's pretty doggone high and he's patient. The most difficult thing is getting out and he's doing that. So when they compare this guy to serial killers, I don't see that at all.

"I honestly believe when they find him, people will be surprised about his background. I don't think it'll be some obvious nutcase. He's probably a person who is not all that deranged, even though the act itself is deranged."

The gunman, who has killed 10, wounded three and missed just once during his murderous spree near the American capital, is operating at much closer range than Vietnam snipers would stalk their prey.

But the credo of "one shot, one kill", his coolness and the apparent refusal to acknowledge his victims as people, are things Kugler recognises instantly. The murders in Washington, Virginia and Maryland have caused him to examine his past once again.

Gazing out across Lake Flathead from his mountainside home in the chilly stillness of Big Arm, Montana, in the Rockies, the affable businessman and management guru reflects on what he once was - a young man who revelled in his role of delivering death from a distance.

"I didn't have any feeling," he says. "In fact, I worked at not having any feelings, and I paid for that for years afterwards. There was no remorse; there wasn't anything. So I don't have a hard time at all relating to what's going on out east."

And his first kill? "To be honest, it was exhilarating. It was like scoring a touchdown. I can say from personal experience that it's about control, because that was what you felt as a sniper - a tremendous sense of power. Maybe the best word is 'intoxicating'."

Snipers are different from regular soldiers because of the intimacy of the kill. "There were a lot of guys who saw much more face to face combat than I did in Vietnam," Kugler says, "but they never looked a gook in the eye because it was all jungle, and they were just blazing away. Whereas we were deliberately making a decision to kill, rather than just defending ourselves. Oftentimes, they [the victims] were looking straight at us. They didn't know we were there, but we were looking right into their eyes."

The skill was as much in the stalk as in the shot itself. "The longest wait was three days," he says. "We were in a big bush, 300 yards above a village. Eventually, they came out and we dropped two out of three of them."

The devastating psychological impact and offensive capability of snipers, coupled with their almost de facto inhumanity, has given their deadly trade an almost mystical aura. The ability to breathe correctly and judge wind and heat conditions makes sniping as much an art as a science. Even within armies, snipers have tended to be treated as a breed apart.

"You were a folk hero among other marines, but you were viewed pretty much as an outcast and as crazy," says Kugler. "The way you were treated fuelled the whole thing."

Hollywood has contributed to the myth. Films such as Sniper (1994), starring Tom Berenger, and Saving Private Ryan (1998) showed hard-bitten southerners in the US Army who dispatched counter-snipers with such clinical accuracy that the coup de grace was delivered by a bullet travelling through their opponent's scope and into the eye socket.

Last year's Enemy at the Gates celebrated an epic duel between the Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev and a partly fictional Nazi adversary called Major Erwin Konig on which the battle of Stalingrad turned.

Websites such as snipercountry .com, snipercentral.com and snipersparadise.com are packed with details about the tactics employed by snipers, specifications of their rifles and scopes and league tables of the numbers of kills famous snipers have chalked up.

The all-time champion is Simo Hayha, a Finn who died in April, with 542 deaths to his name. Zaitsev and Konig are said to have had 400 each. Chuck Mawhinney, a US Marine who retired to become a forest ranger in Oregon after registering 103 confirmed kills in Vietnam, tops the list of living American snipers.

Perhaps the most famous sniper of all is the late Carlos Hathcock, a Marine with 93 confirmed kills - one of them reputed to have been a counter-sniper killed by a bullet that travelled down his scope.

Nicknamed "Long Tra'ng" - or white feather - because of the plumage Hathcock wore in his bush hat, a $30,000 bounty is said to have been put on his head after he carried out an order to assassinate a notoriously brutal female Vietcong interrogator known as Apache.

Kugler says he is uncomfortable with the focus on the number of kills, even though he admits this was a constant preoccupation of most snipers during their time in Vietnam. "I'm not into it at all. When I speak, I won't answer the question, 'How many people did you kill?'

"I mean, my kids know and people close to me know, but I won't do that at a high school or anything because I don't think that's what it was about. It's unnecessary.

"And it depends on how you play the game. I mean, I had 71 if you count confirmed and unconfirmed. The difference is just in reporting - if I shoot someone at 700 yards, I ain't going out there just to check he ain't breathing. So that's an unconfirmed."

After two years in Vietnam, Kugler returned to his native Ohio and began drinking heavily. He missed the adrenaline rush of sniping and, after giving up the bottle, qualified as a pilot, went rock climbing and took up parachuting.

Eventually, his wife, Gloria, persuaded him to view his experience in Vietnam as mainly positive. He landed executive jobs for Pepsi Cola and snack brand Frito Lay and became vice president for worldwide logistics at Compaq, before quitting in disgust at the "bulls- 1-t" that dominated the corporate world.

In recent years, he has written Dead Center, a bestselling account of his Vietnam years, as well as penning business manuals such as How to Solve Problems the Simple, Fast and Easy Way, and Air Cover: The Key to Surviving your Landing on the Beaches of Corporate Change.

A booklet called A Dozen Things I Learned About Life as a Marine Sniper in Vietnam dispensed pithy advice such as "suck it up", "bureaucracy is bad" and "clues are everywhere; listen, read 'em", for managers to digest.

This year, he fired a gun for the first time since 1968. "I don't hunt," he says. "I don't need it; I'm not into that. Why would I want to go and shoot animals? I've already done it." However, he recently decided to teach Whitney, 17, the youngest of his three children, to shoot a .22 rifle. "She's into that more than dancing."

His daughter seems thoroughly at ease with her father's past and his tales of Vietnam. "I've heard them quite a few times, so they are a little worn, but I think it's pretty cool," she says. "Being a sniper is cooler than just being in the war."

Kugler doubts the Washington area gunman is a trained sniper, although he says that, after Vietnam, he would often watch the news "to see if any of my guys had flipped out and gone the other way", and done something stupid.

"I doubt if it's anybody who's done anything like it before - it's somebody who aspires to be. I have this theory about life that, in our heads, we've all got to be important, and some people try to do that through being a criminal, if they perceive that society's screwing them, or whatever." He believes that the effects of the killings will only heighten unhealthy interest in sniping. "This will fuel it even more, give it more romance."

For Kugler, sniping in Vietnam was necessary, but - after the initial heady days - never romantic. He killed women combatants and watched comrades take the fingers and ears of their victims as souvenirs. A lieutenant once ordered him to shoot a boy of 12; when he refused, a corporal grabbed his rifle and killed the child anyway.

Montanans, known for their fierce independence and distrust of government, are respectful of what he did for his country. Kugler himself makes no apologies. In his study, a cigarette lighter taken from the body of one of his victims has a place in a glass cabinet beside his two Purple Hearts.

It is the politicians who mismanaged a just war and sent so many young Americans to their deaths who will have to answer on Judgment Day, he says.

"I've never had flashbacks. I've never seen a face of anybody I've shot or anything. I did the job I was sent to do and I sleep well at night."

30 October 2002

'An affair with Bush's brother? Puh-lease'

How did Katherine Harris transform herself from public hate figure to one of America's hottest celebrities? Toby Harnden meets her

Katherine Harris bustles through the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel in Washington. She is clutching a giant-size cup of Starbucks coffee, smeared with scarlet lipstick on the rim, and halts every few feet to shake a hand or sign an autograph in a beautiful, rounded script.

"Isn't it amazing?" she says, in a Southern drawl. "I've only had three people say unkind things to me, and two were hired protesters." These days, she says, rather than being a hate figure, she is treated like royalty wherever she goes.

A sure-fire bet to be elected as a Republican congresswoman for Florida next month, Harris is now one of America's hottest celebrities. One of the keys to political stardom in the US is the ability to raise large piles of cash, and she has already raked in $2.6 million - more than 20 times as much as her opponent has been able to muster.

This is a remarkable turnaround. It is less than two years since Florida's then secretary of state was catapulted into the public eye during the 2000 recount fiasco, when George W. Bush and Al Gore slugged it out after the presidential election went into extra time.

Vilified by what seemed like half of America for her role in overseeing the Florida recount, she took such a pasting that any political future seemed to have been kissed goodbye.

"I thought it was the end of my career," she admits. "They said I cut off the recount, or that I didn't let Palm Beach's returns come in. That was completely false. But, as Goebbels said, if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will believe it's true.

"There was so much printed that was flagrantly incorrect, and then it built and built. It was just a feeding frenzy. It was printed and then it was assumed and it just went on and on and on."

Having emerged from the clamour at the hotel entrance, Harris is now perched on the edge of a couch around the corner, leaning so close to me that I feel myself gradually sinking into my armchair.

A compact 5ft 5in, she is 45, but has a remarkably unlined face and an hourglass figure that women 20 years her junior would envy. The straight, dark hair of the recount era has been softened with a highlighted, more bouffant style.

She is wearing a St John knit suit and Dolce & Gabbana shoes that are decorated with three safety pins on the right instep and one on the left. "That's the way they're supposed to be!" she cackles, when I ask whether her footwear has split. Her speech, like her new book, Centre of the Storm - her account of the controversial election - is frequently punctuated with exclamation marks.

It is difficult to believe that this is the person who was lampooned so mercilessly as a joyless superbitch, addicted to cosmetics and extravagant couture, that she became an international joke.

Shortly after election day in 2000, the Washington Post's fashion editor wrote that Harris's skin seemed "plastered and powdered in the texture of walls in need of a skim coat" and accused her of "taking styling cues from Versace ads in which models are made up as if by a mortician's assistant".

Democratic apparatchiks nicknamed her Cruella de Vil, and branded her a "crook" and a "Soviet commissar".

Rumours that she was enjoying torrid assignations with Governor Jeb Bush, her boss and the future president's brother, became so prevalent that, at one stage, I was asked by the Telegraph news desk to check them out.

Soon, she became a punch bag for late-night comedians. Jay Leno said the election was "tighter than Katherine Harris's face", while his rival David Letterman quipped: "Did you know that her hair was the only thing left standing after Hurricane Andrew?"

On Saturday Night Live, she was described in one skit as "the lady whose face got run over by a Greyhound bus full of whores, then scraped up with a spatula and doused with a fire extinguisher full of make-up and mascara".

If any of this hurt Florida's 23rd secretary of state, she does a good job of hiding it. What make-up she wore, she insists, was applied at traffic lights during her short drive to the office.

"What was interesting was picking up the newspaper at the time and seeing myself with blue eye shadow and black lipstick. I was, like, 'Woo, somebody's a very creative enhancer there,' because that's not the way I look."

The lowest point, she says, was when she read that the comedian Bill Maher had remarked that Americans were hoping O J Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris. "It was a time when I was having credible threats, as confirmed by the FBI. That took my breath away."

Democrats have since admitted that Miss Harris was deliberately singled out as a target by the Gore campaign. "It was easy to make me the enemy. Machiavelli says: 'If you don't have an enemy, create him,' " she says, matter-of-factly.

"They decided, strategically, that if they could discredit Katherine Harris, then anything she said would be inconsequential. Even if she's following the law, they'll say: 'She's just a Bush crony. She owes her appointment to Jeb. She's having an affair with Jeb.' "

She erupts into squeals of laughter at the very thought. "Puh-lease. Have you seen my husband?"

Miss Harris's husband is Anders Ebbeson, 12 years her senior, whom she met and wed in 1996 after one broken marriage and several other unsuccessful relationships. "I was absolutely a jerk magnet," she confesses.

She had been dating another man when a friend suggested a meeting with the eligible Swede, a multi-millionaire who worked in the marine industry. Eventually, she agreed. "I quit seeing that other fellow, and we met on a blind date, at the opening night of the opera. It was Verdi's La Forza del Destino, so he always says it was the force of destiny that brought us together."

They were married on New Year's Eve in Paris and threw a wedding reception that was described as something straight out of The Great Gatsby.

Miss Harris was born into what in American terms is known as old money. Her grandfather, Ben Hill Griffin Jnr, was a citrus and cattle magnate who was given a 10-acre farm as a wedding present and used it to build a fortune, estimated at $390 million when he died in 1990.

Somewhat implausibly, she describes her upbringing as "more redneck than blue-blood" and fondly recalls a childhood spent "playing polo bareback on a horse with a basketball and broom" and having a best friend who lived in a trailer.

"I never knew that we had any money. It was never discussed. We were given a lot of love, but not things." She was a high school homecoming sweetheart and star tennis player, and then took a history degree in Georgia before working with a Christian mission in Switzerland and studying Spanish and art in Madrid.

There were stints with IBM and as a real estate agent before she moved into politics. When she was elected secretary of state, responsible principally for cultural programmes, historic preservation and international trade, most thought she had risen as high as she would go.

But her giggly charm and prominence on the social scene in Sarasota, on Florida's Gulf Coast, belied a steely determination to succeed. While sitting as a state senator, she commuted to Boston to study for a masters in public administration at Harvard. Perhaps inevitably, she could not fit everything in. "I always dreamt of having children," she says. "Somehow, my life was so intense and so busy. It's astonishing to me that I don't have children. I never intended not to, but I'm a little too old. Although, Anders and I haven't ruled it out."

I remark that Cherie Blair had a baby when she 45. "That would be awesome," she says. "I'd love it. But I'll leave that up to providence."

In the meantime, she has a stepdaughter, Louise, 17. "She's this beautiful, tall Swede. Long, blonde hair. Very elegant, very poised. Speaks languages like her dad - he speaks eight." Tapping her collarbone, she adds: "Her legs come to about here on me."

Harris is still portrayed by her opponents as "Princess Katherine" or "Katherine the Great", a Southern belle airhead concerned only with the fripperies of politics.

But she has already shown that she is not to be underestimated. Republicans talk of her as a future senator, and perhaps, one day, even a vice-presidential candidate.

She seems to recognise that the Florida recount launched her on the national stage and realises that the saga will always be a double-edged sword for her. "With politics, everything can change in a moment. I think I'm a better person for having gone through the recount. On the other hand, it's going to take me a long time to build my way back from all of the outrageous things that were said."

As she jumps into a limousine, waiting outside - a huge handbag on her shoulder, with Rudy Giuliani's book poking out of the top - an unshaven man in a baseball cap stops in his tracks. "Is that Katherine Harris?" he asks me, and jabs his middle finger into the air at the vehicle as it pulls away. Perhaps she still has one or two enemies left.

19 July 2002
‘I love to pick fights with liberals’

Right-wing broadcaster Ann Coulter captured the belligerent mood of America after September 11. Toby Harnden meets her in enemy territory

Believe what you read about Ann Coulter and you could be forgiven for wanting to skip a lunch date with her. Surf the web and you can take your pick - she is anything from a "Right-wing telebimbo", " America's favourite blonde neo-fascist" or "Ku Klux Coulter" to the "whore of babble on". She is also the "Queen of the Maneaters", a female friend warns me.

Coulter is not difficult to spot as she enters the chic La Goulue restaurant on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. She is rail-thin, wears a skirt so short that it would be better described as a small flannel, and leaves men staring in silent awe. "It's my total slutty look," she confides later.

It's a good thing I've got a tape recorder, she tells me breezily, because writers who take notes "always step on the punch line and make me sound like a pedestrian idiot".

Coulter is no idiot and few would describe her as pedestrian. With an Ivy League degree from Cornell, she went to law school before joining a corporate practice and working as legal counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Her book High Crimes and Misdemeanours became the definitive conservative case for impeaching President Bill Clinton and her syndicated columns gained a nationwide following.

She has also been a big hit on television since the Clinton scandals broke. Totally fearless, relentlessly combative and unwilling to brook any talk of mushy compromise, Miss Coulter is the ultimate pin-up for the militia crowd.

It all happened by accident, she says, happily. "It really was just God looking down and saying: 'We've got enough lawyers, I'm putting you on TV'."

Now she is sitting pretty at the top of the New York Times bestseller list with her second book, Slander, a devastating diatribe against the Left and all its works - the New York Times in particular.

Coulter's approach is not so much take no prisoners as capture one's opponents, string them up with piano wire, machine-gun them until all movement has ceased and then fire a celebratory volley into the air.

Her column written on September 11 concluded: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

When the next one called for passports to be required for domestic flights because they could be "checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males", she was dropped from the conservative National Review and denounced by Left and Right alike.

Has this persuaded her to tone things down? "No, I have thought many times that I was being too circumspect and that I should have cut loose a little more," she chuckles. "Obviously, I engage in a lot of invective.

"But liberals can't tell the difference between invective that's true and invective that isn't true. My invective is backed up in my book with 35 pages of footnotes and examples. They just lie when they call people things."

She admits she is deliberately provocative. "Normally, when I write columns I am specifically baiting liberals and I know exactly which line they are going to scream blue murder about."

Coulter is most proud of her recent televised confrontation with Katie Couric, the attractive, cancer-surviving presenter of NBC's Today programme. Also a blonde, Couric is thought by many to be the embodiment of wholesome American virtue - a sort of souped-up Judy Finnegan.

On the contrary, said Coulter in her book, Couric was a dangerous subversive - she was the "affable Eva Braun" of American morning television.

"In retrospect, that phrase was a one-punch knockout," says Coulter, proudly. "I think that a lot of people really hate her and I was just the first one to pop her."

Coulter had been booked on Today well before Slander was published and Couric had no option but to go ahead with the interview.

"It was totally great," Coulter says. "I loved it. She's very friendly, very perky and that's why it makes a difference that she's engaging in this systematic Left-wing propaganda. It totally captured the imagination of all the media. Everybody loves a catfight."

By common consent, Coulter was judged the winner. Couric was exposed as having erroneously quoted Ronald Reagan's official biographer as calling the former president an "airhead".

Off-air, Coulter also skewered her for having suggested that Republicans were responsible for encouraging the murder of a black man in Texas who was tied to a truck and dragged to death. "Katie's defence of that was that many people were saying that, and I said, this is always how liberals inject their personal opinions."

In Slander, Coulter details how conservatives are routinely portrayed as Nazis by liberals, while Republican presidents and vice-presidents from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle and George W Bush are characterised as stupid.

Perhaps, I venture tentatively, liberals might be wrong but not disingenuous. "They're not well-meaning," she says, sternly. "I'm sick of that infernal nonsense about liberals being well meaning but misguided. They're traitors. I don't generally call them stupid. I call the stupid ones stupid. I call the drunks drunk. I'm not pretending to deliver objective news."

Coulter is upset that John Walker Lindh, the young Californian who fought for the Taliban, has struck a deal that allows him to plead guilty in return for a 20-year sentence.

"Oh, the poor little darling," she says, sarcasm dripping from her lips. "He's a traitor. I certainly would have liked to have seen a trial and I would have liked the death penalty. He's the typical product of a liberal upbringing. They should almost forget punishing him, and his parents could get the death penalty."

All this is cheerfully delivered at top volume and some of the diners are beginning to stare. The man at the next table leans over and says: "I think you're great, because you have no soft edges and you never pull your punches."

He then explains how he "came out" as a conservative in San Francisco a few years ago and thereby accepted that this meant he would never climb the corporate ladder in his architecture firm.

Coulter squeals with delight. "This happens to me all of the time in New York and LA. That is the great thing about being a publicly identified Right-winger. It used to be a case of meeting at a cocktail party or whatever and there was always this dance conservatives would do around each other because it's axiomatic that every cultured person is a liberal.

"So each person would get slightly more Right-wing with each statement and it takes, like, 45 minutes for both of you to figure out you can talk honestly. Now I go to a cocktail party and any Right-winger in the room will make a beeline and just start unloading."

An air of mystery surrounds Coulter's age. She says she is 38 but her publicist puts her at 40. After the interview, she sends me an email: "I think you should go with one of the incorrect younger ages."

At the moment, she is without a boyfriend; curiously, her last beau happened to be a Muslim. "The relationship was complicated by his interest in committing jihad," she jokes. "I took away his box cutters. At first, I thought he was a terrorist. I just kept on running into this handsome Muslim on the street. He was a fan of mine."

So was he stalking her? "He was, but he was a good-looking stalker. I'd been so looking for one of those."

Coulter is still searching for Mr Right-Wing. "I've been engaged many times. Four, I think. But I'm not like every other American. I thought I'd meet the right person before getting married and having children."

Who were these dumped fiancés? "Oh, I don't even remember all of them. I really don't think about exes five minutes after they've gone."

She loves New York, because it's "full of single people in their thirties", and accepts the relative absence of Right-wingers. "I must live among them so I can observe liberals in their natural environment. I can catch them saying things when they're off guard and don't think anyone's listening.

"I have the most perfect life imaginable. I sleep till noon. I work in my underwear. I've got no bosses. No one can fire me. I write about whatever I want to write about. I'm happy all the time. Americans like me - real Americans."

Has she ever had a liberal thought? "Oh gosh, I hope not." What about gay rights? "Oh, I think they'll burn in hell. Which is very comforting, by the way, to my gay friends - of which there are many."

Premarital sex? "Well, OK, I'm sort of joking about burning in hell. Well, I'm not entirely joking. I will never say publicly that, as a Christian, I think God says it's OK to have premarital sex or to have homosexual sex.

"You know, that is why Christians are the most tolerant people in the world - because we know there's original sin. We know people do bad things. But it seems to me it's a much worse thing to go around saying that it isn't a sin to commit a sin. I mean - at least feel guilty about it."

Coulter is disappointed by the poor quality of her hate mail. "Some letters say, 'You're ugly'. Or it will be, 'You're only on television because you're pretty.' Liberals can't even get their slanders straight. What is it? Am I pretty or ugly?"

This is a woman who likes being loved but loves to be hated. "Most of the time, I just think of Chairman Mao's saying that it's a good thing to be attacked by the enemy. The more vicious they are, the happier I am."

 Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right by Ann Coulter (Crown) is available from amazon.co.uk

6th June 2002
'My husband and I get a lot of strength from each other'

In an exclusive interview at the White House, Laura Bush talks to Toby Harnden about how the events of September 11 redefined her role as First Lady - and how she took inspiration from the Royal Family

The door to the White House library swings open and Laura Bush beckons me inside. "That's Spot," she says, pointing to the springer spaniel at her heels, as she sits down on the edge of a cane settee. In a light Texan drawl, she apologises for the absence of her other dog, a Scottish terrier. "The last I saw, he was asleep upstairs. Spotty follows me around a lot more than Barney. Barney's got a lot of friends, but Spot likes to hang out with me."

The First Lady, dressed unfussily in a royal blue jacket and black trousers, has just returned from a 14-day tour of Europe that included solo stops in Paris, Budapest and Prague, and a broadcast on Radio Free Afghanistan. She says she is enjoying getting back to her routine.

"We're crazy about our pets; our two dogs and our cat," she says. "Part of the evening is spent walking the dogs on the grounds before we go to bed. I think, after September 11, people realised how important the small family rituals are."

Like many people across the United States, Mrs Bush still finds it difficult to talk about much without referring to that terrible day. September 11 redefined and expanded her public role. Since then, she has spoken at the United Nations, joined forces with Cherie Blair to condemn the Taliban's treatment of women and become the first First Lady to deliver the President's weekly radio address.

Newsweek has described her as the "comforter in chief". Her dignity and straightforward manner have seemed to be just what a fearful and uncertain America needed. And there can be little doubt that she has done much to steel the resolve of President George W Bush and help him rise to a daunting challenge.

Mrs Bush does not stand on ceremony, unlike some of her predecessors (Nancy Reagan would insist on visitors being shown into the White House library before she would enter). A Secret Service agent, a bow-tied butler and two press staff are in attendance, but this First Lady, a former primary school teacher, does not have regal pretensions.

"No, Spotty!" she laughs, as Spot begins licking my hand during the interview. The dog yawns, stretches and then plonks herself back down on the Tabriz rug, which was presented to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 by the Persian consul general in New York.

It is not surprising that Spot feels at home here. Hanging on a wall outside the library, alongside depictions of other First Ladies, is a portrait of Mrs Bush's mother-in-law, Barbara Bush. Beside her is a picture of a springer spaniel called Millie.

Mildred Kerr Bush gave birth to Spot in the White House beauty parlour in 1989. Spot's father was Tug Farish III, owned by William Farish, a Kentucky horse breeder who was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St James last year. Spot - full name Spot Fletcher Bush - was given her moniker by Barbara Bush Jnr, one of the President's twin daughters, then seven, after Scott Fletcher, a short-stop with the Texas Rangers baseball team that her father part-owned. Laura Welch, as she was born, did not have such an impressive pedigree when she married a brash, hard-partying, 31-year-old George Walker Bush in 1977, just three months after meeting him. She knew, however, that she was moving into America's aristocracy.

The only daughter of Harold Welch, a well-known Texas developer, and his wife Jenna, she was working as a school librarian when they met. She stayed at the White House frequently when George Bush Snr was president and she was the First Lady of Texas for six years while her husband governed the state. Despite her shyness, by the time of the presidential inauguration last year, she had become to the manner accustomed, if not to the manner born.

When she travelled to London for the Queen Mother's funeral in April, Mrs Bush was aware, she says, of the story of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who had married a future head of state and then helped to lead a nation at war.

"As I thought about her life, I did see the similarities," she says. "I was always aware that she didn't leave London during the bombing. She wasn't going to make herself safer than everybody else who lived there. She was an example of strength to everyone who was there during the Blitz." Mrs Bush suggests that, in both their cases, the ability to respond to the call of duty was bolstered by the position itself. "There is a certain responsibility that comes with being a First Lady and, certainly, being Queen. I guess it gives you the strength to act in that way.

"There is also the example set by your people. The people of America, the people that I see who are so strong, the people who lost a loved one - they really give me strength. I figure it was probably the same way for her."

On the morning of September 11, Mrs Bush was in a motorcade on her way to Capitol Hill when a Secret Service agent told her that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre in New York.

She had been due to speak before the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy, the only surviving brother of President John F Kennedy. Just before she met Kennedy, she was told that a second plane had plunged into the South Tower and knew that it was an act of terrorism.

President Bush was at a school event in Sarasota, Florida, and their twin daughters Barbara and Jenna, then 19, were in their respective digs at the universities of Yale and Texas. "I thought immediately of my own children and of my husband," says Mrs Bush. "I talked to him as soon as he could call me. We both just tried to comfort each other. As horrific as it was to watch and to see, you couldn't really come to terms with how horrible it was in the very first moments."

Next, she telephoned the twins, who had already been whisked away by Secret Service agents for their own safety. "They were both asleep when it happened because their classes weren't until later, so I talked to them shortly after they were awakened and taken to a secure location.

"And then I called my mother. I acted like I was calling her just to reassure her that I was OK, but the fact was that I really wanted to hear her voice. I think there were probably people all over the United States calling their mothers and their children and their husbands, wanting to know where people were and how they were."

Being with a Kennedy on the morning that America was hit by another unspeakable tragedy, she says, was intensely poignant. "The only other day in my lifetime that I remember with such clarity and horror was the day his brother was assassinated.

"I was a senior at high school at the time and, just like that day, September 11 is going to be a day that stays in everyone's mind for the rest of their lives. The bombing of Pearl Harbor had the same effect on my parents' generation."

Mrs Bush says she "was not really that fearful because I was removed from the Capitol Hill office to a secure location". She thought her aides in the White House were in greater danger.

"There were people on my staff who were told to run from the White House. And, of course, no one expects that when they sign on for the job. When you take a job at the White House, you think it is going to be very glamorous - no one expects to literally have to run for their life. My staff has a lot of very young women, recently out of college, and they were very distraught for a long time after September 11.

"We had a staff meeting the next day and I told them that we now had a responsibility to do as much as we possibly could for our country. I wanted all of them to think of ways that we could be constructive."

In those first few days after September 11, the President gathered a war council at Camp David. Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and John Ashcroft were there. Laura Bush was there, too.

"When we said the blessings around that big table at Camp David, there was a kind of strength that we got from each other. One night, after they had met all day to talk about war, John Ashcroft, the Attorney General - who is a great piano player - played the piano while Condi Rice, who's also a pianist, sang for over an hour. I think it relaxed people and strengthened their fellowship. They sang hymns and Broadway songs and patriotic songs. It's a time I'll never forget."

One senses that Mrs Bush sees her position in the aftermath of September 11 as a privilege rather than a burden.

"One of my long-time friends called me. She said that she always used to think: 'I'm so glad I don't have to do what Laura does', and 'I'm so glad I don't have to walk in her shoes'.

"But she said that, after September 11, she actually had a feeling of jealousy, because she thought that I could do something and she didn't know what she could do to be able to help."

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence Mrs Bush has on her husband. He converted to her Methodist faith on the day their children were baptised in 1982. According to friends, it was she who prompted him to give up drinking soon after his 40th birthday and to find greater direction in his life. Even now, when the President gets a touch excitable, she will whisper in his ear: "Bushee", or "Rein it in, Bubba", and he will fall silent. Mrs Bush, it is said, was responsible for her husband toning down his Wild West "dead or alive" rhetoric last autumn.

Their exceptional devotion to each other and to their children is partly a Bush family trait, but also comes from a degree of personal tragedy in each of their lives. Mr Bush's younger sister, Robin, died of leukaemia when he was seven. Mrs Bush was involved in a car accident at 17 that killed a schoolfriend.

After the couple married, they had difficulty conceiving and were beginning to consider adoption when she became pregnant with the twins. Barbara and Jenna - named after their grandmothers - were born prematurely after Mrs Bush had an emergency Caesarian.

"We are very close," she says, when I ask whether her relationship with her husband has deepened since September 11. "But we already were. My husband and I get a lot of strength from each other. We're fortunate we have that kind of relationship.

"Certainly, both of us have prayed more. We have talked to the girls a lot more, especially in the couple of months following September 11. They called a lot and I could hear anxiety in their voices."

Unlike her predecessor, Mrs Bush, who at 55 is four months younger than her husband, is careful never to stray into areas of policy: when she does, rarely, venture into the political arena, her words are precisely calibrated. carefully. Her influence is more behind-the-scenes. When Mr Bush impressed President Putin last month with a comment about Prince Grigory Potemkin, the lover of the 18th-century empress Catherine the Great, it was Mrs Bush who should have taken the credit.

The First Couple, Mrs Bush explains, often read together and discuss each other's books. On her bedside table at the moment is The Life of Potemkin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. "I started it before we went to Russia, but didn't finish it. Now, actually, it's even more interesting to read it after we've been to Russia because of what we saw when we were there."

President Bush is currently wading through the 1,167-page Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro's work on President Lyndon Johnson. "Johnson was a Texan and we always felt a special fondness for him and for Lady Bird [his wife]."

In the White House library, which was refurbished under the direction of Jackie Kennedy in 1961, we are surrounded by works of American literature. But Mrs Bush, who has always been a voracious reader, says that many of her favourite books are by English writers.

"I love reading all the Jane Austen books. I re-read those periodically, just because I think they're really fun. I like Dickens. But I'd say that Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is the one book that is most important to me.

"The Bible would be above all of those, but if we're talking about literature, those would be the ones. And, of course, there are a number of very famous English mystery writers whom I love to read over and over - Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers"

She giggles: "I can read those mysteries and then not read them for about five years, and I can't remember whodunnit, so I read them again."

Another favourite pastime is watching films. "We don't get to see them early, but we do get to see them as soon as they come out. We get them here in the movie theatre or at Camp David.

"So, this weekend, we saw Hugh Grant's new one - My Life as a Boy I think it was called. It was actually very cute. And we loved Austin Powers."

Although Mrs Bush refers to their ranch in Crawford, Texas - rather than the White House - as "our home", she has done everything she can to make their lives "upstairs" at 1600 Pennsylvania as normal as possible. They like to be in bed by 10pm and the President makes coffee at 5.30am. "He always used to get up and go feed the animals and bring coffee to me and the newspapers. We still do that every morning," she says.

"At night, we eat dinner together, we watch television together, we both read. Usually that's when we read the most, before we go to bed. We just have a very normal life upstairs, like any family."

President Bush has a fondness for simple foods such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or, with comically disastrous results in January, pretzels. Does Mrs Bush cook? "No, not really," she laughs. "He's glad! He [President Bush] still grills on the barbecue and I still cook if we're at the ranch, but we don't cook that much any more."

Last night, she says, a Texan couple - Don Evans, the Secretary of Commerce and his wife, Suzy - joined them for dinner. "We had fried shrimp, which is one of the President's favourites, with red beans and rice. It was sort of a Louisiana menu that we both love. And the White House chef fixed it and it was delicious."

Mrs Bush speaks clearly and without artifice. One reason for this is probably her previous career as a teacher, spelling things out simply for children.

"I think if we make sure that children get a really good education all over the world, it will do a lot of good towards stopping terror," she says, at one point.

"Parents and teachers and leaders everywhere must let children know how valuable human life is and how important it is for all of us to respect our own lives and the lives of other people."

She is very friendly, has a heartfelt laugh and a sparkle in her eye, but is extremely guarded. While there was no prior vetting of questions or subjects declared off-limits, Washington reporters have learnt what Mrs Bush will and will not talk about.

When she was jokingly asked, last month, if she would like to share details of her latest telephone conversation with the President, she responded: "Hey. How are you? How's Barney? Barney's great, the kitty is great, and Spot is great."

My inquiry about Tony and Cherie Blair's visit to Crawford elicits the same sense of caution.

"I think they really liked it a lot," she says. "It, of course, rained the whole time. Our ranch is actually in a very arid part of the country, but we've had so much rain. It was so green, it looked like England. I think they felt at home. President Bush kept trying to tell the Prime Minister that all the farmers were really thrilled he was there since he'd brought that great rain.

"We have two little baby horses, but we don't really ride. The President calls himself a windshield rancher, which means he drives around in his pick-up, so he did that with the Prime Minister. And Mrs Blair and I drove around in the pick-up a little bit, too."

Frank Bruni, who wrote an irreverent book about Mr Bush's campaign in 2000, wrongly described the Bush relationship as one-sided: "He followed his dreams and she followed along," Bruni said. But although this is not a Clinton-style "co-presidency", Mrs Bush has always had at least one hand firmly on the tiller.

She has been compared to Mamie Eisenhower, who would remark that "Ike runs the country and I turn the pork chops", but it is Barbara Bush who inspires her the most.

"Certainly my mother-in-law would be the First Lady whom I love the best. We have a lot in common - we both love George Bush! She's terrific. People look at her and may think she's grandmotherly, but Barbara Bush is the person you'd want to be seated next to at a dinner party because she will regale you with great stories."

Uncharacteristically for Mrs Bush and for this White House, the interview has overrun by 10 minutes. Spot jumps into life as she stands up and asks me how I like living in Washington, before posing patiently for pictures. The next appointment on her schedule, an aide reveals, is something she really enjoys: a walk on the South Lawn with Spot.

5 March 2002

'She asked me how to stop the plane'

US Solicitor General Ted Olson's wife, Barbara, was the first victim of the September 11 terrorist attacks to be named. He tells Toby Harnden of her bravery during her final call from the hijacked plane - and of his determination to fight back

A little over two months after his wife was killed on September 11, Ted Olson, the Solicitor General of the United States, received a photograph from the US Air Force. It showed a laser-guided missile before it was launched from a strike aircraft against a Taliban target in Afghanistan. The name Barbara Olson had been chalked on the side of the weapon in her memory.

"It looked like a 500lb bomb," says Ted Olson, his grief-racked face creasing into a smile for the first time in nearly an hour. "She would have liked that. Barbara was a warrior, so she would have wanted to fight back. And she would have applauded the people who did go and fight back."

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist, has described Barbara, a writer, lawyer and political commentator, as "Ted's departed Spitfire". Apart from the Clintons, she and her husband were probably America's most combative couple - he in the courtroom and she on the talk shows, America's 21st-century court of public opinion. The couple liked to joke that they were at the heart of what Hillary Clinton - the subject of Barbara's excoriating biography Hell to Pay - famously described as a "vast, right-wing conspiracy".

Their beautiful colonial-style mansion in Great Falls, Virginia, was the venue for huge parties at which the conservative intelligentsia would gather. The Olsons were wine connoisseurs and would often travel to California to replenish their cellar.

She always drove a Jaguar; he preferred a Mercedes, after years of favouring Porsches. They shared a love of poetry, Shakespeare and the opera and were keen collectors of modern art. He named their first Australian Shepherd dog Maggie, after Lady Thatcher. She called the second one Reagan, after the president her husband had represented during the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s.

They were married in 1996, he for the third time and she for the second, but they seemed more like high-school sweethearts. Throughout the working day, they would speak on what they called the "bat phone". Each would turn down dinner invitations if the other was not included.

Today, Ted looks wretched; his eyes begin to redden and he occasionally wipes away a tear as he talks. He returned to work six days after September 11 and has been putting in 80-hour weeks ever since, leaving home each morning at 5.30am. Among the issues he has championed has been new anti-terrorist legislation.

He has rationalised his wife's death, but still seems unable to accept she is gone. "You see a blonde woman walking through a crowd, or you see something that reminds you of that person, the way a person turns their head, or their shoes - Barbara wore these very flashy, high-heeled shoes - things like that," he says. "I get reminded of her in scores of ways every day, in something I see or something that flashes through my mind."

We are sitting in the office of the Solicitor General on the fifth floor of the Justice Department building in Washington. One wall is lined with leather-bound volumes of Supreme Court arguments. An ancient, well-thumbed copy of the US constitution is propped up on Olson's reassuringly untidy desk.

This is the man who argued in the Supreme Court for the winning side in the Bush versus Gore case that decided the presidential election in 2000. As a result, Olson's Democratic opponents in the Senate came close to blocking his nomination as the Bush administration's chief courtroom advocate. Soon, he will be defending Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to hand over documents to Congress as part of the investigation into the Enron scandal, and he will have to do so without his staunchest ally.

In their 11 years together, the Olsons seemed indivisible, as well as formidable. "Everybody identified us as 'Barbara and Ted'," he says. "It wasn't 'Ted' and 'Barbara' separately. It was a love affair, and a deep, abiding friendship. It was a partnership in every sense of the word."

The final time I saw them together was last summer, at a small dinner on Capitol Hill. Olson had just won his nomination fight and gave us an update on the partisan struggle that was shaping up in Congress. "We are at war," I remember him saying, as his wife nodded vigorously in agreement.

A few weeks later, I interviewed Barbara and three other conservative women about the new mood in Washington. A loose comment of hers - that President Bill Clinton's late mother had been "a bar-fly" who had allowed herself to be used by men - was noticed by the Washington Post and Democrats rushed to castigate her for being cruel and unfeeling. Many people would have blamed the journalist for misquoting her or tried to wriggle out some other way, but Barbara Olson didn't.

"Barbara's reaction was, 'I did say it'," says Ted. "She would never duck responsibility. It was a hurtful thing and she wished she hadn't said it. She thought the right thing to do was to make a forthright, unequivocal, direct apology, so she did. That's the kind of thing that I respect. She didn't try to soften it. She would not run away from the consequences of her actions."

It was her last newspaper interview. On September 11, American Airlines Flight 77 plunged into the Pentagon with Barbara Olson on board. It was Ted Olson's 61st birthday that day and Barbara had delayed flying to Los Angeles so they could celebrate over dinner the night before.

That morning, a nightmare began to unfold in the room where we are now sitting. "Someone rushed in and told me what had happened. I went into the other room, where there's a television," Olson says. "It went through my mind, 'My God, maybe - Barbara's on an airplane, and two airplanes have been crashed', you know."

Then his secretary told him that Barbara was on the line. "My first reaction when I heard she was on the phone was relief, because I knew that she wasn't on one of those two airplanes." But Barbara then explained calmly that she had been herded to the back of the Boeing 757 she was on, along with the other passengers.

"She had had trouble getting through, because she wasn't using her cellphone, she was using the phone in the passengers' seats," says Olson. "I guess she didn't have her purse, because she was calling collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of Justice, which is never very easy."

He was able to tell her about the World Trade Centre attacks before the line went dead, then he called his departmental command centre to let them know another plane had been hijacked. The phone rang again and it was Barbara.

"She wanted to know, 'What can I tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?' I tried to find out where she thought she was - I wanted to know where the airplane was and what direction it was going in, because I thought that was the first step to being able to do something.

"We both tried to reassure one another that everything was going to be OK, she was still alive, the plane was still up in the air. But I think she knew that it wasn't going to be OK and I knew it wasn't going to be OK."

They were able to have "personal exchanges", he says, before they were cut off in mid-conversation. "It just stopped. It could be the impact, although I think she would have There's no point in speculating."

As soon as he heard a plane had crashed at the Pentagon, he says, "I knew it was her". Olson's voice, which his wife once described as a "rich, rumbling, sort of makes-your-ribs-vibrate" sound, begins to scratch like tired feet wading through gravel. It drops to a whisper and he fetches a glass of water.

He returns and explains that his wife's last moments were typical of her. "It was a deeply embedded part of Barbara's character that she would not have stood by and done nothing. She was engaged in living. She would not accept that things could be done to her without her doing something about it. She was passionate. She was brave. She was involved."

He remained in the office for several hours, telephoning friends and family to let them know Barbara was dead. "There was no point in trying to go home," he says. "The streets were jammed with people trying to move, and no one was moving. So I stayed here until about two o'clock."

Soon, Barbara Olson became the first victim of the attacks to be named on television. She was also the most famous person to die that day.

That afternoon, friends began to gather at the Olsons' house. Ken Starr, the independent counsel who nearly removed president Bill Clinton from office, manned the telephone. Among those who rang to offer their condolences were the two busiest men in America - Mr Bush, who called from Air Force One, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York.

Finally, at 1am, Olson went upstairs to bed. On his pillow he found a note his wife had left less than 20 hours earlier. "I love you," it said. "When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday."

Olson compares her defiance at the end of her life with that of the heroes of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. "Barbara didn't have as much warning, and I don't think she had as many resources," he says. "But it would have been entirely within her character to take action herself."

By killing Barbara Olson, the terrorists incurred the wrath of America, from the White House to the scores of thousands of ordinary people who turned her posthumously published The Final Days, about the controversial end of the Clinton presidency, into a best-seller.

During a recent visit to Florida, when Mr Bush was asked by schoolchildren in Orlando how he had felt on September 11, he told them: "I knew that when I got all of the facts that we were under attack, there would be hell to pay for attacking America." His use of the title of Barbara Olson's first book was no accident.

"9/11 has stiffened the resolve of people in this country, and Barbara was quintessentially American," says Olson. "She was Texan. She was a ballet dancer. She worked in the movie industry. She went to a Catholic college and to a Jewish law school. She was a lawyer. She worked as a government investigator, best-selling author, television commentator. And she was only 45. She was successful because of something about the culture of this country."

Suddenly, the Solicitor General, who has been slumped in his chair, sits bolt upright. "We are going to fight back," he says, deliberately. "We are not going to quit. We are not going to stop. We are not going to forget."

15 January 2002

'I cannot - I will not - put that thing on'

Martha McSally is the US Air Force's senior female jet pilot - so why is she risking her hard-won position for a principle? Toby Harnden reports

When Martha McSally was selected to become one of the US Air Force's first female fighter pilots in 1993, she received a telephone call from a three- star general, ordering her to report to the Pentagon for a press conference the following day. "They were like: 'Look at our capable, competent, professional women'. That's not what they're saying now."

We are in the penthouse suite on the 44th floor of the Hilton, above the Avenue of the Americas in New York. On the television across the room, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, is giving a press conference. Lieutenant Colonel McSally was not invited this time - not least because she is suing him.

Suffice it to say, the lawsuit has not gone down well and she has been subjected to "several verbal counselling sessions".

"There was tremendous negative feedback. My disloyalty and unprofessionalism and poor leadership, you name it, across the board - all the things they promoted me for before," she says, snorting contemptuously.

It is as if the school's star pupil has found herself outside the headmistress's office, waiting for her punishment to be doled out. And the misdemeanour, it turns out, is a uniform violation. McSally refuses to wear the abaya, the traditional item of dress for Islamic women in Saudi Arabia, and similar to the Afghan burqa. "I cannot - will not - put that thing on," she told her commanding officer, before taking up her post near Riyadh, in 2000.

McSally is just 5ft 3in, has freckles on her nose and her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She munches on a cookie as she explains, cheerily, how she acquired the scar on her chin.

"I got Rollerblades for Christmas and I went out in front of my Mom's house, and I was playing around in them and started going down a hill. I tried to stop, but I was on ice and I just totally planted it. So I spent Christmas night getting my face rebuilt."

But McSally is no schoolgirl. The Rollerblade accident happened when she was 28. It was around the same time she became the first female pilot to fly a combat sortie for the US Air Force, when she took to the skies in her A-10 Thunderbolt to enforce the no-fly zone over Iraq.

Now, at the age of 35, she is the American military's senior female jet pilot.

Suddenly, Lt Col McSally (in the air, she is known by her callsign: "Wedge") becomes deadly serious and her piercing dark green eyes narrow. The Pentagon's policy, that female military personnel have to wear the abaya when off base in Saudi Arabia, is an affront to the American constitution, she says.

It violates her religious freedom by forcing her, as a Christian, to adopt Muslim dress and it discriminates against women because male personnel can wear normal civilian attire. Forbidding her to drive and making her sit in the back seat with a male subordinate at the wheel also demeans her and undermines her authority.

In case anyone is in any doubt, the crucifix resting on the front of McSally's magenta turtle-neck, and the Stars and Stripes badge pinned to the lapel of her jacket, symbolise her religious and constitutional principles.

Pentagon officials defend the policy on the grounds of "host nation sensitivity" - not wanting to upset the Saudis - and "force protection" - minimising the risk of terrorist attack against military personnel.

But McSally deals with these arguments as if she were firing her A-10's Maverick missiles at a couple of inviting desert targets.

The wearing of the abaya, she says, was not requested by the Saudis. Women stationed in Saudi Arabia by the US State Department can wear their own clothes, as can the wives of soldiers.

It hardly takes a rocket scientist, she scoffs, to work out that a white woman wearing an abaya and accompanied by a group of western men with crew cuts and wearing jeans might just be a servicewoman.

"Finally, I said: 'OK, help me out here. You trained me to be a fighter pilot to fly, single-seat, into enemy territory; to eject; be shot down; evade capture; be picked up as a PoW and be tortured. Yet, I cannot carry myself downtown in an allied nation without being in danger somehow?' Give me a break."

McSally spent seven years fighting the policy from within, but to no avail. She acquired her callsign in 1985, when she first raised the issue with the then Defence Secretary.

"There's this joke in the fighter community - the wedge theory - that if you ever get into trouble and highlight yourself, just hang on: somebody else will wedge you out of the bottom of the pile shortly.

"So the guys in the squadron said that what I did was the ultimate wedge. 'You're stirring the pot all the way up to the Secretary of Defence.' So they labelled me 'Wedge'."

It wasn't until November 2000 that she became directly affected. The policy did not apply to Kuwait, where she had previously been based.

But after arriving at the Prince Sultan Air Base, in the middle of the night, she was instructed to don an abaya over her flak jacket. Then, in the back seat of a Chevy with dark tinted windows, she was driven to the Eskan Village Base.

"I mean, nobody could see me! I cannot explain to you how humiliating it is to wear that thing. I sat there and realised that, not only is this policy wrong, but it makes no sense. This is so not necessary right now."

A committed Christian who describes herself as a non-denominational Protestant, McSally did not venture off base during her spare time for the next 13 months. "Prison," she says, simply. But when she was ordered to do so, she wore the abaya while travelling on duty.

Her posting over, McSally is now back on American soil, and is busy creating merry hell for the Pentagon. As a former US Air Force Congressional Fellow, she has extensive contacts on Capitol Hill and knows how to stir things up. The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties foundation, is helping to direct the offensive.

Five Republican senators have backed her case and others from both parties are coming on board. Big guns such as Ted Kennedy and John McCain are expected to declare their support and the Pentagon has promised to reply to her lawyers by February 3.

An even more powerful potential ally is Laura Bush, the First Lady, who said recently: "The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."

With the liberation of Afghan women from the restrictions of the burqa, it seems perverse that American servicewomen such as McSally - who, until last month, was directing search and rescue missions in Afghanistan - should be forced to cover up.

McSally confesses that she has always been a bit of a rebel. She certainly looks more Debra Winger than Richard Gere, but her arrival at the Air Force Academy could have been a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman - with her cast as an unruly recruit rather than a local temptress. Before she could start pilot training, she had to fight to win a waiver for being an inch under the minimum height.

"The whole thing is you show up there and they strip you of your identity," she says. "So I thought, well, if they're going to do it, I might as well do it to myself first. So I cut my hair way shorter than they were going to cut it."

For good measure, she also wore trainers, skin-hugging black trousers and a T-shirt with an aeroplane and the word "Kamikaze" emblazoned across the chest. "I was pretty naive," she laughs.

McSally realises that her military career is probably over; her fight against the abaya is on behalf of those women who come after her. A single woman, she hopes that marriage and a family might be on the horizon some day. "I'm waiting to see if God brings along a life partner who he's ordained for me, yeah. But it's tough to stay in a relationship when you're moving every couple of years."

She talks of her A-10 exploits with a fondness that suggests she may suspect they are a thing of the past. "Flying is like nothing else. A lot of people just think: 'Oh, it would be exhilarating, like a theme park ride, or whatever'. But the reality is that it's a very serious thing.

"One guy described doing a low altitude tactical sortie as being like doing long division in the middle of a wrestling match. It can be intense."

McSally's next journey is the 2,300 mile trip from Washington DC to the David Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, where she will begin a two-year staff appointment. In her red Mustang convertible and with her Golden retriever Bennigan at her side, she reckons it will take her about four days. "I used to do it quicker when I was younger."

When she finally parts company with the US Air Force, she says, she intends to continue her public duty in some other way. She could work for a church, or perhaps go into law. Politics is a possibility.

McSally attributes her determination to succeed to the death of her father when she was 12. The youngest of five, she was summoned to his hospital bed after he had suffered a heart attack. He loved her, he said, and told her: "Make me proud." The next morning, he died.

"That encounter - losing him and everything - made me very driven. I make every day count. You never know when this day is going to be your last."



26 October 2001

Building the case against Iraq

Toby Harnden meets the ex-CIA chief on a mission to find evidence of Baghdad's involvement in attacks

THE Taliban regime may be the current target in America's war on terrorism but the Bush administration is already building a case against a much bigger foe - Iraq.

James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, ambassador and Pentagon official who now describes himself as a "private citizen", is the man entrusted with investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks.

The Iraqi National Congress, the exiled group that opposes Saddam Hussein, said it recently held meetings in London with Mr Woolsey. Administration sources have said his trip was funded and approved by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary.

Such is the sensitivity of the Iraq issue, Mr Woolsey will make no comment about the exact nature of his brief. "I was in London and that's it," he told The Daily Telegraph.

But he made clear that he believed there were "substantial and growing indications" that a state was behind the attacks.

The milled, "weaponised" anthrax that virtually shut down Congress and killed two postal workers has increased his suspicions. So too have reports of meetings involving Mohammad Atta, a leading hijacker, in Prague. Atta travelled to the Czech Republic at least twice and was refused entry to Prague airport on another occasion.

According to the Wall Street Journal on one occasion Atta was observed meeting Ahmed Khalil Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat subsequently expelled for spying.

"I doubt very seriously if this was simply a social relationship or that they liked to drink Czech beer together," said Mr Woolsey.

It has also emerged this week that intelligence reports have stated that Osama bin Laden sent an al-Qa'eda delegation to Baghdad on April 25, 1998 to attend Saddam's birthday celebration.

Saddam's son Uday, it is claimed, agreed to train al-Qa'eda recruits and establish a joint force of bin Laden's elite fighters and the Iraqi intelligence unit 999.

All this, Mr Woolsey, said, made it imperative that America "should look under that rock" to establish whether Iraq helped al-Qa'eda to carry out the September 11 or anthrax attacks. "If a state is involved, obviously it seems to me to be important for us to know whom we're at war with."

Focusing solely on proof that would be admissible in a court of law would be a mistake. "Hearsay is not admissible as evidence and almost all intelligence is hearsay. Evidentiary standards are the wrong standards. I would talk about indications, information.

"The United States has not yet decided it is at war with Saddam Hussein but Saddam Hussein may have decided he is at war with the United States."

The Clinton administration, he said, had had "a propensity sometimes to reason backwards from public relations to policy, to the facts one was looking at". This had resulted in the question of Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Centre bombing of 1993 being pushed aside.

In Washington, the debate over global terrorism was continuing to develop as the effects of the anthrax attacks grow more serious. Having suffered thousands of civilian casualties, most Americans would prefer a pre-emptive strike against a known enemy such as Saddam than risk a biological or chemical attack that could kill tens of thousands.

"We ought to seriously consider removing Saddam's regime, if he has been involved in any terror in recent years against us," said Mr Woolsey. Saddam had attempted to assassinate President Bush Snr in 1993. He had also defied UN mandates by developing weapons of mass destruction. "In my judgment that's enough."

President Clinton's response to the assassination attempt was "to shoot some Cruise missiles back into empty buildings in the middle of the night" but this type of limited, ineffective action had been discredited by September 11.

"Some of the states, such as Iraq, and some of the people, such as bin Laden, saw our behaviour over the last decade or two and may have a false impression that they can bludgeon the United States into submission.

"I think some day - hopefully soon - they will come to the same conclusion that Admiral Yamamoto did after Pearl Harbor, which was to remark that Japan had awakened a sleeping giant."

"If the government chooses, based on the information that it has, to take military action against any other state outside Afghanistan, I believe that the world will see our reaction in that case will be ruthless, relentless and devastating.

"In the American vernacular - you ain't seen nothing yet."

Coming from the man entrusted with gathering that "information", Saddam would perhaps be well advised to mark Mr Woolsey's words.

25 July 2001
'We won't be victims any more'

An influential group of post feminist, Republican women has a powerful voice in the Bush administration. Toby Harnden meets them

THE new dawn of post-feminist America is being marked by four women sitting on a veranda in the comfortable Washington suburb of Foxhall. On the wicker table sits a large jug of G&T. A clunking fan provides some relief from the heat, wafting the cigarette smoke away towards the lawn.

It is an occasion to be marked, mind you, rather than celebrated, because these women feel that feminism's destructive legacy lingers on and that there is much work still to be done. But with George W. and Laura ensconced in the White House after eight years of Bill and Hillary, the times augur well for them in the American capital.

The host is Danielle Crittenden, author, social critic and half of one of Washington's new power couples. Her husband, David Frum, is a speechwriter for President Bush: as we talk, Frum returns home from the White House and plays enthusiastically in the garden with their children Miranda, 10, and Nathaniel, seven. A small bump on his wife's slender frame scarcely betrays that she is four months pregnant with her third child.

Among Crittenden's guests is Barbara Olson, former prosecutor and no-holds-barred biographer of Hillary Clinton. A blonde who still turns heads at 45, she is dressed in a royal blue power suit with a skirt that errs just on the right side of decency. She is married to Ted Olson, newly appointed Solicitor General and the man who represented Mr Bush against Al Gore in the Supreme Court when the Florida recount battle reached its dramatic climax last December.

Barbara Ledeen, an Italian-born brunette, arrives straight from Capitol Hill, where she is a director of coalitions for the Republican staff in the Senate. As she walks in, Kate O'Beirne, the Washington editor of the conservative magazine National Review, is showing the assembled company a large map of the United States that is awash with blue.

O'Beirne, tall and elegant, is explaining that the map shows how Bush would have won with a landslide if men were the only voters. If it hadn't been for their weak sisters, she says, there would have been no showdown in Florida and no argument about the new president's legitimacy.

"Take back the vote - we've used it unwisely. We'd like to give it back to our husbands," laughs O'Beirne, who is married to a US army officer.

Olson, in turn, proposes a Republican conspiracy to keep American women at home during the next election: simply run a 24-hour television retrospective of the lives of Diana, Princess of Wales and John F. Kennedy Jnr.

All four friends are veterans of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative group founded in 1992 that challenged the central tenets of feminism and refused to accept that women always had to be the victims.

Today, the IWF is less influential than it was but its former members are spread throughout the new Bush establishment in Washington. Lynne Cheney, the vice-president's wife, is using her role to highlight education issues; Elaine Chao is Labour Secretary; Paula Dobriansky is the State Department official who has to explain to Europe why America thinks the Kyoto protocol on global warming will not work.

Crittenden, 38, is currently writing an online novel called Amanda.Bright§ home, a pointed social and political satire which is being published a chapter a week by the Wall Street Journal and the National Post in Canada. Amanda, a hapless, harassed and insecure Washington mother, is experiencing the downside of the philosophy that suggests a woman has to "have it all".

Her character, says Crittenden - who uses her maiden name professionally and her husband's in everyday life - is a kind of post-modern trophy wife. "It is a status thing now to have a wife who gave up a great job because you don't need the money. It's like retiring a thoroughbred from the track: 'She could be earning $200,000, I could be racing her but she takes care of me and my children'."

Crittenden's first book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, published two years ago, was described by one critic as "a grenade in the face of the women's movement". Tackling the inter-linked intricacies of motherhood, marriage, work, sex and politics, Crittenden argued that her generation of women had been misled by being taught to blame men and embark on a quest for independence at all costs. Erica Jong hated it.

When Barbara Ledeen arrived in Washington, she says, she was made to feel ashamed of being an at-home mother. "I had a little girl who was three and I was the only one who was not working. I remember at one cocktail party speaking to someone with a job like David's, a speechwriter in the White House or something.

"I said I was the mother of a three-year-old and he went right over my shoulder to try to look for someone interesting to talk to. It was really painful. But it's no longer like that any more."

Now, Ledeen says, women are more conservative, partly because liberal groups, such as the National Organisation for Women, damaged themselves so badly by defending Bill Clinton's philandering and lying.

Crittenden has also noticed big changes. "It is really not embarrassing any more for a woman not to work. It's OK to be a housewife. Here we are in the shark tank of Washington and you can go to a party and say, 'Well, I did work in transport under Reagan and now I am at home with my kids'.

"This younger generation sees what the women of our generation lost. They have no romance with the 50-hour working week. It was so glamorous in the Seventies, feeling you could get a job, your own apartment. That is so not glamorous now," says Crittenden. "The idea that you could meet a man, he would stay with you and you could have children and not work - that is glamorous."

But she worries that what she sees as some of the most negative effects of feminism will survive. "Feminist ideas have been absorbed generally by women and by Washington. So you have highly conservatives bodies, like the army or the navy, who are as radically feminist as you can probably be."

One irony, these friends point out, is that although the Bush presidency is perceived as being dominated by male Wasps - white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants - women and minorities are perhaps better represented than in any previous administration. "When the door is closed in the Bush administration, women are in the right side," says O'Beirne.

"You have people like Condoleezza Rice [National Security Adviser] and Karen Hughes [probably the adviser Mr Bush trusts most]. With Bill Clinton, when they closed the door, there wasn't a woman in the room who had any influence."

Olson thinks that the example of Barbara Bush, President Bush's mother and a former First Lady, might be at least partly responsible for this. "Look at Bill Clinton's mother, as opposed to George W's mother. Is your mother a barfly who gets used by men? Or is your mother a strong woman who demanded respect for her ideas and always received it?"

Ledeen is perhaps the most optimistic of the four about the immediate future for women in America. "For the past eight years, it has been the Clinton deal with women," she says. "It's not going to be that way any more."

So why are feminists now so discredited in the eyes of some women? "Their children are a mess," says Ledeen. "They're taking guns to schools and shooting each other. It is hard to say that it is not because of the parents."

Rather than empowering women, she says, feminism taught them to be helpless. "I'll tell you when it started. It started with the whole concept of rape - in 1968, I was there. You had to be back within certain hours. Then, there was no illicit sex in the dormitory, because they would not allow it.

"Part of the whole impetus of the Sixties was: you cannot tell us who to sleep with and where and when. Now fast forward to the Eighties and Nineties - you can drink too much and go to his room, and it is his fault, not yours, if you have sex. You didn't say no, you didn't get up, you didn't leave the room, but it is his fault. Therefore, you are the victim."

Crittenden, who describes herself as a "New Traditionalist" and has been dubbed "Retrochick" by others, believes women's issues are slowly becoming de-politicised. "These issues were never political, although the feminists got a good 15 years out of the personal versus political. This generation is truly post-feminist: they don't politicise their marriages and when you look at the issues women are consumed with day to day, they're very much removed from the political realm."

But all four friends agree that the role of woman as victim is difficult to shake off. During the election campaign, O'Beirne notes, women preferred Tipper Gore to Laura Bush. "It was because Tipper doesn't have her act together. Tipper's a little heavy, she's had problems - Tipper has shown weakness. Laura is self-contained, a little too perfect."

And now, of course, the previous First Lady, Hillary Clinton, is in the Senate and building up her credentials to run for the White House one day. "She's the last vestige of victimhood but she clearly is a huge symbol of victimhood that survives," says Olson, whose book about the scandals at the end of the Clinton administration, The Final Days, is to be published in the autumn.

"She represents what we are all hoping is the past - but it's obviously not as much in the past as we'd like."

If nothing else, the presence of Hillary Clinton is a guarantee that Crittenden and her allies will continue their fight. Now, at last, they have their hands on many of the levers of power and influence in Washington - and they are not going to let go soon.

16th March 2001
'I'm dangerous if I've time on my hands'

Lynne Cheney is the first wife of a US Vice-President to have a job. She talks to Toby Harnden about her role - and her husband's uncertain health

She may be a combat-hardened veteran of America's culture wars, but Lynne
Cheney seems to have emerged from the trenches with her morale and sense of humour intact. There are roars of laughter from within her office - then, as her weekly scheduling meeting comes to an end, a bright-eyed, diminutive figure steps out to welcome me.

It is week seven of the Bush administration and the new tenants are still settling into the part of the White House complex once occupied by the War Department. There is a whiff of new paint in the Old Executive Office Building corridors and cardboard boxes are stacked in many of the newly carpeted rooms.

Inside Mrs Cheney's quarters, pictures of her husband, Vice-President Dick Cheney, have yet to be hung on the ivory walls. A bust of Churchill sits on a shelf. "We still don't have drapes, but it's pretty nice anyway," she says, gazing out of a corner window overlooking the West Wing on one side and the Washington Monument on the other. "When Tipper Gore was here, it was lime green."

Mrs Cheney can be forgiven for not wanting to talk more about colour schemes and soft furnishings. She holds the distinction of being the first Second Lady of the United States - SLOTUS, as her two daughters jokingly call her - to hold down an outside job. A former political talk show host who used to sign off with the catchphrase "from the Right and right on every issue", she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute - a conservative think tank - and is hard at work on her sixth book, Schoolthink.

Since the protracted election process came to an end in December, she has sold one house in Dallas, another in McLean, Virginia and - last weekend - moved into Al Gore's old digs at the Naval Observatory. Apart from resigning from two corporate boards to give her more free time, she has "pretty much just soldiered on", and got it all done.

To add to all this, Mrs Cheney has had to deal with her husband's latest heart scare, when a stent (a device designed to keep an artery open), fitted last November after his fourth heart attack, became clogged. "You certainly would not choose to have coronary heart disease," she says, "but you just deal with the realities of life as they come along." The surgery, she remarked when he left hospital, was "kind of a plumbing thing they had to do".

Now that the practicalities of moving have been taken care of, and the Vice-President is back at work, Mrs Cheney is keen to talk about her real passion: education reform - or, more precisely, how the twin evils of political correctness and progressive dogma have prevented generations of American children from learning what they should.

Her PhD thesis was on the influence of Immanuel Kant's philosophy on the work of Matthew Arnold and she still cites the English writer's belief that students should "learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" as a guiding principle.

The "back to basics" philosophy of teaching, Mrs Cheney says, is effective but distinctly out of vogue. "It is only acceptable to talk about letting little kids discover learning for themselves, to let them learn through projects. It's unacceptable to make them memorise; it's unacceptable to make them enjoy competitive games. That's the orthodoxy I'm focusing on now."

The same trends are apparent in British schools, she says, in response to my confession that I didn't grasp the basic rules of punctuation until the middle of secondary school. "If you learnt it at 14, you turned out OK. I'm not sure we teach it at all."

In past cultural conflicts, Mrs Cheney was at her most effective when going over the top with bayonet fixed. Now, with Mr Cheney ensconced as perhaps the most powerful Vice-President in the history of the Union, given the extent to which George W Bush relies on him, she has a field marshal's baton under her arm and is prepared to wield it.

Her husband's job, she remarks happily, means that when she visits a school: "I can now bring with me a contingent of television cameras and reporters and that is a wonderful thing to be able to do." A former chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, she knows the value of a bully pulpit.

Before Mr Cheney was selected to run for Vice-President, his wife had been an education adviser to George W Bush in Texas, but she insists that despite her position, literally a stone's throw from the Oval Office, she has no policy role. "I think of myself as an outside advocate of what the administration is doing, rather than someone who's trying to make policy They don't need me kibitzing about in their business."

This brings us, naturally enough, to the subject of Hillary Clinton; Mrs Cheney is sometimes portrayed as a Right-wing version of the ex-president's wife. "Mrs Clinton got herself in a certain amount of trouble by operating from a platform where she really didn't have a mandate from the voters to establish policy," she says, firmly.

Mrs Cheney has never hidden her disdain for the Clintons, and the Gores fare little better. Although she admires Tipper Gore for her stand against rock lyrics that contain references to sex and violence, she says that the parental advisory sticker on CDs that was brought in as a result has made little difference. "It's good we have that, but it's almost useless."

She also notes that "when Mr Gore decided to run for president, he and Mrs Gore went to Hollywood and apologised", because they knew that the Democratic Party depended on money from the entertainment industry.

During the election campaign, Mrs Cheney testified before a Senate committee about how Hollywood tried to entice children to watch films classified for adults. In recent weeks, she has excoriated the rapper Eminem for helping create "a culture in which the rape and mutilation of women is advocated", and has spoken out against parents who have taken their children to see Hannibal, which contains graphic scenes of cannibalism.

Hollywood excesses, she maintains, are unnecessary as well as corrupting because films such as Saving Private Ryan showed that audiences were attracted to quality. "We have such national skill in this direction and we're so skilled at marketing that if there were lots more of the good stuff and lots less of the bad stuff, there'd be just as much profit in the industry."

When Mr Cheney was sworn in as Vice-President in January, it was the culmination of a political career that had seen him become chief of staff to President Gerald Ford at the age of 34, serve six terms as a congressman for Wyoming and help to direct the Gulf war while head of the Pentagon. With Lynne Cheney at his side, he was also half of the ultimate Washington power couple.

They met, aged 13, at the Natrona County High School in Wyoming. At the time, she was the school's lead baton twirler and he was captain of the football team. "He likes to say that I didn't pay any attention to him until he was 16," she laughs. "So it's been quite a long time. I'll confess that I'm 60, almost - in August.

"I do remember the first time he asked me for a date. And I did, by this time, think that he had a pretty cute crew cut and I wouldn't mind going out with him. He says it was after chemistry class. I think it was after maths class. He said: 'Would you go to the formal with me?' And I said: 'Are you kidding?' He thought I meant: 'With you?' But what I really meant was: 'That is the most terrific thing'."

Some 44 years later, they are still going strong - her outspoken approach complementing his solidity and discretion. She has flirted with the idea of running for elected office but now doubts she ever will. "One of the things that it does is take you away from your spouse and I happen to like spending time with Dick."

When he left hospital last week, Mr Cheney informed the press that his wife was a bad cook. "I would be totally insulted, except it's true," Mrs Cheney says, cheerfully. "We spent the first year of our marriage, both of us, pretending I could cook and then we realised that this pretence was not making either of us happy. He is actually a good cook."

As well as her better-known non-fiction writing - among her books are Telling the Truth, about America's cultural wars, and a history of Congress, written with her husband - Mrs Cheney has written two novels and co-written another. Since Dick Cheney's recent elevation, both titles are much sought after on Capitol Hill.

Her first effort was Sisters, a Wild West thriller billed on the cover as the story of "a strong and beautiful woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier". Its frank accounts of attempted rapes and prostitution made it, a Princeton academic theorised recently, "very sympathetic to the feminist arguments".

Mrs Cheney giggles at the mention of the book. "Every once in a while, a novel breaks loose. It was actually inspired by Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. It was 1976 and Dick had not decided yet to run for Congress. I thought: 'Here I am in Wyoming and it would be kind of interesting to write a Western version of Rebecca'. It seems to be dangerous when I get time on my hands."

Thirteen years ago, when she was an editor at Washingtonian magazine, Mrs Cheney co-wrote a novel, The Body Politic, with her workmate, Vic Gold. The plot revolves around a 59-year-old vice-president who dies of a heart attack in a passionate embrace with his mistress.

There is an election campaign on, so the White House decides to cover up his death. The book ends with the vice-president's wife being chosen as his successor.

"To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have written the book if I had known Dick was going to be Vice-President,