With the war in Iraq finally going better, the dark cloud that dominated the White House for the past few years has lifted. The overnight reports Bush finds on his Oval Office desk each morning now list fewer casualties in Iraq, easing a burden friends say has weighed on him. It now looks as if the surge, one of the riskiest presidential decisions in a generation, has been vindicated. And Bush seems to be making progress getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons while winning a string of Congressional battles that would under other circumstances be seen as legacy victories  a bipartisan deal on wiretapping, war financing without strings, expansion of his global AIDS program.

As a result, friends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time. He sees the end and has been thinking about life after the White House back down at the ranch and at a new home in Dallas. “You can hear his Texas accent creeping back into his voice, rather than the I’m-the-president, no-accent kind of voice,” observed an old friend from Texas.

Yet there are no valedictory days for Bush. For years, he got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq. Now, it seems, he gets no credit for the improvements in Iraq because of deep discontent over the tattered economy. Housing and energy crises have only deepened public disaffection. While Iraq stabilizes, Afghanistan seems to be unraveling. Russia has been rampaging through its neighbor Georgia, undeterred by Bush’s consternation. As John Weaver told me, “They look better on Iraq, but they look worse on everything else.” So many onetime loyalists have turned on the president that when the former White House press secretary Scott McClellan came out with his break-with-the-boss book in May, Bush sighed and told an aide to find a way to forgive him or risk being consumed with anger.

While Bush publicly commits to “sprinting to the finish” and eschews talk of legacy, even friends say how he will be judged and remembered seems to be on his mind these days. “When I was there, that legacy talk was strictly discouraged,” says David Frum, a White House speechwriter in Bush’s first term. “It was considered very destructive, and we’d all seen what it had done to Clinton in his last year. That seems to have changed obviously lately. From what I hear now, he takes it very, very seriously. He doesn’t joke about it like he used to.”

Bush’s place in history depends on alternate narratives that are hard to reconcile. To critics, he is the man who misled the country into a disastrous war, ruined U.S. relations around the world, wrecked the economy, squandered a budget surplus to give tax cuts to fat-cat friends, played the guitar while New Orleans drowned, politicized the Justice Department, cozied up to oil companies and betrayed American values by promoting torture, warrantless eavesdropping and a modern-day gulag at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for people never even charged with a crime. To admirers, he is the man who freed 60 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq and planted a seed that may yet spread democracy in a vital region, while at home he reduced taxes, introduced more accountability to public schools through No Child Left Behind, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, installed two new conservative Supreme Court justices and, most of all, kept America safe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Whatever the president’s virtues, they remain unappreciated in his own time. To say that Bush is unpopular only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public. He is arguably the most disliked president in seven decades. Sixty-nine percent of Americans disapproved of his performance in office in a Gallup poll in April, the highest negative rate ever recorded for any president since the firm began asking the question in 1938. And while Harry Truman and Richard Nixon at their worst had even fewer supporters  Truman once fell to 22 percent in his job approval rating and Nixon to 24 percent, compared with Bush’s low of 28 percent  no president has endured such a prolonged period of public rejection. Bush has not enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans since March 2005, meaning he will go through virtually his entire second term without most of the public behind him.

Bush has been so far down for so long that his aides long ago gave up any hope that the numbers would change while he is still in office. “There’s kind of a liberating aspect to it,” Dan Bartlett told me over lunch in July, at a homey steak joint in Austin, where he returned after leaving the White House last year. “It’s not that you chase polls, but you’re cognizant of them. So if you know they’re not going to change, you can just do what you think is right.”