Hagel’s unwillingness to endorse McCain is generally perceived to be a result of their ongoing disagreements over the Iraq war. But he told me that the gulf between them is much deeper: “In good conscience, I could not enthusiastically—honestly—go out and endorse him and support him when we so fundamentally disagree on the future course of our foreign policy and our role in the world.”

Like Obama, Hagel—who is not running for reëlection this year—seems to have viewed the Senate more as a stepping stone than as a final destination. As a freshman, he secured a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and became a serious student of foreign policy, treating committee hearings as seminars. After the November, 1998, elections, in which the Republicans failed to gain a single Senate seat, he challenged Senator Mitch McConnell for the chairmanship of the Republican Campaign Committee. He attacked the G.O.P. leadership for running “issueless campaigns” with “demonizing” ads, and he spoke about the need to renew the “political culture in America by ‘defining up’ the standards of debate, political discourse, and campaigns.” (Hagel lost.) In 2000, he was on the short list of Vice-Presidential candidates compiled by Dick Cheney for Bush. Four years later, Hagel, with a small group of advisers, was discussing running for President in 2008.

From the start, securing the Republican nomination loomed as his greatest challenge. A traditional pro-business, small-government conservative, Hagel is a graduate of a Catholic high school, who is pro-life and supports school prayer. He occasionally broke with his party—on immigration reform, on the No Child Left Behind Act, on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage—but, according to Congressional Quarterly, in 2006 he voted with the President ninety-six per cent of the time.

Hagel’s heresy on the Iraq war overshadowed the rest of his record, however. In 2002, the Weekly Standard included Hagel (along with Brent Scowcroft and the Times) in its “axis of appeasement.” After Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 and allowed many more votes on the war, Hagel’s support for Bush’s policies declined—in 2007, he voted with the President just seventy-two per cent of the time—and some commentators referred to him as “not a real Republican.”

Hagel says that he attempted to offer advice privately to the White House but was rebuffed. He once called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and asked to see him; Rumsfeld invited him to lunch. “I wanted to talk to him alone,” Hagel said. “And when I showed up he had a whole table full of generals and admirals.” During the Clinton Administration, he began writing letters to the President on foreign-policy issues of signal importance. “Clinton used to call me and we’d discuss it, or he’d ask me to come talk with him,” Hagel recalled. In the past eight years, he has written to Bush a number of times, including, most recently, letters about Russia and Iran. But he said that he has never received a response from the President. (He has occasionally received an acknowledgment from the assistant secretary for legislative affairs.)

“This Administration has viewed Congress as an appendage, a nuisance,” Hagel told me. “Clinton was just the opposite. Reagan was the opposite. Bush’s father was the opposite. They understood the value of making Congress their ally.” He said that Vice-President Cheney nearly always attended the weekly lunch held by the Senate Republican Caucus, at which major issues—including the war in Iraq—are discussed. Often, someone asked Cheney whether he’d like to say something. “Almost always, he’d say, ‘No, no,’ ” Hagel said. “It always said to me, by his very lack of engagement or even giving us the courtesy of saying something, that they could care less about us. Except when he wanted us to do something: ‘Vote this way.’ ”

In December, 2006, the Iraq Study Group released its report about the war, describing the situation in Iraq as a quagmire. Hagel heartily agreed with the group’s key recommendations—a phased troop withdrawal and diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria—and he was taken aback by the Bush Administration’s negative reaction. “It was a way for the President to almost start over, in building a bipartisan consensus,” he said. “And as I watched this thing go forward—the essential trashing of the report by the President, in his remarks—I was astounded. Not much astounded me about this crowd anymore. But this did.”

Instead of withdrawing troops, the Bush Administration decided to increase their number by thirty thousand, a strategy that became known as the surge. On January 24, 2007, Hagel addressed his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He and his close friend Joe Biden, the Democratic senator who is the committee’s chairman (and now the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee), sponsored a resolution opposing the escalation and calling for a transition to a limited U.S. military mission in Iraq. “This is not a defeatist resolution,” Hagel told members of the committee. “We’re not talking about cutting off funds, not supporting the troops. . . . When I hear, on both sides of this argument, impugning motives and patriotism to our country, not only is it offensive and disgusting but it debases the whole system of our country and who we are.” He went on, “We didn’t involve the Congress in this when we should have. And I’m to blame. Every senator who’s been here the last four years has to take some responsibility for that. But I will not sit here in this Congress of the United States, at this important time for our country and in the world, and not have something to say about this. And maybe I’ll be wrong. . . . But I don’t ever want to look back and have the regret that I didn’t have the courage and I didn’t do what I could.”

Recalling that morning, Hagel said that, as he listened to his colleagues discuss sending more troops to Iraq, he was struck by their “cavalier approach, as if it were an abstraction. Very few people know much about war, very few are touched by it. This is also a time when we had seen over a period of four years so much deception by this Administration—straight outright lies—and I thought to myself, as I looked around the committee, have we learned nothing in the last four years? And we’re now going to send thirty thousand more troops into this meat grinder? For what? . . . We were not a co-equal branch of government. We were just kind of this afterthought to the President, and whatever he tells us to do, we kind of docilely go along.”

The committee approved the resolution in a 12–9 vote; Hagel was the only Republican who voted for it. “I was called a ‘traitor,’ and I was called ‘disgusting,’ ” he told me. “How could I not support the troops? ‘Shut your mouth, you’re a Republican!’ Which I always found astounding—to equate war based on your politics, as a Democrat or a Republican. I often said in hearings, I wonder where my Republican colleagues, who are so enthusiastic about the war in Iraq, would be if Bill Clinton was the President? I think I know exactly where they would be.” Several days after the vote, Cheney, in an interview with Newsweek, said that he believed “in Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved.”

For the next several months, Hagel tried to persuade enough Republicans to vote for a similar Democratic amendment, so that Republicans and Democrats together would reach sixty votes—the number required to prevent a filibuster. Various Republican colleagues told him privately that they agreed with him, he said, but he was unable to win more than a handful of Republican votes.

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On Wednesday, March 7, 2007, Hagel’s staff sent reporters e-mails announcing a press conference at the University of Nebraska, in Omaha, the following Monday. Most reporters assumed that Hagel was planning to declare his intention to run for President; NPR reported that “the Senator’s campaign is portraying tomorrow’s announcement as one of the most important in his career.” But Hagel told the crowd that he had not yet made up his mind, and he was widely ridiculed. That month, in an interview with Esquire, Hagel said of Bush, “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.” John McCollister, a former Nebraska congressman and a longtime friend of Hagel’s, wrote a letter to the editor of the Omaha World Herald, criticizing him, though not by name. “I believe that some people disregard the awful consequences of a premature withdrawal and want to end the war, period,” McCollister wrote. “Others have a consuming, burning hatred of George W. Bush as their dominant legislative priority. Those who carelessly throw out talk of ‘impeachment’ are of the same stripe.” Michael McCarthy, the chairman of a private-equity firm in Omaha where Hagel worked in the early nineties, and who was one of his closest advisers as he considered running for President, told me that Hagel is “very good at political calculus, so there is no doubt that he understood the political ramifications of anything he said, or actions he took.” Even so, McCarthy added, as Hagel has become frustrated by Congress’s failure to confront the Bush Administration over its conduct of the Iraq war, “he has become—he’ll hate me for saying this—somewhat more preachy.”

Some observers were perplexed by Hagel’s behavior; if he was serious about running for President, why was he doing and saying things that virtually guaranteed he could not win the nomination? But Rita E. Hauser, a longtime Republican activist who served on Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during his first term, and had numerous conversations with Hagel as he thought about entering the race, told me that she encouraged him. “It was a long shot, but I felt he could run as a courageous dissenter, and there was plenty of interest in that among a wide swath of Republicans, who felt the war had gone terribly awry.” Hauser said that Hagel was concerned about the growing political power of the religious right. “He was somewhat shocked at the degree to which the pro-life people—I’ll call it the extreme Christian agenda—had taken over the Party.” In the end, Hauser said, Hagel concluded that if he had to take on both the Christian right and the Bush White House he probably could not win the nomination. In September, 2007, Hagel announced that he would not run for President in 2008 and would retire from the Senate at the end of his term.

According to several people close to Hagel, he had become increasingly discouraged by his inability to influence the Bush Administration and his Republican colleagues, particularly on Iraq-war policy. His younger brother Tom, a law professor at the University of Dayton, says that Hagel, in his various occupations before he became a senator, “had his own agenda and could get things done. I think it was incredibly frustrating for him to be in the Senate, as one of one hundred senators.” When I asked Hagel about his decision to retire, he pointed out that after he was elected he said that he only intended to serve for two terms. On Election Night, he went on, his wife, Lilibet, had asked him, “Do you think you can hold a job for six years?”

“That’s true!” Lilibet told me in late July. We were seated at the kitchen table in the Hagels’ large flagstone house, set high on a hill in McLean, Virginia, where they live with their two teen-age children and a Portuguese water dog. Lilibet, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman from Meridian, Mississippi, who volunteers as a reading tutor in inner-city Washington schools, explained that until Hagel became a senator he had never stayed in a job for more than a few years. “I think he just likes change—it keeps things interesting.” It appears to be a pattern set in his childhood. “His father changed jobs a lot—from bad to worse—and they were always moving,” Lilibet said. “Chuck liked going to new schools—a chance to make new friends and, I think, reinvent himself.”