That the trial was so fruitful and revelatory was quite a surprise. It rather looked like all the big enchiladas had gotten away with the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joe Wilson, who, after being sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger, climbed on a soapbox and announced that a central element of the case for war was fraudulent. In the end, all the prosecutor had gotten—and only for the Martha Stewart breach of legal etiquette of trying not to get caught for a crime that seems not to have been committed—was the vice president’s factotum. Only Scooter.

And yet—and this became the fulcrum of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s narrative—Libby’s very scooterness, his being the vice president’s eager sidekick, gave him vast power and his behind-the-scenes machinations deep reach into the workings of the Bush administration. Libby was, after all, the chief of staff, as well as the closest confidant, to the most powerful vice president in history (in addition, he was also Cheney’s national-security adviser and part of the neocon group instigating the war in Iraq), which made him one of the most influential men in this government. (Worth noting: the veep goes into a clear eclipse and becomes the subject of increasing mockery after Libby is indicted and no longer at his side.)

What’s more, Fitzgerald, aware, no doubt, of the weakness of the charges—mere perjury and obstruction, acts of omission rather than commission—and, perhaps, defensive about the tens of millions he’d spent to produce them, put on trial the “state of mind” that led the administration to sell the case for W.M.D., which, in turn, made it go a little batty when Joe Wilson started flapping about there being no deal between the Iraqis and the Nigerois for uranium, and hence no rationale for war (the lawyers and judge kept reminding the jury that, while it wasn’t supposed to judge the war, it could judge the “state of mind” that might have motivated the various players).

And, to boot, Fitzgerald, for all practical purposes, put the vice president on trial. It was his war and, scribbled on the talking points, his marginalia directing the counter-P.R. pursuit of Wilson. If that wasn’t enough, from the opening bell, Ted Wells, the defense lawyer, drew the White House in: Libby, he argued, was in the dock precisely because Karl Rove, the greater message genius, had to be kept out of it.

The entire Iraq-war marketing operation was on trial.

I was reading, as the trial unfolded, Thomas Evans’s new book, The Education of Ronald Reagan, about Lemuel Boulware, the remarkable General Electric P.R. genius who shaped Reagan during the years when the future president was stumping for G.E. and who assembled—largely as a way to counter the growth of organized labor—the first great conservative message apparatus, the model for the Republican media machine and for the party’s ascendancy (“a managed-news program” that, according to Evans, “was the envy of corporate America” and “an inspiration for the Reagan White House”). Boulwarism is part of the DNA which makes Republicans return a reporter’s calls—and not grudgingly but eagerly (in contrast, you should hear the impatient and dismissive tone of the Democrats when you call them up). In every one of Scooter’s calls to reporters, dramatized throughout the trial in loving detail, you sensed his eagerness: he wants to talk, to negotiate, to schmooze, to convince. Republicans are good at this.

Here’s a perfectly revealing moment in the trial, when you paused and appreciated the different professional values of Democrats and Republicans. It came during the recitation of the résumé of Cathie Martin, the vice president’s former communications director. Although Martin is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the greatest professional qualification in the political power structure, and should have, more conventionally, become a framer of policy and legislation or a jurist, in the Bush administration she becomes a P.R. girl—that’s where the power is. In fact, she takes the job held by Mary Matalin, another P.R. girl and one of the icons of the Republican Party.