Making Up Is Hard to Do

By JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F. DICKERSON

The most anticipated--and hyped--meeting between two politicians since the last cold war summit was almost derailed by a 14-year-old boy. Just two days before John McCain and George W. Bush were scheduled to make official their detente, the Texas Governor placed an ice-breaking phone call to the Arizona Senator's mountain retreat. He reached Jack McCain. Dad's outside, said the teenager. Could the Republican nominee call back later? No big deal. Back to Game Boy. Jack promptly forgot about the call and never told his father. "I wanted to throttle him," McCain laughs now. Three hours later, Bush called again and reached...Jack. This time the boy took down the guy's number and told his father. The Republican Party was saved.

Or was it? The phone mishaps of teenagers aren't a bad way for two fathers to start a conversation intended to patch up their differences. But the missed message also turns out to be the operative metaphor for the Bush-McCain rapprochement. In the two months since Bush knocked McCain out of the primaries, relations between the victor and the vanquished have been awkward and tense, with anonymous aides trading acerbic barbs in the press. By the time the two men met in the Westin William Penn hotel in Pittsburgh, Pa., last Tuesday, negotiations had been going on for so long--practically since the day McCain dropped out--that both walked into the room with set lines to deliver. Bush congratulated McCain on his tough campaign, saying it had made him a better candidate, and McCain praised Bush for so artfully returning to his "compassionate conservative" theme since locking up the nomination. Then came the thoroughly precooked dish. Bush brought up the vice presidency, and McCain quickly asked that he not be considered. End of subject. "He had his scripted lines," says McCain, "and I had mine."

The meeting--or at least the spin afterward--was so anodyne that it's easy to imagine that after five minutes, they ran out of things to say and were scanning the offerings on SpectraVision. Neither said he was sorry for the hatchets and sharpened screwdrivers each hurled during the primaries; the vice-presidential offer and rejection were painless; and substantive disagreements over issues like campaign-finance reform, the size of tax cuts and the experience necessary to conduct foreign policy were skipped over lightly. "You don't want one of these things to go badly," says McCain. "The goal is to get it done without any controversy."

So the happy talk centered on whom, with McCain out of the game, Bush might pick as his running mate. The merits of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge and Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Fred Thompson of Tennessee were all discussed. Other names were mentioned too. When the two men got more comfortable, McCain tossed off a few campaign suggestions. Take up Al Gore's challenge to debate, McCain advised. Don't settle for only a handful of engagements where the expectations will inflate beyond reason, but keep Gore in a tight clinch, debating early and often. Bush said he'd think about it.

Fight for California too, offered McCain, even though polls show Bush way down; the state is too important to surrender, as Republicans have done in the past two presidential elections. Bush agreed. He also nodded when his rival suggested the two of them take the compassionate-conservative road show to an Indian reservation in McCain's home state. The meeting went well enough that McCain is considering an aide's suggestion that his wife Cindy and Laura Bush campaign together.

Outside the room, McCain's team of aides wondered what was going on. They had placed bets on how long the meeting would last, with the low bidder guessing McCain would be out of the room in 20 minutes. When he emerged after an hour and a half without rope burns, they joked that he hadn't spent that long alone in a room with another man since he was interrogated at the Hanoi Hilton. Even McCain was surprised. "He has a lot of charm," says McCain.

If Bush kept control behind closed doors, the press conference afterward was pure McCain: unpredictable and laced with edgy humor. Though McCain endorsed Bush, the smiles were forced, and McCain's jokes occasionally misfired. Was he being serious when he agreed with a reporter that the meeting was like taking medicine? The Senator insists that he was joking, and Bush is said to believe him. The worst moment was Bush's. At an event designed to show mutual admiration, the G.O.P. nominee ducked a question about the Rev. Pat Robertson, who recently warned that McCain would be a "very dangerous" Vice President. McCain, though disappointed, understands the bargain Bush has made with the preacher. "Would I have preferred if he'd said Robertson is a turkey? Sure!" McCain says. "Obviously he didn't want to confront Robertson. But why should I get mad about it?" The answer is, he shouldn't. That's what saying "I endorse you" is all about.