After eight months during which he seemed to float happily beyond the reach of his critics, George W. Bush found himself in danger of sinking last week. As clues and warnings about the Sept. 11 plot came to light and the need to assign blame grew stronger, fingers began pointing toward the White House. Bush was in an unaccustomed position Ñ on the defensive against the Democrats, who seemed more energized than they had been in a year. But he responded with a counterattack that turned out to be a dazzling example of Bush Family Combat.

This was one campaign that Bush did not delegate to others. With the cries of "What did Bush know?" at their most hysterical, he knew better than to go out to face the cameras right away. Instead, he began behind closed doors in a Thursday lunch with Senate Republicans. Confident that his words would leak, he offered a passionate defense, saying that had he known about the plot, he would have "used the whole force and fury of the United States to stop them." By telephone later that afternoon, he okayed Dick Cheney's request to turn up the heat publicly at a fund-raising dinner Thursday night. On Friday, he faced the cameras directly. The clearest evidence that the White House was on war footing came with a statement from the First Lady, which recalled the times Barbara Bush deployed her carefully controlled patrician anger in defense of her husband. Laura Bush, traveling in Europe with presidential confidant Karen Hughes, said, "I think it is very sad."

With that, the Democrats were forced to recalibrate. Their unstated implication had been that, in abler hands, the country might have been spared the tragedy. On the Senate floor on Thursday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had cited a New York Post headline that declared "Bush Knew," and added, "The President knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer." But by Friday, Mrs. Clinton was backing off, saying that she was not "looking to point fingers or place blame on anybody." Said Georgia Senator Max Cleland: "This thing went south fast. One side defends, the other side finger-points, and you get nowhere."

If the Bush team had to scramble to regain footing, it was because it had ignored a basic lesson that so many White Houses have learned the hard way: if you know that bad news is on the way, it is best to put it out yourself. A White House source told TIME that after Sept. 11 it decided to make no public mention of the August CIA briefing that raised the possibility of al-Qaeda hijackings; the White House wanted to let time pass and disclose the briefing "in context" when investigations got under way. But that ignores the fact that Bush and Cheney both lobbied congressional leaders to back off an investigation, delaying the reckoning that began last week.

As Cheney warned Democrats "not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions," he made one of his own, implying that Congress was undermining national security by raising questions about how Bush handled 9/11. "An investigation must not interfere with the ongoing efforts to prevent the next attack," Cheney said, "because without a doubt a very real threat of another, perhaps more devastating attack still exists."

The issues were deadly serious, but the debate was not. No wonder there is growing support for a proposed blue-ribbon commission to sort through the questions. The politicians know some things are too important to be left in the hands of politicians.

— With reporting by James Carney and Douglas Waller/Washington