The Man in the Irony Mask

Like Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, Stephen Colbert so completely inhabits his creation—the arch-conservative blowhard host of The Colbert Report, his Daily Show spin-off hit—that he rarely breaks character. As Colbert's new book, I Am America (And So Can You!), is published, Vanity Fair gets a revealing interview with the real thing: a master comedian, forever altered by family tragedy.

By Seth Mnookin | October 2007 | VF.com

I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am? I [told an interviewer that] I'd been arrested for assaulting someone with a flashlight. And I said that I drove a Shelby Cobra, like the Road Warrior, like Mel Gibson. I said, "I'd like you to know I drive a Shelby Cobra." They totally swallowed it, and I felt bad. Then I thought, It doesn't matter. It'll make a better story. —Stephen Colbert in an interview in his office, June 19, 2007.

Stephen Colbert, holding a glass of champagne in one hand and a fluorescent-pink smiley-face cookie in the other, stood behind his desk, which functions as the nerve center of The Colbert Report, the faux newscast on which he plays a blindly egomaniacal, Bill O'Reilly–esque talk-show host also named Stephen Colbert. The majority of the show's 86 staffers—the writers and producers and stagehands and bookers and interns and assistants who ensure that the show makes it on the air every Monday through Thursday night at 11:30—sat in front of Colbert in the bleachers that would soon be filled with 110 foot-stomping, hand-clapping, screaming members of Colbert Nation.

Moments before, Colbert had finished showering and shaving in his second-floor, brick-walled office. He'd changed out of the chinos, rumpled short-sleeved button-down shirt, and black Merrell slip-ons he'd worn to the office and into his costume for the evening: a crisp, white Brooks Brothers dress shirt, a bold (but not too bold) Brooks Brothers tie, and a conservative, pin-striped Brooks Brothers suit. Colbert has a square jaw and thick, black hair, and he wears fashionable, rimless glasses. His getup, combined with the swagger he affects onstage, made him seem like Clark Kent, if Clark Kent acted more like Superman in his everyday life.

The show's set is designed to emphasize the notion of Colbert as the supreme master of this self-created, enthusiastically narcissistic universe. Behind his desk, a faint, almost subliminal outline of a star frames Colbert's head. A series of lines that bisect a ring of concentric circles on the floor converge where Colbert is seated, as if he were a black hole toward which all matter and energy are drawn. His anchor desk is shaped like a giant C, and the colbert report is plastered on more than a dozen places on the set.

The Report (pronounced with a soft t, as is Colbert) debuted in the fall of 2005 as a spin-off of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, the critical and popular success that's often referred to by its host, Jon Stewart, as a "fake news" show. Stewart has turned The Daily Show into a cultural touchstone in the eight years he's been there, and has become such an icon that he hosted the Academy Awards in 2006. But The Colbert Report couldn't take a page from its forebearer's playbook. Stewart plays himself on TV—a smart, witty, liberal Jew who's alternately amused and enraged by the political realities of our time—and a large part of The Daily Show's popularity stems from his personal appeal.

Colbert's character, which grew out of his role as the most noxious and ill-informed of Stewart's on-air correspondents, is most definitely not the type of guy you'd want to share a beer with after work. If Colbert's show were to succeed, it would need its fans to embrace the type of grating know-it-all they would normally disdain. One of the ways the show attempted to do this was by having its audience affect the mob mentality from which Colbert's character drew his power. That way, viewers weren't just in on the joke, they were part of it.

"This show is not about me," Colbert explained his first night on the air. "No, this program is dedicated to you, the heroes.… On this show your voice will be heard, in the form of my voice." Colbert went on to define the show's ruling ethos as "truthiness," an almost Nietzschean philosophy inspired by President Bush's faith in those that "know with their heart" as opposed to those who "think with their head." If one part of the subtext here was how terrifying "truthiness" was in a world leader, another was that having the will to bend reality to reflect your every desire actually sounded pretty cool—as Colbert's id-driven character promised to demonstrate night after night.

This conceit has worked far better than anyone expected. Almost immediately, the Report attracted an audience of more than a million viewers a night. (Today, the show averages about 1.3 million viewers and draws more young men than Letterman, Leno, or Conan.) And by about 10 months into his run, something else had emerged, something that was both more powerful and more complex than anything as prosaic as a late-night, basic-cable hit. Colbert wasn't just getting people to watch his show; he was convincing them to join him as he used the truthiness of his world to influence the real one. After instructing his fans to enter his name in a Hungarian-government-sponsored online poll to determine the name of a new bridge over the Danube River, Colbert beat the runner-up, 16th-century Croatian-Hungarian war hero Nikola Šubić Zrinski, by more than 14 million votes. (The Hungarian ambassador came on the Report to explain that the winner had to be, among other things, dead.) Colbert eventually coined a neologism to reflect this truthiness in action: "Wikiality," which he defined as "a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it becomes the truth." To demonstrate, Colbert told viewers he was going to silence the endangered-species lobby by claiming that the population of African elephants had increased threefold in the previous six months. Within hours, so many changes had been made to Wikipedia, the popular, communally edited, online reference site, that its administrators had to restrict access to its "elephant" and "Stephen Colbert" entries.

Before long, the political and cultural cognoscenti joined in the fun. During his "tribute to the ladies," Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem showed Colbert how to bake an apple pie. Last March, Richard Holbrooke drew on his experience brokering peace in Bosnia to mediate a truce between Colbert and Willie Nelson over who had the better flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. (Colbert's is called AmeriCone Dream.) In April, former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky judged a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between Colbert and Sean Penn. (Sean Penn won, 10 million to one.) In December, New York governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and Henry Kissinger appeared on the show to preside over a guitar contest between Colbert and members of the indie-rock group the Decemberists. (Peter Frampton ended up filling in for Colbert, but that's a whole other story.) And perhaps most surprisingly, more than three dozen congressmen and -women have subjected themselves to Colbert's merciless and occasionally demeaning ridicule as part of the show's ongoing series "Better Know a District." (More on that later.)

"He's able to create a universe where something surreal happens on the program that seems ordinary, and all of a sudden the absurd appears not mundane but expected, organic," says Stewart. "So he can have a conversation with Richard Holbrooke and Willie Nelson and it all makes perfect sense and yet it couldn't appear anywhere else without appearing burlesque. Somehow he has managed to create a fake world that has impacted and found standing in the real world."

Colbert's unique appeal has been duly noted by the television industry: the champagne and smiley-face cookies were in honor of that morning's announcement that the show had been nominated for four prime-time Emmys. This was hardly a surprise—the Report had also been nominated for four Emmys a year earlier, even though it was on the air for only two and a half months in 2005. It came home empty-handed that year, losing out twice to Stewart and The Daily Show. (On his show, Colbert frequently references a supposed rivalry between himself and Stewart. Last May, he played a tape of what he said was a phone call he made to the disgraced Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano in which Colbert said, "Stewart thinks he's so high and mighty. He doesn't have to say 'hi' to me in the halls? You take him down a peg! Permanently! Do you catch my drift?") More demeaning—to Colbert's character, anyway—was that he lost out to Barry Manilow for best individual performance in a variety or music program.

This year he's up against Tony Bennett in that same category. Colbert took a sip of champagne before raising his glass. "And the winner is … Tony Bennett!" The show's staff, all of whom seem to truly both like and admire Colbert, let out a combination giggle-groan. "Who's going to give it to me over Tony Bennett? Nobody. Are you kidding? It's Tony Bennett." By this point, Colbert had taken a seat behind his desk in preparation for a quick rehearsal of that night's show. After he got comfortable, he brought his champagne up to his nose. "Yummmm … that smells like Tony Bennett's aged sack." More groans. "Come on! That wouldn't be so bad, if your aged sack smelled like champagne." (Don't be surprised if Bennett ends up as a guest on the show: after countless gibes, Manilow came on the Report and agreed to share his Emmy, which he admitted he "stole" from Colbert. Then the two men sang a duet of "I Write the Songs.")

As soon as the run-through ended, Colbert and his writers disappeared into a claustrophobic, windowless room with blood-red walls to make a series of final, frenzied changes to that night's script—a night, incidentally, that would conclude an unusually difficult week. A slip onstage a little while back had resulted in a broken wrist Colbert hadn't yet had set. His 12-year-old daughter, Madeline, had been in and out of the hospital with a crippling ear infection, and Colbert hadn't gotten a full night's sleep in days. (Colbert himself is deaf in his right ear due to a childhood tumor.) And he still hadn't fully recovered from the round-the-clock heave required to get I Am America (And So Can You!) to the printer on time for its October publication date; the book, Colbert's first, lays out his character's thoughts—er, feelings—about life. (Sample chapter titles: "Hollywood: Lights! Camera! Treason!" and "Sports: When It's Okay to Shower with Men.")

Despite all this, Colbert seemed happy, even excited. "I love being onstage," he said. "I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising." Colbert also loves the freedom his television persona gives this down-to-earth, all-around decent guy to indulge his most narcissistic fantasies. "I get to piggyback my own ego on the character's unlimited ego," he says. This theme of porous but distinct personas is one Colbert returns to often. That night, when an audience member asked him about the differences between him and "Stephen Colbert" during a pre-taping Q&A, he replied, "I wouldn't want to be that asshole. He's got a tremendous ego. I get to pretend I don't."

Colbert's infectious enthusiasm is felt by everyone who comes in contact with the show. "That was the most fun I've ever had on television," says Holbrooke. "There's this great sense of groundbreaking adventure, this feeling that it's on the cutting edge, that it's the hottest thing in America. And at the center of it all is Colbert himself. I have never seen a television performer about to go on live television who's enjoying himself so much."

Colbert has not always been so content. By his own admission and according to those who know him best, it wasn't until he was in his 20s that he began to develop a sense of who he really wanted to be; before that, he had gone through periods of being everything from a science-fiction geek to a tortured (and bearded) poet. And now? Stephen Colbert is your basic well-grounded, Sunday-school-teaching, authority-distrusting, intensely loyal, 43-year-old man who's happiest when he's either spending time with his wife, Evelyn, and their three children, or playing an obnoxious, over-the-top alter ego that makes fun of the world and has the world join in the game.

I watched [the movie All That Jazz] and I thought, Well, I'd like to do that. I'd like to live that dark life. That kind of appeals to me. I liked how damaged they were and how they used that to … create art, create something beautiful.… There was something viscerally attractive to me about living this sort of life that might kill you young. I liked these unhappy people.… There's [also] lots of drinking and fucking. And that was appealing.

At around six in the morning on September 11, 1974, Dr. James Colbert, the vice president of academic affairs for the Medical University of South Carolina, and two of his sons left the family's house on James Island and headed to the Charleston International Airport. Paul, 18, and Peter, 15, were the second- and third-youngest of the 11 Colbert children, and Dr. Colbert was taking them to New Milford, Connecticut, where they were to enroll at the Canterbury School, a prestigious Catholic institution founded in 1915. Once they were gone, only the Colberts' youngest son, 10-year-old Stephen, would remain at home with his parents, both of whom were in their early 50s.

The three Colberts were booked on Eastern Airlines Flight 212, which departed at seven a.m. for the 35-minute trip to Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a slightly overcast morning, but the flight started out smoothly enough. Just after 7:30, the plane began its descent. As they prepared for their landing, the plane's pilots, Captain Jim Reeves and First Officer James Daniels, were wrapping up a rambling and wide-ranging conversation.

"One thing that kills me so damn much is all this shit that's goin' on now," Daniels said, according to William Stockton's 1977 book, Final Approach. (Stockton's transcripts are drawn from the flight's cockpit voice recorder.) "We need to be takin' definite steps to save the economy of this damn country. I think the A-rabs are takin' over every damn thing." The fog in Charlotte was obscuring the ground, and instead of relying on visual cues, the pilots were now conducting an instrument approach.

Less than three and a half miles from the runway, the DC-9 crashed into the earth. The impact and resulting fire destroyed the plane and killed 71 of the 82 passengers onboard, including the three Colberts. The National Transportation Safety Board report on the accident blamed the disaster on the pilots' discussion of "non operational subjects." (In 1981, partly in response to the crash of EA 212, the Federal Aviation Administration instituted the Sterile Cockpit Rule, which forbids all "non-essential activities" below 10,000 feet.)

In 1974, Charleston's population was fewer than 70,000. "It was really wrenching for the entire community," says Benjamin Hutto, the choral director at Charleston's Porter-Gaud school from 1969 to 1985. "But it was worse for the Colbert family than anyone else." After Peter and Paul died, Stephen Colbert's closest sibling was nine years his senior. Until he left for college, eight years later, Stephen, who'd spent the first years of his life in a household overflowing with brothers and sisters, lived alone with his mother.

Colbert isn't a big fan of discussing his personal life with the media. He's compared the press to a "lamprey that latches onto a subject and just sucks and sucks and sucks until your brain and your soul is as dry as a crouton." That's one of the reasons he does many of his interviews in character. "I like preserving the mask," he says. "Stepping out from behind it doesn't do me any good." But he also recognizes that he is expected, as an increasingly well-known public figure, to let the world know at least a little bit about his private life, and he's spoken about how the deaths of his father and brothers forever altered the direction of his adolescence. After being stricken with a "blazing headache" following their funerals, Colbert picked up a science-fiction novel to distract himself from the pain. He soon was tearing through a book a day. He detached from his peers and more or less ignored school.

He also struggled with his identity. He toyed with changing the pronunciation of his last name from Col-bert to Col-bear. (Several years earlier, after realizing that popular culture employed thick southern accents as a kind of shorthand for stupidity, he had decided to get rid of his.) He threw himself into the alternative realities of role-playing games, becoming an aficionado of the science-fiction-based Metamorphosis Alpha and fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

By Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen | NYTimes.com | Oct. 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.

“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”

“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”

“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.

“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”

Conservatives Consider 3rd-Party Run

By Rachel Zoll, Associated Press | Oct. 1, 2007

Some of the nation's most politically influential conservative Christians, alarmed by the prospect of a Republican presidential nominee who supports abortion rights, are considering backing a third-party candidate.

More than 40 Christian conservatives attended a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City to discuss the possibility, and planned more gatherings on how they should move forward, according to Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail expert and longtime conservative activist.

Rudy Giuliani, who supports abortion rights and gay rights, leads in national polls of the Republican presidential candidates. Campaigning in New Jersey on Monday, Giuliani brushed aside talk of an upstart effort by religious conservatives.

"I'm working on one party right now — the Republican Party," Giuliani said. "I believe we are reaching out very, very well to Republicans. The emphasis is on fiscal conservatism, which brings Republicans together."

Other participants in the meeting included James Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family evangelical ministry in Colorado Springs, Colo., and, according to Viguerie, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a conservative policy group in Washington.

Dobson attended the meeting, but is not yet participating in any planning for a third party, said Gary Schneeberger, a spokesman for Focus on the Family Action. Dobson and others spoke out against the idea at the meeting, even though both major parties could nominate candidates who back abortion rights and other policies that conservative Christians oppose, Schneeberger said.

A spokesman for Perkins did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Viguerie would not give specifics of the proposal or reveal additional names of participants, but said President Bush "would not have been elected in '04 without the people in that room."

"There is such jaundiced feelings about any promises or commitments from any Republican leaders," he said in a phone interview. "You could almost cut the anger and the frustration with a knife in that room it's so strong. Because they don't know what else to do, they're talking third party."

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

The participants were in Salt Lake City for a separate meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, a group of conservative business, religious and political leaders that was co-founded years ago by Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" series of books. Vice President Dick Cheney flew into the city Friday to address the group, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

Christian conservatives, who hold considerable sway in the Republican Party, have been deeply unhappy about the field of GOP presidential candidates.

Dobson has said he wouldn't support Giuliani, calling the former New York mayor an "unapologetic supporter of abortion on demand." Dobson has also rejected former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson as wrong on social issues, and wouldn't back John McCain because of the Arizona senator's opposition to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Viguerie said conservatives "are still open" to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but said, "we haven't seen anything that guarantees that he will hold to the positions that he's articulating." Romney has been questioned about his record on gay rights.

However, the proposal to consider a third-party candidate comes from anger that the Republicans whom Christians have helped elect for decades have failed to act on policy issues important to evangelicals on abortion, marriage and school prayer.

"Conservatives have been treated like a mistress as long as any of us can remember," Viguerie said. "They'll have lots of private meetings with us, tell us how much they appreciate it and how much they value us, but if you see me on the street please don't speak with me."

A third-party run would be a long shot, requiring millions of dollars and challenges to ballot access. Such a bid could prove disastrous for the GOP by splitting the vote.

Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, was not at the meeting. But he said no one floating the idea of a third party thinks there's much chance the candidate would win. He considers the proposal a reaction to "moguls of the Republican establishment" who think conservative Christians will support the GOP no matter what.

"A lot of them won't hold their nose and do it," Land said.

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Associated Press Writer Angela Delli Santi in Dennis Township, N.J., contributed to this report