DICK MORRIS and his wife, Eileen, arrived in Chicago last weekend to share in the triumphant "coronation" of Bill Clinton as the man virtually certain to be re elected US President next November.
Morris was getting ready to take some glory himself. He was going to be the subject of the main story in the next issue of Time as the man mainly responsible for the recovery of Clinton from his desperate position following the 1994 rout of the Democrats. He would be shown on the cover at the ear of the President.
As the giant United Center basketball stadium, doubling as convention hall, resounded on Thursday night to the acclaim of thousands of Democrats for the President's acceptance speech, Morris would be in a VIP box basking in the knowledge that he was the architect of much of this apotheosis and would be feted at the round of convention parties.
Fate ordained otherwise. Earlier that day, Morris and his wife were smuggled from their luxury suite in the Sheraton Hotel to the airport on the first leg of a journey marking his disgrace. During the night as the revelations of his year long relationship with a Washington prostitute were breaking in a New York newspaper and President Clinton slept, Morris argued with his top advisers, that he could fight it out and survive.
But nothing was going to be allowed spoil Clinton's big night. Morris, at 48, was finished as the President's closest political consultant. Sherry Rowlands, the 37 year old "blonde leggy" call girl from Virginia had shopped him.
The lurid details of the relationship with compromising pictures and tapes were going to be published in Star magazine this week but the Ned York Post, part of the Rupert Murdoch empire, had got an advance and was splashing the story under the headline "Bill's Bad Boy".
It was the Star which almost destroyed Clinton in his first run for the presidency in 1992 when it broke the story of his 12 year affair with Gennifer Flowers. Now the "supermarket tabloid" was threatening to destroy the man to whom Clinton had repeatedly turned to for advice.
The magazine claims that Ms Rowlands met Morris weekly at the Jefferson Hotel, near the White House when he came to Washington to work with the President. He reportedly bragged to her about how politically powerful he was and allowed her to listen in once while he telephoned the President.
According to the Star, he let her read the First Lady's speech to the Democratic convention five days before she delivered it and also a draft of the speech for Vice President Al Gore.
Morris also told Ms Rowlands that his nickname for the President was "The Monster" because of his tantrums. For Hillary Clinton it was "The Twister" because of her knack of stirring up trouble.
In a statement on Thursday, Morris did not deny the allegations but said he was resigning so as not to subject his wife and family to "the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism".
In mid July, Ms Rowlands had approached the Star offering to sell details of her relationship with Morris and showed the magazine a diary of their encounters. From that time Morris was doomed. An obsession with politics which began 36 years earlier would eventually bring him to disgrace just when he had reached his position of greatest influence.
The son of a real estate lawyer, Morris grew up in Manhattan. At the elite Styvesant High School, Morris was a champion debater. After graduating from Columbia University, he worked on Senator Eugene McCarthy's New Hampshire primary campaign challenging President Lyndon Johnson.
He then got involved in New York Democratic politics and clashed with another Democrat, Harold Ickes, as they both campaigned, in the districts of the West Side. Ickes, son of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, was to become President Clinton's deputy chief of staff and an ideological rival of Morris after he became a presidential political consultant.
Ickes is said to have been querying Morris's fees and expenses at the Jefferson Hotel but the more serious clashes were over the Morris strategy to pull Clinton into the centre away from the traditional liberal stances which are dear to traditional Democrats like Ickes.
At first Clinton concealed from the White House staff that he was turning to Morris for unofficial advice and the President used to refer to a mysterious "Charlie" as the source before he was taken on the election campaign payroll.
Morris was often supported by Vice President Gore and Mrs Clinton in his policy clashes with other White House aides. There were reports that Morris was telling Republicans that President Clinton would eventually be brought down by corruption and not be political errors.
Morris, for his part, is said to have sent President Clinton secret memos critical of other aides who were jealous of the access he had to the President.
Morris's departure will be felt by the President who so far has refuse to make any criticism of him, calling him a "super political strategist" to whom he would always be grateful.
Morris, in his statement, boasted of helping the President make a "comeback from being buried in a landslide". Politics would remain for him what it was for Robert Kennedy, "a political adventure".
The New York Times criticises him for "the gall" of linking himself to the tradition of Robert Kennedy and says that no one will ever accuse Morris of being "a class act".
That seems pretty certain thanks to Ms Rowlands.