Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane from Iraq and an impish grin on his face, sauntered unannounced into his wife's hospital room in Georgia just hours after she had given birth to their second son.

For two joyous weeks in May, Sergeant Jones cooed over their baby and showered attention on his wife. But he also took care of unfinished business, selling his pickup truck to retire a loan, paying off bills, calling on family and friends.

"I want to live this week like it is my last," he told his wife.

Three weeks later, on June 14, Sergeant Jones was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on his third tour in a war that is not yet three years old. He was 25.

"It was like he knew he wouldn't come back," said his grandmother, Ima Lee Jones, who buried Sergeant Jones beside towering oaks near her home in Sumter, S.C. "He told me, 'Grandma, the chances of going over a third time and coming back alive are almost nil. I've known too many who have died.' "

Sergeant Jones's tale may be unusual in its heartbreaking juxtaposition of birth and death, but it has become increasingly common among the war dead in one important way: one in five of the troops who have been killed were in their second, third, fourth or fifth tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of those service members returned voluntarily to war because they burned with conviction in the rightness of the mission. Others were driven by powerful loyalty to units and friends. For some it was simply their job.

But as the nation pays grim tribute today to the 2,000 service members killed in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, their collective stories describe the painful stresses and recurring strains that an extended conflict, with all its demands for multiple tours, is placing on families, towns and the military itself as they struggle to console the living while burying the dead.

"Two tours is more than you should ask anyone to do," said Randall Shafer, 51, an oil industry consultant from Houston whose son, Lance Cpl. Eric Shafer of the Marines, just finished his second tour in Iraq. "They know they could die anywhere at any time. That will take a toll on anybody. And it takes a toll on their families."

The milestone of 2,000 dead was marked yesterday by a moment of silence in the Senate, and President Bush said that "the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission." But the nation seems as divided over the war as it did in September 2004, when the 1,000th death occurred in the midst of a heated presidential campaign.

The differences between the first 1,000 and the second 1,000 dead illuminate recent trends regarding who is serving in Iraq, who is dying and how the war is progressing.

Most strikingly, death has come quicker, a sign of the insurgency's increasing efficiency. While it took 18 months to reach 1,000 dead, it has taken just 14 to reach 2,000. More powerful and sophisticated explosive devices are a major reason, causing nearly half of the deaths in the second group.

Whites, who represent the vast majority of combat troops, accounted for a larger share of the dead among the most recent 1,000, about three out of four. Blacks and Hispanics died at a somewhat slower rate over the last year.

More than 420 service members, the majority of them marines and soldiers, have died while on repeat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. That number is expected to climb steadily as the Pentagon continues to rotate its main front-line combat battalions into Iraq.

The Marine Corps suffered a particularly heavy toll, accounting for a third of the second 1,000 deaths, though marines represent less than 20 percent of the American force in Iraq. Marines have been stationed in some of Iraq's most violent precincts and assigned to lead dangerous anti-insurgent sweeps in restive Sunni areas like Falluja.

The nation's part-time warriors in the National Guard and the Reserve also shouldered a larger burden, accounting for about 30 percent of the deaths, an increase of more than 10 percentage points. The heavier toll came as Guard and Reserve forces were called to combat in larger numbers than at any other time since Vietnam, a role the Pentagon plans to scale back in the coming year.

Every state in the country was represented on the roster of the dead, as were Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, Guam, Micronesia, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa. California and Texas had the most deaths, as they did for the first 1,000, followed by New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At least 17 of the last 1,000 dead were women.

For Iraqis, too, the death toll seems to have accelerated. Estimates for Iraqis are not precise and are subject to much controversy. But according to figures compiled by the allied military forces in Iraq and analyzed by Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a nonprofit research group, Iraqis have suffered on average more than 50 casualties a day in 2005, including wounded and dead, compared with fewer than 40 a day in 2004.

Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit organization, estimates that 26,000 to 30,000 Iraqi civilians including police officers have died in the entire conflict, though it does not have a figure for military personnel.

Multiple deployments have clearly embittered some American families, driving them to push their children and spouses to quit the military. But others say the willingness, sometimes sheer determination, of loved ones to return to battle has made them see a deeper value in the mission, no matter how deadly or open-ended it may seem.

"I thought initially that we should never have gone to war," said Karen Strain, 51, of North Hero, Vt., whose son, Cpl. Adam J. Strain of the Marines, was killed by a sniper in August.

"But now I feel we have to finish the job," Ms. Strain said, pausing to fight back tears. "Adam gave me more insight for how sad it is for those people, and how we can help give them their freedom. Adam changed my views."

Multiple Tours

With Each One, Death Seems to Loom Larger

It was the tour that was not supposed to happen.

Last year, Sergeant Jones signed a contract with the Army certifying that he would be sent to Kentucky to be trained as a scout and then deployed to Germany. He had already served two tours driving heavy equipment into Iraq from Kuwait, and his wife was pregnant with their second child.

But his unit, the 104th transportation company of the Third Infantry Division, was short of soldiers, and at the last minute the Army changed his orders, dispatching him to Iraq. He dutifully deployed in February, while complaining bitterly about the Army's broken promises and voicing deep concerns about poor equipment.

"He was angry, angrier than I've ever heard," said Ima Lee Jones, his grandmother. "He said, 'I don't mind going. But what the insurgents haven't blown up or burned, we can't get parts to fix. The trucks can't drive more than 40 miles per hour. It's like having a bull's-eye on the door.' "

Sergeant Jones was driving one of those trucks when it was shattered by a roadside bomb on June 14, killing him.

Like Sergeant Jones, more than 300,000 American troops have served more than one tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them in Iraq. But just how those troops and their families are coping with repeat tours is the subject of much study and debate, as repeated deployments to a war zone are a relatively new phenomenon.

In World War II, many service members deployed for the entire war. In Vietnam, conscripts typically served single 12-month tours, rotating through units that remained at war. It was only after 1973, with the all-volunteer military, that the Pentagon began rotating entire units overseas, theorizing that battalions that trained and deployed together would be more cohesive.

Iraq and Afghanistan are the first conflicts since 1973 to demand large continuous rotations of troops.

In dozens of interviews, parents and spouses described the seven-month Marine or 12-month Army deployments to Iraq as periods of unremitting tension.

Roberto Rivera of Chicago, the father of a recently returned marine, said he jogged every day to relieve stress, losing 40 pounds over a seven-month tour. Thomas Southwick of San Diego said he stopped watching the news during his marine son's third tour of duty, which ended in September.

"You're just a constant nervous wreck," Mr. Southwick said, "waiting for a knock on the door."

Many parents said they found second and third deployments more gut-wrenching than first ones, partly because they had learned from their children about the gruesome realities of war, and partly because death seemed to loom larger with each tour.

"How many times can you go out there and be so lucky?" Diana Olson of Elk Grove Village, Ill., said she told her 21-year-old son, Cpl. John T. Olson of the Marines, after his second tour. But he re-enlisted in 2004, only to be killed when a bomb caused his truck to tip over last February on his third tour.

So far, the emotional turmoil of repeated deployments has not taken a toll on re-enlistment rates for the Army or the Marine Corps, which provide most of the American forces in Iraq. Both exceeded their re-enlistment goals this year, aided by signing bonuses of $20,000 and more. But many experts said that could change if the war dragged on and troops were asked to serve more tours in combat.

"Multiple tours have long been a problem for families," said Morten G. Ender, a sociologist at the United States Military Academy at West Point. "And these are dangerous, high-stress tours."

Like many other soldiers, Sergeant Jones was fatalistic about his third tour, telling his wife, Kelly, that he had "a bad feeling" about returning to Iraq. While there, he wrote letters and journal entries musing on death. His wife found one among his belongings after his death.

"Grieve little and move on," he counseled her. "I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves."

Mrs. Jones, 26, said she struggled at first to contain her anger that her husband was sent to Iraq instead of Germany. But she has consoled herself with the conviction that he died for a cause he supported. And she firmly rejects the antiwar protests of Cindy Sheehan, saying they dishonor the fallen.

"I hope she doesn't have my husband's name on a cross," Mrs. Jones said. "My husband, if he had a choice, that's how he would want to die. As a soldier."

Race

As Opposition Rises, Black Enlistment Falls

Sandra Williams-Smith never supported the invasion of Iraq, even though she is married to a former Air Force sergeant and has worked on military bases as a nurse. But Mrs. Williams-Smith kept her views mostly to herself, particularly after her oldest son, Jeffrey A. Williams, joined the Army out of high school in 2003. He saw the military as a steppingstone to becoming a doctor, and she encouraged his ambition.

But on Sept. 5, Specialist Williams, a 20-year-old medic, was killed by a roadside bomb in Tal Afar, Iraq. Mrs. Williams-Smith, 42, is silent no more. Though her oldest living son is in the Navy, and her youngest son wants to join the Marines, she openly rages against the war and President Bush.

"It's time to bring these boys home," said Mrs. Williams-Smith, of Mansfield, Tex. "My feelings for Bush are harsh. He should have taken care of the needs of his own people before going across the ocean to take care of someone else's."

The anger Mrs. Williams-Smith, who is black, feels toward the war is shared by many other African-Americans, according to polls, military officials and experts. And that opposition is beginning to have a profound effect on who is joining the military - and potentially who is dying in Iraq, many experts say.

For most of the last three decades, blacks joined the military in disproportionately high numbers, either because they saw it as an equal-opportunity employer or were attracted by its training programs and college benefits. The Army in particular came to rely heavily on blacks to fill its ranks: in the 1980's, about 30 percent of active-duty soldiers were black, Pentagon statistics show.

But black enlistment has fallen off, particularly in the Army, and the war in Iraq is hastening that decline, military officials and experts say. Lower black enlistment means that the military looks more like the United States in terms of racial balance than it did a decade ago, when it was disproportionately black.

This year, about 14 percent of new Army recruits were black, down from nearly 23 percent in 2001. Army officials say improved job opportunities in other fields is one reason. But a study commissioned by the Army last year also concluded that more young blacks were rejecting military service because they opposed the war, or feared dying in it.

"More African-Americans identify having to fight for a cause they don't support as a barrier to military service," the study concluded.

Not all blacks feel that way. Specialist Toccara R. Green joined the junior R.O.T.C. as an ebullient freshman at a Baltimore high school and became enraptured with the discipline and camaraderie of military life. Even after Specialist Green, 23, was killed by a roadside bomb in August, her parents continued to see the Army as a proud and honorable career.

"Toccara hated Iraq, but she loved the military," her mother, Yvonne, said. "It was in her blood."

Polls indicate that support for the war has dropped among whites as well. But the disparity between blacks and whites is immense: while 45 percent of whites said the invasion was a mistake, 77 percent of blacks felt that way, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month.

As black enlistment has declined, whites have come to represent a larger share of the Army's lowest enlisted ranks, and a larger part of the dead: 78 percent for the second 1,000, up from 70 percent in the first 1,000. The death rate for Hispanics and blacks declined in the second group.

Some experts say the increase in white deaths cannot be attributed solely to lower black recruitment, asserting that more study is needed before any conclusions are drawn. But there is broad agreement among military experts that if black enlistment continues to fall, it could create long-term manpower problems for the Army.

In many ways, Patricia Roberts is hoping that will be the case.

Ms. Roberts's son, Specialist Jamaal R. Addison, was part of the invasion of 2003 when his convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces near Nasiriya. The attack became famous because six soldiers, including Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch, were captured. But nine others from the unit died during and after the ambush, including Specialist Addison, who was 22.

After his death, Ms. Roberts, 45, said she lost her job as a customer service representative because she frequently broke down in tears. After much prayer, she resolved to devote her life to offering alternatives to military service to young blacks.

Since then, she has formed a nonprofit foundation named after her son and begun raising money for mentoring, motivational and scholarship programs. Ms. Roberts, who lives near Atlanta, says she will not discourage anyone from joining the military for patriotic reasons. But too many blacks, including her son, have joined solely for the paycheck or college tuition, she asserts.

"If they are saying, 'There's nothing out there, I'm going to end up selling drugs, I can't get a job,' that's when I want to talk to them," she said. "To show them that there are other ways."

Sgt. Jonathan B. Shields, 25, might have been one of those people. The eldest of four children raised by a divorced mother, he saw the military as a way out of his low-income, high-crime section of Atlanta. After marrying a woman with three children in 2003, he also began to see it as a career, re-enlisting while in Iraq last year.

He died in Falluja last November after an American tank ran into him.

His mother, Evelyn Allen, 48, of Decatur, Ga., said she had been unable to work since Sergeant Shields's death. Ms. Allen has sought to relieve her grief by participating in antiwar rallies. But she fears that her protests will not shorten the war. So she is focusing on a more attainable goal: preventing her three living children from joining the military.

"They would not even think about it," Ms. Allen said. "Our loss is just too drastic."

Marines

A Love for the Corps, but Weary of the War

From the time he was a child in California playing with G.I. Joe's, to the day he watched the World Trade Center collapse as a high school freshman, Adam Strain knew he wanted to join the Marine Corps.

Horrified that he was so determined to go to war, his parents pushed him to think about college, acting or even modeling. He was tall, athletic and handsome, and the Gap put him in print ads during his junior year of high school in California. By his senior year, an agent thought he could land a part in a hit television show, "Dawson's Creek."

But he was also idealistic, and when a Marine Corps recruiter described the suffering of Iraqi children, he signed up just before graduating from high school in 2003.

"He said, 'I can always do the modeling and acting when I come back,' " said his mother, who now lives in Vermont. " 'This is what I'm needed for now.' "

When Ms. Strain asked why he did not join the Navy to avoid combat, he replied, "I want to be on the front line."

Lance Corporal Strain was killed by a sniper in Ramadi on Aug. 3. He was two weeks short of his 21st birthday, six weeks short of coming home from his second tour of duty.

His unit, the First Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment, or the 1/5, is one of the most battered units in the service that has proportionately taken the heaviest death toll in the war. In three deployments to Iraq, including the invasion, the battalion has suffered about 20 deaths, all but six of those in its most recent tour, which ended in September.

One of the first units to enter Iraq during the invasion, the battalion returned when the insurgency gained momentum in 2004. That April, the 1/5 assisted in the assault on Falluja that left more than 50 Americans dead. It returned early this year to patrol the streets of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, where nearly 700 American troops have been killed, the most of any Iraqi province.

Despite the repeated deployments and heavy casualties, Marine Corps officers say that morale in the 1/5 remains high and that its re-enlistment rate remains strong.

But at a homecoming celebration for 260 members of the 1/5 at Camp Pendleton in late September, many parents who said they loved the Marine Corps also expressed deep weariness with the war, and said they hoped their children had had enough, too.

Bob Krieger, 53, a corporate pilot from near Grand Rapids, Mich., said that during two tours in Iraq, his son had seen a friend shot dead, retrieved the bodies of fellow marines blown to pieces by roadside bombs and endured close calls of his own, including having a rocket-propelled grenade shot through his pant leg.

Now, Mr. Krieger, who initially supported the invasion, says it is time to bring the troops home. "It just feels like there is no light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

His son, Cpl. Jeff Krieger, 23, agreed, saying he planned to leave the Marines next year. "Even $20,000 isn't enough to make me go back," Corporal Krieger said.

Another member of the 1/5, Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, rejected a $24,000 bonus to re-enlist. Corporal Starr believed strongly in the war, his father said, but was tired of the harsh life and nearness of death in Iraq. So he enrolled at Everett Community College near his parents' home in Snohomish, Wash., planning to study psychology after his enlistment ended in August.

But he died in a firefight in Ramadi on April 30 during his third tour in Iraq. He was 22.

Sifting through Corporal Starr's laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine's girlfriend. "I kind of predicted this," Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. "A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances."

His father, Brian Starr, had been preparing a basement apartment in his home for Corporal Starr to live in after leaving the Marines. Now Mr. Starr plans to turn it into a memorial of sorts, to display Corporal Starr's war ribbons and the neatly folded flag that once draped his coffin. Perhaps he will also install a pool table there to remind people of his son's fun-loving side.

Mr. Starr, an accountant, said he remained convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. But he said he would also like firsthand confirmation that the war, and Corporal Starr's death, were not in vain.

"I'm hoping, my wife is hoping, that we can visit Ramadi," he said, fighting back tears. "And feel safe. And feel like Jeff died for something."

WASHINGTON — There are still lots of real secrets in Washington. But the most secretive White House in modern history has learned the hard way - even while its spokesman reflexively utter the caution, "We don't talk about intelligence," or, "Sorry, that's classified" - that it must reveal a pretty steady stream of secrets all the time.

That is one reason journalists and some government officials are so wary of what might happen next in the C.I.A. leak case, which could conclude with indictments within a week. What began as a narrow case on a specific leak, many fear, has morphed into a broader threat to the way business is done here, a system that often benefits both sides.

The investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a then covert C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, might end with a broadly defined charge that boils down to divulging secret information, a category that covers not only real secrets, but the daily give and take between officials and journalists.

Reporters worry about a chilling effect, one that would make it even harder to explain what the government is doing. Some government officials say they fear the impact because they know that it is often difficult these days to try to justify a national security decision, or warn of an impending threat, or even complain about some kinds of budget cuts without slipping into classified territory.

In short, the law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp "classified" runs rampant.

Few question that the name of a covert C.I.A. officer qualifies as an important secret: Disclosure can get people killed. But that case is the exception, rather than the rule. In five years of covering national security issues at the Bush White House, I've seen classified information leaked or suddenly declared "declassified" for many reasons, most often to explain a new policy and sometimes to back up a presidential statement.

Just consider the past couple of weeks of White House reporting, which were pretty typical.

My colleague James Risen unearthed a story about a firefight between American and Syrian forces along the Iraq border. Together, we began to explore its larger meaning: An internal White House debate over whether President Bush should formally allow the war to spill over the Syrian border, so that insurgents massing there could be stopped before attacking American troops in Iraq.

The president's top foreign policy aides met to discuss this subject on Oct. 1, though officially the White House would not acknowledge that the meeting took place.

But once they understood we were writing the article anyway, they felt compelled to talk, so that they would not appear to be stumbling into an expansion of the war. It was almost impossible to discuss the policy without wandering into events that were never made public and the debate over whether the president should issue a classified "finding" allowing action in Syria.

Our more creative sources found a way to talk carefully, using coded phrases like "if such a meeting happened ..." or "if the President decided to. ..."

Much the same happens when I press officials to explain the administration's options for beginning a withdrawal in Iraq next year. This means cutting past the president's oft-repeated statement that "as the Iraqis stand up, we can stand down." Similarly, you cannot intelligently discuss the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, or China's missile buildup, without trafficking in facts marked classified.

So it is not uncommon for such facts to slip out, sometimes from officials seeking to wake up the administration or Congress to what they consider an under-appreciated threat. Plenty of strategic leaking goes on in the administration - especially if officials think they can conceal the sources of the information and make it public without putting someone's life in danger.

Misjudgments happen. As soon as news organizations around the world reported several years ago that the United States was listening to Osama bin Laden's satellite phone conversations, he stopped making the calls, intelligence officials say. But such a clear-cut case is usually the exception.

If there ever was a day in which classified material was kept in one well-locked drawer, completely separate from policy arguments and "open source material," it went out with the Pentagon Papers.

There are moments when what is classified in the morning becomes public record in the afternoon. Two weeks ago, President Bush gave a speech defending his record fighting terrorism, saying the United States and its allies had stopped 10 terror plots, including three in the United States. He described none of them, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, declined to provide details.

BUT by late afternoon - after heated conversations between reporters and the White House, and then the White House and intelligence agencies - the White House e-mailed reporters a list of plots. It was a mix of cases that were well known and a few never before made public. A senior official who talked about them that night joked that a few hours earlier he might have been jailed for discussing the subject.

"Now we've posted it on the White House Web site," he said.

He might have said the same of a letter, apparently written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior Qaeda leader, that was seized by American intelligence earlier this year. A few months ago, its existence was closely held. But the administration released it earlier this month to back up Mr. Bush's argument that Islamic extremists are seeking to create a caliphate from Spain to Indonesia.

The administration declassified all kinds of intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program so that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell could discuss it publicly in his famous Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations. Unfortunately for him, almost every example he cited turned out to be wrong.

Later in 2003, the White House resisted for weeks calls to declassify parts of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that formed the basis for Mr. Powell's arguments, and those of Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Those estimates were once considered the crown jewels of the intelligence world. Eventually, the White House was forced to relent after the drip, drip, drip of accusations that the president had cherry-picked intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion. Once it became public, the estimate became Exhibit A in what had gone wrong inside the American intelligence community.

The issue of secrecy won't go away. This week, a prosecutor may send a shot across Washington's bow: any indictment is bound to change the unspoken rules of authorized and unauthorized leaks, even if just for a while. But the week after, government officials will have to explain to allies, other nations and reporters why they are so worried that Iran may be building a bomb, and why they believe North Korea must permit inspections of every nook, cranny and cave in the country. And to do so, they may feel compelled to reach into their bag of secrets.

THE Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set forth the goal. Civil rights and union membership were to be intertwined. The labor movement, Dr. King wrote in 1958, "must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality."

That happened in the 1960's and 1970's. But then unions lost bargaining power and members. And while labor leaders called attention to the overall decline, few took notice that blacks were losing much more ground than whites.

In the last five years, that trend accelerated. Despite a growing economy, the number of African-Americans in unions has fallen by 14.4 percent since 2000, while white membership is down 5.4 percent.

For a while in the 1980's, one out of every four black workers was a union member; now it is closer to one in seven. This loss of better-paying jobs helps to explain why blacks are doing worse than any other group in the current recovery. Labor leaders have acknowledged the disproportionate damage to African-Americans, but they decline to make special efforts to organize blacks and offset the decrease, saying that all groups need help. That lack of priority angers one prominent black scholar.

"The future of black workers is very bleak indeed if they lose their place in the union movement," said William Julius Wilson, a professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard. "I would hope there would be an effort on the part of union leaders, white and black, to address this very important issue. They haven't done so as yet."

The decline was particularly sharp last year. Overall union membership fell by 304,000, and blacks accounted for 55 percent of that drop, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, even though whites outnumber blacks six to one in unions (12.4 million to 2.1 million). The trend seems likely to continue and perhaps accelerate as General Motors and its principal parts supplier, Delphi, cut costs in their struggle to be profitable.

"We have lost 20,000 members since the end of 2000 in Detroit and its suburbs alone," said Linda Ewing, director of research for the United Auto Workers, "and a large number of the workers in the auto and parts plants in this area are black."

Unions, like other institutions in the post-World War II economy, were slow to admit African-Americans to the club, and there is still resistance today in some of the higher-paying skilled trades. Yet blacks came to rely on unions even more than working class whites did to gain entry into the middle class, through jobs that gave them annual wage increases and company-paid health insurance and pensions. Even now, the percentage of black workers who are in unions is slightly greater than the percentage of unionized white workers: 15.1 versus 12.2. "Every survey shows that blacks are the group that most wants to be unionized," said Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist.

Immigration, retirement, automation, the shifting of work overseas, low seniority and privatization have all played a role in the lopsided decline of unionized jobs held by African-Americans. That decline is especially noticeable in manufacturing and the federal government, two strongholds of black employment that have gone through cutbacks in union workers in recent years.

The cutbacks are particularly severe in the auto industry. In addition to the latest problems at G.M., Ford Motor said Thursday that it would soon announce "significant plant closings."

The impact on blacks has gradually drawn the attention of labor leaders, including John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "The percentage of black workers who have been knocked out of union jobs is one of the little-known tragedies of the last five years," he said.

Despite this damage, the federation is not making a special effort to sign up more African-Americans in other industries, Mr. Sweeney said. "We are going to be organizing more blacks," he explained, "but we are also going to be organizing more Latinos and more women."

Mr. Sweeney's reluctance to single out blacks has its counterpart in the breakaway union movement, Change to Win, which promises more aggressive organizing. Rather than focus on any particular group of workers, said Edgar Romney, secretary-treasurer of the new coalition, "we are targeting industries and communities in our organizing effort."

Blue-collar workers earn high pay in manufacturing jobs, and the sharp decline in black union membership in that sector has helped to pull down the median weekly wage of all black workers, union and nonunion alike. Thus far this year, the median weekly wage earned by blacks fell by 5 percent, to $523, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Whites as a group are also experiencing a drop in their median weekly wage, but for them the decline this year is less than 1 percent, to $677, adjusted for inflation.

Some labor economists bridle at such comparisons. Robert Topel of the University of Chicago argues that for many years the wage gap between whites and blacks either shrank or remained stable, after adjusting for differences in education, experience and other factors. This occurred even as union power declined, he said.

"If you ask me for a list of things that would be more important in understanding racial disparities and economic success, unionism would not be high on the list," Mr. Topel said. "Education, development of skills and family environment all play much bigger roles than collective bargaining power."

The decline in black union membership is not simply the result of the erosion of employment in manufacturing. The Service Employees International Union, for example, represented for years large numbers of African-Americans employed in food service, janitorial work and nursing home care. Many were women. As they retired, Hispanics and Asians replaced them, in the jobs and as union members, said Patricia Ford, a former executive vice president of the S.E.I.U.

"You can see the change from what was traditionally African-American to Hispanic," Ms. Ford said. "That is the most striking."

Union membership among Hispanics, in fact, has risen gradually in this decade, to 1.7 million last year. That is partly a result of special efforts to organize Hispanics in service industries, Mr. Romney said.

On another front, privatization and outsourcing have eaten away at federal employment of black workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, which says that nearly 25 percent of its 211,000 members are black.

African-Americans make up an even higher percentage of the union's members at the operations that the Bush administration is turning over to private contractors. These include laundries at veterans' hospitals, ground maintenance and food service at government installations and security guards at numerous federal buildings - much of it work that paid only $15,000 to $20,000 a year, but that came with pensions and health insurance.

The union's leaders resist viewing what is happening in racial terms. "We see it as a class issue rather than a race issue," said Sharon Pinnock, the A.F.G.E.'s director for membership and organization. "It is impacting all workers, black and white."

Automation at the Postal Service, mainly in the form of sorting machines that require many fewer workers, has cut into the ranks of the National Association of Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union, both with high percentages of blacks among their members.

And then there is the tendency of many corporations to move operations to suburbs from downtown locations. In the process, unionized African-American workers are often replaced by nonunion workers, in many cases white.

The Communications Workers of America makes that complaint, citing customer service call center operations as one example. "They gradually move to the suburbs, eliminating African-American union members in the city," said George Kohl, the union's senior director of collective bargaining.

Mr. Sweeney said such stories anger him. "We have learned a lot from the civil rights movement; it is important that we highlight the most egregious offenses," he said. "But we have to focus on all the workers who are getting hurt."

For decades, Donald Trump, America's most effervescent rich guy, has made his wealth a matter of public discourse. But sometimes his riches are hard to find. This article was adapted from "TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald," by Timothy L. O'Brien, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Wednesday by Warner Books, looks inside Mr. Trump's wallet.

BY 1993, with his casinos in hock, most of his real estate holdings either forfeited or stagnant and his father slipping into the fog of Alzheimer's disease, Donald Trump, at the age of 47, had run out of money. There were no funds left to keep him aloft, and as the bare-bones operation he maintained in Manhattan started to grind to a halt, he ordered Nick Ribis, the Trump Organization's president, to call his siblings and ask for a handout from their trusts. Donald needed about $10 million for his living and office expenses, but he had no collateral to provide his brother and sisters, all three of whom wanted a guarantee that he would repay them.

The Trump children's anticipated share of their father's fortune amounted to about $35 million each, and Donald's siblings demanded that he sign a promissory note pledging future distributions from his trust fund against the $10 million he wanted to borrow.

Donald got his loan, but about a year later he was almost broke again. When he went to the trough the second time, he asked his siblings for $20 million more. His brother Robert Trump, who briefly oversaw Donald's casinos before fleeing the pressure of working for him to take over their father's real estate operation, balked. Desperate to scrape some money together, Donald tasked Alan Marcus, one of his advisers, to contact his brother-in-law John Barry and see if he could intervene with Robert and his other siblings.

"John and I spoke about it a few times," Mr. Marcus told me. "In fact, we spoke about it in the conference room in Trump Tower. John then went around and addressed it with the family."

Mr. Marcus said that Mr. Barry successfully lobbied other members of the Trump clan and that another handout was arranged, with Donald agreeing again that whatever he failed to pay back would be taken out of his share of their father's estate.

"We would have literally closed down," said another former member of the Trump Organization familiar with Donald's efforts to keep the company afloat. "The key would have been in the door and there would have been no more Donald Trump. The family saved him."

Donald disagreed with this version of events. "I had zero borrowings from the estate," he told me. "I give you my word." Donald's brother, Robert, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Mr. Barry is deceased. His widow, Maryanne Trump Barry, a federal judge, said that she could not recollect any efforts to offer her brother financial help. Donald's other sister, Elizabeth, was unavailable for comment.

But Mr. Marcus and two other executives who worked closely with Donald all said the family's financial lifeline gave the developer the support he needed to get through the rough waters separating his early years of overblown, overhyped acquisitions and the later years of small, sedate deals preceding his resurrection on "The Apprentice." Both of Donald's parents died during that time, he parried with Ivana Trump in a bitter divorce battle that hinged on properly valuing his dwindling assets, he remarried and divorced again, and then he did what anyone else in his situation would do when confronted with limited options: he ran for president of the United States.

Before Donald could get to Phase 2 of his career, he had to muscle his way through the dismantling of his business empire and a thorny financial restructuring with his bankers and bond holders that left him on the precipice of personal and corporate bankruptcy. As bankers who once fell over one another to throw money at him now lined up for their share of what was left over, Donald scrambled to hang on to whatever he could while maintaining his facade as America's most savvy entrepreneur. And in terms of maintaining his popular mojo, Donald proved remarkably resilient.

"When I was in trouble in the early 90's, I went around and - you know, a lot of people couldn't believe I did this because they think I have an ego - I went around and openly told people I was worth minus $900 million," Donald recalled. "And then I was able to make a deal with the banks."

To survive a process as tortuous and unpredictable as a debt workout, however, requires a large dose of gumption. Donald had gumption in spades.

"You're out there alone. I mean, it's not fun," he advised me. "I went from being a boy wonder, boy genius, to this [expletive] guy who has nothing but problems."

Although Donald's brush with bankruptcy separated him from some of his showiest assets and from the banks whose loans had first puffed him up, his penchant for claiming billionairedom remains. To this day, he closely monitors his ranking on Forbes magazine's annual list of America's wealthiest individuals, the Forbes 400, and his ability to float above the wreckage of his financial miscues and to magically add zeroes to his bank account has ensured that he remains an object of fascination. But how much is Donald Trump really worth?

IN September 1982, with Trump Tower a year away from completion, Forbes published the Forbes 400 for the first time. (In 1918, Forbes produced a list of America's 30 richest people, but that was a one-time event.) Chock-full of anecdotes about how the rich became rich and what they did with their richly deserved riches, the Forbes 400 was financial pornography of the most voyeuristic and delicious sort.

While there was a refreshing inclusiveness about the list (Mafia treasurer Meyer Lansky made the inaugural tally, for example), some on the roster held rank upon the loosest of foundations. For those whose wealth was based on a stake in a publicly traded company, calculating their Forbes worthiness was relatively straightforward: put a value on their stock. But for those with privately held money who weren't a Rockefeller, Mellon, du Pont or Kennedy, the process of ascertaining fortunes was trickier. Forbes relied on those people to willingly fork over an honest and somewhat exact self-appraisal of their wealth.

It also turned out that some big buckaroos, understandably averse to receiving an avalanche of phone calls from charities or scamsters that would follow such publicity, loathed being on the list. Nonetheless, the Forbes 400 drew scads of attention from the moment it was published. The list became capitalism's Rosetta stone, a decoding device for divining the American Way. Even prominent economists parsed it for social truths.

"At a trivial level, it is almost impossible not to be interested in Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 wealthiest individuals, minimum net worth $150 million, and 82 wealthiest families, minimum net worth $200 million," wrote Lester Thurow, an M.I.T. economist, in 1984. "Subconsciously, we read their biographies hoping to find the elixir that will add us to the list. While the elixir - a rich father - is to be found (all of the 82 families and 241 of the 400 wealthiest individuals inherited all or a major part of their fortunes), it doesn't help most of us to point this out to our fathers."

Professor Thurow added: "Great wealth is accumulated to acquire economic power. Wealth makes you an economic mover and shaker. Projects will happen, or not happen, depending upon your decisions. It allows you to influence the political process - elect yourself or others - and remold society in accordance with your views. It makes you an important person, courted by people inside and outside your family. Perhaps this explains why some people try to persuade Forbes that they are wealthy enough to merit inclusion."

This, then, was the dividing line: Those who were secure enough not to reveal their wealth abhorred the Forbes 400, or at least tried to avoid it; those who were less secure, needed to keep score and had their identities wrapped up in the concept of billionairedom turned the list into a white-collar fetish. For the latter group, to be off the Forbes 400 represented emotional and social exile.

Donald, paradoxically, was a loner who did not want to live in exile. He was obsessed with the Forbes list. And his propensity for inflation, matched with Forbes's aversion to hiring the sizable staff it might need to assess accurately the wealth of each of its designated 400, got Donald on the magazine's inaugural list in 1982. Forbes gave him an undefined share of a family fortune that the magazine estimated at $200 million - at a time when all Donald owned personally was a half-interest in the Grand Hyatt hotel and a share of the yet-to-be-completed Trump Tower.

Donald and the Forbes 400 were mutually reinforcing. The more Donald's verbal fortune rose, the more often he received prominent mentions in Forbes. The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald's claim to vast wealth became. The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 - which became the standard that others in the news media, and apparently some of the country's biggest banks, used when judging Donald's riches.

IN some years, Donald insisted on impossibly high figures for his net worth and then, in a faux fit of complaining, settled for an estimate that Forbes convinced itself was conservative - even though it was often wildly high anyway. The one gap in this mating dance was 1990 to 1995, when Donald didn't appear on the list at all. Forbes was apparently so chastened by the $2.6 billion difference in its estimate of Donald's wealth between 1989 and 1990 that the magazine needed a six-year hiatus before it had the confidence to begin helping him inflate his verbal fortune again.

Forbes's odes to Donald and his father, Fred Trump, went like this over the years:

1982 Wealth: Share of Fred's estimated $200 million fortune. Forbes explains: "Consummate self-promoter. Building Trump Tower next to Tiffany's. Angling for Atlantic City casino." Forbes quotes Donald: " 'Man is the most vicious of animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.' " While Forbes estimates that the family's fortune was over $200 million, it says that "Donald claims $500 million."

1983 Wealth: Share of Fred's estimated $400 million fortune. (Author note: Observe that although 1982 to 1983 was a particularly brutal recession year, the Trump family's real estate fortune doubles.)

1984 Wealth: Fred has $200 million; Donald has $400 million.

1985 Rank: 51; Wealth: $600 million. (Donald becomes a solo Forbes 400 act; Fred disappears from the list.)

1986 Rank: 50; $700 million.

1987 Rank: 63; $850 million.

1988 Rank: 44; $1 billion.

1989 Rank: 26; $1.7 billion. (Observe that Donald's wealth has grown by $1.1 billion during a four-year period when he was borrowing huge sums to buy money-losing properties.)

1990 Dropped from the list! Forbes explains: "In 1990 the rich have been getting poorer. Trump is the most noteworthy loser. Once a billionaire, Trump's net worth may actually have dropped to zero." (That makes things clearer. Was he ever a billionaire? Maybe his net worth just stayed the same? Maybe it always had been zero?)

1991 AWOL.

1992 AWOL.

1993 AWOL. (These are the times that try men's souls. Hang in there, Donald.)

1994 AWOL.

1995 AWOL.

1996 He's back. Rank: 373; $450 million. Forbes explains: "Trump, polite but unhappy, phoning from his plane: 'You're putting me on at $450 million? I've got that much in stock market assets alone. There's 100 percent of Trump Tower, 100 percent of the new Nike store - they're paying $10 million a year in rent!' Add it all up, said Trump, and his net worth is 'in the $2 billion range, probably over $2 billion.' " (Don't worry, Donald. One year from now Forbes will help you find another easy $1 billion.)

1997 Rank: 105; $1.4 billion. Forbes explains: "Net worth was negative $900 million in 1990, but the Donald now claims to have $500 million in cash alone. Disputes our estimate. 'The real number,' he insists, 'is $3.7 billion.' "

1998 Rank: 121; $1.5 billion. Forbes explains: "Unstoppable salesman, master of hyperbole. Net worth was negative $900 million in 1990, now claims our estimate is low by a factor of three: 'The number is closer to $5 billion.' "

1999 Rank: 145; $1.6 billion. Forbes explains: "We love Donald. He returns our calls. He usually pays for lunch. He even estimates his own net worth ($4.5 billion). But no matter how hard we try, we just can't prove it."

2000 Rank: 167; $1.7 billion. Forbes explains: "In the Donald's world, worth more than $5 billion. Back on earth, worth considerably less."

2001 Rank: 110; $1.8 billion.

2002 Rank: 92; $1.9 billion.

2003 Rank: 71; $2.5 billion.

2004 Rank: 189; $2.6 billion. Forbes explains: "America's love affair with the Donald reaching impossibly new highs; his reality show, 'The Apprentice,' was prime-time television's highest-rated series last year ... After nearly defaulting on its debt obligations, Trump's gaming properties to reorganize ... No matter. For Donald, real estate is where his real wealth lies. Over 18 million square feet of prime Manhattan space."

Forbes, if not entirely skeptical of Donald, had, of course, grown accustomed to his intense lobbying. "There are a couple of guys who call and say you're low on other guys," said Peter Newcomb, a veteran editor of Forbes's rich list, "but Trump is one of the most glaring examples of someone who constantly calls about himself and says we're not only low, but low by a multiple." Mr. Newcomb said that Forbes works hard to ensure the accuracy of its data but that it also relies on information provided by those whom it surveys.

The Forbes 400, of course, has always loomed large in Donald's imagination.

"When you think of it, I've been on that list for a long time. I think they work very hard at the list," he told me. "It seems to be that they're the barometer of individual wealth. It doesn't really matter. It matters much less to me today than it mattered in the past. In the past, it probably mattered more."

Donald's verbal billions were always a topic of conversation whenever we visited. In my first conversation with him, in 1996, he brought up his billions. When Donald and I spent time together one weekend in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this year, the subject inevitably came up. Donald had gamely and openly fielded a diverse range of questions all day, so I was curious to see where he would go when we got to money. When I popped the wealth question, he paused momentarily and scrunched his eyebrows. We had reached a crossroads. Out it came. He pursed his lips a little bit. Out it came. He blinked. Out it came, rising up from deep within him.

"I would say six [billion]. Five to six. Five to six," he said.

Hmm. The previous August he told me that his net worth was $4 billion to $5 billion. Then, later that same day that August, he said his casino holdings represented 2 percent of his wealth, which at the time gave him a net worth of about $1.7 billion. In the same day, Donald's own estimates of his wealth differed by as much as $3.3 billion. How could that happen? Was Donald living in his own private zone of wildly escalating daily inflation, a Trump Bolivia? And his $1.7 billion figure in August was well below the $2.6 billion that Forbes would credit him when it published its rich list just a couple of months later.

Now Donald was saying he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.

"Five to six. Five to six."

And on the nightstand in my bedroom at Donald's Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, was a glossy brochure that said he was worth $9.5 billion.

WHEN I sat down in a Trump Tower conference room one afternoon earlier this year with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, he claimed that Donald was worth about $6 billion. But the list of assets that Mr. Weisselberg quoted, all of which were valued in very inflated and optimistic terms and some of which Donald didn't own, totaled only about $5 billion. Where might the rest have been? "I'm going to go to my office and find that other billion," Mr. Weisselberg assured me.

Did he ever return? No, he never returned. His assessment of Donald's wealth is outlined in the accompanying chart.

But Mr. Weisselberg's analysis left me confused. So I asked around for guidance.

Three people with direct knowledge of Donald's finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. (Donald's casino holdings have recently rebounded in value, perhaps adding as much as $135 million to these estimates.) By anyone's standards, this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought that he was remotely close to being a billionaire.

Donald dismissed this as naysaying.

"You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I'm a great builder," he told me.

However illusory, it was Donald's fixation on billionaire bragging rights and real estate prowess - in addition to the financial lifeline his siblings tossed to him - that kept his mojo rising during his brush with financial extinction in the early to mid-1990's. But the Donald who emerged on the other side of his business meltdown was a financial shadow of his earlier, acquisitive, debt-laden self, and would remain so right up to the debut of "The Apprentice."

Financial turmoil, of course, didn't stop Donald from spouting. The all-time howler award for a publication taking his verbal billions at face value belonged to Playboy. In early 1990, just a month before the Taj Mahal opened in Atlantic City and began a financial slide that would take Donald's empire down with it, the magazine profiled the developer and said he had amassed "a fortune his father never dreamed possible," including "a cash hoard of $900 million" and a "geyser of $50 million a week from his hotel-casinos."

In the real world, New Jersey casino auditors estimated in public reports that as of September 1990, Donald was worth about $206 million - almost all of which was tied up in hotels, an airline, casinos and other properties that were devaluing rapidly or about to be taken away from him. Donald's cash on hand was only $17 million, and that was dissolving quickly as well.

Regulators projected Donald's 1991 income from trusts and rentals at $1.7 million, offset by $9.7 million in debt payments, $6 million in personal business expenses and $4.5 million to maintain his Trump Tower triplex and estates in Greenwich, Conn., and Palm Beach for the year - meaning that he would be about $18.5 million in the hole at the end of 1991. Regulators projected Donald's income for 1992 to sink to $748,000 and his 1993 income to drop even further, to $296,000 - with all of his debt payments and personal expenses continuing to pile up. At the end of 1993, his personal cash shortfall would amount to about $39 million and there would still be $900 million in personally guaranteed loans hanging over his head.

In the midst of all of this, Donald reached a property settlement with Ivana Trump after their divorce. According to a 1991 New Jersey regulatory report, the settlement called for Ms. Trump to get a $10 million payment, the couple's Greenwich estate, $350,000 in annual alimony, $300,000 in annual child support, a $4 million housing allowance, use of some Trump properties and a $350,000 salary for running the Plaza Hotel. Donald didn't have the $10 million to pay his ex-wife; he ended up using part of the $65 million that banks had loaned his business the prior year to pay her, according to regulators who said in their report that the payment to Ms. Trump "depleted most of Mr. Trump's personal cash."

Throughout early 1991 and into the summer, Donald helped his banks begin to dismantle his holdings so he could pay off $3.4 billion in business debt and release himself from the $900 million in personal arrears attached to that pile. Absent an overhaul, Donald would be wiped out.

The little ray of sunshine in all of this for Donald was that the real estate collapse sweeping the country in the early 1990's left banks with wads of bad loans in their coffers. They could choose to put their borrowers out of business and be left owning companies they didn't want to run, or force debtors into messy bankruptcy proceedings that would involve paying whopping legal fees and suffering through years of delays. Neither alternative appealed to the banks.

"That was sort of the bottom of the heap. Deep trouble. They could have really done a big number. There was a personal guarantee on the loan," Donald told me. "My father was a pro. My father knew, like I knew, you don't personally guarantee. So I wrote a book called 'The Art of the Deal,' which as you know is the biggest of all time. In the book, I say, 'Never personally guarantee.' "

But, Donald added, "I've told people I didn't follow my own advice."

Donald's enthusiasm for the Forbes 400 also waned during his flirtation with bankruptcy. In his sequel to "The Art of the Deal," a book called "Trump: Surviving at the Top," he offered a new take on his view of a rich list to which he no longer belonged.

"It always amazed me that people pay so much attention to Forbes magazine," wrote Donald, who always paid a lot of attention to Forbes magazine. "Every year the Forbes 400 comes out, and people talk about it as if it were a rigorously researched compilation of America's wealthiest people, instead of what it really is: a sloppy, highly arbitrary estimate of certain people's net worth."

DONALD managed to weather the slings and arrows of doubters during these lean years and hunkered down with his bankers and with his debts. As the negotiations progressed, Donald's bankers looked for every alternative they could find to bankruptcy, because none of the banks wanted to contend with the mess that would ensue if the talks collapsed. And the Trumpster kept singing a happy tune. "He was always upbeat," recalled Harvey Miller, a lawyer representing Citibank. "One thing I'll say about Donald, he was never depressed."

Unbeknownst to his creditors, Donald was just as worried about a bankruptcy as they were. He later told me that he wanted to avoid bankruptcy at all costs because he felt that it would permanently taint him as a failure or a quitter.

Sanford Morhouse, a lawyer representing Chase Manhattan bank in the Trump negotiations, said: "I did a lot of workouts in those days on behalf of Chase, with a lot of real estate developers who had similar problems, and big ones. Almost all of them, at one point or another in that era, filed for bankruptcy protection. And Donald, to his credit, did not."

Donald whittled down his mammoth personal debts by forfeiting most of what he owned. Chase Manhattan, which lent Donald the money he needed to buy the West Side yards, his biggest Manhattan parcel, forced a sale of the prized tract to Asian developers. Though Donald would claim after the yards were sold that he remained a principal owner of the site, property records did not list him as such.

According to former members of the Trump Organization, Donald did not retain any ownership of the site's real estate - the owners merely promised to give him about 30 percent of the profits once the site was completely developed or sold. Until that time, the owners kept Donald on to do what he did best: build. They gave him a modest construction fee and a management fee to oversee the development. They also allowed him to slap his name on the buildings that eventually rose on the yards because his well-known moniker allowed them to charge a premium for their condos.

Retained for his building expertise and his marquee value, Donald was a glorified landlord on the site; he no longer controlled it. (Earlier this year, the owners negotiated to sell the site without consulting Donald; terms of the prospective sale are in dispute.)

EVEN as the national real estate bubble was bursting, fresh funds began rushing onto Wall Street, fueling a historic run-up in both the stock market and initial public offerings of often barely viable companies. If you had a good story and a prominent name, it suddenly became quite easy to sell stock. And it turned out, against all odds, that investors were willing to gamble on Donald's name - even though they were getting a chief executive whose sense of his responsibilities as the steward of a publicly traded company and the guardian of other people's money was somewhat ill defined.

"Something gnawed at me, and I knew what it was - the whole head-of-a-public-company routine," Donald wrote in "Surviving," relating his previous experience as a manager of Resorts International. "Although I certainly agreed with the theory of stockholder-owned corporations and was absolutely committed to fulfilling my fiduciary duties, I personally didn't like answering to a board of directors."

In a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Donald managed to take two of the Trump casinos public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when he was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and to unload huge amounts of debt. The offering also yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts traded at $14 a share initially and, along with a fresh bond offering, the new company raised about $295 million.

Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn't entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren't his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations. Even so, Trump Hotels' shares rose to about $36 in 1996, giving Donald a stake worth about $290 million. With little real estate left to speak of in Manhattan, Donald's wealth was centered on his casinos.

But in subsequent years Trump Hotels' stock price tanked. Had Donald tried to pare down some $1.8 billion in debt smothering the casino company and spruced up the operation, he might have ridden a reignited gambling boom and grown his newly seeded fortune. Instead, Trump Hotels, which never earned a profit in any year between 1995 and 2005, became Donald's private stockpile of ready cash. In 1996 alone, Trump Hotels' shares fell to $12 from $35.50. About a decade later, the New York Stock Exchange delisted the shares entirely and any kid with a quarter could buy the stock. (Trump Hotels recently reorganized as Trump Entertainment Resorts; it now carries $1.2 billion in debt, and Donald's stake in the company is worth about $135 million.)

When I interviewed Donald in 1996, he was effusive about his casinos and somehow seemed to forget that he owned relatively little Manhattan property at the time.

"Donald Trump is in two businesses," he told me. "I have this huge company that's real estate. I also have this huge company that's gambling. So I have two huge companies."

Donald continued to carve out a niche for himself in New York real estate as the manager of other people's properties. In 1994, General Electric was looking for someone to refurbish the old Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and retained Donald. Presto, the renovated skyscraper was christened Trump International Hotel and Tower. Even though Donald didn't own the building, it later flashed across the opening credits of "The Apprentice" as if he did.

And Donald did scramble back to gain control of some other Manhattan buildings, including 40 Wall Street, which he spent about $35 million to buy and refurbish in 1996. The building has about $145 million in debt attached to it, and New York City tax assessors currently value the property at about $90 million. Donald values it at $400 million.

Donald's recent golf course ventures have produced some sterling new properties, but the values he assigns those deals appear to be hyper-inflated. Donald's Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County; he doesn't own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.

Forbes, in bestowing a $2.6 billion fortune on Donald in its 2004 rich list, credited him with owning 18 million square feet of Manhattan property, which certainly is an impossibility. On one occasion, Donald told me that the West Side yards, which he doesn't own, would have 10 million square feet of salable space when the site, now known as Riverside South, was completed. (Mr. Weisselberg told me, alternatively, that the site would have about five million square feet of salable space.) However measured, the yards were by far the biggest property in Donald's former Manhattan real estate portfolio - but he no longer owned the tract.

Between 2000 and 2004, Forbes allowed Donald's verbal billions to grow by $1 billion. The jump came during a period when the stock market bubble burst, Donald's stake in his casinos - one of his most valuable assets until "The Apprentice" came along - had fallen in value to $7 million and, despite Manhattan's red-hot real estate market, he owned much less real estate there than he let on.

Donald said his casinos' myriad problems - no profits, suffocating debt, disappearing cash - did not mean that he had failed in Atlantic City. Instead, he described his management of the casinos as an "entrepreneurial" success, defining "entrepreneurial" as his ability to take cash out of the casino company and use it for other things.

"Entrepreneurially, not as a person who drives up stock, but as a private person, it's been a very good deal," he told me. "If I would have worked Atlantic City the way I worked real estate, I would probably be the biggest casino company in the world rather than just a nice company, et cetera, et cetera."

Two weeks ago, Forbes published its 2005 list of America's wealthiest people. Donald held 83rd place with what Forbes described as a $2.7 billion fortune. "My net worth has tripled," Donald told the magazine.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Vice President Dick Cheney makes only three brief appearances in the 22-page federal indictment that charges his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., with lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case. But in its clear, cold language, it lifts a veil on how aggressively Mr. Cheney's office drove the rationale against Saddam Hussein and then fought to discredit the Iraq war's critics.

The document now raises a central question: how much collateral damage has Mr. Cheney sustained?

Many Republicans say that Mr. Cheney, already politically weakened because of his role in preparing the case for war, could be further damaged if he is forced to testify about the infighting over intelligence that turned out to be false. At the least, they say, his office will be temporarily off balance with the resignation of Mr. Libby, who controlled both foreign and domestic affairs in a vice presidential office that has served as a major policy arm for the West Wing.

"Cheney has had a tight, effective team, and they have been an incredible support system for the presidency," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "To the degree that that support system is weakened, it's a bad day at the office. But no person is indispensable." For now, David Addington, the vice president's counsel, is the leading candidate to replace Mr. Libby.

Mr. Cheney's allies noted that there was no suggestion in the indictment that the most powerful vice president in American history, with enormous influence into all important corners of administration policy, had done anything wrong. They also said that Mr. Libby, whose role had been diminished in the past year as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became more powerful and the leak investigation took its toll, could be quickly replaced from the vice president's large Rolodex of support.

"His reach within both the party mechanism and the policy structures of the government is so deep that I believe that it is possible to find somebody who would provide the technical and intellectual support that Libby did, even if he doesn't have the same personal relationship that he had with Libby," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican with White House ties. "That's very hard to duplicate."

The indictment against Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, alleges that the vice president's office was the hub of a concerted effort to gather information about key critics of the Bush Iraq policy. [Page 26.]

The larger question, Republicans said, was Mr. Cheney's standing with the public - and what his staff has often called the vice president's constituency of one, Mr. Bush.

Christie Whitman, the president's former E.P.A. administrator and a longtime Bush family friend who was critical of the White House and the Republican right wing in a recent book, said that she did not expect the president's personal relationship with Mr. Cheney to change. Nonetheless, Ms. Whitman said she believed that if more information about Mr. Cheney's involvement in the leak case became public, "and if it keeps hanging around and getting close to the vice president, he might step aside - but that's an extreme case."

For now, she said, "Scooter has fallen on his sword, and the focus is on him."

Paul Light, a vice presidential scholar at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, agreed that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush would probably remain solid, but the taint of the scandal could hurt the vice president outside the White House.

"Cheney becomes a bit of an albatross except with the base, where he's a real rock star," Mr. Light said. "It'll be less possible for him to make campaign trips because this issue will dog him."

A number of influential Republicans agreed, although they did not want to speak for attribution for fear of harming their relationships with Mr. Cheney.

"Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a political problem," said one Republican close to the White House who did not want to be named to avoid public quarrels with the White House. "As the driving force on foreign policy and the Iraq war, his leadership is now nowhere near as credible. Bush has got to approach the stuff coming from the vice president's office with raised eyebrows."

Others said that Mr. Cheney was far too central at the White House to be diminished by the scandal. "He's a survivor of all time," said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and a longtime friend of the vice president. "I never saw him bow his head or go into a cocoon or suck his thumb or anything like that. He's an unflappable man."

Warren B. Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, agreed with that assessment. "Look, Dick Cheney is not running for anything, he's obviously an incredibly important person in the administration, and I don't think that will change inside the White House," Mr. Rudman said. "If he were a normal vice president looking to run in '08, then it would be a totally different situation."

Most Republicans said that they had not taken seriously recent talk, advanced by conservatives, that Mr. Cheney should be the next Republican presidential candidate. In any case, they said, his history of heart problems, the faulty prewar intelligence and now Mr. Libby's indictment effectively ruled out a political future beyond Mr. Bush's second term. "He's too controversial," Ms. Whitman said.

Although Mr. Cheney makes only three appearances in the indictment, the episodes tell a story of a vice president directly involved in an effort to learn about Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who emerged in 2003 as a critic of the way the administration used prewar intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The episodes do not shed light on the action that set off the special prosecutor nearly two years ago: who first leaked the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, an undercover officer at the C.I.A., as an attempt to denigrate Mr. Wilson's trip as a nepotistic junket arranged by his spouse.

Mr. Cheney's most interesting appearance in the indictment is on Page 5, where he is described as telling Mr. Libby, on June 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. in the counterproliferation division. "Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," the indictment states.

Mr. Cheney also appears on Page 8, when he flew with Mr. Libby and others on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to Norfolk, Va. On the return trip, the indictment states, Mr. Libby "discussed with other officials aboard the plane" what he should say to reporters in response to "certain pending media inquiries," including questions from Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

The indictment does not say who the "other officials" are or the nature of the media inquiries, but it does say that on that same day Mr. Libby spoke to Mr. Cooper, and that he confirmed that he had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife was involved in sending him on the trip.

The indictment comes as other parts of the wall that was built around Mr. Cheney's defense of the war have come tumbling down. Earlier this month, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state, complained in a speech of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and of a "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team.

The indictment also serves as fresh evidence to those Republicans who have known Mr. Cheney for decades and say he has changed, and that he reacted to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by becoming consumed with threats against the nation and his longtime desire to rid Iraq of Mr. Hussein. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, said as much in The New Yorker's current issue.

"I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for 30 years," Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg. "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Some Republicans say that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush has already changed, and that he has become less of a mentor to the president after Mr. Bush's nearly five years in office. Still, Mr. Cheney's allies insist that, with or without Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney will be at the president's side.

"I don't think it's ever been about Cheney's staff," said Victoria Clarke, a former Pentagon spokeswoman and aide to the first President Bush. "It's about him. Cheney's influence has always been his own."