John Kerry was really ill. In November he had picked up a cold, the ubiquitous campaign grippe, and by February he had walking pneumonia.

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He had lost his voice. He looked even gaunter than usual; Lincolnesque, maybe, but he was losing weight and he couldn't sleep. A week after the New Hampshire primary, while campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., he went back to the holding room after an event and lay on the conference table. 'I'm really sick,' he said. He couldn't seem to get up, making his staff very nervous.

'I just want to lie here for a few minutes,' he croaked. But then he got up, as he always did.

When Teresa was on the road with Kerry, she fussed over her husband, recommending various cures and soothing potions. 'Sometimes my mom is very happy when John is sick because she gets to brood over him,' said Teresa's son Chris Heinz. But Teresa did not like to campaign constantly with her husband, and she had her own duties running the multimillion-dollar Heinz Family Philanthropies. Campaigning can energize a natural politician, like Bill Clinton, who feeds off crowds and sucks up adulation. For the more solitary, shy Kerry, campaigning--the day-in, day-out grind of meeting and greeting and staying 'on'--was always a labor, sometimes an ordeal. Kerry's best friend from Yale, David Thorne, his former brother-in-law who had stayed close even after Kerry's divorce from Julia Thorne in 1988, worried about the toll on the candidate.

The campaign was 'depleting' Kerry, Thorne believed. His old friend was stoic and dogged, and Kerry rallied under pressure, but there was never enough time to truly recover. Kerry could be cranky.

He was not a petty tyrant, like some bosses. He could be generous to his staff, who stayed loyal to him. But 'he will whine constantly,' said one top aide, quoting Kerry's bouts of petulance: ' 'I'm not getting enough exercise, I'm overscheduled, I didn't get the speech on time'--on and on, ad nauseam.' Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, didn't put up with much. Core Questions In Philosophy Sober Edition 5000 here. 'She cuts it off,' said this aide. 'She'll say, 'It wasn't anybody's fault,' or 'Whose fault was that?' ' Kerry's personal aide, Marvin Nicholson, had to grin and bear it.

Kerry had met Nicholson, 33, at a windsurfing shop in Cambridge, Mass., where Nicholson was working; he later caddied for Kerry at the Nantucket Golf Club. Now the 6-foot-8 University of Western Ontario grad was, in effect, his valet, serving his personal needs. The two men were close friends, but Nicholson was still the servant. The morning after the Feb. 3 primaries, which vaulted Kerry into a virtually insurmountable lead, the candidate was fuming over his missing hairbrush. He and his aides were riding in a van on the way to a Time magazine cover-photo shoot. Nicholson had left the hairbrush behind.

'Sir, I don't have it,' he said, after rummaging in the bags. 'Marvin, f---!' The press secretary, David Wade, offered his brush. 'I'm not using Wade's brush,' the long-faced senator pouted. 'Marvin, f---, it's my Time photo shoot.' Nicholson was having a bad day.

Breakfast had been late and rushed and not quite right for the senator. In the van, Kerry was working his cell phone and heard the beep signaling that the phone was running out of juice. 'Marvin, charger,' he said without turning around. 'Sorry, I don't have it,' said Nicholson, who was sitting in the rear of the van.

Now Kerry turned around. 'I'm running this campaign myself,' he said, looking at Nicholson and the other aides.

'I get myself breakfast. I get myself hairbrushes.

I get myself my cell-phone charger. It's pretty amazing.'

In silent frustration, Nicholson helplessly punched the car seat. The headlines that winter were mostly good, as Kerry racked up one primary victory after another. But there were some bumps and one near miss. 12 Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip columnist, reported that two major news organizations were working on a story that Kerry had an 'intern problem' with a young female campaign worker.

The story was bogus, but in the post-Monica Lewinsky era, the Kerry campaign feared it would break out of the cesspool of the lower tabloids and Drudge and make it into the mainstream press, cause a distracting flap and possibly open the door to a late Edwards challenge. Democratic members of Congress, whose staffs read Drudge like everyone else in the Washington journalist-politico world, were anxiously calling in to Kerry headquarters. Kerry's staff had to feverishly work the phones to newspaper reporters, imploring and bluffing and trying to play on what little shame the press had left. 'No one else is doing it. You'd be the only one,' the Kerry staffers would say to the reporters and pray that they were telling the truth. The New York Post came closest to running with the story but backed off. The damage was contained; it turned out to be the usual confection of false rumors, possibly stirred up by troublemaking staffers from rival camps.