The Enforcer

Other Clinton veterans are even more pointed about Emanuel's assets. "He's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress," says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff. "The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars — Rahm is a road warrior. He's just what the Democrats need to fight back."

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth — Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

In person, Emanuel projects the hyperactivity of an attack dog straining at the leash. Although he swims and works out several mornings each week before most of his colleagues are out of bed, the exercise evidently does little to drain his energy — he is constantly fidgeting, gesturing, spinning, always on the move. He's notorious for driving those around him mercilessly: When he joined Clinton's campaign team, he reportedly introduced himself by standing on a table and yelling at the staff for forty-five minutes. "We joke that someone should open a special trauma ward in Washington for people who've worked for Rahm," says Jose Cerda, a veteran staffer. Emanuel, who was reared in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics, makes no apologies for his style. "If I got worried about that, I'd sit beneath my desk all day," he says. "I don't."

His combativeness was practically foreordained. The second of three sons born to a pediatrician father and a civil-rights-activist mother, Rahm was raised in a middle-class family that stressed competitiveness and achievement. His older brother, Ezekiel, is a leading medical ethicist. His younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood talent agent who served as the inspiration for Ari Gold, the fast-talking agent played by Jeremy Piven on HBO's hit series Entourage. (In a recent episode shot at a Lakers game, the lead actors sat in Ari Emanuel's $2,000 courtside seats.) "After about the sixth episode, I finally caught it," says Rahm, who himself was the model for the character Josh Lyman on The West Wing. "I called Ari the next day and said, 'Hey, I finally saw the show, and you know what? I like that guy better than I like you.'"