Mr. Kahn likened his company to a pack of barbarians - lean, mean fighters out to vanquish bloated bureaucratic rivals.

And they have faced the threat of new bureaucratic rivals eager for a share of the available turf.

Yet his victory over his bureaucratic rivals so far is a hollow one.

As a bureaucratic rival to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Mr. Cambone's has placed priority on obtaining intelligence for military commanders.

But now Russia's nuclear barons are finding that, along with securing funds and besting their bureaucratic rivals, they have to deal with an increasingly vocal public too.

On a competitive level: if you were Powell, would you want to surrender the Bush foreign-policy field to your bureaucratic rival, Rumsfeld?

Even after he was ousted as president in 1936 by political and bureaucratic rivals, he continued to donate money.

Mr. Shultz also manages to embrace the tradition of using memoirs as a way to slash at onetime bureaucratic rivals.

Unlike past bureaucratic rivals (Kissinger-Rogers, Brzezinski-Vance, Shultz-Weinberger), they admire and enjoy each other.

He was one of Washington's silkiest operators, a master at cultivating the press, working the Congress and outflanking bureaucratic rivals.