In 2004, as Louisiana congressman David Vitter campaigned for the U.S. Senate, he visited the Baton Rouge office of Adam Nossiter, an Associated Press reporter. Nossiter, who had never met the candidate before, knew that Vitter had gone to Harvard, but was surprised to learn that the candidate had graduated just one year behind him, in 1983, and that they had both been residents of Lowell House.

They seemed to have little else in common. Vitter, an economics concentrator from New Orleans, had not been involved in campus politics. After Harvard, he studied in England as a Rhodes Scholar, attended law school at Tulane, and, in 1992, won the statehouse seat previously held by white supremacist David Duke. Vitter ran as a scourge of political corruption. Once in office, he engineered passage of a term-limits bill that made him more friends among voters than state politicos. In 1999, he won the Congressional seat of Bob Livingston, who was about to become House Speaker when he resigned after pornographer Larry Flynt threatened to expose him as an adulterer.

Nossiter had followed a less-conventional path. The son of a Washington Post foreign correspondent, he attended grade school in Paris and high school in London, and studied French history at Harvard. He subsequently covered the Deep South for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote a book about post-civil rights Mississippi, landed a job at the New York Times, then left the paper two years later and returned to France to write The Algeria Hotel, about the Vichy government. When that book was done, he settled in New Orleans, commuting to his AP job in Baton Rouge. He rejoined the Times in 2005 as New Orleans bureau chief.

"I was trying to get him to open up," recalls Nossiter. "Vitter is a stiff politician. There's no easy exchange with him. He seems to submit to interviews only because he has to."

In early 2002, Vitter signaled that he was considering running for the governorship, but he lacked funding and party support. In June that year, he announced that he would not run. Shortly afterward, a small local paper called the Louisiana Weekly reported on rumors that Vitter had carried on an affair with a New Orleans prostitute, allegations that Vitter strongly denied and were little credited.

In the 2004 campaign, Nossiter recalled, "Vitter depicted Harvard as a hotbed leftwing radicalism and communism. The Harvard I knew was rather conservative. It was the Reagan era. A lot of guys had short hair. There wasn't much radicalism and very little drug use that I saw. People were buckling down, like junior bankers or businessmen, trying to get into finals clubs. Vitter kept calling the other two candidates 'Massachusetts liberals.'" Today, the senator's website profile makes no mention of Harvard whatsoever.

Vitter wooed the votes of the Christian right by casting himself as a moral absolutist on abortion, calling gay marriage an American crisis, and sneering at John Kerry "as a perfect candidate--for president of France." He won the Senate seat in a walk, becoming the first Republican senator from Louisiana since Reconstruction.

"His moral stand was so rigid that it almost made you question it," says Nossiter. "Partly, there were the rumors about Vitter's past, but there was also the extremeness of his positions, the unyielding aspect to it."

In early July, an investigator for pornographer Larry Flynt found Vitter's phone number on billing records of the "D.C. Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who is accused by federal prosecutors of racketeering, mail fraud, and a $300-an-hour call-girl operation. Vitter hastily issued a terse written apology for a "very serious sin" caused by unspecified "actions in my past." A subsequent Times-Picayune story quoted a former New Orleans madam as saying that Vitter had also been a patron of her establishment, and a second woman claimed that she slept with him for pay during the time Vitter was a state representative.

On July 16, the senator met briefly with New Orleans reporters to reprise his apology. He denied "New Orleans stories," which he blamed on "longtime political enemies." His wife stood next to him and said, "I am proud to be Wendy Vitter." Taking no questions, they left the room. "Mr. Vitter," Adam Nossiter would write in the Times, "struck on a defiant tone." One had the feeling that the story was far from over.