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His father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem, the son of pharmacists who had escaped the Russian pogroms. In the 1940s Benjamin Emanuel interrupted his medical school training in Switzerland to take part in an unsuccessful scheme to smuggle guns from Czechoslovakia to the Israeli underground. He later served as a medic in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. (Rahm would echo his father’s dedication during the Gulf war: With Iraqi Scuds falling on his father’s home country, he volunteered for military-vehicle-maintenance duty near the Lebanese border.)

In 1953, Dr. Emanuel’s medical training brought him to the States, where he met Marsha, then an X-ray technician at Chicago’s Mount Sinai hospital. They married and, after a brief return to Israel, settled down in Chicago. Dr. Emanuel’s pediatrics practice on the North Side’s Lincoln Avenue drew a passel of immigrants, and eventually became-with his partners-one of the largest in the city. (Decades later the “Doc’s” families would turn out to vote for his son in a congressional election.)

Money was tight in the early years. The family left their first Chicago apartment because it was rat-infested. They were kicked out of their second apartment because tenants complained that the three rambunctious boys were too loud. Yet Chicago also meant a lively street life of playing hoops in the park and building go-carts in the alley with the artist who lived upstairs.

That came to an end when Rahm was 9 and their immigrant father achieved the American dream of buying a house in the suburbs, the lakeside Republican enclave of Wilmette. The boys, recalls brother Zeke, missed the city. “The suburbs never grafted on to us,” he says.

The boys also joined their mother on most civil rights demonstrations within a 50-mile radius of Chicago. “I only brought the kids if I thought it was going to be peaceful, with no arrests,” Marsha Emanuel insists. (Though it wasn’t always predictable; she wore a dress and had a dinner party planned when she was carted off by cops for her first overnight jail term.)

Marsha’s father was a burly Moldavian immigrant who arrived alone on a ship at age 10. He went on to become a union organizer. Politics-loud and argumentative-infused Marsha’s childhood; her three boys got their own dose from trips in their grandfather’s delivery truck.

Rahm jumped into politics right after his graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, where he promised his mother he would take advantage of the campus’s stellar dance program but never did. He quickly discovered a penchant for fundraising, which he applied to campaigns for Senator Paul Simon, the DCCC, and Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley. In 1991 he joined Clinton’s presidential campaign. Emanuel wowed the team from the start, opening a spigot on needed campaign funds, and after Clinton’s election helped program a picture-perfect inaugural. He nabbed the plum White House position of political director.

Then he started shooting off his mouth. There was the time he rapped on a conference table to get “Lloyd’s” attention. (”We were all aghast,” recalls one Clinton aide, noting that even Lloyd Bentsen’s wife still called the Treasury Secretary “Senator.” ) He had a very public run-in with the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, who accused him of being the source of an anonymous quote that “we’ll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to” on welfare reform. (Emanuel denied saying it.) Most damaging were Emanuel’s battles with Hillary Clinton loyalists, who accused him of leaks about the travel office episode.

A year after Clinton took office, Emanuel was demoted. “He was very upset,” recalls Zeke. “He thought he was going to get kicked out of the White House.” He didn’t, and neither did he quit. Instead, Emanuel regrouped, helping lead the charge on key Clinton initiatives, including the crime bill, the assault weapons ban, and NAFTA. “He was constantly on the offense,” says Begala. Emanuel planned to leave after the 1996 election, but Clinton promoted him to take George Stephanopoulos’s spot as senior advisor for policy and strategy.

Still, Emanuel had political aspirations of his own, which necessitated some financial security. So in late 1998 he traded in Clinton as his boss for Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and Wall Street financier. “Money is not the be-all and end-all for him,” says brother Zeke. “But he knew he needed money so that wouldn’t be a problem while he was doing public service.” Over a 2 1/2-year period he helped broker deals-often using political connections-for Wasserstein Perella.

According to congressional financial disclosures, he earned more than $18 million during that period. His deals included Unicom’s merger with Peco Energy and venture fund GTCR Golder Rauner’s purchase of SBC subsidiary SecurityLink. But friends say his compensation also benefited from two sales of the Wasserstein firm itself, first to Dresdner Bank and then to Allianz AG.

By 2002, Emanuel emerged as a wealthy man with a reputation as a battle-hardened national strategist. That year he won a tough primary race for a seat in Congress that paid $138,000. His 1994 White House demotion was ancient history.

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