But as Forbes returned to New Jersey on his company jet, a Boeing 727 known as The Capitalist Tool, his longtime friend Jude Wanniski believed he had seen the future of the GOP -- and his name was Steve Forbes.

"Steve, here's a historic document," said Wanniski, a fervent believer in supply-side economics, as he handed Forbes a handscrawled paper. It was a proposal that Forbes run for president, one of several that Forbes would receive -- and dismiss -- during the year.

Forbes, it turned out, already had a presidential candidate in mind. Jack Kemp was everything that Forbes was not: a back-slapping, handsome former NFL quarterback, well-known nationally and established within the Republican Party. The contrast between Forbes, who laughingly notes that some people call him "charismatically challenged," and Kemp, is one of the most striking in politics.

Yet the two men did share something: a near-religious belief in the sanctity of deep Reaganesque tax cuts, which under the supply-side theory of economics would spur enough growth to more than pay for themselves. Forbes was astute enough to realize that Kemp was the ideal political and personal package to sell the controversial idea.

But during the tumultuous year that followed, Forbes went from being a passionately private multimillionaire, a man who laughed off talk of running for president, into a politically energized campaigner, convinced that he was the savior of the Republican Party.

It was a transformation that would require Forbes to rethink his self-image, and invent a public one. It would place his life on a road he had avoided, more in harmony with the passionately public life led by his father and namesake, Malcolm S. Forbes Sr., a man who helped redefine the word flamboyant for the post-war generation and once ran for New Jersey governor. It would also lead him to tap deeply into his inherited wealth, draining the dominant share in the Forbes empire that his father had reserved for his first son.

And so, at some cost, ambition was born. The incubator for Forbes' new dream was Empower America, a business-oriented think tank in Washington. Kemp and Bennett were the public face of Empower America, but Forbes was quietly funding it, and his confidant Bill Dal Col -- now Forbes' campaign manager -- was running it.

Forbes could well afford the luxury of paying huge sums of money to let other people muse at Empower America's many conferences, including the Telluride gathering. But, though he enjoys the perks and properties of his inherited millions -- his home in rural Bedminster, N.J., sits on 550 acres, with 148 head of cattle -- he wears his wealth lightly. It is one of the ways he is most unlike his father, who died in 1990 with a train of mourners that ranged from Richard Nixon to Elizabeth Taylor.

Forbes' indulgences are intellectual. He has lived and breathed economics and policy, and one of his proudest accomplishments came in winning the so-called Crystal Owl award for accurate economic forecasting an unprecedented three times. In many ways, his most significant role model was his grandfather, B.C. Forbes, a Scottish immigrant who was a freelance journalist. As Steve Forbes describes it, his grandfather one day had an epiphany: "Why just write about it? Why not start a business myself?" Thus was born Forbes magazine.

Steve Forbes said he found himself facing a similar question as he entered midlife in the early 1980s. Why confine himself to just dispensing opinions as editor of Forbes magazine? Why not take a shot at public life?

Forbes took an important step in that direction when President Reagan appointed him head of the government's Board for International Broadcasting, a part-time position he held for four years. While the agency had only 15 employees, its adjuncts, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty, had 2,000 workers around the world.

While Forbes' position was low-profile, he now says he helped play a role in the fall of the Berlin Wall. He traveled to Washington hundreds of times during his tenure, meeting with administration officials and testifying before Congress. From Forbes' point of view, the job gave him executive government experience. And he didn't like much of what he saw in Washington, especially the way the Republican Party seemed to be falling apart in the post-Reagan world, culminating in the election of President Clinton in 1992.

By 1994, several of Forbes's friends, displeased with the crop of likely GOP candidates, were suggesting that he run for president. These friends included Ken Tomlinson, former editor of Reader's Digest, and Bruce Porter, the former executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting.

"What few people realize is that his whole life, from when he was a young man, he was fascinated by politics," Porter says. "He probably is one of the most widely read persons I have ever known. When he found out I was from Utah, he started talking to me about senatorial politics in Utah 50 years ago. He can do the same thing about every state in the union."

Forbes laughed off most of the suggestions that he make political history himself, largely because he was still convinced Kemp would run. But on Super Bowl Sunday, 1995, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback sent word that he didn't have another White House race in him. Forbes began to seriously consider the idea that if Kemp wouldn't, he should. He informed his wife, Sabina, and their five daughters, who were shocked at the unlikely turn of events.

"It didn't really reach a critical mass in my mind until January, when Jack decided to pull the plug," Forbes says. "Even then, as the idea began to germinate, I kept going after Jack to take the plunge when it was clear the other candidates were not going to have the kind of positive, progrowth agenda."

In fact, Forbes' decision had as much to do with his antipathy toward the GOP front-runner, Bob Dole, as it did with Kemp's decision not to run. Dole was considered by many supply-siders to be too zealous about balancing the budget and too quick to raise taxes to accomplish that goal.

Dole, famous for his barbs, once delivered this unforgettable rebuke: "The good news is that a bus loaded with supply-siders went over a cliff. The bad is that there were a few empty seats."

Forbes wasn't laughing. (Indeed, such Dole-isms would embolden Forbes to launch harsh television ads against the Kansan in the 1996 primary). Supply-siders believe that tax cuts would spur so much growth that they would bring in billions of dollars in extra revenue and balance the budget in the process.

This economic theory, which critics famously derided as "voodoo economics," is the heart of Forbes' political philosophy. But Forbes has taken this theory even farther than the original proponents, advocating a 17-percent flat tax which eliminates many of the usual deductions, including the supposedly sacrosanct one for mortgage interest. As Forbes saw it, Dole was the enemy of supply-siders, and by extension an intellectual outlaw in the Republican Party. While there is reason to doubt whether Forbes' view was shared by a majority of Republicans, he saw himself as the only person with the will and the wallet to defeat Dole.

Forbes had nearly reached his moment of choice. Sensing this, Forbes' supply-side friends pushed him more strongly than ever. In mid-March 1995, seven months after Wanniski had scrawled his proposal on the back of an envelope, he wrote an eight-page memo outlining why he believed Forbes could run a winning campaign.

"You start with a great name, Malcolm Forbes, known at least as well and probably more than Ross Perot at the time of his entry in February '92," Wanniski wrote. "You actually have a lead of 11 months on Ross. And, remember, he did not spend more than pocket money from the moment he indicated that he would run, and the day he hit 40 percent in a matchup with Bush and Clinton. The initial hesitancy I get from supply-siders when I bring up your candidacy is your 'shyness,' your outward demeanor."

But, Wanniski continued, "Your ability to speak with extemporaneous skill, in measured tones and the compactness of a self-edited writer, is unparalleled among conservatives.... Jack [Kemp] has more energy in his presentations than you do and will get more spontaneous applause lines, but your messages tend to be philosophically seamless and appealing."

Forbes decided he could wait no longer. On a spring day that Forbes describes as one of the most fateful of his life, he flew to Phoenix to meet with Kemp and asked him whether there was any chance he would run for president.

"No," Kemp said, then uttered the words that Forbes wanted to hear: "If you do, I will back you."

Kemp, in an interview, recalls the meeting slightly differently. "He just asked me if I was going to run. I said, `No, I don't think I could raise the money.' He said, `Well, I will.' He had the resources." [Kemp, who became displeased with Forbes attack ads against Dole, has not endorsed anyone so far in the 2000 race.] Whatever the exact exchange, Forbes walked away from the meeting having decided to run, carrying the supply-side banner. "There was a vacuum in the political sphere," he explains.

And Forbes could not resist its pull.

Forbes' political model might appear to be Ross Perot, the Texan who financed an unsuccessful independent bid for the presidency in 1992. Some of Forbes' friends believed that Perot had opened the door for an outsider multimillionaire -- and that Forbes' dry manner would be welcomed after the criticism of Perot's brash style.

Forbes, however, insists that discussion of Perot rarely came up. Instead, he says, "the name that was more mentioned was Wendell Willkie," who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1940. Forbes considered him a hero because he was an outsider businessman who risked his reputation on a presidential bid.

"He had never held elective office, he came out of the business world and came in after the party was floundering in 1936 and all the old leaders were out," says Forbes. Today, he believes, the GOP is in a similar situation, and he has no qualms about presenting himself as the 2000 version of Wendell Willkie.

Today, while many of Forbes' original backers still believe he would make a good president, others such as Wanniski are disappointed. Wanniski, for example, said he urged Forbes not to run the much-criticized attack ads against Dole in 1996, which by most accounts backfired on the publisher and helped lead to his withdrawal from the race. This time around, Forbes has tried to recast himself, with sunny advertisements featuring his daughters and a fervent antiabortion pitch that is designed to appeal to social conservatives.

But at his core this is a man who chose to go public -- sacrificing fortune and privacy -- in the name of one belief: that tax cuts, and tax cuts alone, can "drain the Washington swamp," as he likes to say, and remake the American economy.

"He is not a natural candidate," says longtime friend Michael Novak, an American Enterprise Institute scholar. "He doesn't like small talk. He is not gregarious. But he is steady as a dime. Most of the country is now talking about what he first talked about -- a flat, or flatter, tax."