A recent ACLU campaign beefed up its major gifts and planned giving

But before Romero could exhale, McKay was greasing the wheels for the next campaign, which promised to be bigger, bolder, more comprehensive and — yes — probably more exhausting than the  last one.

"George Bush was in the White House, and John Ashcroft was our attorney general," McKay says. "We [felt we] were in the midst of one of the greatest civil-liberties crises in the country's history, a crisis of epic proportions, a crisis that is still going on today.