"It always feels like batting practice felt to me," he said. "I always wanted more. It was fun. It wasn't significant, it wasn't the game, but it always felt good. In a life of total indecision about virtually every large and small question - I still don't know if I want whole milk or skim milk, every time I walk in the store it's a struggle, I have made no policy decision there - I've always wanted to do this."

I love my work, too, but even on the very best days it would never occur to me to compare what I do to batting practice. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I envied my brother.

I'd left Boston early on a snowy morning in January, arrived in Los Angeles before noon, and drove straight to the studio in Burbank. Brad showed up a few minutes later. I hadn't seen him in nine months - except on television every Wednesday night - and those first few moments after we hugged were unexpectedly awkward. Instead of seeing my own brother standing before me, I was seeing Josh Lyman, deputy White House chief of staff. I'd forgotten (or maybe I'd never noticed before) that he has green flecks in his irises. His hair was redder than I remembered. His head looked bigger.

We're two and a half years apart, a pair of afterthoughts that didn't occur to our parents until they were well into their forties and had three kids already, the youngest a decade earlier. First me, then Brad. Mom says the only reason she got pregnant the last time was so that I wouldn't grow up feeling like an only child; she was giving me a playmate. It took me a while to appreciate the gift. Brad and I were raised in a Quaker household, but whenever he whacked me, even by accident, I'd go nuts. My favorite target was the upper back, between the shoulder blades (so I wouldn't bruise his kidneys). He was a cutup from the start, a jokester at the dinner table, a ham, but also, for such a big, handsome kid, surprisingly fragile. In grade school, he'd start getting anxious toward the end of every summer, worried that this would be the year he wouldn't make any friends. The spring day he caught me smoking dope out by the garage - I was in tenth grade, he was in eighth - he ran off in tears. I was afraid I'd scarred him for life.

That summer, in 1973, Dad switched jobs. We moved from a suburb of Philadelphia to a place called Maple Bluff, on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin, which put us both in East High. One day during my senior year, I was sitting with my back to the wall in the big covered courtyard at East that we called the mall. There were lockers and benches and picnic tables there, and people had their spots. Crossing the mall between classes was like crossing a stage, always nerve-racking - for me, anyway. But here came my brother, maybe thirty feet away when I spotted him, moving in a way I'd never seen him move before. So easy and so cool, almost floating; as if he were in the king of the mall or something. I was dumbfounded. Who's that? I was wondering. Then he caught my eye, and in that instant, he cowered, as if somewhere overhead a puppeteer had abruptly dipped the strings. His shoulders dropped, his chin fell, his prance became a shuffle. He looked like my brother again.

Years later, I reminded him of that moment. "I figured it was like, 'Oh, my big brother just saw me, and he knows I'm just me,'" I suggested.

"How about if that was me?" my brother said.

Sunday afternoon, the Golden Globes are tonight, and it feels as if we're going to a wedding. ("Except a wedding has consequences," my brother points out.) While the limousine waits, I'm snapping pictures of the whole family in front of the fireplace; my brother in his slim-cut tailored tux, looking like a bass player in a sixties British rock band; my sister-in-law, the actress Jane Kaczmarek, gorgeous in a shimmery blue satin gown; their daughter Frances, three years old, hiding in the folds of her mother's dress; and George, the baby, squirming happily in his father's arms. (My brother's always been a hugger. He doesn't know this, but as a young man in college, he once hugged my mother so tightly he broke one of her ribs. "He just picked me up and whirled me around, and I heard it go," Mom told me. "But I didn't want to mention it. It was such fun to have him do it.")

My brother's up for best supporting actor in a catch-all category that includes TV series, TV movies, and miniseries. It's his first nomination for a major award. Maybe that's why he keeps sighing heavily and flapping his lips and muttering, "God, I hate this." Jane is calmer. She's been here already. Before the Emmys last September, people kept telling her she was sure to win best actress in a comedy series for her role as Lois, the manic mom in Malcolm in the Middle. As it happened, Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) won instead. At least she doesn't have to write another acceptance speech.

Brad and Jane met in New York in 1989. They're both from Wisconsin, both are classically trained (Jane at Yale, Brad at Juilliard), and both began their careers as stage actors in New York. Both landed what looked like their breakthrough roles early on with big-name stars who had recently won Oscars - Jane with Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro in Falling in Love, Brad with Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner in A Perfect World - and both movies flopped. Both subsequently made a very good living on stage and screen for years without ever quite becoming famous. And both were wary of television. Jane walked away from her recurring role as a cop on Hill Street Blues to do Falling in Love. Producer Steven Bochco kindly offered to have her character hospitalized for a few episodes, but she wasn't interested. "I said, 'No, no, no, kill me,'" Jane says. "'Thank you very much, but I'm going to do movies now.'" They didn't just kill her; they blew her away.

The last thing either of them expected was exactly what happened in the late spring of 1999. Both wound up with lead roles in terrific television shows. It was a simultaneous career orgasm.

As soon as our limousine pulls up to the red carpet at the Beverly Hilton, my brother hops out - hops, no hesitation - and shoots his right arm up and out like a politico, waving to the crowd with two fingers. It's chaos; klieg lights, flashbulbs, a helicopter thumping overhead, paparazzi in scuzzy tuxedos, and the carpet, the long red carpet, a chute lined with cameras and screamers. "Brad!" "Jane!" "Let's see the back of the dress, Jane!" "Can I get one single, please?"

"Try to keep moving," the security guard tells me, and I'm willing. But Brad's publicist grabs my arm. "Stay right where you are," he whispers. "You own this red carpet."

Hardly, but my brother does. "Hi, Jack," he says, clapping someone on the back. Jack Lemmon turns around: "How you doing, Brad?" He gets a hug from Tom Hanks ("Lovely pieces I see on you all the time"), a kiss from Julia Roberts ("She's a fan of the show," my brother explains), best wishes from Faye Dunaway.

Brad won't win tonight; just as he predicted, his category will go to Robert Downey Jr. for Ally McBeal. Nor will Jane (Sarah Jessica Parker this time). But it won't seem to matter much to either of them. We'll still go to the parties and drink champagne. And afterward, walking out of the hotel to meet the limousine, I'll be struck once again by the way my brother moves.

"The reason that actors are basically alcoholics waiting to happen," my brother explains, "is that if you are the personality that at some point in your life goes to a Broadway play or sees a movie and somewhere in your mind you're thinking, I should be there. I should be up on a screen. I should be someone that people go to see in a play - if you are that kind of person, the kind of person who acts on that, you are in the most assertive, extroverted .022 percent of the population. That's a very assertive chord in your personality. Then the business renders you totally passive. And there is no resolution to that."

Of the one hundred thousand card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild - encompassing pretty much everybody you see on television and in the movies - only about 3 percent earn as much as $100,000 a year in their chosen profession. My brother has struggled over the years, often felt miscast and undervalued, wondered many times if his life wasn't just a pointless pursuit of affection from strangers, but he has nearly always worked. Within months of graduation from Juilliard, he landed a big role in a Sam Shepard play, Curse of the Starving Class, starring Kathy Bates. Brad took over the role of Wesley from Bill Pullman, who quit suddenly to do a movie, and played the part for nearly seven months, eight shows - and $450 - a week, nearly three hundred performances, standing onstage every night dazed, wet, and naked with a sacrificial lamb in his arms. "I saw the play," says Richard Schiff, who plays Toby Ziegler on The West Wing and who's known Brad for twenty years. "I saw his naked butt. He was really good. My ex-wife went twice, which got me really upset. I remember her saying, 'He's just too good to be true. He's good-looking and he's really nice and sweet and he's talented. He has to be gay, right?'"

Still in his twenties, he played Paris in Romeo and Juliet at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Claudio in Measure for Measure at Lincoln Center, Theseus and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hartford, Richmond in Richard III at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and the title role in Coriolanus at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. In 1987, in his first significant film role, he played Elisabeth Shue's vain high school boyfriend in Adventures in Babysitting. Not exactly Shakespeare, or even Shepard, but a big-time movie absolutely, with a clever script and a fun little part.

That same year he appeared in Revenge of the Nerd II: Nerds in Paradise (he played the evil president of the jock fraternity), which was kind of a cult classic, you may recall, and pretty thrilling at the time, except that it nearly dead-ended his career. My brother confirmed his talent for playing the jerk. And for years afterward, he got way too many opportunities to resurrect the part. He played a slippery lawyer in Philadelphia, a relentless assistant DA in The Client, an emotionally dead son in Bicentennial Man, a Hollywood agent in The Muse. He was the bad guy who got what was coming to him in the end - the FBI sharpshooter kneed in the nuts by Laura Dern in A Perfect World, the obnoxious nephew strangled by Al Pacino during Thanksgiving dinner in Scent of a Woman, the process server pistol-whipped in Cobb. Invariably, those were moments when the audience cheered. Take a look: The guy who always played yuppie scum? That's my brother. "If you do an asshole well, you will be an asshole," says Brad now. "When you get into features, the best parts are taken, and what's left are the assholes. Every movie needs a villain. It used to be the villains were Nazis. Now villains are white guys with receding hairlines and jobs, and that was something I could do."

His undeniable achievement in such roles reached its apex in 1995 with the release of Billy Madison, in which Brad played the conniving Eric Gordon, Adam Sandler's rival for the Madison family empire. Two summers ago, Brad and I met in Boston for the baseball All-Star Game, and even then, everywhere we went, people would recognize my brother and shout, "Business ethics!" He understood the reference - to the category that proves to be Eric's downfall in a climactic game show for all the marbles - but he still hasn't seen the movie.

"We should rent it," I said.

"I really don't want to," he said.

"It might be good," I said.

"I really don't want to."

I didn't force the issue. Turns out he's never seen Bicentennial Man either. In fact, there are lots of movies and television shows my brother's been in that he hasn't seen, including many episodes of The West Wing. That's partly because he's never gotten over the creepiness of seeing himself on film. "It's just weird," he says. "You're used to seeing your face because you see it in a mirror. But I'm not used to seeing myself walk away from behind. It's really odd to see objectively what that looks like. It can be totally unnerving."

But there's also the fear of falling into what he calls a "shame spiral." One night when my brother was in New York, a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk at Eighty-eighth and Columbus said to him, "I know you. You play the asshole in movies." Brad gave him a buck anyway, then went straight home and called his agent. "You have to do something," he pleaded. "People without VCRs - people without heating - are typecasting me!"

In the summer of 1990, my brother was still single, living in a tiny New York apartment with a schizophrenic cat named Blanche and his good dog, Luke. He had just finished a play, The Tower of Evil, at the Classic Stage Company downtown - for which the final judgment of a review in the Daily News was that "Bradley Whitford as the queen's new love" is "inept" - when Aaron Sorkin abruptly changed Brad's mood. Sorkin chose him to succeed Clark Gregg as the marine prosecutor in A Few Good Men on Broadway. And later, when Timothy Busfield had to leave at the end of the summer to go back to thirtysomething, my brother took over the lead. It was the biggest coup of his young career, an achievement every bit as meaningful as being cast in The West Wing years later. The reviews were strong, his stature in New York and Hollywood soared - and Sorkin loved him.

But Tom Cruise got the lead in the movie. And my brother got pilots. He still appeared in movies and plays, but television was calling. His first series, a film-noir spoof in 1993 called Black Tie Affair, was yanked after four episodes. It led to big roles in a string of other pilots, none of which got picked up. He remembers going to a birthday party during those first years in Los Angeles and meeting someone's five-year-old daughter. She had a question for him: "Are you an actor?"

"And I said, 'Yeah, sweetie, I am,'" Brad recalls. "And she said, 'Are you acting today?' And I said, 'No-no, I'm not.' 'Are you acting tomorrow?' Totally innocent. And I said, 'No.' And then she said, 'What do you do all day when you're not acting?' And immediately I said, 'I drive around L.A. and I try to make people like me.' The kid goes 'Oh,' and walks away. And I'm like, Jesus, God! So pathetic!"

Sorkin, meanwhile, was in Hollywood writing screenplays, meeting Brad occasionally for dinner or a drink. "I would see him in some great things," Sorkin recalls, "like Scent of a Woman. And then I'd see him in some not-so-great things, as you will always see great actors in not-so-great things because they have to make a living. But I would always think to myself, My God, why isn't anybody using Brad Whitford for something big?"

In the fall of 1997, my brother and his wife were back east, expecting their first child. Brad was doing Three Days of Rain at the Manhattan Theatre Club, driving two hours home every night to the farmhouse in Connecticut. Sorkin was in New York, too, holed up in the Four Seasons Hotel, working on the pilot for Sports Night. The evening he finished, Sorkin says, "It was really raining outside. I found myself a Kinko's someplace. I printed it out, and the first place I took it was the stage door of the Manhattan Theatre Club, because I wanted Brad to read it."

My brother loved it. Sorkin wanted to cast him as one of the anchors. But Brad knew the show was a long shot; and even if it turned out to be a hit, he figured Sorkin would do what most creators of successful television series do - eventually pass off the writing chores and move on to the next project. My brother already had a firm offer for what seemed like a sure thing: thirteen guaranteed episodes of a new half-hour comedy called The Secret Lives of Men, about three divorced guys living in New York, with a pilot directed by Jim Burrows of Cheers fame. Reluctantly he told Sorkin, "I can't."

Sports Night aired to critical acclaim. It was fast, smart, different, and Sorkin was writing every episode. Secret Lives, on the other hand, was a disaster. The critics hated it. It wasn't just that they thought it was a bad show; it was as if they were angry with everyone involved for daring to put it on the air. "Disdain," is what my brother remembers. "Just waves of disdain."

ABC killed Secret Lives after six episodes. That same day, Sorkin called Brad at home. My brother knew Sorkin had been shopping a one-hour-drama about the White House. "I'm really sorry," Sorkin said. "I know it must be frustrating, but I want you to play Josh on The West Wing." Sorkin sent him the script that afternoon. Josh was charming, caustic, explosive, sexy, capable of moral outrage, and a comic to boot - an immensely appealing character and one with whom Brad felt an immediate kinship. In fact, Sorkin says now, he wrote Josh with Brad in mind: "I tried to throw it in his strike zone."

But my brother would still have to audition, and he prepared as if it were the biggest audition of his life. "I was determined to prepare beyond overpreparedness," he says. "To prepare it enough so that when I went in there, it would be as if I'd been doing this ten-minute play for six weeks. When you rehearse a role or even memorize lines, it's like the process of having a stroke and recovering from it. You go to the first read-through of a play and it's great. Then you break it down and the Zen gets sucked out of it, and you can't even put words together. And slowly you get better, and then all of a sudden you're up. For me, its a sensation of feeling like your blood is moving again. In this case, I knew the lines cold. I would imagine myself being in my worst emotional state and try the scene. I'd act as if I was acting badly and try to do the scene well. I anticipated being very uncomfortable in the room so I would be comfortable. I desperately wanted this."

The audition took place in the office of John Levey, the casting director at Warner Brothers. Sorkin was there, too, along with one of the show's other executive producers, Thomas Schlamme, who directed the famous live episode of ER and was Sorkin's collaborator on Sports Night. Sorkin was the only one who'd already made up his mind. To the others, my brother was not exactly a stranger - they remembered him especially from an Emmy-winning 1995 episode of ER, filmed at Warner Brothers, in which he'd played a young father whose wife dies in childbirth - but, frankly, he was just another name on the list.

My brother used all the tricks experience has taught him. He politely cut short the small talk at the beginning ("Can I act now?"). He turned to leave immediately after he was finished so as not to seem like a "needy actor". And though the lines by this point were all but written on his heart, he did the entire scene holding the pages in his hand, occasionally glancing down at them, hoping to imply, "This is where I am now. I can go farther."

He nailed it; they laughed out loud. When my brother was on the way out the door, Levey's assistant whispered in his ear, "Nobody has done it like that! Wow! Wow!" When he got home, there was a message on his answering machine from Sorkin: "You hit it out of the park."

And then... nothing. Just weeks and weeks of silence. As it turns out, Levey wasn't persuaded that my brother had the sex appeal to play a leading man on network television. Schlamme wasn't sure he had enough depth to carry off the scenes he knew Sorkin would eventually have to write if The West Wing were ever going to be more than a simple romantic comedy. "There's a place that he doesn't sometimes go in his writing," says Schlamme, who viewed his role partly as nudging Sorkin in that direction. "It's not about naked people fucking. It's about going to a place that is a man absolutely standing toe-to-toe with a woman, getting his heart broken if that's what's going to happen, and dealing with the sexual energy of a relationship. I knew Brad had the comic timing. But in my experience as a director, people with incredible comic timing sometimes have a very hard time going to that place I just described. Because comedy is the deflection of having to be revealed, having to be hurt."

My brother might have had something to say to Levey's and Schlamme's concerns if he knew what they were, but he didn't. All he knew was that they were standing in his way. Reluctantly, he agreed to a second audition in front of Levey and The West Wing's John Wells, probably the most powerful producer in television (ER, Third Watch), this time with Moira Kelly, whose character, Mandy was originally conceived as Josh's love interest. It did not go well. Afterward, Levey told Brad's agent, Adena Chawke, that her client had "receded" in Kelly's presence.

"I don't understand," Chawke said.

"What part of my English don't you understand? It's not going to happen for Brad."

Meanwhile, it was getting to be pilot season. Other people were calling. Fox was interested in him for an hour-long dramedy. "They wanted to pay me a lot of money," Brad says. "A lot more [than West Wing]. And if I wanted to do it, I could have done it. None of this bullshit of jumping through Tommy fucking Schlamme's hoops, you know? At this point, I'm furious at him. It's like, I know, I know, I know I can play this role! You feel like a crazy person in an asylum trying to convince the orderly that you're sane. 'I know this is ridiculous because I'm an actor trying to get a part, and, of course, this part would be great for me, but seriously, I am really built for this!'"

It came down to the Friday before production was to begin. Chawke called my brother. Good news: He's been offered a part on The West Wing. Bad news: It's Sam, not Josh. "I was just, Nooooo. No, no, no, no," Brad says. "So I called Aaron. You don't know if you're going to be articulate or pathetic. I honestly did not know. And I just said, 'Aaron, I just feel this very strongly. This isn't about me wanting a job. This is the only time in my life I will play this card. I am this guy; I am not the other guy.' And Aaron's point is, 'Don't worry about what you do in the pilot,' and I was saying, 'No, no, no. There is a difference. There is a difference starting with the pilot. Josh isn't sexual-high-jinks-boy. Josh is, You know what? I had to tell the fucking Christian Right off! Because it's ridiculous. And I lost control!'"

Sorkin was impressed. ("That's sort of when we knew, Gee, we really do have a good marriage here.") Sometime over the weekend, Rob Lowe got what he was asking for, including first billing and a lot more money than anyone else in the cast except Martin Sheen. Which meant Lowe could play Sam and Brad could play Josh.

"And then it was very funny," my brother says, "because I go to the read-through and we're reading the pilot, and Rob's reading Sam, and I'm thinking, 'That's a much better part in the pilot.' You know, he's getting big laughs, all that hooker stuff and everything, and I'm, like, telling off the Christian Right. But I'm so happy it's this part."

The president and his senior staff are sitting around a large oval conference table beneath a chandelier in the make-believe Roosevelt Room. All except the chief of staff - John Spencer is off doing a play tonight. ("Getting enough acting these days, John?" my brother teased, as Spencer was leaving.) Each has a copy of this week's script, Sorkin's thirty-seventh since the pilot, a stack of paper half an inch thick, about ten thousand words (including stage directions), the cover emblazoned with the presidential seal. "I've taken another whack at this," Sorkin says, calling this week's read through to order late on a Friday afternoon. They read at hyperspeed, stumbling occasionally (who knew that President Bartlet wouldn't know how to pronounce Yemen?), laughing like an audience at their own jokes, then snapping back into character, managing - without lights, music, props, or even sitting up straight - to make the story so compelling that when it's over, they can't help themselves, they applaud: for Sorkin, I'm sure that's the idea, but I think also for themselves.

Afterward, I walk with my brother to his trailer; but we don't go inside yet. It's a gorgeous winter evening, the green hills across the road going black in the fading light, the clouds on the horizon blazing a fiery pink, a glow descending on this little corner of Burbank like a cloud of grace. Jeffrey Sacino, aka the Hair Fairy, wanders over from the makeup trailer to wish my brother good luck at the Golden Globes on Sunday. (It was Brad who came up with that nickname, just blurted it out one day to the horror of everyone, apparently, but the Hair Fairy himself). Later Sheen stops by to commiserate with a kindred soul about the inauguration tomorrow - the real one in Washington. Both he and my brother campaigned hard for Al Gore. "They'll be playing 'Hail to the Thief!'" Sheen fairly yelps.

I'm just watching; thinking about other scenes I've witnessed on the set during this visit: My brother and Dule Hill playing catch with a medicine ball outside the Oval Office. My brother and Allison Janney trading arias from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, just because they happen to be in the same room together. (How do they know these things?) My brother greeting nearly every women he meets in the course of his day, cast or crew, with a kiss on the lips. I remember him saying he doesn't like watching himself on film, even in the good roles, that he finds it "totally unnerving." I completely understand. I find it unnerving watching him, too. But I'm getting used to it. That's Bradley Whitford, I'm beginning to realize. That's my brother. And once again he catches my eye. But this time he doesn't wilt.