When Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona learned on the Sunday after Thanksgiving that Senate Republican whip Trent Lott would announce his retirement the next day, he moved swiftly. It was mid-afternoon. By the end of the evening, he had 20 of the 25 votes needed to succeed Lott as the number two Republican in the Senate. And that was just by making phone calls from his home in Phoenix.

By midday Monday, Kyl had locked up a solid majority of Republican senators. Twenty-four hours later, his chief rival for the whip post, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, backed out of the race. Alexander had to settle for succeeding Kyl as chairman of the Senate Republican conference. And last week, Kyl was formally elected whip. The media labeled him the "consensus" choice.

But calling Kyl the winner by consensus doesn't quite capture what happened. By acting unobtrusively but decisively, Kyl created a consensus rather than waiting for the possibility that it might form on its own. This is the way Kyl, 65, has worked since he was elected to the House in 1986, then the Senate in 1994, and he has done so with remarkable effectiveness.

Last year, Time picked Kyl as one of the 10 best senators and called him "The Operator." True enough. But Kyl is not an operator in the Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton sense. He is not a pragmatist in search of compromise or popular applause. Kyl is a conservative--probably the smartest one in the Senate--in search of conservative victories.

The contrast between Kyl and his Arizona colleague, John McCain, is instructive. McCain is a public senator. His influence comes from taking on issues with maximum media attention and building public support for his position. Kyl is a private senator. He maneuvers skillfully out of public view to build Senate support for his positions. As Time said, he succeeds by "subterfuge."

"You can do so much by following that practice," Kyl told me. "I have never had the need to get a lot of publicity. I've found I can be a lot more effective if I'm not in the limelight." His style fits with the whip's job, McCain's with running for president.

Kyl's father, John Kyl, was a Republican congressman from Iowa who was squeezed out of office in 1972 when the state lost a House seat in a reapportionment. The younger Kyl never pursued a political career in Iowa. After high school, he became ill with pneumonia and moved to Arizona for the climate. He stayed for college and law school.

Oddly enough, his model in Congress is not his father. But his father, Kyl says, gave him one great piece of advice. When getting ready to vote, pick out a Republican you trust who's voting the other way and ask him why. "It didn't take me long to pick Dick Cheney." Vice President Cheney was then the House Republican whip.

Cheney was a "thoughtful, responsible, moderate sort of person" who worked behind the scenes and rarely with great fanfare, Kyl says. Today, he and Cheney, more conservative now, are close friends and political allies, agreeing particularly on national security.