In My Time - Dick Cheney [153]
As the Bush margin in Florida grew smaller and smaller, everyone started looking to Jeb Bush for answers and hope. He was in the corner of the room with my chief of staff, Kathleen Shanahan, huddled over a computer screen. They were logged on to the Florida secretary of state’s website trying to follow the vote count directly as it was posted. When the governor of Texas walked into the room looking for information, his brother, the governor of Florida, whispered to Kathleen, “Just don’t make eye contact with him,” hoping to avoid a barrage of questions he couldn’t yet answer.
Everybody was angry and frustrated with Gore. Who retracts a concession? In 1976 the election had also been very close, and we had decided to sleep on it and see how things looked in the morning before making any decision about conceding to Carter. I thought that if the Gore campaign had been any kind of a professional operation, they would have realized how close the vote was and wouldn’t have conceded in the first place. But to concede and then take it back was amateur hour. And the fact of the concession hurt Gore, I believe, as we headed into the recount.
In the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas later that night with Lynne, George and Laura Bush, Jeb Bush, President Bush 41, Al and Ann Simpson and campaign chairman, Don Evans, after Al Gore had withdrawn his concession. (Photo by David Kennerly)
It was clear that nothing more was going to be decided that night, but we had a large crowd of supporters still standing in the rain at the state capitol. Don Evans went over to thank them and tell them to go home for the night. The rest of us went to bed.
“NOW WHAT?” MARY ASKED. It was late Wednesday morning in our suite at the Four Seasons, and she addressed her question to the good-sized group that we had assembled: Scooter Libby, Dave Addington, Rob Portman, Paul Wolfowitz, Terry O’Donnell, Steve Hadley, Kathleen Shanahan, and Michael Boskin, a Stanford economist who had been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George H. W. Bush. Someone had ordered sandwiches, but the plate sat largely untouched on the round table at one end of the room, alongside a book I’d been given, Hemingway on Fishing. Enthusiastic as I am about the sport, fishing was about the furthest thing from my mind at that point.
Our sense was that the Gore campaign would not draw things out for too much longer. We anticipated a quick concession. Our hopes were dashed the next day when Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave a press conference in Tallahassee. The Gore campaign had sent Christopher to Florida to oversee their recount effort, in much the same way that we had sent former secretary of state Jim Baker. Both sides realized they needed someone with gravitas who didn’t appear too partisan or political as the public face of efforts in Florida. But we also knew that we were in a real fight and that we needed seasoned and savvy managers. I was willing to match Jim Baker against Warren Christopher or just about anybody else, any day of the week. He was clearly the best man for this job.
Standing in front of a room full of reporters, Bill Daley announced that the Gore campaign would be requesting hand recounts of the ballots in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Volusia, and Broward counties—all solidly Democratic areas. Daley also noted that the Gore campaign was unlikely to stop there and was “still collecting other irregularities.” One member of the team watching the press conference with us piped up from the back of the room that the Daley family had been “collecting irregularities” in Chicago for decades. The Gore team was clearly going to do everything they could to overturn the results of election night. We were in for a fight.
It became clear that we were entering on a long course with no predictable end in sight. Although I was confident that we would ultimately prevail, I