Going After Gore

Al Gore couldn't believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes ("I invented the Internet"), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush. For the first time, Gore and his family talk about the effect of the press attacks on his campaign—and about his future plans—to the author, who finds that many in the media are re-assessing their 2000 coverage.

From Vanity Fair:

As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.

Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).

Today, by contrast, Gore is "the Goreacle," the elder statesman of global activism, and something of a media darling. He is the Bono of the environment, the Cassandra of Iraq, the star of an Oscar-winning film, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the amusement of his kids, some people now actually consider him cool. "If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over," says his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, 34, referring to the Live Earth 24-hour extravaganza in July.

What happened to Gore? The story promoted by much of the media today is that we're looking at a "new Gore," who has undergone a radical transformation since 2000—he is now passionate and honest and devoted to issues he actually cares about. If only the old Gore could have been the new Gore, the pundits say, history might have been different.

But is it really possible for a person—even a Goreacle—to transform himself so radically? There's no doubt that some things have changed about Al Gore since 2000. He has demonstrated inner strength, rising from an excruciating defeat that would have crushed many men. Beyond that, what has changed is that he now speaks directly to the public; he has neither the patience nor the need to go through the media.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."

How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore's communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren't so liberal?
Eight years later, journalists, at the prompting of Vanity Fair, are engaging in some self-examination over how they treated Gore. As for Gore himself, for the first time, in this article, he talks about the 2000 campaign and the effect the press had on him and the election. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my father, Martin Peretz, was his teacher at Harvard and is an ardent, vocal Gore backer. I contributed to his campaign in February 1999. Before reporting this article, however, I'd had maybe two passing exchanges with Gore in my life.) Gore wasn't eager to talk about this. He doesn't blame the media for his loss in 2000. Yet he does believe that his words were distorted and that certain major reporters and outlets were often unfair.

How does he feel about it all? "I feel fine," he says, "but, when I say that, I'm reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages." To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, "Isn't it true that right after the accident, you said, 'I feel fine'?" The farmer said, "Well, it's not the simple," before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, "The patrolman then came to my side and said, 'How do you feel?'… so I said, 'I feel fine.'"

The Wonk Versus the Frat Boy

The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. "Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. "Someone draws a caricature, and it's funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, 'Aw shucks, that's too simple.' In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom." He notes, "I do not except myself from this criticism."

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."

George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush's "folksy affability," "distinctive charm," "effortless banter," and the feather pillow that he traveled with.

But Gore couldn't turn on such charm on cue. "He doesn't pinch cheeks," says Tipper. "Al's not that kind of guy." With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with "the government nerd." "The reality is," says Eli Attie, who was Gore's chief speechwriter and traveled with him, "very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail."

Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn't particularly see the value in happy chitchat. "We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. "I fault myself." It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush's campaign, led by the "iron triangle" of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.

"The campaign went through several official slogans," says The New York Times's Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. "They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don't give them French fries and ice cream."

Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn't provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he'll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.

The seeds of Gore's caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal's Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time's Karen Tumulty and The New York Times's Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It's funny—he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal's Love Story, which was Jones's first film. Tumulty followed up, "Love Story was based on you and Tipper?" Gore responded, "Well, that's what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee."

As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. "The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated," Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.

In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore's part. "It's somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news—unknown even to many close friends and aides," wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?" Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. "What's bizarre," he wrote, "if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place."

Tumulty says she was stunned at seeing Gore's remark being turned into a "window onto his soul" in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere: "I'm in the middle of this gigantic media frenzy. It had truly, truly been an offhanded comment by Gore. And it suddenly turns into this big thing that probably continues to dog him for the rest of the campaign."

Caught in the Web

The Love Story distortion set the stage for the "I Invented the Internet" distortion, a devastating piece of propaganda that damaged Gore at the starting gate of his run. On March 9, 1999, CNN's Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview with Gore shortly before he officially announced his candidacy. In answer to a question about why Democrats should support him, Gore spoke about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative"—politico-speak for leadership—"in creating the Internet," he said, before going on to describe other accomplishments. It was true. In the 1970s, the Internet was a limited tool used by the Pentagon and universities for research. As a senator in the 80s, Gore sponsored two bills that turned this government program into an "information superhighway," a term Gore popularized, and made it accessible to all. Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore's leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that "Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."

The press didn't object to Gore's statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN's Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore's remark "a case study … in delusions of grandeur." A few days later the word "invented" entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet; March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he "invented the Internet." Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word "invented" was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore's word of choice. Here's how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: "A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he 'invented' the Internet, didn't help." And Newsday's Elaine Povich ridiculed "Gore's widely mocked assertion that he 'invented' the Internet." (Thanks to the Web site the Daily Howler, the creation of Bob Somerby, a college roommate of Gore's, we have a chronicle of how the Internet story spiraled out of control.)

Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he "was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder." But it was too late—the damage had been done.

The Beat Goes On

As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.

A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."
"It was like they'd been locked in a room, and they were just pumping each other up," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew.

"They just wanted to tear Gore apart," says a major network correspondent on the trail. (Both refute such characterizations of themselves. "Why would reporters [from] major news organizations confer with the competition on such a fiercely competitive story?" asks Connolly.)

Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."

The disparity between her reporting and Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. "Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing," she says, "disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations." (Seelye's and Bruni's then editors declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore's "grubbing for dollars inside a monastery," and "stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can." Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for "the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire." In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, "From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: 'Liar, Liar') to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore's credibility is resonating."

When Lehane and his communications partner, Mark Fabiani, selectively granted access, Connolly, for reasons Gore staffers say are obvious, was rarely favored and experienced it as an attack. "The 'Masters of Disaster,' as [Lehane and Fabiani] like to be called, spent an inordinate amount of time attacking various reporters and pitting journalists against each other and generally trying to steer the subject away from a troubled campaign," Connolly says today. (Lehane had no comment.)

But eventually, Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being "single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids" to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group's endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. "She goes, 'That's all you're going to say?'" recalls Eskew. "And I said, 'Yeah, that's all we're going to say.' And she goes, 'Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?' And then she threatened me, 'Well, if that's the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you'll find out the kind of relationship we're going to have'—something to that effect." ("I never threatened Carter Eskew," says Connolly. "It's possible I pressed him for something more than a 'perfunctory' answer.… It's odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.")

Toxic Coverage

On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:

"I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved."

Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, "I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say." But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn't do—"discovering" Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, "I was the one that started it all," instead of "that was the one that started it all." The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore's visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled "First 'Love Story,' Now Love Canal," she wrote:

The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story" and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Gore went on to brag about holding the "first hearing on that issue" and said "I was the one that started it all."

The story picked up steam. "I was the one that started it all" became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, "Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal." On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore's "delusionary" thinking. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.…' It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron." "It became part of the vocabulary," Matthews says today. "I don't think it had a thunderous impact on the voters." He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.

Seelye would later write a story with John Broder under the headline questions of veracity have long dogged gore and provided "familiar and fairly trivial examples," including his "taking credit for inventing the Internet or being the model for … Love Story." Asked today why those discredited allegations of misstatements were included, Seelye says, "Probably because they were ones that everyone had heard of. We did write that they were 'trivial,' but if that was the case, we should have left them out or debunked them."

Perhaps reporting in this vein was just too gratifying to the press for it to stop. As Time magazine's Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, "You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it's really easy, and it's fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was "a different kind of Republican."

At the time, the only people seeming to notice the media's missteps were journalists at the fringes or out of the mainstream, including Somerby of the Daily Howler, Robert Parry on consortiumnews.com, and Eric Boehlert on Salon, as well as mere citizens who had no outlet but the telephone. These last included the Concord High students, who were trying to correct the record on Love Canal. The footage was reviewed by a teacher, Joanne McGlynn, the day after the initial Love Canal stories ran. McGlynn spotted the discrepancy between Gore's actual words and what was being reported, and phoned the relevant news outlets to alert them. The Times and the Post printed the correction … about a week later. But by that time the story had been echoed widely and was accepted as fact.

Connolly contends that the misquote "did not dramatically change the point he was trying to make" and that "the Love Canal reference was near the end of a story that ran deep inside the paper." (Page A-10.)

At least one reporter who either made or repeated the misquote was not thrilled to have been corrected by high-school students and their teacher. Sometime after the Love Canal stories came out, Hoffman, the high-school senior, went to see Gore speak again at an event in New Hampshire. There she was introduced to one of the reporters who'd gotten it wrong. The reporter, Hoffman said, made it clear her help in fixing the misquote was not appreciated, and said that the article was written very fast, while riding in a van. "It's amazing what one word can do to a person's integrity," says Hoffman today.

Gore responded to episodes like these by distancing himself from the beat reporters, which puzzled them. "Some of these reporters would write ruthlessly unfair pieces about him and then come complain to me in private, 'Gore could've been friendlier to me at that cocktail party,'" recalls Gore speechwriter Eli Attie. To this day, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who spent time traveling with both candidates, wonders why Gore remained "secluded in the front cabin [of the plane]" and didn't engage in chitchat. "Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign," says Kurtz, "and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it's the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention. If Gore had had a lighter touch, he probably could have overcome that."

Running the Gauntlet

One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. "Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president," says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. "They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable." Chris Matthews contends that "the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators," but adds, "The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities."

Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the "pious smarty-pants" and the "amiable idler," and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. "Al Gore is desperate to get chicks," she said in her column. "Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn't stop turning off women, he'll never be president."
"I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow," she wrote in another.

Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush's intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the "bad boys," "rascals," and a "rapscallion." She shared with the world a charged moment between them. "'You're so much more mature now,' I remarked to the Texas Governor. 'So are you,' he replied saucily." And in another column: "You don't often get to see a Presidential candidate bloom right before your eyes."

As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. "Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?" … "He would have been in a suit a month ago." … "He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him." Williams's frequent guest Newsweek's Howard Fineman later chimed in: "I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire."

Maureen Dowd's June 16, 1999, New York Times column.

And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, Seelye wrote, "Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters." The Washington Post's David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he'd do as president. "But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president," wrote Broder. "I almost nodded off." As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that "Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating." In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, "I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction."

The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. "They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions," Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. "Do you think that's presidential behavior?" For the Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. "It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan," he wrote. "Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica."

As Jonathan Alter points out, "Overall, the press was harder on Gore than it was on Bush.… The consequences of [that] in such a close election were terrifying."
Gore couldn't believe his eyes when he read distortions about him printed in the country's most respected newspapers, say those in his inner circle. "It stung to have the political media, the elite political media, buy into this crap," says Roy Neel, his close friend and adviser of 30 years, about the press coverage. "But I don't recall him ever blaming the media for the problems he was having."

Indeed, Gore accepts responsibility for not being able to communicate more clearly with the public. He admits, however, that the tendency of the press to twist his words encumbered his ability to speak freely. "I tried not to let it [affect my behavior]," Gore says. "But if you know that day after day the filter is going to be so distorted, inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of messages that you try and force through the filter. Anything that involves subtlety or involves trusting the reporters in their good sense and sense of fairness in interpretation, you're just not going to take a risk with something that could be easily distorted and used against you.… You're reduced to saying, 'Today, here's the message: reduce pollution,' and not necessarily by XYZ out of fear that it will be, well, 'Today he talked about belching cows!'"

According to Gore, bringing up the Internet again in public was like stepping on a verbal land mine. "If I had tried in the wake of that to put expressions about the Internet in campaign speeches, it would have been difficult," he says. "I did, of course, from time to time. But I remember many occasions where I would say something about the Internet, and as soon as the word 'Internet' came from my lips, the press would be snickering and relishing the mention. Not everybody in the press, but the Zeitgeist was polluted, and it never dissipated, because the stream of pollution coming into it was constant, constant."

The notion that he was prickly or unpleasant to reporters doesn't jibe with what Tipper witnessed. From her viewpoint, he remained gracious with the reporters—even at an event during the campaign, when Maureen Dowd sidled up in the middle of a conversation he was having with two other reporters. "He stood up and got her a chair and said, 'Please, join us.'" After Dowd had written about him "lactating," he agreed to an interview with her, answering questions about his favorite this, his favorite that. According to his staffers, she was a fact of life that would have to be endured.

The Gores, a famously close-knit family, could laugh at the coverage some. They joked around at the nonstop talk about which president you'd want to have a beer with. The Gore's middle daughter, Kristin, pointed out, "Gee, I want the designated driver as my president." But down deep they weren't laughing. "The sighs, the sighs, the sighs," says Gore, of the debate coverage. "Within 18 hours, they had turned perception around to where the entire story was about me sighing. And that's scary. That's scary."

The Comeback

After the election the Gores, heartbroken, traveled in Europe for two months. "We were roadkill," admits Tipper. "It took a long time to pick ourselves up from what happened." Gore grew a beard while he was there. After he stepped back onto U.S. soil, the press began knocking him around again for his latest "re-invention." Ceci Connolly, who had become a contributor on Fox News in 2000, said, "Looks like he's ready to go, but go where? Back to Europe with his backpack?" Later, in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Germond wrote, "He should have shed the beard before coming back. Instead, he continues to wear it in what is being interpreted as a signal of another 'new' Gore."

Over the course of Bush's early months in office, the Gores watched in profound disappointment as Bush rolled back many important environmental regulations of the Clinton-Gore years. But, as Karenna says, "my father set the tone for our whole family in not dwelling. The way he publicly put his weight behind George Bush in the beginning, did not fan the flames, did not cause division—and there was every opportunity to do that—sent a very strong message to all of us to not be dragged down into anger and sadness about it but just to try to make the best of it." After September 11, Gore stood by Bush, saying, "George Bush is my commander in chief."

By September 2002, the country was on the march to war. Against the advice of some confidants, who suggested he might turn out to be on the wrong side of history, Gore spoke out against the invasion—fervently. On September 23, 2002, he articulated all the dangers that have now come to pass. The Washington Post's Michael Kelly wrote about the speech, "It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible." (Kelly was killed on April 3, 2003, in Iraq when his Humvee crashed while trying to evade enemy fire.) Fineman didn't hold back in describing how the "Beltway/Broadway clan" now regarded Gore: "as an annoying and ungracious bore who should have the decency to get lost."

In order to diversify and open up the messages coming out of the news media, Gore helped launch Current TV, an alternative channel that features viewer-generated content, thereby providing a dialogue with the medium. He also taught journalism, began working with Apple, and co-founded a business called Generation Investment Management. And, with the encouragement of Tipper, he dusted off the global-warming slide show in the attic of their Arlington, Virginia, home, the one that he had been delivering for 25 years to audiences as small as 10 and as large as 10,000. The first time he showed it, at Middle Tennessee State University, the slides were in backward and upside down. It would be turned into An Inconvenient Truth, win an Oscar, and help wake up the world to a global crisis.

Over the years since 2000, some journalists have attempted to reach out to the Gores. At a pro-choice event a few years ago, Time's Karen Tumulty gave Tipper her card and asked her if she would ever want to talk. "When I saw her that night, she looked as though a gigantic weight had been lifted," recalls Tumulty, who'd recently seen the couple agonizing over Gore's political future. At the East Coast premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, the Gores bumped into Fineman, who recalls, "I said to [Gore], on a personal level, I want you to know that I admire you for the way you have stayed in the game and taken the mess of a few years ago and turned it around and become such a leader in this debate." At the time, Tipper just said thanks and moved on, thinking to herself, Too little, too late, buddy. In retrospect, she appreciates the gesture.

Katharine Seelye, who still writes about national politics for The New York Times, has had time to reflect on her work: "I'm sure there were times my phrasing could have been better—you're doing this on the fly. Sometimes you're just looking for a different way to describe something that you have to write about over and over again," she says. "But I think overall my coverage was tough-minded. A presidential campaign is for the most important, hardest job in the world. Shouldn't the coverage be tough?" Connolly, still a staff writer at the Post but on a leave of absence, maintains that "the Washington Post political team, myself and a dozen other journalists, approached the Gore campaign no differently than any other—with aggressive, thorough, objective reporting."

As for Dowd, a Democratic operative recalls running into her and having an argument with her about her columns on the 2000 debates, in which, he felt, she devoted as much attention to Gore's sighing as she did to Bush's not knowing that Social Security was a federal program. "I basically said, 'How could you equate the two?'" he recalls. "'How could Gore's personal tics deserve as many column inches as the other guy being an idiot?' And her defense was 'Well, I voted for Gore.' I thought, Well, that's great. But hundreds of thousands of people who read your column probably didn't." (A source close to Dowd says that she does not write a partisan column, keeps her votes private, and certainly would not have disclosed that information to a political aide.)

Thanks to his newfound status, speculation about Gore's entering the presidential race has refused to die down. Alas, he's not going to announce his candidacy in the last paragraphs of a Vanity Fair article. "Modern politics seems to require and reward some capacities that I don't think I have in abundance," says Gore, "such as a tolerance for … spin rather than an honest discussion of substance.… Apparently, it comes easily for some people, but not for me."

Tipper says he has made zero moves that would suggest a run for the presidency, but adds that if he turned to her one night and said he had to run, she'd get on board, and they'd discuss how to approach it this time around, given what they've learned.
The reporters and opinion-makers have eagerly chewed over the possibility. After all, he's now a star. In step with the new enthusiasm for Gore, Dowd, in a February 2007 column, described him as "a man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism, and Iraq," a sentiment echoed by many. The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: "But if he ran, would he revert to the 'old Gore'?" Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards's haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?

Newsweek: Past as Prelude

The economy's in trouble, Gore is stirring and in Florida the ghosts of 2000 are returning to battle anew.

In Newsweek, Howard Fineman writes:

Cathy Dubin was in her Lexus, visiting polling places in Palm Beach County last Nov. 7, when her mobile phone rang. As director of the county Democratic Party, she was on the lookout for Election Day crises, and now her husband was calling--minutes after the polls opened--to report from their own precinct. "You've got a major problem here," he told her. "People can't figure out the ballot." The world soon came to know what he was talking about: the inscrutable "butterfly ballot," which helped make George Walker Bush president.

These days Dubin is on a new mission: to stage a giant rally in West Palm on the first anniversary of Election Day. In a venue usually played by the likes of Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Sting, she hopes to draw 6,000 Democrats eager to take vengeance on one of the men they blame for Bush's victory, his younger brother Gov. John Ellis (Jeb) Bush. Sen. Joe Lieberman will headline the event. ("He's a rock star down here," says Dubin.) The local draw is Janet Reno, the Democrat most likely to win the right to challenge Jeb in what is sure to be a nasty prelude to the 2004 presidential race. "We're angry, but we are also excited," says Dubin, "because we are going to channel our anger into beating Bushes."

A new political season has begun, and it's shaping up as a War of Settling Scores, with all the old familiar places, faces and themes. Democrats and the press are revisiting the Florida count, recount and Supreme Court decision sealing Bush's victory. Al Gore has grown a beard, and is heading to Iowa to say "I told you so" as the economy sinks. Bush, his standing still enfeebled by the manner in which he was elected, again has to demonstrate that he is Up to It, this time by leading the country out of an increasingly gloomy economy and helping his "little brother" win re-election. Even Bill Clinton is back. Reno's inner circle has discussed inviting him to campaign for her if she can win the gubernatorial nomination. And, as improbable as it seems (there is no love lost between them), Clinton is eager to do so.

The anniversary of the Florida fiasco will find the survivor--Bush--in the swamp of a weak economy. Even before he was elected, his aides foresaw the end of the Long Boom, and tried to warn the public so Bush would not be blamed. But while voters may thank him for their $600 tax rebates, they also may blame him--fairly or unfairly--for the collapse of the stock market, the shrinkage of their 401(k)s or, worse, the loss of their jobs. White House aides rightly note that the so-called misery index--the combined inflation and unemployment rate--is far lower than in past recessions. But doubts about Bush's legitimacy will resurface, Democrats contend, if he can't handle this crisis now. "Because of how Bush got there, the risks of failure are always going to be greater," says Democratic consultant Bob Shrum.

In this new-yet-old cold war, Florida is the DMZ, a rubble-strewn free-fire zone neither party can afford to lose. This week President Bush choppers in for two days with Jeb (his fifth trip there since March 12). The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, will meet in Miami, its first-ever fall conclave outside Washington. Cities such as Tampa, polltakers say, are teeming with "persuadables," the fickle voters of the future. "Florida was a big Republican state," says White House strategist Matthew Dowd. "Now it's the biggest swing state of all."

And Bush's victory there was dicier than we knew, but not for the reasons assumed. Various news outlets have combed through the state's ballot wreckage (another such effort is due next week) and found no conclusive evidence that the count was wrong. But the real story of Florida was in Washington, according to a new book out this week by NEWSWEEK's David A. Kaplan.

In "The Accidental President," he unearths new details about backroom maneuvering and bitterness within the U.S. Supreme Court, which last Dec. 12 ruled that the Florida recount was unconstitutional, effectively declaring Bush the winner. Kaplan reports that Justice David Souter thought he had nearly persuaded Justice Anthony Kennedy to join the "moderate" bloc, which would have reversed the court's ruling and perhaps thrown the election into Congress. "One more day," Souter lamented afterward. And, in an unusual display, Justice Stephen Breyer (in front of a delegation of Russian judges) castigated the conservatives' ruling as an "indefensible" trampling of the people's will.

Most voters have put Florida 2000 out of their minds, but not hard-core Democrats, who blame the high court and the Bush family for Gore's loss. "People say I should stop talking about it," says DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. "But I'll tell you what: our people are still mad." The Florida fiasco shows the need for uniform national election rules, he says. Until Bush agrees, McAuliffe says, he'll mouth off. But other Democrats worry that the jihad-like language will distract the party from the task of assembling a new governing agenda. "Payback is not a platform," says one of the party's top strategists.

But it can be rocket fuel in a campaign, and may be the juice that relaunches Gore. Party insiders were dubious about him in 2000, but went along because he was veep. Now most of them--from the trial lawyers to the contribution bundlers, from Big Labor bosses to table hosts at Jefferson-Jackson dinners--think he should step aside.

That's not what most rank-and-file Democrats seem to think. They believe he was screwed--an experience with which they can identify. To them he is a celebrity victim. And after months in self-imposed exile, Gore is ready to return as the sadder but wiser man who still thinks he knows the Way--and who can finally do what most strategists think he didn't do enough of last year: brag about the Clinton-Gore economy.

For now, he's steering clear of Florida and trying to fly below radar. That is no longer possible. Gore's coming-out party is Sept. 28 at a "Jeff-Jack" dinner in Iowa, an event he couldn't avoid because he owed state leaders for sticking with him against Bill Bradley in the 2000 caucuses. Gore had penciled in other dates, including a dinner in New Hampshire and the West Palm rally, but news of the Iowa event created such a frenzy that his handlers advised him to back off. Still, McAuliffe persuaded Gore to do three DNC fund-raisers, and sources say the former veep is likely to do a fourth--in Florida.

The Florida circle can't be unbroken until Clinton comes back. He'd love to show Democrats--and Gore--how to win there. In 1992 he insisted the ticket could win the state, and was convinced it lost only because handlers directed last-minute time and money elsewhere. Clinton-Gore won it in 1996. In 2000 the president was apoplectic at Gore's failure to lock it up early. On election night Clinton homed in on Florida, according to Kaplan's account. "Why is it so f---ing close?" he asked. It was a good question then, and it has been haunting politics, in Florida and Washington, ever since.

Newsweek: How History Will View the Court

Final Ruling: The legal academy may still be blasting Bush v. Gore, but fears that the court would forfeit the public trust were overblown.

In Newsweek:

Last January, a month after the supreme court handed down its hugely controversial decision in Bush v. Gore--ending the month-old election stalemate and turning the White House over to George W. Bush--legal scholars across the country joined in protest. In a full-page ad in The New York Times, 554 law professors accused the high court of "acting as political proponents" for Bush, and "taking power from the voters." Worse, the ad scolded, "the Supreme Court has tarnished its own legitimacy."

That criticism has yet to subside. Some nine months into the Bush presidency, the debate over the ruling among legal scholars goes on. Many of the country's most respected legal minds have weighed in on Bush v. Gore. The critics contend the court should never have taken the case in the first place. It was a matter of state law, and should be left to state courts, as is the tradition, they argue. The majority's claim that the Florida State Supreme Court's recount procedures violated the Constitution's equal-protection clause is both novel and out of whack with conservative doctrine, they add. And they smirk at the justices' suggestion that their legal analysis should not carry the power of precedent.

The attacks are framed in unusually unflattering terms. Here's a sample. Yale Law School's Bruce Ackerman: "A blatantly partisan act, without any legal basis whatsoever." Harvard's Alan Dershowitz: "The single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history." American University's Jamin Raskin: "Bandits in black robes."

But do such judgments reflect the merits of the ruling itself, or the professors' own ideological bias? It's hardly a secret that legal academia is a liberal bastion. Conservatives generally defend the result. There are dissenters, but the most forceful ones don't want their names in the newspaper. In the judgment of one such conservative legal thinker, the court's equal-protection argument was "laughable," and, he adds: "I think history will judge the decision harshly." He and many others have suggested that the court's conservatives would have handed down a far different ruling if Bush had been the one demanding a manual recount, and Gore had been demanding that it be stopped. In a recent book, U.S. court of appeals Judge Richard Posner, a highly respected Reagan appointee with liberal views on some issues, was kinder to the justices. He argued that the decision was poorly reasoned and badly written--but in the end fundamentally right, a "kind of rough justice" that was necessary to avert a political crisis threatened by the Florida court, which had "butchered" Florida's election laws and behaved like a "banana republic" in rigging an unreliable process for the recount.

As the academic establishment tells it, Bush v. Gore left the Supreme Court practically in ruins, and caused Americans to lose faith in the court's ability to put the law above politics. But is that true? Do Americans hold the court in lower esteem than they did a year ago? No.

Historically, Americans have ranked the court higher than Congress and the president in confidence ratings, and those ratings have not diminished in the months since the decision. In a Gallup poll, for instance, 49 percent of those surveyed expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the court immediately after the election ruling; 50 percent said so this June. That's a smidgen higher than the court's 47 percent approval rate in June 2000, long before the big controversy. It's hardly a surprise that the court is less popular among Democrats than before, and more popular with Republicans. Eighty-eight percent of Bush voters and only 19 percent of Gore voters polled by NEWSWEEK last December thought the decision was fair.

The deeper question is how the court will look in the cold, impartial eyes of history. A hard question to answer, especially since those eyes are neither cold nor impartial. Historians, like law professors, are often influenced by their own political world views. What's more, Bush himself may influence how future scholars judge Bush v. Gore. If Bush is ultimately considered a successful president, historians may come to look kindly on the court decision that put him in the White House. And vice versa.

No matter what history decides, the ongoing dispute has certainly raised the high court's profile in the minds of the public. The television networks think Americans are just dying to know what really goes on behind that crimson curtain. Not one, but two Supreme Court dramas will debut on TV in January. One, on ABC, stars Sally Field as a liberal justice. The other, on CBS, stars James Garner as the chief justice. Law professors will argue about the fate of the court for years to come. But for Hollywood, at least, the verdict is in.

Newsweek: Gore's Secret Plan: The Brockovich Gambit

Al Gore reportedly considered asking Erin Brockovich's help in the 2000 Florida election

In Newsweek, David A. Kaplan writes:

Early on, much more than possible recounts, the issue of the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County consumed the Gore campaign. If a lawsuit went his way, it would eliminate George W. Bush's lead. But how could Gore operatives efficiently collect enough horror stories to convince a judge that the ballot confused enough voters to turn the election?

At 12:30 a.m. on the Friday after Election Day, the phone rang in the Tallahassee hotel room of Ron Klain, a top Gore aide. It was Al Gore, calling from Washington, D.C. Gore had not only been thinking about the problem, but he'd done something about it. He'd called Erin Brockovich. Not Julia Roberts, who played Erin Brockovich in the movie about a town's legal fight with a polluter--but the real Erin Brockovich. The vice president thought "she should come to Florida and lead our efforts to collect affidavits." Gore had figured it all out. "What Erin Brockovich's good at is going to real people and getting them to tell their stories," he told Klain. "That's her specialty."

Klain was tired, "really tired." But you can't exactly put off the vice president. "Sounds fine to me, it's great," Klain said to Gore.

"Well, Michael Whouley [Gore's chief political strategist] thinks that Erin Brockovich is a really bad idea. What do you think?"

"I don't know. This really isn't my part of it. Michael's down there running the political operation. If Michael thinks it, I'm sure it's right. I'm up here trying to deal, like, with Tallahassee."

"Well, I think Erin Brockovich would be great."

The call ended. Klain tried to go back to sleep, bemused by the conversation. Barely two days into the post election morass, and Gore was recruiting somebody he'd heard about in a movie. "Bring in a camel with three heads," Klain said later. "It just seemed like the whole thing's a huge menagerie at this point. Erin Brockovich--of course!"

Twenty minutes later the phone rang. It was Gore again. "I tried to call Bill [Daley, the campaign chairman], but his phone's off the hook and his cell's turned off."

"Silly me," thought Klain. "I'd kept mine on."

"I really want to go forward with this Erin Brockovich thing. Tell Bill in the morning we're going to do Brockovich."

It was the last Klain heard of it. Brockovich was not spotted in Florida during the 37 days.

Newsweek: A Bush Feeler: Sun, Surf and Skepticism

George W. Bush attempts to recruit the help of Jack Danforth in the 2000 election

In Newsweek, David A. Kaplan writes:

Who would lead the legal effort for George W. Bush? The campaign immediately thought of a man who combined political smarts and moral rectitude--Jack Danforth, the retired GOP senator and Episcopal priest.

Two days after Election night, Danforth and his wife, Sally, were on their way to the Caribbean. Enjoying Margaritas by the turquoise sea in Cancun, the Danforths expected the week to themselves, far from the electoral struggle of friends back home. But before they finished a second drink at La Maroma, a hostess told Danforth he had a call. It was Don Evans, the Bush campaign chairman. "We want you to represent us in a federal challenge to the constitutionality of the manual recount in Florida," Evans said.

Danforth had concerns about a strategy that revolved around federal court, a venue that Republicans had been sniping about for decades. But it wasn't some philosophical inconsistency that worried him--that his party would be seeking salvation from the one branch of government it had learned to despise. No, he was afraid of losing.

"Don, I have three questions," Danforth told Evans. "Is there a chance of us prevailing? If not, what will this do to the reputation of Governor Bush? And what about logistics? I don't even have a coat and tie down here." So weak did Danforth consider any federal claim that any lawyer who filed it was jeopardizing his credibility.

The next morning, Evans called back and said, "We've thought about it and we want you to do this." If there were misgivings, they belonged to Danforth. As much as he might've liked to re-enter the political game, he couldn't imagine how a recount could automatically be unconstitutional.

The Bush campaign arranged to send a private plane to take Danforth to Tallahassee. Danforth checked out of the hotel, though he remained uneasy. He decided he needed to talk to Bush himself. In his next call with Evans--this time with the leader of Bush's team, Jim Baker, on the line as well--Danforth said so.

"Well, you're the lawyer," Baker agreed.

Danforth assumed they'd put him right through. The phone rang, but it was Evans again. "Jack," he said, "it sounds like your heart's not in this. Maybe it's best for you not to do it. Have a nice vacation."

The 'Accidental President'

"The vote in Bush v. Gore was, like all decisions at the High Court, arrived at in secret conference. But this one determined who would be president. We didn't know just how close it was--until now."

Excerpt from David A. Kaplan's book, The 'Accidental President,' as it appeared in the September 17, 2001 edition of Newsweek. This edition was on the newsstands on the morning of September 11, 2001 (taken off the newsstands and replaced two days later by a special edition covering the events of September 11, 2001):

As both campaigns and the entire country awaited the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore, the vice president couldn't sit still. The vote would decide who'd win Election 2000. The process kept starting and stopping. Now, Gore needed to vent his emotions, with whatever degree of optimism he could muster.

So on Tuesday afternoon, December 12, Gore decided to write an Op-Ed for The New York Times, on the assumption the Court would rule in his favor. "As I write this," the piece began, "I do not know what the Supreme Court will decide." Gore repeated the themes of the five-week post-election struggle: count all the votes "so that the will of the people" was honored; work "for the agenda that Senator [Joe] Lieberman and I put forward in the campaign," which "50 million Americans" supported; and appreciate that history and the "integrity" of the national government demanded he fight on after Election Day.

Gore acknowledged that "no single institution had been capable of solving" the electoral standoff and that this resulted in "continued uncertainty." But the greater good, he contended, was being served. Invoking Lincoln and Jefferson, he mused on the "consent of the governed" and the "wellspring of democracy." Jefferson had "justified revolution" because the people of the colonies had not given their consent. How could the U.S. Supreme Court justices "claim for themselves" the right to determine the presidency? It was up to the people. He concluded by quoting Lincoln's First Inaugural, delivered a month before Fort Sumter: "Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?"

It was only a draft, and Gore might've toned it down before publication, given its intimations of revolution and allusions to the Civil War. But it was strongly worded, all the more so as the justices had Bush v. Gore in front of them. The vice president phoned Walter Dellinger, a former solicitor general under Bill Clinton, for counsel. "I've spent the last few hours writing an Op-Ed for tomorrow's Times," Gore told him. "I want your judgment on whether I ought to run this or not."

Dellinger liked it, suggested some changes that Gore punched into his laptop, and they were done. Gore said he would send it to Bill Daley, the campaign chairman, for one last look. "Is there anything else I need to think about?" he asked Dellinger.

"As a lawyer, I wouldn't write an Op-Ed on a case I'd argued that was pending. But, then, you're not the lawyer. You're the client, so there's no rule about keeping silent." Dellinger then added, "But still, you should be thinking about whether running this would provoke the Court." After all, it was Gore who'd told aides after the recounts were halted over the weekend that no one in the campaign should "trash" the Court. Might this Op-Ed be regarded as the velvet-gloved equivalent?

"O.K., let me think about it."

Gore paused for only seconds, then made up his mind. He chuckled. Said the vice president of the United States about the Supreme Court: "----'em."

The few people in Goreworld who heard about his remark had the identical reaction: if he had only shown that kind of animation during the campaign, he wouldn't have been in the position of having to make the remark.

The Op-Ed never ran. Before the Times closed the piece, it became moot. At 10 p.m. on December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling that made George W. Bush the president-elect.

That wrenching decision pitted the Court's five conservatives against its four liberals, producing vitriolic opinions not seen in a generation, in a case many thought the Court should not have taken in the first place because state elections weren't federal judicial matters. Yet within weeks of Bush v. Gore, many of the justices gave speeches trying to defuse the controversy. All was well at the High Court, they said; everybody had moved on. Given the public record, that seemed plausible. And because the Court's "conference"--where the Supremes, without clerks or anyone else, debate cases and render their votes--is ultra-secret, it's hard to pierce the judicial veil.

But behind the scenes, in remarkable post-decision moments previously unreported, the justices were stewing. In particular, the dissenters--Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens--couldn't believe what their conservative brethren had wrought. How could the conservative Court majority decide to step into a presidential election, all the more so using the doctrinal excuse of "equal protection"? Equal protection? That's the constitutional rationale the liberals had used for a generation to expand rights, and the conservatives despised it. But now the conservatives were embracing the doctrine, claiming that different recount standards in Florida counties amounted to unequal protection? The whole thing smelled bad.

When the justices' counterparts on the Russian Constitutional Court came to town for a private gathering, the American justices let slip the recriminations. Those scenes shed light on what transpired inside the High Court as the justices determined who'd be the next president--and on the raw emotional fallout from the fateful decision.

Given the hard feelings, the amazing aspect of Bush v. Gore is that it just might've gone the other way. Justice Anthony Kennedy--the key swing vote, the man the Court's law clerks once dubbed "Flipper" for his equivocations--had wavered, enough that Souter thought until the very end that he'd get him. If Kennedy could be flipped, the 5-to-4 ruling for Bush would become a 5-to-4 win for Gore. They'd find an equal-protection violation, send the case back to the Florida justices to fix standards and administer the best recount they could under the circumstances and before December 18, and then leave it to the political branches--the Florida Legislature and, if need be, the U.S. Congress--to settle for good. (The political composition of Congress and the Legislature suggests Bush probably would've won in the end anyway.) But the High Court's decision short-circuited the process. The vote was close. But we never knew--until now--just how close.

A month after the decision, Souter met at the Court with a group of prep-school students from Choate. Souter was put on the Court in 1990 by Bush's father, advertised as a "home run" for such constitutional crusades as overturning Roe v. Wade. Instead, Souter turned out to be a non-doctrinaire New Englander who typically sided with the liberal justices. It didn't make him a liberal--this was a passionately modest man in matters of law as well as life--as much as it reflected how far the rest of the Court had yawed starboard. Souter told the Choate students how frustrated he was that he couldn't broker a deal to bring in one more justice--Kennedy being the obvious candidate. Souter explained that he had put together a coalition back in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the landmark abortion case in which the Court declined by a 5-to-4 vote to toss out Roe; Souter, along with Kennedy and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, took the unusual gesture of writing a joint opinion for the majority in that case.

If he'd had "one more day--one more day," Souter now told the Choate students, he believed he would have prevailed. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, had long ago become part of the Dark Side. O'Connor appeared beyond compromise. But Kennedy seemed within reach. Just give me 24 more hours on the clock, Souter thought. While a political resolution to the election--in the Florida Legislature or in the Congress--might not be quick and might be a brawl, Souter argued that the nation would still accept it. "It should be a political branch that issues political decisions," he said to the students. Kennedy, though, wouldn't flip. He thought the trauma of more recounts, more fighting--more politics--was too much for the country to endure. (Souter and Kennedy, as well as the other justices, declined to be interviewed on the record.)

Mild-mannered by nature, Kennedy had a grandiose view of his role. In a memorable profile of the justice in California Lawyer magazine back in 1992, Kennedy had agreed to let the writer into chambers just before going into the courtroom to announce a major ruling. "Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own towline," Kennedy ruminated to his listener. Then the justice self-consciously asked for solitude. "I need to brood," Kennedy said. "I generally brood, as all of us do on the bench, just before we go on." The difference was that most of them didn't do it on cue.

The margin of victory for George W. Bush wasn't 154, 165, 193 or 204 votes (depending on which numbers you believe from the abbreviated recounts). Nor is the operative margin Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's initial number of 930. The sands of history will show Bush won by a single vote, cast in a 5-to-4 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court. The vote was Tony Kennedy's. One justice had picked the president.

In a Virginia hotel, near the makeshift Bush transition office, Karl Rove--the campaign's political guru--was watching MSNBC when the Court ruling was announced. He called Bush in Texas; the governor was watching CNN, which took longer to decipher the opinions. "This is good news," Rove told Bush. "This is great news."

"No, no, this is bad news," Bush replied. Rove was the first person Bush talked to as the verdict came in--Bush had no sense initially he'd just been declared the winner by the stroke of the Court's pen. It was very confusing. "Where are you now?" he asked Rove.

"In the McLean Hilton--standing in my pajamas."

"Well, I'm in my pajamas, too," said the new president-elect.

Rove laughed at the vision of them both, at this historic moment, in their PJs. Soon enough, Bush talked to his field general, Jim Baker, who talked to Ted Olson and the other lawyers on the team. Within half an hour, Bush was convinced Gore had finally run out of tricks.

A month later, the animosities within the Court finally spilled over at a gathering inside the marble temple. It was a meeting known only to the participants, as well as a few translators and guests. Yet, in illuminating how Bush v. Gore came to be, it was the seminal event. It happened in January as Inauguration Day approached--after the 37 days of Florida, but while emotions were still raging. It was the time when the justices let their guards down, without knowing they were providing an X-ray into their hearts.

The Americans were playing host to special visitors from Russia. Their guests were six judges, all part of that country's decade-long experiment with freedom after Communism. It was the fifth gathering between the judges and their counterparts at the Supreme Court--an attempt by the most powerful tribunal in the world to impart some of its wisdom to a nascent system trying to figure out how constitutional law really worked in a democracy. It was by no means obvious. To outsiders, the idea that unelected judges who served for life could ultimately dictate the actions of the other two branches of American government, both popularly elected, was nothing short of unbelievable.

These were always collegial meetings inside the Supreme Court. This time--over the course of two days, January 9 and 10--seven American justices participated, everyone but Souter and Thomas. The justices from the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation--Yuri Rudkin, Nikolai Seleznev, Oleg Tyunov, and Gennady Zhilin--were joined by judges from the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Dagestan and the Constitutional Supervision Committee of the Republic of Northern Ossetia-Alania. They all met in the Court's private ceremonial conference rooms: for an informal reception, the blue-motif West Conference Room; for hours of discussions about law and American heritage, the rose-motif East Conference Room, with a portrait of the legendary 19th-century chief justice John Marshall above the fireplace.

But this year, the discussions weren't about general topics such as due process or free expression or separation of powers. Some of the Russians wanted to know how Bush v. Gore had come to pass--how it was that somebody other than the electorate decided who ran the government. That was the kind of thing that gave Communism a bad name. "In our country," a Russian justice said, bemused, "we wouldn't let judges pick the president." The justice added that he knew that, in various nations, judges were in the pocket of executive officials--he just didn't know that was so in the United States. It was a supremely ironic moment.

Bush v. Gore was the elephant in the room--the ruling was on the minds of the Russians, but would it be rude to raise it? Once one of them did, it elicited an extraordinary exchange, played out spontaneously and viscerally among the American justices, according to people in the room. It could have been a partial replay of the Court conference itself in Bush v. Gore.

Justices don't discuss their decisions with others. That's because their views are supposed to be within the four corners of their written opinions. A good legal opinion isn't supposed to need further explanation. Memorialized in the law books, a Court opinion spoke for itself to future generations. But Bush v. Gore was so lean in its analysis, so unconvincing in its reasoning, that it led all manner of observers to wonder just where the Court had been coming from. Maybe that's why some of the justices so readily engaged their guests.

Stephen Breyer, one of the dissenters and a Clinton appointee, was angry and launched into an attack on the decision, right in front of his colleagues. It was "the most outrageous, indefensible thing" the Court had ever done, he told the visiting justices. "We all agree to disagree, but this is different." Breyer was defiant, brimming with confidence he'd been right in his dissent. "However awkward or difficult" it might've been for Congress to resolve the presidency, Breyer had written, "Congress, being a political body, expresses the people's will far more accurately than does an unelected Court. And the people's will is what elections are about." To have judges do it instead--as the country learned in the Hayes-Tilden presidential stalemate of 1876--not only failed to legitimize the outcome, but stained the judiciary. That was "a self-inflicted wound" harming "not just the Court, but the nation."

In contrast to Breyer, Ginsburg--Clinton's other appointee--was more baffled than annoyed, attempting to rationalize the legitimacy of the ruling that so ripped away her confidence in the neutrality of the Court. "Are we so highly political, after all?" she said. "We've surely done other things, too, that were activist, but here we're applying the Equal Protection Clause in a way that would de-legitimize virtually every election in American history."

"I'm so tired," offered Justice John Paul Stevens. "I am just so exhausted." His weariness may have reflected the fact that he was the oldest member of the Court at 80--or that he'd been fighting these battles from the left for 24 years, and the number he won was decreasing.

O'Connor talked pedantically about the Electoral College, which, of course, had nothing to do with the Russians' curiosity. Rehnquist and Scalia--the intellectual firebrands on the Court's right flank--said almost nothing, leaving it up to a floundering Kennedy to try to explain a 5-to-4 ruling in which he was the decisive vote, the justice who gave the presidency to Bush. The virtual silence of Rehnquist and Scalia led some in the room to wonder if the two justices were basically admitting their ruling was intellectually insupportable, all the more in a setting where there might be give-and-take. Maybe they didn't think this was the right forum or audience in which to engage a debate. In any event, Kennedy was left holding the bag.

"Sometimes you have to be responsible and step up to the plate," Kennedy told the Russians. "You have to take responsibility." He prized order and stability. Chaos was the enemy. This was vintage Kennedy, who loved to thump his chest about the burden of it all. For example, back in the controversial 1989 decision that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment, Kennedy joined the 5-to-4 majority, but dramatized his discomfort. "This case, like others before us from time to time, exacts its personal toll," he wrote. "The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like."

Everything Kennedy did or thought seemed to him to carry great weight. It had to--he was a justice of the Supreme Court. It was as if Kennedy kept telling himself, and us, that--but for him and his role--the Republic might topple. In Bush v. Gore, that meant entering the breach to save the Union from an electoral muddle that could go on and on. The equal-protection stuff? That was the best he could come up with on short notice. It was apparently no big deal that there was another branch of the government right across the street--democratically elected, politically accountable, and specifically established by the Constitution, as well as by federal statute, to finally determine a disputed presidential election. "Congress" wasn't even mentioned in the opinions by the Court's conservatives. Congress was the appropriate, co-equal branch not because it was wisest, but because it was legitimate.

What was Kennedy's explanation for becoming the deus ex machina? It was Bush and Gore who should be blamed for bringing their problems to the Court. "When contending parties invoke the process of the courts," he wrote, "it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront." But that was theatrical nonsense. The justices refused to hear 99 percent of the appeals they were asked to take. Since 1925, their discretion was unbridled--they could decline to take a case because it failed to raise significant issues, because the questions involved were purely state affairs, because they'd decided a similar appeal in recent years, or for no reason at all. Accepting jurisdiction in the presidential election of 2000 showed not respect for the rule of law, but the hubris of kings. Any imminent constitutional "crisis" was only in the imaginations of the justices.

Nobody "forced" Kennedy or four of his brethren to hear Bush v. Gore. In the very first instance, they had to choose who chose--whether the Court or Congress was the proper branch to settle the presidential dispute. The justices chose themselves.

Newsweek Magazine: September 13, 2001

A list of articles in the September 13, 2001 edition of Newsweek, a special edition that hit the newsstands on September 13, 2001, removing the previous special edition excerpting the book, The 'Accidental President,' that revisited the controversial election of 2000:

'I Saw Things No One Should Ever See': These are dispatches from the front. Schoolteachers and firefighters, parents and police, trauma surgeons and tourists--they all struggled to explain the inexplicable. Here are their voices., September 13, 2001

'We've Hit the Targets': That message, allegedly sent by Osama bin Laden's men, makes him suspect No. 1. Can he be stopped at last?, September 13, 2001

A New Date of Infamy: In the skies and across the nation, the worst terrorist strike in U.S. history is a story of horror, heroes and the resolve not to give in to killers.(United Airlines Flight 93 passengers fight back, Sept 11, 2001 terrorism), September 13, 2001

A President Faces the Test Of a Lifetime: When the news broke, the Secret Service moved Bush deep into the interior, but by nightfall he'd returned to his besieged capital. The journey ahead of him--to reassure the nation and respond to an act of war--will be long and difficult, too., September 13, 2001

America, Unchanged: It's hard to imagine ever caring again about trivial or pedestrian concerns. But here's why we should try., September 13, 2001

Our Worst Nightmare.(September 11, 2001 attacks)(Brief Article), September 13, 2001

The Attack: How It Happened.(Sept 11, 2001)(Brief Article)(Illustration), September 13, 2001

The Toll On Our Psyche: By striking at the icons of America's military might and economic strength, the terrorists aimed to deeply shake the way the nation thinks of itself.(Sept. 11, 2001), September 13, 2001

The War On Terror Goes Global: America alone cannot triumph in the fight against terrorism. It needs the help of freedom-loving nations everywhere. This is their struggle, too., September 13, 2001

Justices Defend Handling of Florida Election Case

CNN reports:

U.S. Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas told a congressional panel Thursday that it was the court's responsibility to decide last year's presidential election dispute in Florida.

The court's 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore December 12 halted a Florida recount sought by Democrat Al Gore and in effect handed the presidency to Republican George W. Bush.

The justices testified at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the court's budget.

Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-New York) asked the justices about the controversial ruling, saying the court "went and broke my heart by getting involved in a political decision."

Kennedy said the court is the only branch of government that must give reasons for its actions.

"Justice Thomas and I and our colleagues will be judged not by what we say after the fact in order to embellish our opinions or detract from what some of our collegues say, we will be judged by what we put in our appellate reports. That's the dynamic of the law," Kennedy said.

He said the court's power and prestige are built on trust.

"My colleagues and I want to be the most trusted people in America," Kennedy said. "How do you instill that trust? Over time you build up a deposit, a reservoir, a storehouse of trust. When we make a difficult decision in many areas -- and this was not the most difficult decision the court has made -- for many of us, you draw down on that capital of trust."

Kennedy pointed out that the justices did not file the lawsuit that brought the dispute to court.

"It involved a constitutional issue of the gravest importance decided 4-3 by a state court on a federal issue that it was our responsibility to take the case," Kennedy said. "Sometimes it is easy, so it seems, to enhance your prestige by not exercising your responsibility, but that's not been the tradition of our court."

He said that seven justices agreed that allowing manual recounts only in selected Florida counties violated the Constitution's equal protection clause, but they disagreed on the remedy. The decision blocked a statewide hand count of ballots because the tally could not have been finished in time for Florida to meet the deadline for selecting electors to the Electoral College.

Kennedy said disagreements among the justices are expected in the difficult questions the court often hears.

"In the European Court of Justice, there are no dissents and the European judges say, 'How can you do this, how can you have a system where you criticize each other? Isn't this bad for the institution?' We say no, it's good for the institution. We want to make it clear by our dynamic and our discipline and our tradition and by our dissenting opinions and by reasons that the issues we decide are very difficult ones."

Thomas said he would have preferred not to have gotten involved in the case, and that if he had wanted to be in politics, he knew where to go.

"If there was a way, and I only speak for myself, to have avoided getting involved in that very difficult decision and simultaneously living up to my oath, I would have done it," Thomas said.

Thomas and Kennedy also discussed plans to update the court's computer systems and replace the electrical, air conditioning and other systems in the Supreme Court building, which has not been remodeled in 65 years.