Jim Lehrer

by From Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates

  What the Times and others did was confirm what my family and friends already knew: I do not handle criticism well.

  Bottom line, the Gore people eventually got some of what they wanted. But not before I spent a full day in real hell.

  THAT POST-WINSTON-SALEM New York Times story came out the day of the third presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis. I had spent time—too much, in retrospect—dealing with it in the days before, counseling with NewsHour folks, talking to the reporter, anguishing with Kate and our daughter Jamie, who was with us in St. Louis.

  But much more important on the hell scale for me, the commission and candidates had agreed on a town hall process that was drastically different from the 1996 event in San Diego.

  This time, the moderator would be in charge of it all.

  I would be given the questions in advance and select which ones to use. I would then brief representatives of the candidates on the method I used for selecting “the questions at random while assuring that questions are reasonably well balanced in terms of addressing a wide range of issues of major public interest facing the United States and the world,” according to the rules agreed to by each candidate.

  I met with the 140 citizen-questioners, gave them a briefing and preaching similar to the one in San Diego, and asked, finally, that each write two questions on separate pieces of paper and make an extra copy for me—and only me.

  That whole process took more than two hours.

  After that, I went to the briefing of the candidates’ people. Janet Brown of the commission was also present for the meeting at the office of the Washington University athletic director, where I was working. That lasted another thirty minutes. I talked only process, of course—not the content of the questions.

  I looked at a wall clock. I could not believe that I suddenly had so little time left to sort through nearly three hundred questions, each on a small piece of paper. Kate and Jamie joined NewsHour staffers Les Crystal and Annette Miller in frantically separating them in stacks by subject and then by quality.

  As in San Diego, I knew that only about twenty would actually be heard by anyone in the debate itself.

  A moment was rapidly approaching when I honestly believed we might not make it in time. I was going to have to look out at a television camera and say something like:

  “Good evening from the Field House at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m Jim Lehrer of The NewsHour on PBS and I’m sorry to report that I am not quite ready for tonight’s presidential debate between Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush. So we’re going to play music—something from Mozart or the Beatles, possibly, or feel free to talk among yourselves while you wait.”

  The last critical task, which Kate and I did literally with only a few minutes to go, was check the chosen few for a balanced race, gender, and age mix. PC or not, that had to be done. I felt strongly that the very nature of this event demanded that the diversity of the American electorate’s representatives be recognizable beyond just their questions.

  I went out to the hall, did my introductions and cautions to the audience, and prepared to go on the air. I took my seat and got hooked up, as always, to two microphones in case one went bad and to an earpiece so I could hear cues from the debate executive producer.

  After several sound checks, I arranged my papers on the small table before me and took one of the longest breaths of my life.

  Suddenly there was no noise in my ear. A crew member onstage told me that the debate executive producer, Marty Slutsky, was saying things to me. (Slutsky had replaced Ed Fouhy in that job by then.)

  I could not hear Slutsky.

  “Lost audio!” I said firmly, barely able to keep sheer panic out of my voice. Everyone in the hall, including both Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Gore and their families, went absolutely silent. Everyone could tell I was in trouble.

  “Working on audio!” someone on the crew announced loudly to all. “Three minutes to air!”

  “It’s okay with me if you don’t take the full three minutes to fix it,” I said with a false tone of confidence and coolness. This was pressure beyond most anything I had even imagined before.

  There was a sympathetic round of laughs and small applause for me in the hall, which I appreciated.

  The only serious audio problem I had dealt with previously was during the October 11, 1992, Bush-Clinton-Perot debate, also at Washington University in St. Louis. During that entire ninety minutes, someone backstage had inadvertently left open his internal communications mike in the control room. As a result, I had the distraction of hearing every behind-the-scenes word spoken to him and by him. The fact that I did not miss any cues or many words spoken by the candidates was a miracle.

  Now, eight years later, I was really proud of myself for fighting my natural instinct to scream something profane that would not only be heard in the hall but by viewers of C-SPAN, which was broadcasting the pre-debate activities.

  Then, with less than thirty seconds to go, I heard the magic words, “Jim! Jim! Can you hear me now?”

  I could.

  I did my welcome, explained the rules, and announced to the television world:

  “Before we begin, a correction from last week’s debate. I was wrong when I said Vice President Gore’s campaign commercials had called Governor Bush a bumbler. That specific charge was made in a press statement by Gore campaign spokesman Mark Fabiani, not in a TV commercial.”

  Gore said to me: “I’m glad you clarified that.”

  The studio audience, possibly puzzled along with the rest of America about the real difference between a commercial and a press statement, laughed uncomfortably.

  I then called on the first citizen questioner—a man concerned about HMOs and insurance companies—instead of medical professionals—making decisions that affect people’s lives.

  But the trip to hell and beyond was not quite over.

  About two-thirds of the way through the ninety minutes and fifteen questions, Gore began his menacing march across the stage directly toward Bush. I thought, Oh, my God! Gore’s going to physically attack Bush! Do a body block, a head butt—something.

  I had tried to imagine every calamity that could possibly happen in any given debate. I had, indeed, silently rehearsed to myself what I would say if any candidate continually refused to obey the time-limit rules, as I thought Dole might do in a Hail Mary attempt at that critical 1996 Hartford debate with Clinton.

  But I was not prepared for leaping, boxing-referee fashion, into a physical fray between two candidates.

  Fortunately, Bush merely gave the approaching Gore a puzzled smile, stepped to one side, and continued saying whatever he was saying in response to an audience question about voter apathy.

  And my trip to hell ended—finally.

  MY OPPORTUNITY TO get George W. Bush’s debate reflections came on January 16, 2007, after a twenty-five-minute NewsHour interview in the White House Cabinet Room. The premise was a State of the Union preview, and much of the time was devoted to the Iraq war.

  The debates came up in the pre-interview chat, while our technicians were testing camera shots and sound.

  Bush, in a good humor, asked me: “You think they’ll recycle you for one more election cycle?”

  I said probably not—no thanks. I’ve done enough of them already, and I’ve got the scars on my psyche to prove it. I then quickly put in a pitch to interview him sometime for an update of our earlier debates documentary.

  “Well, why don’t we do it at the end of this?” he said.

  I was not really prepared, but I said, Yes, sir, fine with me. A bird in the hand in the presidential interview business is … well, a Bush in the hand.

  So after I said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” to end the main interview, a new tape was inserted in our cameras and we started talking about debates.

  Bush had been understandably tight and careful during the previous twenty-five minutes, but now he was relaxed and grinning.

&
nbsp; As for Gore’s sighing in the first debate in Boston, Bush had an experience similar to mine.

  “I didn’t have any idea it was going on. I really didn’t. I was so focused that when it was over, somebody, I can’t remember who it was, Karen [Hughes] or Karl Rove or somebody, said, you are not going to believe Al Gore’s facial expressions. Really cost him the debate, they thought.”

  It was in the third debate, of course, when Gore’s aggression reached its Major Moment pinnacle during an exchange about HMOs, health insurance companies, and a patients’ bill of rights.

  Bush’s version:

  “I was prowling a little bit, but so was Gore. And he approached me at first and I wasn’t certain what was happening, and it looked like it was going to be the body bump—the chest bump. I think, as I recall, I gave him an odd-expression kind of a look. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to threaten me, in which case it amused me even more or—I wasn’t sure what his motives were. All I can tell you is that, I think if you review the tape you will see a bemused expression on my face.

  “The other option would have been to go for the huge chest bump, which in itself maybe decided the debate, and he was bigger than I am.…”

  I REGRET THAT I was never able to secure an interview with Gore about any of his debates, the three in 2000 as well as the 1992 vice presidential debate, and even the NAFTA event with Ross Perot. A sweep through the press coverage of the 2000 debates produced only a few Gore comments.

  I have only one statement to report on my own.

  He said it to me as the Gore and Bush families and major supporters exchanged greetings on the St. Louis stage at the end of that third and final debate. Photos were being taken with some of the members of the questioning audience, part of a process that is no longer permitted, presumably, for security reasons.

  Gore, in a reference to the Goldilocks fairy tale, said to me, “In the first debate I was too hot, in the second I was too cold, and in the third I was just right.”

  He repeated that take in a 2002 CNN interview with Paula Zahn, saying that he and his wife, Tipper, had said that to each other right after the debates ended.

  Zahn asked Gore if he felt manipulated by his handlers—if they had tried to make him be someone he wasn’t.

  “No,” said Gore. “If I had any criticism, it would be of myself for, you know, not just focusing on the things that mattered the most.”

  He said that immediately after the first debate his advisers got him to watch a Saturday Night Live satire of what he had done. “ ‘Hey, look, during those cutaways, the reaction shots, you know, the sighing stuff.’ It made it easier for me to see what didn’t—what wasn’t good about that, sure.”

  I have no trouble understanding why Al Gore has not talked at length about the 2000 debates—with me or anyone else. He has had little to say about that entire election process, which resulted in the most agonizing finish ever for a presidential candidate. Despite the wounds from that experience, some of which may never fully heal, he has moved on to an honored place as a world advocate for environmental causes.

  My guess is that someday he will tell his story of 2000 in a well-written book that will, in fact, include specifics about how he was hurt by some of his campaign friends as much as by his enemies—and his sighing.

  FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY different.…

  There was the vice presidential debate of former defense secretary and Republican congressman Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Democratic senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

  The candidates met on October 5, 2000—between the first and second Gore-Bush debates—at the campus of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. CNN’s Bernard Shaw moderated.

  Lieberman told me in our documentary interview that about a week or ten days before the debate Gore called him and said, “ ‘Are you getting ready for the debate?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘You know what Cheney is going to do during the whole debate, don’t you?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘He’s going to attack me. So your job is to defend me.’ ”

  Lieberman said Gore told him that he based that on his own ’92 vice presidential debate experience with Dan Quayle and James Stockdale, when Quayle spent the whole night attacking Clinton.

  On the other hand, Cheney said in his documentary chat that after watching tapes of Lieberman’s Senate campaign debates in Connecticut, particularly against Republican Lowell Weicker, he, too, was expecting a rough time.

  “Joe was very tough. Those debates with Weicker were a knock-down, drag-out kind of an affair. So I went in prepared for that possibility.”

  But there were no knockdowns, no tough talk—or even any Major Moments.

  Cheney concluded that the format, first suggested by the debate commission, contributed to the tone.

  “I am a great believer that the physical arrangements are important, and the one condition that we had both in 2000 and in 2004 in terms of the negotiations prior to the debate was that I wanted to be seated at a table. I wanted the format like this or as on Meet the Press or your show on PBS. The bit with the podium and the staging and the certain spacing between the podiums—those kind of arrangements always gave it a sort of stilted affair, and I was much more comfortable sitting down and talking. And both times we were successful. We had that as our sort of nonnegotiable demand for the vice presidential debate, and both times they agreed.”

  I asked Lieberman if he was aware of any of that.

  “It’s interesting. Nobody’s told me that before.… There was a team negotiating, and they came back to me and said we are going to do this seated, and I must admit my first response was ‘Gee, that’s strange. I’ve done all my other debates, Senate debates, standing.’ And they said no, we think this will be great for you because it will make you comfortable and it will make you feel just like it is a TV interview, perhaps on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour or something weird like that. So that was about it.”

  Both candidates, in their separate interviews with me, agreed their debate was the most civilized anyone could remember. Cheney and Lieberman even assessed the debate result the same way—almost.

  Cheney said he definitely believed he won it.

  Lieberman said, “I’ll tell you something, I think both Dick Cheney and I did well in that debate, and I suppose I would say both of us gained and therefore maybe both of us were winners.”

  Bernard Shaw told me:

  “It was fascinating sitting there. They were real statesmen debating. I think the format had everything to do with it. Apart from the qualities of these two public servants, they were seated almost elbow to elbow. It’s hard to batter a guy sitting next to you. You have to really look him in the eye and address the issue on the table.”

  Shaw added that a lot of people after the debate “said both parties should have flipped their tickets and put Lieberman at the top for the Democrats and Cheney at the top for the Republicans.”

  That thought should serve as a mind-rattling reminder of how things can shift in the world of American politics.

  Lieberman was defeated in 2006 for the Democratic renomination to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut mostly because of his support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. But he won reelection as an independent and went on to endorse Republican John McCain against Democrat Barack Obama for president in 2010.

  CHAPTER 6

  Play-by-Plays

  Then came the Year of Our Politics 2004 when I moderated the first debate between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry.

  A personal play-by-play:

  The official call came from Janet Brown, with whom I had become foxhole comrades after sharing the experiences of nine previous debates. Brown was the first and the only executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates there has ever been. She is, without any doubt, the central driving force behind the commission’s life and work.

  By the time of her call, the commission had already announced the 2004 dates, places, and formats of three presidential and one vice presidential
debate.

  “I hereby ask if you would moderate the first presidential debate between President Bush and Senator Kerry on September 30, 2004,” Brown said with an embellished tone of phony formality. “The subject will be domestic policy; the location will be the University of Miami at Coral Gables.”

  No way! That was the answer that flashed immediately in my mind. I had already talked through such a possibility with Kate. Nine debates were enough. The stress and strain of 2000 had left me determined to rest forever on my arrows and/or laurels.

  I felt I had done my duty for my country and, yes, my ego. I had, in fact, proclaimed to Brown quite forcefully, “This is it for me!” during a debriefing session a few weeks after the 2000 debates.

  Now, four years later, I told Brown that I was honored to be asked again, but my inclination remained to take a pass on doing it one more time. But give me a day to talk to Kate and the girls—daughters Jamie, Lucy, and Amanda—before giving a final answer.

  The family consensus was easily reached. Do what you want to do. But that was accompanied by strong reminders about the various hells of 2000, and the potential for it happening again. There also was stern unanimity for absolutely refusing to do more than one debate this time, no matter what.

  I called Brown the next day and accepted the invitation to moderate the Bush-Kerry debate in Florida on September 30.

  CBS’s Bob Schieffer and Charles Gibson of ABC agreed to moderate the other two Bush-Kerry presidential debates, and my NewsHour colleague Gwen Ifill did the same for the vice presidential conversation between Vice President Cheney and Senator John Edwards.

  The debate commission had taken a major step toward declaring its independence. The moderator selections and the location decisions had not been run by Kerry and Bush representatives in advance, much less negotiated with them officially.

  Since some of the Kerry consultants were Gore leftovers with 2000 grievances, I heard there were internal grumblings, particularly about my selection as a moderator.

  There had also been some indications that the Bush campaign was interested in fewer debates this time and in using other sponsors besides the commission. The networks, most particularly NBC and some of the cables, were reported to be hustling behind the scenes to stage their own debates.