Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Dispensing with the earth tones, he appeared in denim, the fabric of the south, for a concert that featured Patty Loveless, Billy Ray Cyrus and Tony Bennett. In the home of country and western, the New York crooner should have looked the most out of place, especially since he had come dressed in a shiny silk suit with a scarlet handkerchief flopping insouciantly from his breast pocket. Inevitably, however, it was the vice president who looked the more awkward of the two. Gore was so out of tune with the heartland, as the headlines would later put it, that he could not even clap in time to the music.

  That night, perhaps the most telling moment came when the master of ceremonies, Eddie George, the running back of the local NFL team, the Tennessee Titans, asked Gore where his footballing allegiances truly lay. With synthetic home-town pride and without any hint of irony, Gore proudly announced that the Tennessee Titans was his team, even though virtually everyone in the Wildhorse Saloon knew him to be a devotee, man and boy, of the Washington Redskins.

  An elderly southern matriarch, with a turn of phrase dripping in sorghum and molasses, had told the BBC that Gore would rather ‘climb a tree to tell a lie than stay on the ground to tell the truth’. Here was yet more proof. More than that, the Titans mistruth revealed one of his recurring problems: his lack of an anchor, both personal and political.

  Confidently expecting his son would one day take the oath of office as president, Al Gore Snr, a former Tennessee senator himself, had raised him in Washington. He was sent to an elite academy, schooled in the workings of the capital and dispatched to the finishing school of Harvard. However, Washington had turned him into a political being. So much so that when the politics changed, so too did his personality. The Gore paradox was that his rearing in Washington, combined with his experience as a congressman, senator and vice president, made him super-qualified to fulfil his parents’ great master plan. Yet a life spent in Washington had stunted his development. He had spent too much time in the American capital to take its top job.

  Throughout the campaign, Gore was also victimised by a hostile and unforgiving press. Tellingly, it was not the right-wing ideologues on Fox News that became his most troublesome critics. Far more hurtful was the friendly fire he came under from liberal-minded reporters. They were so determined to demonstrate their impartiality that they tended to overcompensate and ended up handicapping the race in Bush’s favour.

  In the first presidential debate, Gore demonstrated a much greater mastery of the issues and was clearly the more eloquent and intelligent of the candidates. However, the post-debate coverage was dominated instead by his huffing, sighing and heavy makeup. In a similar vein, Gore’s habit of making small exaggerations became a much bigger story than Bush’s gaffes and the gaps in his knowledge.

  Nothing illustrated this more than the reporting of his supposed boast during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he had invented the worldwide web. Gore actually said that during his years as a congressman he had taken ‘the initiative in creating the internet’, which was an overstatement for sure, but one with a grounding in truth. No lawmaker on Capitol Hill had made a greater contribution to nurturing the worldwide web, as some of its original designers happily put on the record.

  Another of Gore’s presumed lies, which in its later reporting seemed even more outlandish, was his boast that he had inspired the character Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal’s campus romance Love Story. Again, however, it was not a barefaced fib. As Segal himself later explained, Barrett had been a composite character, which drew on Gore and his Harvard roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

  From his robotic speeches to his habit on even mildly temperate days of sweating through his shirts, there was a snideness about the reporting of Al Gore that would have been considered a breach of impartiality had it been targeted at Bush. It was a cannibalistic meanness, for a liberal-minded press was devouring one of its own. Another motive was also at work. Journalists often write out of self-interest, and many had simply decided that a Bush victory was better for business. The first father–son presidential combo since John and John Quincy Adams – ‘Bush 41’ and ‘Bush 43’, as they took to calling themselves – offered a much better story than a continuation of the Clinton years without its central protagonist.

  What had so far been a fairly uneventful general-election campaign finished with another trope: an October surprise, even though it came 48 hours late, on 2 November. Ever since Henry Kissinger stepped before the cameras in October at the fag end of the 1972 campaign to announce that peace was at hand in Vietnam, journalists awaited an unexpected event or revelation with the potential to completely transform the race.

  Bona-fide October surprises were actually extremely rare, but just four days before election day it was reported that in 1976 George W. Bush had been pulled over by the police in Kennebunkport, Maine, at the end of a night of drinking with the Australian tennis ace John Newcombe, for driving too slowly. After being breathalysed, he tested positive to driving under the influence and was given a $150 on-the-spot fine. Now, it threatened to cost him the election.

  Not to have pre-empted the story with a timely public confessional was considered by Karl Rove to be the single biggest tactical error of the entire campaign, and later he estimated it had cost Bush the states of New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa, Oregon and Maine – victory in which would have made Florida entirely superfluous. Looking back, however, perhaps what was most intriguing about the DUI October surprise was the source of the story.

  It was first put to air by a Fox affiliate in Maine, whose scoop was picked up immediately by Fox News, which broke it nationally. In Britain, The Sun had long claimed to have been chiefly responsible for a string of Conservative victories. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’, the paper claimed on its front page after John Major’s come-from-behind victory at the 1992 general election. In America, its Murdoch-owned corporate stablemate had come close to producing a very different headline: ‘It Was Fox News Wot Lost It’.

  Perhaps sensing that his days as the face of CBS News might be numbered, Dan Rather arrived for duty on election night bristling with Ratherisms. The Texan newsman unleashed this arsenal with the fervour and profligacy of a buckskin-clad cowboy engaged in his very own private Alamo, determined to fire every bullet and empty every shotgun before his anchor desk was finally overrun by network executives brandishing a slew of falling ratings.

  For Rather, the election was not merely close, it was ‘tight as the rusted lug nuts on a ’55 Ford’, it was ‘a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach’, it was ‘spandex tight’. As for the key battleground state of Florida, it was ‘hot enough to peel house paint’. With its outcome increasingly uncertain, Dan went ape: ‘Turn down the lights, the party got wilder.’

  The mad tumble of events had started just before eight o’clock, when the networks first put Florida in the Democratic column, which appeared to foreshadow a Gore victory nationwide. Then, two hours and four minutes later, they retracted Florida from Gore and declared it too close to call. Over the next four hours, I have never known a newsroom to be at once so suspenseful and so feverish. At times, it felt akin to maintaining an all-night vigil in a hospital waiting room when the patient stood only a 50/50 chance of survival. At others, it had the revelry of the countdown to midnight on New Year’s Eve.

  Finally, at 2.16 am, after freshly counted votes started streaming in from the Florida panhandle, which was an hour behind the rest of the state, the networks made their long-awaited call. The Sunshine State had gone … Bush. With Florida came victory, and Fox News was the first out of the traps with a full-screen graphic of emphatic certainty announcing that George W. Bush would now become the next president.

  Minutes later, with the same definitiveness, the other networks followed suit. ‘Sip it, savour it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red, press it in a book, put it in an album, hang it on the wall,’ suggested Dan Rather, mistakenly thinking it would be his final broadside of the night. ‘George W
. Bush is the next president of the United States.’ Gore thought so too, and telephoned the Texan governor to congratulate him on his victory.

  As Gore set off in his vice-presidential motorcade to deliver his concession speech at the War Memorial Plaza in Nashville, his number-crunchers at base were still keeping track of Florida’s late-reporting precincts and noticed he was fast gaining ground. With votes left still to count, Gore was only 5000 behind. So, like lawyers who have uncovered a vital piece of evidence that exonerates their client just as he is about to mount the gallows, they put frantic calls through to the motorcade and managed to halt it just in time.

  An awkward phone call followed, in which Gore withdrew his earlier concession. ‘There’s no need to get snippy about it,’ said Gore when Bush expressed incredulity. And then the networks went into breakneck reverse. Now, Florida was too close to call. ‘We don’t just have egg on our face,’ observed Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, ‘we have an omelette.’

  Dan Rather also admitted the networks had erred: ‘We lived by the crystal ball. We’re eating so much broken glass.’ As for his take on the main protagonists, Mssrs Bush and Gore: ‘They both have champagne on ice, but after the night is over they might need a pickaxe to open them.’

  I spent much of that night racing between our on-air set in Washington, trying to provide a commentary, and the video-editing suite, where my picture editor played his edit deck like a pinball machine. In television news editing, the general rule of thumb is that it takes an hour to cut a minute. The storyline careered all over the place at such a pace, however, that often we had less than fifteen minutes to cut three.

  Time pressures made the mechanics of laying pictures and voice difficult enough. (Never, before or since, have I seen an editor lay both at the same time, as we did that night.) A harder challenge was making sense out of chaos. Looking back from this distance, the night had a neat timeline: Gore edges ahead, falls back, realises he has lost, concedes defeat, then retracts. On the night, however, with the momentum shifting constantly, and with spin and counter-spin coming from both camps, I fear that we, like the US networks, only added to the mayhem. Wrapping up our coverage shortly after breakfast time, I offered an exhausted final thought from that well-thumbed compendium of statements of the complete obvious: ‘The election will not be over until Al Gore concedes.’ But none of us suspected that it would be a further 35 days before he did so.

  Even as I spoke, teams of lawyers were already boarding the first planes out of National Airport heading south to Miami, Palm Beach and Tallahassee. The marrying of the American political and legal systems, a process that had started with Watergate and continued through the Clinton impeachment, was about to reach its zenith. In truth, I was not quite sure whether we as journalists were sufficiently well credentialed to cope. In a trade traditionally populated by history and English literature graduates, linguists and the occasional classicist, the Florida recount merely confirmed what I had thought throughout impeachment: that by far the best grounding for any Washington-based reporter was to have spent two years studying jurisprudence at law school.

  Aside from the angry partisanship, perhaps the most discouraging trend in Washington politics over the past 30 years has been the extent to which law has overtaken history as its academic touchstone, and how the juridical letter of the Constitution has come to crush its spirit. As Louis Menand observed in The New Yorker, a magazine where the in-house legal-affairs writer was about to make a big name for himself, we were about to embark on a ‘civics lesson from hell’.

  A few hours after finally retiring to bed after our election-night marathon, we awoke to a politics transformed. Footage had already come through from Florida showing polling stations looking more like crime scenes, cordoned off with yellow police tape, with blinking squad cars parked outside. This unfolding national melodrama had a new nomenclature – dimpled chads, pregnant chads, hanging chads – and a new complement of characters. The first, unlikely cast members became the befuddled pensioners of Palm Beach County, many of them Jewish, who had been so bamboozled by a complicated ballot paper, the notorious butterfly ballot, that many had speared the hole earmarked for Pat Buchanan, a fringe candidate regularly accused of anti-Semitism.

  Then the focus shifted to the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, the exotically named Theresa LePore, the registered Democrat who had designed the ballot’s perplexing layout. Rather usefully for his brother, the Florida governor Jeb Bush now became a central figure. So, too, did his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who wore such heavy and glossy make-up that she was cast as the Cruella de Vil of the Florida recount.

  Now that the cinematic character of the election had shifted from campaign road movie to courtroom drama, with the occasional nod towards Disney, the legal hired guns and trial lawyers became inadvertent stars. As the court-ordered recounts started, so, too, did the boggled-eyed voting officials who peered through thick magnifying glasses examining ballot papers as if they were rare stamps. The candidates, meanwhile, largely disappeared from view, having become almost superfluous to the story. Not much they could say publicly could materially affect the outcome. Now, it was down to their lawyers and the judges.

  Once writs had gone airborne, it was only a matter of time before the US Supreme Court intervened. On 9 December 2000, more than a month on from election day and just 24 hours after the Florida Supreme Court had ordered all the votes to be counted again by hand, the Supreme Court’s nine justices, in a 5–4 decision, stayed the recount. Two days later, it heard oral arguments in Bush vs. Gore. That morning, boisterous cheer squads from both sides besieged the court, with a donkey deposited at the foot of its marble steps by the supporters of Al Gore that served as a mascot for the Democrats and a four-legged reminder, presumably, of the deficiencies of the law.

  In this normally subdued corner of Capitol Hill, there was more pandemonium on the night the justices delivered their decision. Handed the ruling in the bowels of the Supreme Court, a posse of journalists and legal analysts came sprinting out of a side door, like lunatics escaping an ornate and pillared asylum, with cellphones in one hand and the freshly printed judgment in the other. Then they stood before the cameras in the chill late-night air, illuminated by giant Klieg lights and flanked by rivals from other networks, ferociously racing to become first to break the news.

  Deciphering the ruling was like trying to crack a code, and the correspondents were experiencing an exquisite form of torture: rarely in their professional lives would they have broadcast live before such massive audiences, and rarely would they have appeared on screen with so little idea of what they were talking about. On ABC News, the anchor Peter Jennings was as unflappable as ever. ‘Nobody should be embarrassed about trying to work out a Supreme Court ruling on the fly,’ he said, before crossing over to its correspondent, Jackie Judd, of blue-dress fame, and Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker’s legal eagle. ‘Jackie, why don’t you start?’ Jennings said coolly.

  ‘I’m going to turn it over to Jeffrey Toobin,’ she said.

  ‘I was hoping to turn it to Jackie,’ replied Toobin.

  Both had trampled all over the correspondent’s second commandment, that one should never voluntarily cede airtime to a rival. But both had upheld rule number one, which is never to look stupid on air.

  Further down the row, CNN’s legal analyst was less judicious. He got the ruling badly wrong, suggesting in the haste of the moment that the recount would be allowed to continue. He did not survive at the network much longer.

  As this absurd slapstick unfolded, I was in the warmth of our television studio in Washington but felt much the same discomfort. Naturally, London was desperate to know the outcome, but as luck would have it a fellow correspondent happened to be on anchoring duties that night, and he kindly allowed me a few minutes to read the ruling off-camera rather than attempt to decode it live on air.

  I was unable to make sense of the majority ruling, which was a jumble of legalese, but the di
ssenting opinions were easy to divine. So angry was the tone from the Democrat-appointed justices that it became instantly clear that the court’s 5–4 ruling favoured George W. Bush.

  As soon as it intervened in the disputed election, most assumed SCOTUS would rule along partisan lines, and so it proved. Put simply, it had decided that a state-wide recount was the ideal way to settle the disputed election but that there was not enough time to complete it. A heavily politicised legal system had delivered an overtly political decision, and one that the pro-Bush justices admitted guiltily should not be relied upon as a precedent.

  ‘Whew, it may not be everything we want,’ opined Dan Rather, ‘but at least we’re still breathing.’

  Al Gore conceded the following evening, and George W. and Laura, his first-lady-in-waiting, could now finally RSVP to the organisers of the ‘Black Tie and Boots Ball’, a Lone Star extravaganza held on the eve of inauguration day. Seemingly dreamt up to prove once and for all that Texas did things bigger and better, the ballrooms were decorated with 20,000 yellow roses, a live steer, various dead armadillos, a mechanical bucking bronco and cowboys that dangled from the ceilings. A menu weighted more heavily towards turf than surf included 2.5 tonnes of brisket and 20,000 shrimp, and more than 5000 Texan wives came dressed in so many sequins that Bill Clinton’s Arkansas ball quite literally paled in comparison.

  The country artist Lee Greenwood sang that rousing anthem of the Reagan years, ‘I’m Proud to Be an American’, and a group of high-kicking Texan Rangerettes dressed in scarlet tunics, knee-high white cowboy boots and sky-blue miniskirts also performed their patriotic duty. But the legs that hogged the headlines belonged to George W. Bush, who pulled up his tuxedo to display custom-made cowboy boots embossed with the presidential seal, like a cancan girl lifting up her skirt to reveal the top of her stockings.