by Dick Cheney
In the final days of the campaign, with the race uncomfortably close, time became our most precious commodity, and all our attention was concentrated on blanketing the battleground states. We no longer had the luxury of driving from an airport to an event, and by late October nearly every event was a massive airport rally. These were great theater, directed and staged to achieve the maximum impact with each audience. The plane would land and taxi in slowly to a stop right in front of the hangar. Sometimes the advance team would have it timed so the hangar doors would open on cue, and we would walk from the plane into the hangar with the theme from Rocky or something equally triumphant blasting over the huge speakers. We did a lot of these events in a lot of different places. In order to avoid the obvious disaster, a staff member was assigned to tape a piece of paper just inside the airplane door, so as I disembarked I would see “Portland, Oregon” or “Everett, Washington” or “Las Vegas, Nevada” and know for sure where we had landed and where I could say I was so glad to be.
Even though the polls were still neck and neck, as the campaign entered the final stretch, I was feeling good about things. I sensed that we had the momentum. Then on Thursday, November 2, five days before the election, we were at a rally in Chicago when we learned a story was breaking that in Maine in 1976, Bush had been cited for driving under the influence. I didn’t like the timing of this at all. It looked like the classic “October surprise”—a negative story timed for release at the last minute, when it can do the most damage possible.
I was sure that the news of the governor’s DUI would bring up stories of my own DUIs from nearly forty years earlier, but that didn’t happen because they had already been written about. They were old news. But this Bush story, even though it was twenty-four years old, was now completely new. The late revelation hurt us. Karl Rove has pointed out that before the story broke we led Gore 40–35 in Maine. One night later Gore was ahead of us 44–40. We ended up losing Maine by 5 percent.
ALTHOUGH THIS OCTOBER SURPRISE was unpleasant, I didn’t think it would do us in, and we were in good spirits as we landed at home in Jackson Hole late on the evening of Monday, November 6. We walked through the frigid cold into an airport hangar full of the warmth of friends and family for a final rally. Then we headed home where, too exhausted to sleep, Lynne and I popped popcorn with our granddaughters.
Election Day dawned crisp, clear, and cold. It was one of those late fall mountain mornings I love. We drove the short distance from our house to the Wilson Fire Station to cast our votes. The traveling press corps was there, as was our friend David Kennerly, President Ford’s photographer. David always managed to appear at historic moments in our lives, and this certainly was one.
At the fire station Lynne and I stood in line to vote, and I held my granddaughter Kate’s hand as the election worker handed me my paper ballot and directed me to the voting booth nearest one of the exits to cast my vote. Photographers and cameramen had been allowed to crowd into the exit doorway, and I could hear the whirring and clicking of their cameras as I marked the space for George Bush and Dick Cheney on my ballot.
We went directly from the fire station to the airport. Just before boarding the campaign plane for what—one way or the other—was going to be the last time, we took lots of pictures of family and staff on the tarmac. The photos show happy, exhausted folks in front of the plane emblazoned with the big blue Bush-Cheney letters on the side, and in the background the most beautiful mountains in the world, the Grand Tetons.
To help occupy the time on the flight to Austin, some of the staff organized a pool for people to guess what our total number of electoral votes would be. Two hundred and seventy are needed to win and everyone laughed when Liz’s sister-in-law, Kristienne Perry, took the decidedly lowball number of 280. Liz and Mary teased her, telling her that she clearly didn’t know much about politics if she thought we were going to get only 280 electoral votes.
While we were still in the air, we started to get the first exit poll results. Kathleen Shanahan brought them up to Lynne and me in the front of the plane. They were bad. We were up in Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, but we were down by 3 percent in Florida and 4 percent in Michigan. And the list of states where we were tied was too long for comfort. “It’s going to be a long night,” Kathleen said. We couldn’t have guessed just how long.
As soon as we arrived in Austin, we went to Karl Rove’s office at the campaign headquarters. It had a large wall of glass overlooking the hallway, and as we had our meeting, staffers stared in as they walked by, no doubt trying to assess our mood, anxious for any clue as to whether this was going to be a night to celebrate. In fact, we didn’t know much more than they did.
Based on the way things seemed to be breaking, Karl said it looked likely to be a long night, but he sketched out the path he saw that could move us to the neighborhood of three hundred electoral votes. Needless to say, Kristienne won the pool and was closer to right than most of the experts.
Lynne and I had invited friends and family to join us at the Four Seasons Hotel to watch the early election returns, before we all headed to the big celebration that had been planned at the state capitol, about a mile away. At six o’clock, when the first results started coming in from the east, it became clear just how close the vote was going to be. Lynne and I left our suite and went downstairs to the big party in the hotel ballroom. Despite the evening’s uncertainty, we were buoyed by the love and warmth of our friends.
When we got back upstairs about an hour later, we told Mary, Heather, Phil, and Liz that they really needed to go down to the party. They said they weren’t in a party mood. The networks had already called Florida for Gore, a surprising and irresponsible decision, given that the polling places in the heavily Republican western panhandle of the state hadn’t even closed yet. But we exercised our parental prerogative and strongly encouraged the kids to go downstairs. There was nothing they could do except sit in the suite, and all the friends in the ballroom would be so happy to see them. They took our advice, headed downstairs, and were surrounded by hundreds of cheering friends and family a short while later, when the large-screen TVs in the ballroom flashed the news that the networks had reversed the Florida call and returned the Sunshine State to the toss-up column.
With us in our suite that night were our dear friends Al and Ann Simpson, Nick and Kitty Brady, Don and Joyce Rumsfeld, Jim and Susan Baker, Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Don Evans, and Andy and Kathleene Card. A photo from the evening shows Jim Baker sitting next to me with Al Simpson and the Rumsfelds looking over our shoulders. We’re all studying the tally that I was keeping on a yellow legal pad. I had clipped an electoral map out of the newspaper that morning and was using it to keep track of which states we needed to win to make it to 270.
It looked to me as if it was indeed going to be a very long night, so about 12:45 a.m. I decided to go into the bedroom to take a nap. I had been asleep only a few minutes when Liz woke me up. “Dad,” she said, “you just got elected vice president. The president-elect wants to talk to you.” That got my attention.
Liz and Mary on election night 2000 reacting to the news that the networks had called the election for George W. Bush and me. It was a premature – but nonetheless heartfelt–celebration. (Photo by David Kennerly)
The networks had now called Florida for George Bush, and at 1:30 a.m. Austin time, Al Gore had called Bush to concede. Liz handed me the phone, and Governor Bush got on the line. He told me about Gore’s call and suggested that I bring the family over to the Governor’s Mansion so we could ride together to the victory celebration at the state capitol, where a large crowd had been standing outside for hours.
As we prepared to leave to join the Bushes, Don Evans was on his cell phone talking to Gore’s campaign manager, Bill Daley. “Gore’s in talking to his family,” he reported. “They are taking it hard, and he’s asked us to give him a little while with them before he makes his concession speech.” Of course we understood, and we he
aded over to the Governor’s Mansion thinking we would watch Gore’s concession speech there.
We left the hotel through the kitchen as we nearly always did when the Secret Service was with us. As we walked through, surrounded by our family, Lynne looked at me and said, “What’s wrong? You don’t seem as happy as you should be.” She read me well. I couldn’t say why, exactly, but I thought we were celebrating too soon. “This just doesn’t feel right,” I told her.
I put those thoughts aside as we walked into the family celebration that was already under way at the Governor’s Mansion. President George H. W. Bush and Barbara were there along with Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Al and Ann Simpson had come with us from the hotel. We all crowded around a tiny, antiquated television in the sitting room on the first floor of the ornate old mansion and watched footage of empty stages in Austin and Nashville, where Gore’s campaign headquarters was located. The networks were all marking time until Gore made his concession official so that Bush could then make his victory speech. But then there was another phone call for the governor. It was Al Gore, calling to retract his concession.
As the Bush margin in Florida grew smaller and smaller, everyone started looking to Jeb Bush for answers and hope. He was in the corner of the room with my chief of staff, Kathleen Shanahan, huddled over a computer screen. They were logged on to the Florida secretary of state’s website trying to follow the vote count directly as it was posted. When the governor of Texas walked into the room looking for information, his brother, the governor of Florida, whispered to Kathleen, “Just don’t make eye contact with him,” hoping to avoid a barrage of questions he couldn’t yet answer.
Everybody was angry and frustrated with Gore. Who retracts a concession? In 1976 the election had also been very close, and we had decided to sleep on it and see how things looked in the morning before making any decision about conceding to Carter. I thought that if the Gore campaign had been any kind of a professional operation, they would have realized how close the vote was and wouldn’t have conceded in the first place. But to concede and then take it back was amateur hour. And the fact of the concession hurt Gore, I believe, as we headed into the recount.
In the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas later that night with Lynne, George and Laura Bush, Jeb Bush, President Bush 41, Al and Ann Simpson and campaign chairman, Don Evans, after Al Gore had withdrawn his concession. (Photo by David Kennerly)
It was clear that nothing more was going to be decided that night, but we had a large crowd of supporters still standing in the rain at the state capitol. Don Evans went over to thank them and tell them to go home for the night. The rest of us went to bed.
“NOW WHAT?” MARY ASKED. It was late Wednesday morning in our suite at the Four Seasons, and she addressed her question to the good-sized group that we had assembled: Scooter Libby, Dave Addington, Rob Portman, Paul Wolfowitz, Terry O’Donnell, Steve Hadley, Kathleen Shanahan, and Michael Boskin, a Stanford economist who had been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George H. W. Bush. Someone had ordered sandwiches, but the plate sat largely untouched on the round table at one end of the room, alongside a book I’d been given, Hemingway on Fishing. Enthusiastic as I am about the sport, fishing was about the furthest thing from my mind at that point.
Our sense was that the Gore campaign would not draw things out for too much longer. We anticipated a quick concession. Our hopes were dashed the next day when Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave a press conference in Tallahassee. The Gore campaign had sent Christopher to Florida to oversee their recount effort, in much the same way that we had sent former secretary of state Jim Baker. Both sides realized they needed someone with gravitas who didn’t appear too partisan or political as the public face of efforts in Florida. But we also knew that we were in a real fight and that we needed seasoned and savvy managers. I was willing to match Jim Baker against Warren Christopher or just about anybody else, any day of the week. He was clearly the best man for this job.
Standing in front of a room full of reporters, Bill Daley announced that the Gore campaign would be requesting hand recounts of the ballots in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Volusia, and Broward counties—all solidly Democratic areas. Daley also noted that the Gore campaign was unlikely to stop there and was “still collecting other irregularities.” One member of the team watching the press conference with us piped up from the back of the room that the Daley family had been “collecting irregularities” in Chicago for decades. The Gore team was clearly going to do everything they could to overturn the results of election night. We were in for a fight.
It became clear that we were entering on a long course with no predictable end in sight. Although I was confident that we would ultimately prevail, I was concerned about the potential negative impact on our administration of a shortened transition period. Whatever else happened, the forty-third president of the United States was going to be inaugurated at noon on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, January 20, 2001. So in the hotel room on the afternoon of November 9, I reached for the nearest piece of paper—which happened to be a Bush-Cheney press release on the situation in Palm Beach County—and flipped it over and began listing what needed to be done in the seventy-one days between now and then. In that time we had to name a cabinet of the highest-caliber individuals we could find. We needed a secretary of state to advise on foreign affairs, a secretary of the Treasury who could oversee the nation’s economy, and a secretary of defense who could be entrusted with the nation’s security. Along with the attorney general, these are the most prominent cabinet positions, but we also had literally thousands of other jobs to fill, many requiring FBI background checks, financial disclosure, and Senate confirmation. I had personally participated in five previous transitions, and I knew how tough it could be even in the best of circumstances to get everything done in such a short amount of time. We had won the vote in Florida and had therefore won the Electoral College. Although Gore might be trying to overturn the outcome at the ballot box through a series of court challenges, we needed to get moving with preparing to govern.
On November 17 it became clear that the recount was going to drag on much longer than anyone had anticipated. That day the Florida Supreme Court ordered Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris not to certify the election results until it heard arguments about whether the results of the Gore-requested hand recounts must be included in the final certification. There was nothing more we could do in Texas, so, after ten days in Austin, Lynne and I left for Washington.
On Sunday, November 19, Joe Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and I was reminded why I had such respect for him. Despite the fact that the Gore campaign was working hard to disqualify many of the absentee ballots cast by members of the U.S. military stationed overseas, he said he felt that was wrong. He said each campaign should do everything possible to ensure that ballots cast by members of America’s armed forces were counted.
A few days later the Florida Supreme Court essentially changed the rules of the election after the election was over by extending the deadline for the completion of the hand recount to November 26. Several hours after we got news of the decision, I awoke in the middle of the night with an uncomfortable sensation in my chest. It wasn’t really pain, but I knew it wasn’t right. I woke Lynne up and told her we needed to go to the hospital to get it checked out. The trip from our home in McLean to George Washington University Hospital, seven blocks from the White House, took less than fifteen minutes in a speeding black limo driven by the Secret Service down the deserted George Washington Parkway.
At the hospital doctors ran a series of blood tests to determine if my cardiac enzymes were elevated, which is a standard way of checking for a heart attack. The first tests showed no increase in the enzyme level; in other words, no indication that I’d had a heart attack. We passed this information along to campaign headquarters in Austin sometime before I went in for a cardiac catheterization, a procedure t
hat was recommended based on my history and the fact that I had experienced chest discomfort. Dr. Jonathan Reiner inserted a stent made of stainless steel mesh in an artery that was 90 to 95 percent blocked.
When I came back from the procedure about noon, I learned that a second set of blood tests showed an increase in enzyme levels. It was minimal, such a small elevation that it wouldn’t have been detected a few years previously when tests were less sensitive. Nevertheless, the release of enzymes meant I had suffered some heart damage. I’d had a small heart attack, information I was absorbing at the same time that President-elect Bush, operating on earlier information, was telling the press that I hadn’t had a heart attack, that “Dick Cheney is healthy.”
We notified the Bush camp and told them that doctors would soon be holding a press conference to talk about the second test results. In that briefing, the slightly elevated enzyme levels were the focus, and since in the medical world elevated enzymes are synonymous with heart attack, Dr. Alan Wasserman, who held the press conference, didn’t use that phrase. Karen Hughes, watching from down in Texas, called to warn us that the press would now be absolutely convinced that the Bush-Cheney campaign was engaged in a cover-up. She told us that the doctors had to go back out and say the words heart attack. At my family’s urging, the George Washington medical team held a second press conference, using the phrase heart attack and explaining that the heart damage I had suffered was minimal. “This would be the smallest possible heart attack that a person can have and still have it classified as a heart attack,” Dr. Reiner said. But some members of the press remained suspicious that we were hiding some grave news about my condition. I knew that wasn’t true—and I decided not to worry about it. My job was to recuperate.
