In My Time (48 page)

We were all relieved when Liz called later to say that Alma Powell, Colin’s wife, had offered to cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner for our family. When Liz went to pick up the dinner on Thursday afternoon, she looked around the Powells’ kitchen and realized that Alma had, in fact, cooked two entire turkey dinners—one for us and one for her own family. She had probably been up most of the night to get it all done. It was one of the kindest gestures we could imagine and one we’ll never forget.

Kathleen Shanahan and some of her friends contributed more food for the occasion, and we were able to enjoy a wonderful, if unique, family Thanksgiving with plenty of turkey to share with the Secret Service agents who were stuck spending the holiday with us in the hospital.

A few days later I was back at home when Katherine Harris finally certified George Bush and me as the winners of the Florida recount. My six-year-old granddaughter, Kate, had fallen asleep on the red couch in our TV room. After the announcement, Lynne whispered in her ear, “Katie, wake up. Grandpa just got elected vice president of the United States.” Kate rolled over and gave voice to what many Americans were undoubtedly thinking at that point. “What?” she said. “Again?”

The U.S. Supreme Court had already agreed to hear our challenge to the Florida Supreme Court’s decision allowing the hand-recounted ballots. But now that we had been certified as the winners in Florida, our campaign had a major decision to make. We knew that the Gore challenge would continue, but we had to consider whether pushing this to the U.S. Supreme Court now constituted a risk for us. What would happen if they ruled against us? Would that put us in a worse position than we currently occupied, having been certified the winner? Jim Baker and his team in Tallahassee put together a memo laying out the pros and cons of moving ahead, and we had several conference calls going over the possibilities. George Bush listened to the arguments and then made the decision that we would press ahead with the case.

After the certification Governor Bush also announced that I would be chairing the Bush-Cheney transition.

On the Bush ranch in Crawford during the 37 day recount. (Photo by David Kennerly)

For the last several days, we had been operating a skeleton transition from the kitchen table of our home in McLean. Most of the time we had to stand on the back porch to get decent cell phone reception. All of the phones in our house were cordless, and we worried about eavesdropping, so for the most sensitive conversations, Lynne dug an old “princess” style phone out of the attic. This relic from Liz’s and Mary’s high school days was placed in the middle of the kitchen table. Lynne also found an old bulletin board in the attic, and we leaned it up against the kitchen wall so people could tack up messages.

I scheduled a press conference for November 27, the day after the certification. In my brief, I explained where things stood. I said that even though the Gore team was still contesting the outcome and the General Services Administration was not yet providing us with the transition office space or funds normally available to the president-elect, we felt that we had an obligation to move forward with the business of getting ready to govern. “The transition affects the quality of planning, the building of relationships between the administration and the Congress, the capacity of a new administration to develop and execute a legislative program, and even the ability of the new team to deal with that first crisis when it arises, as it inevitably will,” I noted. Every day that we waited to begin the transition was another valuable day lost, and so, I announced, we were setting up a foundation to accept private contributions so that we could begin transition operations.

I also reiterated a point that had been made in the last twenty-four hours by Governor Bush and by Jim Baker:

Governor Bush and I have prevailed at each step of the election process in Florida. Now we have been officially certified, in accordance with the laws of the state of Florida, the winners of the state’s twenty-five electoral votes. Every vote in Florida has been counted, every vote in Florida has been recounted. Some have been counted three times. Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman are apparently
still unwilling to accept the outcome. That’s unfortunate in light of the penalty that may have to be paid at some future date if the next administration is not allowed to prepare to take the reins of government.

We find ourselves in a unique and totally unprecedented position. Never before in American history has a presidential candidate gone to court to try to change the outcome of an already certified presidential election. But whatever the vice president’s decision, it does not change our obligation to prepare to govern the nation.

With that, we began a period of seven weeks of intense work to fill the most important positions in the U.S. government.

It was important that the American people know that we were preparing to govern, so we arranged regular press briefings to report on our progress. At first these briefings were held in hotel ballrooms in downtown D.C., but as soon as we rented office space in McLean for our transition headquarters, eager volunteers moved heaven and earth to transform it into a place we could hold such events. I was most impressed when an energetic young advance man gave me a tour of an area that had been miraculously transformed in twenty-four hours from an empty space into a professional briefing room with yards and yards of blue fabric, a stage, a podium, and rows of chairs. I listened as he explained that the next step would be knocking down a wall so we could have direct access to the stage without having to walk through the room. I put the kibosh on that idea. I didn’t think we’d want to explain to the landlord that we needed to knock down walls in what was supposed to be temporary office space. But I was impressed with this young man’s creativity and energy.

On the night of December 12, Liz and Phil were at their house in McLean, Mary and Lynne were both upstairs fighting the flu, and I was sitting alone in the kitchen watching the news when there was a bulletin that the Supreme Court’s decision in
Bush v. Gore
was about to be handed down. The doorbell rang, and I found David Kennerly and Mike Greene standing on my front porch. David had been having dinner
with Mike, the AP photographer who covered me throughout the campaign, at a nearby restaurant. When they heard the Supreme Court decision would be announced, they rushed over to my house, figuring photos of me hearing the news—either way—would be historic.

When copies of the decision were made available, television producers grabbed them and sprinted down the steps of the Court building to get the decision into the hands of their on-air reporters. I surfed the channels trying to find a reporter I could trust to be able to skim what might be a very complicated legal document and to report its meaning accurately. When I saw Pete Williams of NBC on the screen, I stopped surfing. I knew that if anyone could analyze the Court’s ruling quickly, it would be Pete. And he didn’t disappoint. We’d won the case, and we’d won the election. It was time for them to go.

I picked up the phone and called Jim Baker. “Hello, Mr. Vice President–elect,” he said. “Thank you, Jim,” I said, “and congratulations to you. You did a hell of a job. Only under your leadership could we have gone from a lead of eighteen hundred votes to a lead of one hundred fifty votes.” He laughed heartily. He knew and I knew that his leadership in Florida had been vital.

I hung up and looked around. I really was going to be vice president. And the only people there to celebrate the moment with me were David Kennerly and Mike Greene. Pretty soon Liz and Phil showed up with a bottle of champagne. It wasn’t the victory party I’d imagined, but it was sweet nonetheless.

The next night we gathered old friends, family, and transition staff at the Sheraton hotel near transition headquarters. As we sat watching Al Gore’s concession speech, a small press pool came in to shoot footage. Shortly after they departed, my three-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth, strolled in dressed in a red and white dress, holding a sippy cup in one chubby hand and a cookie in the other. She stopped in front of the TV and announced loudly, but to no one in particular, “That’s Al Gore. We don’t like Al Gore.” I can’t imagine where she picked that up, but I was glad she’d kept her opinion to herself while the press corps was in the room.

As soon as the Supreme Court ruled, the GSA called. They were prepared, they said, to turn over the keys to the official transition space. It was slightly anticlimactic when, at a press briefing on December 14, the deputy GSA administrator and I posed for photographers as he finally handed me a plastic key card on a neck lanyard that would guarantee my access to the official transition office.

On the day after the Supreme Court’s decision was handed down, five moderate Republican senators—Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe, and Lincoln Chafee—invited me to lunch in the Capitol. They wanted to talk about how the new Bush administration planned to govern. We had run and been elected on a conservative agenda of tax cuts, education reform, and a strong national defense. Since our margin had been historically narrow, my luncheon hosts assumed we would be trimming our sails, moving to the center, and looking for areas of compromise. I suspect they thought that would put them in a very powerful position. I also suspect that they were surprised when I made clear that we didn’t plan to alter our agenda at all. We had won, and we would deliver on our campaign promises. We weren’t looking for a fight, but we certainly didn’t plan to capitulate preemptively, either.

A few days later we made our first cabinet announcement. I flew with Colin Powell, the secretary of state-designate, to the Bush ranch in Crawford. George Bush, General Powell, and I went together to the local school gym for the announcement. I was proud of the Powell pick and glad he had agreed to join us. We had worked together well during my time in the Pentagon, and I was looking forward to the chance to work with him again.

I introduced George Bush to another old friend when Paul O’Neill joined us for lunch at the Madison hotel in downtown Washington. Paul and I had worked together in the Ford administration when Paul was deputy director of OMB, and now we were considering him to be secretary of the Treasury. He knew more about the budget and the budget process than just about anybody else and was one of the most capable and competent people I’d ever worked with. After a stint in
government, Paul went into the private sector, and we’d crossed paths when I was at Halliburton and he was chairman of Alcoa. He also came highly recommended by former Secretary of State George Shultz and by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. I was key in recruiting Paul to take the job, and I would be the one to call him two years later when the president decided to make a change.

The other top job, of course, was secretary of defense. The president-elect and I interviewed several top candidates. The interviews covered general topics and discussion, but we also asked specific questions—how would you handle a crisis in Taiwan, for example. We had a number of excellent candidates to choose from, but Don Rumsfeld outperformed the others in his interview. Having had the job before and having clearly spent time thinking about what should be done to transform the military into a modern fighting force, he was very impressive in our small meeting. Don would become both the youngest and the oldest man ever to be secretary of defense, and his competence, intelligence, and dedication would serve him and the president well.

We had discussions about bringing in a new director of central intelligence, but decided to leave George Tenet in place. In 1977 Jimmy Carter had replaced George H. W. Bush as CIA director, and I’ve always assumed that Bush 41 disagreed with that decision, not because it affected him personally, but because he believed that the position should be nonpartisan and shouldn’t shift when the presidency changes hands. I imagine that this experience informed President Bush 43’s decision to leave George Tenet in place.

We wanted to make sure our cabinet was bipartisan, and we reached out to former Wyoming Governor Mike Sullivan, a Democrat, to see if he would be interested in serving as secretary of interior. Mike had a good record as governor and knew the range of issues the department dealt with very well. When I called to gauge his interest, however, he seemed less than enthusiastic. I don’t know if he didn’t want to serve in a Republican administration, or perhaps he just wasn’t prepared to leave Wyoming and move to Washington. Whatever the reason, we ended up selecting Gale Norton, who was the attorney general of Colorado. She
became the first woman to serve as the interior secretary, and she did a terrific job for us at Interior.

One Democrat who served in the cabinet with great distinction was Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta. On September 11, Norm sat with me in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House and supervised the unprecedented operation of bringing every single commercial airliner out of the sky.

Governor Bush and I had our first intelligence briefings together as president-elect and vice president–elect on December 18 and our first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon Tank on January 10. I also spent a good deal of time during the transition on Capitol Hill. I would be the only person in the Bush 43 West Wing initially who had previously been a member of Congress, and I enjoyed the chance to renew old friendships. In addition, I knew that we would need good relations on the Hill. As vice president, my constitutional duties—in addition to being prepared to take over should something happen to the president—included breaking tie votes in the U.S. Senate. And the U.S. Senate was split fifty-fifty, so this duty was likely to be more than theoretical.