CHAPTER 41

The Rise of George W. Bush

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, January 10, 1999, Geraldine and I were leaving Cole Field House on the University of Maryland campus after the Terrapins defeated North Carolina State University in basketball. I was not paying much attention when I slipped on ice from a recent storm and fell heavily. The pain was terrific. I tried to stand up, but I could not and knew something was broken. I was operated on at Sibley Hospital in Washington early Monday evening and had a pin inserted in my hip.

A broken hip is no fun, particularly for a man a few weeks shy of his sixty-eighth birthday. I progressed from wheelchair to walker to cane, with mandatory physical therapy that I hated. I did not miss a column and was back on my rigorous CNN schedule after less than two weeks.

         

AFTER RECOVERING from my broken hip, I made the largest charitable commitment of my life. It dated back to April 27, 1996, when I was at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago addressing a breakfast meeting of the President’s Council of the University of Illinois Foundation, consisting of generous alumni. I told them how my interest in my alma mater had revived and how I had established the Robert D. Novak scholarship in nonfiction writing four years earlier. I continued:

Shortly after my scholarship was announced, two Illinois students interning in Washington contacted me. They described themselves as conservatives and asked—rather unpleasantly—how in the world could I, as a conservative journalist, contribute to a corrupt left-wing [university] administration. Their manners could have been improved, but I understood where they were coming from, even if I disagreed with their final diagnosis and prescription.

I then quoted Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention describing “a cultural war…for the soul of America.” I agreed, asserting that I wanted to stop the retreat of traditional values on the college campus:

I vividly remember my first class at the university, a 9 a.m. Tuesday lecture at Gregory Hall on the History of Civilization—Western civilization, really. It was a golden moment for a 17-year-old boy from Joliet, leading to four years of exploration in the riches of our heritage: Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, John Donne, Hawthorne, Melville, T.S. Eliot—dead white men all. How barren would be my life without that background?

Next I invoked as “a witness for liberal education from nearly five hundred years ago” my future patron saint: Sir Thomas More. I described him as a “courageous advocate of individual freedom and God-given free will against unlimited governmental power—going to the executioner’s block in defense of his ideals and in opposition to tyranny. He crusaded for an international fraternity of Christians to end aggressive war, and founded it on the bedrock of liberal education.”

I concluded that while I could not “dictate policy positions to the faculty,” I could help position the University of Illinois “as a bastion of traditional academic values in the cultural war.” I then offered my proposal:

Within my limited means, I would hope to influence the future of the University by helping in the years to come to endow a chair…. My hope for the University of Illinois is that for as long as can be imagined into the future, young men and women can on a bright early autumn morning attend a lecture on Western civilization as I did as a seventeen-year-old from Joliet and have their eyes opened to the riches of our great tradition of learning and virtue. That, I contend, is winning one very important great cultural war.

For me to propose a Chair of Western Civilization and Culture in those conservative terms was, in retrospect, audacious. I did not know whether I could afford endowing a chair at a great university. I did not even know how much it would cost. I did not know whether the University of Illinois wanted a chair endowed by a right-wing columnist to study the works of dead white men. After all, Princeton had recently spurned such a bequest from a much more prestigious alumnus than I.

Finally, conservative friends to whom I revealed my intentions told me I was taking a terrible risk with a left-wing public university. Surely after I was dead and perhaps even while I was still alive, these skeptics warned, my chair would be filled by an exponent of racial and gender diversity. If I was determined to part with my money this way, they said, I would be better off endowing a chair at right-wing Hillsdale College. My response was that Hillsdale did not need my chair, but Illinois surely did.

The university graciously accepted my offer, informing me it would cost me $1.25 million. The proposal for the chair was drafted by Jesse Delia, dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He knew exactly what I wanted. Jesse was no conservative, but he understood my conservatism. This is his description:

It is desired and expected that the holder of the Chair shall contribute directly to academic work in his or her academic discipline and to the broader goals for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as it relates to sustaining understanding of the central values and traditions of Western civilization and culture.

These values and traditions concern the great themes of individualism and human dignity, the primacy of freedom, equality, liberty and democratic choice in political life; the rights of individuals to hold and create property as foundational to economic life; the centrality of personal expression and an unfettered press in a free society; the openness of inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge as goods in themselves; the enduring significance of Judeo-Christian concepts and religious practices; and the importance of personal relationships and the family as the foundational elements of social life.

We reached this point with glacial speed, which was about to get slower still. Two and a half years passed after I had made my proposal in Chicago without any progress in pinning down financing.

But I had a plan when I went to New York City on Monday, November 30, 1998, to attend the annual black-tie dinner at the Metropolitan Club hosted by Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger International, Inc. (owner of my home newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times). I made a predinner appointment with Black in his Manhattan office for five thirty p.m. He was a big, handsome guy with all the charisma his sidekick F. David Radler, publisher of the Sun-Times, lacked. I figured that if I made my proposition to Black one-on-one, he might give me a quick yes.

I proposed a “Chicago Sun-Times–Robert D. Novak Chair of Western Civilization and Culture” at the University of Illinois to be financed fifty-fifty—$625,000 by Novak, $625,000 by Hollinger. I tried to sell Black, a conservative and an intellectual, on the idea he would be taking action to preserve the Western tradition. I also pitched him as a businessman who could see the benefit of his Chicago newspaper getting more involved with the state’s great public university. In retrospect, I think Black was more into his own ego than focused ideology or even business. It drove him three years later to give up Canadian citizenship and sell his Canadian newspapers to achieve his heart’s desire of becoming an English baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Nevertheless, Black’s first reaction was positive: “That sounds terrific! Let’s do it!” He asked me to put the deal in writing and mail it off to him. But my letter with the details Conrad had requested went unanswered. So did a second letter. So were my phone calls to Black. My fourth call was returned by a Black aide who asked what I wanted. When I told him, he said Mr. Black was in London and he would contact him. More silence followed. I then called the aide, who said that Mr. Black wanted me to know this was a Chicago matter and that Mr. Radler was in charge of everything in Chicago. So if I wanted Hollinger to help in funding the chair, I had better see the thoroughly unlikable Mr. Radler.

Arranging that ate up more than four months. It was May 1999 before I was seated in Radler’s large office on the seventh floor of the Sun-Times Building in Chicago. While Conrad Black was Right of center politically, I found nothing conservative about David Radler. I believe he fancied using the Sun-Times to make himself a kingmaker in Chicago Democratic politics, which my sources in the party there found laughable. In any conversation, Radler quickly would get on my back about Israel. He was a fervent Zionist and thought it his duty to lecture me on the subject, though my column published in his newspaper seldom dealt with Israel now that Rowly had retired. I got right to the point with my sales pitch for the Sun-Times to share the project with me at a cost of $625,000.

“Not a chance,” Radler replied. When I asked him why, he explained: “This is a Chicago paper. We don’t have much connection with a downstate university.” I was infuriated by the ignorance of this Canadian interloper. The University of Illinois was a beloved institution all over the state, including the Chicago metropolitan area. I pointed out that a majority of the university’s students came from the newspaper’s circulation area. “Well,” he countered, “we never contribute to projects like this anyway.” That surprised me, I told Radler, because Conrad Black had said yes in New York the previous November. Flashing his only smile of the meeting, Radler declared: “Conrad says yes to everybody. He can’t say no. That’s what he has me for. I can say no.”

While they were giving me the runaround on $625,000 (to be paid over several years), Black and Radler were looting a half billion dollars from the Sun-Times and their other newspapers. In September 2005 at age sixty-three, F. David Radler was sentenced to two and one-half years in federal prison for fraud. That was about half the stretch Radler would have had to serve if he had not become a witness for the prosecution against Lord Black of Crossharbour, who at age sixty was indicted by a federal grand jury in November 2005. For once, Radler could not just say no.

When I left Radler’s office in April 1999, I had decided to fund the chair by myself. I could do it, thanks to an American economy made vibrant by tax cuts and to the stock selections of Richard Gilder. It was a blessing. Think how embarrassed both the University of Illinois and I would have been had my partners in the chair been exposed as thieves. Instead I look to the Novak chair (filled by Professor Jon Solomon, a renowned classicist who was formerly invested on April 20, 2006) as a perpetual contribution that will outlive me and anything I have written.

         

GOVERNOR GEORGE W. BUSH of Texas was the front-runner for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination when he was scheduled to go to Iowa State University in Ames for the quadrennial presidential straw poll on August 14, 1999. I had been trying to get him on Evans and Novak ever since his election as governor in 1994, but strategist Karl Rove said it was not time for him to do “national” interviews. Now, however, Rove said Bush would tape the program (which had become Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields) in Iowa that weekend, the first national TV show he had done.

My role was a tiny element in the intricate design laid out in the early nineties by Rove for moving George W. Bush, a failed businessman and a failed politician, into the governor’s mansion in 1994 and the White House in 2000. Bush was made available to me anytime I came to Texas during that decade. I took Rove’s overtures not as an effort to establish a buddy-buddy relationship between George W. and me (which I am sure neither of us desired), but an attempt to avert a repetition of my hostility toward his father.

I met with Bush after his 1994 election and wrote that he “does not sound much like his father as he voices the Gingrichite rhetoric of the ’90s.” In 1997, I described him as “what Republicans want for president in 2000: non-Washington, Southern, on good terms with both the Country Club and the Religious Right, not mean-sounding or overly partisan and a robust 51-year-old family man.”

In June 1998, I reported how Republican operative Ron Kaufman, a devoted supporter of the elder Bush, sent a fund-raising letter for the governor’s reelection campaign urging contributors to “send an important signal about the strength of the Bush network.” I wrote in a column:

Alarm bells went off nationwide…. [D]oes the bright, likable and conservative younger Bush carry the unwanted baggage of politicians and advisers associated with his father’s dreadful campaign of 1992?

According to sources, Kaufman was scolded by someone close to the Governor for suggesting a family cabal.

Insiders could guess that the “source” and the “scolder” were the same person: Karl Rove. Indeed, Rove let me know that the boarding party had been repelled and that Kaufman and the rest of the Bush Senior entourage would not be on the son’s ship.

Unsubstantiated rumors of past cocaine use by Bush dominated political news in early August 1999. I was at our summer place at Fenwick Island. In phone conversations, Rove stressed two points. First, Bush never would answer any question about cocaine, no matter how many ways the issue was broached. Second, sooner or later, reporters would get sick of these nonanswers and stop asking them.

We taped the interview Saturday morning, August 14, 1999, in a suite CNN rented at the Marriott Hotel in Des Moines. Rowly, who had never met Bush, said after the interview he was favorably impressed. So was I, as I indicated in the column:

Contradicting claims by Steve Forbes [running second in Iowa] that he hides his views or doesn’t have any, Bush was responsive in detailing his position on more than a dozen issues—with a surprise or two.

He proposed rolling back President Clinton’s 1993 tax increases (something that the Republican Congress has never attempted). He promised to act if China attacks Taiwan. He said he would end, not mend, the present affirmative action system. He liked being called the nation’s most anti-abortion governor, and praised the National Rifle Association.

Such newsy discussion took up the first twenty minutes of the interview’s twenty-two-minute airtime. But none of it made the weekend news and talk shows. That was because of what happened in the last two minutes of the interview when Rowly asked a carefully framed question about “possible past use of hard drugs.” Bush, apparently thinking he had dodged the bullet with the interview nearly over, looked a little surprised before he answered:

Bush: When I first got going in this campaign, I started hearing about these ridiculous rumors. I made up my mind in this point of time not to chase every single rumor that had been floated about me….

I’m going to tell you something. It’s time for some politician to stand up and say enough is enough of this. The game of trying to force me to prove a negative and to chase down unsubstantiated, ugly rumors has got to end. And so, therefore, I’m going to end it.

Evans: This is the only rumor. There’s not a lot of rumors swirling about you. And this is the only [one]…Are you never going to answer that question?

Bush: Let me tell you something. It’s not the only rumor. The minute you answer one question, they float another rumor. I know how the game works. I saw it firsthand. And I ain’t playing…. And the process needs to be cleaned up….

What I did twenty-five to thirty years ago is—is—I’m not just going to inventory.

Uncommunicative though Bush’s remarks were, they were the only thing he had said about cocaine and were all over weekend television (while his substantive remarks in our interview were ignored). I was told Bush staffers felt I had betrayed Rove by asking the cocaine question. Of course, I had made no such commitment, and Rove never complained.

My continued good relations with Rove were demonstrated during our Texas Christmas trip of 1999, which was the last of its kind for Geraldine and me. Her mother died on December 15, 2000, ending nearly four decades of holiday visits to Geraldine’s family. In 1999, with Bush’s presidential campaign in full blast, I asked to see Rove in Austin. He not only gave me an office visit, but arranged a dinner party for Geraldine and me at his home attended by Bush’s full campaign team. It’s hard to extract much news from an event like that, but I thought Karl made the point that he wanted me to feel I was highly regarded by the Bush operation.

         

LATE ON TUESDAY night, February 24, 2000, I was in the CNN bureau in a strip mall office on the outskirts of Detroit when I was called upon to deliver an instant analysis of John McCain’s stunning victory over George W. Bush in the Michigan primary. I went on the air to say this was a golden opportunity for McCain to wrest the presidential nomination away from the anointed Bush. It had been an improbable journey for McCain, who had begun trailing Dan Quayle, Steve Forbes, Elizabeth Dole, and Pat Buchanan among Bush’s challengers in the polls.

McCain outlasted them all and was Bush’s last remaining serious challenger when he was interviewed by Mark Shields and me on Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields on January 15, 2000, from Des Moines. McCain was there for a debate in which he turned to Bush and declared: “Your tax plan has 36 percent of it going to the richest 1 percent in America.” I pressed him in our subsequent TV interview, evoking this reply: “When there’s a growing gap…between the haves and have-nots in America…now is the time to give the break to middle-class Americans.” What he said at the debate and in our interview was Democratic class-warfare rhetoric, which is why his Republican candidacy appealed so much to Mark Shields and Al Hunt.

During the interview, McCain said: “I think that Mr. Novak’s insults that he’s hurled at me all these years have kept me awake many nights.” That was sarcasm with a twinkle in his eye, reflecting the peculiar relationship we had. When I came in late once to a packed town meeting rally in New Hampshire, McCain spotted me and yelled: “Ah, there in the back is the Prince of Darkness!” Reporters liked McCain, and I was no exception, though I was troubled by his playing to applause from Hunt and Shields.

Independents in New Hampshire could vote in either primary, and in 2000 they selected the Republican ballot to vote for McCain. His landslide win thrust him ahead of Bush in polls taken all over the country, even in conservative South Carolina where the next primary test came on February 19. An unusually fierce Karl Rove appeared on Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields on February 5 and promised: “We’re not going to allow Senator McCain to do what he did to us in New Hampshire.” His rough campaign against McCain defeated the senator in South Carolina, leading to Michigan three days later on February 22.

In the absence of a Democratic primary in Michigan, the Democratic-Independent turnout for the Republican primary was a stunning 51 percent, enabling McCain to edge out Bush while winning only one-third of Republican voters. Making calls to Republicans around the country from that Detroit strip mall, I found McCain’s second primary win was eroding support for Bush.

The big test would be the Republicans-only primary in Virginia on February 29, one week after Michigan. Polls showed Bush’s big lead in Virginia had turned into a dead heat. If McCain could win Virginia, he might be on the way to one of the great surprises in American political history. But McCain squandered the opportunity.

In Virginia Beach the night before the election, he delivered a jeremiad against two leaders of the Christian Right who happened to be Virginians. By calling Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” and warning his party against “pandering to the outer reaches of American politics,” he symbolically declared war on the engine of majority status for Republicans. McCain lost Virginia—and any hope for the nomination—by following the advice of his friend, former senator Warren Rudman, who detested religious conservatives. I wrote then and I believe now that the hot-tempered senator acted out of rage, incensed by the religious Right’s campaign that lost him South Carolina.

         

BILL CLINTON WAS not wild about Gridiron Club dinners and bagged his final one (the second time in eight years) on March 25, 2000. Vice President Al Gore would substitute, giving the presidential speech in the year he would be the Democratic nominee for president.

I learned the Gore operation had waited until the last minute to put his speech together when I received a telephone call from my friend Bob Shrum, Gore’s media specialist, on the Wednesday before the Saturday night dinner. Shrum asked me to participate in a “good-natured” gag video to be inserted in Gore’s speech. I would be videotaped as a reporter asking questions of George W. Bush. A clip of Bush would have him answering every question with one word: “General.” That was the answer he gave when a local TV interviewer in Boston asked him the name of the President of Pakistan and he did not know it.

Why would I lend myself to such a stunt, intended to make Bush look dumb? Shrum could not have been surprised when I responded that Gore would have to pay a price. Not since 1988 preconvention activity had Gore gone on television with me, ignoring my repeated requests. I could understand why. I had been pounding Gore for years. But now for me to help out the vice president, he would have to submit to a half-hour interview on Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields. While Shrum agreed immediately, I said his word was not enough. I wanted to hear it from Al Gore himself before I fulfilled my part of the bargain.

Early that evening, the vice president phoned me at my apartment. We had not exchanged a word for many years, but he was cordial as he thanked me for agreeing to help him. I reminded him politely of his commitment to follow that favor promptly with a TV interview. Gore said he understood and agreed, without equivocation. On Thursday, I taped the questions at CNN. My participation in Gore’s stunt shocked some Gridiron guests, though it was one of the evening’s entertainment high points.

I called Shrum the next week, seeking a firm date for the interview. It was the first of many such conversations extending for weeks and then months. Finally, in August, a contrite Shrum gave up. Gore simply would not schedule the TV interview.

Bill Daley had just been named Gore’s national campaign chairman, and I telephoned him at his Nashville headquarters in mid-August. I felt that unless we got this done before Labor Day, any chance of it happening would disappear. Raised in Chicago politics where commitments were taken seriously, Daley seemed appalled when I told him about Gore’s conduct. He sounded as though he thought he could fix it. But when he called back, Bill said it was no deal. However, he quickly asked, would I settle for a print interview for the column or the Sun-Times? It was not what I was promised, I said, but I would take it. Daley soon called again with more bad news. Gore would not do that either. He would do nothing for me. “I thought a deal was a deal,” I told Daley. “So did I,” he replied.

Would my treatment of Gore over the next two and one-half months have been any softer if he had kept his word? I hope not, but who knows? Al Gore demonstrated that he was even more of a phony than I had thought.

         

THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL campaign was the eleventh and probably last where I hooked up with a candidate in its final days. I got aboard Bush’s plane the Thursday night before the election and spent all day Friday following him, ending up in Morgantown, West Virginia. A visit to a state with few electoral votes that usually went Democratic was unusual. But this was not your father’s West Virginia, and Karl Rove was not kidding when he said this would be a very close election (where Bush in fact needed West Virginia to be elected). What I never expected was being on hand for a “November Surprise” by the Democrats.

With no more than five percent of the electorate undecided, Bush’s tax cuts and smaller government were going over better with the undecided middle than Gore’s gun control and prescription drug subsidies. I had expected a late missile launch by Gore. But by my November 1–2 visit to the Bush campaign, I thought it might be too late.

I should have known it’s never too late for a “roorback” (a smear on a candidate so close to election day that it’s impossible to rebut effectively). It came the Thursday before the election. In Portland, Maine, a “civic-minded” judge had tipped off an “enterprising” lawyer about a long-hidden, twenty-four-year-old arrest of George W. The thirty-year-old Bush, in 1976 a heavy drinker, was arrested for a drunken driving violation in Maine where he was staying at his father’s Kennebunkport house. Reporters covering his campaign could not conceal their elation.

Working on the road with a cell phone on Friday, I had a tough time finding what was behind the story. I couldn’t get Karl Rove in Austin, and other sources pleaded ignorance. Then, for the only time in forty years on the campaign trail, I received serious help from a competitor.

Carl Cameron of Fox News was thirty years younger than I and one of the nation’s best young political reporters. He tipped me off to what really happened and provided the names of the cast of characters. That enabled me to place calls to Maine and elsewhere over that weekend, and have a well-reported column for Monday, the day before the election. Carl knew, of course, that I was a commentator for CNN, Fox’s hated rival, in addition to being a newspaper columnist. But I guess he figured it was important that his not be the only report demonstrating that the real duplicity in this story rested with Gore. Besides, he would have broadcast the story before I commented on CNN’s Capital Gang Saturday night. This is what I wrote in Monday’s column:

Portland, Maine, lawyer Tom Connolly, who attracted only 13 percent of the vote as the [Democratic] party’s 1998 nominee for Governor, is renowned as a character who wears his long-billed fishing cap into court.

It was Connolly who leaked Bush’s 1976 Maine arrest record after supposedly being tipped about it by an unnamed “political official” whom everybody in politics knows is Portland Probate Judge Billy Childs. Connolly and Childs are political compatriots and proteges of Joe Brennan, the state’s last Democratic governor….

Maine sources say Childs…dug up Bush’s court record some four months ago. Its impact would long ago have faded had it been released then. Five days before the election could be another matter.

I am convinced the DUI revelation cut into a rising Bush tide, costing him a popular vote majority and nearly giving Gore the presidency. While Gore’s campaign denied complicity, I suggested in my November 6 column that it was inconceivable that the vice president’s political operatives were unaware of what Judge Childs had in his hands for four months. The campaign’s Maine connections were manifold. Press secretary Chris Lehane was born and raised in Kennebunkport, and his sister was a partner with a Democratic law firm in Portland. Connolly was a Gore delegate to the 2000 national convention.

The Bush camp’s argument that Gore’s roorback had no impact on the outcome was a postelection attempt to evade responsibility for a stupendous tactical blunder. Rove, Karen Hughes, and the other Bush insiders all knew of the drunken driving arrest but bet that the Democrats would never discover it. It reflected an ominous tendency by the Bush inner circle toward secrecy and deception.

         

IN FORECASTING 2000, the Evans-Novak Political Report was right on the nose in the House with a two-seat Republican loss, reducing the GOP majority to eleven seats. The ENPR’s Senate projection of a one-seat Republican loss was further off the mark, compared with a loss of four Republican seats that narrowed the GOP margin to what turned out be a perishable one-seat margin. The Electoral College projections, made by me and my reporter Mike Catanzaro, seemed way off by projecting a 308 to 230 Bush victory while Bush in fact won by 271 to 266 after the Florida dispute was settled. Actually, we only missed three states—incorrectly putting Michigan, Wisconsin, and Delaware in the Bush column.

Michigan, along with Pennsylvania and Florida, constituted the “Trifecta” of 2000. If either Bush or Gore won all three states, he would be president. I attended a luncheon at The Palm hosted every Election Day for a group of conservative journalists and Republican strategists by Bill Schulz of Reader’s Digest. As we left the restaurant and walked onto 19th Street, I observed my Crossfire adversary Bill Press and a few other liberals, after eating at the restaurant, whooping it up on the sidewalk as they scrutinized sheets of paper. They were reading exit polls, supposedly secret until the voting was finished, that showed Gore sweeping the Trifecta and winning the presidency.

Press and I went on Crossfire from CNN’s Washington studios at seven thirty p.m. Eastern time, before the polls had closed in key states. That meant we were not supposed to say a word about the exit polls indicating a Gore victory. Press was so excited he could barely contain himself on the air without telling all he knew.

The Florida voting was just ending when Crossfire finished at eight p.m. The Voter News Service (VNS), the combine that made election night decisions for the networks and the AP, immediately awarded Florida to Gore on the basis of exit polls. This was ominous for Bush, inasmuch as Florida was considered the most likely Trifecta state to go Republican. At nine p.m., VNS awarded the other two Trifecta states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, to Gore. It looked like an early evening.

But at that point, my Republican sources—Karl Rove included—told me in phone calls that the raw vote numbers pouring in from Florida showed the state’s exit polls were wrong and that VNS’s award of the state to Gore had been premature. It took VNS experts an hour to agree, retracting their Florida call at ten thirteen p.m. and saying the presidential election was too close to call. It was midnight, and nobody knew who had been elected. At two sixteen a.m., the Fox News Channel called Florida—and the presidency—for Bush. The other networks quickly followed, and at two thirty, Gore conceded in a phone call to Bush.

I was wired with a microphone and earpiece to comment on Bush’s victory. I did so around three a.m., but the latest Florida vote count showed Bush’s lead there diminishing quickly. As Gore retracted his concession, the networks retracted their victory call and when a voter recount mandated by Florida kicked in, I was asked to stay wired to comment from time to time. I remained in that seat, making several commentaries, until five a.m., when I was told to go home.

I caught a couple hours of sleep at my apartment before going to my office to work on a column for Thursday morning and an edition of the ENPR. I figured we surely would know who won by noon. I could not conceive what was coming.