2000: Gore Floats into “Floodgate”
(Or, How a Dam Release Turned an Environmentalist into a Hypocrite)
The Shakedown Summer
In the middle months of 1999, Vice President Al Gore, then fifty-three, expected to be elected president in a year and a half. Had he won, he would have been fifty-four shortly after his inauguration, the average age at accession, exactly, of the forty-four men who have served in that office. While he fell in middle of this pack, age-wise, his resume put him near the peak of American politicians. His seven years of service as vice president following his eight years in the Senate and twelve in the House of Representatives certainly should have signaled to him—and others—a sense that his life’s work in politics was reaching an apex.
But a cloud hung over Gore. He was endeavoring to succeed a scandal-shrouded boss while that boss’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was herself emerging from her husband’s shadow to run for the Senate from New York. Making matters worse, Gore’s staff and consultants were enmeshed in rivalry, giving him conflicting advice.1 While a recipe for success on the campaign trail is to project the image of “the happy warrior,” a confluence of factors left him in an unhappy spot from which to debut an eighteen-month drama.
There was also the thing about Gore: a perception—cross-examined and reconsidered only after he left office—that he was prone to exaggeration or, as Lou Dobbs put it on CNN, “delusions of grandeur.”2 The real thing about Gore, this many years later, might be that the D.C. press corps didn’t much like him. Could they be blamed for that? In the way he comported himself on the stage or in on-the-record interviews, he wasn’t a natural. Unlike Clinton, he didn’t easily warm to strangers.
Gore was also emerging into his own amid a sea change in the TV news business. Long the sole twenty-four-hour cable news channel, CNN was joined by MSNBC on July 15, 1996, and Fox News Channel followed later that year on October 6. The three networks competed intensely, putting up prime-time programming that was built on parsing and amplifying the newspaper and magazine reporting of the day.
The cable networks had plenty to parse and amplify from a casual comment Gore offered up during a late-night 1997 conversation with Rick Berke of the New York Times and Karen Tumulty of Time aboard Air Force Two. These kinds of chats often comprise a bonding strategy for presidential candidates to forge closer ties to the reporters on their beat. Instead, the chat session spawned the urban legend that Gore boasted of being the model for the Oliver Barrett IV character in Erich Segal’s Love Story. Closer examination of a range of reporting shows that he never made that claim.3
And then there was the “Internet” fiasco. An interview of Gore by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 1999 was misconstrued from Capitol Hill to green rooms all around Washington implying that the wonky vice president claimed he had “invented” the Internet. A closer watch of that interview shows that he didn’t say that either.4
Finally, there was Love Canal. At an event in 1999 in New Hampshire, Gore told students that, while researching a mysterious illness affecting a girl from his home state, he “found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.” He did say that, but when you read the quote in context, it’s called conversation, as in “I found a little restaurant in Greenwich Village”—it doesn’t mean you discovered it.5
Further deconstruction of Gore’s choice of words in his pre-campaign positioning is folly. Eric Boehlert in Rolling Stone and Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair, among others, did a thorough autopsy of those moments years ago.6 Anyone searching for a classic origin story of how “narratives” of public figures are formed should study the source materials, follow-on stories and the revisionist analysis of Gore’s so-called lies. The upshot is that the late 1990s “exaggerations” of Al Gore say more about the media and our pop culture than they do about the man. It was simpler, cheaper and easier to serve up superficial, reprocessed mockery about an individual than dive deep into issues like foreign policy and climate change.
Reporters like Boehlert and Peretz, or one-time insiders like me, can wag our fingers against popular mythology all we want. It matters little to a defeated politician. The die was cast on Al Gore in 1999 when, to drive chatter, eyeballs and votes, the influencing class of the Age of Optics decreed certain “truths” about Gore, if they are repeated over and over, to be self-evident.
Water-cooler chatter of the strain that infected Gore is bred by what leads the news the night before, how the late-night comics twist it for laughs and where it pops out from the paper as you sip your coffee on the commuter train. Attitudes formed in the evening during cable news prime time harden overnight, glazed by the heat from the picture on the front page and the first twenty minutes of the network morning shows. The process is magnified in a media town like New York, where tabloids like the Post and Daily News scream from every street corner. The “wood” from those papers informs columnists and comedy writers about what material might kill in a monologue or in 750 words along the edge of a page of newsprint.
A photo, and the story behind it, can drive punchlines for a week or more. At the worst possible time in his political career, when he had to redefine his character and cleanse himself from a year of scandal that started steps from his West Wing office, Gore’s team made an unforced error in the execution and aftermath of a photo op. It was seized on instantly by the media and his enemies, adding to the ingrained, if unfair, perception of the candidate as hypocrite.
In July 1999, the Gore presidential “road show” went through its shakedown summer. This was a time to clear the cobwebs from seven years as the presidential understudy and get into fighting trim against New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, a political icon who proved to be more of a warm-up bout than a title card fight.
In the early months, some events on the vice president’s schedule were political in nature, paid for from his campaign coffers. Some events were official in nature, with Gore performing vice presidential duties as a representative of the federal government, but still seen by the news-consuming public through the prism of a man seeking even higher office.
As the pace of campaigning picked up, reporters like Katharine Seelye of the New York Times and Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post took on the Gore beat full time, competing for every scoop, the words in their stories periodically freshening the unflattering episodes of the Gore mythology.7 Through their reporting, and that of other news organizations, every abnormal tic, imprecise phrase and awkward image mattered. Such warmed-over gruel was easier for readers to digest than substance. While the traveling press doesn’t like to admit it, the road show is more like a concert tour than an exercise in civic discourse, and the reporters are the jaded rock critics. Their job is to uncover evidence, preferably visual, that the band on its summer tour doesn’t have its shit together.
As my old friend Mike Feldman, an ex-advance man who served that summer as Gore’s senior advisor and his traveling chief of staff, told me, “The fact of the matter is that ‘the road show,’ however you define it, at that point in time and still to this day, is still a series of productions. Everything is designed to try to convey some sort of message about the administration’s agenda, and also about the priorities of the man who might be potentially running for president.”8
Crisis Manager
Feldman was no rookie on the road show. A veteran of the 1992 campaign like me, we bonded during a 1993 trip to Silicon Valley to lay the groundwork for Clinton and Gore to unveil their new high-tech initiative at the headquarters of Silicon Graphics, then a leading maker of high-powered workstations for design and special effects firms. The hundreds of engineers who worked at SGI, and their CEO, Ed McCracken, were focused on where the new team in the White House would take U.S. technology policy. McCracken opened the company’s doors wide to us, and we graciously accepted his hospitality.
On site selection visits like our trip to Northern California, a tape measure makes the first calculation of how many people can cram into a location. Wearing a producer’s hat, you pinpoint where lights, cameras and staging will go. Importantly, you also need a human barometer to gauge how generous a host will be to underwrite the myriad costs of your event. Working in the White House is fundamentally different from campaigns, where you can use donors’ funds to produce any kind of extravaganza.
Silicon Graphics offered the best mix of people, products and open space—and an open wallet, thanks to Ed McCracken—to host a great event. While Feldman worked the politics of bringing the president and vice president to Northern California, I focused on transforming the Silicon Graphics cafeteria into a Town Hall venue, linked to the rest of its campus by remote video hookups. With some spare time on site, I sat down with Silicon Graphics visual engineers to produce a special effects–driven video for the event intro that used SGI’s then-revolutionary technology to morph Clinton’s image in a long line of great presidents, from Washington to Jefferson to Lincoln to FDR and JFK. Next stop, Mount Rushmore.
This event wouldn’t have been tried in the Reagan years. Had I pulled that stunt of morphing Clinton’s image from a line of great predecessors in the run-up to the 2000 campaign, or more surely today, I would have ignited a small scandal and been run out of town. But back then, there was no YouTube, and only the Silicon Graphics team and I had a copy of the video.
On Game Day, the film brought down the house and even got the press laughing before the event settled into a geekfest with Clinton and Gore hatching their new ideas against a backdrop of computer monitors feeding a constant image of the Presidential Seal. While a supermarket scanner had “amazed” President Bush, Clinton and Gore seemed at home amid the advanced wizardry of Silicon Graphics. The setting created a high-tech composition for evening-news packages and still photos for the next day’s papers. It didn’t hurt that the new policies resonated with the sympathetic audience of super-smart engineers, adding to the favorable television coverage.
Six years later, with Clinton in near-retirement and Gore in the spotlight, an advance man’s prescription to highlight the vice president’s priorities was to get out of Washington and away from his boss’s shadow. The destination: a picturesque spot in an early primary state in which to remind voters through imagery of your sterling environmental credentials, for example. You might prefer to sit around a table and lecture for hours on the topic, but you’ve got to scale the communication to an electorate with better things to do on a beautiful July day. One picture, and the few seconds it takes to absorb it, is the most attention you might hope to expect.
Another dividend of the precise outdoor visual is the power to awaken local activists from an eight-year slumber to support your cause. Done well, they would see the next morning a large, four-color shot covering the top half of the Concord Monitor. The picture would feature the splendor of the New Hampshire backcountry with a casually attired candidate placed artfully in the middle of a gently flowing river. Any outdoorsy Granite Stater gazing on such an image would feel a sense of kinship with the candidate, or so the thinking went. That guy, they would conclude, shares my values.
But an advance-man-turned-advisor like Feldman knew from experience that it was precisely these moments that could turn hellish in a hurry, especially with a hyper-competitive press corps in tow. “It is, in a sense, a transaction,” Feldman told me, “where you have something you want from the event, the media has something that they want from the event, and those things are not always aligned.”9 The somethings of which Feldman spoke were badly misaligned when Gore traveled to New Hampshire on July 22, 1999.
Earth Day
Seven years before that trip to New Hampshire, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush had mocked Gore as “Ozone Man” in one of Bush’s flailing broadsides against a ticket that was faster, fresher and more polished than he and Dan Quayle.10 The president, facing two opponents, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, found himself on the losing side of the environmental issue, among others, and was denied a second term in office.
While Gore was in office as Bill Clinton’s wingman for the seven years that followed, he tried—but couldn’t always mollify—each constituent for whom the environment was a ballot-box issue. Though the Clinton years left some green voters disappointed, Gore had worked hard to maintain his conservationist cred, often taking the lead on choreographed White House events designed with a “green” patina.
Since 1970, thanks to the vision of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Earth Day had been celebrated each year on April 22. During the Clinton-Gore years, that day afforded us a chance to bring the president and vice president outside together somewhere for a back-to-nature image.
On April 22, 1996, our White House scheduling office sent the pair, looking like park ranger trainees, on a mission to the C&O Canal National Historic Park in Montgomery County, Maryland. Their job was to roll up their sleeves and haul away a mess of logs and branches from a paralyzing winter blizzard that closed off 6.4 miles of the 184-mile towpath. With Clinton in khakis and Gore in jeans, and both wearing tan leather work gloves, they were seen smiling and straining to toss a massive, rotten stump away from a pile of debris. The wire image ended up on the front page of many newspapers.
Beyond scenes casting him as a boy scout, Gore nurtured his conservationist cred by returning to writing. In 1994, he penned a fresh introduction for the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the landmark book that helped launch the U.S. environmental movement in 1964. This followed earlier turns as an author, including 1992’s Earth in the Balance, which staked his claim to his trademark issue.11
Now, approaching the 2000 campaign, the environment might again serve Gore’s political purposes. His likely opponent, Texas governor George W. Bush, the son of Gore’s 1992 opponent, appeared to have environmental liabilities from his record that could be exploited. Bush had signed widely criticized legislation as governor that established a voluntary program for Texas industrial plants to reduce air pollution. The law was roundly derided by Democrats for allowing in-state corporations to skirt environmental responsibility.
There were substantive contrasts between the two men on this and many other issues, but the coming 2000 campaign was already being reduced by the media to a simple story of the studious, colorless fellow (Gore) against the kid who made friends easily but focused blithely on his schoolwork (Bush). The caricature was unfair to both men, but the narrative was easy to follow, the characters played to type and the resulting news product kept viewers’ attention.
As Gore’s advance team deployed to New Hampshire to orchestrate the latest chapter of the environmental play—Gore announcing a federal grant to cleanse toxins from a river and canoeing down that very river—they walked into an accidental trap. They missed the warning signs that in planning a photo op, no gesture, no matter how small, can help sink a campaign. By most measures, artificially raising the river’s water level to buoy a downstream paddle is no small gesture.
“An event that backfired, creating a potential embarrassment,” Mike Feldman told me, remembering the incident many years later, “is more interesting to the media than the message you’re trying to deliver. I approached every day with the question: what could go wrong?” But Feldman was no longer the advance man scouting the way. Seven years removed from that role, he could only implore young colleagues to serve as his early warning radar.
That job began with the advance team. “There are so many moving parts, so much travel, and sometimes three, four or five markets a day, with dozens of events in the course of a week”—what Feldman summed up as “the precariousness of the road.”
In listening to conference calls about upcoming stops, Feldman could only run through his mental checklists. “What hand grenade is going to go off today? What mine are we going to step on? What are the things that are going to potentially trip us up?” Feldman repeatedly asked himself those questions and hoped Gore’s advance teams were doing the same.12
Not sufficiently enough, as it turned out. When a minor photo op—a four-mile canoe trip down the Connecticut River near Cornish, New Hampshire—becomes a scandal in itself, there’s deeper trouble ahead. Welcome to “Floodgate.”
Downstream from Wilder Dam
The summer of 1999 was marked by drought conditions in the Northeast United States. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued warnings of “record and near-record short-term precipitation deficits occurring on a local and regional scale.” Down on the farm, it resulted in agricultural losses and drought emergencies in several states, costing eastern growers as much as $1.1 billion in lost income.13
Also, in July, just as the campaigns on both sides were eager to get their road show operations underway, politics took a temporary backseat to national tragedy. A small airplane, a Piper Saratoga, piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. and carrying his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on July 16 off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The occupants perished, sending the country into a week of national shock and then mourning for the loss of an icon of a bygone era. On every medium were melancholy reminders of decades of heartbreak befalling the Kennedy family.
Visual retrospectives rushed into production in TV newsrooms showed the image of the boy who, in Alan Stanley Tretick’s famous October 1963 photo for Look magazine, peered through the secret door of the Resolute Desk while his father worked away in the Oval Office. Jackie Kennedy didn’t like her children being photographed for political purposes, but she was out of the country when Tretick got that frame.14
In a stark contrast to that final endearing moment preserved on film between father and son, viewers were riveted to live coverage of the search for the bodies of JFK Jr. and the Bessette sisters. The victims were finally pulled from the ocean floor by Navy divers on Wednesday, July 21. They were cremated that evening at the Mayflower Cemetery crematorium in Duxbury, closing a final chapter of America’s Camelot.
Meanwhile, 175 miles away in Cornish, New Hampshire, a Gore advance team was balancing both the drought conditions and the somber national mood as they put the finishing touches on a signature Gore event. Along the banks of the Connecticut River, they were preparing for the vice president to tout a federal grant that would provide $819,000 for projects to restore the waterway, which had become so polluted that by the 1950s inspectors taking water samples from the river took to wearing gas masks to accomplish their task. The river had been a haven for settlers during colonial times and a busy thoroughfare for commerce in the following centuries, leading to its degradation. During the Clinton years, it was one of fourteen waterways designated as an American Heritage River, making it eligible for federal funds to assist in their cleanup.15
On July 22, the day after Kennedy was cremated, the Gore advance team had arranged a speaking opportunity to announce the Heritage Rivers designation, an event tailor-made for a natural backdrop. Gore, at a microphone erected near the riverbank, said, “Environmental protection and economic growth are not opposing forces, but go hand in hand.” With the flowing water behind him, Gore added, “To me, these are more than public policy issues, they are moral issues. We have to make the twenty-first century the time we right the environmental wrongs of the past.”16 Cameras dutifully recorded the remarks and reporters scribbled in their notebooks, but the main event was still to come.
To give photographers a newsworthy visual to buttress Gore’s message, the vice president would embark, via canoe, on a leisurely paddle four miles down the river. In conference calls with the advance team, Gore’s assistant press secretary, Nathan Naylor, pressed them to arrange a vantage point that allowed lenses to capture the full panorama of the idyllic scene. No problem, they told Naylor. On site scouting visits, they had found a dry sandbar in the middle of the river that provided a perfect angle to film approaching watercraft. On Game Day, Naylor would escort the pool to that spot to await their prized catch.17
According to the plan, New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen would paddle in the bow of the canoe, with the vice president navigating the red craft from the stern. The forecast called for good weather, and the canoers would be suitably decked out in khaki pants and golf shirts and properly fitted with life preservers to make the trip. The image was a no-brainer. The only nagging worry for the advance team, one they thought they’d put to rest days before, was would there be enough water?
Water flow on the river near Cornish was regulated by the Wilder Dam, built in 1950, located several miles upstream. The dam, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric, “impounded” the river for forty-five miles upstream, creating a reservoir that drove turbines providing forty-two megawatts of hydroelectric power to nearby cities and towns. In the summer months, especially these parched summer months of 1999, the utility released millions of gallons of water at timed intervals during the day to meet peak power demand in nearby communities. When the water was released from the dam, the level of the river would rise commensurately, by as much as a foot in the dry months. A calculated bonus from the artificially rising tide meant that a canoe could float down the river without the risk of running aground.
Daily massive releases of water weren’t just normal, they were necessary. But for the advance team planning Gore’s canoe trip, a water release was also expedient, if it could be well-timed. A rise in the water level of eight to ten inches would ensure that the canoe carrying Gore and Shaheen would cruise above any embarrassing obstacle during its four-mile journey, a logistical detail that commanded attention on daily trip calls.
In addition to Nathan Naylor, another Gore aide monitoring the calls for the July 22 trip was my old friend Matt Bennett, now Gore’s trip director. Bennett had held that role since 1997, logging hundreds of thousands of air miles with the VP on trips around the world. His wife, Sue, was expecting their first child, and the road show would soon end for Bennett, the duties of trip directing a new candidate and fatherhood of a newborn baby being both similar yet fundamentally incompatible. As trip director, Bennett oversaw the staff on Gore’s plane and tried to keep the entourage on schedule, all while staying abreast of the planning process for upcoming trips and preparation for diaper-changing.
“At some point,” Bennett told me, the VP’s scheduling office “became concerned because the local contact said, ‘Look it’s summer, and that time of day, at this time of year, the river is low. And it’s a dam-controlled river and we might not even be able to canoe on it. The water is released every day, but the timing doesn’t work very well. If you guys were here three hours later, it would be fine. But the river’s going to be low and that could be a problem.’”18 It’s not a problem, however, if you control the levers for the floodgate.
The Gore advance team and the Secret Service were working with Sharon Francis, executive director of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions, on planning for the trip. The Joint Commissions’ statutory mission is to preserve and protect the resources of the Connecticut River Valley and guide its growth and development. Having the vice president fly up from Washington to showcase their work and bestow $819,000 in federal money for river-related projects, including $100,000 for the commission itself, meant that Francis had a hefty stake in making sure everything came off without a hitch. “As hosts for our vice president on the Connecticut River, we felt a responsibility for his safety and that of the governor and the river’s other guests,” Francis said later.19
The issue of safety and water level never reached the vice president before the trip, according to Bennett, but it was a hot topic of conversation on daily trip calls. “As is typical with these kinds of scheduling things, we just said, ‘All right, let’s see if there’s any way of sorting that out so that we don’t hit bottom on the river,’” Bennett told me.20
On the morning of July 22, as Air Force Two descended toward the Lebanon Municipal Airport in New Hampshire, Bennett, Feldman, Naylor and Chris Lehane, Gore’s press secretary, reviewed their schedules one last time for the vice president’s trip to New Hampshire. The day would have two planned stops, the environmental remarks and canoe trip near Cornish, and a picnic in the Seacoast area of the state later in the afternoon. By the time the foursome arrived with the vice president at the Seacoast, they would have to reckon with an inconvenient truth: the Connecticut River Joint Commissions had requested that the river be raised through a dam release to smooth Vice President Gore’s ride downstream.
Tin Man in a Boat
At the time Gore flew to New Hampshire, Bill Clinton’s taint from scandal was beginning to fade. On February 12, following his impeachment trial, the Senate acquitted him on perjury charges, 55 to 45. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 10,000 for the first time on March 29 and, on April 20, Clinton again rose to the role as consoler in chief after teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School. Even with this turn in perceptions regarding Clinton’s job approval, there was persistent coverage of a deepening divide between the president and vice president who had so amicably shared the stage that Feldman and I set up at Silicon Graphics six years earlier.
A month before the canoe trip, on June 16, Gore formally launched his candidacy before 8,000 supporters in his hometown of Carthage, Tennessee. “If you entrust me with the presidency,” he told the crowd, “I will marshal its authority, its resources and its moral leadership to fight for America’s families.” Moral leadership wasn’t a term he used lightly. “With your help,” he added, “I will take my own values of faith and family to the presidency to build an America that is not only better off but better.”21 Reference to “values of faith and family” was thinly veiled code quickly deciphered by the press.
While Gore had stood by his boss throughout the impeachment, in an interview on ABC News’s 20/20 to preview his campaign launch, Gore said that what Clinton had done “was inexcusable, and particularly as a father, I felt that it was terribly wrong, obviously.” Quizzed on his feelings when Clinton wagged his finger at the cameras in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” Gore added, “I didn’t like that moment at all.”22 That was how Gore managed his message in the summer of 1999, trying to cast himself as his own man.
Things did not start well with “the Maureen Dowd primary.” The New York Times columnist had her antenna finely tuned for anecdotes that allowed her to tweak Gore, and while she was also tough on George W. Bush, it came off in print in a more big sisterly sort of way. In an October 9, 1999, column under the headline, “Here Comes the Son,” she described Gore as “stiff” and wrote, “W. is loose because his father never expected him to be President.” She also included this suggestive exchange with the Texas governor:
“‘You’re so much more mature now,’ I remarked to the Texas Governor.
‘So are you,’ he replied saucily.”23
Dowd didn’t write that way about Gore. Before any votes are cast, pundits track a dashboard of varied indicators—the amount of money raised, the favor of party elders, fawning from columnists—as pre-primary “primaries.” Dowd, who had covered President George H. W. Bush as White House correspondent was, in the view of some, a primary unto herself. Getting on Dowd’s good side, or at least minimizing her ridicule, can be a leading indicator of how early donors, activists, and coastal opinion shapers will flock to your candidacy. In her June 16, 1999, column reacting to the dueling announcements of candidacy by Gore and Bush, Dowd began, “Al Gore is the Tin Man: immobile, rusting, decent, badly in need of that oil can.”24
Amid paragraphs describing Bush as the scarecrow in her Wizard of Oz meme, ascribing to him a string of adjectives including “charming, limber, cocky, fidgety” and noting his campaign accessories of monogrammed ostrich cowboy boots and oversized belt buckles, she added that “Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating.”25
The image of the vice president lactating was particularly damning, and her dismissal of Gore’s environmental record as “ecologically correct” was equally dismissive. By any measure, Gore was a genuine environmentalist, spending much of his free time with his family pursuing activities that were far more in tune with nature than most men his age. Bush might go mountain biking to burn off steam, but Gore preferred the canoe.
I had already helped to produce some made-for-camera “back to nature” moments for Bill Clinton by the time the 1996 campaign geared up, including a whitewater trip on the Snake River near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, during the summer of 1995. It lasted less than two hours, in contrast to the week-long, no-press paddle down the Colorado River that Gore enjoyed with his family that same summer. Clinton was an environmental tourist, with the press in tow. Gore was the real deal, and the privacy he demanded was authentic.
In New Hampshire, on the Connecticut River instead of the Colorado, it was different. Despite being an official event to do government business, it was plainly obvious that this was the very media market where Gore would face his first big test as a candidate against Senator Bradley in that state’s Democratic Primary six months hence. The Office of the Vice President reached out to the Connecticut River Joint Commissions to help organize the downriver trip, but even when you’re playing with water, it’s still easy to get burned.
Rather than risk their candidate running aground, the decision was made to move up the timing of the dam’s daily water release. This assured that the canoe ride would go smoothly, but the planners didn’t fully game out a scenario of the water release itself becoming a story. “A host wants to be helpful,” Mike Feldman told me, “and somebody along the way didn’t process the fact that it could potentially be embarrassing. We were out of the event before I heard anything about it or before I knew there was an issue.”26
After the vice president’s remarks announcing the government grant, the Gore flotilla embarked, including canoes and boats filled with security and staff. Feldman and Bennett were in their own canoe, out of the cameras’ sightlines.
Naylor, who skipped the remarks to pre-position the press pool on the sandbar, stood aghast on the riverbank: his sandbar, the carefully chosen vantage point for image-making, was submerged under inches of water. “I could tell right away that the throw was way too far. Few had long lenses and the stills were starting to grumble,” Naylor told me. A “throw” is advance-speak for distance, and “long lenses” is the photojournalists’ jargon for heavy zoom lenses that can easily capture the quirks of facial expression at a distance of fifty yards. “I asked our advance man, ‘What gives with the sandbar?’” he said. “It was here yesterday,” came the reply.27 Not wanting to miss the shot, Naylor forged MacArthur-like into the river, telling his poolers to roll up their pants and follow him to take up positions on the sunken berm.
Print reporters traveling under Naylor’s escort mingled with onlookers on the riverbank. Bill Sammon, a correspondent for the Washington Times, was among those who rolled up their cuffs, but he returned to dry land to acquaint himself with John Kassel, director of the Vermont Department of Natural Resources. As the barefooted reporter chatted with Kassel, the Vermont official didn’t immediately process that he was talking with a newsman, or that his casual observations of the scene playing out on the river in front of them were being noted for the record.
Sammon on the River
The first story emerged from the river trip just as the Gore campaign might have scripted it themselves. “Gore Says Environmental Concerns and Economic Progress Go Together,” ran a headline from an article by Ann S. Kim for the Associated Press.28 The just-the-facts piece would find its way into many newspapers, connecting Gore with the nearly $1 million earmarked for river cleanup. The press staff of a campaign loves wire stories like Kim’s because the pieces weave themselves into small markets where the local papers can’t afford to send reporters to cover national campaign events in person.
In the Dallas Morning News, George W. Bush’s hometown paper, the story was even better. “Gore Seeks Edge in Campaign with Environment Issue; He Says Protections, Growth Linked,” read the headline. Gore couldn’t hope to win Texas, but it was good to needle Bush in his geographic power base. Susan Feeney, the Morning News correspondent, echoed Kim’s story with 800 words reinforcing Gore’s message. In her story, Feeney quoted Tom “Smitty” Smith, the director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, who said, “Basically, Governor Bush has a horrible environmental record.”29 A few more stories like this and the canoe trip might be a home run.
A third story followed in sync with the prior two. Sandra Sobieraj, an AP reporter who covered Clinton and Gore closely, favorably contrasted Gore’s positions against those of Bush. Sobieraj included a comment from spokesman Chris Lehane that any campaign would covet: “In 2000, the American people will have a stark choice,” Lehane said, “between the vice president and whoever the Republican presidential candidate may be when it comes to the environment.” Always quick to launch a missile at his opponents when reporters craved a quotable quip, Lehane added, “Republicans seem to believe it’s more important to protect the polluters.”30
But while Kim, Feeney and Sobieraj were doing their reporting, Bill Sammon remained busy talking with John Kassel. Those few minutes of conversation—a reporter listening intently to the unguarded musings of a man with an official state position—spawned a series of stories by Sammon and a legion of follow-on coverage from mainstream news outlets that would dominate campaign news in the week to come. A headline from the story, authored by Sammon and Laura Vanderham, screamed, “New Hampshire Opts to Float Gore’s Boat; 4 Billion Gallons Released for Photo Outing.”31
The lead paragraph of Sammon’s Washington Times story went in an entirely new direction than those of the AP and the Dallas Morning News. “Nearly 4 billion gallons of water were unleashed from a massive dam yesterday,” Sammon and Vanderham wrote, “to raise the level of the Connecticut River in Cornish, N.H., so that Vice President Al Gore’s canoe would not get stuck during an environmental photo opportunity.”
The toughest commentary for the piece came from Kassel, who told Sammon, “They won’t release the water for the fish when we ask them to, but somehow they find themselves able to release it for a politician.” Sammon noted that Kassel “groused” as he “clambered up the riverbank after the four-mile canoe trip.” Giving the reporter a tip that would inform a total of four stories by Sammon, and scores more by other reporters and additional commentary from TV and radio outlets, he said, “The only reason they did this was to make sure the vice president’s canoe didn’t get stuck.”32
With a tip like that, Sammon knew we was onto something beyond a routine photo op. He began making calls. Reflecting on the action along the riverbank that day, Nathan Naylor told me, “I’ve often wondered if I didn’t march the cameras into the current would Bill have been so interested in the story?”33
In the course of his reporting, Sammon found Cleve Kapala, director of government affairs for Pacific Gas and Electric, owner of the Wilder Dam, who said that his company was asked several days earlier by the Connecticut River Joint Commissions to release water earlier than planned to add downstream depth to the river at the appointed time. “The river was pretty dry and no one wanted the canoes to be dragging on the bottom,” Kapala told Sammon. “Vice President Gore’s people were concerned that we not raise the level too high, either, because they didn’t want it to be dangerous.”34
Far more than the stories by Kim, Feeney and Sobieraj, Sammon’s piece infused dramatic elements into the fluid scene on the river and the steps taken at the dam to create it. “The water was less than 8 inches deep in many spots at 6 a.m. yesterday, when Dennis Goodwin of PG&E pushed a few buttons at his control panel at Wilder Dam, unleashing 180,000 gallons per second,” Sammon wrote. “The dam is 10 miles upstream from the point where Mr. Gore’s canoe was to enter the water, and Mr. Goodwin wanted to have a good three hours for his unusual task.”35
Sammon’s use of Kassel as a source allowed him to connect the dots that the water had been boosted by eight to ten inches on the stretch of river over which Gore paddled. “There are people on the phone right now telling them to shut it off,” Kassel told the reporter. On the other end of the phone, Sammon noted, “Mr. Goodwin confirmed that, as soon as Mr. Gore disembarked the canoe, the dam’s floodgates were closed.”36
Reading Sammon’s story, the picture he paints of Dennis Goodwin sealing the floodgates as Gore disembarks sounds like standard Secret Service protocol for watching a president go “wheels-up” following a visit. In that scenario, the advance team stays in place and the counter-assault team follows Air Force One until the plane’s wheels leave the ground. The thinking behind that is that if the plane for any unknown reason doesn’t take off, the agents are back on guard. There was no real imperative for Goodwin to keep the floodgates open ten miles upstream while Gore was ending his canoe trip, but just in case the vice president decided to extend his journey, the water level would remain high.
To cap things off on the first of four Washington Times stories, the enterprising reporters unearthed an earlier Rocky Mountain News item from 1996 in which the Denver Water Board opened the gates of the Chatfield Reservoir in Colorado to unleash 92 million gallons of water into the South Platte River “to make a robust background for Mr. Gore’s visit to the area,”37 as the story read. Sammon noted that state officials in office at the time, along with Vice President Gore, had issued statements “deploring” the misuse of state resources. There was no connection between the two events, but there was an implication of a pattern of hypocrisy of an environmentalist politician manipulating the environment to leave no stone jutting out above the water that might mar the imagery.
Speaking years later, Feldman respects the role of reporters to call out mistakes. “I’m not big on placing blame on our press corps for digging in around issues like this,” he told me. “If you run for president, you have to be prepared to deal with diligent reporting.”38 In the same breath, he points out that the guy at the top doesn’t vet the details of each event. That was the reality Gore faced just weeks after announcing his candidacy. He had to stomach writers like Maureen Dowd imagining him lactating, and then get up the next day with a smile on his face as the central character in events that he parachuted into. The questions he encountered when he landed weren’t from reporters seeking his views on the environment, but rather the next installment of the story of Gore the hypocrite.
“You’re beginning to make your first impressions as a potential candidate in your own right, you’re a high-profile person, you cannot possibly be responsible for everything that happens at every level of a negotiation leading up to an event like that,” Feldman told me, “and yet you’re the guy that’s being skewered.”39
With Sammon’s story hitting the newsstands the next day, the mainstream media followed along with the current of maritime metaphor. “Special Dam Release to Keep Gore’s Canoe Afloat,” read a headline from the Associated Press.40 “Controversy Muddies Gore Float Trip,” added the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.41 “Gore Takes Aw-Shucks Tour (and Hits a Bump),” was the banner in the New York Times.42 “Gore’s N.H. Canoe Trip Leaves Questions in Wake,” the Boston Globe headlined. “The photos of Vice President Al Gore and New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen canoeing down the sparkling Connecticut River Thursday were scenic and beautiful,” wrote Jill Zuckman for the Globe in her lead paragraph. “Yesterday, however, Gore aides spent the day trying to drown out questions about who asked the local power company to release 4 billion gallons of dammed water to lift the river level—as well as the canoes,” she added.43
Lehane pushed back against the stories throughout the afternoon while Gore attended the Seacoast picnic. He tried to reason with the Globe’s Zuckman and the Times’s Melinda Henneberger but made little headway. He briefed the vice president about the brewing stories while he tried to gather more facts. “When it was brought to our attention, we specifically asked them not to do anything out of the ordinary,” Lehane said in Henneberger’s story. “They raised the river and it has no impact on the environment. It’s not our screw-up and nothing bad happened,” Lehane added.44
In the days that followed, Republicans seized on Sammon’s reporting of the 4-billion-gallon water release, which they equated to a more eye-popping 180,000 gallons per second when the floodgates were opened. The Republican national chairman, Jim Nicholson, put a price tag on the release at $1.7 million, citing water use rates provided by the Pennichuk Water Works, which serves the region. “So much for the environmentalist vice president,” Nicholson was quoted as saying.45
Locally, New Hampshire State GOP chairman Steve Duprey weighed in too, asserting that the value of the release constituted an “in-kind” corporate campaign contribution by Pacific Gas and Electric, later filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission to question its legality. “The vice president says one thing on the environment and does another,” he told reporters.46
Doug Hattaway, a Gore spokesman, shot back. “Duprey’s up a creek without a paddle. He should be ashamed of wasting taxpayers’ money on a frivolous complaint that he knows is totally invalid.”47 But the volley extended the life of the story, which is exactly what the Republicans wanted. The spin and counterspin hearkened back to the effort, a dozen years earlier, by Lee Atwater and his Republican cohort to define Michael Dukakis over Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance and President Reagan’s musing that the Massachusetts governor may be “an invalid.” The more noise that was created by the to and fro, and the more days the arguments spanned, the more stories were written.
On Saturday, July 24, Sammon, who had introduced the controversy with his first dispatch and earned his newspaper widespread credit for original reporting, filed his second story for the Washington Times. The new piece claimed that the vice president was told immediately after his river trip about the water release, despite having said that he didn’t know about it until reading Sammon’s initial story.
“I told the vice president about it as we walked to the stage,” said Sharon Francis of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions in the new Washington Times piece. “He kind of laughed and said, ‘I’m very familiar with fluctuating water levels. We’ve got that in Tennessee, too.’”48 Lehane, after gathering more details on the conversation between Francis and Gore, explained to Sammon that his boss was simply acknowledging, having grown up along a river, how dams work.
The water released from Wilder Dam to elevate Gore’s trip was probably no more or no less than on other summer days. The adjusted timing, one story pointed out, was similar to accommodations for other canoe trips, such as one by the Boy Scouts.49
Despite the efforts to clarify facts, the pushback was drowned out by the casual observations of crusty New Hampshire voters who reacted negatively to the growing flood of news accounts. The river-inspired metaphors continued through the weekend and into the next week. Dan Balz, among the most admired political writers inside the Beltway, wrote about the incident as “4 Billion Gallons for a Photo Op,”50 giving it mainstream credibility. Newsweek, jumping into the river story, termed it the “photo op from hell.”51
The hyperbole, and the torrent of stories, editorials and late-night jokes that continued for a week after the canoe trip, added to the narrative of a calculating public official who might be something different than the environmentalist he professed to be.
A week after the canoe trip, the RNC issued a news release quoting Chairman Nicolson saying, “I want to thank the Gore press office for their work in keeping the story of Gore’s hypocrisy flowing. While some have accused the vice president of being shallow, I think his staff has shown remarkable buoyancy and depth.”52
Bill Sammon wrote his third story about the canoe trip on Monday, August 2, correcting himself by noting “revised” data from Pacific Gas and Electric that reduced the amount of excess water released to 500 million gallons, down from the 4 billion gallons he originally reported, the outsized figure that spawned follow-on articles by a broad array of national media outlets. Still, he wrote, “The constant revisions and backpedaling by both PGE officials and Democratic defenders of Mr. Gore have served to prolong what some Republicans initially expected would be a one- or two-day story about an embarrassing political misstep. Eleven days after the canoe trip went bust, GOP operatives are still gleefully lampooning the vice president in the same way they accused him of having claimed to invent the Internet.”53
The damage was done. A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of 905 registered voters brought bad news. The poll, taken after the canoe trip, contained results that 44 percent believed “Gore is not the strong environmentalist he claims to be” while only 29 percent said that his environmental credentials remain intact.54
Sammon’s final story, on August 6, would detail the New Hampshire State Republican Party’s FEC complaint asking the commission to investigate whether Gore had accepted an illegal campaign contribution to float his canoe.
Eli Attie, a Gore speechwriter with whom I worked during the Clinton years, later told Vanity Fair, “The reality is very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail.” Offering a different perspective on the same article, Carter Eskew, Gore’s strategist and a founder, along with Feldman, of the Glover Park Group, took some responsibility for not forging a better relationship with reporters. “We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair,” he told Vanity Fair, “and made no real effort to schmooze at all.”55
Matt Bennett, who rode in a canoe with Feldman in the flotilla, falls in line with Eskew. “The way that it manifested itself the most was Gore’s incredible hyper-caution around the reporters who traveled with us,” Bennett told me. “Gore’s view, which we all shared, was that there was a purely adversarial relationship.” One tactic in creating harmony with reporters—private chats on the campaign plane—was off limits. “Gore would not come back on the plane to talk to them because they would refuse to allow him to talk off the record, which is what the reporters who followed Governor Bush would allow,” Bennett told me. “And so he would never let his guard down and it was very difficult to get a nice story like this written because they just seemed to be out for his blood all the time. And this was a perfect example.”56
Feldman looks back on the failed canoe trip as inconsequential in a campaign that would go on for eighteen more months and ultimately be decided by 537 votes out of 100 million cast. Instead, Feldman saw it as a lesson that helped Gore develop thicker skin for the hard road ahead. To point to any single thing and say that it was decisive in the outcome of the election, he told me, is “enough to drive anybody crazy.”
“It wasn’t a clear path” for Gore, Feldman told me. “He had to carve out a path to be able to get people to hear him and listen to his message. It is one of the things that you have to endure and have to overcome to be elected president in the modern era. Every day is a series of these challenges, and there’s something elegant about it.”57
Elegant or not, the lessons Al Gore learned in 1999 would be put to use ultimately as a private citizen. He would have the rest of his life—watching America enter a new century, brave the wounds of 9/11 and the wars that followed, and reach the depths of an economic crisis—to think about what he learned on his last campaign. The Connecticut River canoe trip might not have been decisive for Gore, as Feldman said, but it was instructive—for every candidate who followed in his wake.