What It Took

(2 of 11)

Bill Clinton had long thought basing the campaign in Washington was a mistake. Gore's brother-in-law Frank Hunger had been harping on it since the spring; he convinced the Gores' daughter Karenna and finally even Gore's wife Tipper. Coelho too wanted to roll the dice, as he called it, but he knew that meant being stuck with a $60,000-a-month space in Washington. And with the fight against Bill Bradley looking as though it might drag through the spring, that was money the campaign could ill afford to spend. If you added the cost of another headquarters in Nashville, Coelho said later, "we'd probably still win the nomination, but we'd be penniless, and it would be worthless." But Karenna thought the problem was deeper than money. Her dad needed to be set free. "The last few years of the Administration were heavy ones," she explained, in a veiled reference to impeachment. After that, "the vice presidency is not the best platform to dive off from."

Gore was aware that a lot of people on his team were not fully committed to his cause, still working for other clients and interests. But as one of his top advisers admitted, "Gore wasn't fully invested in his campaign either." Finally, one night after a fund raiser in Maryland, Gore motioned Coelho to his car and asked him to ride back to the Veep's residence. "I've made up my mind," Gore said. "Let's roll it. Let's go to Nashville."

Except he didn't go. The man from Carthage remained in Washington. So, for the most part, did his inner circle: Bob Shrum, Carter Eskew and Tad Devine. Coelho went down; so did Donna Brazile, his fiery field marshal. It was an open secret in the capital: if you wanted to find top Gore campaign aides, you could try them on their 615-area-code cell phones--even though they might be working in offices right down the block.

The night Gore decided, in a session that went until midnight with Coelho, Eskew, chief of staff Charles Burson and Tipper, he quoted the Old Testament story of Gideon, from Chapter 7 of Judges. In it, General Gideon gathers his troops to be on the march. He leads them to a lake and tells them to drink. Some of the troops put their face in the water and gulp; others cup their hands and drink. The general, acting on God's command, tells those who gulped to return home, those who cupped their hands to follow him. Why? Because those who cupped their hands were taking just what they needed, a sign they were there out of commitment. And in a meeting with his staff the next morning, he drew on the work of a Scottish mountain climber, W.H. Murray: "Until one is committed, there is hesitancy...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too." Tearful campaign workers lined the walls a few moments later as Gore announced to reporters: "It's a new campaign now."

And after ruling out the morgue, Coelho sent the real estate agents to find Gore's troops new digs in Nashville--this time at a rehabilitation clinic called the Sundance Center. And Sundance just happened to be Gore's Secret Service code name.

Just Say No (Sort Of)
Sam Attlesey of the Dallas Morning News is a craggy, lanky Texan who wears Wranglers and cowboy boots and patterned shirts with open necks. With the help of a colleague, Attlesey had come up with a question for Bush about his possible past drug use that would force the Governor to abandon his stock reply: that when he was young and irresponsible, he was young and irresponsible, and he would not catalog his past indiscretions.

Traveling with Bush as he campaigned in Louisiana, Attlesey sidled up to the Governor after a press conference at a school in Metairie and asked him if he could clear the FBI background check administered to prospective employees. The standard questionnaire asks applicants if they have used illegal drugs in the previous seven years. Bush hemmed and hawed, giving Attlesey a non-answer, before slipping away to his hotel suite. But the Governor stewed about the question. A little later, Mark McKinnon, Bush's media director, called Attlesey in the hotel lobby and asked if he could take a copy of the FBI background check to the Governor. Attlesey agreed. Thirty minutes later, Bush called. Yes, the Governor said, he could clear the background check.

What Bush didn't realize was that he'd just started sliding down the slippery slope. The next morning's Dallas Morning News headline--BUSH DENIES USING DRUGS IN PAST 7 YEARS--sent the press into a frenzy at a time when Karen Hughes, Bush's longtime spokeswoman, had dropped off the road. (This left McKinnon in charge. "It was like jumping out of a plane without a parachute," he later recalled. Hughes would rarely leave Bush's side again for the rest of the campaign.) It would take 48 hours of revisions before Bush and his team would give their final answer: that he could have cleared the check as far back as 1974, seven years prior to the year his father became Vice President. The statement never admitted, of course, that he had ever done drugs.