Down & Dirty (62 page)

Beneath hazy gray clouds that keep the street’s immense palm trees from casting a shadow, a crowd of four hundred or so Bush
supporters chant, “Rotten to the Gore! Rotten to the Gore!” Other familiar faces from the
campaign are scattered throughout, wearing orange baseball caps that read “W. Florida Recount Team.” “You’re a bunch of Dummy-crats!”
one from their number shouts on a megaphone to the pathetically sparse crowd of pro-Gore protesters across the way, many of
whom hold signs deriding “Bushit.”

“You couldn’t even get a ballot right in Palm Beach!” the pro-Bush protester continues. “What a bunch of losers! I’ve never
seen so many losers in one place!” The Bush crowd laughs. One protester holds a sign featuring Gore’s head in a noose next
to the words “Gore: Hangin’ by a chad.” Another sign reads: “Hey, Gore, I hear Hell needs a president.”

Every few minutes, the Republicans who continue to identify themselves only as “volunteers” exit the Windsor Monaco RV parked
down the street and distribute T-shirts and baseball caps for free to the ravenous crowd.

“How to STEAL an Election,” one popular shirt reads. “1. Count all votes. 2. Re-count all votes. 3. Re-count some votes. 4.
Hand count some votes. 5. Change the rules. 6. Exclude the military.”

Who’s paying for those shirts? I ask a man who refuses to tell me his name.

“I’m just a volunteer,” he says.

Yeah, but who’s paying for the shirts?

“I dunno,” he says. “I’m just a volunteer.”

This “volunteer” is actually Phil Muster, a Bush political staffer. But whatever.

Different players in the saga have vastly different Thanksgivings.

The Bush campaign makes sure that their operatives in southeast Florida have a memorable holiday, if not one with family.
About two hundred of them gather in the Fort Lauderdale Hyatt, where Bush and Cheney thank them via speakerphone and entertainer
Wayne Newton recites the Lord’s Prayer.

Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker awakens that morning and drives around Tallahassee in an attempt to clear her mind. But before
long she’s beckoned back to the Bush Building after the Gorebies file a brief with the Florida Supreme Court in order to force
Miami-Dade to count. She goes back to work, putting out a statement, appearing on TV.

At 4
P.M
., she and around twenty others have reservations at Tallahassee’s Chez Pierre. On her way there, she receives a call on her
cell phone; the Florida Supreme Court decided against the Gorebies.

“Good,” she thinks. “Now at least I can have Thanksgiving dinner.”

At Chez Pierre, Tucker’s standing at the bar, waiting for a glass of chardonnay when she receives another call. Ron Klain
and David Boies are holding a conference call with reporters, she’s told. Gore is going ahead, preparing to contest the election.
Does she have any comment?

Aargh!
she thinks. Don’t these people celebrate Thanksgiving? Do they not ascribe any meaning to this holiday? She phones up Ari
Fleischer in Austin. “I’m livid,” she says. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Ron Klain says they’re going to contest this.” Tucker wants
to take the evening off, so she’d prefer the response to be, “We have no formal comment; it’s Thanksgiving.” Is that OK with
Fleischer? “I think it’s fine,” Fleischer says. “Do it.”

She sees Klain on the bar’s TV, saying that Al Gore’s spending the day with his family.

“Oh, my god! That’s bullshit!” Tucker says out loud, to no one in particular. “Al Gore is not ‘spending the day with his family’—they
just did a conference call!” She starts yelling at the TV. “I cannot believe you just said that!” she says to Klain.“He is
not
spending the day with family. He was just on the phone with you!”

A few Gore attorneys are at another table, laughing at her frustration.

They send her a bottle of champagne.

She feels obliged to walk over to them, to thank them. “How did you know champagne was my favorite?” she asks.

“All beautiful women love champagne,” a Gore lawyer responds.

Tucker is repulsed.

The Palm Beach County canvassing board has taken the day off. On Wednesday, a county public-information officer told the board
that “we can’t work tomorrow,” since they were having a tough time getting counters to agree to come in on Thanksgiving.

“How are we doing?” Burton asked her.

“Well, we’re picking up the pace,” the director of public affairs, Denise Cote, said.

There was no discussion.

“Great, let’s take the day off,” Burton said. “I could use it.”

Perhaps no decision to have a Thanksgiving feast has had such national implications since, well, 1621.

The Broward County canvassing board is surprised when they hear of Palm Beach’s decision. But they’re working through the
holiday, no matter what.

When they break in the afternoon to have Thanksgiving dinner, Lee, Gunzburger, and Rosenberg have unexpected guests at their
Thanksgiving dinners: sheriff’s deputies.

Gunzburger, in particular, has been receiving hate mail and threatening phone calls. She’s become the target of much ire on
the Internet. Her son Ron, who writes for a political Web site, tells her that she’s been linked romantically with Commissioner
Carol Roberts.

But there’s other stuff, too. She’s been told that someone wrote on another site that she needed to be “taken out,” and she’s
received forty-five thousand hateful e-mails. On one site her daughter and granddaughter’s names were listed. She feels incredibly
vulnerable.

One morning, while her attorney, Larry Davis, drives her to the canvassing board, she breaks down and cries. “You know, Larry,
I’m doing this because I think I’m doing a public service,” she says. “I want to see my grandchildren grow up. I don’t want
to die over this.”

When Lee goes to feast at the home of his partner’s sister, sheriff’s deputies sit outside in their squad cars. Lee feels
guilty, though, so he forces them to come inside for dessert.

On Friday, someone throws a brick through a window of the Broward County Democratic HQ with a note: “We will not tolerate
any illegal government.”

Baker, meanwhile, thinks that they need reinforcements. Whether or not the
SCOTUS
takes up their case, they need some trial lawyers on the ground in Florida. This thing’s clearly going to be contested in
court, by one side or the other. And Baker here makes a tactical decision that contrasts sharply with the Gorebies’ team building.

The Gore team, with the possible exception of Boies,
^*
is made up of diehard Democratic, Gore-supporting lawyers. Mitch Berger, Ben Kuehne, Steve Zack, et al. Some of them are
very talented, some of them less so, but they were selected because of their allegiance to the party and the vice president.

Conversely, Baker starts seeking the best trial lawyers he can get. It doesn’t matter to him what party they belong to, whom
they voted for.

Early on in the process, for instance, Baker calls up Irv Terrell, a tall, bald, bespectacled Texan who’s a childhood friend
of Bush’s and a colleague from Baker Botts, where Baker’s a partner. But Terrell is also something of a Democrat, a man who
leans left on issues like abortion and race.

Terrell can’t do it, he tells Baker, he’s just too busy. Plus, Terrell’s reluctant to jump into another high-profile case,
having participated in the
Pennzoil v. Texaco
case.“Participated” isn’t even the word, really.
The American Lawyer
would refer to Terrell as Pennzoil’s “hit man” in the oil company’s successful 1985 $10 billion suit against Texaco for screwing
them on a deal Pennzoil had made with Getty Oil. That was a case, interestingly, on which Terrell had worked with Tribe, and
against Boies.
^*
Such high-profile cases bring out the worst in people, Terrell thinks. On
Pennzoil v. Texaco,
Terrell saw one of his co-counsels, Joe Jamail, take credit away from co-counsel John Jeffords, a close friend of Terrell’s
who subsequently died of a brain tumor. Terrell didn’t like what the media attention did to Jamail. He didn’t like what it
did to him, either.

Okay, then, Baker says, then who else? Baker asks Terrell for recommendations. Who else can be brought down to Tallahassee?
Baker asks. Terrell recommends Daryl Bristow, another Baker Botts attorney, a Republican, though not an active party guy or
anything. Another name that immediately comes to Terrell’s mind is Fred Bartlit.

Bartlit—who you may recall was a young Kirkland & Ellis attorney in 1960 when the GOP hired him to investigate vote fraud
in Texas—is at his daughter’s wedding at the Drake Hotel in Chicago when he first gets the call, on Saturday, November 18.

It comes from Glen Summers, one of his associates from Denver; Bartlit splits his time between Illinois and Colorado. Summers
says that the Bushies—he’s been contacted by an old chum, Ted Cruz, who’s on the ground in Tallahassee—want Bartlit to leave
the wedding ASAP, to fly down to Florida, and argue for the inclusion of overseas military absentee ballots. Bartlit, sixty-eight,
agrees to do it in the morning. A friend and client says that Bartlit can fly down early Sunday morning using his charter
plane.