Kristen Silverberg, deputy policy adviser: I was on the first plane out [of Texas after Election Night] which left at 5:00 [a.m.], and then there was another one that left at 5:20. We all had our designated assignments.

I remember getting on the plane and saying, “OK, who knows the Florida recount rules?” I look around and everybody gives me a blank stare. We all fall asleep for two hours and then wake up and go to figure it out on the ground. … I went to Broward. They did the automatic recount [there] and we picked up a vote. I sort of thought of this as easy.

Q: One vote?

Silverberg: One vote, which was fine. I left a message [back home] saying, “OK, we're wrapping up here. Maybe we can all get together for dinner.” Six weeks later my friend[s were] still playing that voicemail message, laughing. Then I went to Palm Beach to meet that group. That’s where it was clear this was going to be a much longer deal. In the automatic recount they went down several hundred votes.

Q: Who was giving you your marching orders?

Silverberg: We didn’t really have [anybody]. I was calling Josh [Bolten] to update, but at that point we were making it up. You had these teams deciding how aggressive they were going to be on fighting different issues. For example, in Palm Beach we had had a debate about whether we are OK with the countywide recount or whether we wanted to limit it to specific precincts. It was very disorganized.

Chaotic is not the right word for almost anything associated with Bush. For some reason there is rarely chaos anywhere around him, in part because he doesn’t tolerate it.

Josh Bolten, campaign policy adviser: There’s probably no way anybody from Tallahassee could have helped you make that decision. It was pretty organic. Chaotic is not the right word for almost anything associated with Bush. For some reason there is rarely chaos anywhere around him, in part because he doesn’t tolerate it. But it was kind of haphazard how the decision-making structures grew up and how different people ended up in different places. They just showed up. There was nobody formally credentialing Kristen as our representative in [Broward]—we just knew she was. . . . Everybody knew who was ultimately in charge, so that if you really had to get some kind of decision-making, you took it to Jim Baker.

James A. Baker III: Gore had appointed former Secretary of State Warren Christopher to be his representative, to take the recount challenge out of the dirty, nitty-gritty [of] crass politics. I think that’s the reason why the Bush people decided, Well, hell, we have our own former secretary of state. I got a call from [Don] Evans, who said, “We're talking about the possibility of you representing us in Florida. If the governor asked you to do it, would you be inclined to do it?” I said I’d be glad to do it.

Theodore Olson, former US solicitor general and outside counsel: By the time I got there, what was going on was a recount that had been called for by the other side of four counties in Florida that had voted predominantly for Al Gore. I think their strategy was that, if they could count votes cast in those counties, if there were votes that hadn’t been counted the first time around because of ambiguity, because of the high percentage of votes that had been cast for their candidate, if you took an uncertain number of ballots and counted them and decided which way they were probably intended to be voted, they would theoretically, on percentages, be skewed in favor of their guy.

But by then it was also clear that the recount was a chaotic system itself. Four different counties were counting the ballots differently. They were unsure of what the rules were, or they were changing the rules. The process by which you count these punch-out ballots is very problematic anyway, and it seemed to be chaotic and the rules seemed to be changing, and the process seemed to be unequal.

I was pretty much convinced that we had to file something in federal court to get control of this situation, because it was falling apart.

I was pretty much convinced that we had to file something in federal court to get control of this situation, because it was falling apart. It seemed to me that that process was highly suspect, because you have an ambiguous process with ambiguous rules that are subject to manipulation after the fact, and we had to stop that. It was already in my mind on my way down there that we had to file something in federal court.

Q: Some of your legal team was not optimistic that the Supreme Court would take an appeal?

Jim Baker: A majority was not optimistic. But my view was, if they don’t take it, so what? If we stay in the Florida Supreme Court, we’re finished. And we would have been.

I had [long ago] become a good friend of [Florida Senator] Lawton [Chiles] because I was Treasury Secretary and he was chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. We did a lot of work together. He was an adversarial Democrat and I was an adversarial Republican, but we both liked to turkey-hunt. He would invite me to Florida to hunt turkeys and I would invite him to Texas to hunt turkeys.

One thing that really paid dividends with respect to the Florida recount [is], I remembered the types of people that Lawton [as governor] had appointed to the Florida Supreme Court. They were all liberal trial lawyers. So when I got to Florida I was of the view, pretty much right off the bat, that if we weren’t able to get this into federal court, we had a really tough row to hoe. So that relationship I had with Lawton Chiles really paid dividends when it was time to go to do the recount.

So when I got to Florida I was of the view, pretty much right off the bat, that if we weren’t able to get this into federal court, we had a really tough row to hoe. So that relationship I had with Lawton Chiles really paid dividends when it was time to go to do the recount.

Q: Were others slow to get it that this was a stacked court against you?

Baker: Yes, I think they got it, but I think they thought maybe it was a long shot to get the [US] Supreme Court to [rule] on an election dispute in a state. I remember we talked long and hard about whether we could make the equal-protection clause work here. They really picked up on that, but they didn’t pick up on it until the Florida Supreme Court had given this [gesturing]…

Q: Let the record show that a middle finger has been raised.

Baker: That’s right. That’s what the Florida Supreme Court did to the United States Supreme Court. And boy, don’t think that didn’t piss them off. Instead of coming back to the Supreme Court and explaining the rationale [for their decision to extend the recount, as the Supreme Court ruled], the Florida Supreme Court just ignored the US Supreme Court opinion.

We had people like [Florida justice] Barbara Pariente and all these left-wing nuts controlling the court. That’s when they sealed their doom, in my view, when they didn’t respond. That is a direct challenge to the authority of the United States Supreme Court. That’s why [the Supreme Court was] so quick to grant certiorari and then to rule on constitutional grounds that this violated the equal-protection law of the Constitution.

Many people were saying, including people in the academic world, “There's no chance the Supreme Court is going to take this.”

Ted Olson: A lot of people [were] saying, This is a state-court matter, this is Florida, blah blah blah. I was hearing that from everybody, it seemed to me. My position was, No, this is a federal election; this is a federal constitutional question. There were cases—notwithstanding all of the people who were saying this is a state-court thing—in which the Supreme Court has said federal presidential elections, particularly, are matters of federal constitutional concern, and that what happens in one state can affect the outcome of a national election, and therefore it is an important concern of federal courts.

Many people were saying, including people in the academic world, “There's no chance the Supreme Court is going to take this.” One guy I remember saying [on television] it’s professional malpractice to even bring this to the Supreme Court.

Q: You had just come from clerking for Justice Clarence Thomas. How did you think this would get perceived?

Kristen Silverberg: I thought we were going to have a really hard time with those arguments in front of that court. I mean, I thought they would be tempted by our arguments because what was happening in the state court was clearly going to be a political decision, and I think they would know, if they didn’t intervene, they were basically saying that the fact that there were more Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court was going to decide the election. They were going to feel uncomfortable with that. But they were going to have to weigh that discomfort against constitutional theory that was a little bit of a departure [from their customary jurisprudence].

I thought they would be tempted by our arguments because what was happening in the state court was clearly going to be a political decision, and I think they would know, if they didn’t intervene, they were basically saying that the fact that there were more Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court was going to decide the election.

Q: Take us through the release of the opinion.

Ted Olson: Oh, gosh, we were going crazy. That was the 12th [of December] … [and] shortly before 10:00 I got a call from the deputy clerk, Denise [McNerney].

She said, “There's going to be a decision.” [The clerk of the court] General [William] Suter had orchestrated all of this so that he could get the lawyers on the phone and stand by so that we would get the word simultaneously and no one would get an edge on anybody else. It was close to 10:00 at night, and then when the signal came, I’m pretty sure it was still Denise, read off the front of that thing that said that there’s a per curiam decision, and then there’s a concurring decision, and then there’s a dissent by Justice [John Paul] Stevens, joined by Justices [David] Souter and [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and [Stephen] Breyer, something like that, and then there’s a dissent by Justice—there in the sequence you know—and I was thinking, What is going on? I want to know, Did we win? But I sort of felt that we had won, because of the dissents and who had dissented.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that we had won, and shortly after that Secretary Baker and I think Governor George Bush were on the phone. I can’t remember now, but there were phone calls from Florida and phone calls from Texas, and I was asked, “Did we win?” I stuck my neck way out and said that we had won, and stuff was still coming off the [fax] machine. 

Jim Baker: The Democrats made a bunch of mistakes. The big mistake was asking for a recount in [just] the four Democratic counties. That gave us the high ground. We said, “Wait a minute, you're going to have a recount just in four counties?” That was a bonehead thing to do.

When we walked out to meet the press, I remember worrying that there could be demonstrations, violence, and that in probably any other country there would be.

Representative Dick Gephardt (D-MO), House minority leader: I got word from my office that the Court had decided the case against us. This was the final opinion.

I remember two things came to my mind. One was that I was horribly disappointed and not in agreement with what they had decided and thought it was a miscarriage of justice. But having said that, I also believe that Vice President Gore’s reaction to it was the correct reaction. When we walked out to meet the press, I remember worrying that there could be demonstrations, violence, and that in probably any other country there would be. I was wondering if Americans would rise to the occasion and, as Gore [did], put up with this, even though you hated the result.

That to me has always been the essence of the majesty of democracy. I’d always say to my members in Congress, in a democracy, process is everything. I said that because, in a democracy, if people feel there is a process that is legitimate and fair and reasonably well run, then they’ll put up with bad outcomes, even though they are very angry. If you lose that process, people resort to violence. I always would say politics is a substitute for violence. As [Winston] Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government on earth except for all the others.” What he was really saying was, the process allows people to govern themselves without resorting to violence.

That to me has always been the essence of the majesty of democracy. I’d always say to my members in Congress, in a democracy, process is everything.

So this was a clear, prime example of that. Even though all the cards were on the table. This was king of the hill, that’s exactly what it was. You know, I think we evolved from animals—I’m deadly serious. We’ve evolved, though. That’s the good news. What we’ve evolved to is self-government and democracy and a process that people can put up with when they lose. That to me was a memorable moment in my recollection of beginning to deal with George W. Bush.

Even though we felt the process was not as good as it should have been, we have a process. The judicial process was ending where it had to end. Even though we didn’t like the way it was run, in the end you have to accept it. That is the key to democracy.

Excerpted from Inside the George W. Bush White House published by Oxford University Press ©2026