Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
Better Late Than Never
By Michael Tomasky
"Work Hard, Study...and Keep Out of Politics!": Adventures and Lessons from an Unexpected Public Life
by James A. Baker III, with Steve Fiffer
Putnam, 460 pp., $28.95
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach
by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs
Vintage, 142 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Shortly after 10 PM on the night of Tuesday, December 12, 2000, in Tallahassee, Florida, James Addison Baker III received a telephone call from George W. Bush, who was in Austin, Texas, that night and already in his pajamas. The United States Supreme Court had just handed down the decisions in Bush v. Gore. There was much confusion in both Democratic and Republican camps as lawyers and aides scrambled to interpret the decisions. Television reporters, reading the opinions for the first time on the air, offered wildly differing (and ill-informed) interpretations. Bush's strategist Karl Rove, watching one channel at campaign headquarters in northern Virginia, concluded that the Court had decided in his candidate's favor and called the Texas governor to congratulate him. Bush, watching another channel that was spinning the decisions differently, thought the opposite.
Review, 4154 words
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