Tuesday occurred, and, as we’ve already discussed, it ended in a way none of us had anticipated. By Thursday, I was headed to Tallahassee. I called Heidi on the way to the airport and told her, “Sweetheart, tell your father I had to go to Tallahassee.” Heidi, I’m sure, was puzzled by the urgency with which I wanted her father to know this. I think she probably believed I was trying to brag to him about my being involved in the recount. She said something like, “Yes, yes, I’m sure he’ll be impressed,” but for me, there was a much greater urgency: I had told him I was going to ask Heidi on Friday, but I wasn’t going to be with her on Friday.
When I flew to Tallahassee, I assumed the recount would last just a couple of days and that I would return to Austin and then ask Heidi when I got back. Nobody anticipated it would drag on for over a month. A few days later, Heidi flew to Tallahassee to join the team. She’s not a lawyer, but she worked tenaciously assisting the quantitative analysis of the vote totals county by county. As time went on, I figured I’d just ask her to marry me there, but I realized I had left the engagement ring in my closet in Austin. (I knew—and still know—nothing about diamonds, but I knew that Heidi liked Tiffany’s, so I had gone to the store, handed them my credit card, and told them to get me the biggest diamond they had that would fit under my credit limit; it took many months for me to pay it off, but the ring, hopefully, was for a lifetime.)
I called my roommate from the campaign to see if he could maybe FedEx the ring to me in Florida, but my roommate, unbeknownst to me, had also arrived in Florida a couple of days earlier. So I was stymied trying to get the ring to Florida.
Heidi’s parents are not terribly political. I don’t know that they cared deeply about who prevailed in that presidential election, but for the entire thirty-six days of the recount, her entire family knew that I was going to ask her to marry me. My entire family knew that I was going to ask her to marry me. And, as a result, her mother desperately wanted Al Gore to hurry up and concede the damn race, so that her daughter could get engaged.
The Supreme Court’s decision came down on December 12. The next day, Heidi and I flew back to Austin and, on December 14, a chilly winter’s day, I took her to an Austin watering hole called “The Oasis” high on the cliffs overlooking Lake Travis. At sunset, about 5:00 p.m., with the sun’s rays cascading off the clear blue water hundreds of feet below us, I dropped to one knee and proposed.
Heidi’s initial reaction was to laugh. She began laughing uncontrollably. I was down on one knee feeling a little uncertain, and stammered, “Usually there’s an answer at this point.” At which point, still laughing she said, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Now, get up off your knee. Yes.”
Although I was one of the most junior members of the Bush campaign’s Florida-recount legal team, I was blessed to work alongside some of the most extraordinary litigators on the face of the planet, to learn from them, to see their skills and expertise in action. My tasks varied widely. I wrote portions of briefs. I edited portions of briefs. I tried to ensure that what we said in one court was consistent with what we said in each of the other courts. Often that played out in a chaotic manner. Indeed, I remember tearing pages out of briefs hours before they had to be filed because what was written there contradicted what we had said in a different proceeding while listening to the lawyer who had written that particular pleading invariably yelling at me.
At other times, my roles were more mundane. One day, shortly before Thanksgiving, most of the lawyers had gone home for the holiday, and I was tasked with filing a pleading in court. Bob Zoellick, who would later become a cabinet member and then president of the World Bank, was essentially functioning as Jim Baker’s chief of staff. Zoellick grabbed me by the front of the shirt, pulling my face within inches of his protruding red mustache and unruly red eyebrows, and growled, “Ted, don’t f—- this up.” I tried to respond calmly, “Bob, it entails walking across the street and handing a stack of papers to the clerk. I believe I can adequately perform that task.”
Another job I was given was helping prepare some of our senior surrogates to make the case for Governor Bush to the press. One such surrogate was then-Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania. Josh Bolten asked me to fly up to Pennsylvania, pick him up, fly back, and brief him on what was happening in the case so that he could talk to the media. That evening, I flew up to Pennsylvania in a beautiful, private jet. It was the second time in my life I’d been on a private jet—the first being the flight from Austin to Tallahassee. The next morning, I flew back with Senator Specter at 6:00 a.m. to brief him on the latest in the litigation.
Heading up to Philadelphia, I was joined on the flight by Barbara Olson. Barbara was Ted Olson’s wife. She was a friend and a fiery, beautiful, tenacious conservative. She was a veteran of Capitol Hill, a Houston native, and someone who never shied away from a fight. When I was clerking for Judge Luttig, he had performed Ted and Barbara’s wedding, and
