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The Connecticut senator publicly longed for “the Democratic Party that I grew up in—a
party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid
to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders, a party that understood
that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters
around the world against the forces of totalitarianism, or we would fall divided.”

And on no issue was Lieberman more assertive, more hawkish, than on Iraq. He had deplored
the Bush administration’s failure to “finish the job” in 1991 by going to Baghdad
and removing Saddam from power. He had also been a fervent supporter of Ahmed Chalabi
and the Iraqi National Congress ever since Richard Perle had brought Chalabi to his
attention on a plane ride to a national security conference in Munich. Lieberman quickly
became enamored of the charismatic Iraqi, and championed Chalabi’s repeated claims
that he and his allies could overthrow Saddam if the United States would only let
them establish a “free Iraq” zone in the North, where Saddam’s power no longer reached.
Such views had put Lieberman in opposition to the Clinton administration’s “containment”
policy, but that did not deter Gore from picking him as his running mate in 2000.
Gore’s principal challenge as the Democratic nominee was the same as for any sitting
vice president: to demonstrate independence from the man he was trying to succeed.
And no Democrat had been more critical of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair than Lieberman.

But once the new administration took office, Lieberman’s focus on Iraq—some called
it an obsession—returned to the surface. He and his national security advisor, Ken
Pollack, would regularly push the State Department to disburse funds to Chalabi’s
Iraqi National Congress, even when State Department officials argued that the underground
newspapers and radio stations Chalabi was “funding” had no apparent existence inside
Iraq. His speeches—always cleared with the White House—brought the crowds at the American
Israeli Public Affairs Committee and other advocates of a strong defense posture to
their feet as he pledged that “President Gore and I embrace the wisdom of Dean Acheson,
perhaps our greatest secretary of state, who said, ‘No people in history have ever
survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive
to their enemies.’ Those who would be our adversaries—from Tehran to Baghdad and beyond—ignore
these words at their peril.”

But that was
before
the attacks of September 11. Now, as Lieberman waited for his weekly lunch with the
president, his long-held convictions had turned into something else: a profound, deepening
dissatisfaction with the course on which the administration—the Gore-
Lieberman
administration—was embarked. And that discontent had crystallized in the form of
a memo that he and Pollack drafted, which he had hand-delivered to President Gore’s
personal secretary two days earlier.

Dear Mr. President:

I’m taking the extraordinary step of putting my thoughts on Iraq on paper—for your
eyes only—because I genuinely believe it is the single most urgent issue you, or any
President has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink of nuclear
war almost 40 years ago.

Put bluntly, I believe our national survival is at stake in the war against terrorism.
And I am convinced this war against terrorism will not be over until Saddam Hussein
is removed from power in Iraq.

Saddam is the sworn enemy of the United States and is still seeking revenge for the
humiliating Gulf War defeat.

His regime has the means—chemical and biological weapons—that he hasn’t hesitated
to use, killing at least 25,000 Iranians and Kurds in at least 10 different attacks.
And by all accounts, Saddam has been actively working to develop nuclear weapons since
the end of the Gulf War. All that needs to present itself to him, I fear, is the opportunity.

It is, I believe, imperative at this point that the White House, the Pentagon, the
State Department and our intelligence services have begun to draw up plans and options
for changing the regime in Baghdad.

I fervently hope that you will give this critical cause the leadership and the advocacy
it deserves. Our national security demands nothing less.

President Gore pushed away the plate of kosher chicken salad, took a quick glance
at one of the three BlackBerrys clipped to his belt, and nodded his head.

“Joe,” he said, “I read your memo. I appreciate the candor; so let me reply with some
of my own. I’m not happy with your insistence on Iraq—and I’m even less happy with
what I’ve been reading in the press.”

“Mr. President,” Lieberman said, “let me assure you—”

“I’m
not
reassured, Joe,” Gore said. “Not when I read Bob Novak reporting on … let me get
this right,” he said as he thumbed his BlackBerry. “Yes, here it is: ‘open discontent
inside the administration over its refusal to deal with Iraq,’ or when I see a
Wall Street Journal
op-ed asking ‘if Vice President Lieberman can turn around White House policy.’ Where
the hell am I supposed to think these stories are coming from, Joe? You’re not going
to tell me you don’t stay in regular contact with your neocon friends, are you?”

“Mr. President,” Lieberman said, “I make no secret of the fact that on the question
of how we should deal with our enemies, I share a lot of views with them. But this
is a much bigger question for me. It’s not just the threat from Iraq; it’s what I
think it could mean if the world saw a tyrant like Saddam fall: what a free Iraq would
mean in the region, for a real peace in the Middle East—”

“I know the arguments, Joe—the virtuous circle: We take out Saddam, then the Sunnis
and Shiites put aside, I don’t know, thirteen hundred years of hatred, the mullahs
fall in Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas come to their senses and make peace with Israel,
and the Saudis decide to become Social Democrats. But if by some wild stretch of the
imagination it
doesn’t
work that way, you could have the same thing that happened in the Balkans—a thousand
years of bottled-up ethnic hatred exploding, leaving us with a choice: occupy the
country for years, or pull out and watch mass slaughter.

“Joe, I promise you: The minute someone shows me
any
credible evidence that Iraq had
anything
to do with 9/11, or is
in fact
aiding Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group, or is in fact stockpiling WMDs, we
will hit them with everything we have. But you know the history as well as I do: You
start counting the lives lost to bad information or wrongheaded assumptions and you’re
into the millions. And every person I trust tells me that Chalabi and his neocon friends
are blowing smoke. I understand some of them are your friends, too, Joe. But this
is the decision I’ve made.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

“I guess in that case,” Lieberman said, “I’ve got a decision to make, too.”

The lawn outside the Naval Observatory was packed with cameras, lights, two hundred
folding chairs occupied by a press corps in full Martian-invasion hysteria. A half-dozen
men and women, microphones in hand, were speaking urgently to the cameras in front
of them.

“My God,” a CNN desk assistant said to her colleague, “I can’t believe we’re actually
covering ‘breaking news’ that’s actually …
breaking news
.”

“Not since President Ford dumped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to save his nomination
from Ronald Reagan’s challenge … ”

“Not since FDR replaced John Nance Garner with Henry Wallace in 1940, then dumped
Wallace for Harry Truman in ’44 … ”

“We’ve seen two secretaries of state—William Jennings Bryan and Cy Vance—resign because
of policy disagreements, but for a sitting vice president … ”

And Joe Lieberman, accompanied by his wife, Hadassah, and his daughter Rebecca, walked
out of the official vice president’s residence and mounted the stage.

“Two years ago,” he began, “I proudly accepted Al Gore’s invitation to join his campaign
as his running mate. I believed then and believe now that on a broad variety of issues,
President Gore is on a course to keep America prosperous and to expand opportunity
for those still left behind.

“But it has also become clear to me that on what I believe to be the central issue
of our time—the protection of our national security and our battle against worldwide
terrorism—the president and I have a fundamental, irreparable disagreement.

“I think it’s time to acknowledge that our strategy of trying to manage this menace
has simply not succeeded. Indeed, it seems to me that trying to manage the Iraqi threat
under Saddam is like trying to cool a volcano with a thermostat. It doesn’t work.
We must therefore declare a new objective. Our clear, unequivocal goal should be liberating
the Iraqi people and the world from Saddam’s tyranny, as we should have done in 1991.

“I have made this argument repeatedly within the counsel of the administration. It
has been rejected. And this leaves me with a hard choice: to remain silent in the
face of my deep conviction that we are on a dangerous course that threatens incalculable
harm to our nation or to step down and make my case openly before the American people.

“And I asked myself: What would I have done had I been in Neville Chamberlain’s British
government in 1938 as he pursued a policy of appeasing Hitler? What would I have done
had I been in Lyndon Johnson’s government as he escalated the Vietnam War? Once I
answered those questions, my course was clear. Accordingly, I shall resign the vice
presidency effective at noon tomorrow. President Gore, I believe, agrees that this
is the wisest course of action.”

The questions that followed were inevitable.

Does this mean you will challenge President Gore for the Democratic nomination in
2004? Will you change parties?

“The dangers we face as a nation are too profound,” Lieberman responded, “and the
challenges we face too real, for us to look at this through the lens of partisan politics.
In fact, I have spoken to my good friend John McCain; and he and I have agreed to
begin a nationwide campaign to alert America to the clear and present danger posed
by Saddam Hussein.”

Might you and John McCain run together in 2004 on the Republican ticket?

“What makes you think we’d have to do it as Republicans or Democrats?” He chuckled
as he said it, but the graphics were already streaming across the live TV feeds:
LIEBERMAN HINTS HE AND MCCAIN MAY MAKE INDEPENDENT WHITE HOUSE RUN IN ’04.

“I’m sorry the news isn’t better, Mr. President,” said Stan Greenberg as he dropped
the sheaf of papers on the table between them. “I know it’s not going to make for
pleasant bedtime reading.”

“Not to worry, Stan,” Gore said. They were sharing a late drink in Gore’s East Wing
study while they went over Greenberg’s latest numbers. Five days after Lieberman’s
sudden resignation, the president’s approval rating had dropped into the mid-thirties.
Fifty-five percent of Americans said they would choose a different president if the
election were held today. (“Yeah,” Gore said, “but if the election were held today,
80 percent of them would be
very
surprised.”) The midterm elections, three months away, were shaping up as a full-fledged
disaster for the Democratic Party, and
DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR BUSH
bumper stickers were already appearing. Karl Rove had come out of retirement to tell
a Midwest Republican gathering, “We can go to the country on this issue of defending
national security, and we can cite Al Gore’s own vice president as Exhibit A.”

President Gore bid his longtime pollster goodnight, and thought for a long moment.

Then he picked up the phone and asked the White House operator to place a call.

“Good evening, Hillary,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing your dinner. I have a
proposition for you. Would it be possible for you to come by the White House tomorrow?”

“I appreciate the invitation, Mr. President,” Senator Clinton said. ‘But in fairness,
you should know that I’ve just given an interview to Tim Russert; I’m pretty sure
it’ll be on the
Today
show tomorrow.”

“And … ?”

“And I told him that in view of—how did I put it?—the ‘radically changed’ circumstances,
I intended to keep all my options open. And I mean
all
my options.”

And in the long silence that followed, Hillary Clinton looked over at her husband
and exchanged a nod and a smile.

While the history of the Gore administration is fiction, I have tried as hard as possible
to be guided by the star of plausibility—shaping the course of events as much as possible
based on the words, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of the actual players. What follows
is an explanation of how these fictional events are rooted, on one level or another,
in reality. To be clear: This is in no sense an argument that this is how it
would
have happened. You’re free to imagine a whole different set of events. Perhaps Gore
would have lost Florida even without a controversy over Elián González. Perhaps, as
many believe, a President Gore, with his understanding of the Al Qaeda threat, might
have managed to stir the bureaucracy into action and prevented the September 11 attacks,
or minimized the damage they did. In a universe of infinite parallel worlds, all things
are possible. For good or ill, this is my parallel world.

The general state of Al Gore’s presidential campaign is drawn from my book on the
2000 election,
Oh Waiter, One Order of Crow
(2001).

For a thorough, brilliantly researched and reported account of the Elián González
case and its profound impact on Miami’s Cuban American community, see Ann Louise Bardach’s
Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana
(2003).