43*: When Gore Beat Bush-A Political Fable (Kindle Single) by Jeff Greenfield

Description

At 5:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, an ashen-faced but composed President Al Gore stepped into the East Room of the White House to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as Texas governor George W. Bush—flown to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first visit back to the capital after the close race that lost him the presidency just months before.

That’s not how you remember it?

Imagine if the 2000 presidential election had turned out differently and Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush to become the 43rd president of the United States. How might events have played out? Would Osama bin Laden have loomed as large? Would the 9/11 attacks have been even worse? Would we have invaded Iraq? Would the economy have plunged into recession?

This is the provocative alternate universe of “43*,” a riveting thriller by veteran political commentator Jeff Greenfield. Richly reported and anchored in actual events, “43*: When Gore Beat Bush” is the fascinating follow-up to Greenfield’s bestselling “Then Everything Changed,” which imagined what-if scenarios for the Kennedy, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.

Greenfield takes readers deep inside the Gore administration and reveals high-level meetings, top-secret programs, and ego-fueled battles that forever altered the global landscape. And in Greenfield’s hauntingly plausible parallel universe, the law of unintended consequences has a dramatic effect on the fate of the United States.

“It’s the ‘butterfly effect,’” writes Greenfield, “where one dead butterfly millions of years ago leads to a contemporary world immeasurably more coarse, less kind. It’s the notion of the old nursery rhyme: ‘For want of a nail the kingdom was lost.’”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One of America’s most respected political analysts, Jeff Greenfield has spent more than thirty years in network television, including as a commentator on CNN, ABC News, and CBS and currently as an anchor on PBS’s “Need to Know.” A five-time Emmy Award winner, he is a political columnist for Yahoo! News and the author of more than a dozen books, including the bestseller “Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics—JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan.” He divides his time between New York and Santa Barbara.