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 you said. It does not get filtered through the press or television, and therefore
 the accuracy is much higher. Because anytime you start writing and changing
 things and giving your interpretation, which is what historians do, sometimes we
 overstep the case or are biased in one direction or the other.

M: Well, too, this thing about biography, especially autobiography, it tends to be
 mainly lies or rationalizations, or people look back on, say, their career as a
 political figure or whatever, they're constantly tweaking things to make them
 come out [as] they wish they really had. There are numbers of notorious
 examples of that in our political history. There's big difference between what
 some political figure writes in his autobiography and what actually happened.

P: The best examples of that are Richard Nixon's memoirs.

M: Exactly, that's one of the people I was thinking of. Sure.

P: And Eisenhower to some degree as well. Are you glad you had the opportunity
 to go through this?

M: You mean the oral history?

P: No, I'm sorry, the recount.

M: It's emphatically not something that I would have volunteered for, but I harken
 back to what my secretary told me people in the courthouse in Daytona Beach
 were saying. [They were saying], thank God it's McDermott, because people in
 the court system that knew me, I'd been a judge at that point [for] almost twenty-
 four years, I was coming to the end of my twenty-fourth year as a judge, [they
 knew] that I try to get to the point. I do not allow myself to be distracted by what I
 consider to be irrelevancies, and I do not put up with any nonsense from
 anybody. I think when I threw that Republican attorney out that night when we
 made the vote to do the complete recount, I didn't do it for the purpose of setting
 a tone, but I think it did have that effect, because after that nobody messed with
 me.

P: I wanted to read into the record some comments on the recount. The Daytona
 Beach News Journal and the Orlando Sentinel had very high praise for you.
 [They stated that] you remained calm, deliberate, unflappable, and nonpartisan;
 outstanding performance under great pressure. Obviously, with the world
 watching, it had to be a pressure-filled, tension-filled sort of activity, and you
 knew, as you said earlier, this could determine the outcome of the vote for
 President of the United States.


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