Reinventing Al Gore

It was February 1976 and Al Gore was at loose ends. For five years, he and his bubbly wife, Tipper, had been enjoying a comfortable life in Nashville. He was moderately successful as a reporter for the city’s leading daily, the Tennessean, and he’d been enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s law school and divinity school. Still, as the Harvard-educated son of a senator, he wasn’t quite living up to others’ expectations. His grades, for example, were horrendous (he failed five of his eight divinity courses and earned no degree from either school). As for politics, he’d shown little interest since his father’s defeat in 1970. Indeed, his political activity in Nashville had been limited to talking public policy while smoking reefer with a friend from the newspaper.

Then one day Gore got a call from the publisher of the Tennessean informing him that the congressman representing Carthage, Gore’s hometown, was going to announce he wouldn’t seek reelection. Moments after hanging up the phone, he told Tipper, “I think I’m going to run for Congress.” Just as striking as this split-second decision is what the twenty-seven-year-old did next: He fell to the floor and started doing push-ups.

As Bill Turque shows in his enlightening biography, Inventing Al Gore, the push-ups marked the end of Gore’s carefree days. They also symbolized the end of his struggle with his father, who had prodded him to pursue politics from day one. Not only was Al running for Congress, he was doing so even younger than his father, who had first been elected at thirty-one. What’s more, Gore’s reflexive action after making up his mind was to launch into an exercise his father used to put him through daily before he dashed off to school.

As Gore moves closer to locking up his party’s presidential nomination, there is endless droning about Bill Clinton as Banquo’s ghost haunting the Gore campaign. In the public mind, that may be true. But in the vice president’s mind, it’s just as likely that the ghost of his father looms right alongside the shade of Saturday Night Bill.

Turque, who is particularly perceptive about Gore’s early years, informs us that his father had high expectations for his son even before the child was born. While Gore’s mother was pregnant with Al, her husband noticed that the birth of a baby girl to his chief competitor in Tennessee politics, congressman Estes Kefauver, had been written up on an inside page of the Tennessean. That wouldn’t do for Gore Sr., who remarked, “If I have a boy baby, I don’t want the news buried inside the paper. I want it on page one where it belongs.” He lobbied the paper’s editors to grant this extraordinary request, and they did. The day after Al Gore was born, the Tennessean ran a one-column headline, on the front page, trumpeting his arrival. “Before he was home from the hospital,” writes Turque, “Al Gore had won a news cycle for his father.”

In this account and others, Gore Sr. fits the stereotype of fathers insistent that their sons follow in their footsteps. That meant a rigorous upbringing for young Albert. In addition to the traditional grooming, there were the push-ups before school and manual labor through scorching Tennessee summers. When Gore’s mother questioned whether fifteen-year-old Al should really plow a hillside steep enough to put him at risk, Gore Sr. shot back that “a boy could never be president if he couldn’t plow with that damned hillside plow.”

Like other politicians, Gore Sr. and his wife traveled frequently, often leaving Al with Carthage families. In Washington, the father never bothered to attend any of his son’s football games, and when Al was a senior his parents had him board at his school, the exclusive St. Albans, while they campaigned for reelection. Given his father’s heavy-handed ways, this absenteeism may have suited Al fine. Indeed, years later Tipper was asked about Al’s relationship with his father. She laughed and said, “You remember Oedipus?” Similarly, Gore’s mother once said Al “never wanted to be bossed by his father,” and as a boy he “hated” being known as the son of a senator.

Gore dealt with his inner conflicts by taking a bold step in his first run for Congress: He asked his father not to campaign for him. “I don’t want people voting for me because I’m Albert Gore’s son,” he told a family friend. He did this again when he first sought the White House in 1988. But his overbearing father found ways to intrude. Before the 1992 election, the New York Times reported that, soon after Gore’s selection as Clinton’s running mate, Gore Sr. had told a reporter, “We raised him for it.” Asked about this, Al had heatedly objected, “That’s not true. When I was growing up, I don’t ever remember a time when either of my parents said: Don’t you want to go into politics?” (Gore further revealed his sensitivity on this subject when he responded to the story with a curious letter to the New York Times. It said he felt “compelled to write by a glaring error of fact and interpretation” about his parents, but never identified the error.)

For all Turque’s attention to the father-son relationship, the bond between the two remains something of a mystery. The political influence, however, is clear. Gore Sr. lost in 1970 primarily because he’d become too liberal for his state. Not only had he opposed the Vietnam war — an unpopular move in pro-military Tennessee — he’d also voted for gun control, against school prayer, against two conservative Supreme Court nominees from the South, and against a bill that would have banned busing. A September 1970 memo from H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon’s chief of staff, laid out the strategy Republicans would use against him: Gore’s “cocktail party liberalism offers a chance to rebut his folksy image.” Aides to Gore’s Republican opponent were instructed to publicize not only the dinner parties the senator attended, but also the type of menu (“The Frenchier the better”).

So Al Gore went to great lengths while in the House and Senate not to become too liberal for his constituents. Early in his career, as Bill Bradley has been noting, Gore frequently voted against gun control and government funding of abortions, and for tobacco subsidies and tax breaks benefiting racially segregated schools. Once his aspirations reached beyond Tennessee to the White House, he dropped many of his more conservative stances in order to curry favor with liberal interest groups. Even then, though, Turque shows that he was more than happy to strike up an alliance with the right-leaning Dick Morris in 1995 in order to rescue the Clinton presidency.

This work with Morris reflects another lesson Gore learned from the 1970 Senate race, in which Gore Sr. was the target of countless attacks: Use slash-and-burn politics if that’s what you need to win. Gore never faced any serious competition in Tennessee, but in his first run for president he attacked other Democrats so ruthlessly that party chairman Paul Kirk publicly pleaded for him to stop — he didn’t — and New York governor Mario Cuomo characterized his style as “terribly dangerous.”

The current campaign is no different. After a slow start, the vice president hired a murderers’ row of advisers — Bob Shrum, Carter Eskew, and Harrison Hickman — best known for their merciless tactics. It’s no coincidence that at the recent Harlem debate, when Bradley criticized Gore for not doing more to curb racial profiling, Gore’s gutter-level response was to throw the issue back in Bradley’s face, saying the practice had begun in his home state of New Jersey.

Throughout his political career, Gore has been driven in a way few other elected officials are. Like Newt Gingrich, he’s exhibited an inflated interest in Answers to Big Questions, which has led him to espouse fringe theories on the environment and other issues. And despite his firsthand knowledge of the strains a political career places on a family, he kept one of the busiest schedules of anyone on Capitol Hill during his sixteen years in Congress. His family grew to include four children, and Tipper chafed at her husband’s peripatetic ways. Still, she made the necessary sacrifices. In the mid-’80s, she carved out time to lead a crusade against explicit music lyrics and wrote a book entitled Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. But when Al decided in 1987 to launch his presidential campaign, she abruptly canceled her national tour to promote the book.

Gore’s ceaseless ambition appeared to have leveled off when he announced, in 1991, that he wasn’t going to seek the White House. “I would like to be president,” he said, “but I am also a father, and I feel deeply about my responsibility to my children.” Tipper later told the Washington Post that he didn’t run because “when it came down to the wire, he said, ‘I’m not going to do it because I can’t rip myself out of the fabric of your lives now.'”

But these explanations look hollow in retrospect, particularly after Gore used his speeches at the Democratic conventions of 1992 and 1996 to exploit family tragedies. Indeed, Gore ultimately did accept the vice presidency and all the burdens it carried. Why? He liked Clinton, George Bush no longer looked invincible, and he could keep his Senate seat if the ticket lost. Moreover, the post was one his dad had desperately wanted, but never got.

In Inventing Al Gore, Turque skillfully explores not just Gore’s relationship with his father, but his time at St. Albans and Harvard, his experience in the military, and his congressional career. Turque was also the first to uncover Gore’s extensive use of marijuana in his twenties. Unfortunately, the two final chapters of the biography, covering the vice president’s ethical missteps and his posture during the Lewinsky matter, add little to the public record.

Gore Sr. died in December 1998, two weeks before his son described Bill Clinton as a man historians would deem “one of our greatest presidents.” To the very end, he held out hope that Al would reach the very top of the greasy pole. “I had ambitions for the presidency,” he told a reporter a few years ago. “It didn’t turn out that way.” Asked what he would feel if his son reached the Oval Office, he was almost embarrassingly candid: “How could a father be more satisfied?” With this last expectation to meet, Al Gore, one suspects, will be pounding out push-ups right up until Election Day.

Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.