2 Share Ambition : Gore: Mirror to Father’s Long Career

On the first Wednesday in November, 1970, Albert Gore Sr. and his son, Albert Jr., spent a somber day canoeing on the Caney Fork River, which flows past the Gore livestock farm outside this small town in middle Tennessee.

The previous day, after 18 years as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate, the elder Gore had lost a particularly brutish reelection campaign to William E. Brock III, scion of a wealthy Chattanooga candy-making family. The Brock campaign had focused on Gore’s liberal voting record, his support for civil rights, his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Seeks Son’s Advice

As the two paddled the Caney Fork, Gore Sr. reflected on the pain of the defeat. And he sought advice from his son, then a 22-year-old Army enlistee soon to ship out for Vietnam. What should he do after 32 years in Congress?

“Dad,” the younger Gore counseled, “I would take the 32 years”--retire gracefully from public life.

For himself, Al Jr. declared, he would never enter politics. Never subject himself to the punishment his father had suffered for being right--as both of them were convinced--on the most divisive issues of his day.

Deeper down, however, young Al Gore was drawing a profoundly different lesson from his father’s bitter experience. It is a lesson that may go far toward explaining how it is that--despite his vow to shun politics--Albert Gore Jr., a relatively youthful first-term U.S. senator, today is one of only three contenders still alive in the once-crowded Democratic presidential race.

When to Be Right

In politics, Gore learned, being right is no defense. You must be right at the right time, he concluded, right on the right issues, and in the right way.

His father, never humble or introspective, took his stands with an uncompromising self-righteousness that angered Democratic and Republican presidents, alienated many of his colleagues in Congress and finally turned Tennessee voters against him.

The younger Gore’s political career can be seen as a mirror image of his father’s, a perfect copy, perfectly reversed.

The Senator, as the senior Gore is known today to many in Tennessee, grew increasingly distant from his constituents back home during his long tenure in Washington. Al Jr. has compulsively kept an ear to the Tennessee ground. Since his election to Congress in 1976, the younger Gore has held 2,000 town meetings in hamlets stretching across Tennessee from Difficult to Mt. Pleasant.

Gore Sr. was an unabashed liberal, an absolutist who made few concessions to the will of Tennessee voters. The younger Gore describes himself as a “raging moderate,” a man whose policy positions on issues from abortion to aid to the Nicaraguan Contras are sliced paper thin, designed to give something to everyone.

The elder Gore delighted in taking stands that put him at odds with his Southern colleagues. He was one of only two Southern senators who voted against the segregationist “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. He voted against Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Supreme Court nominees Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell. His votes earned him then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s famous epithet, “Southern regional chairman of the Eastern liberal Establishment.”

Gore Jr. flaunts his Southern ties and his moderate record, particularly on military questions. His candidacy is based on the premise that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying the South, and he argues that his rivals--Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson--are too liberal to attract Southern voters.

Sings Country Tune

Although Washington-bred and Harvard-educated, young Al Gore insists he’s just a country boy and makes a point of breaking into the country-and-western tune “All My Exes Live in Texas (That’s Why I Hang My Hat in Tennessee)” whenever a new reporter joins his campaign entourage.

Yet among his congressional colleagues, Gore has developed a reputation that is very different from the folksy-but-substantive image he projects on the campaign trail. In private conversations, a number of lawmakers and aides who have worked with Gore during his eight years in the House and three-plus years in the Senate said they considered him to be at once a publicity-conscious grandstander and an aloof outsider.

One Democratic aide expressed a sentiment echoed by several congressmen as he said of Gore’s years in Congress: “He was arrogant. He loved being the best looking and the smartest boy in the class, and he felt he didn’t need them (his colleagues) to succeed.”

Gore himself says he searches for issues with “finite solutions.” Thus he is not associated with complex and ideologically charged questions such as immigration, tax reform and abortion. He learned from his father’s career that he could be on the “right” side of such difficult issues--and still lose everything.

He has taken positions that entail little risk--opposing the poisoning of babies, for example, and the dumping of chemicals that contaminate drinking water. His interest has been in publicizing problems, not in the intricacies of writing and passing legislation.

Share Characteristic

Although the two Gores developed starkly contrasting images in Washington, they share at least one defining characteristic: ambition. Gore Sr. admitted during his political career that he occasionally looked in the mirror and thought he saw a President. Gore Jr. seems to truly believe he is the best-qualified man in America to lead the nation for the next four years.

In Milwaukee recently, Al Gore Jr. appeared at Syrena’s Polish-American Restaurant to make a final pitch for votes on the eve of the Wisconsin primary. As the candidate stood before the crowd in the hard glare of television spotlights, an aristocratic 80-year-old man stood off to one side of the room, a mane of white hair resting on the collar of his blue suit coat.

“He’s in his stride now, isn’t he?” the ancient politician asked the man standing next to him.

Even without the Gore-for-President button, the Gore profile was unmistakable. And for a moment, the man who never would be President and never would know why allowed himself the pleasure of thinking that maybe, just maybe, he had fathered one.

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born March 31, 1948, the second child of Albert Gore Sr., then a five-term congressman from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, a politically savvy lawyer who was one of the first women graduates of Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Law School.

The Gores’ first child, Nancy, was to become her younger brother’s best friend, despite a 10-year difference in age and starkly different temperaments. Nancy, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer in 1984. Her death appears to be the one profoundly painful episode in an otherwise charmed life for Gore, and he declines to talk about her. Pauline Gore turns away in tears when Nancy’s name comes up.

“They were opposites,” Pauline Gore said in an interview. “As far as Nancy was concerned, rules were made to be broken. But Al was fairly much a conformist. I used to say that Nancy wanted to find out what I wanted and she would do something else, but Al wanted to find out what I wanted him to do and he’d do it.”

Indeed, friends, colleagues and teachers throughout Gore’s life often remarked on his polite and deferential manner. This deeply rooted respect for authority, along with his name, helped earn Gore the patronage of powerful elders--the headmaster of Washington’s St. Albans School, who helped him into Harvard, professors who guided him there, an influential publisher who hired him without experience to write for the most influential newspaper in Tennessee. The Gore name didn’t hurt, either.

Model of Decorum

Harvard Prof. Richard Neustadt and former Prof. Martin Peretz, for example, recall the late 1960s as a time of youthful insolence among many Harvard students. But when Al Gore came for dinner at their homes, he was a model of decorum. He arrived in jacket and tie, stood when ladies entered the room and addressed his elders as “sir” and “ma’am.”

All of which made it that much easier to appreciate his natural intelligence and earnestness.

“This is a substantial guy . . . and he was quite substantial at 21,” Neustadt said. “A lot of people, including me, see in him a combination of brains, morals, energy and realism.”

When campus radicals at an anti-Vietnam War meeting advocated sabotage of railroad tracks outside a Boston armory, Gore’s friends recall him denouncing the idea, then leaving the meeting despite his deep personal opposition to the Vietnam war.

“What they were doing, he felt, was beyond the limit of responsibility,” said roommate John Tyson, now an investment banker in Washington. “The issue was change; the question was, from within the system or without? He believed in the system, even though he didn’t agree with the people who ran it.”

In part, that may have been because Gore actually knew many of the people running the system.

Meets Nation’s Leaders

Before he finished grade school, Al Gore had sat on the knee of Vice President Richard M. Nixon, met Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson at his parents’ farm and listened in on a salty phone conversation between his father and Sen. John F. Kennedy. His father used to take him to swim at the Senate Office Building swimming pool.

When Gore was sworn in as a senator in 1985, he was introduced to Sen. Strom Thurmond, the veteran South Carolina conservative. “Oh, I remember you,” Gore said, recalling a trip to the Senate pool. “You stepped on my submarine.”

He was intimate with the system, and he liked it.

“He was raised in a family, a context, leading to public service,” said Charles Martin, former headmaster of St. Albans, the prestigious private school Gore attended. “It is comparable to Prince Charles being raised for public service.”

Political analysts often note that Gore appears calculatedly custom-made for a President, and his friends said that in Carthage, at school and around Harvard, “it was never a question of if , but when Al would become President.”

“I remember when Al was a young boy, people always assumed he would go into politics like his father,” said family friend and former CBS correspondent Fred Graham, now a television anchorman in Nashville. “It’s very predictable, knowing the two of them.”

Gore concedes an early interest in politics, but he and his family steadfastly reject the notion that young Al was--as satirized in “Doonesbury”--”Albert, Prince of the Tennessee Valley,” groomed from birth for power.

“Never once did they push me or channel me toward a political career,” he said.

“A lot of the things Al has done seem to aim in this direction,” acknowledged his mother, “but my (only) admonishment to him was: Get the very best education you can get and prepare yourself for whatever opportunity comes along.”

The process started soon after young Al was born, when the Gores moved from suburban Arlington into Embassy Row’s elegant old Fairfax Hotel, then owned by a wealthy Gore cousin. Gore was enrolled first in Miss Cook’s School, a private academy now called the Sheridan School. In fourth grade, he moved to the St. Albans School for Boys on the grounds of the National Cathedral.

Gore was a top student, class prefect and captain of the football team. He was also close to headmaster Martin, who guided his protege toward Harvard. It was the only college Gore bothered to apply to.

At his senior prom, Gore met Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) Aitcheson, a bright, pretty junior from the adjoining National Cathedral School for Girls. He called her the next day; they began dating and never stopped. She enrolled in Boston University to be near Gore at Harvard, and they were married at the National Cathedral shortly after her graduation in 1970.

At the time, Washington was only two-thirds of Gore’s life. When Congress was not in session, the family would return to their 250-acre farm near Carthage.

Strict Work Ethic

Gore’s Tennessee roots also gave him a strict work ethic, although his mother said Gore is hardly the hands-on farmer he implies in campaign appearances when he claims to be the “only active farmer in the race.”

“Al likes the background and he likes to be involved,” she said. “but . . . he will leave (the daily chores) to the farm hands.”

As a boy, however, Gore was introduced to farm work by his father, and Gore worked hard.

“If (we) were going to put a hundred bales of hay on one wagon, he’d find some way to put on 51 one of them himself,” said boyhood pal Edd Blair, a Tennessee state trooper. “Anything he tried, he tried to do best.”

Although Gore seldom complained about chores and rarely acted up, he did on occasion indulge in mischief. His mother recalled a time when young Gore was asked to whitewash a fence with one of his Carthage friends. For fun, they used their brushes to fling whitewash on passing trucks; when that grew old, they threw entire brushes. When the complaints hit the Gore farmhouse, the boy was forced to write letters apologizing for his hooliganism, a future politician’s penance.

Later, in college, like many of their contemporaries, he and Tipper smoked marijuana. His dope-smoking continued while he served in the Army in Vietnam and later as a newspaper reporter in Nashville. He said he quit 15 years ago.

Admission Stuns Mentors

The admission, which came in the wake of the discovery last fall that Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg had smoked pot while a law professor at Harvard, stunned his mentors and Tennessee friends. To them, smoking dope seemed completely out of character for Gore. The revelation does not seem to have damaged Gore--to many it humanized an otherwise conventional candidate--and it is seldom raised in campaign appearances or in press interviews.

After graduating with honors from Harvard in 1969, Gore enlisted in the Army, despite his fervent opposition to the Vietnam War. The public explanation is that he felt an obligation to his country and he wanted to spare some other Carthage boy from being called up by the local draft board. But Gore was also aware that his dodging the draft could jeopardize his father’s 1970 reelection chances.

Pauline Gore--who believed her husband’s defeat was unavoidable anyway--told her son that if he wanted to go to Canada to avoid the draft, she would support him. Gore rejected that option as both morally wrong and politically unwise.

College friend Bob Kanuth, now an investment banker in Washington, adds another reason for Gore’s enlistment: a lack of viable options. Graduate-school deferments had ended, the draft lottery had begun and Gore had a low lottery number. Had Gore not enlisted, he probably would have been drafted.

Unattractive Alternatives

“The alternatives were not very attractive,” Kanuth remembered. “They were either leave the country or go to jail.”

In his time in Vietnam Gore worked as a reporter for an Army newspaper. Although he never engaged in combat, he says Vietnam taught him a powerful lesson about “the consequences of misapplied power.”

He said he now realizes that success in a guerrilla war requires popular support. This led him to oppose military aid to the rebels in Nicaragua because, he said, most Nicaraguans do not embrace the Contras, nor would the American people support a prolonged war in the region.

Gore does, however, support “humanitarian” aid to the Contras. His position, which rejects the absolutes of full military aid and a total ban on support, typifies Gore’s approach to morally perplexing questions. He is constantly searching for the middle ground--and for a position designed to alienate the fewest voters.

When he was discharged from the Army in 1971, Gore again received the timely assistance of an influential mentor, Nashville newspaper Publisher John Seigenthaler, who hired him as a reporter for The Tennessean. Under Seigenthaler’s tutelage, Gore rapidly advanced from covering the Hillbilly Days festival to uncovering corruption on the Nashville City Council.

His colleagues on the newspaper, even those who liked him, recognized that he got favored treatment from publisher “Sig,” who had been a close adviser to Jack and Bobby Kennedy and who had a penchant for hiring the sons of Tennessee’s rich and powerful families.

“Getting a good shot at an investigative series, free of daily stories, what do you think?” said former Tennessean reporter Kenneth Jost, when asked if Gore benefited from favoritism at the paper. Jost worked for Gore in Congress and today serves as the campaign’s issues director.

While at the newspaper Gore attended Vanderbilt University, first the divinity school and then the law school. He finished neither, although his father urged him to get his law degree in case of an “unanticipated career change” like his own.

At the time, Gore said, he still was disillusioned by Vietnam and the Watergate scandal and was not even considering a political career. But his friends suspected he was just biding his time.

Gore insists he is still unsure what pushed him into politics. When Seigenthaler called to say Rep. Joe L. Evins was retiring in 1976, Gore remembers that he decided to run before hanging up the phone. He said he turned to his wife and announced: “I’m running for Congress.”

“When Seigenthaler’s call came that day,” Gore said, “I surprised myself with the extent to which I had gone back toward an inclination to politics.” He said covering politics for the newspaper had shown him how poorly government operated and inspired him to try to improve it.

He and Tipper insist they had never even talked about his potential political career before that moment. But in less than two hours, they rented their Nashville home to another student, loaded up their car and were on the highway back to Carthage and the campaign trail.

Three days later, he walked out on the steps of the quaint Smith County Courthouse and made his first political speech--after first vomiting in a courthouse men’s room.

“Until he feels like he is on top of something and knows how it’s all going to turn out,” his mother said, “he is a little bit nervous.”

But he won the race.

The U.S. House of Representatives has been described by one member as “435 senior class presidents,” and many there had their considerable egos jostled by the arrival in 1977 of Tennessee’s “Prince Albert.”

From the outset, many bristled at Gore’s apparent sense that he was somehow more special than they. As other equally ambitious junior congressmen toiled in obscurity, they resented how the Tennessean with the famous name and the movie star looks could command the news media’s attention with hearings on such high-profile issues as tainted infant formula, organ transplants and toxic waste.

Gore said that when he arrived in Washington, he saw Congress as not much different from a newspaper, except the audience was bigger and he now had subpoena power.

He also benefited from the favoritism shown him by former Rep. John Moss, the California Democrat who chaired the House oversight and investigations subcommittee and who, like Tennessean Publisher Seigenthaler before him, steered the hottest investigations Gore’s way.

“He believes strongly in the investigative role of Congress,” campaign adviser and former Gore congressional staffer Jost said. Added Peter Knight, who was Gore’s administrative aide from 1977 until last year, when he joined the campaign as finance director, “He was driven by the reporter’s instinct, always asking himself, ‘Can I get there first? And can I do something about it?’ ”

Avoids Idle Chatter

He did not seem to be particularly concerned about making friends, colleagues recall. “Al didn’t have time for people,” one influential House Democrat remembered. “He didn’t have time for idle chatter. He was somewhat abrasive.”

A telling contrast can be seen between Gore and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), another member of the House’s class of 1976, who abandoned his own presidential candidacy last month.

Gephardt rose through the House ranks by playing the game as an insider, counting heads for the leadership, collecting chits and stroking fellow congressmen. “With Dick, everyone assumed he would be Speaker one day,” said Rep. Robert T. Matsui, a Sacramento Democrat. “Everyone assumed Al Gore would be President.”

When it came time for choosing sides, 58 House members endorsed Gephardt’s bid for the presidency, while only 10 House members and three senators were willing to lend their names to Gore’s effort, according to a tally earlier this year by Congressional Quarterly. Of Gore’s 13 endorsements, seven were from fellow Tennesseans.

Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), who served with Gore on the Science and Technology Committee, counts himself among Gore’s admirers. He lauds the Tennessee senator as having “the best understanding of any of the candidates . . . with regard to high-technology issues. . . . Al would make a very capable President.”

Plays to Strengths

But even Brown noted that from his committee posts, Gore “picked as topics (for hearings) those issues that would get maximum exposure . . . Al has played to his political strengths with great skill.”

Gore likes to portray himself as congressional David taking on corporate Goliaths. Others are less impressed.

“When you’re investigating Love Canal,” said one Democratic aide, “there isn’t anyone who is rooting for Hooker Chemical. . . . Yeah, he was a fighter for the working men and working women of this country when it involved notoriously bad actors. . . . But if it’s an important corporate interest, he was a little less decisive.”

For example, Gore supported the Tennessee Valley Authority’s controversial Clinch River breeder reactor project while proclaiming his concern for the environment. And he backed a bill that would protect textile companies--and Tennessee jobs--from foreign competition even as he railed against trade protectionism.

To his credit, Gore’s attacks on Hooker Chemical came at a time when his father sat on the board of Hooker’s parent firm, Occidental Petroleum Corp. The elder Gore met Occidental chairman Dr. Armand Hammer at a Nashville cattle auction 40 years ago. When the elder Gore was turned out of the Senate in 1970, Hammer hired him as a corporate lawyer and later as president of Occidental’s Island Creek Coal Co. subsidiary.

Benefactor of Gores

Over the years, Hammer has been an important financial and political benefactor of the Gores. He sold the family the Tennessee farm that Al Jr. now owns and arranged a 1985 meeting between the younger Gore and Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly F. Dobrynin.

In recent years, the one issue with which Gore has been most publicly associated is the mobile Midgetman nuclear missile. After months of studying the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, Gore concluded that military stability between the two nations would best be served by eliminating huge multi-warhead missile systems such as the American MX and replacing them with accurate, single-warhead missiles.

His conclusions have been endorsed by a wide range of strategic thinkers, including former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Interestingly, his ideas echo those of his father, who in 1970 proposed scrapping heavy intercontinental missiles in favor of a smaller, mobile force.

However, Gore’s sponsorship of the Midgetman in Congress faltered after he signed onto a deal with the Reagan White House to support building the MX in exchange for accelerated development of the Midgetman, which the White House and the Pentagon did not want. The MX has now been built, while the Midgetman has been all but killed by Air Force opposition, weak congressional support and Pentagon budget problems.

Some in Washington think Gore allowed himself to be “taken” by the White House. It is allied to feelings about his youth--that he simply has not paid his dues--which may be his biggest drawback among his colleagues in Congress.

Said Matsui, who has endorsed Dukakis: “I could see myself one day supporting Al Gore for President. . . . Just not today.”

Until Gore’s announcement last year that he would seek the presidency, he was probably less well known nationally than his wife, Tipper. She won headlines, and waves of shrill criticism, for her campaign to pressure record companies to put warning labels on rock albums with explicitly sexual or violent songs.

Gore steadfastly supports his wife’s anti-pornography campaign as well as her work in such issues as helping the homeless, ending child abuse and promoting affordable day care. “She is 10 times more helpful than hurtful,” he said.

At the same time, Tipper denies rumors she has dropped the anti-pornography fight. She still criticizes music and films glamorizing violence against women, citing as an example a band that graphically simulates the bloody murder of topless women during its act.

“I question the responsibility of that, especially at a time when there’s so much domestic violence in daily life,” she said, adding that she seeks only a voluntary industry-run rating system, not government censorship.

Gore is not burdened by entangling alliances or competing loyalties, and that may provide a clue to the type of President he would be. His aides describe him as a demanding boss who never relaxes in the office, never goes out for beers with the staff after work. In a style reminiscent of former President Jimmy Carter, he emphasizes “quality control” of every letter and every speech.

Unlike his sometimes impulsive father, Gore is always careful in what he says and does. Even his light moments appear calculated, as when he breaks into song on his campaign plane or balances a photographer’s monopod on his nose.

“Whatever Al Jr. does will be thought through,” said Sam Kennedy, a Columbia, Tenn., lawyer and an astute student of Tennessee politics. “Al Sr. is a likable, warm person who played fiddle in his first campaign. Al Jr.’s suit is always blue, his tie is always in place, and when you ask him a question he gives a thoughtful, detailed answer.

“That’s deadly in politics. It’s a horrible fault I never figured how he was able to overcome in Tennessee. It’s been his greatest fault in this campaign.”

Surfeit of Caution

The senior Gore’s political career came to an untimely end in part because of an excess of zeal for causes he believed were just. The junior Gore may find his presidential ambitions thwarted this year because of a surfeit of caution--voters have not seized upon his candidacy yet, poll results and interviews indicate, because they have not yet figured out what he stands for.

Pauline Gore was asked in an interview last month what her son learned from his father’s political career, and from his mistakes.

“I don’t call them mistakes,” she said. “Of course, (young) Al’s behavior is conditioned by every experience he’s had in life. Al by nature is more of a pragmatist than his father. As am I. I tried to persuade Albert (Sr.) not to butt at a stone wall, just for the sheer joy of butting.”

She suggested that her son had learned what her husband had not: “If there’s no chance of victory, there’s no sense in bloodying yourself.”

Staff writer Karen Tumulty contributed to this story.