A Life of Preparation, and Now, Gore’s Moment

It has been a lifetime in preparation. No blank space remains in his resume. Al Gore has left almost nothing to chance.

Boarding Air Force Two, he rakes the air with windmill waves--even when no one but his security detail is watching. He is ready in case a camera blinks.

He has sculpted himself for the long haul. The prep school boy whose senator father once goaded him through a grueling regimen of farm chores now does his own toughening up: Two years of hard morning runs and weight training have forged a marathoner’s constitution and a logger’s taut frame.

As Tennessee congressman, then senator, then vice president, Albert Gore Jr. has always thrived on rigorous preparation. The spine to his lifelong tutorial is politics--its allure, its conflict, its shadow, its stigma. At 52, steeped from childhood in the backstage interplay of national affairs, Gore has achieved more than most politicians could hope to win--and mastered more lessons than most public men have the capacity to absorb.

Yet he is no natural, not an intuitive player like Bill Clinton. He trudges, earthbound, where Clinton glides. His pursuit of politics is prosaic science, not vaulting art.

Politics does not come instinctively to Gore, perhaps because--despite his raising as a senator’s son--he has chafed at others’ expectations, doubting at times whether he wanted a public career at all. He became a success at what he was expected to be only after straying off his eventual course.

He overcame his doubts, Gore says, because of his parents’ influence. Albert Gore Sr., a fiercely independent senator from the Tennessee hill country, and his politically shrewd wife, Pauline, taught their son to always venerate public service.

“Before I became so thoroughly disillusioned,” Gore said in an interview, “I had the seeds of idealism planted in my outlook early on.”

Those seeds were nourished by duty and desire. Gore absorbed his parents’ rarefied world through a child’s casual osmosis. Campus upheaval at Harvard and reluctant service in Vietnam quelled his interest. His father’s bitter loss of his Senate seat all but snuffed it out.

He detoured into newspaper reporting and raising a family. But at the first scent of opportunity, Gore ran for Congress--and won. His return to the expected path came with such swift ease that his years of exile seemed to have happened to someone else.

“This is what Gores do,” said Anthony Hagan, a central Tennessee lawyer who worked for Gore in his early congressional years. “They run.”

Gore fashioned his political identity out of the shards of his father’s 1970 loss. He saw himself adhering to the old senator’s ideals, prizing “victories of the heart [that] are more important than victories at the ballot box.”

But he also took lessons in his father’s political weaknesses: He learned to pay careful heed to voters, navigating 16 years in the House and Senate with caution. His prepared, aggressive campaign style preempted rivals from defining him. He became a dutiful player in the hard-boiled world of campaign fund-raising.

In his eight years as vice president, Gore has been far more than apprentice to Clinton’s sorcerer. His bulging issues portfolio--stretching from school uniforms to nuclear disarmament--reflects his omnivorous appetite for total access, unlimited preparation, all the time.

“He is clearly the most powerful and effective vice president in history, not just by a little but by order of magnitude,” said Dick Morris, the Machiavellian consultant who fell from White House grace.

No longer in Clinton’s shadow, Gore offers impeccable credentials and his enduring ethic of preparation as evidence of his readiness. “I wanted to be of maximum use to the country,” he says of his eight years as vice president.

Voters need to feel at ease with their leaders--as well as trust in their abilities. The question of whether Al Gore emerged from his lifelong tutorial as his own man or a man tailored to the expectations of others may be central to whether Americans want him as their next president.

The Senator’s Son

It was easy to tick off the ill-humored old man in the downstairs apartment. All Al Gore had to do was bounce his basketball.

From inside Suite 809, the rhythmic pounding throbbed through the muffled silence of the Fairfax Hotel until the telephone call came from 709. Then his parents would order him to quit it.

They had good reason. The tenant below was John McClellan. Sen. McClellan of Arkansas, the powerful Southerner who worked in the same vast oak-paneled chamber as Sen. Gore Sr. of Tennessee.

“It was my floor. But it was his ceiling,” Al Gore recalls with a smirk.

The dour McClellan was not to be trifled with, a man whose importance counted in a city teeming with important men. They could be found all over the Fairfax, a faded residential hotel in downtown Washington. War hero Adm. Chester Nimitz had a room there. So did Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut, father of a future president and grandfather of Al Gore’s presidential rival.

Pare away the hauteur, and Washington was any one-industry town. A Capitol kid got used to the sight of important men striding through slick corridors, throwing their weight around.

Al Gore’s inner antenna caught it all.

He listened to his father “talk about what he was doing and what was in the newspapers every day.” He stored it all away: the names of important men, the issues they advanced, who won and lost, who were friends, who were foes.

He and his older sister, Nancy, were encouraged to sit at the table when a high-powered guest arrived. It might be the silkily influential lawyer Clark M. Clifford. Or Sam Rayburn, the pint-sized Texas Napoleon who ran the House like a train depot. Once, Gore eavesdropped on a phone chat between his father and John F. Kennedy. He hung up, amazed, hearing a president curse.

Gore scoffs at the idea that this was the way his parents groomed him for a political life. “Neither one of them ever steered me toward it,” he said.

But the Gores made sure he paid attention. They stressed the uplifting satisfaction of public service. It was New Deal altruism, buffed up for Kennedy’s New Frontier.

“There was an unspoken acknowledgment of it,” said cousin Mark Gore, whose family branch owned the Fairfax. “This was Al’s life, and everything revolved around that higher order.”

Little Al’s caution and analytical bent came from his mother. His deep-rooted sense of idealism and excessive formality were his father’s gifts. And from both, Al Gore learned the value of being prepared. His father constantly interrupted the boy’s playtime with a refrain: “You readin’?”

Albert and Pauline Gore did well enough on his Senate salary and the money they made raising Black Angus cattle on their farm in Carthage, an hour east of Nashville. Still, they felt the need to economize. Pauline bought secondhand furniture on Baltimore’s Antique Row. Gore Sr.’s cousins discounted the rent.

The Gores both had to scratch to survive the Depression. They had married in 1937 after meeting at the Nashville restaurant where Pauline LaFon, then a young divorcee, waited on tables to pay for law school tuition at Vanderbilt. Albert Gore Sr. took night law classes at a YMCA.

A loyal Democrat, Albert was a farmer’s son from the Cumberland foothills. Alternately bombastic and formal as a collar stay, he was a devotee of the progressive tax Populism of Cordell Hull, a family friend who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime secretary of State.

Gore Sr. parlayed a school board job into a post as state labor commissioner, then made Congress from central Tennessee--a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War. Victory brought upward mobility at last.

“These people came from nothing, understand?” said Pauline’s brother Whit LaFon, a retired judge. “This wasn’t a dynasty like some people say. They knew what it was like to be poor. They carried it with them their whole lives.”

Pauline Gore sacrificed her law career to play senator’s wife and ‘50s mom, spending hours chilling homemade ice cream. But she could divine who was trustworthy in her husband’s political circles, vetting his staff and federal appointments. Now wheelchair-bound, she phones her son daily from the family farm to offer tart opinions on the campaign.

“She’s always been the political brains of that family,” said former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, a distant relation.

The senator had his own ideas about keeping Little Al from becoming a Capitol Hill brat. Every morning, the boy had to hit the floor for 50 push-ups. And Gore Sr. took every opportunity to familiarize the boy with his turf.

If there was a revelation about the reach of that world, it came to the youngster after hours spent watching hearings on the federal interstate highway system. He listened intently as senators and experts bickered over the proper width of roads and color of highway signs. Months later, on a family trip to Tennessee, Al gazed out the car window and noticed new signs. They were green--the color mandated on every U.S. roadway. The connection jolted.

“I went, whoa! It all made sense,” Gore recalls.

On the Senate floor, the grandiloquent Gore Sr. sat the boy down at his scarred desk and told of the chamber’s hallowed importance. Years later, taking his own place there, Al Gore repeated the same bromides to his children.

“He remembered the drama of his father communicating to a child what happened there,” daughter Karenna Gore Schiff said. “Talking about freedom . . . that in another country, people can’t say what they want to say. And this country is not like that.”

Al Gore has a different recollection of his father’s lecture. His memory is of an admonition about “fighting for the people and how our democracy depended on people who had courage to take on the wealthy and powerful.”

The stirring Populist phrases could be vintage Gore Sr. But they also happen to mirror perfectly the “progress and prosperity” slogans Al Gore recites every day on the campaign trail.

Stumping at Harvard

On his second day at Harvard, Al Gore went calling on his new classmates. He hit every freshman dormitory in North Yard, glad-handing for votes.

He was angling to be elected president of the freshman council. He already had government experience: At St. Albans prep in Washington, Gore had been a prefect, one of 10 council members. He oversaw the lunchroom.

Harvard was a new proving ground. When Gore knocked at his door that September morning in 1965, Paul Zofnass--a New York freshman who also was running--knew instantly that he and 13 other candidates were out of their league. Here was an assured, square-jawed striver. As always, Al Gore came prepared.

“He stuck out his hand and introduced himself,” recalls Zofnass. “He had obviously taken the time to read the school register and find out who I was.”

It was his way, Gore says now, of toying with what and who he might become.

“I was carrying with me the idea from childhood that I might want to do what my dad did,” he said. “I felt as if I had an aptitude for it. I had kind of absorbed some of the skills I saw in him.”

His interest in school office lasted only as long as his one-year term. But Gore’s Harvard preparation shaped him as thoroughly as any period in his life. In four years, he passed from callow undergraduate to war-haunted senior.

Flitting academic interests distanced Gore from his parents’ sober Depression-era sensibilities. He lost himself in Wallace Stevens’ elegant verse. His conscience was pricked by environmental pioneer Roger Revelle’s lectures about global warming. In a course taught by eminent Freudian analyst Erik Erikson, Gore assembled a psychological portrait of his father.

But he came alive for political discourse. Gore eagerly studied the theories behind his father’s lectures in a presidential decision-making class taught by political historian Richard Neustadt. He played Nikita S. Krushchev and Kennedy in simulations of the Cuban missile crisis.

“We blew up the world,” Gore recalls, “several times.”

Diligent but never gifted as a student, his grades ranged from A’s to D’s. Gore was a long way from the voracious, middle-age highbrow he would become--the one who would write about Cartesian philosophy and chaos theory in his book, “Earth in the Balance,” and obsess as vice president about the role of metaphor in American life.

“He never strove for the brilliant apercu,” said Martin Peretz, a friend who taught Gore in a freshman political theory course and now publishes the New Republic. Peretz calls Gore an exemplar of an educated leader. “He always wanted to make a substantial, if grave, contribution.”

Gore settled into life at Dunster House dormitory with a raffish group led by future actor Tommy Lee Jones. He slouched around in bib overalls and raced on his Honda Superhawk motorcycle, ferrying Tipper Aitcheson, the blond, model-thin girlfriend he had known from his St. Albans days.

Political families were not “out of the ordinary” to Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson. The daughter of a divorced suburban Virginia couple who lived among congressional families, she fit snugly into Gore’s world. They were inseparable in Cambridge, Mass., where she attended Boston University, double-dating and “hanging around with Tommy Lee,” Tipper Gore recalls.

Outside Harvard Yard, the nation was in turmoil. Young men were being sent to Vietnam in increasing numbers. After progress in the South, civil rights marches stalled in Northern cities and gave way to a new militancy.

Al Gore already had confronted that dashed idealism the year before when his father voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Facing a tough reelection campaign, Gore Sr. said he had no choice, that the bill’s penalties would deprive liberal Tennesseans of federal funding because of bigotry elsewhere in the state.

“I didn’t buy it,” Gore says. He argued, but the older man would not budge. The chink in his father’s armor rankled. When the son talks movingly of race before black audiences these days, his disappointment of 1964 is not mentioned.

Gore’s parents still held sway over his life away from Harvard. Every summer, he joined them at the Carthage farm, 250 acres of cresting hilltops and swale where they raised cattle and grew tobacco.

Carthage was where Gore wished he had grown up, he told Steve Armistead, his best friend there. Despite their class divide, Armistead says, Gore “didn’t have that stuck-up attitude silver-spoon kids have.”

In Carthage, Gore was free of Capitol propriety and Harvard pressure. He and Armistead rollicked around the countryside, plowing his father’s Chevy Impala into hog feeders and sneaking beer from country pit stops. Even the high jinks were part of the experience the elder Gores sought. Albert also made sure his son got a full dose of his work ethic, sending him out to plow steep hillsides, harvest tobacco, brand skittish steers.

The trips home met several needs. Albert and Pauline reconnected with constituents. Albert played country squire. Young Al learned rural values.

“His father wanted him to have roots in Smith County,” Ned McWherter said. And if the boy ever entertained thoughts of running for office, he would have a place to run from. “Albert,” McWherter allowed, “wanted to set the option before him.”

The farm was also a place he could run to--a secluded refuge. In the summer after his 1969 graduation, Gore walked through its fields often, circling out to the bluffs and back to the farmhouse where his parents waited. He had a decision to make about Vietnam.

Debating Vietnam

Facing Vietnam was as wrenching a quandary as the war itself. For the nation, the dilemma was getting out. For Al Gore, the problem was going in.

Intellectually, viscerally, the war made no sense to him. Gore wrote his father from Cambridge that the conflict’s anti-Communist rationale had darkly blossomed into “national madness.” He renounced the words when the letter was made public a few years ago. But his old opposition leached out recently as he caught himself describing his “attitude toward the reflexive support for a dumb war--for a mistaken war--that caused so much heartache and conflict.”

Wherever Gore turned up in 1968 and 1969, the war spread bad karma. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he gave his father ideas for a damning antiwar speech before the packed hall. Watching protests at Grant Park, he retreated when Chicago cops charged yippie demonstrators.

The next spring was Harvard’s turn. Gore and Tipper already had attended peace rallies. But when a mob of angry antiwar students raged into University Hall on April 9, taking over the building, Gore watched from the sidewalk. Confrontation was not his way. In darkness the next morning, police retook the hall, arresting 250. Mike Kapetan, a close friend, was clubbed unconscious.

Gore told him later it was a wasted effort. “What’s the point of lashing out?” he asked Kapetan, who agreed: “We were a lousy army.”

By his graduation in June of ‘69, Gore was consumed by his future--and his father’s. For once, his intensive preparation was of no use. Confronting the draft was a dilemma too thorny to deflect. No matter whom he talked to or how many options he sifted, Al Gore faced agonizing choices.

Since returning from an inspection of operations in Vietnam, Albert Gore Sr. had been a leading voice against the war. His approaching reelection race in 1970 was seen by the Nixon administration as a test for its “Southern strategy”--an attempt to topple Southern Democrats by depicting them as soft on Vietnam and conciliatory on civil rights.

Gore worried aloud to his Uncle Whit that if he avoided military service, would he hand Republican Bill Brock, his father’s opponent, a natural advantage: “He didn’t want to hurt his daddy,” said LaFon, who urged volunteering.

Worse, to Gore, was the grim prospect posed by his split-screen childhood. His draft board was in Carthage. If he joined the Reserves or National Guard, he told Peretz, some Tennessee friend “I played ball with or went to church with is going to go.”

Carthage kids did have ways out. Steve Armistead’s knees were battered from too many savage football tackles. But Gore told Armistead how trapped he felt.

Gore mentioned flight to Canada but “not seriously,” Armistead recalls. And alternative service was unrealistic. “He was worried about how people would perceive a senator’s son taking that choice,” Armistead said.

Soon after their talk, Gore paced around his family’s farm. Returning from the bluff, he told his parents his mind was made up. He would enlist.

That fall, Pvt. E-1 Gore was on the march, double-time, with his unit on a training ground at Ft. Dix, N.J. As tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled by in a dust-clouded field, Gore noticed a familiar face. It was Zofnass, his old student government rival.

Zofnass expressed shock at seeing a senator’s son in fatigues. Gore replied that “his dad and he decided it was the right thing to do for his sake,” Zofnass recalls. The “implication was that he wanted to go into elective politics, and if you’re going to do that and there’s a war, you’ve got to serve.”

“My career down the line? No, no way,” Gore said recently aboard Air Force Two. “You know, people’s memories are funny.”

Whatever his motivation, Gore had taken the hard choice. He was in harm’s way. His Carthage friends would not think less of him. His father had one less campaign issue to worry about.

A political career, any career, was too remote to consider. In Vietnam, there were no guarantees.

Lessons of Warfare

The orders never arrived. All through the spring of 1970, Al Gore waited for his assignment, writing for the base newspaper at Ft. Rucker, Ala. He had signed up for duty in Vietnam, wondering to Mike Kapetan “how he could be from the Volunteer State and not volunteer.” The only combat he saw was weekend touch football games in the Florida sand.

In May, he married Tipper at the National Cathedral in Washington. Pvt. Gore wore a borrowed dress blue uniform and sword. The two returned to Alabama, where they moved into a trailer and waited to hear from his superiors.

Gore saw his limbo through a political prism. Nixon seemed crouched behind every ordeal. The suspicion was partly justified. Nixon had approved a secret slush fund, “Operation Townhouse,” to pump $3 million into Republican campaigns. About $200,000 went to Bill Brock, a candy heir opposing Gore Sr.

Brock insists now that “money was not an issue between us. Both campaigns seemed to be adequately funded.”

But his father’s failure to keep pace with an opponent’s fund-raising was instructive in Gore’s own careful political ascent--one of several lessons he stored away. Six years later, he retrieved those lessons in constructing his political style: cautious, calibrated and always well-prepared.

“There’s no doubt one of the reasons my father was defeated was that the Nixon dirty tricks team funneled millions of dollars of illegal money into the 1970 campaign,” Gore says. Brock’s overwhelming $1.25-million budget stood as a warning to Gore that a candidate has to “do everything you can to level the playing field.”

Brock saturated Tennessee newspapers and media affiliates with coded ads suggesting the elder Gore had lost touch--on Vietnam, school busing, gun control. “Bill Brock believes” billboards cluttered state roadsides.

Al Gore stored those images away too. “The lesson he learned was to leave no scurrilous charge unanswered,” said Roy Neel, a longtime aide.

On election night, Armistead picked Gore up at the Nashville airport. On the ride to the post-vote rally, Gore said his father had asked him to write a victory speech. “He knew there wasn’t going to be one, but he wrote it anyway,” Armistead said.

Defiant, Gore Sr. refused to concede when Brock’s tally was confirmed. “The truth will rise again,” he vowed. Years later, after his son became vice president, the senator elaborated to an oral historian: “And it has!”

Within two months of his father’s defeat, Al Gore was at the Bien Hoa military complex in South Vietnam. His station was the 20th Engineers Brigade, his home a reinforced hooch called the “Beach Club,” his assignment to write about the soldiers who erected bases and airstrips across the war zone.

Hitching rides on Huey helicopters, Gore flew repeatedly into the interior with Mike O’Hara, now a Detroit News sportswriter. Gore was cautious enough to cover his foxholes with discarded tin. But he was not outwardly spooked, O’Hara says. “He didn’t try to get out of anything.”

Gore was never caught in a firefight during his five-month hitch “in-country”--despite telling several newspapers later on that he was “shot at” and writing at least one story that left the impression he had come close.

But anything could happen in Vietnam, O’Hara and others who served with Gore argue. Grunts and desk jockeys alike died in helicopter crashes and ammo dump explosions, from booby-traps and bar fights.

Gore revealed himself cautiously to barracks mates. When they found out he was a senator’s son, a walking Creedence Clearwater lyric, they were startled by his contempt for that side of his life. “He seemed pretty bitter about politics and war,” said Michael Roche, who edited an engineer’s magazine.

“I was way far gone,” Gore agrees. The hallucinatory parade that started with the Kennedy assassination and ended with Nixon’s reelection “was just a devastating body blow to me,” Gore said. And the dismaying epilogue of his father’s loss “just knocked the wind out of me.”

The only thought Gore remembers from his wearying transpacific flight home in May 1971 was his aching desire to “take Tipper camping out West.”

He would do that. Then he would start his long, self-imposed exile.

The Homecoming

Tennessee was home. No more divided loyalties.

Inside the newsroom at the Nashville Tennessean, Al Gore had a steel desk and a bulky typewriter. His Army brush-cut had grown out in scruffy waves.

Mark Gore heard the senator’s son had chucked it all. When he passed through on his way to college in Colorado, he was pleased to find his cousin thriving. “Al didn’t spend a day of his life drifting,” Mark Gore says.

The old senator and his wife were clear about what they wanted. When Jim Sasser, who managed the 1970 loss and went on to win Brock’s Senate seat back, sat down with them in the farmhouse kitchen, Pauline said bluntly: “There’s another Gore coming along, and he’s going to be better than the first one.”

Al Gore was thinking about politics, he admits now--but only remotely. His vague plan was to buy the small Carthage Courier newspaper and run it with Tipper, who had taken up photography. If they succeeded, it might give them “an option for possibly running for Congress 10 years down the road.”

But they could not scrape up financing. And the congressman from their district, Joe L. Evins, appeared strapped into his seat for time immemorial.

So Gore studied religion at Vanderbilt for a year, then joined the Tennessean, where John Siegenthaler, its no-nonsense editor, molded celebrity offspring into investigative reporters. Gore had one stipulation: No politics.

“He was adamant,” said Frank Sutherland, then a fellow reporter and now the paper’s top editor. “He didn’t want to be compromised in any way.”

Gore wrote on hillbilly festivals and a spat between a hippie commune and its churchgoing neighbors. But he relaxed his ban, soon covering City Hall.

Outside the paper, he and Tipper were raising a family. Karenna was 2 1/2; three children would soon follow. The Gores lived frugally in an old house with a water bed upstairs and a stereo downstairs, where Gore blared Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead.

At parties, he might bogart a marijuana joint passing around. Years later, Gore told reporters he had lit up a few times in Vietnam. “He was somewhat open about his smoking,” said Ken Jost, a former Tennessean reporter and Gore aide. But Jost saw it only on occasion in Nashville.

Gore was likely too deep in his job to lose himself in dope haze. In 1974, his front-page investigation of a council member led to criminal charges. The councilman was caught on tape accepting a bribe--a sting set up by prosecutors with Gore’s help, which raised ethical questions. The councilman accused them of entrapment, and his jury trials ended in mistrial, then acquittal. Gore was crushed.

“It was like his dad’s loss,” said Jost, who covered the case. “He saw it as a bad verdict but not that the system was broken.”

The distinction was crucial. Searching again, Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt Law School in the fall of ’74. His parents were ecstatic. Lawyer Frank Hunger, Nancy’s husband and Gore’s closest friend, told him “he was heading in the right direction.”

On the last Friday in February 1976, Gore excitedly phoned friends, telling them he was going to run for Congress. Siegenthaler, he explained, had tipped him off that Evins was abruptly retiring.

Repeated over the years, the story is now as polished as whittled wood: Gore told a stunned Tipper. Then, he dropped and began doing push-ups. He called his vacationing parents out in California and huddled with friends for advice. He got a haircut. Nerve-racked the following Monday, he vomited in a Carthage courthouse bathroom, then emerged to give the first speech of his life.

Tipper Gore says she can detect her husband’s unseen drift toward politics only in hindsight. “It wasn’t obvious at the time. There was no discussion of it. So it really was a surprise.”

But according to others on the scene at the time, Gore would not have made such a critical decision without his characteristic lifelong preparation. Stanley Rogers, the Democrat who was Gore’s main primary rival that spring, says he had “heard that [Gore] was considering running. This was weeks before he got into the race. I knew he was thinking about it.”

And Anthony Hagan, a lawyer who was Gore’s campaign manager for a period that spring and became an aide after his victory, says Gore came to his office several weeks before his announcement to gauge his interest in joining up. Gore told him: “I believe I have a good shot. I think I can win.”

Gore insists Hagan’s sequence is wrong--the two did talk, but not until after he had announced for the seat. “Tony’s memory’s faulty,” Gore said. “I think that what he was thinking about was that a few weeks before I asked him to be my campaign manager, I went to see him and said I’m going to run. But that would have been after the telephone call from Siegenthaler.”

In an interview, Hagan stuck to his recollection. “This was before he declared. I’d say it was weeks before he declared.”

A quarter-century on, the significance of Gore’s first glimmering of electoral interest is a faded point of his history. Memories can dim. But the disconnect between Gore’s ambitious self-promotion and the plainer truths of his life have at times been interpreted as varnishing. Those who know him say it follows from Gore’s understandably tight grip on his own narrative.

“You want to win so badly and get things exactly right that sometimes you forget who you are,” said former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.

His desire to win in 1976 seemed bottomless. Wobbly at first, he overcame his inexperience with brute energy. He was out the door early, the last candidate standing at nighttime meet-and-greet events. He did it on his own, ordering his father not to campaign for him. The old man was hurt, but he marshaled old contacts by phone. Pauline helped choose aides and urged her son to look the part of a congressman. Gore bought three identical blue pinstripe suits from a traveling Korean tailor.

“He wore them so often, everybody thought he had only one,” Hagan said.

He would wear them in Washington.

The Balancing Act

Congressman Al Gore had a lot of ground to cover and no time to waste.

Every Friday, he raced from the Capitol after the last vote. He had to catch a 5 p.m. Nashville flight, then head to a night meeting with constituents. He slept in Carthage, then peeled out the next morning on a ride as white-knuckled as a stock car race: four county seats, four town meetings in a day.

Sunday, he flew home. It was family day. He was not to be disturbed.

Town meetings were the high point of his week. Everyone he met was a potential voter. Aides scurried to get names and addresses. Contact lists piled up back in the Washington office. There was a wall map with dozens of pins--one for every town he visited--and a file reminding him when to be back.

“He’d be there on time, and you’d damn well better be too,” said Hagan, who as a Gore field representative showed up for scores of meetings. “He looked them right in the eyes. They liked that.”

As always, there was an underlying consideration. Gore had bristled at Bill Brock’s line that his father was out of touch. The son took no chances: “Upon reflection, that’s one of the reasons I kind of went overboard in staying in close touch--that nobody could even unfairly accuse me of that.”

The downside to his pinpoint preparation was at home. After caring for her growing brood all week, Tipper Gore was at wits’ end by the weekend. When Gore told her he took “energy and strength” from the meetings, she countered: “ ‘I get my energy and strength drained from me because I’m taking care of the kids when you’re gone. So on Sunday--family day--you take them!’ He took them a lot.”

She is adoring of her husband, but no shrinking violet. “Politics is a part of my life, but it’s not my life,” she says.

The balancing act between Gore’s political ascent and his family’s needs has required constant retuning. Tipper Gore has been blunt about her occasional struggle with “situational depression.” And after their son, Albert III, was injured after being rammed by a car in Baltimore in 1989, the couple worked hard at cementing their relationship with each other and their children.

Despite the repair work at home, Gore’s attention to Tennessee voters paid off. In 16 years in Congress, he had no tight reelections. He was never too far ahead of the state’s dominant conservative base. He backed existing gun control but no further measures. He hemmed on abortion.

His calibrated stances allowed Gore to pursue his own interests. He mastered nuclear disarmament, learning its complexities through a series of private tutorials with defense experts. He became an avid environmentalist, traveling repeatedly to foreign capitals to persuade governments to halt global warming. His support of wildlife and parks grew stauncher by the year--although he wavered early in the House on dam projects and a nuclear plant in Tennessee.

“He wasn’t always out front, but he was a pretty reliable vote,” says a consultant who analyzed Gore’s record for environmental groups this spring.

Gore’s strong suit in the House was oversight. He blistered hostile witnesses in high-profile hearings. Gore saw himself as an “investigative reporter with a subpoena.” He worked late and “went home with huge amounts of material,” says Jost, who served as a legislative aide. “The committee investigators loved him because he was always so prepared.”

He took on flammable pajamas and toxic waste dumps alike. Even GOP staffers were impressed. A former committee counsel who tangled often with Gore found him “kind of solemn and a publicity hog but very effective. We preferred not to go up against him.” The intense preparation and spotlight were perfect training for the high-stakes atmosphere of national debates Gore would shine in years later.

To some House leaders, he was seen as a loner, “full of himself,” said former Rep. Stan Lundine of New York. The Gores avoided the cocktail circuit. But the gulf was also stylistic. “Sure he ruffled feathers,” said former Rep. James Santini of Nevada. “But that was mostly insiders.”

In the Senate, Gore saw the big picture while many liberals were lost in the partisan sniping of the Ronald Reagan years. As a Democrat who had endured in a conservative state, “he was out there early searching for a new [centrist] way,” says Bruce Reed, a Gore aide who became a top Clinton domestic advisor.

Gore’s moderate posture provided a rationale for his late entry into the 1988 presidential race. He managed a strong showing in Southern primary states but sank elsewhere. The campaign was plagued by bad strategy--Gore chose to enter several states that proved to be clear disasters--and by low cash reserves.

His emphasis flitted from solemn issues to attack politics. In one debate, he took off after Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) as if the only thing holding him back was an invisible chain. But most Democrats that year played it rough, notes Arlie Schardt, Gore’s spokesman at the time. “A lot of party people liked what they saw but figured he needed more seasoning.”

Gore dropped out, $2 million in debt. Instead of vacationing, he drove staffers to pay it all back fast. When aide Peter Knight told Gore it could be done in six months, Gore told him to do it in six weeks.

They came close--netting much of the money in a gala fund-raising party hosted by Johnny Cash and Tommy Lee Jones at the governor’s mansion in Nashville. In the end, they repaid it all in three months. Gore enhanced his national reputation both as a candidate and a fund-raiser. He was a comer.

On the Senate bus, Sasser often saw Gore with a portable phone jammed against his ear, cajoling money men.

“He was certainly single-minded about it,” Sasser said.

The White House

The meeting in the Capitol Hilton started out with the unspoken formality of a job interview. Both men sat upright on couches, facing each other. As the minutes crept away and their conversation animated, they sprawled out on the sofas like college students deep in a dorm room rap.

By the time the bull session ended 3 1/2 hours later, they were still talking, splayed out on the floor.

“It was easy and relaxed and devoid of the tension that other people expected might be there,” Al Gore says of that meeting with Bill Clinton. The convivial hotel suite talk that night in June 1992, Gore believes, sealed the deal for his vice presidency.

The meandering conversation ranged from the national issues that intrigued them to the politicians they admired. Although he wanted the offer for himself, Gore deferentially mentioned the names of several other Democrats. “I guess that probably made him think even more seriously about me,” he laughs now.

Gore went about his eight years in the White House the same way he advanced his cause with Clinton that night--using both his finely honed tact and loyalty and his ambition as preparation for the presidency.

Gore’s need to see it all and do it all has likely made him the most prepared vice president of the modern political age--but also led him into the White House phone call and Buddhist temple campaign finance abuses that linger as the most damaging mistakes of his career.

“He always was careful to let the president take the lead,” said Panetta, who has known Gore since his House days. “But he wanted to have issues he could work with and develop on his own. From the beginning, it was obvious it was much more of a partnership than the traditional vice president’s role.”

Even before considering Clinton’s offer, Gore himself had mulled running against George Bush in 1992. But he bowed out early because of “family considerations,” he says. “I was happy with that decision. And I had no desire to be vice president.”

Personal upheaval had altered his political trajectory before. His sister Nancy’s 1984 lung cancer death spurred Gore into an emotional campaign against the cigarette industry--despite his family’s long history of tobacco farming.

Five years later, his son Albert’s critical auto injuries shook Gore into reevaluating his priorities. He pulled back from the Senate, gave more time to his family. He toyed with the idea of hosting an environmental television documentary, then dropped it to write “Earth in the Balance,” his environmental call to arms.

Gore cited both crises as emotional story lines in high-profile convention speeches in 1992 and 1996--sparking criticism that he used personal tragedy for political gain. But in the end, the controversies ebbed as Clinton and Gore won two terms.

The morning in November 1992 after he and Clinton danced with their wives to Fleetwood Mac on the steps of the Little Rock, Ark., Capitol building, Gore and a group of aides began preparing for his new job. “Every time Clinton had meetings in Little Rock, Gore was at his side,” said former aide Jack Quinn.

For eight years. Gore guarded his time with Clinton fiercely, insistent on always keeping their weekly private lunch. “If the lunch was moved,” said former aide Lorraine Voles, schedulers “had to have a good reason.”

Gore’s aides became practiced at ensuring he never arrived too soon for a meeting with Clinton. “He would show up at the Oval Office just as they started,” a former speech writer recalls. “His people would be checking with Clinton’s people minute by minute: ‘Are they ready yet? Are they ready yet?’ ”

Clinton gave Gore a vast portfolio. He spearheaded government downsizing, acted as point man on entertainment violence, reached out to Russian leaders and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. “Gore was Clinton’s go-to guy,” said maverick consultant Morris.

Gore allied himself with Morris in working with Clinton to repair the damage caused by the administration’s disastrous lurch to the left early in the first term. As a “political animal,” Gore “understood he was playing with the dark side” in dealing with the volatile Morris, Panetta said.

Gore found success as the administration’s debate hit man. His controlled aggression flummoxed Texas businessman and Reform Party founder Ross Perot during televised sparring over the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Three years later, Gore’s deft use of rosy economic figures quieted Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp.

Steely preparation underlay Gore’s prowess. He downed Diet Cokes all night, jotting down tactics and scribbling killer lines on butcher paper.

His preparation even exceeded the thoroughness he demanded of aides. Before the Kemp debate, his staff was ordered to build a replica of the studio inside his Florida compound. The mock-up had the exact same lighting, heights and proportions as the real studio. Finally, Gore asked if the room’s ambient temperature was the same. “There was silence,” a former aide recalls.

But Gore’s driving--even blinding--need to excel and nail down every detail, some White House observers say, led to the fund-raising blunders of 1996.

In succession, Gore had to defend himself for attending a political event at a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights where money was raised, then for making dozens of fund-raising phone calls from his White House office--a skirting of a federal law that banned such activity. Gore said he was unaware of any wrongdoing in the temple incident. And he said there was “no controlling legal authority” that showed the phone calls had violated the law.

In the preceding months, Gore had made fund-raising a priority, even though he privately detested putting the touch on donors. “He was open about how much he hated it,” said Voles. But when he met with schedulers, she added, Gore always “let us know we had to pencil in calls and fund-raisers.”

“He never really sat back and asked, ‘What’s involved here?’ ” said Panetta, who was present for many meetings where fund-raising was discussed. “I think he viewed it as his responsibility as part of the team.”

Gore says his mind-set was inflamed by the partisan strife between the White House and congressional Republicans led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“I don’t have any fondness for that part of politics,” he says, voice rising. “But my competitive intensity was aroused by the fact the other side was so far ahead of us and was pulling out all the stops.”

Clinton stood by Gore during his hard days. Gore returned the favor in 1998, when the Monica S. Lewinsky affair dragged Clinton to his impeachment. Gore kept mum until Dec. 19, the day the House voted for a Senate trial. Standing before 80 Democratic legislators on the South Lawn, Gore predicted Clinton would be “regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.”

Gore’s oratory and, perhaps his emotion, had been sharpened two weeks earlier by the death of his father.

The senator died at 90 in his bed in the farmhouse in Carthage. Gore was at his side, and soon after the old man slipped away, the son began to compose his thoughts on a laptop. Gore sat, writing, for 28 hours.

His bid for the White House was still two years away, but he had already begun laying groundwork.

Quietly, he had met with aides in his residence at the Naval Observatory, analyzing polls and thumbing through issues papers. He was cultivating allies--phoning New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen minutes after she was sworn in. And he was running again--long, hard jogs in the morning--and building up his strength with barbells and sit-ups.

The rest of his world was in place as Al Gore took the podium in the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville. The president sat near Pauline, Tipper and Gore’s children. Beyond them sat political allies and a few old foes, the cream of Tennessee and American leadership.

“My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my life,” Gore began.

The old senator had launched him on a life of preparation and promise. Now he was on his own.

Major Influences

Albert Gore Sr.

* Fiercely independent, principled, exaggeratedly formal and a stentorian speaker, the senator was always known as “Albert,” never “Al.” It is his father whom Al Gore measures himself against in making decisions of conscience. But Gore also used his father’s devastating 1970 defeat as a primer to learn from and improve on in shaping his political identity. Albert Gore died in 1998 at age 90.

*

Pauline Gore

* The lone female graduate of her 1936 Vanderbilt law class, Pauline Gore sacrificed a legal career to help Albert Gore Sr. on his political ascent in Congress. Her husband and her son both came to rely on her astute political savvy and ability to shrewdly size up the players in Tennessee and Washington political circles.

*

Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore

* Over the years, she has been Al Gore’s most humanizing influence. Far more than a political wife, she is a committed advocate for homeless and mental health causes as well as a photographer. She took heat for her controversial stand against obscenity in rock lyrics.

His Early Years

PERSONAL

* Born March 31, 1948, the son of Albert Gore Sr. and Pauline LaFon Gore.

* Married 30 years to former Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson. Three daughters: Karenna, 26, Kristin, 23, and Sarah, 21. One son: Albert, 17. One grandson: Wyatt Schiff, 1.

* Residences: Washington, and Carthage, Tenn.

* Religion: Baptist.

* Hobbies, interests: Painting, running, water-skiing.

* Pets: dogs Shiloh and Daisy.

*

EDUCATION

* Government degree with high honors, Harvard University, 1969. Senior thesis was titled “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969.” Attended Vanderbilt Divinity School, 1971-72. Attended Vanderbilt Law School, 1974-76.

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MILITARY

* Served as a journalist in the U.S. Army, 1969-71, including five months of service in Vietnam.

His Professional Years

* Newspaper reporter and editorial writer, The (Nashville) Tennessean, 1971-76.

* U.S. representative from Tennessee, 1977-85.

* U.S. senator from Tennessee, 1985-93.

* Unsuccessfully ran for Democratic presidential nomination, 1987-88.

* Vice president, 1993 to present.

* Wrote “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” published in 1992.

Compiled by MASSIE RITSCH/Los Angeles Times

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Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.