The Real Al Gore
Carlson, Tucker
The Real Al Gore By Tucker Carlson In early March, Vice President Al Gore held an impromptu press conference at the White House to explain his role in the administration's growing fund-raising...
...And in a very short time, her breathing became labored and then she breathed her last breath...
...At one point, Gore took them for a tour of the Naval Observatory on the property...
...But his calculations had nothing to do with independence or integrity...
...A year later, when House proceedings were first televised, Gore again elbowed his way to the front of the queue to deliver the first speech...
...Infant formula was an effective issue," sighs a frustrated Republican party official in Nashville...
...It got more hostile from there...
...And, as such, it is an aberration...
...The worst part was that Gore's account of his son's accident wasn't even original...
...After a while, Russert, and then the rest of the press corps, gave up...
...There is nothing intrinsically dishonest about changing one's position, of course, but Gore refused to admit he had ever been anything but pro-choice...
...Three days later, Gore quit the newspaper, withdrew from law school only months from graduation, and entered the race...
...For the first 10 years of his career, Gore was a pro-life Democrat...
...In effect, what we have to do is deny, deny, deny...
...she asked, "her eyes focused tensely right at me...
...He simultaneously endorsed the Grenada invasion and the nuclear freeze, and at various times seemed both to support and to oppose the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...Since there's a record of that vote, we have only one choice," a Gore political adviser told U.S...
...Throughout his career in Congress, Gore continued to bore deeper, and more loudly, into esoteric issues...
...In the end, Gore made the right choice...
...During one interview with People magazine, Tipper, apparently no great speller, also revealed that she had named her oldest daughter, Karenna, after Tolstoy's suicidal adulteress, Anna Karenina...
...Seven years later, Gore was still using his victory over Gulf in his political ads...
...At one point he describes the overgrazing of pasture land as "a crushing blow, like a dashboard striking the forehead of a child...
...We in Alabama reserve the right to discriminate against homosexuals," he said defiantly...
...A former aide to Dole who was present at the time says Gore was blunt about his offer: "He went to Dole and said, 'If I go with you on this, Bob, am I going to be able to get some good TV time to explain my position?'" Under heavy pressure from the Bush administration to get the resolution passed, Dole agreed to accommodate him, then headed off to see the secretary of the minority, Howard Greene, who penciled in Gore for 20 minutes of prime speaking time...
...I hate him," said Carrick, who went on to describe Gore and his advisers as "the phoniest two-bit bastards that ever came down the pike...
...Gore grew up in Washington, went to high school there, then went off to college...
...I can remember in 1984, when he was running for Senate, having a couple of long conversations with him," says a newspaper reporter who covered Gore...
...Just 13 days after Nancy Gore Hunger died from tobacco in 1984, Gore received a $1,000 campaign contribution from the U.S...
...He was talking explicitly about wooing the tobacco vote, and about how he was trying to make a distinction between the tobacco farmers and the tobacco industry...
...His eyes were open with the empty stare of death . . ." It went on...
...Gore had indeed mastered the details of the debate...
...It was "fear" that fueled the Reagan administration's foolish defense buildup, Gore told a group of Soviet doctors at a meeting of the leftist International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Moscow in the summer of 1987: "We must be doctors to each other's fears...
...Gore has always been shifty and disingenuous—shiftier and more disingenuous, in fact, than just about anybody currently in national office...
...Knight doesn't see it that way...
...Take abortion...
...His stand against using government money to pay for abortions—like his position against gay rights legislation—was central to Gore's well-tended image as a "raging moderate," which in turn was critical to his success in Tennessee...
...The excitement didn't end there...
...The Gulf settlement alone obliged the oil company to pay $40 million to the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of whose main power plants was located in Gore's district, and another $30 million to businesses in Tennessee...
...Before she could answer, Goldberg defined the term for her...
...During the 1988 presidential race, Gore, who never saw combat or fired a shot in anger, sent out a campaign brochure that strongly implied he had been an infantryman during the war...
...We've muddled the point, and with luck, the attention will turn elsewhere...
...Gore soon calmed down, and moments later he was boasting of his efforts to make peace with pro-lifers...
...Not even politics, however, accounts for Gore's willingness to exploit his family's tragedy for political gain...
...In early 1976, Democrat Joe Evins announced his retirement from the House...
...he demanded...
...Gore achieved his first success in the summer of 1977 when he attacked Gulf Oil...
...Tipper and I watched as he was thrown 30 feet through the air and scraped another 20 feet on the pavement after hitting the ground," Gore recounted...
...He also squeezed in an interview with a wire-service reporter...
...Blacklisting, he said, is "when government officials or people close to them start criticizing entertainment...
...They did not, however, result in a very dramatic outcome, so in later years Gore simply added a better ending by claiming that Haddox and Clariday had received prison terms...
...And have long acknowledged—his nickname in high school was "Gorf...
...At a Senate hearing in 1986, Gore asked Democrat Ernest Hollings to yield the microphone so Gore could speak...
...From a public relations standpoint, Gore's petit-Naderism was easy to understand, even respect...
...That know-it-all takes some getting used to," complained Hollings later...
...It was pathetic, degrading, painful to watch...
...He has not changed...
...After a lifetime in politics, pretending comes naturally...
...As you know, I have strongly opposed federal funding of abortions," began one typical 1984 reply to a voter...
...The Gulf Oil episode, scolded Forbes, "smelled of the notorious and now-defunct House Un-American Activities committee and of the late-Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting...
...By the sixth paragraph Gore was still wading through preliminary remarks, promising "to strike a balance and to take my stand...
...I Politics has tainted virtually every aspect of Al Gore's life...
...The day Nancy Hunger died must have been a very busy one for Al Gore, for at some point during the same day, July 11, 1984, he also found time to give a speech before the Kiwanis Club in Knoxville, across the state from his sister's deathbed...
...Gore told reporter after reporter about her devotion to Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead...
...In 1969, he graduated Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...On other foreign policy issues, Gore was less hawkish than simply hard to pin down...
...As a political strategy, it was inspired and did more than anything else to set Gore apart from the pack of Democratic presidential contenders that year...
...He enlisted, not because he liked the Army or supported the war—his mother had offered to move with him to Canada, and Gore considered accepting—but in order to help his father win a Senate race against Republican Bill Brock...
...At one point, Irving Azoff of MCA Music told Tipper to "drop the word 'music'" from the name of her group and call it simply the Parents Resource Center...
...Press bias doubtless played a role, but there is another reason: Somehow, even for reporters who cover him, it's hard to imagine Al Gore's being as nasty as he often is...
...If I have a baby boy," Albert Gore, Sr...
...An accompanying photo showed Gore in a backpack and bush gear, toting an M-16...
...He spent the next 13 months consulting with experts and tutoring himself on arms control...
...According to both friends and enemies, Gore actually did the work, studying diligently for eight hours a week every week, and by the end knew more about defense issues than perhaps any other senator...
...And nobody had...
...During the 101st Congress, he sponsored a bill to create National Digestive Disease Awareness Month...
...The Siljander Amendment made this pose difficult, yet Gore decided to brazen his way through it anyway...
...In January of this year, he gave one of the more emotional speeches of his career, to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League in Washington...
...Her husband agreed, adamantly...
...Four years ago," he said, "I personally reached out to individuals who are leaders on the other side of this issue, and asked, Is there a way to make common cause in the effort to reduce the number of times women find themselves in a situation where they go through this process of choosing...
...Gore waited so long to make up his mind that he apparently ran out of time to write a speech for the occasion...
...Good idea, said Tipper, who promised to get on it right away...
...Gore received the news in a phone call and before he hung up the receiver had decided to run...
...He spoke for half an insufferable hour," Peretz says, "telling us about the history of astronomy and the history of telescopes in America...
...When the resolution to support military action in the Persian Gulf arrived in the Senate in early 1991, however, Gore had no choice but to make a clear, highly publicized choice between two positions...
...There is no question Gore knew better—he had testified in both of Haddox's trials, as well as before the grand jury that indicted him—yet in 1988, Gore told the Des Moines Register that his stories about the Nashville city council "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail...
...But as merely a "freshman minority member of the committee," he explained, there was nothing he could do to stop publicity-hungry Republicans from holding it...
...Gore was "appalled" and decided at that moment to, as he put it later, "develop a theory of understanding the arms race, different from the way anyone else was talking about it...
...I used to fly these things with the doors open, sitting on the ledge with our feet hanging down," he said...
...The worst thing about Gore," former senator Eugene McCarthy said later, "was how he read that heavy stuff right off the TelePrompTer...
...In the years since, of course, Hollywood has become an indispensable source of cash for Gore and the president he works for...
...Gore's support of the Gulf War was the turning point in his career...
...The Gores, for their part, took their reeducation meekly...
...There was a certain kind of gravity to his voice," Peretz says, "and I wondered whether he was going to tell me some bad news about himself...
...Desperate as he was for votes, Dole was offended by Gore's shamelessness and opportunism, and he complained about the deal widely afterwards...
...Gore's father had lost his seat for becoming too liberal for southern voters, and Gore internalized the lesson...
...And indeed, when Al, Jr...
...Toward the end of the speech, Gore asked the girls if they thought the United States and the Soviet Union would engage in a nuclear war during their lifetimes...
...My decision today is the product of an intense, may I say, excruciating, effort to find my way to a place as close to a sense of the ultimate truth in this matter as I am capable of getting," he began, and it got less clear from there...
...Exactly...
...Marty Peretz, who taught him at Harvard in the 1960s, says he once got a call from Gore asking if the two could meet in Boston for dinner...
...Are you familiar with blacklisting and how it happened...
...They'll never believe it...
...Gore repeated the phrase, robot-like, seven times...
...Both also pointed out that Gore would pay a political price if he voted against it...
...Though he rarely does now, Gore used to tell a story about how he first became interested in the subject...
...And those details appear only after hundreds of pages of kooky New Age millenarianism ("Soon we will learn to recognize crescendos in human affairs more easily—and see that they frequently signal the beginning of systematic, chaotic change from one equilibrium to another"), as well as calls for every conceivable kind of tax increase...
...Actually, in 1987, Gore did have to contend with a controversial issue, though one that had more to do with his wife, Tipper, than with any daring stand he had taken...
...Consider Gore's speeches at the last two Democratic conventions...
...And Gore kept up the trivialization long after the war ended...
...I did not ask for the hearing," Gore said, and "I was not in favor of the hearing...
...Gore recounted his last conversation with his sister: "Do you bring me hope...
...Gore's calculated histrionics may have kept his name in the paper, but they irritated his colleagues...
...While in the House, he led the battle to impose nutritional standards for baby formula...
...As he recounted acts of violence committed by protesters at abortion clinics, Gore exploded...
...In 1984, he cast a ballot in favor of the Siljander Amendment, which defined a "person" to include "unborn children from the moment of conception...
...I think we made a tragic mistake in the days right after the war in deciding that the best way to maintain stability in Iraq was to leave the Ba'athist regime in power there," Gore said heatedly...
...Between Dole and Gore, it all came down to television...
...The Gulf War was one of the only issues I can recall when he took a position that was very controversial...
...A lot of this," Marty Peretz concedes, "people are not interested in...
...In 1985, Jimmy Knight resigned as director of the Alabama Democratic party, citing the corrosive influence of liberals on the national party...
...Then there was the time last summer, Ann Peretz remembers, when scientists "had just discovered the little piece of Mars...
...But Gore remained unpopular with many of his former colleagues in Congress, even politically sympathetic Democrats...
...As the 1980s progressed, Gore slowly shifted his attention from consumer-safety issues to foreign policy...
...Virtually all of the girls raised their hands...
...He couldn't...
...In 1988, according to the New York Times, Gore was advised by a political consultant not to "vary his wardrobe too much...
...As it turned out, the tobacco industry wasn't that bad, either...
...It was among the lowest, most unfair slurs of the campaign, and yet Gore's words received almost no coverage and were reprinted virtually nowhere...
...The future vice president wore his Army uniform...
...When regular House proceedings were first broadcast live on the radio in 1978, Gore was the first member to speak over the air...
...He spent the remainder of the speech congratulating himself on having recognized the Iraqi threat years before the rest of his colleagues, and attacking George Bush...
...Global civil war wasn't the kind of "change" Clinton '92 wanted to be associated with, but it was only the beginning in Earth in the Balance...
...Why was "a politician of such integrity and personal probity," the Washington Post wondered, being so evasive...
...The entertainment people were not satisfied...
...And those were just the monetary benefits...
...Gore soon switched to law school...
...Days after he voted to authorize force in the Gulf, Gore gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he outlined the limits of American objectives there: "No one in a position of responsibility is talking about the conquest of Iraq," he declared...
...Sometime during his run for president, Gore decided to become pro-choice...
...He loves all the really advanced technology...
...Tipper Gore emerged a national celebrity...
...We are liberal-minded people...
...Whether he managed to do these things before or after his sister's last words to him is not clear, since Gore didn't mention her in the UPI interview he gave...
...More likely, Gore was doing his best to cover all the bases...
...Eight months later, Gore appeared on Larry King Live to attack the Bush administration for following his advice...
...I understand that the hearings frightened the artistic community," she said...
...One afternoon in late October, Al and Tipper Gore found themselves having lunch in the executive dining room at the MCA building in L.A...
...It is clear that, lung-cancer death or not, Gore didn't talk much about curbing smoking that year...
...Over the course of 17 paragraphs, Gore explained how watching his sister's agonizing death from lung cancer—"savaged by that terrible disease . . . she could barely retain consciousness...
...Gore spent fewer than five months in Vietnam, working as an information officer attached to an engineer brigade...
...In 1995, in a single Larry King appearance, Gore referred to Republicans as "extremists" no fewer than six times...
...Al Gore—Harvard-educated, Washington-bred, the man who pushed Clinton to make good on his promise to let gays serve in the military—would seem to be the embodiment of all that Knight dislikes in his party...
...We sometimes didn't know if she could hear what we were saying or recognize us"—gave him new appreciation for President Clinton's anti-smoking initiatives...
...Only a few raised their hands...
...And he is nasty: It was Gore, for instance, who first used the specter of Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis during the 1988 campaign...
...The next day his words made the front page of the Washington Post, and a muckraker was born...
...In 1992, during his address to delegates, Gore described in excruciating detail the car accident that nearly killed his only son three years before...
...It's a good thing he did, for the transcript of the Hollywood Summit will in decades to come provide an indispensable resource for historians seeking to understand Al Gore...
...He had lifted it almost word-for-word from the introduction to his eco-opus, Earth in the Balance...
...it is characteristic of Gore that he claimed to be able to do both, while actually doing neither...
...He basically was against it, but he wanted to give the impression that he was responsible and thoughtful...
...But he got excited by it, maybe more excited than one should...
...The meeting was supposed to be confidential, but one of the entertainment people had the presence of mind to bring a hidden tape recorder and later to leak a tape of the proceedings to a reporter at Daily Variety...
...How many believe we can change that if we really try...
...Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit came out just in time to be used against him in the presidential campaign, and the Clinton communications staff spent a good part of the race trying to respond to charges that Gore had gone off the deep end—that he had become, as Admiral James Stockdale put it in the vice-presidential debate, one of those "fanatics that want to overdo this thing...
...We now face the prospect of a global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's ruthless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction," Gore writes in a typical passage from page 294...
...Johnson later checked with the Catholic bishops conference...
...Gore had decided to run for president, and he realized that in order to win, he would need the financial support of his wife's enemies in Hollywood...
...Still, in the public mind, Gore remains a nerd—or as Michael Kinsley put it, "an old person's idea of a young person...
...informed the editors of the Nashville Tennessean, "I don't want the news buried in the inside of the paper...
...Son, always love your country," he said...
...By 1988, nonetheless, Gore was marketing himself as a hawk...
...Really...
...Several years ago, while touring a flood zone in the Midwest by helicopter, the vice president reminisced out loud about his time in the battle zone...
...Tobacco Company PAC...
...Gore asked...
...Shortly before the Iowa caucuses in 1988, political consultant Bill Carrick, then working as Dick Gephardt's campaign manager, gave an unusually harsh assessment of Gore to the Washington Post...
...She also drew the scorn of the people who make and sell obscene rock music, and by 1987 this had become a problem...
...Haddox, after two trials, was acquitted of all charges...
...Reporters seemed confused, even shocked by Gore's performance...
...Instead, he said, "'I love you.' And then I knelt by her bed and held her hand...
...The hearings, she now realized, had been a "mistake," one that "sent the wrong message...
...We don't want our babies eating dangerous food.'" After edging out a crowded field of opponents in his first primary in 1976, Gore never again faced significant opposition in an election in Tennessee...
...Knight no longer holds party office, but he remains a fervent fan of the vice president's...
...Months before he was even born, his father, then a congressman from Tennessee, made certain his child's arrival would receive ample, politically valuable publicity...
...You're talking to someone who truly understands rock music...
...There was just one problem: He still didn't have firm beliefs about foreign policy...
...Don't tell that to his supporters, though...
...In 1992, pressed by Tim Russert during a television appearance to explain his former views, Gore barely responded to the question...
...After all, it worked back home...
...He's always been a moderate...
...It appears at first an unlikely alliance...
...But for Gore, the rewards more than compensated for the criticism...
...But that wasn't the worst part...
...Both Solarz and Peretz argued that voting for the resolution would be in the best interests of the country...
...I was one of the earliest Springsteen fans," she told the Washington Post, as her husband worked the campaign trail...
...The Real Al Gore By Tucker Carlson In early March, Vice President Al Gore held an impromptu press conference at the White House to explain his role in the administration's growing fund-raising scandals...
...Two years earlier, both Gores—he as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, she as the founder of the Parents Music Resource Center testifying before the committee—had been at the center of congressional hearings into the destructive effects of "porn-rock...
...I ran to his side and held him and called his name, but he was limp and still, without breath or pulse...
...But lunch at MCA was only the beginning...
...Tipper, who had once appeared at a press conference in the 1970s to announce her support of "a ban on the advertising of highly sugared products to children under the age of 12," went on at some length about her opposition to "censorship...
...He wanted a guarantee that he could speak when people could watch him back in Tennessee...
...Gore now is among the most visible pro-choice crusaders in the country...
...Gore cultivates this image, aware that there is advantage in being considered too bland to be calculating, and that stiffness is easily mistaken for principle...
...Instead, he criticized his opponent in that year's Senate race, Victor Ashe, and talked about the specifics of their upcoming televised debates...
...Later that week, as it happened, Johnson attended a strategy meeting of the leaders of virtually every significant anti-abortion group in the country, with the exception of the Catholic church...
...But then he was not actively involved in the effort to persuade other people...
...We had our meal, and then he said, 'And now I want to talk to you about what I called you about.' And he had just read two books on chaos theory...
...The Gores soon began a PR blitz designed to show that they weren't prudish blacklisters after all, but culturally aware baby boomers sympathetic to the record-buying habits of modern young people...
...In his concession speech seven years before, Gore's father had predicted: "Someday, and someday soon, I know that the truth shall rise again in Tennessee...
...In 1994, Gore's parents repaid the sacrifice by giving Peter Boyer of the New Yorker copies of embarrassing letters their son had written from Harvard, in which the college student described the U.S...
...His father rode into the ad on a white horse...
...Within two weeks, Al Gore had announced that he and Tipper used to smoke dope from time to time...
...The pro-lifers' response, Gore claimed: "We just can't do it...
...Within hours of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, Gore was in front of a television camera demanding an "immediate" and "extensive" investigation into NASA...
...The whole event "was not a good idea," Gore concluded, and he was very, very sorry it had ever taken place...
...For one thing, Gore was never entirely able to shed the rhetoric of encounter-group foreign policy that so discredited the Democrats of the era...
...At some point during the mid-1980s, Gore, who had supported nuclear-power projects earlier in the decade, became a radical environmentalist...
...Gore's statement to NARAL is fascinating for its Orwellian qualities alone—"this process of choos-ing"—but it is also worth considering for another reason: It is almost certainly untrue...
...it is unlikely that Gore would have been picked as Clinton's running mate had he voted differently...
...On most issues, Gore conveyed precisely that impression, mostly because he was relatively intelligent, worked hard, and rarely had to take rigorously consistent stands...
...Gore's bargain with Dole has been well known on Capitol Hill for more than five years, mostly thanks to Dole himself...
...Gore didn't answer...
...On page 304, Gore lets it drop that his "Global Marshall Plan" to save the environment will cost the United States "almost $100 billion a year...
...Meanwhile, Gore's campaign distributed copies of magazine profiles that made the same claim...
...Douglas Johnson, federal legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, heard Gore's speech...
...Just hours before the vote, Gore was still mulling the decision with advisers and friends, including New Republic proprietor Marty Peretz and then-New York congressman Steve Solarz...
...The following spring, during a speech in Boston, he again assailed his own previous position, likening Bush's policy of not using military force in Iraq to save Kurdish refugees to Stalin's decision to keep the Red Army out of Warsaw in 1945—"postponing liberation deliberately to give the Nazis just enough time to finish butchering the Polish resistance...
...That much is clear...
...We will not let you destroy the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood that is America...
...No," replied Hollings, exasperated...
...He also took a job as a reporter on the Tennessean, a paper whose coverage had long been friendly to his father...
...Steve Solarz, for his part, considers the story too sleazy to believe: "On a matter involving the fate of half a million Americans who were about to be sent into battle, every one of whose life hangs in the balance, not to mention the other, larger American interests involved, to make one's vote—potentially the decisive vote— contingent on whether you get an extra 15 or 20 minutes to speak, would seem to be"—Solarz pauses, at a loss for words—"a total trivialization of an issue of fundamental national interest...
...I played the drums in high school...
...In other words, we're not as uncool as we look...
...In fact, Gore had become just that...
...And after a while, Gore's previous position on abortion didn't seem relevant...
...Last year, Peretz says, he and his wife, Ann, went to dinner at Gore's official residence in Washington...
...with Norman Lear, Danny Goldberg, Don Henley, a number of record company presidents, and the lawyer who represents the artist then known only as Prince...
...During his seven years in the House, Gore voted with the National Right to Life Committee 84 percent of the time...
...Page 177 informs readers that "today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin...
...Supporters pointed to his ideologically uneven record as evidence of Gore's independence and integrity...
...News and World Report at the time...
...And that is why until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking...
...People in Tennessee just thought, 'Well that's good...
...Republican congressman Joe Skeen once said that when Al Gore ran a subcommittee hearing, "If you got fewer than six cameras it was considered a bust...
...The abuse continued even after the meeting was over...
...Gore, for years after his sister's death, took money from tobacco companies, even bragged about being a tobacco farmer himself...
...After he returned home, Gore enrolled briefly at Vanderbilt University's divinity school in Nashville— a decision, he explained at the time, he had made "to atone for my sins" in Vietnam...
...Fearing that America's poor could be used "for parts," Gore also championed federal regulation of organ donation...
...He jumps around like a little kid at a new technological insight or advance...
...Reached for comment by Variety, I.R.S...
...Gore doesn't really believe much of what he says in public...
...At the next Democratic convention four years later, Gore again used the suffering of his relatives to make a polemical point...
...If you flew low and fast they wouldn't have as much time to shoot you...
...It was solely a matter of how he would vote...
...For years after, his vote would be held up as proof of his hard-nosed, New Democrat instincts...
...Yet he almost did...
...Shortly before he resigned, Knight hosted a dinner for Gore, and his support has continued...
...They think it's a little weird...
...Belief requires convictions, and on many subjects, Gore doesn't have any...
...But ultimately it was effective...
...In November 1976, at 28, Gore fulfilled the prophecy, winning his father's old Fourth District seat in an uncontested general election...
...At a hearing into allegations that Gulf had fixed world uranium prices, Gore accused the company of behaving like a "corporate Patty Hearst...
...But then, he doesn't see Al Gore that way, either...
...If I could rewrite the script I certainly would...
...From his family's point of view, Gore's decision seemed like destiny...
...Out of habit, probably...
...Yet, he has never lost his desire to play both sides of the issue politically...
...It was the summer of 1980 (or the winter, or even the next year, depending upon which of the many versions of the story you take as accurate), and Gore was speaking before a group of high-school girls in Tennessee...
...If there is anyone capable of standing before a group of competent adults and smiling as he tells utterly implausible tales—all while maintaining an air of moral indignation—it is Al Gore...
...Brock won the race, and Al Gore went to Vietnam anyway...
...He's a moderate," says Knight resolutely...
...Both Peretzes take these encounters with Gore as examples of his intellectual seriousness, and they may be...
...Peretz and Solarz may have been persuasive, but it was Senate minority leader Bob Dole who made the most compelling case...
...Why would Al Gore, who doesn't need the support of pro-lifers (and for the most part, doesn't have it), pretend to court their support...
...It is a book laced with glimpses of Gore's signature ghoulishness...
...Gore came off as insincere, slippery, and, most of all, guilty of something...
...Twenty pages later, he calls for the elimination of the internal combustion engine...
...If you look at his career, particularly in the House," says another fellow Democrat who served with Gore for more than a decade, "it was a career based more so than almost any other I know of on non-controversial issues, like liver transplants...
...We will find you...
...Both Haddox and Clariday were soon indicted...
...In my opinion, it is always wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably the taking of a human life...
...Tipper went first...
...Given his reputation," concluded the Post with some surprise, Gore's behavior was—how to put it?—"unexpected...
...There is a lot of competition, but Al Gore may be the biggest phony in the White House today...
...They also were baffled by this and had never heard such a thing," he says...
...The atonement period didn't last long...
...For years, Gore stuck to this strategy as tightly as he once had to his blue suits...
...There is nothing about Gore's record of service in Vietnam he should be ashamed of, but over the years he has felt the need to embellish it nonetheless...
...Gore went around to the proponents and opponents of the resolution and asked how much floor time he could have depending on how he voted," recalls a Senate staffer...
...Clariday was convicted of bribery the next year and received a suspended sentence...
...I have a hard time getting this mike away from you...
...Shortly before the election, the two Alberts appeared in a campaign commercial together...
...was born at Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, it was...
...And the grandstanding on issues continued...
...During his Senate race two years later, Gore received close to $65,000 from music and film executives...
...IV Gore's environmentalism is clearly a matter of conviction...
...Not everyone appreciated Gore's overheated and theatrical tactics...
...Any effort to expand our objectives so as to include the military conquest of Iraq would certainly blow apart the core of international consensus upon which all else depends...
...In 1992, he made the mistake of publishing his beliefs in book form...
...On the question of aid to the contras in Nicaragua, says a longtime Republican Hill staffer who worked with him in the 1980s, "Gore was always one of these guys who would dangle the idea that maybe he could be supportive under certain circumstances, though he almost always voted against it...
...I want it on page one where it belongs...
...He was born to it...
...He embraced the suggestion with gusto, "refusing to appear in anything but a blue suit, light blue shirt and red tie...
...Gore really is a fairly major dork, as even some of his friends acknowledge...
...He was willing to call the tobacco industry Merchants of Death kind of thing, but the tobacco farmers were stout-hearted individuals...
...I believe that a woman ought to have the right to choose," he said...
...And it's not all contrived...
...Record executives and rock stars angrily berated the Gores for more than an hour...
...The Gores, by contrast, released a statement saying they believed the meeting had been "very constructive...
...After my presentation," Johnson says, "I asked if anybody had participated in such a meeting with Al Gore, or had ever heard of it before...
...Why did he sidestep questions, dodge responsibility, give meaningless, contradictory, legalistic answers...
...The removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait is enough to warrant a suspension of combat operations...
...III Aman who would make his wife grovel and humiliate herself before record producers for the sake of his political career would probably do just about anything, and some of Gore's opponents seemed to sense this...
...The Gores began the lunch with a frenzy of abject apologizing...
...The hearings became the most highly publicized that Congress had held since Watergate, drawing, it was estimated, more nightly news coverage in one day than the federal budget deficit got in an entire month...
...Not clear at all, as it turned out...
...Danny Goldberg of Gold Mountain Records turned his anger on Tipper Gore...
...He's totally psyched about it...
...It is never easy for a freshman member of Congress, even one with a famous last name, to get media attention, but Gore soon devised a winning strategy: become the self-appointed spokesman for issues few others understand or care about, master their details, and use them as a platform for providing inflammatory but memorable quotes to the press...
...II Almost exactly two years after the city council stories appeared, Gore's career in journalism came to an abrupt end...
...The appearance—in which Gore simultaneously claimed to be proud of soliciting money from his West Wing office and promised never to do it again—turned out to be an unqualified failure...
...It didn't work...
...Until at least the mid-1980s, letters Gore's office sent to constituents were bluntly anti-abortion...
...Now, please, I know nothing about chaos theory beyond what he told me...
...from Harvard and joined the Army, becoming one of the very few men from his class to go to Vietnam...
...But it was not particularly accurate...
...In February 1974, Gore wrote an investigative series for the Tennessean accusing two Nashville city council-men, Morris Haddox and Jack Clariday, of soliciting bribes from local developers in return for help on zoning matters...
...With the contras, predictably, he voted for humanitarian aid, but against military assistance...
...Carrick later apologized to Gore for his statements, and by last year had been forgiven and was running the Clinton reelection effort in California...
...He was ecstatic...
...Meanwhile, back in Washington, Gore sought publicity with relentless intensity...
...His rhetoric is like Bob Dornan's, but nobody notices," says one reporter who has...
...record chief Miles Copeland said he still thought Tipper Gore's opinions about music were "very destructive and stupid...
...Actually, the only thing unexpected about Gore is that his true nature has escaped detection for so long...
...The stories were the highlight of Gore's work at the newspaper, and for a young reporter they were an achievement...
...They are also evidence of a deep conviction that one's own momentary philosophical dabblings are, by definition, terribly interesting to others—or, in Gore's case, that they might make good public policy...
...Army as "the best example" of "fascist totalitarianism" and bemoaned the "national madness" of anti-communism...
...he yelled, Khrushchev-like...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 35
