The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore

Looks at the life and political career of Vice-President Al Gore, detailing the factors that have shaped his life, his beliefs, and his goals.

Chapter One: The Long Road

In the foothills of middle Tennessee there is a little village called Difficult. Whatever hardship that place name was meant to convey, it could not match the resigned lament of the nearby hamlet of Defeated, nor the ache of lonesomeness evoked by a settlement known as Possum Hollow. It was that kind of land, isolated and unforgiving, if hauntingly beautiful, for the farmers and small merchants who settled the region, families of Scots-Irish and Anglo-Irish descent named Hackett and Woodard, Key and Pope, Gibbs and Scurlock, Beasley and Huffines, Silcox and Gore.

For generations one old road, Highway 70, was the main road west and the best way out, weaving through the hills of the Upper Cumberland past the county seats of Carthage and Lebanon and across the barrens of rock and cedar and flat cactus to the capital city of Nashville. Albert Arnold Gore, then a young superintendent of schools in rural Smith County, regularly drove that route in the early 1930s to study at the YMCA night law school, and to loiter at the coffee shop of the nearby Andrew Jackson Hotel, pining for a brilliant young waitress named Pauline LaFon who would forgo her own law career to become his wife and adviser and, some say, his brains.

Now on the morning of December 8, 1998, the whole Gore family was retracing that original journey, traveling west to Nashville through a dreary gray mist. Al Gore Jr. made the trip in a limousine, braced by his mother, his wife, Tipper, and their four children. His father, the former United States senator who gave Al his name and his life's profession, rode ahead as usual this one last time, at the front of the funeral cortege, his body resting within a solid cherry casket inside a black Sayers and Scoville hearse.

Keep up, son! Keep up! The elder Gore used to bark out as he strode briskly down the sidewalks of Carthage or the corridors of the Capitol with young Al, never slowing to a child's pace, determined to teach his boy that the race went to the swift. His race was at long last done. He had died three days earlier at age ninety in a way that any father might wish to go: in his own bed in the big house on the hill above the cold Caney Fork River, his wife of sixty-one years at his side, his only son, vice president of the United States, holding his hand for the final six hours. Senator Gore, as he was commonly known, seemed to linger long enough for the arranging of all that needed to be arranged and the saying of everything that needed to be said. Carthage folks had become accustomed to his occasional bouts of befuddlement in his final years, yet he seemed sentient at the end, and his last words of fatherly advice -- "Always do right," he reportedly whispered -- might have been uttered with posterity in mind. But what was the meaning of the old man's life? That was the question the son grappled with as he rode west through the mist down the ancestral highway, occasionally reading something aloud as he revised the text of a eulogy he had composed on his laptop computer.

He had been at it for twenty-eight and a half hours straight, since four on the morning before when he bolted out of bed and began rummaging through a drawer in the predawn darkness, gathering up loose scraps of paper that he had been tossing in there for weeks, usually after returning from his father's bedside. On each crumpled page he had scribbled a few words that represented something more, a family folk tale or serious political theme -- scraps of paper that, if pieced together, might bring ninety years back to life. He had taken them out once before, but it was too soon after his father's death, and he could think of nothing, not even an outline. The second time, as he sat at the dining room table of his farmhouse retreat across the river from his parents' place, the words began pouring out. My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my life, he began, and he kept writing past dawn and through breakfast and lunch until seven that night, when, as he later recalled, he "showered and shaved and grabbed a bite to eat and went down to the funeral home for the wake and stood in line and shook hands with the people."

Two hours later he was back at the table, writing through the night without feeling tired, until 8:30 the next morning when he packed up his computer, showered and dressed again, and got his family ready for the trip to Nashville for the first memorial service. That Al Gore had pulled an all-nighter was characteristic in one sense. Going back to his prep school days at St. Albans in Washington, when he would persuade classmates to cram for midterm exams while devouring hamburgers past midnight at the twenty-four-hour Little Tavern on Connecticut Avenue, he had shown a propensity for avoiding some subjects until finally focusing on them with seemingly inexhaustible energy. But this eulogy represented more than another essay test. Funerals honor the dead but tend to reveal more about the living. In trying to tell the world who his father was and what he meant to him, Al Gore was explaining his sense of self as well; doubling back on his father's life, he unavoidably encountered many of the markings of his own unfinished biography.

Only two words on a scrap of paper were needed to remind Gore of a story he had to include in the eulogy: Old Peg. This was the tale his father told more than any other, embroidering it through the years with ever more vivid and piteous details, and though by the end Old Peg seemed more comic fable than historical account, the moral revealed something about the early motivations of Senator Gore and the ambition that he passed down to his son.

The year is 1920 and Albert Gore has just finished eighth grade, an age when many farm children quit their formal schooling. He lives with his parents, Allen and Margie, along with his siblings and an orphaned cousin on a farm in Possum Hollow about fifteen miles from Carthage at the edge of Smith County. The Gores moved there when Albert was five, coming down from the Upper Cumberland hills near Granville. Albert has been obsessed with fiddle music for years, so much so that his classmates call him Music Gore. He has his own $5 fiddle and one night there is a hoedown at his parents' house and musicians venture down from the neighboring hills, among them a one-legged traveling mandolin player named Old Peg, who stays the night.

Albert is mesmerized by Old Peg, and the next morning helps hitch up the harness for his horse and buggy. "Each time he told this story, the buggy grew more dilapidated," Al Gore, in his eulogy, said of his father's version of the tale. "Before long it had no top; the harness was mostly baling wire and binding twine. He counted that scrawny horse's ribs a thousand times for me and my sister, and then counted them many more times for his grandchildren." All leading up to the punch line: As they watch sorry Old Peg and his sad-sack horse and crumbling buggy ramble down the road and out of hearing range, Allen Gore, known for being a dead-serious man, puts his arm around his son and deadpans, "There goes your future, Albert."

The difficult life, if not defeated. In retelling the story at his father's funeral, Al Gore used it not just as a reminder of a road not taken, but of the distance this branch of the Gore family had traveled in one generation to reach the heights of national power. People looking at Al Gore today see a product of the American upper crust: a presidential contender born in Washington, reared in a top-floor suite of a hotel along Embassy Row, his father a senator, his mother trained in law, the high-achieving parents grooming their prince for political success at the finest private schools in the East. It was as though his entire future had been laid out in front of him on the direct route he took to school as an adolescent, 1.9 miles up the hill of Massachusetts Avenue from the Fairfax Hotel to St. Albans, passing on the left along the way the grounds of the Naval Observatory, where he would live as vice president.

All true enough, yet misleading if considered without the prologue in Tennessee. Gore's father could find poetry in the hardship stories of his early days in Possum Hollow, recalling droughts so bad that they had to cut down trees to let cattle suck moisture from the leaves, but most of the romance was in the telling, not the living. He was determined to escape. "There was but one way to go from Possum Hollow -- that was up and out," he once said. "You couldn't get out except by going up, and once you got out, you still were pretty far down that pole." What is it that lifts people from provincial obscurity? Luck seemed barely a factor in the case of Albert Gore. His father, a strict disciplinarian, first placed his hopes in the oldest son, Reginald, but he had gone off to fight in World War I and came home incapacitated, one lung destroyed by mustard gas, leaving the family's future to Albert, who was twelve years younger but precociously eager. The "ethyl in my gasoline," as he once described it, was an intense pride in achievement, something that first overtook him at the end of the first week of first grade when his teacher in the one-room schoolhouse in Possum Hollow praised him for mastering the alphabet in five days. He hungered for that sensation again and again, and that is what led him toward education and law and politics -- and out of Possum Hollow.

During his late teens he was the only member of his generation from Possum Hollow to go to college, attending the state teachers school in Murfreesboro, while also hauling livestock to market, raising a tobacco crop, and selling radios door-to-door for the furniture man in Carthage. He began teaching, long before he had a degree, over in a one-room schoolhouse amid the hollows of Overton County in a place known informally as Booze, and soon became principal in a community closer to Carthage called Pleasant Shade, living where he could, sometimes in the homes of his students, who took to calling him Professor. He thought of himself first as a teacher from then on, always looking for lessons to pass along, a pedagogical style that his son inherited, for better and worse. Albert loved the sound of his own mellifluous Tennessee mountain voice and seemed enthralled by the art of speechmaking, which he had been practicing since his Possum Hollow childhood. They would be working the fields and his father would turn around and Albert had disappeared and they would find him "on a stump somewhere speaking to an imaginary crowd," recalled Donald Lee Hackett, an old family friend.

The first politician Al Gore mentioned in the eulogy to his father was a former congressman from middle Tennessee who "made all the families in this part of the country proud" by becoming secretary of state under Franklin D. Roosevelt and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. For anyone seeking to understand the origins of Gore's political personality, routinely characterized as stiff and oddly formal, there are clues to be found in the direct line that traces back through the family to their political hero, Cordell Hull. During Hull's teenage years in the Upper Cumberland hills, he often "ran the river" with Allen Gore, floating logs down the Caney Fork and Cumberland toward Nashville and taking a steamboat back. Albert Gore grew up hearing his father's stories about those days and watching Hull's political rise, and wanted nothing more than to be like him. When he was teaching in Pleasant Shade he often drove twelve miles down to Carthage at the end of the day if he heard that the congressman -- Judge Hull to his constituents -- was back in town. After sifting through his mail while eating a late lunch, Hull would sit under a shade tree on the front lawn of the Smith County Courthouse and talk with the checkers players. Albert Gore, hovering close by, listened intently and came away "greatly impressed."

Many of Hull's basic political convictions -- his belief in progressive taxation, internationalism, and free trade -- were bequeathed to Albert Gore, and then to son Al, but also notable was the style that was passed along as well. Hull's public manner was invariably formal and correct, as if to insist that he never be taken for a hillbilly from the hollows of middle Tennessee. Gore Senior consciously modeled himself after Hull, adopting the same formal bearing for the same reason, but then slightly exaggerating it: always in dark suit, white shirt, and tie; courtly, but rarely relaxed in public, little small talk or informality, always on, speaking in complete sentences full of Latin-rooted words, as if his thoughts were being recorded for history. In the eulogy, Al Gore took wistful note of this last trait, saying that he "always marveled" at his father's vocabulary and archaic pronunciations -- "for example, instead of 'woond,' he always said 'wownd.' " Others viewed it as a symptom of grandiosity, someone trying too hard to impress. "He did try to compensate for perceived inferiority to a degree," said historian Kyle Longley. "He went out of his way oftentimes to use very SAT language -- the only time you see those words is on the SAT [exam]." During Albert Gore's later days in the Senate, colleague Robert Kerr of Oklahoma stopped a committee hearing and said, "Wait a minute, Albert, what did you say?" Gore repeated a seldom-uttered word, prompting Kerr to direct an aide to bring him a dictionary so he could look it up on the spot.

The senator from Tennessee was not to be treated like a country bumpkin. His colleague Birch Bayh said that with his shock of premature white hair and stately bearing, Gore "looked like a Roman senator -- all he needed was a toga." Bernard Rappoport, a Texas financier who befriended progressive southern Democrats in Congress, called them all by their first names when he visited their offices on Capitol Hill, with one exception. "It was always Senator Gore. He demanded to be treated like a statesman." This formality at times was taken for aloofness. Francis Valeo, who served as secretary of the Senate during Gore Senior's three terms there, described him in an oral history as "a very egotistical man" who "sort of lived in his own world." Jesse Nichols, a librarian on the Senate Finance Committee and the first black appointed to a clerical position in the Senate, recalled that "Senator Gore used to come in and out of the clear blue sky he would say, 'Jesse, bring me a Coca-Cola.' " Other members of the committee, Nichols remembered, would put money in the kitty for him to buy coffee and sparkling water. But "Senator Gore would ask time after time for a Coca-Cola. So one time, Senator Kerr and I were in the room together, and I told him, 'Senator, he asks for a Coca-Cola as if I'm a daggumbed servant -- and he hasn't put nothing in the kitty!' "

If there was a bit of the Senator Claghorn archetype in old man Gore, who considered his every utterance profound, he was his own man, not the creation of staff. "The staff could help him get the mail together, but when it came time to voting, he took care of himself," said one longtime aide, Jack Robinson Sr. "If you saw a vote up there 94 to 2, you knew he might be one of the two." Gore never had a press secretary, and for decades made the rounds of the galleries, dropping off press releases himself. He also had the touch of country common sense. When much of America was shaken by the Russian success with the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, Gore was part of a small delegation from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that toured the Soviet Union. Upon his return, Robinson asked him whether he was impressed by the rival superpower's scientific prowess. "Jack Robinson," said Gore, shaking his head. "They don't build things plumb over there!"