Inventing Al Gore (Paperback)

Excerpt

1
"Well, Mr. Gore, Here He Is"
No son of Albert Gore's was going to enter the world quietly.
Humility had never come easily to Gore, and underneath his hill
country populism lay a touch of the aristocrat. The male heir he had
longed for, all nine pounds and two ounces, arrived at Columbia
Hospital for Women in Washington on March 31, 1948. The Gores had ten-
year-old Nancy, but waiting a decade for a second child had been
difficult for the couple, especially Pauline. Having little Albert
Arnold, when she was thirty-six, "has always been kind of a miracle
to us," she said. And miracles, Albert Gore believed, merited more
than passing mention.
Gore had noticed several months earlier that when a daughter
was born to Representative Estes Kefauver, his principal rival in
Tennessee politics, the story appeared on the inside pages of the
Nashville Tennessean. He set to work and eventually extracted

Excerpt

1
"Well, Mr. Gore, Here He Is"
No son of Albert Gore's was going to enter the world quietly.
Humility had never come easily to Gore, and underneath his hill
country populism lay a touch of the aristocrat. The male heir he had
longed for, all nine pounds and two ounces, arrived at Columbia
Hospital for Women in Washington on March 31, 1948. The Gores had ten-
year-old Nancy, but waiting a decade for a second child had been
difficult for the couple, especially Pauline. Having little Albert
Arnold, when she was thirty-six, "has always been kind of a miracle
to us," she said. And miracles, Albert Gore believed, merited more
than passing mention.
Gore had noticed several months earlier that when a daughter
was born to Representative Estes Kefauver, his principal rival in
Tennessee politics, the story appeared on the inside pages of the
Nashville Tennessean. He set to work and eventually extracted a
promise from the paper's editors. With their help, he would both hail
the arrival of his son and one-up Kefauver, who was on his way to the
Senate seat that Gore coveted. "If I have a boy baby, I don't want
the news buried inside the paper," said the five-term congressman. "I
want it on page 1 where it belongs." The Tennessean complied with a
one-column headline in its April 1 editions, wedged in the left-hand
corner between civil war in Costa Rica and a Japanese train
wreck. "Well, Mr. Gore, Here HE Is - On Page 1." Before he was home
from the hospital, Al Gore had won a news cycle for his father.
The only known postpartum complication was what Pauline
called the "battle royal" over their son's name. She favored the
traditional "Junior" added onto "Albert Gore," but her husband
thought it would be a burden to the young man. "He was adamant about
it," Pauline said. So, like congressional conferees, they cut a deal:
he would be Albert (called "Little Al" as a child) but could decide
for himself later whether he was comfortable with "Jr." When the time
came, Gore struggled with the choice. He was Junior and then he
wasn't; he adopted it as a teenager, then in 1987, as a thirty-nine-
year-old presidential candidate anxious to deflect attention from his
youth, jettisoned juniorhood for good.
Survivors of punishing climbs from poverty, Albert and
Pauline Gore endowed their son with a granite self-confidence about
what was possible, and expected, in life. As full political partners
decades before Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Washington, they made
politics the family business. The single-minded drive that propelled
Al Gore to the House of Representatives at twenty-eight and the
Senate at thirty-six - and the hubris that made him a presidential
candidate before he was forty - is their bequest. From Albert came a
crusader's passion for public service, a globalist's view of issues,
and a moralist's disdain for opposing points of view. Just as visible
is Pauline's pragmatism, caution, and steely competitive edge. "I
think the biggest influence you have on your child is the life you
live day after day," she said. Any understanding of Al Gore begins
with Albert and Pauline.

Allen Gore, Albert's father, was descended from the Scots-Irish who
came to Virginia in the early seventeenth century and moved to
Tennessee after the Revolutionary War, where they farmed the rugged
slopes of the Cumberland River Valley. Albert, the third of five
children he had with Maggie Denney Gore, was born near Granville,
Tennessee, the day after Christmas 1907. When his son was two, Allen
packed the family in a buggy and two wagons and moved to a 186-acre
farm in Possum Hollow, a Smith County community where the poverty and
desolation was echoed in the names that surrounded it on the map -
Difficult, Defeated, Nameless. They were poor but well fed, producing
their own chickens, eggs, and milk and selling the surplus for
cash. "We lived apart from the world," Albert Gore wrote in his 1970
memoir, "relatively isolated and therefore dependent entirely on one
another."
The unforgiving environment fostered a hard-edged
independence and wariness of outsiders among those who coaxed a
living from the land, and it left young Albert with firm, often
inflexible, beliefs about right and wrong. His father's discipline
was absolute and his authority unquestioned. He rose at 4:00 a.m.
every day of the year and tasked Albert to get up with him and build
a fire. Despite the heavy workload, Allen Gore kept up with the world
outside Possum Hollow and encouraged his children to set their sights
on it. In the evenings he read the newspaper with a kerosene lamp and
talked about the politicians he admired, including William Jennings
Bryan, "the Great Commoner" whose populism and anti-imperialism made
a lasting impression on Albert, and Cordell Hull, a boyhood friend
who served in the House and Senate and as Franklin Roosevelt's
secretary of State. Later, as a young aspiring politician, Albert
spent Sunday afternoons listening to Hull talk about Washington as he
sat in the shade with the whittlers on the courthouse square in
Carthage. He became a mentor for Gore, who adopted Hull's advocacy of
free trade and progressive taxation as cornerstones of his own
politics when he was elected to the House.
Albert's political ambitions were sparked as a grade-
schooler, when he saw the picture of a cousin, running for the state
legislature, tacked to utility poles and roadside trees. "In my
childish imagination I was fascinated by the prospect of seeing my
own picture there someday," he wrote. As a teenager, Gore was a good
enough fiddler to sit in at square dances and briefly flirted with a
musical career, but he soon targeted law school as his platform into
public life. It was a struggle to get there. He scraped his way
through the University of Tennessee and Murfreesboro Teachers
College, never able to afford more than a semester at a time. To put
together funds he drove a truck, waited tables, and taught in a one-
room schoolhouse in the Cumberland Mountain community of High Land,
known more widely as "Booze" for its robust moonshine commerce.
At eighteen, Gore was handsome in a stalwart, square-jawed
way, with waves of curly brown hair and a reputation as one of the
area's most enthusiastic bachelors. "Listen," said one former Smith
County schoolteacher, "every girl in this county dated Albert Gore
before he went to law school." Gore also discovered early that he
enjoyed being the center of attention. A classmate at Murfreesboro
recalled his performance as a young lieutenant in a student
production of the war drama Journey's End, a play that required him
to die in the final scene. "Albert died beautifully," his friend
recalled. "But as the curtain started closing, he reached out from
his deathbed, held back the curtain, and died a little more. Albert
always did like the limelight."
It took him seven years to work through college. After
graduating in 1932, he moved to Carthage, the Smith County seat,
where he made his first try for public office as superintendent of
schools a year later. He lost both the election and his teaching job
and returned to his father's farm at the age of twenty-six. Not long
before, in the late 1920s, Allen Gore had grown uneasy about the
soundness of the banks and spread his life savings of $8,000 among
several institutions. Within a few days, the banks had failed. When
Albert came home, his family was still better off than many of their
neighbors - at least the mortgage was paid - but the Depression's
devastation left an indelible mark on him. At market, as he saw "men
with wives and children whom they could neither feed nor clothe well
and whose farms were not paid for, I recognized the face of poverty:
grown men who were so desperate the tears streamed down their cheeks
as they stood with me at the window to receive their meager checks
for a full year's work."
His fortunes turned when his victorious election opponent,
Edward Lee Huffines, fell gravely ill several months after taking
office and before his death recommended to the county court that Gore
succeed him. The unexpected tribute from a competitor was a signal
event for Gore. Over the next four decades, he never made a personal
attack on an opponent. Now with the means to finance a legal
education, he enrolled in night law school at the Nashville YMCA,
working as superintendent by day and driving one hundred miles round-
trip from Carthage three evenings a week for three years. Before the
long, late evening trip home, Gore would stop for coffee at the
Andrew Jackson Hotel, where one of the waitresses was a twenty-one-
year-old divorcée named Pauline LaFon.
In the 1930 Tatler, Jackson High School's yearbook, she
listed her life's ambition as "to keep her husband happy." Whether
that statement was playful sarcasm or an attempt to supply a socially
acceptable answer, it never reflected her real aspirations. For
Pauline, the future wasn't a question of staying at home or going to
work; it was how far she could get in the world of work. "I didn't
want to be a nurse, I didn't want to be a teacher. I didn't want to
be most of the things women were," she said many years later.
It seemed she would have no choice. Walter and Maude LaFon
were Arkansans who opened a general store on a crossroads near
Palmersville, just below the Kentucky line in northwest Tennessee.
Pauline was twelve when an infection froze Walter's right elbow and
left him unable to work. The family's political connections in
Weakley County helped Walter land a job with the state highway
department in Jackson, the Madison County seat fifty-five miles to
the south. The LaFons and their six children moved into a modest
house on Poplar Street that they opened to boarders for extra cash.
Pauline spent much of her adolescence cooking, cleaning, and looking
after her sister Thelma, who was blind from birth. As her parents
struggled to piece together a living, Pauline's siblings looked to
her for inspiration. "She was the heart of the family," said Whit
LaFon, a younger brother and now a retired Madison County circuit
court judge. "She just always had a burning desire to better herself.
She probably had more guts than anyone I'd ever seen. I don't know
where it came from."
Her first marriage, as a teenager, was primarily an attempt
to escape from poverty; it lasted less than year. Pauline took Thelma
with her to Union College, a small Baptist school in Jackson, where
for two years she kept her sister's notes and read assignments to her
while doing her own course work. To pay the tuition, she waited
tables at a tearoom on the courthouse square. Pauline said in a 1997
interview that her inspiration to study the law came from watching
helplessly as her mother lost some land in a dispute with her own
family in Arkansas. But Whit LaFon said Pauline's recollection was
simply "an old folks' tale" and that she chose the law because it was
the quickest and surest way out of Jackson. She borrowed $200 from
the Rotary Club and headed for Nashville, where she took a room at
the YWCA and entered Vanderbilt Law School, riding the trolley to
morning classes and dashing back in time for the dinner shift at the
Andrew Jackson. The lone woman in the graduating class of 1936, she
is remembered by fellow students for her luminous blue eyes and no-
nonsense demeanor. Henry Cohen, a classmate who competed against her
in moot court, said she reminded him of a young Margaret
Thatcher. "She wanted results," said Cohen. "She wasn't satisfied
leaving anything halfway."
Pauline found her late-night customer charming, if a bit too
conscientious - even by her rigorous standards. "He was serious even
then," said Pauline. "I couldn't tempt him to leave any serious work,
no matter how fancy a party we were invited to. That was what
bothered me the most at that age." After graduation they took the bar
together and for a time went their separate ways, Pauline to a
Texarkana, Arkansas, law firm, one of the few that would take a woman
in 1936, and Albert to the next level of state politics. Gordon
Browning, a reform-minded Democrat Gore had worked for in an
unsuccessful Senate campaign, was elected governor that year and made
his former aide the state's first labor commissioner.
Pauline spent less than a year in Texarkana, a period she
describes as "a disaster." She was hired by Bert Larey, another
Vanderbilt alum, and, perhaps because of her own experience, began to
take divorce cases for their new two-person firm. After seven months,
however, she abruptly returned to Nashville. She said that she
planned to wed Albert and help him with his political career. But
there was another reason, one she did not discuss publicly for many
years: Larey sexually harassed her. (He died in 1984. His son, Lance,
an Oklahoma attorney, said such behavior would have been unlike his
father.)
Perhaps because her family couldn't afford anything more, or
because she was a divorcée and he a member of the governor's cabinet,
her wedding to Albert Gore was modest and out of the way, conducted
in a judge's chambers just across the state line in Tompkinsville,
Kentucky, on May 15, 1937. The "not published" notation on their
license meant that news of the marriage was kept out of the local
paper. Their first child, Nancy LaFon Gore, arrived eight months
later.
Pauline Gore insisted that she had not abandoned personal
ambition but had traded her own career for the prospect of bigger
rewards by supporting her husband's climb to power. "I was not only
ambitious for him but for myself too," she said. The first
opportunity for advancement emerged in early 1938 when J. Ridley
Mitchell, the Fourth District's incumbent congressman, decided to run
for the Senate.
Gore quit Browning's cabinet and assembled several thousand
dollars, part of it by mortgaging a small farm he owned. He was not
the clear front-runner. Five other candidates crowded the Democratic
primary field, and Gore was partial to eye-glazing disquisitions on
reciprocal trade. On a stifling July evening at the Fentress County
courthouse, Gore was in the middle of just such a talk when he
spotted a man headed down the center aisle carrying a fiddle, and two
others behind him with a guitar and a banjo. "Here, Albert," said the
first man, who clearly preferred Gore the teenage square dance
prodigy to Gore the candidate, "play us a tune."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Inventing Al Gore by Turque, Bill Excerpted by permission.
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