"We raised him for it"
Gore's father wanted his son to finish what the family had
started
By Margaret Carlson
February 21, 2000
Web posted at: 4:11 p.m. EST (2111 GMT)
Our parents mess with our heads long after the first gray hair
appears. As much as Al Gore insists he is not living out his
parents' dreams for him by running for President, he has
followed dutifully in his father's footsteps since he learned to
walk. When he was born, 10 years after his sister Nancy, when
his parents had nearly given up hope of having another child,
Congressman Albert Gore Sr. got the Nashville Tennessean to
announce the event on the front page, as if an heir to the
throne had arrived. When his son took office in 1992, his father
boasted, "We raised him for it."
What the elder Gore didn't say was that his son was raised to go
further than the vice presidency, to finish what the parents had
started back in 1938, when Gore Sr. won his first congressional
seat at age 30. That alone was a remarkable feat for the son of
a hardscrabble farmer, who had to work the fields in dirt-poor
Possum Hollow, putting himself through a state teacher's
college and then a no-account law school. He met another
striver, Pauline LaFon, who worked at a coffee shop to pay her
way through Vanderbilt law school. They married and merged their
formidable ambitions, Pauline becoming the brains and heart of
his campaigns. He won office after chucking his long speeches on
reciprocal trade in favor of playing Soldier's Joy on the
fiddle. Fourteen years later, Gore Sr. boldly challenged the
state's venerated Demo- cratic Senator Kenneth McKellar and
whupped him. That made Gore Sr. a formidable presence even
before he shouted, "Hell, no," to Senator Strom Thurmond when he
tried to intimidate Gore into defying the federal desegregation
orders.
A living legend can be a terrible thing to live up to, but by
all accounts, Al Jr. was an earnest acolyte. His second-grade
teacher said he was so mature that she wondered whether "he was
a child or a man." He listened raptly as his father held up the
phone while John Kennedy bullied the steel industry, sat through
hearings on the transportation bill that would create the
interstate highway system, and was invited onto Vice President
Nixon's lap when he presided over the Senate. At St. Albans, an
elite prep school, Gore was a diligent student and athlete. Once
when the other boys were roughhousing on a class trip to Andrews
Air Force Base, the little man asked the chaperone whether it
was time "to be rowdy."
Many people remember the young Gore as remote even as a little
boy, loved by his father but treated with a courtly formality.
Friends say father and son did not chat baseball and girls but
monetary policy. Gore Sr. sent Al away most summers to toughen
him up. On the 250-acre family farm in Carthage, Al would rise
at dawn to feed the cattle, slop the hogs and clear tree-filled
fields by hand. Pauline, no slouch herself, once chided her
husband for pushing Al so hard, saying it would be possible for
a boy to grow up to be President even "if he couldn't plow with
that damned hillside plow."
However formal the father-son relationship, it was strong enough
that Al went off to war for him. When most kids wouldn't come to
the dinner table wearing a clean T shirt, Al signed up for
Vietnam to diminish the impact of his father's opposition to the
war in his unsuccessful fight to keep his Senate seat in 1970.
Gore, to preserve his father's career, did what few sons of
privilege had to do.
This couldn't prevent the most devastating moment of Gore's
life, his father's defeat by a minor businessman who ran the
prototype negative campaign. It was one of the few times his
mother saw him cry, and since then Gore has been at pains to
avoid his father's mistakes. He never lost touch with his
constituents in Tennessee, holding thousands of town meetings
since 1976, and never strayed far from the conservative forces
that consumed his father: until a decade or so ago, he was
pro-gun and reluctantly pro-choice, and he's always been a
centrist hawk in a party of doves. He has yet to risk his whole
career for a big cause, as his father did for civil rights. But
in honor of the man who reportedly whispered as he died, "Always
do right," he has taken up the environment, no profile in
courage, perhaps, but quirky enough to get him ridiculed as
Ozone Man.
So if Al was such a clone of his dad, why isn't he folksy, open
and voluble like the old man? Well, because Gore Sr. wasn't
really a backslapper either. Nancy remembered her mother as the
one who would work a crowd while her father would insist on
talking issues. In fact, he tried his best to avoid anything
that made him sound like a Possum Hollow hillbilly. According to
Tennessee reporters, Gore abandoned the fiddle after that first
campaign, practiced his locution, turning himself into a
"self-made highbrow" who used words seen only on the sats. The
Vice President rejected the "Senator Claghorn" oratory, but a
certain remoteness turned out to be in the DNA.
As psychiatrists and Shakespeare would have it, a son comes into
his own when he surpasses his father. By that measure, Gore is
fully grown. Unlike the breezy George W. Bush, who was on a
career respirator much of his adult life, Gore has worked up a
sweat getting to where he is. He didn't avoid the military and
beat the old man at his own game by becoming Vice President, an
office his father pleaded for but lost in 1956. Now, only one
task remains: to prove himself to the man he eulogized little
more than a year ago as "the greatest man I ever knew."
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