Drawing on their roots: BushThe last thing Al Gore's father told him a few days before he died, and just before he lost the ability to speak, was: "Son, always do right. Always do right." His father, the senator, felt he had himself done right a lot of the time, and he reliably kept after his son to follow suit.
After the vice president talked about that last conversation, though, in a eulogy he had worked on without sleeping for two nights straight, even some friends wondered whether his father had tacked on a Hollywood ending, scripting his goodbyes at least in part for the benefit of the papers and maybe the history books. This time, nobody came right out and accused Gore himself of tweaking the dialogue.
Even the rawest and most intimate moments in Gore's life are now widely seen as mere theatrics, all part of a presidential campaign strategy designed by his ambitious, up-from-nothing parents, Albert and Pauline LaFon Gore, before he was born, and even unto death.
That perception has clearly become a political problem for the vice president. Gov. George W. Bush of Texas regularly suggests that Gore is a natural-born phony, and the vice president's every remark is now fact-checked so scrupulously that when he recently said he had once dreamed of becoming a teacher, reporters wondered if he could prove it.
The questions are about more than Gore's claims about the Internet and "Love Story." What in his life was scripted, and what was real? Could even he know the difference? Where did his parents' hopes end and his own begin? And do you get credit for hosing out hog parlors only if you did it without an agenda?
But in separating the facts from the fanciful in Gore's life, perhaps the most striking discovery is the extent to which the material that is the most widely doubted is also the most demonstrably true: Al Gore did do a lot of his growing up in Tennessee. He did work hard on the farm there -- so hard, in fact, that the hired help felt sorry for him and thought his father should ease up.
In the same way, some of what is generally assumed about Gore's life is not true: He did not, for example, live in luxury back in Washington during the school year.
Gore's parents were both famously frugal and were not well off until after their son was grown and after the senator's political career had ended. Though they sent their children to exclusive schools and provided social necessities like ballroom dancing lessons for their son, they also dressed him in a cousin's hand-me-downs and lived in a hotel because it was owned by a relative who gave them a break on the rent.
Some summers, the Gores had to pack up their four-room suite and put their belongings in storage so the place could be sublet while they were in Tennessee. And Al shared a bedroom with his sister, Nancy, who was 10 years older, both before and after her college years.
Part of the reason that the contours of Gore's unusual upbringing are not better known, however, is that he himself has worked so hard to discredit a lot of authentic stories about his childhood -- the very stories, in fact, that would probably do him the most good politically. The problem, for him, are the scenes from the past that portray Gore sympathetically at the expense of his hard-driving parents. They suggest an emotionally neglected boy forced to bear the weight of enormous adult expectations, and Gore, who is fiercely protective of his 87-year-old mother and the memory of his father, categorically balks at that.
In a series of interviews about his life, Gore was relaxed and appeared at peace with the past. He frankly described a childhood in which even the usual juvenile scrapes might become part of continuing political calculations -- maybe the same way writers often end up milking their families for material. When he got in trouble for throwing whitewash on trucks as they passed the Gore farm when he was 12, for example, his father made him send letters of apology to a number of trucking companies. "That was also an election year, I believe," Gore remarked wryly. But, he made clear, it was also just a kid's life.
"I was conceived in Tennessee," Gore began, drawling for effect, in a radio announcer voice that poked fun at the whole biographical exercise. Though his political opponents have successfully portrayed him as a pure-bred Washington creature, with only photo-op moments in the heartland, he did have a life there, on the family farm, and by all accounts a more intense emotional connection to that place than to the nation's capital.
His real childhood was in Tennessee; in Washington, he spent his time with adults -- important adults, in whose presence he was expected to behave beautifully, and did. Tennessee was, at the very least, where Al Gore wished he had grown up.
His buddies in Tennessee certainly considered Carthage, the small community on the Cumberland and the Caney Fork Rivers, where the Gores spent summers and holidays, as his true home. "There were not a lot of kids around the Fairfax," the Embassy Row hotel where the Gores lived while in Washington, "so he could not wait to get back home," said Steve Armistead, Al Gore's closest childhood friend and a good pal still.
"I went up there" when Gore was in high school, "and the friend he had in the Fairfax was a bellhop," Armistead said. "There were all these dignitaries, but not much for a kid. There was a dullness, a loneliness about it. He didn't lay around Washington much when he could have been in Carthage, and that's where he got his values, working on the farm and growing up around Smith County people."
Of course, Gore is the product of both Washington and Tennessee -- and of the very fact of having grown up in two places, with two groups of friends and two ways of looking at the world. He was born in Washington, lived in Tennessee from the time he was 1 until he was 4, while his father ran for the Senate, and then moved between the two places until college.
Gore himself seems to feel that his split-screen view of the world was a gift, at least in the end. "Even though I spent more time each year in Washington, Tennessee was home," he said recently. "Now I'm sure that part of that was me, as a kid, absorbing my parents' insistence on the political reality of their lives, that they were representing Tennessee in Washington. I'm sure I picked up a lot of that as a child. But it was more than that."
He described Tennessee as a place where "the human relationships were much warmer," and where he had his dearest friends.
Gore's parents thought that working on the farm would be good for their son, whom they told friends they hoped would be president one day.
His friends feel sure Gore would move back to Carthage if, as Thompson delicately put it, "worse comes to worst." The vice president laughed at that but agreed. "Well, I'll retire in Carthage for sure," he said. "You know, I hope that's many years from now."
One thing that still strikes all his Tennessee friends as odd, though, is that through all the time he spent there growing up he never spoke a word about Washington. And he absolutely refused to wear any of the neatly folded T-shirts his mother had packed for him -- T-shirts emblazoned with the name of his prep school, St. Albans.
"He probably thought we would think he was trying to act like he was better than the rest of us," guessed his old friend Edward Blair.
From fourth grade on, young Al attended St. Albans, the Episcopal boys prep school on the grounds of the National Cathedral, where he did well but was not, according to friends, especially happy. Throughout high school, he wrote his Tennessee girlfriend, Donna Armistead, twice a day and called her on a pay phone every Saturday night.
More often, his father took him to Senate hearings. He sat through long stretches of discussion over the bill, co-sponsored by his father, that created the interstate system of highways. How wide would the new roads be? Green or blue for the road signs? As a kid, Gore followed these developments avidly, keeping track of the miles of completed highway the way other kids his age followed the Yankees' box scores.
"He also took me on the Senate floor, even though he wasn't supposed to," Gore remembered. And one day, when Gore was 5, he was invited to come up front to meet the vice president, Richard Nixon, who was presiding that day: "He put me on his knee and was very nice to me, and the experience forever after deprived me of the more sublime pleasures of Nixon hatred."