FW: NY Times Article

In case you missed this.

< May 22, 2000
< New York Times
< AL GORE'S JOURNEY A Boyhood Divided
< A Boy's Life In and Out of the Family Script
< By MELINDA HENNEBERGER
< The 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 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 Mr. Gore himself of tweaking the dialogue.
< Even the rawest and most intimate moments in his 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 Mr. 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. Had anyone ever heard that story before?
< The questions are about more than Mr. Gore's assertions 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 only get credit for hosing out
< hog parlors if you did it without an agenda?
< But in separating the facts from the fanciful in Mr. 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 Mr.
< Gore's life is not true: he did not, for example, live in luxury back
< in Washington during the school year.
< Mr. Gore's parents were both famously frugal and were not well
< off until after their son had grown and after the senator's political
< career had ended. Though they sent their children to exclusive schools
< and provided such social necessities as 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 Mr. 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, is the scenes from the
< past that portray Mr. 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 Mr. Gore, who is fiercely
< protective of his 87-year-old mother and the memory of his father,
< categorically balks at that.
< For a time, a decade ago, after his unsuccessful 1988
< presidential campaign and his son's near-fatal car accident the next
< year, Mr. Gore himself seemed determined to explore the meaning of his
< own life story.
< He made a serious study of family dysfunction -- the subtext of
< his 1992 environmental manifesto, "Earth in the Balance" -- and passed
< out copies of Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child," a book about
< how narcissistic parents can leave their high-achieving children cut
< off from their own feelings and hazy on just what they want, other
< than to make Mom and Dad proud. Back then, friends said, he was
< absorbed by the need to figure things out, to emerge from his father's
< shadow. To decide.
< But today, Mr. Gore seems nothing if not decided. He does want
< to be president, and if he can never really know exactly how much of
< that want began with his parents, his current attitude seems to be: So
< what? "One of the oldest plots in the human story is child follows
< parent," he said recently, with what sure seemed like authentic
< boredom. And looking back on his early years did not seem so very
< difficult.
< In a series of interviews about his life, he 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," he remarked wryly. But, he made clear, it was also just a
< kid's life.
< From the Farm and the City
< "I was conceived in Tennessee," Mr. 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 Mr. Gore was in high school "and the
< friend he had in the Fairfax was a bellhop," Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
< This back and forth set him slightly apart from those around
< him, in season and out, and made him tough to figure.
< Even his sense of humor is a hybrid, a little bit corny with
< flashes of sarcasm.
< Mr. 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. "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.
< "I think I learned a great deal from the, forgive the word, the
< parallactic view provided by growing up in two places," he says now,
< "because just as having two eyes gives you depth perception, having
< two homes allows you to see some things that stand out in relief when
< viewed from two different perspectives."
< A Tennessee Work Ethic
< Mr. Gore's father -- who also favored fancy words -- moved
< between two worlds, too, and for all his striving in Washington did
< not believe in leaving either Tennessee or his farm roots behind,
< ever, even after his career in politics ended.
< And he and his wife thought that working on the farm would be
< good for their son, whom they told friends they hoped would be
< president one day. "It was expected from the time he was little," said
< James Fleming, a Nashville doctor and friend of Nancy Gore's, who for
< a time served as the Gore family physician. It was not so much that
< the Gores thought cleaning out barns would add just the right touch of
< "log cabin" to his r,sum,, family friends said, as that they simply
< felt it would toughen him up and give him a proper work ethic.
< "His daddy used to get him up about 6 o'clock in the morning,"
< said Mattie Lucie Payne, who worked for the Gores as a housekeeper for
< more than 40 years. "And Al would say, 'Daddy, we have men working,'
< and his daddy would say, 'I know, and you go on down and help them.' "
<
< He baled hay, cut tobacco and cleaned out hog parlors along with
< the hired help.
< But the senator also seemed to revel in assigning his son some
< of the most backbreaking tasks, like clearing 20 hilly acres with a
< hand ax.
< "He'd drive him pretty hard," said Gordon Thompson, a friend
< whose family used to live on the Gore farm, back when his own father
< worked for the senator.
< But then, he drove himself hard, too. Even at 4-H camp, as a
< 9-year-old, he asked to be given the heavy-lifting kitchen duty
< usually reserved for 13- and 14-year-olds. "He was the only camper I
< ever had volunteer for K-P," said Jerry Cole, the local 4-H agent.
< For several weeks every summer after school let out, but before
< his parents could get away from Washington, Mr. Thompson said, Al
< would stay with them in a house with no indoor plumbing. "He never
< complained," Mr. Thompson said. "I think he was always happiest on the
< farm."
< Always, he was serious. "He pretty much acted the same way when
< he was 13 as he does now," said Donna Armistead, Steve Armistead's
< sister and Mr. Gore's first real girlfriend, for several years,
< beginning when he was an extremely confident 13-year-old and she was
< 16.
< "He was a terrific listener," recalled Ms. Armistead, now a
< nurse and divorced mother of two. And not just to her, she said. He
< would pay attention to the old folks at her grandparents' grocery
< store, and hold his grandmother's hand in the nursing home for long
< stretches several times a week.
< Mr. Gore's own mother "was not very touchy," Ms. Armistead said,
< adding, "When he came in she just wouldn't come running to hug him."
< She said his father used an entirely different voice when he
< talked with Al.
< "He'd talk with authority," she said.
< And nobody, the way Ms. Armistead remembers it, gave him any
< breaks for being a senator's son.
< Once, after Mr. Gore and Ms. Armistead had done a particularly
< hard job on the farm, the senator told him to take her out for a meal
< at a certain cafe. "We were so thrilled," she remembered. "But after
< dinner Al gets up to the cash register and said, 'My dad said to
< charge it to him,' and the guy wouldn't do it."
< The senator's tab was too long already.
< "So I had to tell him I'd be right back, and go get the money
< from my mom," Ms. Armistead said.
< A Touch of Mischief
< Still, his time in Tennessee was not all boot camp and character
< building, and Mr. Gore did manage to have some unscripted fun. Mr.
< Thompson remembers his friend as "pranky," with a love of practical
< jokes that endures today.
< One New Year's Eve, several of his friends said, their whole
< group was snowed in at the Gore farm, so Pauline Gore corralled all
< the girls in an upstairs bedroom and the boys in Al's room on the
< lower level. The senator, dressed in his bathrobe, sat sentry duty at
< the top of the stairs all night long, and every so often yelled
< downstairs to his son and the other boys, who were busy sharing one
< bottle of beer.
< At first light, Ms. Armistead heard a knock on the window,
< looked out and saw Al and his buddies, who had slipped out a window
< and climbed up onto the deck outside her room, where they were making
< snowmen in their underwear for the girls' benefit.
< "Mr. Albert still thought he had everything under control," she
< said.
< Her brother, Steve, describes a pretty mild teenage rebellion:
< "We did all the experimental things kids do. We'd sneak out at night
< and pick up Coke bottles off a front porch that probably were not
< ours, or go to the lake and maybe do a little water skiing at night
< that was not too smart, and occasionally have a party. We probably did
< a little bit of alcohol abuse."
< But there were also times, even as a kid, when Mr. Gore flouted
< authority more directly. Once, while staying with the Thompsons, he
< heard that his father, who was away, was going to be giving a speech
< in Nashville, 55 miles east.
< His parents, though, had decided that their son should not come
< to the event.
< "He was little," 12 at most, Mr. Thompson said, "but Al went
< over to Carthage and caught the bus and went down there, still dressed
< for the farm. That didn't go over too well. His mom called and wanted
< to know where he was -- that was a biggie. My mom had to tell her he
< wasn't here. Today, you'd be worried about all kinds of things
< happening. But they were more concerned about him not being all
< cleaned up."
< Like a lot of mothers, Pauline Gore always insisted publicly
< that her son was at all times the perfect boy.
< But was she embellishing a little? At least at times, she
< apparently thought she had reason to worry.
< Dr. Fleming said, "I remember Donna, this good-looking girl,
< running around the house, and Pauline saying, 'Ohmigod, she's going to
< get pregnant, I know it.' "
< Mr. Gore was not shy about expressing affection for his
< girlfriend in front of his mother.
< "I remember Pauline and I drove him to the airport one time,"
< said Ms. Armistead, "and he kissed her on the cheek and then he kissed
< me. I mean, he laid one on me, honey."
< Ms. Armistead says the two of them were lectured. "Miss Pauline
< said keep busy, don't think about sex, enjoy your time together but
< always have something in mind to do," she said. "Cold showers and lots
< of exercise."
< But she also says Mrs. Gore need not have worried. "Sex was sex
< even then," Ms. Armistead said, "but Al and I both had goals."
< Finding a Role Model
< Today, the vice president seems to enjoy looking back on the
< benign pleasures of the summers when he got to be a kid in Tennessee
< -- skinny-dipping with Mr. Thompson in a cattle trough or hypnotizing
< chickens, which Mr. Gore says is "a little-known farm skill passed
< down from adolescent wizard to adolescent wizard."
< Mr. Gore also situates himself politically in Tennessee, as heir
< not only to his father but to Cordell Hull, whom he describes as "the
< model for public service in our part of the country." Mr. Hull floated
< logs down the Cumberland River with Mr. Gore's grandfather, settled in
< Carthage and became the congressman in the seat the Gore father and
< son later held.
< An ardent free-trader, Mr. Hull won the Nobel Peace Prize for
< his role in founding GATT, now the World Trade Organization, and was
< secretary of state in World War II. "But before that he was a judge on
< the circuit, and in 10 counties there, the picture above the judge's
< chair in the courtroom is neither George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
< nor Franklin Roosevelt," Mr. Gore said, with the greatest possible
< reverence. "It's Cordell Hull to this day."
< Asked to name the most important things he had inherited from
< his parents, Mr. Gore talked for a long time about his father and his
< father's ideals. But the first thing he said in answer to the question
< was this:
< "Some of what people perceive as the stiffness and formality I
< sometimes lapse into comes in part from my father's habit of trying to
< ensure that he always presented a dignified appearance to live up to
< the position he felt deserved dignity.
< "People who saw him on the stump and playing the fiddle find
< that ironic because they don't remember the formal bearing that he had
< in most of his appearances. He had a capacity to enjoy humor and music
< and friendship, and he also felt the need to present himself as a
< senator in a formal and dignified way."
< Those who knew the senator say his climb from poverty was still
< too fresh and stereotypes of Tennessee hillbillies with dirt under
< their fingernails still too prevalent for him to feel he could afford
< the luxury of letting his guard down in certain public settings.
< His father "always raised cattle, he always farmed, he always
< found relaxation, even in Washington, by going to the farm and working
< with cattle," the vice president said.
< "But he became a statesman," too, Mr. Gore said. "I've often
< thought in my father's persona he continued to manifest both."
< His friends feel sure Mr. Gore would move back to Carthage if,
< as Mr. 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.
< But Mr. Gore, who had his boots up on the table in front of him
< as he talked, snorted when he heard this.
< "I guess maybe they were thinking that Washington is such a neat
< place," he said, "that I would naturally want to tell them all about
< the great things there."
< Few Comforts of Home
< If the Fairfax was a cold place to grow up, it was not because
< there was no family close by.
< The owner, Grady Gore, was a cousin of the senator's. Louise
< Gore, one of Grady's daughters, lived in the hotel. Her sister, Mary
< Gore Dean, moved in, too, after her husband died in a plane crash. For
< a while, their brother Jimmy Gore and his family were on the premises,
< as well. When they moved, it was just down the block.
< But the vice president is not sentimental about his time there.
< "I came to love the farm," he said. "The hotel I never loved."
< The senator's correspondence makes clear that he and his family
< were there because the price was right. The Gores looked for a house
< in Washington for years, but never found anything they felt they could
< afford.
< And one thing that seems to bother Mr. Gore -- far more, in
< fact, than the idea that his 52 years add up to something that is not
< so much a life as a story line -- is the perception that "I was in
< this luxury apartment eating room service, sort of like Eloise."
< Asked if his younger days in Washington were lonely, he sighed.
< "Oh, no," he said. "I mean I had good friends and I had my
< sister. And it's not as if I didn't have my parents. They went out
< frequently, and every six years they had a hard campaign, but they
< were great and loving parents, and the times when they were pulled
< away I had Nancy and my friends. I wasn't left alone with my
< thoughts."
< He got pretty creative about making his own fun, sometimes
< upending all the furniture in the living room to construct an
< elaborate fort. But activity was supposed to be purposeful. "His dad
< was a very, very proud man and believed that old Cordell Hull thing of
< you're put on earth for a purpose and it's to improve the condition of
< life," said Mr. Gore's cousin, Mark Gore, who lived down the block.
< (His cousin also remembers Senator Gore teaching him to swim by
< throwing him into a pool when he was 4, while Al, who was 7, looked
< on, laughing.)
< 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, Ms.
< Armistead, twice a day, and called her on a pay phone every Saturday
< night.
< Two of Mr. Gore's closest Washington friends recall that while
< Al Gore was the focus of his parents' fondest hopes, it was his
< free-spirited, rebellious sister, Nancy, who took more of their
< energy. "The general topic of conversation over there was what
< outrageous thing Nancy did this week," said one of these friends. "She
< got a lot of attention and Al was kind of an afterthought, because he
< never misbehaved."
< For him, the best times were those spent throwing a ball around
< with his father at Grady Gore's estate in Potomac, Md. "He had some
< cattle from the Tennessee farm brought up there," Mr. Gore said,
< smirking like he knows that sounds kind of crazy. "And a lot of times
< on weekends we'd go up there and he'd work with the cattle and I'd
< help him and then we'd take a break." Sometimes, too, they played
< catch in the Russell building, outside the senator's office, though if
< someone walked by, "he'd duck back into the office until they passed"
< because "it wasn't very dignified," the son recalled. When Al Gore had
< real ballgames, though, it was his sister, not his father, who would
< come.
< 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,
< Mr. 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," Mr. Gore remembered. And one day, when Al was 5, he was
< invited to come up front to meet the vice president, Richard M. 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."
< Once, Mr. Gore's father let his son listen in on an extension
< while he spoke to President John F. Kennedy, who at the time was
< furious at a certain steel executive for raising prices after the
< steel workers had agreed not to seek a wage increase. "The family
< anecdote that my father always told after that -- like a lot of family
< anecdotes I can't really vouch for -- but he said that I said, 'Dad, I
< didn't know presidents talked that way.' "
< The vice president does have strong memories of Kennedy, though.
<
< "I was blown away by his inaugural address," he said. I remember
< so vividly the thick snow on the seats, and listening to each word
< bring out such poetic force. Really, it was a remarkable time. My
< sister was one of the first volunteers for the Peace Corps that month,
< and the whole family was filled with the excitement of the New
< Frontier."
< They all wanted, each in their own way, to be part of that
< excitement. And the entire family talked a lot about not just the
< bills before Congress but the big issues of the day, especially civil
< rights. In these discussions, was his mother more liberal than his
< father, as some who knew the couple have suggested? "Mmmmm, my dad was
< pretty liberal," Mr. Gore answered. "She was, like most moms, the
< conscience of the family, but they didn't really disagree. And my
< sister was more liberal than both of them put together."
< Then Mr. Gore started to laugh, and kept on for a good long
< time. "It was a family of many consciences," he said.
<
<
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