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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A new bio suggests that underneath the stiff, zombielike striver we've come to know is a real guy.
Mar 7, 2000 | A source once told me, when I was writing an article about a famously nasty man, "It's true what they say about Bob: Underneath that mean, abusive guy is a pretty nice guy. But underneath that there's another whole guy who's really mean and nasty." So it is with Vice President Al Gore: Beneath the wooden, proper candidate is a funny, amiable guy. But underneath him is an emotionally isolated man of almost total opaqueness.
It's an intrepid reporter who volunteers to spend three years of his life examining the wild underbelly of a career as dutiful as Gore's. Newsweek reporter Bill Turque has returned with a thorough, fair and nearly complete biography, but I can't say that his investment of time and effort has entirely paid off: It's beige down there, all right. Turque turns in a very professional inventory of Gore's first 51 years, but only occasionally presents the contents in a light that gives us any new insight into Gore.
"Inventing Al Gore" has all the right pieces of the puzzle in place. The two biggest pieces are, of course, Albert and Pauline Gore, the political parents from Central Casting: he a bombastic, prideful Tennessee senator with a terrible score to settle (his 1970 reelection defeat) through his namesake; she a cooler, more calculating stage mama who is widely seen as the brains of the pair. These parents were always completely frank about the fact that they were grooming their son, from the time he was in short pants, to be president.
As a result, Gore was, from the start, a tiny politician: a pleaser of the kind who was always looking over the shoulders of his peers to the frowns and smiles of an older, sterner audience. There is a real poignancy to the story of Gore's upbringing, in which much of the warmth apparently came from the mothers of friends and the Tennessee women hired to look after "little Al" while his parents were on the road. (Pauline indignantly dismissed this portrait of Gore's childhood when the author interviewed her. Never, she told him, had she left her little boy "for more than two weeks at a time.") As Gore himself has from time to time acknowledged -- most completely in his ecological manifesto, "Earth in the Balance" -- he was an accomplished, compliant, uncomplaining boy whose chief concern was to reflect well on others.
These are the children who grow up hollow -- with a streak of what Turque identifies as grandiosity. It's the only way to explain why Gore, a man with a palpable conviction that he is usually the smartest person in the room, can't restrain himself from the weird little acts of self-aggrandizement that cause him so much trouble. It wasn't enough that Gore played an important role in garnering federal support for the immediate precursors of the World Wide Web; he had to tell an interviewer that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." It wasn't enough that "Love Story" author Erich Segal had borrowed a bit from Gore's background in devising his hero; Gore had to tell reporters that his romance with Tipper was the model for the entire book.
The most sensational material in Turque's book is an old friend's claim that Gore smoked far more pot in his youth than he has previously admitted. The friend, John C. Warnecke, says that as a newspaper reporter in Nashville, Gore smoked three or four times a week, and didn't give it up until he ran for Congress in 1976. Gore's account, laid down during his 1988 presidential campaign, is that he tried pot only on "rare and infrequent" occasions and gave it up entirely in 1972.
Turque's version seems very credible, partly because other old pals who declined to talk to him about the issue did so in a way that tacitly acknowledges that Gore is vulnerable here. Even so, Warnecke's information is most interesting not for any great shock value but for its further testimony to the reductive persona Gore has accepted all his political life, which is to say all his life. To think of Gore as a young student, soldier and journalist lighting up the bong every time he got a chance is to think of him as a real person, doing what people of his age and station did in that place and time, instead of as the pinched, improbable youthful experimenter he asks us to believe in, who quickly put away all the childish things that were beneath someone of his ambition and probity. Which is sadder: to think of him as so ambitious that he automatically denies and compresses this mildly wicked chapter of his youth or to think of his never having lived such chapters at all?
Turque renders Gore's life as a series of intermittent, half-hearted efforts to break the baleful chains of his duty and the vice president as "a man who at critical moments had proclaimed independence and then retreated from it." Hence Gore goes to Harvard and decides to study English instead of government, but after a year or two reverts to the family business. He comes to loathe the Vietnam War, but enlists anyway out of concern for his father's waning political career. Gore comes home from Vietnam and again swears off politics, taking up journalism instead, but five years later runs for Congress after all. Following his humiliating defeat in the 1988 presidential primaries, Gore writes a passionate environmental manifesto, in which he describes the self-loathing he sometimes feels over his own tendency to "put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously," but then when he is invited to join Bill Clinton's ticket in 1992, he softens and minimizes what his book presented as the most urgent counsels of his conscience. His life and career, Turque writes, have been "punctuated by separations never quite achieved, and by bold strokes never quite converted into personal or political liberation." It is a theme mirrored in his political behavior, which holds examples of both genuine principle and the most blatant expediency.
Turque's thesis makes a lot of sense. Watching the radical difference between the informal Gore who talks to reporters off the record and the formal campaigner so widely derided for his stiffness, one has the impression that the gulf between these two men is a willed accomplishment on Gore's behalf -- a way of holding apart from politics some essential self that he still hopes to try to salvage from the Great Inevitability that has always ruled his life.
