CARTHAGE, Tenn. — On the first Wednesday in November, 1970, Albert Gore Sr. and his son, Albert Jr., spent a somber day canoeing on the Caney Fork River, which flows past the Gore livestock farm outside this small town in middle Tennessee.
The previous day, after 18 years as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate, the elder Gore had lost a particularly brutish reelection campaign to William E. Brock III, scion of a wealthy Chattanooga candy-making family. The Brock campaign had focused on Gore's liberal voting record, his support for civil rights, his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Seeks Son's Advice
As the two paddled the Caney Fork, Gore Sr. reflected on the pain of the defeat. And he sought advice from his son, then a 22-year-old Army enlistee soon to ship out for Vietnam. What should he do after 32 years in Congress?
"Dad," the younger Gore counseled, "I would take the 32 years"--retire gracefully from public life.
For himself, Al Jr. declared, he would never enter politics. Never subject himself to the punishment his father had suffered for being right--as both of them were convinced--on the most divisive issues of his day.
Deeper down, however, young Al Gore was drawing a profoundly different lesson from his father's bitter experience. It is a lesson that may go far toward explaining how it is that--despite his vow to shun politics--Albert Gore Jr., a relatively youthful first-term U.S. senator, today is one of only three contenders still alive in the once-crowded Democratic presidential race.
When to Be Right
In politics, Gore learned, being right is no defense. You must be right at the right time, he concluded, right on the right issues, and in the right way.
His father, never humble or introspective, took his stands with an uncompromising self-righteousness that angered Democratic and Republican presidents, alienated many of his colleagues in Congress and finally turned Tennessee voters against him.
The younger Gore's political career can be seen as a mirror image of his father's, a perfect copy, perfectly reversed.
The Senator, as the senior Gore is known today to many in Tennessee, grew increasingly distant from his constituents back home during his long tenure in Washington. Al Jr. has compulsively kept an ear to the Tennessee ground. Since his election to Congress in 1976, the younger Gore has held 2,000 town meetings in hamlets stretching across Tennessee from Difficult to Mt. Pleasant.
Gore Sr. was an unabashed liberal, an absolutist who made few concessions to the will of Tennessee voters. The younger Gore describes himself as a "raging moderate," a man whose policy positions on issues from abortion to aid to the Nicaraguan Contras are sliced paper thin, designed to give something to everyone.
The elder Gore delighted in taking stands that put him at odds with his Southern colleagues. He was one of only two Southern senators who voted against the segregationist "Southern Manifesto" in 1956. He voted against Richard M. Nixon's Southern Supreme Court nominees Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell. His votes earned him then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew's famous epithet, "Southern regional chairman of the Eastern liberal Establishment."
Gore Jr. flaunts his Southern ties and his moderate record, particularly on military questions. His candidacy is based on the premise that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying the South, and he argues that his rivals--Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson--are too liberal to attract Southern voters.
Sings Country Tune
Although Washington-bred and Harvard-educated, young Al Gore insists he's just a country boy and makes a point of breaking into the country-and-western tune "All My Exes Live in Texas (That's Why I Hang My Hat in Tennessee)" whenever a new reporter joins his campaign entourage.
Yet among his congressional colleagues, Gore has developed a reputation that is very different from the folksy-but-substantive image he projects on the campaign trail. In private conversations, a number of lawmakers and aides who have worked with Gore during his eight years in the House and three-plus years in the Senate said they considered him to be at once a publicity-conscious grandstander and an aloof outsider.
One Democratic aide expressed a sentiment echoed by several congressmen as he said of Gore's years in Congress: "He was arrogant. He loved being the best looking and the smartest boy in the class, and he felt he didn't need them (his colleagues) to succeed."
Gore himself says he searches for issues with "finite solutions." Thus he is not associated with complex and ideologically charged questions such as immigration, tax reform and abortion. He learned from his father's career that he could be on the "right" side of such difficult issues--and still lose everything.
