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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 9.6 KB | 200 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page  28

BILL CLINTON and AL GORE

GORE: A Hard-Won Sense of Ease


A failed White House run and his son's accident tempered and
matured him

By WALTER SHAPIRO -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington


     Q. How do you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret
Service agents?

    A. Gore's the stiff one.


    These days, Tennessee Senator Al Gore -- the bottom half
of Bill Clinton's Democratic baby-boomer ticket -- freely
retells this joke about his wooden campaign style in his
ill-fated 1988 presidential race. The self-deprecating humor is
a reflection of Gore's hard-won sense of ease, the tempering of
the fires of ambition, the self-awareness that comes with
staring tragedy in the face and surviving.

    It was April 1989, and Gore, already mulling another
presidential race, was leaving Baltimore's Memorial Stadium
after taking his six-year-old son Albert III to watch the
Orioles. Suddenly the boy darted out of his father's grasp --
and into the postgame traffic. A car struck young Albert,
throwing him 30 feet into the air. By the time Gore reached his
son's side, the child was lying in a gutter, without breath or
pulse, suffering from massive internal injuries. The Senator
just held his only son and prayed.

    The boy recovered, but it took months and extensive
surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Gore moved into
his son's hospital room for those first few weeks and tried to
maintain his Senate duties from the child's bedside. "It was a
terrible jolt for Al, a defining moment," says a longtime
friend. "Al hasn't been the same since."

    He eventually abandoned plans to run for President in
1992. As Gore explained in an interview with TIME last week, "It
was a shattering experience for our whole family. And yet it
has been in so many ways a great blessing for us. I never
thought at the time I'd ever be able to say that. It completely
changed my outlook on life."

    In a way, this new outlook may be responsible for Gore's
place on the ticket. Clinton and Gore -- the new gold dust twins
of the Democratic Party -- had been eyeing each other warily
for years. Only 19 months apart in age (Gore, 44, is the
younger), they have been in many ways so similar, so driven, so
high-test-scores smart, so blue-suit sincere that it once seemed
inevitable that their ambitions for the White House would
collide. Consider the dualities: both are new-ideas moderates
with a policy wonk's love of the intricacies of complex issues;
both boast blue-ribbon educational pedigrees and are not ashamed
to show it; both are Southern Baptists who married strong,
assertive blond women; and both, having achieved political
success early in life, have never made a secret of their zeal
for higher office. In fact, Clinton almost jumped into the 1988
presidential race to vie with Gore for Southern support.

    Given the potential for conflict, it is surprising that
personal chemistry between the two men clinched the
vice-presidential nod for Gore. "The big factor was the personal
and political comfort level Bill felt with Gore," explains a
senior Clinton adviser. "Every time, Bill would come away from
a conversation with Gore and say, `He's so smart.' "

    There was no blinding flash of light, no excited cry of
"Eureka!" when Clinton made his decision late Wednesday night
at the end of a two-hour meeting. The Democratic nominee had
been listening to pro-and-con discussions on the merits of the
six finalists (Gore, Congressman Lee Hamilton and Senators
Harris Wofford, Bob Kerrey, Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham).
Suddenly, without fanfare, Clinton said, "I think I'm ready. I
think I'm going to ask Senator Gore to run."

    That low-key moment brought to an end a search process
that began with 40 names supplied by Warren Christopher and his
team. In late June, Clinton mused aloud to an old friend about
whether the ultimate hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf, might be
available. The name of New York Governor Mario Cuomo continually
wafted on the periphery of the deliberations. Christopher
recounts that he had only "an incomplete discussion" by phone
with a harried Cuomo, who never clarified whether he was willing
to be considered. Others suggest Clinton believed to the last
that if pressed, Cuomo would probably take a spot on the ticket.

    Part of Gore's appeal is that he buttresses Clinton on his
weakest flank -- the nagging questions about character.
Politically it helps that Gore's wife Tipper has been crusading
for years to label rock music to alert parents to obscene
lyrics. Tipper and the three youngest Gore children were near
center stage all during the unveiling last week of the new
Democratic ticket. Such placement was not accidental. As Mickey
Kantor, Clinton's campaign manager, puts it, "The more you look
at Bill Clinton and Al Gore and those families standing
together, the more you recognize this ticket represents new,
fresh change -- action."

    Gore strengthens Clinton in three other areas -- the
geosphere, geopolitics and geography. As the Democratic leader
on environmental issues (he headed the Senate delegation to the
Rio summit and adroitly challenged Bush on global warming), Gore
strengthens Clinton's shaky appeal to affluent suburbanites and
West Coast voters. A thoughtful moderate on foreign policy, Gore
was one of only 10 Senate Democrats to support Bush by voting
to authorize the use of force to drive Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait. The last time the Democrats ran with an all-border-state
ticket was 1948 -- and Missouri's Harry Truman and Kentucky's
Alben Barkley won the upset of the century.

    Despite their affinities, Gore's background could not be
more different from Clinton's. The son and namesake of a fabled
three-term liberal Senator from Tennessee (the senior Albert
Gore is now 84), he grew up mostly in Washington, spending his
teenage years in the family suite in the Fairfax Hotel on
Embassy Row and attending the prestigious St. Albans School.
When it came time for college, Gore filled out just one
application -- to Harvard. There he impressed professors who
would later prove to be politically useful, most notably Martin
Peretz, the editor in chief of the New Republic.

    Like Clinton, Gore protested the Vietnam War -- and
anguished about the political consequences of resisting the
draft. But the Gore electoral career that was on the line was
that of the candidate's father -- Albert senior -- who also
opposed the war and was facing a bitter 1970 re-election fight
that he would ultimately lose. Gore was inducted into the Army
in mid-1970 and ended up serving for six months in Vietnam as
a reporter for military publications, a soldier who never saw
a shot fired in combat.

    After Vietnam, Gore joined the staff of the Nashville
Tennessean, a protege of editor John Seigenthaler. Columnist
Michael Kinsley captured Gore's lifelong ability to attract
mentors when he described him as "an old person's idea of a
young person." Gore abandoned journalism in 1976 to run for the
House. A workhorse from the moment he returned to Washington in
1977, Gore still found time to play basketball regularly in the
House gym with a group that included fellow Congressman Dan
Quayle. By 1984, when he ran for the Senate, Gore had already
made his mark as an arms-control expert.

    As a fledgling presidential candidate in 1988, Gore ran
credibly in the South before badly embarrassing himself by
embracing New York City Mayor Ed Koch and his vendetta against
Jesse Jackson in New York's pivotal primary. Gore was trying to
rebuild his political image after that '88 pratfall when his son
had the accident. And life for Gore changed forever.

    In his son's hospital room at Johns Hopkins, Gore began
writing Earth in the Balance, a rare political volume actually
crafted by its author. In the book's introduction, Gore sketches
out the other forces that helped alter his world view after his
son's injury: "I had also just lost a presidential campaign; I
had just turned forty years old. I was, in a sense, vulnerable
to the change that sought me out in the middle of my life."

    What Gore does not mention in the book -- and did not, in
fact, publicly reveal until last week -- is the pivotal role
psychological counseling played in helping him and his wife
recover from their boy's brush with death. The hospital told
them, Gore recounts, "Don't be afraid to ask for family
counseling." The Gores took this advice. "We grew tremendously
by becoming aware of how we were dealing with it and how we were
relating to one another in the midst of it," the Senator says.
"I strongly recommend to any family -- undergoing an experience
remotely similar to what we went through -- not to be afraid to
do this." The subject is still painful for Gore, as well as
politically sensitive -- and in his TIME interview he balked at
revealing the duration and the precise nature of the counseling,
saying, "I don't feel the need to go into a lot of details."

    The political arena is not an environment that normally
fosters emotional growth. When Gore was running for President
in 1988, there was, despite his clear mastery of the issues, an
aura of callowness about him -- a certain
not-ready-for-prime-time quality. But there is the sense that
his family's terrible ordeal -- and the entrance into his middle
years -- have matured and perhaps softened Gore. If that is
indeed the true measure of the Tennessee Senator, Gore is now
prepared for a national race in ways that can never be gleaned
from a briefing book.