Tales from the Farm - Review

National Review, May 17, 1999 by Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg

Mr. Goldberg, an NR contributing editor, writes "The Goldberg File" for NR Online (www.nationalreview.com).

Gore: A Political Life, by Bob Zelnick (Regnery, 384 pp., $29.95)

Give Bob Zelnick a round of applause. Before he even finished Gore: A Political Life, he elicited a degree of hypocrisy remarkable even in Bill Clinton's Washington. In 1997, Zelnick's bosses at ABC News told him he couldn't write a book about the vice president. David Westin, the head of ABC News, wrote to Zelnick, as if it were perfectly obvious, "We cannot have a Washington correspondent writing a book about one of our national leaders whom that correspondent will undoubtedly have to cover." What this says about the employers of Bob Woodward, Michael Isikoff, David Maraniss, and the scores of other Washington reporters who without controversy write books about the subjects they cover for newspapers and magazines, Westin did not say.

Zelnick was given a choice: keep his cozy and lucrative correspondent post at ABC or-after 21 years of award-winning service-write a tome for a conservative publishing house about a prosaic liberal politician, with no guarantees about where his career would go from there. Undaunted, Zelnick chose Curtain Number Two. And it's a good thing he did. Gore: A Political Life is a well-written, thorough, and surprisingly interesting consideration of a man widely regarded as the only person duller than Warren Christopher.

Opposition researchers at the Republican National Committee won't applaud Zelnick's treatment of some subjects. He calls Gore's service as an Army journalist in Vietnam "honorable" (though not the vice president's subsequent embellishment of his war record). Gore's vote in favor of the Gulf War was "an act of conscience and moral courage." Nor does Zelnick dwell on Gore's youthful mistakes: smoking pot and inhaling-a lot; suggesting in a letter to his father that the U.S. Army was pro-fascist and that anti-Communism was a "psychological ailment."

On other points-Gore's shady campaign-finance practices, his sudden, retroactively lifelong mission against tobacco, his less than stellar reinvention of government-Zelnick's treatment is not unduly harsh, but rather duly harsh.

Take campaign finance. These days Gore is often depicted as an honest, hapless victim of sleaziness on the part of his boss. In fact, the vice president tracked plenty of his own Chinese mud into the White House. Maria Hsia, the lady who helped him set up the Buddhist-temple fund-raiser, has been a political and financial patron of Gore's since his days in the Senate. Zelnick presents a straightforward case that, while indeed there was "no controlling legal authority" covering Gore's misdeeds, the vice president knew his shenanigans were as kosher as an order of clams casino with extra bacon.

Unfortunately, Gore's assertion that he created the Internet came too late for Zelnick to write about. But another gaffe, often repeated by Gore, is a central theme here. Lately, Gore has been insisting to Iowa farmers that he too was raised on a farm and that he knows what it is like to "take up hay all day long in the hot sun" and "plow a steep hillside." Republicans are already using these statements to paint the vice president as the chief revisionist of his own personal history.

Zelnick defends Gore, who did indeed work on a farm, albeit mostly when he was on summer vacation from St. Alban's. Actually, what's interesting is why Gore worked on that farm.

Zelnick writes that Sen. Al Gore Sr. believed his son should haul pig manure as "part of his preparation for higher calling." One almost gets the sense that his parents were caught up in some scheme a la The Boys from Brazil to create the perfect southern liberal president.

At first, Mrs. Gore wasn't happy with the idea of Young Al tackling that hillside, thinking it too dangerous. Eventually, she relented, saying, "Yes, a boy could never be president if he couldn't plow with that damned hillside plow."

Zelnick suggests that the father is the key to understanding the son's complexities. Out of a loving desire to make a president, Dad made Al a perfectionist. And, Zelnick writes, "the man who must be perfect equates nonperfection with evil."

This explains why Gore gives speeches in which he treats his audience like a dog who just stained the living-room rug. Because he's smart and good, those who disagree with him must be dumb and bad. (Indeed, in this sense he has far more in common with Hillary Clinton than with Bill.) At the NAACP convention in 1998, he equated opponents of affirmative action with the men who dragged James Byrd to his death in Jasper, Texas. During the impeachment "troubles," Gore said Republican voters were the kind of people "who call C-SPAN at three in the morning, not knowing it's a taped replay."

It should be said that as a father, a husband, and a friend, Gore gets high marks. On the other hand, it does seem that the man can flick a switch and turn off the admirable qualities of the private Gore in favor of remorseless demagoguery.