THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE: The Rise of Al Gore. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2000 by Jon Meacham

THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE: The Rise of Al Gore by David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima Simon & Schuster, $23.00

From Caney Fork to Capitol Hill, Al Gore has never stopped striving

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, JUST BEFORE Al Gore joined Bill Clinton on the 1992 ticket, I happened to spend a day with the young senator back home in Tennessee. I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and had been assigned to do a "day in the life" piece on Gore; we spent most of a Friday, as I recall, driving through the Sequatchie Valley, from town meetings and elementary school visits in places like Jasper and Dunlap. Lots of hands to shake, questions to answer, little towns to see, calls to return (we had to stop at a gas station to do that; this was still essentially a pre-cellular era). The senator had been promoting Earth in the Balance, which he actually wrote himself; was commuting between Washington and the state; and had his mind on the Earth Summit in Rio. It seemed a grueling pace, and I remember asking him how he juggled everything--the Senate, family, fundraising, book writing. "You just keep after it," the senator replied. "You don't waste time."

Al Gore has rarely frittered away a moment. The basics of his biography are familiar: the capital childhood in the Fairfax Hotel; the tough summers of farm work in Carthage; the diligent study at St. Albans and Harvard; the anguished choice to go to Vietnam; the years in the newsroom of The Tennessean; the decision to run for his father's old House seat at the age of 28. Though his dad was only a senator and George W. Bush's made it all the way to the White House, Gore has led the vastly more interesting political life, from listening to President Kennedy talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis to navigating conservative waters in the South at the apex of Ronald Reagan's popularity. Yet the vice president is not merely a driven electoral automaton; he's an intriguing human being. Together with Bill Turque's excellent Inventing Al Gore, David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima's The Prince of Tennessee sheds light on an important slice of modern American political history, for the rise of Al Gore is about more than a seemingly stiff Sunbelt boomer who might be president. It's also a compelling (yes, compelling, not a word you often see associated with Gore) personal story of ambition, anxiety, and ambivalence unfolding amid the great events of our time: the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Reagan Revolution, and the Age of Clinton.

In the tradition of First in His Class, Maraniss' magisterial biography of Clinton, The Prince of Tennessee began in the pages of The Washington Post, and it deftly carries the reader through the stages of Gore's life. Expectations were high from the start. He was born on March 31, 1948, almost a decade after his sister Nancy. Pauline Gore said they "had almost despaired of having another child, much less a son" and thought of the baby as "kind of a miracle." From then on, it seems, Al was essentially the center of the Gores' world, both in the Fairfax and in Carthage during the summers. In his acceptance speech in Los Angeles a half century later, he tellingly noted that "when I was a child, it never once occurred to me that the foundation upon which my security depended would ever shake."

The implications of that certitude are complicated, and in that apparent confidence lie the origins not just of Gore's ambition ("We raised him for it," his father said when Gore was nominated for vice president) but of his uneven public style (the tendency to lecture, the occasional stiffness). The sense of destiny is clear. It would have been hard not to think of politics as a career when you grew up in Suite 809 of the Fairfax, dropping water balloons on limousines waiting on Embassy Row and annoying Sen. John McClellan, who lived downstairs, every time you dribbled a basketball. "Official Washington," the authors note, "was as much of a small town in its way as any backwater spot in Tennessee, with its own rituals and mores and circle of families" And so young Al played in the Senate pool, sat on Vice President Nixon's knee, and lived in a hotel where Robert Kennedy would dine downstairs at a back table in the Jockey Club with Cuban refugees.

A wonderful life, unimaginable to most Americans of his (or any) generation. But you can also see the beginnings of the cautious, sometimes overly formal Gore in those early days. He wasn't particularly free to be a kid, or to screw up. This is a boy whose shopping trips to buy a bow and arrow with his dad ended up in the paper, and supper wasn't just supper. "If we had important people," Mrs. Gore later said of dinner parties in the suite, "... I liked for Al to be able to be there. I selected guests for us; if it so happened there was a great guest who was a good conversationalist and the issue was proper for me and my son, then I would see if I could wedge Al in"

Al was almost always surrounded by grown-ups, and learned early how to charm and impress. In this he shares a childhood legacy with Franklin Roosevelt, another beloved son of older parents who could get along with adults but had a harder time with his contemporaries. The boys at Groton thought the young FDR was affected and coo eager to please. (His boisterous Oyster Bay cousins tardy referred to Franklin as "Miss Nancy.") Maraniss and Nakashima paint a similar portrait of the young Gore. On a field trip to Andrews Air Force Base when Al was 10, the St. Albans bus broke down, and his classmates scampered around an open field while they waited for another. Young Gore approached a science teacher, Alexander Haslam, and solemnly asked: "Sir, is this the time to be rowdy?" Another teacher recalled Gore as "a dutiful son ... It was almost unnatural for a boy to be that well behaved" The other boys noticed, too. In his high-school yearbook the editors archly captioned a cartoon of Gore as a heroic statue with a quotation from Anatole France: "People with no weaknesses are terrible."