Gore Cronies Benefit From TVA

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 20, 2000 | by Charles C. II Thompson, | Tony Hays

Al Gore seems to have used the Tennessee Valley Authority to help good ole boys in Tennessee strike it rich, raising allegations of a Gore family tradition of political patronage.

Albert Gore Sr., critics say, treated the sprawling Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) almost from its inception in 1933 as a candy store from which he doled such goodies as lucrative contracts and plum jobs to good-ole-boy cronies. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1938 at age 31, Gore Sr. quickly had attached his star to TVA. The agency's mission was to improve the navigability of the Tennessee River and its tributaries and to generate electricity in eight Southern states through coal and, later, nuclear plants. He helped stave off an effort by the Eisenhower administration to privatize TVA and frequently was at odds with both conservatives and environmentalists through 14 years in the House and 18 in the Senate.

However, it was Gore Sr.'s paid association with Soviet agent, stock swindler, art forger and international wheeler-dealer Armand Hammer that caused Gore's reputation to suffer. Decades before Gore Sr. was defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1970 he had become little more than a highly paid errand boy for Hammer, whose father had been instrumental in founding the U.S. Communist Party. To do favors for Hammer in Russia and elsewhere, Gore Sr. attempted to intervene in the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Mostly he was unsuccessful because both the FBI and CIA had thick dossiers on Hammer, Gore Sr. and their Soviet paymasters.

One of the seamier deals Gore Sr. and Hammer engaged in was the breeding and selling of prize cattle. Frequently, "fat cats" from all over the country would travel to Carthage, Tenn., to bid outrageous prices for Gore livestock. A former Gore Sr. staffer said that the buyer would pay Gore and then leave the cattle with the senator. "This wasn't bribery per se" a Gore employee of the era says. "It was more like putting money in the bank for when you needed a favor from Senator Gore. However, it was a disgrace." One such sale in 1955 reportedly grossed $85,000.

Once Gore Sr. was out of office, he went to work for Hammer full time as executive vice president of Hammer's Occidental Petroleum Corp. at a reputed $500,000-a-year salary. One of the first favors he performed was getting TVA to rescind a longtime contract with Island Creek Coal Co. so that Island Creek could charge TVA a higher fee for its fuels. Hammer was so impressed that he made Gore head of the company; Island Creek, later sold, remains TVA's largest coal supplier. According to TV newsman Bob Zelnick in his book, Al Gore: A Political Life, "Despite its abysmal environmental record and its anachronistic state-subsidized monopoly power, Al Gore, the champion of environmentalism and of `reinventing government,' has been staunch and unquestioning in his support of TVA as was his father" who died in Dec. 5, 1998 at age 90.

Al Gore Jr. also benefited from the largess of Hammer, Occidental Petroleum and Island Creek Coal companies. Hammer gave Gore and his wife, Tipper, free use of his Boeing 727 jet and feted them at parties in Hollywood and Washington. Gore Jr. flew with Hammer to Moscow in 1987 for Hammer to receive a prize from a group of antinuclear "scientists." On their return, Gore Jr. held a reception for Hammer, where among other things he lauded the patriotism of this man who had been a personal friend of both Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin and was a Soviet agent of influence all of his adult life (see " Gore Family Tradition Includes Aid From Communist Oil Tycoon" p. 45).

Hammer in turn made it possible for Gore Jr. to buy his 80-acre farm along the Caney Fork River next to his father's place at a bargain-basement price. Gore Jr. leased the zinc-mining rights back to a Hammer subsidiary, earning almost $450,000.

His father having gone into the dirty-coal business with Hammer, Gore Jr. adhered strictly to the doctrinaire environmentalist line with several notable exceptions, both TVA boondoggles. One was the Tellico Dam, said to imperil the snail darter, an endangered species of fish. The other was the Clinch River breeder reactor, which was to be built on the false premise that the Earth was running out of uranium.

The breeder reactor allegedly was being built on a geological fault, and the testing of plant components reportedly was slipshod. The night before a critical House Commerce subcommittee on Energy and Power report and backup documents on the Clinch River reactor were to be released, Gore Jr. and his top aide, Peter Knight, obtained them over the objection of subcommittee staff member Peter Stockton. The next day, the TVA and U.S. Department of Energy officials who were scheduled to testify for the project appeared with 10 large boxes stacked in front of them, as if to have detailed answers to the concerns of investigators. The bluff worked, but upon later inspection the documents proved to be phony, filled with audit reports about unrelated solar projects and other refuse.