Gore Spent Undergrad Years Away From Politics

Vice President Albert A. Gore, who graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with an honors degree in government, rarely talks about his life at the nation's most prestigious university in public, perhaps because of the elite image a Harvard education evokes.

The capsule biography on Gore's Web site skips his Harvard education altogether, going straight from his adolescence in Carthage, Tenn. to his experiences in Vietnam. It does, however, mention his short stint at divinity school.

Friends, teachers and colleagues who knew Gore during his four years at Harvard describe the Dunster House resident as a through-and-through Southerner, caught, like many of his peers at the time, between personal, parental and societal considerations.

A quiet and studious undergraduate, Gore spent his weekends playing card games with his friends and courting his future wife.

And other than a foray into student politics during his first year, the affable Gore avoided both political organizations and political discussions for the rest of his time.

Less than three months after graduating, Gore enlisted in the Army, much to the delight of his father, a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. The decision surprised his friends, who said that Gore had always opposed the war.

At school, though, life was quiet, and Gore's manner was open and down-to-earth, his friends say.

"He was extremely Southern oriented. He was definitely from Tennessee. I think you would have known he was from the South," says Robert A. Somerby '69, a Gore blockmate.

Former roommates and teachers recall Gore's pronounced twang, as compared with the halting Middle Atlantic English he speaks today.

One example of Gore's love of the South sticks out in Somerby's mind.

One night in 1966, Gore, his roommate Tommy Lee Jones '69 and Somerby performed a play in honor of Somerby's grandfather, a 19th-century traveling showman.

Gore's role was to sell a mysterious elixir to the crowd. Somerby recalls he bought a frayed tweed suit and several bottles of "elixir" in preparation.

Unfortunately, Gore and Jones sampled the alcoholic brew before the play and were quite drunk by the time the curtain rose.

A responsive but confused audience of Wellesley College students then watched Gore and Jones tell tall tales of their childhood.

"It was totally a Southern show and Al and Tommy Lee were totally Southern guys," Somerby says.

The image of a easygoing Al Gore carousing on a stage with Tommy Lee Jones is not one that fits with current media portrayals of the vice president. Many of Gore's Harvard friends, especially Somerby, have publicly castigated the media for portraying Gore as an elitist.

But his friendship with Jones suggests something different.

Gore's first-year roommate in Mower Hall was Jones, then wild-eyed and, in the words of a contemporary, "working-class." At first appearance, the two couldn't be more different. Gore was friendly and accessible but quiet, fond of studying in his Mower double. He had a steady girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson, his future wife.

Jones, on the other hand, was a ladies man who was known for leaning out his window and screaming teasing insults at his classmates.

Still, friends say the two roommates got along famously.

While Jones directed his energies toward acting, Gore pursued more typical first-year activities.

As a first-year, he spent most of his free time chatting with friends while playing intramural football or pickup Frisbee in the Yard, or participating in a regular evening poker group.

The wry Gore helped propel the Mower team to the first-year intramural championships, where they narrowly lost to a powerful Hurlbut Hall.

Gore took a licking as the team's quarterback but was always graceful.

"He was a very good, natural athlete," recalls Michael D. Kapetan '69, a friend and blockmate.

Sampling Politics

That first year, Gore had his only brush with organized campus politics.

In the fall of 1965, he ran for a first-year seat on the Undergraduate Council. Dressed in semi-casual clothes, Gore canvassed the dorms of the Old Yard, knocking on doors and introducing himself. Gore won the election.

The council at the time was more conservative than the rest of the campus. When, in December of 1965, Lamont Library decided to open to female undergraduates, the council protested loudly.

There are no records of Gore's involvement on the council, but friends recall that he didn't spend much time attending the meetings. His political participation, friends said, seemed to stem from a sense of obligation, and not from a personal commitment.

"He got out of campus politics. He had other issues to work out like the rest of us," Kapetan said.

William S. Robertson '69, the class marshal for Gore's graduating class, told The Crimson in 1992 that after his first year, Gore "backed away" from politics.

But at Harvard in 1965, Gore couldn't be completely insular. It was difficult for any student to escape the daily barrage of national and international affairs. The war in Vietnam had just begun to receive intense, critical coverage in the national media.

Day after day, The Crimson printed Associated Press stories on troop deployments. Cambridge and Boston experienced racial and ethnic unrest. Not a week went without news of a new Vietnam protest in Cambridge or Boston by student groups.

By the end of his first year, Gore had decided upon government as a concentration, but he had left the council in favor of more studious pursuits.

The Life of the Mind

Gore's blocking group was slated to spend its remaining years at Harvard in Dunster House.

"That circle of friends that I was part of one the most intellectually and personally diverse and vibrant and challenging and upsetting and stimulating," blockmate Kapetan says. "I think that's why we selected one another."

The group never went to church, but debated religion vigorously.

"We talked about the Bible and we talked about God. [Gore] could quote the Bible," Kapetan said.

On the wall of his room, Gore had a picture representing Daniel in the Lion's Den--an Old Testament allegory of the benevolence of God amid personal crisis.

Gore was always interested in the life of the mind, his friends say, and this extended to his choice of classes.

His favorite course was Social Science 139, "The Human Life Cycle," taught by Erik H. Erickson. For two hours a week, Gore sat enraptured by Erickson's lectures.

Kapetan remembers evenings where Gore would wax eloquent about Erickson's theories.

Gore "had a whole idea of maturation through the theories of life. That's why he explained it well. It was his spiritual life," Kapetan says.

Gore's environmentalism, nurtured by his summers on his family farm, acquired intellectual weight when he took courses in ecology, psychology and politics as part of his concentration in government.

Back in the dorm room, Gore was a methodical planner, never seeming to worry much about tests or term papers. Although Gore's staff declined to release his grades or a transcript of his courses, friends said they recall Gore as a superior student. His grades were high enough to qualify him for the Honors Program in government, which allowed him to write a thesis.

The subject: the impact of television on presidential leadership.

The Media Spotlight

With his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr., appearing on the news almost nightly--particularly because of his eloquent speeches on civil rights and military involvement in Southeast Asia--Gore's interest in television had risen.

He spent February of 1969 on the telephone, interviewing the media literati for his senior thesis.

He turned in a draft in early March, and the final product a few weeks later.

The 86 pages of text with 251 footnotes reads like a lucid exploration of a developing medium, peppered with incisive sound-bite quotations from the New York Times' Tom Wicker and James Reston, Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti.

Gore begins with the notion that presidents since Eisenhower have used television--not newspapers--to communicate to the nation. The thesis attempts to answer why this change took place so rapidly. He considers how one can best master the news medium, what structural factors influence news coverage of the president, and finally, how has presidential leadership changed since 1947, the year that Gore begins his study.

Gore concludes that "[t]he regularization and intensification of the President's personal communication with these two constituencies--the public at home and the audience abroad--promise to complicate his relations with" Congress and his own staff. "Consequently," Gore writes, "a key factor in this trend is the increasing importance of the President's personality."

Auguring, perhaps, the skills of a future boss of his, Gore writes that would-be presidents would be wise to learn the art of "visual communication."

You Can Call Me Al

Although Gore was a Government concentrator, did his thesis on politics, and was lucid in political debates, his earnestness to actually participate in politics wasn't as obvious as the media makes it out to have been.

Far from having a pre-ordained career path chosen for him by his father, Gore told his roommates that he had no idea what he wanted to do in life.

"He wasn't earnest. He was normal. Earnest is put on him in contradistinction to normal. In fact, he was extremely normal," Somerby says.

Adults who knew him then said they saw a very driven, intense young man, at times confused about the direction he wanted his life to take.

Author Erich Segal, on a sabbatical at Harvard in 1968, used Gore as a model for the serious side of the hero of Love Story, later a blockbuster movie.

Gore's delicate and tense relationship with his own father, Segal has said, was palpable enough that even his casual friends noticed it.

"There's no question that his parents seemed to have had...some kind of idea [of a life in politics] for him from the beginning," Kapetan says.

When Gore did talk about his father, says Kapetan, it was usually in reference to the Senator's strong record on civil rights or his anti-war stance.

Gore was "really proud" of his father, Kapetan says.

Al Gore, Upperclassman Roger Rosenblatt, then a junior professor of government, was a newly-minted senior tutor in Dunster House when Gore moved in.

While the House would later become a hotbed of campus radicalism, when Gore arrived to live there in the fall of 1966, it was still a staid, traditional Harvard house.

In the grand dining hall, recalls Rosenblatt, "believe it or not,

people did wear a jacket and tie."

Coat and tie were gone by 1968, as many campus radicals chose either Dunster or Adams as their base of operations.

Around the House, Gore didn't make a splash. Had he not known Gore's background, Rosenblatt would never have guessed that Gore was the son of a famous senator.

Gore was easy to talk to and very approachable. "I always liked him very much," Rosenblatt recalls, describing him as staid and a bit stiff--qualities that Gore is often criticized for today. "It was interesting that those same qualities which one admires without taint or adulteration as a young man are sometimes questioned as an older man."

"The awkwardness that has set in has come from somebody who doesn't trust being boring...When he was a young man, he never had to dress up who he was," he says.

The lack of outward exuberance didn't mean that Gore was lazy--or that he couldn't have a good time.

He spent his Dunster days in C-entryway, on the fifth floor in his sophomore year, and on the third floor from then on.

Gore's roommate, Bart Day '69, was punched by a final club at the beginning of their sophomore year.

Somerby said he doesn't believe Gore had ever been punched, and both Somerby and Kapetan say Gore never joined a final club, nor did he seem to be interested in them.

During his sophomore year, Gore spent Friday nights at the movies with the guys, around a dusty pool table in the Dunster basement or amid a deck of playing cards.

Gore would leave Cambridge at night for one reason: to court Tipper, who was then a student at Boston University.

By all accounts, the two fell deeply in love, very quickly. Consequently, as his Harvard years unfolded, Gore spent less and less of his free time with his roommates.

"Gore had a steady girlfriend," says Kapetan. "His weekends were...you know..."

Tending the Farm

Through his four years at Harvard, Gore would return home to Tennessee as many times as he would visit his father's temporary residence in Washington.

Though he spent much of his early life in a fancy Washington, D. C. hotel--perhaps, some have said, giving him a sense of privilege--he spent most of his summer vacations in Tennessee. And nearly all of Gore's biographers, even the critical ones like Robert Zelnick, say that Gore's parents insisted that their son learn the value of working with his hands.

From the testimony of his friends, his own words now, and letters he sent to Tipper back then, it seems he struggled with the usual problems of post-adolescence--an overprotective mother and a controlling but caring father.

In a letter sent just as the summer began in 1966, Gore wrote from his Tennessee home, "The cattle party was tonight--the sale is tomorrow. It's 11 o'clock and I have to be up at 5. That's not so bad but I didn't get any sleep last night."

The letter, one of many obtained by the historian Douglas Brinkley for Talk Magazine, also shows a hint of youthful exuberance.

"Mother's having a fit about me riding the motorcycle back to Harvard," Gore noted, referring to the Honda he used to ride to visit Tipper at Boston University. "Dad's mad about my long hair. I didn't even think it was long."

His status as son of a senator did not earn him any special privileges among his friends.

"You'd have to conduct a search to find a less connected bunch of Harvard," Somerby says. "Tommy Lee Jones came from a working-class background.... By Harvard standards, [Gore] was living with the complete proletariat."

Even Gore's room wasn't spectacular. "We just looked out on a big tree," Somerby says.

Life seemed idyllic, perhaps, but, by 1969, no one on campus was isolated from the contentious Vietnam protests.

Openly, Gore didn't talk much about Vietnam, preferring to debate over intellectual issues. "I don't remember too much," Somerby says. "I think freshman year was a pretty non-political year for him."

Gore and his friends were aware of the heat on campus, but they stayed in their own worlds. Dunster by 1969 had become very radical, but Gore's blocking group never took part in demonstrations or protests.

Kapetan says Gore and his friends were surprised when they heard that students had occupied University Hall on April 9, demanding that the Reserve Officer Training Corps be removed from campus.

" We were all shocked. It was a major surprise," Kapetan says.

Several members of Gore's blocking group joined students who were holding a vigil for their friends inside.

"Al came down in the evening," Kapetan recalled, and with his friends, expressed wonder about the events of the day.

"None of us were sympathetic, though all of us were troubled and opposed to the war," he says.

Though against the war, Gore enlisted in 1969.

Kapetan admits he was "a little bit" surprised when he heard of the decision.

In all their conversations, Gore had never discussed the possibility of actually joining the military.

"It was news, that's all. I didn't know he was planning to do it. But then, if you reflect on it, it sort of made sense," Kapetan says.

Brinkley wrote in Talk magazine that Gore was pressured into serving because his father's re-election bid might be jeopardized by a son who didn't enlist.

Gore, wrote Brinkley, was submerged in the shadow of a domineering and powerful father.

In published interviews, Gore has admitted to feeling ambivalent about the war, and to feeling pressure from his family.

But he has also said that the decision was ultimately entirely his.

Gore graduated from Harvard and served two years as an Army journalist in Vietnam. Upon his return to the United States, he attended the Divinity School for a while, and then was hired as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean.

In 1976, he ran for Congress, beginning the political career that landed him in the vice presidency in 1992.

Gore has returned to Harvard more than a dozen times since he graduated, although not always in a political role.

Two daughters, Karenna Gore Schiff '95 and Kristin Gore '99, are also graduates. One, Sarah L. Gore '01, is an undergraduate.

Without fanfare and with little overt security, Gore helped his daughters move in and attended Freshman Parent's Weekend.

Gore knew the shortcuts around campus and knew the best places to eat in the Square--after all, he is familiar with the territory.