Al Gore

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.
45th Vice President of the United States
In office January 20, 1993 – January 20, 2001
President	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	Dan Quayle
Succeeded by	Dick Cheney
Incumbent
Assumed office November 7, 2000
In office January 3, 1985 – January 2, 1993
Preceded by	Howard Baker
Succeeded by	Harlan Mathews
In office January 3, 1983 – January 3, 1985
Preceded by	Robin Beard
Succeeded by	Bart Gordon
Born	March 31 1948 (1948-03-31) Washington, D.C.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" A. Gore
Religion	Baptist (formerly Southern Baptist)
Signature

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) was the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore also served in the House of Representatives (1977–1985) and the U. S. Senate (1985–1993), representing Tennessee. Gore was the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 election, ultimately losing to the Republican candidate George W. Bush in spite of winning the popular vote. A legal controversy over the Florida election recount was eventually settled in favor of Bush by the Supreme Court. A prominent environmental activist, Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for the "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." He also starred in the Academy Award - winning documentary on the topic of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007, Gore helped to organize the July 7 benefit concert for global warming, Live Earth.

Gore subsequently became chairman of the Emmy Award-winning American television channel Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a director on the board of Apple Inc., an unofficial advisor to Google's senior management, chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, and a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group. Despite Gore's major contributions to American political life and the private world of business, he most likely will be remembered as a prominent environmental activist raising global consciousness about the dangers of global warming. It has been said that in his post-Vice-Presidential career, having apparently embraced a career outside politics with no intention of contesting high office again, Gore is more comfortable in his own skin.

Background

Albert Gore, Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., to Albert Gore, Sr., a U.S. Representative (1939–1944, 1945–1953) and Senator (1953–1971) from Tennessee and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. He divided his childhood between Washington and Carthage, Tennessee as a boy. During the school year, the family lived in a hotel in Washington, but during summer vacations Gore worked on the family farm in Carthage, where the Gores grew hay and tobacco and raised cattle. He had an elder sister, Nancy Gore Hunger, who died of lung cancer in 1984.

Gore was an honors student at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. He attended Harvard University and graduated with a B.A. in government (cum laude) in June 1969. Gore's senior thesis at Harvard was regarding the impact of television on the conduct of the presidency. This thesis essentially stated that television had an inherent bias towards individuals over institutions which would bring more attention to the president than the other branches of governments. The thesis furthermore argued that the ability to communicate well visually was becoming crucial to governing.

In 1970, Gore married Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson (known as Tipper), whom he had first met at a party the night of his [high school] graduation. They have four [[children]: Karenna, Kristin, Sarah, and Albert III; and three grandchildren: Wyatt Gore Schiff, Anna Hunger Schiff, and Oscar Aitcheson Schiff. The Gores reside in Nashville, Tennessee.

Vietnam War

Gore as a field reporter in Vietnam

Gore opposed the Vietnam War and could have avoided serving overseas by accepting a spot in the National Guard that a friend of his family had reserved for him, or by other means of avoiding the draft. Gore has stated that his sense of civic duty compelled him to serve in some capacity. He enlisted in the United States Army on August 7, 1969. After basic training at Fort Dix, Gore was assigned as a military journalist writing for The Army Flier, the base newspaper at Fort Rucker. With seven months remaining in his enlistment, Gore was shipped to Vietnam, arriving on January 2, 1971.

Gore said in 1988 that his experience in Vietnam:

"...didn't change my conclusions about the war being a terrible mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself, really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for."

Journalism and graduate study

Gore's father would later recall that, "the war, combined with his own campaign defeat and the Watergate scandals, turned his son temporarily against a political career." Thus, after returning from Vietnam (receiving a non-essential personnel honorable discharge two months early), Gore turned to journalism and divinity school at Vanderbilt University. He attended the program from 1971–1972 and his goal was to explore "the spiritual issues that were most important to me at the time." He also worked part time as a reporter for The Tennessean, a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee on the night shift. He would eventually spend five years as a reporter for The Tennessean. His investigations of possible corruption among members of Nashville's Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses. After completing the one year on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, he left the divinity school to focus on journalism full time. A few years later, he studied law at Vanderbilt. He attended law school from 1974–1976 but did not graduate, instead deciding in 1976 to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Political career

Congressional service

At the end of February 1976, 4th District congressman Joe L. Evins unexpectedly announced his retirement from the seat in which he had succeeded Albert Gore, Sr. in 1953. Within hours after Tennessean Publisher John Seigenthaler called him to tell him the announcement was forthcoming, Gore decided to quit law school and run for the United States House of Representatives:

Gore narrowly won the Democratic primary, then ran unopposed in the general election and was elected to his first Congressional post at the age of 28.

He was re-elected to the House three times, in 1978, 1980, and 1982. In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the United States Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker. Gore served as a Senator from Tennessee until 1993, when he became Vice President. While in Congress, Gore was a member a number of committees including : Senate Armed Services, House Intelligence, Commerce, Science and Transportation, Rules and Administration, and Governmental Affairs.

In the late 1980s, Gore introduced the Gore Bill, which was later passed as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.

Gore clarified his positions as a senator with regard to the Gulf War (particularly the events before and after it) during a speech he gave on September 29, 1992. In it, he stated that while a senator, he twice attempted to get the U.S. government to pull the plug on support to Saddam Hussein, citing Hussein's use of poison gas, support of terrorism, and his burgeoning nuclear program, but was opposed both times by the Reagan and Bush administrations. In the wake of the Al-Anfal Campaign, during which Hussein staged deadly mustard and nerve gas attacks on Kurdish Iraqis, Gore cosponsored the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, which would have cut all assistance to Iraq. The bill was defeated in part due to intense lobbying of Congress by the Reagan-Bush White House and a veto threat from President Reagan.

1988 Presidential election

Gore ran for President in the 1988 United States presidential election. He campaigned as a "Southern Centrist" whose main opposition was Jesse Jackson. On Super Tuesday he won Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Nevada, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Gore eventually dropped out of the democratic race which went to Michael Dukakis.

Vice Presidency (1993–2001)

Vice President Gore with President Bill Clinton walking along a colonnade at the White House.

Bill Clinton chose Gore to be his running mate for the 1992 United States presidential election on July 9, 1992. Gore accepted the position after previously choosing not to run for President. On April 3, 1989, his six-year-old son Albert was nearly killed in an automobile accident while leaving the Baltimore Orioles' opening day game. Because of the resulting lengthy healing process, Gore chose to stay near him during the recovery instead of laying the foundation for a 1992 presidential primary campaign (it was during this time period that he wrote Earth in the Balance). Gore was inaugurated as the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993. Clinton and Gore were re-elected to a second term in the 1996 election.

As Vice President, Gore promoted the development of what he referred to as the Information Superhighway. In addition, during the Clinton-Gore administration, the U.S. economy expanded according to David Greenberg (professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University) who argued that "by the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged."

In 1996, Gore was criticized for attending an event at the Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California. In an interview on NBC's Today the following year, he stated that, "I did not know that it was a fund-raiser. I knew it was a political event, and I knew there were finance people that were going to be present, and so that alone should have told me, 'This is inappropriate and this is a mistake; don't do this.' And I take responsibility for that. It was a mistake." In March 1997, Vice President Gore also had to explain certain fund-raising calls he made to solicit funds for the Democratic Party for the 1996 election. At a news conference, Gore responded, "My counsel advises me that there is no controlling, legal authority or case that says that there was any violation of law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our re-election campaign. ... I never asked for a contribution from anyone who was in a federal building. And all of the calls that I made were charged to the DNC."

2000 Presidential election

After two terms as Vice President, Gore ran for President in the 2000 United States Presidential election, selecting Senator Joe Lieberman to be his vice-presidential running mate. Gore's policies had changed substantially from his 1988 Presidential campaign when he ran as a Southern Centrist, reflecting his eight years as Vice President.

On election night, news networks first called Florida for Gore, later retracted the projection, and then called Florida for Bush, before finally retracting that projection as well. This led to the Florida election recount, a move to further examine the Florida results. The Florida recount was stopped a few weeks later by the Supreme Court of the United States. In the ruling, Bush v. Gore, the Florida recount was called unconstitutional and that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline, effectively ending the recounts. This 7-2 vote ruled that the standards the Florida Supreme Court provided for a recount as unconstitutional due to violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and further ruled 5-4 that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline.

This case ordered an end to recounting underway in selected Florida counties, effectively giving George W. Bush a 534-vote victory in Florida and consequently Florida's 27 electoral votes and the presidency. The results of the decision led to Gore winning the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes nationwide, but receiving 266 electoral votes to Bush's 271 (one DC Elector abstained). Gore strongly disagreed with the Court's decision, but decided "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

The election was one of the most controversial in recent American history.

Presidential run speculation

Initially, Al Gore was a potential candidate for the 2004 Presidential Election leading to the creation of the bumper sticker "Re-elect Gore in 2004!" On December 16, 2002, however, Gore announced that he would not run in 2004, stating, "I personally have the energy and drive and ambition to make another campaign, but I don't think it's the right thing for me to do [...] I think that a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would in some measure distract from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about."

In July 2004, Gore opened the 2004 Democratic National Convention stating, "Let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure not only that the Supreme Court does not pick the next President, but also that this President is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court."

Gore was not a declared candidate in the 2008 presidential election. However, as he did not reject the possibility of future involvement in politics, the prospect of a Gore candidacy became the topic of public discussion and speculation throughout 2007. There were also grassroots draft campaigns including one group which considered a write-in campaign for the New Hampshire primary on January 8, 2008, as well as a number of web-based organizations encouraging him to run.

The release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and its subsequent acclaim increased Gore's popularity among progressives. After An Inconvenient Truth was nominated for an Academy Award, Donna Brazile (Gore's campaign chairwoman from the 2000 campaign) speculated on the possibility that Gore might announce a possible presidential candidacy for the 2008 election. During the award ceremony, Gore and actor Leonardo DiCaprio shared the stage to speak about the "greening" of the ceremony itself. Gore began to give a speech that appeared to be leading up to an announcement that he would run for president. However, background music drowned him out and he was escorted offstage, implying that it was a rehearsed gag, which he later acknowledged. Later that evening, his film won the Academy Award and speculation increased about his possible run. Some speculated that Gore may have come out of a brokered 2008 Democratic National Convention as a "compromise candidate" (perhaps with Obama or Clinton as VP) if the party decided it cannot nominate either of the current candidates. Gore responded to this speculation in a March 30, 2008 interview with 60 Minutes in which he stated that he continued to maintain a neutral position on the subject of the election and is "not applying for the job of broker." On June 16, 2008, one week after Hillary Clinton had suspended her campaign, Gore endorsed Obama in a speech given in Detroit, Michigan.

Gore repeated his neutrality eight years later during the Democratic presidential primaries of 2016 until endorsing Hillary Clinton on July 25, 2016, the first day of that year's Democratic National Convention.

Environmental issues

Gore was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of climate change, holding the first congressional hearings on the subject in the late 1970s." He also starred in the Academy Award-winning 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. The film documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns of dire environmental consequences if people and industries do not make immediate changes to their behavior.

Gore receives the Nobel Peace Prize in the city hall of Oslo, December 10, 2007

Gore has also been criticized by those who argue that he maintains carbon neutrality by purchasing carbon credits from Generation Investment Management, a company for which he serves as Chairman. In response, a spokesman for Generation stated that "Gore is not profiting from his crusade against global warming" and that Gore does not purchase carbon credits from Generation. Instead, Generation purchases carbon credits from third party providers such as the Carbon Neutral Company to offset the personal emissions of all employees and their families, including Gore's. He also argued that Generation does not sell carbon credits, nor does it develop them—rather, they voluntarily purchase credits from others on behalf of employees. Other critics accuse him of attempting to make a huge profit from his global warming activism. However, Gore denied money motivates him to fight global warming.

Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri (Delhi, India). The award was given "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" on October 12, 2007.

Gore's An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, a sequel to his 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film documents his continuing efforts to battle climate change.

Internet and technology

Gore has been involved with the development of the Internet since the 1970s, first as a Congressman and later as Senator and Vice-President. His High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (often referred to as the Gore Bill) was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway."

In a March 9, 1999 interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Gore stated, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." This statement was often misquoted by media outlets and led to the creation of a widely spread urban legend that Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet."

Gore has been a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc. since 2003 and serves as a Senior Advisor to Google Inc.

Gore's 2007 book, The Assault on Reason is an analysis of what he calls the "emptying out of the marketplace of ideas" in civic discourse, which, according to Gore, is due to the influence of electronic media, especially television, and which endangers American democracy; but he also expresses the belief that the Internet can revitalize and ultimately "redeem the integrity of representative democracy."

Private citizen

General

In the summer of 1999 Gore and his son summited Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Gore has been involved in education on a number of levels. He taught at four universities in 2001 as a visiting professor (Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, Middle Tennessee State University, and UCLA. He was also elected an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2007 and was inducted in a ceremony in October 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Finally, Concordia University awarded Gore an honorary doctorate on March 22, 2007 during the Youth Action Montreal's Youth Summit on Climate Change in Quebec, Canada.

Political activism

On September 23, 2002, in a speech before the Commonwealth Club, Gore criticized President George W. Bush and Congress for what he claimed was their rush to war prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq. In it, Gore alleged that the war was a risk to America's reputation in the world, and questioned the legality of the Bush Doctrine.

In September 2005, Gore chartered two aircraft in order to evacuate 270 evacuees from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was highly critical of the government and federal response in the days after the hurricane. On January 16, 2006, Gore delivered a speech criticizing President Bush's use of domestic wiretaps without a warrant.

Legacy

Al Gore left a permanent imprint in the world of politics, serving in both houses of the U.S. Congress, becoming the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States, and running for president in the 2000 election, winning the popular vote yet losing by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. Yet, history may best remember Gore for his raising global awareness about the dangers of climatic change, in particular, global warming. In his post-political role of environmental activist, Gore won accolades in both the scientific world (a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for the "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change") and popular culture (starring in an Academy Award-winning documentary on the topic of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.) In 2007, Gore helped to organize the July 7 benefit concert for global warming, Live Earth. Indeed, if Gore's warnings about the danger of global warming prove true, then his stature as an environmentalist will surely rise. It has been said that in his post-Vice-Presidential career, having apparently embraced a career outside politics with no intention of contesting high office again, Gore is more comfortable in his own skin.

Other honors and awards

Gore won a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV in 2007, a Webby Award in 2005, and the Prince of Asturias Award in 2007 for International Cooperation.

Select Publications

• The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Random House. 2013. ISBN 978-0812992946
• Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. New York, NY: Rodale Books, 2008. ISBN 1594867348
• Our Purpose: The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture 2007. Rodale Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1605299907
• The Assault on Reason. New York, NY: Penguin, 2007. ISBN 1594201226
• An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York, NY: Rodale Press, 2006. ISBN 9781594865671
• Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family (with Tipper Gore). New York: Owl Henry Holt. 2002. ISBN 978-0805074505
• The Spirit of Family (with Tipper Gore). New York: H. Holt. 2002. ISBN 978-0805068948
• From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books. 2001. ISBN 978-1589635715
• Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. ISBN 9780395578216

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Cockburn, Alexander, and Jeffrey St. Clair. Al Gore: A User's Manual. London, UK; New York, NY: Verso, 2000. ISBN 9781859848036
• Edwards, George C.III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry. Government in America: People, politics, and policy. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2006. ISBN 9780321292544
• Gore, Al. The Assault on Reason. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2007. ISBN 9781594201226
• Maraniss, David, and Ellen Nakashima. The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000. ISBN 9780743204118
• Turque, Bill. Inventing Al Gore: A Biography. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN 9780395883235

External links

All links retrieved June 17, 2023.

• Transcript: Former Vice President Gore's Speech on Constitutional Issues, January, 2006.
• Remarks of Former Vice President Al Gore to the Democratic National Convention, 2004.
• Official website.

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