Gore A Hard-Won Sense of Ease

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Q. How do you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret Service agents?

A. Gore's the stiff one.

These days, Tennessee Senator Al Gore -- the bottom half of Bill Clinton's Democratic baby-boomer ticket -- freely retells this joke about his wooden campaign style in his ill-fated 1988 presidential race. The self-deprecating humor is a reflection of Gore's hard-won sense of ease, the tempering of the fires of ambition, the self-awareness that comes with staring tragedy in the face and surviving.

It was April 1989, and Gore, already mulling another presidential race, was leaving Baltimore's Memorial Stadium after taking his six-year-old son Albert III to watch the Orioles. Suddenly the boy darted out of his father's grasp -- and into the postgame traffic. A car struck young Albert, throwing him 30 feet into the air. By the time Gore reached his son's side, the child was lying in a gutter, without breath or pulse, suffering from massive internal injuries. The Senator just held his only son and prayed.

The boy recovered, but it took months and extensive surgery at Johns Hopkins ) Hospital in Baltimore. Gore moved into his son's hospital room for those first few weeks and tried to maintain his Senate duties from the child's bedside. "It was a terrible jolt for Al, a defining moment," says a longtime friend. "Al hasn't been the same since."

He eventually abandoned plans to run for President in 1992. As Gore explained in an interview with TIME last week, "It was a shattering experience for our whole family. And yet it has been in so many ways a great blessing for us. I never thought at the time I'd ever be able to say that. It completely changed my outlook on life."

In a way, this new outlook may be responsible for Gore's place on the ticket. Clinton and Gore -- the new gold dust twins of the Democratic Party -- had been eyeing each other warily for years. Only 19 months apart in age (Gore, 44, is the younger), they have been in many ways so similar, so driven, so high-test-scores smart, so blue-suit sincere that it once seemed inevitable that their ambitions for the White House would collide. Consider the dualities: both are new-ideas moderates with a policy wonk's love of the intricacies of complex issues; both boast blue-ribbon educational pedigrees and are not ashamed to show it; both are Southern Baptists who married strong, assertive blond women; and both, having achieved political success early in life, have never made a secret of their zeal for higher office. In fact, Clinton almost jumped into the 1988 presidential race to vie with Gore for Southern support.

Given the potential for conflict, it is surprising that personal chemistry between the two men clinched the vice-presidential nod for Gore. "The big factor was the personal and political comfort level Bill felt with Gore," explains a senior Clinton adviser. "Every time, Bill would come away from a conversation with Gore and say, 'He's so smart.'

There was no blinding flash of light, no excited cry of "Eureka!" when Clinton made his decision late Wednesday night at the end of a two-hour meeting. The Democratic nominee had been listening to pro-and-con discussions on the merits of the six finalists (Gore, Congressman Lee Hamilton and Senators Harris Wofford, Bob Kerrey, Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham). Suddenly, without fanfare, Clinton said, "I think I'm ready. I think I'm going to ask Senator Gore to run."

That low-key moment brought to an end a search process that began with 40 names supplied by Warren Christopher and his team. In late June, Clinton mused ^ aloud to an old friend about whether the ultimate hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf, might be available. The name of New York Governor Mario Cuomo continually wafted on the periphery of the deliberations. Christopher recounts that he had only "an incomplete discussion" by phone with a harried Cuomo, who never clarified whether he was willing to be considered. Others suggest Clinton believed to the last that if pressed, Cuomo would probably take a spot on the ticket.

Part of Gore's appeal is that he buttresses Clinton on his weakest flank -- the nagging questions about character. Politically it helps that Gore's wife Tipper has been crusading for years to label rock music to alert parents to obscene lyrics. Tipper and the three youngest Gore children were near center stage all during the unveiling last week of the new Democratic ticket. Such placement was not accidental. As Mickey Kantor, Clinton's campaign manager, puts it, "The more you look at Bill Clinton and Al Gore and those families standing together, the more you recognize this ticket represents new, fresh change -- action."

Gore strengthens Clinton in three other areas -- the geosphere, geopolitics and geography. As the Democratic leader on environmental issues (he headed the Senate delegation to the Rio summit and adroitly challenged Bush on global warming), Gore strengthens Clinton's shaky appeal to affluent suburbanites and West Coast voters. A thoughtful moderate on foreign policy, Gore was one of only 10 Senate Democrats to support Bush by voting to authorize the use of force to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The last time the Democrats ran with an all-border-state ticket was 1948 -- and Missouri's Harry Truman and Kentucky's Alben Barkley won the upset of the century.

Despite their affinities, Gore's background could not be more different from Clinton's. The son and namesake of a fabled three-term liberal Senator from Tennessee (the senior Albert Gore is now 84), he grew up mostly in Washington, spending his teenage years in the family suite in the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row and attending the prestigious St. Albans School. When it came time for college, Gore filled out just one application -- to Harvard. There he impressed professors who would later prove to be politically useful, most notably Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of the New Republic.

Like Clinton, Gore protested the Vietnam War -- and anguished about the political consequences of resisting the draft. But the Gore electoral career that was on the line was that of the candidate's father -- Albert senior -- who also opposed the war and was facing a bitter 1970 re-election fight that he would ultimately lose. Gore was inducted into the Army in mid-1970 and ended up serving for six months in Vietnam as a reporter for military publications, a soldier who never saw a shot fired in combat.

After Vietnam, Gore joined the staff of the Nashville Tennessean, a protege of editor John Seigenthaler. Columnist Michael Kinsley captured Gore's lifelong ability to attract mentors when he described him as "an old person's idea of a young person." Gore abandoned journalism in 1976 to run for the House. A workhorse from the moment he returned to Washington in 1977, Gore still found time to play basketball regularly in the House gym with a group that included fellow Congressman Dan Quayle. By 1984, when he ran for the Senate, Gore had already made his mark as an arms-control expert.

As a fledgling presidential candidate in 1988, Gore ran credibly in the South before badly embarrassing himself by embracing New York City Mayor Ed Koch and his vendetta against Jesse Jackson in New York's pivotal primary. Gore was trying to rebuild his political image after that '88 pratfall when his son had the accident. And life for Gore changed forever.

In his son's hospital room at Johns Hopkins, Gore began writing Earth in the Balance, a rare political volume actually crafted by its author. In the book's introduction, Gore sketches out the other forces that helped alter his world view after his son's injury: "I had also just lost a presidential campaign; I had just turned forty years old. I was, in a sense, vulnerable to the change that sought me out in the middle of my life."

What Gore does not mention in the book -- and did not, in fact, publicly reveal until last week -- is the pivotal role psychological counseling played in helping him and his wife recover from their boy's brush with death. The hospital told them, Gore recounts, "Don't be afraid to ask for family counseling." The Gores took this advice. "We grew tremendously by becoming aware of how we were dealing with it and how we were relating to one another in the midst of it," the Senator says. "I strongly recommend to any family -- undergoing an experience remotely similar to what we went through -- not to be afraid to do this." The subject is still painful for Gore, as well as politically sensitive -- and in his TIME interview he balked at revealing the duration and the precise nature of the counseling, saying, "I don't feel the need to go into a lot of details."

The political arena is not an environment that normally fosters emotional growth. When Gore was running for President in 1988, there was, despite his clear mastery of the issues, an aura of callowness about him -- a certain not- ready-for-prime-time quality. But there is the sense that his family's terrible ordeal -- and the entrance into his middle years -- have matured and perhaps softened Gore. If that is indeed the true measure of the Tennessee Senator, Gore is now prepared for a national race in ways that can never be gleaned from a briefing book.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 594 registered voters taken for TIME/CNN on July 8-9 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%

CAPTION: Who is more qualified to be President?

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington