Al Gore
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously represented Tennessee in both houses of the U.S. Congress, first as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1985, and then as a U.S. senator from 1985 to 1993. Gore was the Democratic nominee in 2000; he lost to George W. Bush despite winning the popular vote.
The son of politician Albert Gore Sr., Gore was raised in Tennessee and Washington, D.C., where he was born. After graduating from Harvard University and serving in the U.S. Army, he quit law school to run as a representative for Tennessee's 4th congressional district in 1976. Gore was re-elected three times before running for U.S. Senate in 1984, winning re-election in 1990. He was considered a moderate and an "Atari Democrat". Gore served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001, defeating then-incumbents George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle in 1992, and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1996, and was the first Democrat to serve two full terms as vice president since John Nance Garner., Gore's 1990 re-election remains the last time Democrats won a Senate election in Tennessee.
Gore was the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2000 election, in which he lost the U.S. Electoral College vote by five electoral votes to Republican nominee George W. Bush, despite winning the popular vote by 543,895 votes. The election concluded after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Bush v. Gore against a previous ruling by the Supreme Court of Florida on a re-count. He is one of five presidential candidates in American history to lose a presidential election despite winning the popular vote.
After his vice presidency ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, and his work in climate change activism earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore is the founder and chair of The Climate Reality Project, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, the since-defunct Current TV network, a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. and a senior adviser to Google. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading its climate change solutions group. He has served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He served on the Board of Directors of World Resources Institute.
Gore has received a number of awards that include the Nobel Peace Prize, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV, and a Webby Award. Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, as well as its 2017 sequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time 2007 Person of the Year. In 2008, Gore won the Dan David Prize for Social Responsibility, and in 2024 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.
Early life and education
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., as the second of two children born to Albert Gore Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from the Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore is a descendant of Scots Irish immigrants who first settled in Virginia during the mid-17th-century and moved to Tennessee after the Revolutionary War. His older sister Nancy LaFon Gore died of lung cancer in 1984.During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C. During the summer months, he worked on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle.
Gore attended St. Albans School, an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in Washington, D.C., from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. He was the captain of the football team, threw discus for the track and field team and participated in basketball, art, and government. He graduated 25th in a class of 51, applied to one college, Harvard University, and was accepted.
Harvard
Gore enrolled in Harvard College in 1965; he initially planned to major in English and write novels but later decided to major in government. On his second day on campus, he began campaigning for the freshman student government council and was elected its president. He was roommates with future actor Tommy Lee Jones in Dunster House.Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories, but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math. During his first two years, his grades placed him in the lower one-fifth of his class. During his second year, he reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool and occasionally smoking marijuana. In his junior and senior years, he became more involved with his studies, earning As and Bs. In his senior year, he took a class with oceanographer and global warming theorist Roger Revelle, who sparked Gore's interest in global warming and other environmental issues. Gore earned an A on his thesis, "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947–1969", and graduated with an A.B. cum laude in June 1969.
Gore was in college during the era of anti-Vietnam War protests. He was opposed to the war but disagreed with the tactics of the student protest movement, and believed it to be juvenile and misguided to use a private university as a venue to vent anger at the war. He and his friends did not participate in Harvard demonstrations. John Tyson, a former roommate, recalled, "We distrusted these movements a lot... We were a pretty traditional bunch of guys, positive for civil rights and women's rights but formal, transformed by the social revolution to some extent but not buying into something we considered detrimental to our country." Gore helped his father write an anti-war address to the 1968 Democratic National Convention but stayed with his parents in their hotel room during the violent protests.
Military service and early career (1969–1976)
Military service
When Gore graduated in 1969, he immediately became eligible for the military draft. His father, a vocal anti-Vietnam War critic, was facing re-election in 1970. Gore eventually decided that enlisting in the Army would be the best course between serving his country, his personal values and interests. Although nearly all of his Harvard classmates avoided the draft and service in Vietnam, Gore believed if he found a way around military service, he would be handing an issue to his father's Republican opponent. According to Gore's Senate biography, "He appeared in uniform in his father's campaign commercials, one of which ended with his father advising: 'Son, always love your country'." Despite this, Gore Sr. lost the election to an opponent who vastly out-fundraised him. This opponent was later found by the Watergate commission to have accepted illegal money from Nixon's operatives.Gore has said that his other reason for enlisting was that he did not want someone with fewer options than he to go in his place. Actor Tommy Lee Jones, a former college housemate, recalled Gore saying that "if he found a fancy way of not going, someone else would have to go in his place". His Harvard advisor, Richard Neustadt, also stated that Gore decided, "that he would have to go as an enlisted man because, he said, 'In Tennessee, that's what most people have to do.'" In addition, Michael Roche, Gore's editor for The Castle Courier, stated that "anybody who knew Al Gore in Vietnam knows he could have sat on his butt and he didn't."
After enlisting in August 1969, Gore returned to the anti war Harvard campus in his military uniform to say goodbye to his adviser and was "jeered" at by students. He later said he was astonished by the "emotional field of negativity and disapproval and piercing glances that... certainly felt like real hatred". Gore had basic training at Fort Dix from August to October, and then was assigned to be a journalist at Fort Rucker, Alabama. In April 1970, he was named Rucker's "Soldier of the Month".
His orders to be sent to Vietnam were "held up" for some time and the Gore family suspected that this was due to a fear by the Nixon administration that if something happened to him, his father would gain sympathy votes. He was finally shipped to Vietnam on January 2, 1971, after his father had lost his seat in the Senate during the 1970 Senate election, becoming one "of only about a dozen of the 1,115 Harvard graduates in the Class of '69 who went to Vietnam". Gore was stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Biên Hòa and was a journalist with The Castle Courier. He received an honorable discharge from the Army in May 1971. Of his time in the Army, Gore later stated, "I didn't do the most, or run the gravest danger. But I was proud to wear my country's uniform." He also later stated that his experience in Vietnam
Vanderbilt and journalism
Gore was "dispirited" after his return from Vietnam. The Nashville Scene later noted that "his father's defeat made service in a conflict he deeply opposed even more abhorrent to Gore. His experiences in the war zone don't seem to have been deeply traumatic in themselves; although the engineers were sometimes fired upon, Gore has said he didn't see full-scale combat. Still, he felt that his participation in the war was wrong." Although his parents wanted him to go to law school, Gore first attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for people planning secular careers. He later said he went there in order to explore "spiritual issues", and that "he had hoped to make sense of the social injustices that seemed to challenge his religious beliefs".In 1971, Gore began to work the night shift for The Tennessean as an investigative reporter. His investigations of corruption among members of Nashville's Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses. In 1974, he took a leave of absence from The Tennessean to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. His decision to become an attorney was a partial result of his time as a journalist, as he realized that, while he could expose corruption, he could not change it. Gore did not complete law school, deciding abruptly in 1976 to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives when he found out that his father's former seat in the House was about to be vacated.