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Chapter One: The Long Road
In the foothills of middle Tennessee there is a little
village called Difficult. Whatever hardship that place
name was meant to convey, it could not match the
resigned lament of the nearby hamlet of Defeated, nor
the ache of lonesomeness evoked by a settlement
known as Possum Hollow. It was that kind of land,
isolated and unforgiving, if hauntingly beautiful, for the
farmers and small merchants who settled the region,
families of Scots-Irish and Anglo-Irish descent named
Hackett and Woodard, Key and Pope, Gibbs and
Scurlock, Beasley and Huffines, Silcox and Gore.
For generations one old road, Highway 70, was the
main road west and the best way out, weaving through
the hills of the Upper Cumberland past the county
seats of Carthage and Lebanon and across the barrens
of rock and cedar and flat cactus to the capital city of
Nashville. Albert Arnold Gore, then a young
superintendent of schools in rural Smith County,
regularly drove that route in the early 1930s to study at
the YMCA night law school, and to loiter at the coffee
shop of the nearby Andrew Jackson Hotel, pining for a
brilliant young waitress named Pauline LaFon who
would forgo her own law career to become his wife and
adviser and, some say, his brains.
Now on the morning of December 8, 1998, the whole
Gore family was retracing that original journey, traveling
west to Nashville through a dreary gray mist. Al Gore
Jr. made the trip in a limousine, braced by his mother,
his wife, Tipper, and their four children. His father, the
former United States senator who gave Al his name
and his life's profession, rode ahead as usual this one
last time, at the front of the funeral cortege, his body
resting within a solid cherry casket inside a black
Sayers and Scoville hearse.
Keep up, son! Keep up! The elder Gore used to bark
out as he strode briskly down the sidewalks of
Carthage or the corridors of the Capitol with young Al,
never slowing to a child's pace, determined to teach his
boy that the race went to the swift. His race was at
long last done. He had died three days earlier at age
ninety in a way that any father might wish to go: in his
own bed in the big house on the hill above the cold
Caney Fork River, his wife of sixty-one years at his
side, his only son, vice president of the United States,
holding his hand for the final six hours. Senator Gore,
as he was commonly known, seemed to linger long
enough for the arranging of all that needed to be
arranged and the saying of everything that needed to
be said. Carthage folks had become accustomed to his
occasional bouts of befuddlement in his final years, yet
he seemed sentient at the end, and his last words of
fatherly advice -- "Always do right," he reportedly
whispered -- might have been uttered with posterity in
mind. But what was the meaning of the old man's life?
That was the question the son grappled with as he rode
west through the mist down the ancestral highway,
occasionally reading something aloud as he revised the
text of a eulogy he had composed on his laptop
computer.
He had been at it for twenty-eight and a half hours
straight, since four on the morning before when he
bolted out of bed and began rummaging through a
drawer in the predawn darkness, gathering up loose
scraps of paper that he had been tossing in there for
weeks, usually after returning from his father's bedside.
On each crumpled page he had scribbled a few words
that represented something more, a family folk tale or
serious political theme -- scraps of paper that, if pieced
together, might bring ninety years back to life. He had
taken them out once before, but it was too soon after
his father's death, and he could think of nothing, not
even an outline. The second time, as he sat at the
dining room table of his farmhouse retreat across the
river from his parents' place, the words began pouring
out. My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my
life, he began, and he kept writing past dawn and
through breakfast and lunch until seven that night,
when, as he later recalled, he "showered and shaved
and grabbed a bite to eat and went down to the funeral
home for the wake and stood in line and shook hands
with the people."
Two hours later he was back at the table, writing
through the night without feeling tired, until 8:30 the
next morning when he packed up his computer,
showered and dressed again, and got his family ready
for the trip to Nashville for the first memorial service.
That Al Gore had pulled an all-nighter was
characteristic in one sense. Going back to his prep
school days at St. Albans in Washington, when he
would persuade classmates to cram for midterm
exams while devouring hamburgers past midnight at
the twenty-four-hour Little Tavern on Connecticut
Avenue, he had shown a propensity for avoiding some
subjects until finally focusing on them with seemingly
inexhaustible energy. But this eulogy represented more
than another essay test. Funerals honor the dead but
tend to reveal more about the living. In trying to tell the
world who his father was and what he meant to him, Al
Gore was explaining his sense of self as well; doubling
back on his father's life, he unavoidably encountered
many of the markings of his own unfinished biography.
Only two words on a scrap of paper were needed to
remind Gore of a story he had to include in the eulogy:
Old Peg. This was the tale his father told more than
any other, embroidering it through the years with ever
more vivid and piteous details, and though by the end
Old Peg seemed more comic fable than historical
account, the moral revealed something about the early
motivations of Senator Gore and the ambition that he
passed down to his son.
The year is 1920 and Albert Gore has just finished
eighth grade, an age when many farm children quit
their formal schooling. He lives with his parents, Allen
and Margie, along with his siblings and an orphaned
cousin on a farm in Possum Hollow about fifteen miles
from Carthage at the edge of Smith County. The Gores
moved there when Albert was five, coming down from
the Upper Cumberland hills near Granville. Albert has
been obsessed with fiddle music for years, so much so
that his classmates call him Music Gore. He has his
own $5 fiddle and one night there is a hoedown at his
parents' house and musicians venture down from the
neighboring hills, among them a one-legged traveling
mandolin player named Old Peg, who stays the night.
Albert is mesmerized by Old Peg, and the next
morning helps hitch up the harness for his horse and
buggy. "Each time he told this story, the buggy grew
more dilapidated," Al Gore, in his eulogy, said of his
father's version of the tale. "Before long it had no top;
the harness was mostly baling wire and binding twine.
He counted that scrawny horse's ribs a thousand times
for me and my sister, and then counted them many
more times for his grandchildren." All leading up to the
punch line: As they watch sorry Old Peg and his
sad-sack horse and crumbling buggy ramble down the
road and out of hearing range, Allen Gore, known for
being a dead-serious man, puts his arm around his son
and deadpans, "There goes your future, Albert."
The difficult life, if not defeated. In retelling the story at
his father's funeral, Al Gore used it not just as a
reminder of a road not taken, but of the distance this
branch of the Gore family had traveled in one
generation to reach the heights of national power.
People looking at Al Gore today see a product of the
American upper crust: a presidential contender born in
Washington, reared in a top-floor suite of a hotel along
Embassy Row, his father a senator, his mother trained
in law, the high-achieving parents grooming their prince
for political success at the finest private schools in the
East. It was as though his entire future had been laid
out in front of him on the direct route he took to school
as an adolescent, 1.9 miles up the hill of
Massachusetts Avenue from the Fairfax Hotel to St.
Albans, passing on the left along the way the grounds
of the Naval Observatory, where he would live as vice
president.
All true enough, yet misleading if considered without
the prologue in Tennessee. Gore's father could find
poetry in the hardship stories of his early days in
Possum Hollow, recalling droughts so bad that they
had to cut down trees to let cattle suck moisture from
the leaves, but most of the romance was in the telling,
not the living. He was determined to escape. "There
was but one way to go from Possum Hollow -- that was
up and out," he once said. "You couldn't get out except
by going up, and once you got out, you still were pretty
far down that pole." What is it that lifts people from
provincial obscurity? Luck seemed barely a factor in
the case of Albert Gore. His father, a strict
disciplinarian, first placed his hopes in the oldest son,
Reginald, but he had gone off to fight in World War I
and came home incapacitated, one lung destroyed by
mustard gas, leaving the family's future to Albert, who
was twelve years younger but precociously eager. The
"ethyl in my gasoline," as he once described it, was an
intense pride in achievement, something that first
overtook him at the end of the first week of first grade
when his teacher in the one-room schoolhouse in
Possum Hollow praised him for mastering the alphabet
in five days. He hungered for that sensation again and
again, and that is what led him toward education and
law and politics -- and out of Possum Hollow.
During his late teens he was the only member of his
generation from Possum Hollow to go to college,
attending the state teachers school in Murfreesboro,
while also hauling livestock to market, raising a
tobacco crop, and selling radios door-to-door for the
furniture man in Carthage. He began teaching, long
before he had a degree, over in a one-room
schoolhouse amid the hollows of Overton County in a
place known informally as Booze, and soon became
principal in a community closer to Carthage called
Pleasant Shade, living where he could, sometimes in
the homes of his students, who took to calling him
Professor. He thought of himself first as a teacher from
then on, always looking for lessons to pass along, a
pedagogical style that his son inherited, for better and
worse. Albert loved the sound of his own mellifluous
Tennessee mountain voice and seemed enthralled by
the art of speechmaking, which he had been practicing
since his Possum Hollow childhood. They would be
working the fields and his father would turn around and
Albert had disappeared and they would find him "on a
stump somewhere speaking to an imaginary crowd,"
recalled Donald Lee Hackett, an old family friend.
The first politician Al Gore mentioned in the eulogy to
his father was a former congressman from middle
Tennessee who "made all the families in this part of the
country proud" by becoming secretary of state under
Franklin D. Roosevelt and winning the Nobel Peace
Prize. For anyone seeking to understand the origins of
Gore's political personality, routinely characterized as
stiff and oddly formal, there are clues to be found in the
direct line that traces back through the family to their
political hero, Cordell Hull. During Hull's teenage years
in the Upper Cumberland hills, he often "ran the river"
with Allen Gore, floating logs down the Caney Fork and
Cumberland toward Nashville and taking a steamboat
back. Albert Gore grew up hearing his father's stories
about those days and watching Hull's political rise, and
wanted nothing more than to be like him. When he was
teaching in Pleasant Shade he often drove twelve miles
down to Carthage at the end of the day if he heard that
the congressman -- Judge Hull to his constituents --
was back in town. After sifting through his mail while
eating a late lunch, Hull would sit under a shade tree
on the front lawn of the Smith County Courthouse and
talk with the checkers players. Albert Gore, hovering
close by, listened intently and came away "greatly
impressed."
