Al Gore

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American former 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 the 2000 presidential election, losing to Republican nominee George W. Bush.

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. As of 2025, 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 while 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 (jointly with the IPCC) 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.

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.

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.

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 [all-male] 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

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.

Gore began serving in the U.S. Congress at the age of 28 and stayed there for the next 16 years, serving in both the House (1977–1985) and the Senate (1985–1993). Gore spent many weekends in Tennessee, working with his constituents.

At the end of February 1976, U.S. Representative Joe L. Evins unexpectedly announced his retirement from Congress, making Tennessee's 4th congressional district seat, to which he had succeeded Albert Gore Sr. in 1953, open. Within hours after The Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler Sr. called him to tell him the announcement was forthcoming, Gore decided to quit law school and run for the House of Representatives:

Gore's abrupt decision to run for the open seat surprised even himself; he later said that "I didn't realize myself I had been pulled back so much to it." The news came as a "bombshell" to his wife. Tipper Gore held a job in The Tennessean's photo lab and was working on a master's degree in psychology, but she joined in her husband's campaign (with assurance that she could get her job at The Tennessean back if he lost). By contrast, Gore asked his father to stay out of his campaign: "I must become my own man," he explained. "I must not be your candidate."

Gore won the 1976 Democratic primary for the district with "32 percent of the vote, three percentage points more than his nearest rival", and was opposed by only an independent candidate in the election, recording 94 percent of the overall vote. He went on to win the next three elections, in 1978, 1980 and 1982, where "he was unopposed twice and won 79 percent of the vote the other time". In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. He was "unopposed in the Democratic Senatorial primary and won the general election going away", despite the fact that Republican President Ronald Reagan swept Tennessee in his reelection campaign the same year. Gore defeated Republican senatorial nominee Victor Ashe, subsequently the mayor of Knoxville, and the Republican-turned-Independent, Ed McAteer, founder of the Christian right Religious Roundtable organization that had worked to elect Reagan as president in 1980.

During his time in Congress, Gore was considered a moderate, once referring to himself as a "raging moderate", opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment of silence in schools, and voting against a ban on interstate sales of guns. In 1981, Gore was quoted as saying with regard to homosexuality, "I think it is wrong", and "I don't pretend to understand it, but it is not just another normal optional life style." In his 1984 Senate race, Gore said when discussing homosexuality, "I do not believe it is simply an acceptable alternative that society should affirm." He also said that he would not take campaign funds from gay rights groups. Although he maintained a position against homosexuality and gay marriage in the 1980s, Gore said in 2008 that he thinks "gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women...to join together in marriage." His position as a moderate (and on policies related to that label) shifted later in life after he became Vice President and ran for president in 2000.

In 1988, Gore sought the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States. Gore carried seven states in the primaries, finishing third overall in a field that included Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, then Senator Joe Biden (who would later become Vice President and then President), Gary Hart, Congressman Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon and Jesse Jackson. Dukakis eventually won the Democratic nomination and went on to lose in a landslide to George H. W. Bush in the general election. Although Gore initially denied that he intended to run, his candidacy was the subject of speculation: "National analysts make Sen. Gore a long-shot for the Presidential nomination, but many believe he could provide a natural complement for any of the other candidates: a young, attractive, moderate Vice Presidential nominee from the South. He currently denies any interest, but he carefully does not reject the idea out of hand." At the time, he was 39 years old, making him the "youngest serious Presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy".

CNN noted that, "in 1988, for the first time, 12 southern states would hold their primaries on the same day, dubbed 'Super Tuesday'. Gore thought he would be the only serious Southern contender; he had not counted on Jesse Jackson." Jackson defeated Gore in the South Carolina primary, winning, "more than half the total vote, three times that of his closest rival here, Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee". Gore next placed great hope on Super Tuesday where they split the Southern vote: Jackson winning Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia; Gore winning Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Nevada, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Gore was later endorsed by New York City Mayor Ed Koch who made statements in favor of Israel and against Jackson. These statements cast Gore in a negative light, leading voters away from Gore who received only 10% of the vote in the New York primary. Gore then dropped out of the race. The New York Times said that Gore also lost support due to his attacks against Jackson, Dukakis, and others. Gore was eventually able to mend fences with Jackson, who supported the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996, and campaigned for the Gore-Lieberman ticket during the 2000 presidential election. Gore's policies changed substantially in 2000, reflecting his eight years as vice president.

Gore was initially hesitant to be Bill Clinton's running mate for the 1992 United States presidential election; after clashing with the George H. W. Bush administration over global warming issues, he decided to accept the offer. Clinton stated that he chose Gore due to his foreign policy experience, work with the environment, and commitment to his family. Clinton's choice was criticized as unconventional because rather than picking a running mate who would diversify the ticket, Clinton chose a fellow Southerner who shared his political ideologies and who was nearly the same age as Clinton. The Washington Bureau Chief for The Baltimore Sun, Paul West, later suggested that "Al Gore revolutionized the way Vice Presidents are made. When he joined Bill Clinton's ticket, it violated the old rules. Regional diversity? Not with two Southerners from neighboring states. Ideological balance? A couple of left-of-center moderates. ... And yet, Gore has come to be regarded by strategists in both parties as the best vice presidential pick in at least 20 years."

Clinton and Gore accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention on July 17, 1992. Known as the Baby Boomer Ticket and the Fortysomething Team, The New York Times noted that if elected, Clinton and Gore, at ages 46 and 44 respectively, would be the "youngest team to make it to the White House in the country's history". Gore called the ticket "a new generation of leadership". The ticket increased in popularity after the candidates traveled with their wives, Hillary and Tipper, on a "six-day, 1,000-mile bus ride, from New York to St. Louis". Al Gore would participate in one vice-presidential debate against Vice President Dan Quayle, and Admiral James Stockdale. That debate, as of 2023, was the only televised Vice-Presidential debate with more than two participating candidates. The Clinton-Gore ticket beat the Bush-Quayle and Perot-Stockdale tickets with 43% of the popular vote, versus their 38% and 19%, respectively. Clinton and Gore received 370 electoral votes, versus the incumbent ticket's 168, and Perot's 0.

Al Gore served as vice president during the Clinton administration. Clinton and Gore were inaugurated on January 20, 1993. At the beginning of the first term, they developed a "two-page agreement outlining their relationship". Clinton committed himself to regular lunch meetings; he recognized Gore as a principal adviser on nominations and appointed some of Gore's chief advisers to key White House staff positions. Clinton involved Gore in decision-making to an unprecedented degree for a vice president. Through their weekly lunches and daily conversations, Gore became the president's "indisputable chief adviser".

Gore had to compete with First Lady Hillary for President Clinton's influence, starting when she was appointed to the health-care task force without Gore's consultation. Vanity Fair wrote that President Clinton's "failure to confide in his vice president was a telling sign of the real pecking order", and reported "it was an open secret that some of Hillary's advisers...nurtured dreams that Hillary, not Gore, would follow Bill in the presidency".

Gore had a particular interest in reducing "waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and advocated trimming the size of the bureaucracy and the number of regulations". During the Clinton administration, the U.S. economy expanded; according to David Greenberg (professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University), "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." According to Leslie Budd, author of E-economy: Rhetoric or Business Reality, this economic success was due, in part, to Gore's continued role as an "Atari Democrat", promoting the development of information technology, which led to the dot-com boom. (c. 1995–2001).

Clinton and Gore entered office planning to finance research that would "flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry". Their overall aim was to fund the development of, "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications and national computer networks. Also earmarked [were] a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage." Critics claimed that the initiatives would "backfire, bloating Congressional pork and creating whole new categories of Federal waste".

During the election and his term as vice president, Gore popularized the term "Information Superhighway", which became synonymous with the Internet, and he was involved in the creation of the National Information Infrastructure. Gore first discussed his plans to emphasize information technology at UCLA on January 11, 1994, in a speech at The Superhighway Summit. On March 29, 1994, Gore made the inaugural keynote to a Georgetown University symposium on governmental reform with a lecture entitled, "The new job of the federal executive". Gore spoke on how technology was changing the nature of government, public administration, and management in general, noting that while in the past deep hierarchical structures were necessary to manage large organizations, technology was offering more accurate and streamlined access to information, thus facilitating flatter management structures. He was involved in a number of projects including NetDay '96 and 24 Hours in Cyberspace. The Clinton–Gore administration also launched the first official White House website in 1994 and subsequent versions through 2000. During 1993 and early 1994, Gore was tapped by the administration to advocate for the adoption of the Clipper Chip, a technology developed by the National Security Agency designed to provide for law enforcement access to encrypted communications. After political and technical objections, the initiative was essentially dropped.

During a speech that he gave on June 16, 1999, in Carthage, Tennessee, Gore formally announced his candidacy for president. His major theme was the need to strengthen the American family. He was introduced by his eldest daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff. In making the speech, Gore also distanced himself from Bill Clinton, who he stated had lied to him. Gore was "briefly interrupted" by AIDS protesters claiming Gore was working with the pharmaceutical industry to prevent access to generic medicines for poor nations and chanting "Gore's greed kills". Additional speeches were also interrupted by the protesters. Gore responded: "I love this country. I love the First Amendment ... Let me say in response to those who may have chosen an inappropriate way to make their point, that actually the crisis of AIDS in Africa is one that should command the attention of people in the United States and around the world." Gore also issued a statement saying that he supported efforts to lower the cost of the AIDS drugs, provided that they "are done in a way consistent with international agreements".

While Bill Clinton's job-approval ratings were around 60%, an April 1999 study by the Pew Research Center for the People found that respondents suffered from "Clinton fatigue" where they were "tired of all the problems associated with the Clinton administration" including the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment. Texas Governor and likely Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush was leading Gore 54% to 41% in polls during that time. Gore's advisers believed that the "Lewinsky scandal and Bill's past womanizing...alienated independent voters—especially the soccer moms, who stood for traditional values". Consequently, Gore's presidential campaign "veered too far in differentiating himself from Bill and his record and had difficulty taking advantage of the Clinton administration's legitimate successes". In addition, Hillary's candidacy for the open Senate seat in New York exacerbated the "three-way tensions evident in the White House since 1993", as "not only was Hillary unavailable as a campaigner, she was poaching top Democratic fund-raisers and donors who would normally concentrate on the vice president". In one instance "Hillary insisted on being invited [to a Los Angeles fundraiser for the vice president]—over the objections of the event's organizers", where the First Lady "shocked the vice president's supporters by soliciting donations for herself in front of Tipper".

Gore faced an early challenge by former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. Bradley was the only candidate to oppose Gore and was considered a "fresh face" for the White House. Gore challenged Bradley to a series of debates which took the form of "town hall" meetings. Gore went on the offensive during these debates leading to a drop in the polls for Bradley. In the Iowa caucus the unions pledged their support to Gore, despite Bradley spending heavily in that state, and Bradley was much embarrassed by his two to one defeat there. Gore went on to capture the New Hampshire primary 53-47%, which had been a must-win state for Bradley. Gore then swept all of the primaries on Super Tuesday while Bradley finished a distant second in each state. On March 9, 2000, after failing to win any of the first 20 primaries and caucuses in the election process, Bradley withdrew his campaign and endorsed Gore. Gore eventually went on to win every primary and caucus and, in March 2000 even won the first primary election ever held over the Internet, the Arizona Presidential Primary. By then, he secured the Democratic nomination. As of 2023, Al Gore remains the only presidential candidate in American history who was not the incumbent president to win every single contest in his or her party primary.

On August 13, 2000, Gore announced that he had selected Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his vice presidential running mate. Lieberman became "the first person of the Jewish faith to run for the nation's second-highest office". Many pundits saw Gore's choice of Lieberman as further distancing him from the scandals of the Clinton White House. Gore's daughter, Karenna, together with her father's former Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones, officially nominated Gore as the Democratic presidential candidate during the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California. Gore accepted his party's nomination and spoke about the major themes of his campaign, stating in particular his plan to extend Medicare to pay for prescription drugs and to work for a sensible universal health-care system. Soon after the convention, Gore hit the campaign trail with running mate Joe Lieberman. Gore and Bush were deadlocked in the polls. They participated in three televised debates. While both sides claimed victory after each, Gore was critiqued as either too stiff, too reticent, or too aggressive in contrast to Bush.

There was talk of a potential run in the 2000 presidential race by Gore as early as January 1998. Gore discussed the possibility of running during a March 9, 1999, interview with CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. In response to Wolf Blitzer's question: "Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley", Gore responded: