I always liked a comment by our mutual friend, John Lahr: “Gore pisses from a great height.” He did, showering all below who had dared to seize the reins of power without a sense of public virtue. He had a strained relationship with JFK, having been a groomsman at the wedding with his distant relative, Jacqueline. (One could write a whole book on his difficult relations with the Kennedy clan, especially RFK, whom Gore found especially distasteful.) In the late sixties and early seventies, he singled out Richard Nixon for particular scorn, and could do marvelous imitations of Tricky Dick, making his jowls quiver as he spoke. Ronald Reagan was another godsend for a born mimic, and Gore often referred to him as “our acting president.” While he seemed to like the Clintons – Hillary was a personal friend – he found George W. Bush a perfect target, and he lashed out after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, writing blistering pamphlets that castigated the White House for its willingness to trade American blood for oil in the Middle East.He learned his politics early, at the side of his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore, who raised him. (Gore’s parents had divorced, and he was a lonely boy who didn’t get along well with his alcoholic mother.) I remember, perhaps fifteen years ago, walking around Gore’s old mansion on Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C. It had become an embassy by then, but its current inhabitants let us wander around freely. Gore showed me where he slept, where his grandfather’s huge library was. He recalled reading late into the night in that room, working his way through Greek and Roman history, through the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. He had a terrifying recall of favorite passages, and would recite them to me, over and again. He showed me where he crouched at a small desk under the eaves and wrote his first poems and stories – he originally thought he might like to be a poet, although his family wanted him to enter the family business: national politics.