June 21, 2000

AL GORE'S JOURNEY A Character Test at Harvard

On Campus Torn by 60's, Agonizing Over the Path

By MELINDA HENNEBERGER

l Gore arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1965 so sure of himself and his place in the world that he hadn't even bothered applying anywhere else. "I had the idea it was the best," he said simply, in one of several interviews about his college years. "I knew President Kennedy had gone there."

By his second day on campus, the 17-year-old Mr. Gore was out knocking on doors, in a successful campaign to become president of the freshman council.

In those days, women were not allowed in men's rooms after 11 p.m., and coats and ties were still required at dinner.

Yet all of this genteel tradition, and much of what Mr. Gore had in mind when he signed up for Jack Kennedy's Harvard, was on the way out even then. Vietnam was not a world away any more, and American involvement there was escalating constantly.

In Al Gore's sophomore year, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara visited the university to give a speech and was mobbed by screaming students who climbed on his car and rocked it while he sat inside. During his junior year, protesters organized by the Students for a Democratic Society held a recruiter for Dow, the maker of napalm, in a classroom for five hours.

In his last semester, demonstrators took over the main administration building, University Hall, only to be forced out the next day by local and state police swinging clubs and wearing riot helmets.

And exactly four years after he had first arrived, the recently graduated, recently enlisted Mr. Gore returned to campus in short hair and an Army uniform -- an inherently provocative act in militantly anti-military Cambridge in September 1969. Students in Harvard Yard jeered at the sight of him.

That moment, the moment he truly left Harvard behind, remains alive for the vice president across the decades. "It was an amazing experience," he said, "a Ralph Ellison experience in that I was the same person inside but my physical appearance conveyed a message that completely overwhelmed the message of my humanity.

"It was just an emotional field of negativity and disapproval and piercing glances that shot arrows of what certainly felt like real hatred, and I was astonished. I mean, it was no big deal in the sense that I didn't suffer as a result of it at all, but it was really educational. Really educational."

Certainly, both the freeze-frame of that man in the uniform, looking more surprised than he probably should have been, and the vice president's view of it, more than 30 years later, say a few things about Al Gore. There he was, going off to fight in a war he hated, after a solid year of agonizing which everyone who knew him believed could only have ended exactly as it did.

He had said a lot of conflicting, conflicted things to his friends, as 21-year-olds do. Sometimes, he muttered about Canada and how different things might be if his father were not a United States senator. But the conclusion, obvious to others long before he reconciled himself to going to Vietnam, was that he could never seem to stop thinking about the boys his age back in Tennessee, where he was registered for the draft.

The teenagers he had spent summers with did not have the options he and his Harvard buddies had. The guys who had worked alongside him cutting tobacco on the family farm were not thinking, Hmm, body bag or divinity school? And he kept coming back to that.

"He said that if he found a fancy way of not going, someone else would have to go in his place," recalled his college housemate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

This rings especially true in light of Mr. Gore's rigorous upbringing, a childhood in which adult notions of responsibility were constantly reinforced by his hard-working parents. It seems unlikely that their ultra-dependable only son, who carried their hopes and was made so responsible for their happiness, would ever have let someone else go to war in his place.

Nor was it in him to disappoint his parents, who apparently expected him to serve despite their own antiwar feeling.

Mr. Gore's senior thesis adviser at Harvard, the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, is pretty sure he told young Al that serving would preserve the possibility of a political career, the career both his mother and father wanted for him.

And Mr. Gore told friends it was, perversely, in going to war that he could probably best support the antiwar movement -- by helping his father, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, win re-election. The senator's stand against the war was wildly unpopular in the Volunteer State, and if his son had stayed home, he would have handed a campaign issue to his father's opponent.

Interestingly, Mr. Gore apparently believed all along that his father would lose in 1970 -- and he did. Still, the young man felt obligated to do whatever he could to help, and as he marched off to join the service seemed to feel he was sacrificing himself to two lost causes, in Vietnam and Tennessee.

Yet the final decision appears to have hinged more on Mr. Gore's sense of himself as a Tennesseean -- and as the moral man his parents had constantly prodded him to be. In the end, he was one of only about a dozen in Harvard's class of '69 who served in Vietnam.

"I remember so clearly him saying he was going to have to do it the way his fathers' constituents did it, as an enlisted man," Mr. Neustadt said.

"He'd spent enough time in Tennessee to understand morality as it applied locally, and it was a moral, not a political, judgment that 'if the regular folk have to enlist, I do, too.' "

"Certainly no other Harvard kid I knew who thought he might want to get into politics did that," Mr. Neustadt added. "All the ones that talked to me came to the conclusion that they had to serve, but they were quite happy to serve as officers."

When Mr. Gore returned to campus in his uniform, to say goodbye to Mr. Neustadt and others, he never dreamed that anyone could fail to see this, and would somehow miss that he was really one of them.

"I really didn't" see the negative reaction coming, he said in a recent interview.

"That did not occur to me. It's one of those things that's hard to see from the inside. It was just, 'I am myself and here I come. I know this place well.' "

There is much that is instantly recognizable in that picture of Al Gore at the end of his college days. He is a man who in the end probably chose the harder of two hard roads, but someone who also seems to have made that road harder than it had to be.

Freshman-Year Entertainments

As Mr. Jones put it, "It wasn't any fun to have the war in Vietnam weighing heavily on one's mind, but fun was possible, and it's fun to be 21 if you've got any brains at all."

Soon enough, Mr. Gore put the earnest student-government work of planning mixers and lodging official protests about room-cleaning behind him. He and the friends he made in Mower B, his dorm in the North Yard, pooled their record collections and listened to a lot of Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Buffalo Springfield. He played poker, house football and took up handball because his group considered squash "too Harvard."

He mostly warmed the bench for Harvard's basketball team his freshman year, too, averaging slightly less than 3 points a game. And he was forever challenging friends to all kinds of other competitions -- push-ups, swimming the Charles River, beer chugging.

Both Mr. Gore and Mr. Jones, who grew up in Texas and lives there still, recall nearly killing an elm tree near where they lived in a monthlong knife-throwing contest, "testing our ability in that backwoods skill," the vice president said.

The fact that his father was a senator was not a big deal on campus. "One thing about that university is almost everybody has a father," an important father, said Mr. Neustadt. "They recede into the distance. At another university, it might have made more of a difference."

While others might have been running from their roots, Mr. Gore was busy living through his, wearing bib overalls and subscribing to The Carthage Courier, the paper from the small Tennessee town where his family had their farm.

He hoped it might provide inspiration for the novel he was trying to write, set in Carthage and populated with folks he had known. "It meandered like the Caney Fork River," Mr. Gore said recently, spoofing his former literary aspirations. He spent hours at the typewriter, not always productively.

Mr. Jones recalled: "I remember the day push-button phones came to Harvard. There he sat in his bib overalls and a gold ball cap -- Golden Acre Seeds, Carthage. There sat Li'l Abner. And what he'd done is taught himself to play Dixie on the phone. Of course we took it right away from him."

At the end of their freshman year, Mr. Gore, Mr. Jones and a couple of other friends assembled a musical revue that they actually took on the road -- for one performance, at a Wellesley coffeehouse. "It was kind of like the Little Rascals: 'Let's put on a show!' " said Michael Kapetan, now a sculptor at the University of Michigan.

"Here at last, no longer coming soon," it said, "the Old-Time Country Panorama, featuring those old-time country musicians of note, Tommy Lee Jones and the Ben Hill County Boys."

"I was the stand-up comic," Mr. Gore said, "if you can believe that." And sure enough, there he is, billed as "the highly respected professor of animal husbandry and the curative sciences, Doctor Albert A. Gore" who "has promised to favor us with readings from the society pages of The Carthage Courier, including news on Wilber Gridley's recent trip to Bristol."

Mr. Gore does not remember the show as an unqualified success: "The women of Wellesley were in between puzzled and amused," he said. "Not quite the reaction we were shooting for."





Copyright The New York Times Al Gore opposed the Vietnam War but was not among the Harvard protesters who were evicted from University Hall on April 10, 1969, by police officers swinging clubs.

That same year, he rode a motorcycle back to school from Washington in the rain, and gave friends high-speed rides around Boston.

"I didn't like to ride on his bike," said a friend, John Tyson, now an international business consultant in Washington. "He'd try to scare you, popping gears, going 65, 70 and laughing."

As the world knows, he also smoked pot on occasion. When prodded to tell an anecdote about getting high, though, he drew the line -- the only time he did so during a number of interviews. "I hate to make light of it, I don't want to encourage it," he said.

Seeking Ideas and Insights

He started out as an English major -- until, he says, Chaucer nearly killed him -- and along with his novel, which he never finished, he enjoyed writing poetry.

He was always a reader, and Harvard nurtured the part of him that is in love with the world of ideas -- promiscuously taken, in fact, with scientific theories, mathematical concepts, great and maybe not-so-great literature. Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan turned his head in college. Later, he was enchanted by chaos theory. These days, it's the debate about whether we're part of a multiverse -- one of many universes competing in a Darwinian struggle to reproduce.

Also in college, he became a fan of Star Trek, adored the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and showed great enthusiasm for astronomy, as he still does. "It's one of the things he loves about living at the Observatory," said his oldest daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff, referring to the official vice presidential residence at the United States Naval Observatory. "At dinner parties, there's always a march to the telescope, and it always seems like he's having the most fun."

His studies did not really engage Mr. Gore until his junior year, when he took Mr. Neustadt's course about presidential decision-making. When the class re-enacted decisions made during the Cuban missile crisis, he played President Kennedy. He got his first A's that year, after a string of C's -- and even a D in biology as a sophomore, which prompted one friend to joke that having failed evolution, he was all set for a career in Tennessee politics.

When energized, though, Mr. Gore did have quite a ride academically. After taking Mr. Neustadt's course, he switched his major to government and nagged his professor into giving him a private reading course, and into overseeing his senior thesis on how television was changing the presidency.

From what he saw in class, Mr. Neustadt said, Mr. Gore "is not afraid of decisions, but not precipitous about it, either, like the early Harry Truman saying, 'How many decisions did I make today?' "

"In terms of the originality of his mind, I would probably have called him a good Group Two student, not a Group One student."

But Mr. Neustadt made clear that he was not one of the easiest graders on campus: "The brightest people I've seen in the White House were in different ways Kennedy and Johnson, and neither of them was Group One, either."

Almost as a throwaway, Mr. Neustadt added that "as intelligences go" among presidents of the 20th century, only "Teddy Roosevelt might have stood higher" than Mr. Gore -- who, by the way, received an A-minus in Mr. Neustadt's Government 154.

Yet if the challenge for George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is to prove his smarts, Mr. Gore's is precisely the opposite -- to show that he is a regular guy despite a perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some Americans seem to find intimidating, boring, or, as he himself worries, just weird.

Asked if he thinks America wants an intellectual for a president, Mr. Gore said, "I don't think book smarts are necessarily the highest qualification to lead so much as good values, good judgment, and a willingness to fight for the right thing. These things are all cartoon images anyway -- Truman was extremely well-read, for example. But if you give people the impression you're a smartypants, that's no good for sure."

Mr. Gore is keenly sensitive, though, to just such impressions, and he really does not like to talk about some of his more obscure preoccupations.

At one point in a conversation about some of the "big think" questions that intrigue him, he began to moan, "I can't say this, it's going to sound so weird." He went on that way for a minute, as if he were about to admit to something really twisted, before he finally revealed the big secret: "Oh, O.K.! I find the ideas in the fractals, both as a body of knowledge and as a metaphor, an incredibly important way of looking at the world." (Fractal geometry -- as everyone knows, right? -- examines the irregular patterns that repeat and are similar at all size scales. In nature, an example is a mountain range.)

His appreciation of science really exploded in his senior year, when Mr. Gore also got to know Roger Revelle, the oceanographer who did much of the pioneering work on the greenhouse effect and global warming -- a major focus of Mr. Gore's 1992 environmental tome, "Earth in the Balance." When Mr. Revelle shared his research with the students, Mr. Gore was hooked.

"It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates," Mr. Gore said. "Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!"

He also took "The Human Life Cycle," a course on the stages of human development taught by the psychologist Erik Erikson, who coined the phrase "identity crisis" and believed that identity, rather than being fixed in childhood, depends in part on how well a person deals with each stage of his adult life.

"He was just as influential as any of the others, but more in personal terms," Mr. Gore said. For the course, Mr. Gore prepared a "psychobiography" of his father and learned, for example, that his father's older brother Reginald, who had been disabled in World War I, had been the one expected to succeed. "I gained a sense of perspective on him that I'd needed," he said, talking about his father.

Mr. Gore had already found an important friend in Martin Peretz, who taught him in a seminar his freshman year, "Problems of Post-Industrial Society." Along with an introduction to Marx and Freud, Mr. Gore got a booster who later bought The New Republic and has tirelessly plugged his former pupil's presidential prospects through the years. They also bonded during his senior year, at a time when Mr. Peretz, like Mr. Gore, was increasingly disenchanted with the tactics of the left.

Yet Mr. Gore himself says that everything he learned in the classrooms of Harvard was dwarfed by the emotional education he got from Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson in those first years after they met at his senior prom at St. Albans in Washington.

A year younger than Mr. Gore, Tipper Aitcheson, who grew up in Washington's Virginia suburbs, joined him in Boston his sophomore year, studying at Garland Junior College and then Boston University.

When he speaks of his wife today, it is with awe, gratitude and an explicit acknowledgement that even his parents had a less formative influence on him.

"It's clearly the most important relationship I've ever had with anyone, bar none," he said. "Even at a young age, she helped me understand things I never would have been able to understand otherwise. She has a way of understanding people and the world that I, well, I would be a completely and totally different person in every way except for her."

Recently, an interviewer mentioned having met with her earlier the same day, and he beamed with pride: "Isn't she cool?"

Mr. Gore says he knew almost right away, even at the age of 17, that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with this woman. That was one thing, at least, that he knew when he arrived freshman year and was even more sure of on graduation day.

Wrenched by Tumultuous 1968

So much else, though, seemed up for grabs. In Mr. Gore's junior year, said Mr. Tyson, who roomed with him that year, "came the rev-o-lu-tion. The war came into our living room with the body-bag count every day. Every day, religiously, our gurus were Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid."

Mr. Tyson, who is black, quit the football team because he no longer wanted to be a "hired gladiator" for white alumni; he said he and Mr. Gore talked themselves to sleep in their bunk beds many nights that year, endlessly discussing race and the war. Mr. Gore read "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and they discussed the books, too.

Then the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot during their spring break, in Memphis.

"I was driving with Tipper from Boston to Washington, and it happened when we were on the road," Mr. Gore said. "It was devastating. When we arrived, my mother was downtown at an auction house and needed a ride home because the rioting had started. I don't think I ever saw her scared, but as I drove up, stores on either side were having glass fronts crushed in and there was looting. She walked rather calmly but quickly as I drove up."

The first night the roommates were together again, Mr. Tyson said, he and Mr. Gore both cried for their country and stayed up until 4 a.m. talking. "He was so upset because it had happened in Tennessee. I just wanted to curse," Mr. Tyson said. "It was very, very sad, and we were sick from watching our nation burn up. You didn't want to believe what you were seeing and what had happened. How were we going to stay together as a people?"

"I also remember him saying, 'Jesus, we've got to understand who we are as a people and we don't, and we haven't formed that e pluribus unum.' We both felt that things had gotten so out of hand that this could happen in our America."

Mr. Gore spent some of that tense summer in Memphis, taking a course in Tennessee history at Memphis State, probably on some level in preparation for a career in politics, though at the time he felt completely disillusioned. Unsure what he wanted to do, he was considering journalism.

That summer, too, Mr. Gore helped his father write a short speech for the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he stayed with his parents while others his age were fighting with police in Grant Park.

Inside the convention hall, both Gores shared the demonstrators' bitterness: "Four years ago our party and the nominee of our party promised the people that American boys would not be sent to fight in a land war in Asia," Senator Gore told the convention, to huge applause from supporters of Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, who had been denied the nomination in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. "They voted for our distinguished leader, President Lyndon B. Johnson, but they got the policies of Senator Goldwater."

Yet, back at school in the fall, Mr. Gore and most of his friends continued to shy away from various protest groups.

"We weren't demonstrators," Mr. Tyson said. "We distrusted these movements a lot because a lot of this stuff was very emotional and not well thought out. 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."

Mr. Gore recalls that he while he agreed with their antiwar sentiments, he found students who were protesting the presence of R.O.T.C. on campus wrongheaded and even kind of juvenile. He thought taking anger about the war out on the university was plain illogical. "It seemed silly to me to target the administration of a private university," he said recently.

Though in a letter home he railed against the "national madness" of anticommunism, he mostly disagreed with both the tactics and rhetoric of the S.D.S.

And one thing he has in common with his opponent, Mr. Bush, who experienced the 1960's very differently, is that he was never seriously tempted by anti-establishment politics. Each stuck close to his father's view of the war, though those views were of course quite different.

Mr. Gore not only did not hate the establishment, he revered it. He had been raised by a New Dealer who believed in nothing so much as the power of government to change people's lives for the better. When the government disappointed him -- "when America uncharacteristically lost its way," as he puts it now -- he felt deeply hurt, and declared that he wanted nothing to do with his father's line of work.

In Mr. Gore's senior year, when police moved in and beat a number of the students occupying University Hall, Mr. Jones remembers his friend's reaction as "the same reaction all Harvard people had, that suddenly all this talk about the fascist threat was real. On that day, we joined the ranks of paranoids who have people after them.

"Nobody stayed away from the S.D.S." entirely, Mr. Jones said. "Jean Paul Sartre's metaphor of 'words as bullets' comes to mind, and bullets were flying everywhere."

But in Cambridge in the late '60's, a refusal to join fully in the revolution was itself a rebellion. Mr. Peretz said Mr. Gore "called attention to himself by the moderation of his views. It took a kind of defiance to say, 'Let's not get carried away.' "

Mr. Peretz's principal memory of his former student on June 12, 1969 -- the day Mr. Gore graduated, with honors -- was that he seemed quite embarrassed by his father's bragging about him. As part of a planned protest, a number of Mr. Gore's classmates raised their fists and walked out halfway through the ceremonies. Mr. Gore stayed in his seat.

But then, Mr. Gore did end up staging a one-man protest of sorts when he showed up in his uniform in Harvard Yard a few months later. That day, he was angry at the self-righteousness of kids who thought all decisions about the war were easy. And finally, in spite of himself, Al Gore was demonstrating after all.