Does Al Gore have a heart?
A new bio suggests that underneath the stiff, zombielike striver we've come to know is a real guy.

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By Marjorie Williams

| A source once told me, when I was writing an artic le about a famously nasty man, "It's true what they say about Bob: Underneath t hat mean, abusive guy is a pretty nice guy. But underneath that there's another whole guy who's really mean and nasty." So it is with Vice President Al Gore: Beneath the wooden, proper candidate is a funny, amiable guy. But underneath hi m is an emotionally isolated man of almost total opaqueness.

It's an intrepid reporter who volunteers to spend three years of his life ex amining the wild underbelly of a career as dutiful as Gore's. Newsweek reporter Bill Turque has returned with a thorough, fair and nearly complete biography, but I can't say that his investment of time and effort has entirely paid off: I t's beige down there, all right. Turque turns in a very professional inventory of Gore's first 51 years, but only occasionally presents the contents in a ligh t that gives us any new insight into Gore.

"Inventing Al Gore" has all the right pieces of the puzzle in place. The two biggest pieces are, of course, Albert and Pauline Gore, the political parents from Central Casting: he a bombastic, prideful Tennessee senator with a terribl e score to settle (his 1970 reelection defeat) through his namesake; she a cool er, more calculating stage mama who is widely seen as the brains of the pair. T hese parents were always completely frank about the fact that they were groomin g their son, from the time he was in short pants, to be president.

As a result, Gore was, from the start, a tiny politician: a pleaser of the k ind who was always looking over the shoulders of his peers to the frowns and sm iles of an older, sterner audience. There is a real poignancy to the story of G ore's upbringing, in which much of the warmth apparently came from the mothers of friends and the Tennessee women hired to look after "little Al" while his pa rents were on the road. (Pauline indignantly dismissed this portrait of Gore's childhood when the author interviewed her. Never, she told him, had she left he r little boy "for more than two weeks at a time.") As Gore himself has from tim e to time acknowledged -- most completely in his ecological manifesto, "Earth i n the Balance" -- he was an accomplished, compliant, uncomplaining boy whose ch ief concern was to reflect well on others.

These are the children who grow up hollow -- with a streak of what Turque id entifies as grandiosity. It's the only way to explain why Gore, a man with a pa lpable conviction that he is usually the smartest person in the room, can't res train himself from the weird little acts of self-aggrandizement that cause him so much trouble. It wasn't enough that Gore played an important role in garneri ng federal support for the immediate precursors of the World Wide Web; he had t o tell an interviewer that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." I t wasn't enough that "Love Story" author Erich Segal had borrowed a bit from Go re's background in devising his hero; Gore had to tell reporters that his roman ce with Tipper was the model for the entire book.

The most sensational material in Turque's book is an old friend's claim that Gore smoked far more pot in his youth than he has previously admitted. The fri end, John C. Warneck e, says that as a newspaper reporter in Nashville, Gore smoked three or fou r times a week, and didn't give it up until he ran for Congress in 1976. Gore's account, laid down during his 1988 presidential campaign, is that he tried pot only on "rare and infrequent" occasions and gave it up entirely in 1972.

Turque's version seems very credible, partly because other old pals who decl ined to talk to him about the issue did so in a way that tacitly acknowledges t hat Gore is vulnerable here. Even so, Warnecke's information is most interestin g not for any great shock value but for its further testimony to the reductive persona Gore has accepted all his political life, which is to say all his life. To think of Gore as a young student, soldier and journalist lighting up the bo ng every time he got a chance is to think of him as a real person, doing what p eople of his age and station did in that place and time, instead of as the pinc hed, improbable youthful experimenter he asks us to believe in, who quickly put away all the childish things that were beneath someone of his ambition and pro bity. Which is sadder: to think of him as so ambitious that he automatically de nies and compresses this mildly wicked chapter of his youth or to think of his never having lived such chapters at all?

Turque renders Gore's life as a series of intermittent, half-hearted efforts to break the baleful chains of his duty and the vice president as "a man who a t critical moments had proclaimed independence and then retreated from it." Hen ce Gore goes to Harvard and decides to study English instead of government, but after a year or two reverts to the family business. He comes to loathe the Vie tnam War, but enlists anyway out of concern for his father's waning political c areer. Gore comes home from Vietnam and again swears off politics, taking up jo urnalism instead, but five years later runs for Congress after all. Following h is humiliating defeat in the 1988 presidential primaries, Gore writes a passion ate environmental manifesto, in which he describes the self-loathing he sometim es feels over his own tendency to "put a finger to the political winds and proc eed cautiously," but then when he is invited to join Bill Clinton's ticket in 1 992, he softens and minimizes what his book presented as the most urgent counse ls of his conscience. His life and career, Turque writes, have been "punctuated by separations never quite achieved, and by bold strokes never quite converted into personal or political liberation." It is a theme mirrored in his politica l behavior, which holds examples of both genuine principle and the most blatant expediency.

Turque's thesis makes a lot of sense. Watching the radical difference betwee n the informal Gore who talks to reporters off the record and the formal campai gner so widely derided for his stiffness, one has the impression that the gulf between these two men is a willed accomplishment on Gore's behalf -- a way of h olding apart from politics some essential self that he still hopes to try to sa lvage from the Great Inevitability that has always ruled his life.

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