Al Gore (A Better Millennium)

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the. Previously, he served as 's Vice President from 1993 to 2001, a Senator of from 1985 to 1993, and a Congressman from Tennessee from 1977 to 1985. Towards the end of Clinton's second term in office, Gore announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the and ran virtually unopposed during the primaries. He then went on to defeat Texas Governor in a narrow race, defeating him with 292 electoral votes to Bush's 242.

Eight months into Gore's first term in office, the occurred. President Gore responded by ordering the, signing the (CAND), and establishing several government bodies to protect the nation from terrorist threats. For domestic policy, Gore pushed for the expansion and extension of, minimizing the , repealing in the military, protecting the environment, and broadening the definition of hate crime laws to include homosexuals. Gore also pushed for $500 billion worth of to help people get better educations and healthcare.

Gore successfully ran for a second term in against former House Speaker  in another narrow election. Shortly after reelection, Gore faced harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum for his response to and  using  against the  in northern. As a result, the Republicans gained more seats in the House and retook control of the in the. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post- recession, often referred to as the "", prompting the Gore administration to obtain congressional passage of multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system. Nationally, Gore was both one of the most popular and unpopular presidents in history, having received the highest recorded presidential approval ratings in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as well as one of the lowest approval ratings during the.

Gore left office in 2009, returning to his hometown of. He is currently a public speaker, and has written a memoir, . His presidential library was opened in 2013. His presidency has been ranked on the lower tier in historian rankings of U.S. presidents published in the late 2000s and 2010s.

Early life and education
Gore was born in, the second of two children of , a U.S. Representative who later served as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, and Pauline (LaFon) Gore, one of the first women to graduate from. Gore is partly descended from Scots-Irish immigrants who first settled in Virginia in the mid-17th-century, and moved to Tennessee after the Revolutionary War. His older sister Nancy LaFon Gore, who was born in 1938, died of in 1984.

During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the section in Washington D.C. During the summer months, he worked on the family farm in, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle.

Gore attended, 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 his class of 51, applied to only one college, Harvard, and was accepted.

Personal life
Gore met Mary Elizabeth "" Aitcheson from the nearby St. Agnes School at his St. Albans senior prom in 1965. Tipper followed Gore to Boston to attend college; and on May 19, 1970, shortly after Tipper graduated from Boston University, they married at the Washington National Cathedral.

They have four children— (b. 1973), (b. 1977),  (b. 1979), and  (b. 1982).

Harvard
Gore enrolled in Harvard College in 1965, initially planning to major in English and write novels but later deciding to major in government. On his second day on campus, he began campaigning for the freshman student government council and was elected its president.

Although he was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories, he did not do well in science classes in college and avoided taking math. His grades during his first two years put him in the lower one-fifth of the class. During his sophomore year, he reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool, and occasionally smoking. 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, 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.

Gore attended college during the era of anti-Vietnam War protests. Though he was against that war, he disagreed with the tactics of the student protest movement, thinking it silly and juvenile to take anger at the war out on a private university. He and his friends did not participate in Harvard demonstrations. John Tyson, a former roommate, recalled that "We distrusted these movements a lot ... 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." Gore helped his father write an anti-war address to the Democratic National Convention of 1968 but stayed with his parents in their hotel room during the violent protests.

Military service
When Gore graduated in 1969, his student deferment ended and he immediately became eligible for the. His father, a vocal anti-Vietnam War critic, was facing a reelection in 1970. Gore eventually decided that the best way he could contribute to the anti-war effort was to enlist in the Army, which would improve his father's reelection prospects. 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.

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, 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,, 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 from August to October, and then was assigned to be a journalist at, 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, becoming one "of only about a dozen of the 1,115 Harvard graduates in the Class of '69 who went to Vietnam." Gore was stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade in 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 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."

Vanderbilt and journalism
Gore was "dispirited" after his return from Vietnam. noted that, "his father's defeat made service in a conflict he deeply opposed even more abhorrent to Gore. His experiences in the war zone don't seem to have been deeply traumatic in themselves; although the engineers were sometimes fired upon, Gore has said he didn't see full-scale combat. Still, he felt that his participation in the war was wrong."

Although his parents wanted him to go to law school, Gore first attended (1971–72) on a  for people planning secular careers. He later said he went there in order to explore "spiritual issues", and that "he had hoped to make sense of the social injustices that seemed to challenge his religious beliefs."

In 1971, Gore also began to work the night shift for  as an investigative reporter. His investigations of corruption among members of Nashville's Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses.

In 1974, he took a leave of absence from The Tennessean to attend. His decision to become an attorney was a partial result of his time as a journalist, as he realized that, while he could expose corruption, he could not change it. Gore did not complete law school, deciding abruptly, in 1976, to run for a seat in the when he found out that his father's former seat in the House was about to be vacated.

House and Senate
At the end of February 1976, U.S. Representative unexpectedly announced his retirement from Congress, making the  seat, to which he had succeeded Albert Gore Sr. in 1953 open. Within hours after The Tennessean publisher 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 only by 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, which had been vacated by Republican. He was "unopposed in the Democratic Senatorial primary and won the general election going away", despite the fact that Republican President swept Tennessee in his reelection campaign the same year. Gore defeated Republican senatorial nominee, subsequently the mayor of Knoxville, and the Republican-turned-Independent, , 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" (he once referred to himself as a "raging moderate") opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment in 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 2012 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 and ran for president in.

Son's 1989 accident and first book
On April 3, 1989, as the Gores and their six-year-old son Albert were leaving a baseball game, Albert ran across the street to see his friend and was hit by a car. He was thrown 30 feet (9 m), and then traveled along the pavement for another 20 feet (6 m). Gore later recalled: "I ran to his side and held him and called his name, but he was motionless, limp and still, without breath or pulse [...] His eyes were open with the nothingness stare of death, and we prayed, the two of us, there in the gutter, with only my voice." Albert was tended to by two nurses who happened to be present during the accident. The Gores spent the next month in the hospital with Albert. Gore also commented: "Our lives were consumed with the struggle to restore his body and spirit." This event was "a trauma so shattering that [Gore] views it as a moment of personal rebirth", a "key moment in his life" which "changed everything."

In August 1991, Gore announced that his son's accident was a factor in his decision not to run for president during the. Gore stated: "I would like to be President [...] But I am also a father, and I feel deeply about my responsibility to my children [...] I didn't feel right about tearing myself away from my family to the extent that is necessary in a Presidential campaign." During this time, Gore wrote, a text which became the first book written by a sitting U.S. Senator to make the since 's .