The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

They were distinctive Senators in an exuberant and confident era 30 years ago, walking the U.S. Capitol together, debating, opposing, befriending one another for a decade in the mannered legislative rituals of the time. They were A. Willis Robertson, old-line Democrat of Virginia; Prescott S. Bush, Republican investment banker from the moneyed precincts of Connecticut; and Democrat Albert A. Gore, feisty country teacher turned lawyer out of the hills of Tennessee.

More important for our time, they all had sons who were nurtured in politics. History now has summoned the sons to the struggle for the presidency, and there are echoes to be heard from long ago. The Super Tuesday performances of George Bush, Pat Robertson and Al Gore Jr. will have a profound effect on one another and, of course, the nation.

None of the old Senators ever dreamed of such an event, says Albert Gore Sr., the only one of the three still alive. At 80 he is a cheery and tireless campaigner for his son. "I've been through 35 states, and I have 13 to go," he said over the phone from New Orleans last week. Then he reminisced.

Back then Gore fought Bush's efforts to lift the 4.5% interest lid on Government bonds. Bush hammered Gore's enthusiasm for the Trade Expansion Act in John Kennedy's Administration. But the two joined in the struggles for civil rights legislation. "There was never an impolite exchange between us," recalls Gore. "We could debate for two hours and then go down to the Senate Dining Room and have coffee together."

Willis Robertson was a states'-righter opposing Bush's bold civil rights views. When Gore led the fight to expand the federal highway system, Robertson fought him. "We used to get together at prayer breakfasts," remembers Gore. "Willis used to tell good stories. He was a man of good humor."

While the fathers were doing the nation's business, the sons were walking their own paths. George Bush was making his stake in the Texas oil patch. The tall, kindly Pres Bush passed on the stories of a life he relished when the grand men of the Senate's inner club held sway. His son could not resist Washington.

At the same time Pat Robertson had begun his broadcasting. That was never enough. Way back when Pat was a wild kid at Washington and Lee, he had inhaled the vapors of power around his dad's Senate office, where he often visited, sleeping in the Senate gym to be near great events. Yet young Robertson had a tumultuous relationship with his father. Saying he was acting on the Lord's orders to avoid politics, Pat did not help his father in the re-election run of 1966. Willis lost and left the Senate a "broken, defeated man," as described by his son.

Al Gore as a child spent his winters in an eighth-floor apartment in the old Fairfax Hotel on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue. In the summers he would let his energy explode on his dad's farm in Carthage, where there were a collie named Buff and fish in the pond. Young Al hid behind the apartment doors in 1960 to listen to his father and friends help plot the campaign strategy for Kennedy. Neither Harvard nor those 500 farm acres in Tennessee could turn his head. Politics enticed him back to the Capitol.

Gore, Bush and Robertson are, in most of their beliefs, like their fathers. But Gore does not have his father's bubbling public humor. Bush does not have his dad's imposing mien, and Robertson lacks his father's restraint. Yet all three have gone beyond paternal ambitions. Maybe when this battlefield is stilled, the three will hear their fathers' voices, and they will pause to share coffee and a story or two.