Profiles In Caution

By Richard Stengel

In 1970 Albert Gore Jr. watched Albert Gore Sr. lose the Senate seat that he had held for 18 years. The father he adored had taken brave and unpopular stands against Southern fealty to segregation and then against the Viet Nam War, and he had lost his seat because of those stands. "His father's defeat was very traumatic to him," says his mother Pauline. It reaffirmed in the son an innate cautiousness and taught him the virtues of moderation, compromise, consensus.

In his own eight years in the House and three in the Senate, Al Jr. has rarely embarked on a controversial crusade. He is a man of cool and thoughtful calibration. His passions are more intellectual than ideological: he is more comfortable dealing with the abstractions and technicalities of arms control or the greenhouse effect than he is leading ideological battles. Whereas the father often demonstrated a kind of moderate rage on moral issues, the son describes himself as a "raging moderate." The oxymoron is appropriate, because Al Gore is a mixture of opposite, sometimes contradictory elements.

Gore is a combination of St. Alban's polish and down-home charm, Harvard intellectualism and backwoods shrewdness. He is almost as at home wearing pointy cowboy boots as clunky wing tips, drinking Corona beer in a rowdy bar as sipping Chablis in a Georgetown salon. But not quite. Now, in an effort to reposition himself, Gore the cerebral technocrat is coming on like a fiery champion of "working men and women." His problem is making the transformation credible. On the stump, he attempts to heighten emotions simply by raising the volume of his voice. Though he has fought for such causes as consumers' rights, he seems to have put on his hand-me-down populism like the work shirts he donned for his new TV ads. Far more than even Richard Gephardt, Gore is an insider among the media and power elite, the teacher's pet of the Georgetown set.

The contradictions extend to his personality. In public, the buttoned-down Gore is solemn and earnest. A joke among the press corps is, How do you tell Al Gore from his Secret Service protection? Answer: He's the stiff one. In private, he is funny and irreverent, a good mimic and storyteller. In the right setting he will debate not only the virtues of the Midgetman missile, but whether the Beatles were a better group than the Rolling Stones (yes, he says).

As a second-string guard on the Harvard basketball team, Gore made up for a lack of physical skills through hustle and hard work. Nowadays when he turns his active, creative mind to a topic, he exhibits the same dogged discipline.

The major focus of that discipline has been arms control. "Doing something about arms control was the deciding thing in getting him in the race," says Gore Sr., one of five Congressmen consulted about the Manhattan Project to build the Bomb. In the early 1980s Gore was tutored each week on arms control for a year, and he was one of the first to urge funding of a mobile, single- warhead Midgetman missile as a way to enhance nuclear stability. In late February 1987 he was part of a congressional delegation visiting the arms- control talks in Geneva. The group met with Chief U.S. Negotiator Max Kampelman, the Pentagon's Richard Perle and Arms-Control Veteran Paul Nitze in the bubble, a bugproof chamber in the embassy, and Gore led an often testy discussion that resulted in a secret compromise. The "treaty of the bubble" declared that in exchange for the Senate's supporting a moderate level of funding for SDI research, the Administration would not carry out SDI development and testing in violation of the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty as interpreted by most Senators.

Gore gets worked up over arcane scientific knowledge. Sipping soda water and lime on a plane, he will take out a pad and scribble a graph explaining the differentials in the salinity of the oceans at various latitudes; he will talk in a knowing way about the volcanic eruption at Krakatoa in 1883 as an analogue to nuclear winter, or about a town in Patagonia that is under the ozone hole. He got legislation passed to accelerate research on a national fiber-optics network. At times his fascination with technological detail suggests both a keenness and a narrowness of mind. Yet he claims he is able to put his knowledge into a larger context of related issues, what he calls an "outframe."

Gore plays up his moderately hawkish stance on foreign policy along with his status as the only Viet Nam veteran in the race. He enlisted, after he & considered avoiding the draft, partly because he did not want to sabotage his father's re-election. He served for six months as an Army reporter in Viet Nam, sometimes in hairy combat situations. The Democratic Party, he believes, derived some faulty conclusions from that war. "I think the party has to rebuild its standing with the American people," he says, "by putting the neo-isolationist impulse that came out of the Viet Nam War into its proper perspective."

Gore is the first baby-boom presidential candidate, but only in the past few weeks has he picked up on Gary Hart's theme of trumpeting the "politics of the future." As yet, he is not drumming up any generational excitement. His campaign could have been the first with a Big Chill sound track, yet Gore somehow seems to be outside his own generation. He does not want to seem youthful, and at that he succeeds. He comes across instead as a young fogy. He is what grandparents call a "nice young man"; Al Gore is not so much a good ole boy as just a good boy. Moreover, his wife's crusade against "blue" rock-'n'-roll lyrics does not do much to endear him to those weaned on Sympathy for the Devil.

Gore, up close, can strike an idealistic note, talking about starvation in the sub-Sahara and the $1 trillion spent a year "on new ways to kill people." In his stump speeches, he sounds off about engineering fundamental change rather than "tinkering around the edges." Gore does have a feeling for how such forces could affect America's future. Yet at the moment, just as the campaign spotlight hits him, he is latching on to various populist code phrases that hardly do justice to the message he could convey.

With reporting by Steven Holmes with Gore and Strobe Talbott/Washington