Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

Pauline raised a tough, pragmatic politician, but it took a life-altering family crisis to make Al see how much he had to learn from Tipper

By Karen Tumulty Monday, Aug. 21, 2000

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    His parents shaped him, but it was not until mid-life that Al discovered they had left part of him unformed. In an interview with TIME, he talked about his parents in a way he never has before in public. "For whatever reason, I grew up with an inclination to turn first of all to my head instead of my heart," he says. "Everybody turns to both, but I guess I was raised in a family that gave more reinforcement to that kind of approach. It's like anything else. If that's all you know, you don't have anything to compare it to."

    Or at least he didn't until he confronted a trauma so shattering that he views it as a moment of personal rebirth. The near death of his son Albert III in 1989 was the key moment in his life. It changed the man, it changed his marriage, it changed everything, to the point that in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention eight years ago, he said, "I want to tell you this straight from my heart...When you've seen your six-year-old fighting for his life, you realize that some things matter a lot more than winning."

    Once Gore began, better late than never, to build some emotional muscles, Tipper found him turning to her and listening in a way he hadn't before, certainly not during the first 15 years of their marriage. In those early years, he thought nothing of discussing with his father the pros and cons of running for President in 1988, a full four months before he even mentioned the idea to his wife. Nowadays she is front and center of everything he does. However large the asteroid belt of pollsters and consultants and advisers that spins around him, Tipper is the center of gravity. "She's the first person he talks to about an idea," says Gore strategist Bob Shrum, "and the last person he listens to before he decides."

    BREEDING A POLITICIAN

    From the day they met, they were partners," Al has said of his parents. But in truth, Pauline LaFon was not looking to play a supporting role in anyone's life on that day. She was determined to find out how far she could make it on her own. Only after she discovered the limits of where grit and brains could take a woman in 1936 did she put her aspirations aside. She channeled her political drive toward shaping her husband's career and her maternal one toward shaping her son's thinking. "I trained them both," she used to say, "and I did a better job on my son."

    She was the only woman in the Vanderbilt University Law School class of 1936, the 10th female graduate in its history. After classes let out each day, she would catch the trolley to make it to the Andrew Jackson Hotel coffee shop for the dinner shift and the 25[cent] tips that were paying for her law-school tuition. She reminisced about those days to her granddaughter Karenna, who provided her notes exclusively to TIME. "I learned more about politics being a waitress than any other way," Pauline told Karenna. "The nicer you were to other people, the nicer they would be to you."

    No customer was so charmed as the law student from the YMCA night school who stopped in most nights for caffeine to sustain him for the hour's drive home to Smith County. He was as poor as she was. He was also "handsome, pleasant and ambitious," she later told Karenna. "I thought he had a future."

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