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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    Al also put more energy into getting to know his children as individuals, taking Sarah three times to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Albert to tour a submarine in Baltimore harbor, each of the four to dinner alone when he could. In the mornings, he would wake them one by one. Says Karenna: "He just wanted to know what was going on in our lives."

    Al also turned his intellect toward an exploration of his childhood, and he did it partly by reading everything he could get his hands on. In particular, he pored over psychoanalytic works that included Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book on how parents who impose their ambitions on their children can leave their highly accomplished children emotionally stunted and confused about what they want other than to please the parents. In raising his family, Al says, "I had the benefit of seeing my own children's experience with the backlight of my own experience as a child so that"--he sighs, and pauses to pick his words--"I had an advantage as a parent that my parents didn't."

    Al and Tipper also went to work on their marriage in family-therapy sessions, and he finally began to understand she had something vital to contribute that was as important to his public life as it was to his private one. "One of the lessons here I've learned from her is a way to enrich my own experience of life by opening up to the heart as well as the head," he told TIME. "We've had many great discussions about that, and she's been a great teacher for me. The catharsis I went through beginning on April 3, 1989, was a time when those lessons really hit home for me, because I was suddenly open to them."

    He had become a different kind of husband, a different kind of father--and, he insists, a different kind of politician. When Al is asked how, he says, "Where don't you see it? It's pervasive." He brought in a "facilitator" to help the "group dynamics" of his Senate staff (and later, to some ridicule, did the same to boost the team spirit of Bill Clinton's new White House staff). He began to organize annual conferences to explore how government might help troubled families. "I never would have done [that] except for the transformative experiences that I had," says Gore.

    Al considered another bid for President in 1991, but this time, he and his family retreated to a houseboat on a Tennessee lake to make the decision together. Aides eager for word of which way he was leaning had to wait until he pulled up to a dockside pay phone. From the questions he was asking, they were certain it was a go. But when the family came ashore, he announced he would not run. It was, Tipper said, "a gift."

    And then, a year later, Bill Clinton called.

    TIPPER UNLEASHED

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