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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    But Pauline, who had fled crushing poverty in a speck of northwest Tennessee called Cold Corner, who had taken her blind sister with her to college classes, who had escaped a brief first marriage that her family still does not talk about, was not ready to lash her fortunes to a man, even one with prospects. So Albert waited for her in Tennessee while she took more law courses and lived alone by a lake in Wisconsin. And he waited again when she found work practicing oil-and-gas and divorce law in Texarkana, after discovering no firm in Nashville would hire a woman without connections. "That he didn't clip her wings was part of the romance," Karenna says.

    But her wings got clipped nonetheless, and pretty brutally. Less than a year later, she left the firm and moved back to Nashville. No one had heard of sexual harassment at that time, but when she looked back on her first job almost 60 years later, Pauline finally told the whole story. "It was a disaster," she told journalist Pamela Hess. Today she would sue her law partner, she said. But then her only course was to endure the abuse long enough to pay off her law- school loans, and then return to Albert. On May 15, 1937, he scooped a bridal bouquet of red ferns from the roadside and married Pauline before a judge just over the state line in Kentucky.

    Within a year after their marriage, Albert was running for Congress as the youngest in a five-candidate field. At a time when most political wives were invisible, Pauline was running just as hard. "Off I went, almost charting a new course, especially in Tennessee," she recalled in a 1994 speech at Vanderbilt. She hiked the dirt roads of the district, sometimes taking off her shoes and wading through the mud, determined "not to miss a person," she said.

    Pauline was a vivacious presence on the stump and a shrewd tactician behind the scenes, both during campaigns and in Washington, as the young Congressman made his name. She was "the best politician in the family," says former Tennessee Governor Ned McWherter. Never was that truer than in Albert's big step up, in the 1952 Senate campaign against ornery, pork-ladling Kenneth D. McKellar. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he was one of the most powerful men in Washington. The most often told family story is about Pauline's quick response when McKellar's workers papered the state with signs saying THINKING FELLER, VOTE FOR MCKELLAR. Alongside each McKellar placard, she had workers tack up a sign that read THINK SOME MORE AND VOTE FOR GORE.

    Their daughter Nancy was born in 1938, and for the next 10 years, they were desperate for a son. "I'm almost ashamed of the kind of longing we had," Pauline once told the Washington Post. She later described young Al's birth as "kind of a miracle." His father got the Tennessean to promise that if the second child was a boy, the news would go on the front page. And it did, under the headline WELL, MR. GORE HERE HE IS--ON PAGE 1.

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