(3 of 4)
In 1976 Gore surprised and delighted his father by suddenly announcing that he would run for Congress. The elder Gore was all set to "give my hillbilly speeches to elect my boy to Congress." But Al said, "Hold on, Dad. I want to win this one myself." Upon arriving in Washington, Gore exclaimed to a friend, Carter Eskew, "Hey, this is great! I'm still an investigative reporter. I just happen to be a member of Congress. You can get your phone calls returned, and you can actually have an influence."
He assigned himself to the medical beat, cracking down on influence peddling in the contact-lens industry, sponsoring legislation to regulate organ transplants, and pushing for tougher warnings on cigarette packs -- despite a constituency that included 10,000 tobacco farmers. In 1984 he won the Senate seat of retiring Republican Howard Baker.
In the midst of that campaign, Gore's older sister Nancy died of cancer. "She was a terribly important part of Al's life," says Tipper. "She was a mediator, adviser, powerful supporter and loving critic." Today that role falls largely to Gore's mother Pauline. "I've been working on him to relax and smile," she says.
Gore will have to overcome a lot of what Eskew, now a Washington media consultant, calls "yuppie envy," eloquently expressed by Arkansas Democratic Activist Archie Schaffer III, 39. "I'm not sure I'm ready," he says, "for anyone my age to be close to the button."
Yet the button is a large part of why Gore thinks he should be President. In 1980 Gore asked for a show of hands at a girls' student convention in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and found that most of the young people present expected a nuclear war in their lifetime. He went back to Washington and spent eight hours a week for a year mastering the arcana of nuclear deterrence and diplomacy.
Since then he has played a key role in brokering a number of agreements between Congress and the Reagan Administration on defense policy and arms control. Gore says he is running for President now, rather than waiting until he is a bit older, largely because "Mikhail Gorbachev may be ready for a breakthrough in the way we keep the nuclear peace. The next few years could be an opportunity we won't have again."
As he campaigns around the country, he carries a gun-metal-gray garment bag with his conservative blue suits, his jogging shoes and a serious book on an unfashionably important subject about which he is busy educating himself. Sipping soda and lime on a flight to yet another fund raiser, he muses about how, as President, he might go to Brazil to warn the world of the dangers of & deforestation or to Antarctica to point at the ozone hole or how he might push to include global environmental problems on the agenda of his first summit with Gorbachev. Yet in public at this point in his campaign, Gore downplays the mega-issues. Explains Eskew: "Al has got to be careful not to become the Senator Moonbeam of 1988."