II.

Early Life and Career

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., was born in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1948, into a political family. His father, Albert Gore, Sr., spent 32 years in Washington, D.C., as a representative and senator from Tennessee. Pauline Gore, his mother, was an astute political thinker and an important adviser to her husband. Both of Gore’s parents came from poor families in rural Tennessee. During the Great Depression of the 1930s they were ardent supporters of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. Many of the positions the younger Gore took during his own political career, on issues such as the environment, arms control, and civil rights, were heavily influenced by his liberal parents.

Gore’s childhood was split between Washington, D.C., and rural Tennessee. He spent most of the year attending school in the nation’s capital and spent summers on the family farm near Carthage, Tennessee. Gore had a sister, Nancy.

Gore attended St. Albans, a private prep school in Washington, D.C., where he played football and basketball and was a leader on the debate team. In 1965 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For much of his academic career he was an average student, getting mostly Bs and Cs. His grades improved, however, during his last two years at Harvard.

While Gore attended Harvard, the United States was deeply divided over the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Like his father, Gore was opposed to the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. This opposition led to a difficult decision: whether or not to join the Army and serve in South Vietnam after graduation. By Gore’s senior year, his father was facing a difficult fight for reelection to the Senate because of his opposition to the war and his liberal positions on civil rights issues. Gore knew that if he decided to protest the war by avoiding the draft, it would cause more political trouble for his father. As he later recalled, he was also bothered by the realization that, if he avoided the draft, someone less privileged would be sent in his place. In August 1969, several weeks after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard, Gore enlisted in the U.S. Army. After basic training at Fort Lee, New Jersey, and a stint at Fort Rucker, Alabama, he served for five months in South Vietnam as a journalist.

On May 19, 1970, while stationed in Alabama, Gore married Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson, a woman he had met during high school and had dated throughout college. Their first of four children, Karenna, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1973. A second daughter, Kristin, was born in 1977, Sarah in 1979, and Albert III in 1982.

After Gore was honorably discharged from the Army in 1971, he entered divinity school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. While attending Vanderbilt he worked as a newspaper reporter for the Nashville Tennessean.