July 11, 2000

AL GORE'S JOURNEY Off to War

For Gore, Army Years Mixed Vietnam and Family Politics

By MELINDA HENNEBERGER

	Bob Delabar/The New York Times
	Al Gore, stationed at Fort Rucker, Ala., was pulled out of a ceremony at the base to have a chat with Gen. William Westmoreland.
	THE 2000 CAMPAIGN
	Political Journeys This is the sixth in a series of articles about the lives of the presidential candidates. Future installments will examine George W. Bush's relationship with his father and how both candidates entered politics. Related Articles • Close to Home: Bush's Choice in War: Devoid of Passion or Anxiety (July 11, 2000) • Al Gore's Journey: On Campus Torn by 60's, Agonizing Over the Path (June 21, 2000) • George W. Bush's Journey: Ally of an Older Generation Amid the Tumult of the 60's (June 19, 2000) • Al Gore's Journey: A Boy's Life In and Out of the Family Script (May 22, 2000) • George W. Bush's Journey: A Philosophy With Roots in Conservative Texas Soil (May 21, 2000) • The 2000 Campaign: White House • The New York Times on the Web Politics Forum • Join a Discussion on Election 2000 Related Sites These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. • georgewbush.com • algore2000.com
	Mr. Gore in Vietnam in 1971, in a picture from his personal photo album.

n some ways, Army Private Al Gore was never and could never have been just one of the guys, another grunt.

Recruiters were afraid to even sign him up without calling in a supervisor, once they heard his name and caught on that he was the son of that antiwar Senator Albert Gore.

"Those with lesser rank bumped him up to me because they were scared of making a mistake," said Dess Stokes, the staff sergeant on duty at the Newark Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station, where Mr. Gore went to enlist, hoping to avoid notice, in August 1969. "We all knew who he was because of his daddy opposing the war."

No less than the Army's highest-ranking officer, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, singled him out during a visit to Fort Rucker, Ala., where Mr. Gore was stationed for more than a year. The Army chief of staff stopped in the middle of a ceremony to pull the young man aside for a private chat -- and kept Mr. Gore's superior officers waiting, and watching, while he asked one of the lowest-ranking men on the base for his thoughts on why so many young people opposed the war.

Yet there is no evidence that Mr. Gore sought special treatment, or that the extra notice he got anyway provided any real protection. On the contrary, as an Army journalist, Mr. Gore probably assumed more risk than he had to, choppering around South Vietnam interviewing soldiers who had just seen action.

"Anybody who knew Al Gore in Vietnam knows he could have sat on his butt and he didn't," said Michael Roche, Mr. Gore's editor on The Castle Courier, the newspaper of the Army's Engineering Command in Long Binh, near Saigon. Among 30 or 40 part-time correspondents and 3 or 4 reporters, Mr. Roche said, "I didn't have one who traveled as much as he did."

And if Mr. Gore has a dirty secret from Vietnam, it is not that he spent his tour hiding in headquarters, but that he found much of the experience exhilarating and loved feeling "more alive," to use his words, in the middle of the war that he and millions of other Americans hated.

"There's a vividness in a war zone, even if you're not in combat," the vice president said recently, during one of several interviews about his military experience.

"You're driving down a one-lane road with vegetation on both sides, and it's an area where people say, 'Keep on your toes.' That's quite vivid. A lot of people when they came home felt disoriented just because that vividness wasn't in their lives any more. I know a lot of guys who felt a great urge to go back, and the camaraderie was very intense and powerful."

Mr. Gore is drawn to vividness, and though he is generally regarded as cautious, he has also, throughout his life, been a little bit attracted to risk and speed, practicing water-skiing stunts as a kid in Tennessee, riding his motorcycle too fast around Harvard -- or taking off in a helicopter near the DMZ with his legs dangling out the side.

Not long ago, he told Barbara Walters that he too often stayed on an intellectual level rather than going with his feelings. And the way he speaks of his time in Vietnam suggests that he was grateful to have been forced to feel while he was there.

When asked about an Army friend's comment that he had a lot of fun in Vietnam, Mr. Gore said: "You aren't supposed to say that, I guess. There was always the awareness of why you were there and what was going on. But in the sense of the camaraderie and the vividness again? In many ways, you're more alive."

Those who knew Mr. Gore as a child remember his home life as rigorous, achievement-oriented and more focused on doing than feeling.

His mother, Pauline LaFon Gore, recalled that the night Albert Gore lost his Senate seat in 1970 was one of the only times she ever saw her son cry. Recently, he was telling the story of his mother's being stranded in downtown Washington immediately after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. But when his interviewer remarked that the looting and smashing of windows must have been scary for her, he offhandedly said no, he didn't believe he'd ever seen his mother show fear.

One Army friend said Vietnam seemed to draw Mr. Gore out emotionally -- providing no shortage of what he himself called the vividness that made him feel more alive.

Mr. Gore has occasionally added a splash of color to the tableau when describing his military service. Years ago, he told reporters he was shot at in Vietnam when he was not -- an exaggeration that may have been less an attempt to mislead than to make his experience more vivid.

When asked about those statements, Mr. Gore said only this, "I wasn't shot at, but I was in areas where there was firing." He mentioned a trip with Mike O'Hara, now a sportswriter for The Detroit News, to Khe Sanh, near the DMZ, where Army engineers were re-opening an abandoned airstrip.

"They sent in the infantry to secure it and there were helicopter gunships firing," Mr. Gore added. "My buddy kidded me for digging a foxhole, but there was firing in the hills surrounding there. It wasn't aimed at me, but I wasn't sure of that." Mr. O'Hara, Mr. Gore's closest friend in Vietnam, has said he recalls gunfire, too -- all outgoing.

When he first ran for president, in 1988, Mr. Gore's campaign was criticized for using photos of him in his uniform, carrying a standard-issue M-16. Was he trying to create the impression that he saw combat?

"It's an accurate picture," he said, irritated. "That's what I looked like when I was doing my job. The fact is, I carried a pencil and a loaded M-16 A1 outside the base camp and I worked in areas where I had to be armed."

"I've never claimed to have been in combat," he continued. " No way I would compare what I did with people who came through the fire and did brave things. But Vietnam is a subject people hear about in funny ways. If they see a picture of you with a gun, they'll see that as an exaggeration. Well, excuse me, but that's reality. People have such charged feelings."

Including, at least in this case, the vice president.

Alan Leo/The New York Times

As an Army journalist, Al Gore traveled extensively to get stories. He is seen here interviewing soldiers near the Cambodian border.

Avoiding an Alternative to Service

Al Gore's military record is in no particular need of improvement. He was one of only about a dozen of the 1,115 Harvard graduates in the Class of '69 who went to Vietnam. And even before enlisting, he passed up a chance to serve in the National Guard -- the military option chosen by his presidential opponent, George W. Bush.

A cousin of Mr. Gore said she and her then-husband had secured the promise of a place for him in the Alabama Guard.

"I had friends who had gone to Vietnam, and one who had come back a paraplegic, and I was beside myself wanting to keep Al out of there," said the cousin, Gayle Byrne, of Birmingham, who grew up near Carthage, Tenn., where the Gores spent summers on their farm. So Ms. Byrne's former husband, a member of the Guard, asked a well-placed contact to hold a spot for Mr. Gore.

"When the word came back that yes, they would hold a slot, we were so excited," Ms. Byrne remembered. "But he said, "I appreciate what you've done, but I just don't believe I can do this.' He talked about how small the draft roll was in Carthage" -- and how, if he did not serve, someone he knew would have to take his place.

The decision was complicated by his father's coming Senate race, which everyone knew would be tough, in large part because of Senator Gore's stand against the war. Though Albert Gore voted to authorize American involvement in August 1964, by the end of that year he was pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Communists.

The war was not the only campaign issue, but so many others -- race, busing, even school prayer -- to some extent became mixed with the war in the minds of voters, who found the senator too tolerant of social protest of all kinds and of change in general.

Young Al worried that if he found a way around military service, he would be handing an issue to his father's opponents. But once he finally decided to enlist, he never looked back. "I wanted to serve honorably and well and get it over with," he said.

Others his age were headed for Woodstock that month, but he was calling his old Harvard roommate, John Tyson, to ask him to come along for moral support as he signed up for the Army.

Though Mr. Gore said his assignment as an Army journalist came as a complete surprise, Mr. Tyson recalled that "the reason people enlisted was to have a greater ability to pick" their job, an assessment Army historians say is accurate. A family friend recalled that Mr. Gore surveyed the options and hoped to serve as an Army journalist.

Highly credentialed enlisted men generally got their choice of assignments, and with his Harvard degree, Army officials said, Mr. Gore never ran any real risk of being assigned to the infantry.

So after basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., he was sent to Fort Rucker, the Army's aviation school in Alabama, where he wrote for the base newspaper, The Army Flier, under Margaret Cobb, the civilian who handed out assignments.

"She and Al were like Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore," cracked Maurice Hendrick, who worked there with Mr. Gore and later became mayor of Rutherford, N.C. "She'd been there 1,000 years and was very firm and no-nonsense," while Mr. Gore, in the ingénue role, worked hard and aimed to please.

The real goal was to obscure the news. "If there was a helicopter crash, you couldn't put that on the front page," said Gus Stanisic, who served with Mr. Gore and edited the paper. "You couldn't dwell on fatalities."

The half-dozen soldiers who lived and worked together on The Flier were against the war, same as Mr. Gore. They saw protest movies -- among them "M*A*S*H*" and "The Strawberry Statement" -- right on the base, and got away when they could.

On weekends, they rented a house in Panama City, Fla., where they'd play cards and drink cheap wine. One fellow soldier, Richard Abalos, now a lawyer in Odessa, Tex., wrote home that he had befriended a future president -- so smart, but a good guy, too -- who had gotten their group into playing football on the beach "just like the Kennedys."

That May, Albert Arnold Gore Jr. and Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson were married in Washington's National Cathedral, Al in his dress blues, Tipper in a formal, high-necked gown. Then he brought his new bride back to Alabama, where home was a 10-foot wide "Expando model" trailer.

There was a sweetness to this anxious time, though. The night before a friend, Bob Delabar, shipped out for Vietnam, Mr. Gore spent hours crawling around on a highway median looking for a four-leaf clover -- a talisman Mr. Delabar said he carried to Vietnam and back, until it finally disintegrated in his wallet.

"I'd had a few too many beers," the vice president says now.

Mr. Gore was waiting to go to Vietnam, too. All his friends remember that he wanted to go, and the usual course of a two-year hitch in the Army included a year there.

The Gore family could never prove their suspicions, denied by various Nixon administration officials, that Mr. Gore's orders were deliberately held up. At the time, his Army buddies said, they were convinced President Nixon would not allow him to go to Vietnam -- not while there was even a slight chance it might do Senator Gore some political good should something bad happen to his son.

But the fact that Mr. Gore was eventually sent to Vietnam with only seven months left to serve in his hitch was highly unusual. In the end, Mr. Gore shipped out the month after the election.

The Associated Press

Al and Tipper Gore were married in Washington on May 19, 1970. They were greeted afterward by his parents, Senator Albert Gore Sr. and Pauline Gore.

Learning Political Lessons

And the nastiest fighting Mr. Gore saw in 1970 was back in Tennessee.

Senator Gore's antiwar position was a loser there, and his son took a couple of weekend passes and a week's leave to try to help save his father's career.

The son stood behind the father at rallies, sometimes in uniform, to remind folks that the Gores opposed the war but were still good Americans doing their duty. They also appeared together in two commercials, one in which he and his father were on horseback and another in which the senator told him, "Son, always love your country."

But the senator, always an indifferent fund-raiser, was badly outmatched this time. And the campaign run by his Republican opponent, Bill Brock, is still considered a model of dirty politics: The Watergate investigation would later find that Nixon operatives poured illegal money into the race. One donor was Richard Mellon Scaife, the same conservative who later spent millions on anti-Clinton investigations.

Mr. Brock, who went on to serve as chairman of the Republican Party, then as Trade Representative and Secretary of Labor in the Reagan administration, would later express regrets for his campaign. His slogan,

"Bill Brock believes in the things we believe in," was a bald appeal to disaffected supporters of George Wallace, and his campaign made Senator Gore out to be a turncoat son of the South.

"A person who preceded me speaking in East Tennessee one night called him a traitor to his country," said Frank Hunger, who was married to Mr. Gore's sister, Nancy. "At a football game that fall when his name was announced he was practically booed out of the stadium, but he held his head high. He took it."

On election night, Albert Gore gave a concession speech conceding nothing. "The truth shall rise again!" he told supporters, in what has been interpreted as a reference to the promise of his son's future. Those who knew the senator, though, feel he was too lost in his own pain that night to have been thinking any such thing.

Though Mr. Gore no doubt learned a great deal from his father, who died in 1998, that one campaign shaped Mr. Gore's own public life to a remarkable extent.

Asked if there was any link between his enthusiasm for fund-raising and the fact that his father was badly outspent in 1970, he first said, "I hadn't thought of that, but maybe that was a factor."

Really? Even though some of the same people who defeated your father were coming after you and President Clinton? Asked again, Mr. Gore let loose, sounding much more like the son of an old Tennessee populist than he usually does: "One thing I did learn in the aftermath of that election is that the people you're fighting for should not have their interests damaged and overturned by superior fund-raisers and political activities on the other side!" he said, almost shouting. "You owe it to them! The wealthy and the powerful will always have more money, but if you can even the odds? You can't let them down, because they're depending on you."

Mr. Gore then offered another way the 1970 campaign stayed with him. His father, he said, "was accused during that race of losing touch with his constituency, which wasn't true, but later when I was in Congress I believe I held what was the all-time record for town hall meetings. And nobody ever said that about me, not even unfairly."

Which may also explain why Mr. Gore's long campaign days so often end in some deserted hall where he has stayed late to answer every straggler's question -- long after Mr. Bush and most other Americans have knocked off for the evening.

Whether the 1970 campaign also made Mr. Gore a more cautious politician is less clear. His father got out in front of his constituents -- on race and the war and the separation between church and state -- and lost his seat.

And his son, it is true, often sticks to the safety of well-worn slogans; this week he is criticizing what he calls the "do-nothing-for-people Congress." Yet he is also capable of the in-your-face iconoclasm of "Earth in the Balance," his 1992 environmental manifesto.

In a new forward to the book, which was reissued this spring, Mr. Gore wrote, "For those who want to attack my view, let me the save you the trouble of reading the entire book. On pages 325 and 326, I wrote: 'It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period.' It is possible; it needs to be done; it will create more jobs, not destroy jobs. I'm proud that I wrote those words, and I reaffirm them today."

Mr. Gore said his father taught him when to play it safe and when to go for it: "My father told me, 'Son, you have to pick the walls you're going to butt your head against.' He meant some issues are so tough that if you take on the overwhelming opinion of the majority in your district you better keep track of how much damage you're doing to your ability to accomplish constructive change. Very few people will talk about that, but it's something we all have to think about.

"So I use the 'strict scrutiny' standard that I learned in law school about how the Supreme Court uses a different standard for very important cases. I try to be ferocious in defending what's most important to me -- freedom of speech, religion -- and refused to yield an inch on prayer in school even though 90 percent in my district felt the other way."

Politicians cannot apply that standard to every single issue, he said -- an acknowledgment that is obvious but also pretty nervy. As an example of an issue to which he has applied a less stringent standard over his career, Mr. Gore named gun control, saying that "unlike today, the 1970's did not cry out for restrictions on guns."

After his father's 1970 race, Mr. Gore felt sure he'd never have a career in politics. He talked about writing, even farming -- and told Mr. Hendrick, back at Fort Rucker, that he and Tipper wanted nothing more than to move back to Tennessee, live on a commune and raise vegetables.

Chasing Stories in Fire Zones

Right after Christmas, Specialist 4 Al Gore finally did ship out for Vietnam, and arrived at the 20th Engineer Brigade at Bien Hoa, outside Saigon, on Jan. 2, 1971. The Army was in bad shape at that point, demoralized by the scornful lack of support for a war the country was no longer even trying to win.

Troops had already been withdrawing for two years, and those left on the ground were waiting to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese. Morale was so low that a few American soldiers had shot their own commanding officers rather than follow their orders to fight.

"Everybody knew what a moronic war it was by that time, and it was, 'Do what you have to do to get home,' " Mr. Roche, Mr. Gore's editor in Vietnam, said.

Mr. Roche recalled that "I was told to go North again with 35 days left" to serve in Vietnam "and I said, 'No, you can court-martial me but I'm not getting killed for nothing.' The guy backed down."

"So getting in a chopper to go to fire support bases at that point in time was pretty risky" for Mr. Gore, Mr. Roche said.

"But the one thing you could do" that didn't seem like an utter waste in those days, Mr. Roche added, was try to build up fellow soldiers by reporting the individual acts of bravery that did happen amid so much despair -- and, less dramatically, the good works of the engineers, who were building roads, hospitals and water purification systems all over the country. And that is what Mr. Gore did in the war.

Bien Hoa was relatively safe, though sirens occasionally warned of mortar attacks. From the quarters Mr. Gore shared with nine other guys, he could hear fighter planes taking off throughout the night.

Barry Ancona, of Manhattan, who had known Mr. Gore at Fort Rucker, said he knew even before Mr. Gore arrived that he was on the "watch list." "All that meant was that he was connected to someone important. It was more like a protocol thing, but it didn't mean anything."

Still, it is not inconceivable that an ambitious commander might have wished to avoid seeing such a soldier harmed on his watch.

An Army photographer, H. Alan Leo, said his commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Kenneth Cooper, called him in before Mr. Gore arrived. "His exact words were, 'This is not a direct order, but I want to make sure this person does not get into a situation he cannot get out of.' "

General Cooper, now retired, has said he has no memory of either that conversation or Mr. Leo. Several other soldiers who knew both Mr. Gore and Mr. Leo in Vietnam said they liked Mr. Leo but either did not believe him or thought he must have taken a comment like "Watch his back" a little too literally.

Mr. Leo acknowledged that he had resented Mr. Gore before he ever met him, and changed his routine only slightly.

"I think he did have the bug, and actually wanted to go in the field," Mr. Leo said. "There was occasional sniper fire when I was with him, and he took his chances like the rest of us. I guess I still had that animosity that he probably never had a hard day in his life, but when other guys would go to the houses of ill repute, he would stay faithful to his wife and I never saw him treat anyone with disrespect. He wasn't my slap-on-the-back buddy, but he earned my respect. There were some values there."

Mr. Gore says he more often traveled with other photographers, and never felt restrained. Did he feel treated differently by some of the other guys, because of his name?

"No more so than at any other time in my life," he said, after thinking for a minute. In fact, maybe less, he added; His father, after all, was not a senator anymore.

A few men in his company said Mr. Gore was probably best known in Vietnam for his scathing impersonations of superior officers.

His biggest story for The Castle Courier ran under the headline, "Threatened Overrun of Fire Support Base Blue Thwarted By Quick Reactions." In it, he wrote, "On the night of Feb. 22 there was no moon. The men sacked out early as usual, soon after the movie was over -- "Bloody Mama" with Shelley Winters as the maniac murderess . . .

"Three hours later, a trip flare was set off on the outside strand of barbed wire . . . Then silence. Probably another one of those damn rabbits -- and probably a dead rabbit by now.

"There was an explosion . . .

The explosions kept up, and they all seemed to be hits. Either they were damned accurate shots or . . . 'V.C. in the compound! VC in the compound!' Suddenly everyone was yelling it. And dogs were barking."

Many of his other dispatches were less colorful. From Khe Sanh, where engineers were opening supply lines, he filed this report: "The fork-lift operators had their hands full -- or rather, their forks full."

Mr. Gore also seems to have quoted every Tennessean in Vietnam at one time or another. And he offered highly detailed accounts of the engineers' work.

Once, he recalled, he covered a mountain road Australian troops were helping to build. "We wouldn't call it a mountain in Tennessee, but anyway the Viet Cong controlled it at night and the United States during the day and my buddy and I stayed there and lived in a tent. We took comfort from the fact that ambushes were rare, but still, it was, 'O.K., how rare?' "

Every night, he said, the Australians would sing Maori folk songs -- which inspired Mr. Gore to write an admiring story "about the diversity and multiculturalism" of their schools. "I opined that we Yanks could learn a thing or two." The piece never ran.

After five months in Vietnam, Mr. Gore applied for and received an early out to attend Vanderbilt divinity school in Nashville. The Army was granting such outs easily at that point.

Though he had gone in hating everything about the Vietnam War, he was coming out with a more complicated assessment of the situation -- and an evolving view on the use of American military force.

"I still think Vietnam was a big mistake, but it was the feelings of the ordinary Vietnamese people in the South who were terrified of losing their freedom that had an effect on me," he said recently. "Especially Catholics were terrified of a Communist victory and that sure didn't fit into the cartoon image I had before I went over."

Vietnam certainly did not make Mr. Gore an anti-interventionist, even in the 1970's and '80's. Unlike others in his party, he supported the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and was one of only 10 Senate Democrats who supported the Gulf War in 1991, infuriating his party's leadership.

Before he left Vietnam, he wrote to Mr. Stanisic, his buddy at Fort Rucker, to say that when he got back he planned to "atone" for his sins by attending divinity school.

What was he atoning for?

Mr. Stanisic has no idea. "In those days you just said, 'Oh, yeah, man, I dig.' " Mr. Gore said he didn't remember using the word atone, but very much recalled his deeply unsettled feelings about the war. And about coming home.

He had missed Tipper desperately, of course, and was glad to be back, yet something nagged at him for months, even years, after. On many nights, his wife would wake up and find that he was out walking.

"I'm not sure I fully understand it," Mr. Gore said quietly. "But you know, it didn't end. You were leaving something that was still going on. If you're a part of something, a war, you want to win it. Not that I had a bayonet in my teeth, but part of what was screwed up about it was that we weren't trying to win."

And if the highly competitive Mr. Gore was atoning, it was not because he went to war, but because he came home.