Chapter Thirty-eight

“AL JUST NEEDS TO BE HIMSELF”

On the day the House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton, in December 1998, Al Gore joined his boss and a large delegation of congressional Democrats on the White House South Lawn and uttered perhaps the day’s most memorable words. The vice president said he was proud to stand with a “man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.”

For nearly seven years, Gore had never flashed a public hint—and only rarely private ones—that this was not exactly what he believed. He expressed loyalty in the same way he expressed other values important to him: with emphatic certitude.

The exaggerated affect with which Gore dispatched the obligations of the vice presidency only heightened the curiosity. What did this discreet and self-contained man really think about the president he served with such deference? There were, once in a while, fleeting glimpses that suggested he might harbor more complex feelings about the man who had placed him in his job.

Clinton, for his part, was irritated by Gore’s chronic neediness and inflexibility over the routine business of politics, such as public schedules and agency appointments. “That is just like Al Gore—just like Al Gore!” Clinton fumed one day late in the first term as Gore was angling to install more of his loyalists in jobs. Gore would have the presidency to himself soon enough, Clinton complained, but he wanted it all now. “We are going to have real problems with him in the second term, I’ll tell you that.”

In his own way, Gore had been plotting a path to the presidency for much of his adult life, just as Clinton had. Now he had concluded that the biggest obstacle in that path was Clinton himself.

Gore had seen polling that to his mind showed irrefutably that public disdain over Clinton’s conduct in the Lewinsky affair, and his ethics generally, was creating a serious headwind for Gore’s own candidacy. He found the surveys on public discomfort with Clinton entirely plausible. They mirrored the feelings he found in his own family, where his wife and daughters in particular had been disgusted by 1998’s year of scandal. Moreover, after seven years of discretion and self-discipline, Gore was no longer of a mind to contain his own real feelings. It was as if an inner dam had burst.

At one skull session with his advisers, Gore noted the long-standing public doubts about Clinton’s character and gave his appraisal of the political dynamic between them. “In 1992, I provided the moral energy for Clinton to win,” he said. “This year, he’s sapping the moral energy of my campaign.”

There was an irony in Gore’s predicament, though he was in no mood to appreciate it. By the spring of 1999, polls showed that a majority of the public, and certainly most Democrats, were eager to move on from the Lewinsky obsession—if not necessarily to forgive, certainly to forget, and to accept Clinton for what he was: an imperfect but talented man. Gore was more judgmental, and more mired in the past, than the voters he brooded over.

This is not to say that the vice president was imagining the Clinton problem. A critical portion of culturally conservative independent voters, people any national Democrat needs to win election, were indeed angry with Clinton and inclined to take it out on Gore. It was a genuine problem, but one a politician like Clinton could have dispatched easily. For a less nimble politician like Gore, the problem was almost paralyzing. It should not have been so hard for him to declare that he was running on the policy record of the previous eight years and his own platform for the next four, while inviting voters to judge his character on its own, not in the shadow of Clinton. But Gore oddly came to believe that to embrace any part of the Clinton record was to embrace all of it.

Clinton was in Europe at the time Gore officially launched his presidential campaign with an announcement in his hometown of Carthage, Tennessee. The speech was laced with references to personal values that seemed by implication an indictment of Clinton: “I say to every parent in America: It is our own lives we must master if we are to have the moral authority to guide our children.” If his subtlety was lost on anyone, Gore made it explicit in an interview with Tennessee reporters in which he recalled “that awful year we went through. . . . I felt what the president did, especially as a parent, was inexcusable.”

In his Paris hotel suite, Clinton had gotten word of Gore’s comments from his traveling staff. He was angry—and incredulous. “What is this about?” he boomed. He calmed down a few minutes later and placed a call to Gore. Making no mention of his irritations, Clinton said he had watched a replay of the announcement speech. “Nice job!” he said.

Then, putting down the phone, he returned to his mystification at Gore’s efforts to put distance between them. “I don’t get it,” Clinton said. “Is this some kind of strategy? What the hell is this about?”

In part, it was about the paradox of the vice presidency. Through much of American history, the job had been a backwater, occupied by a parade of historical obscurities. In the twentieth century, however, it had transformed into the principal launching pad to the presidency itself. Since World War II, five vice presidents had become president (Truman, Nixon, Johnson, Ford, and Bush) and three more missed but managed at least to secure their party’s presidential nominations (Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Gore). Yet the office also had a diminishing effect on its occupants, who were regularly humiliated by the presidents they served and at the very least were seen in the public as servants rather than masters of their own fate. Clinton never sought to humiliate Gore, as Lyndon Johnson did Humphrey. Indeed, he relied on Gore and gave him more substantive influence than any vice president had ever before enjoyed. Even so, Gore continued the historic pattern: He seemed a less vibrant, less self-confident, and, most of all, less independent figure at the end of his tenure. Years of self-effacing service had taken a powerful emotional and political toll.

Like most people who worked closely with Clinton, Gore was impressed by his energy and intelligence and broad good intentions, even if sometimes erratically executed. Moreover, as someone who in 1988 had sought the presidency and failed, Gore had as keen an appreciation as anyone else of Clinton’s political skills. For Clinton’s part, he genuinely liked Gore and wished him well. But the two men had not become personal intimates over the course of seven years. When a Gore aide once remarked about an evening of movies the Clintons had hosted in the White House theater, Gore had said coolly, “They have never once invited us.”

Under other circumstances, these small fissures would have remained inconsequential. In the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, they became glaring. By 2000, Gore’s travel meant that he and Clinton often went weeks at a time without seeing each other. When they were together, Gore seemed to physically shrivel in Clinton’s presence.

An especially awkward episode occurred one evening at a fund-raiser in New York City, a Democratic double billing featuring both the Clintons and the Gores. For big-dollar donors, there was a small reception before the main event at which the couples were scheduled to appear. At the last minute, there was a crisis. Tipper Gore announced that she would not attend. She was of appealing vivacity and charm, but in some moods the vice president’s wife could be a fearsome presence. Gore’s staff learned to walk on tiptoes around her. A staff hand tried to gently remind her that donors were waiting. She was not especially fond of Hillary Clinton, and now refused even to be in the president’s presence.

“No, I’m not doing it,” she snapped at an aide. “I’m not going out there with that man.”

The vice president, in anguish, realized she meant it. He went to the reception by himself. When it was over, the Clintons and both Gores spoke to a larger audience in a hotel ballroom. The president entertained the crowd with his usual polish, gushing with superlatives for his vice president. But when Gore took the podium, his words were slow, lifeless, and meandering. One felt the room grow limp. When it was over, Democrats in the crowd were whispering to themselves, asking what was wrong with Gore. The answer was that Clinton’s very presence imposed a psychic burden on him that was a major hidden factor in the politics of 2000.

Clinton was mystified by what he regarded as Gore’s political clumsiness. Routine political tasks that for Clinton required no more effort than breathing or blinking—dodging a curveball question at a news conference or warming up a crowd of Democrats—were a heavy lift for the vice president.

Back in 1992, in the bright first light of their partnership, it was the similarities that were most striking: They were young, intelligent, moderate southern Democrats. It was by now clear that their differences were more numerous and profound. Gore was a vastly more complex public figure than Clinton.

One reason that Clinton found it easy to speak in public was that he was essentially a transparent man. There was a narrow difference between the man at the podium and the man with his shoes off and feet up on Air Force One. Clinton in private was surely more expressive, more profane, but the opinions and perspective he expressed were the same in both settings. Clinton was, by the standards of politicians, free of artifice.

In his frustration with Gore’s awkward performances, Clinton would say to friends like Terry McAuliffe, and even to Gore’s campaign operatives, that “Al just needs to be himself.” It was not so easy as that. Gore, for all his moderate Democrat packaging, had the intellectual instincts of a radical. He had revealed himself as such in his environmental tract, Earth in the Balance. He had written the book in 1991 at a time when he was not calculating presidential politics, and indeed had grown contemptuous of what he described in its pages as his own tendency to be a “finger-in-the-wind” politician. There was a utopian streak to his mind, manifested in the book’s calls to banish the internal combustion engine and to make environmentalism the “new guiding principle for civilization.”

If Gore had spent a career just being himself and saying what he really thought, he never would have made it into office in Tennessee, much less to the vice presidency.

Clinton meant well with his advice. When it came to helping others, he was an uncommonly generous politician—certainly by the standards of presidents, who historically have not been notably helpful to vice presidents trying to succeed them. Dwight Eisenhower, when asked in 1960 about Richard Nixon’s contributions to his administration, answered, “If you give me a week I might think of one.” Lyndon B. Johnson scarcely lifted a finger to help Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. Ronald Reagan lifted a finger, but no more than that, to help George H. W. Bush. Clinton, however, genuinely believed that Gore had been the best vice president in history, and would have done anything to make Gore his successor.

Clinton’s reputation for political selfishness was a consequence of the necessary steps he had taken in 1995 and 1996 to put distance between himself and congressional Democrats. But the reputation was in the main unfair. Long after he had raised enough money for himself, the president kept up a punishing schedule of evening and out-of-town fund-raisers to help the Democratic National Committee and all manner of other party candidates. He wanted nothing more than to hit the campaign trail on Gore’s behalf. All Gore wanted Clinton to do was go away.

Ordinarily a perceptive man, the president was nearly the last person to see the reality that his relationship with Gore was broken. When his own West Wing advisers fumed about Gore, Clinton always made excuses for him. Gore’s strategists were the problem, Clinton would say, adding that they had embraced a bogus notion that voters suffered from “Clinton fatigue.” He would not accept the fact that Gore himself was rejecting Clinton, for reasons that were personal as well as political.

Clinton’s interest in the matter, of course, was not completely selfless. He wanted Gore to run on the Clinton record—job growth, deficit reduction, environmental enforcement—and believed that the vice president’s election would be an important validation of his own legacy. He was genuinely stumped that Gore would not do so, and blind to the fact that for some voters Gore needed to reach, the Clinton legacy was more about personal failings than public accomplishments. Clinton had long been worried about the election. Watching cable television early in 1999, he had seen Texas governor George W. Bush speak to a group of Republicans. Bush was laboring under a reputation for being a lightweight, but Clinton instantly recognized a formidable politician. As he saw it, Bush’s promise of “compassionate conservatism” was a brilliant formulation. It was a way of taking the old right-wing agenda and dressing it up so that it sounded like something Bill Clinton would say—high praise indeed in the president’s book.

In the summer of 2000, as the problems between him and Gore became too obvious to ignore, Clinton tried to patch things up. Run on the record, he urged, and stop worrying about Clinton fatigue. “Al, there’s not a single person in this country that thinks you messed around with Monica Lewinsky,” he said.

On another occasion, he tried to make light of things. If it would help, Clinton said, he would be delighted to stand on the front step of the Washington Post and let him “lash me with a bullwhip.”

“Maybe we ought to poll that,” Gore replied. For a moment, the old banter between them returned.

It was not, however, enough to heal the rift. If Clinton had trouble seeing this, his wife did not. In August, Gore chose as his running mate Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Clinton had known Lieberman since he campaigned for him during his days at Yale, and both were leaders in the New Democrat movement to remake the party. Nationally, however, Lieberman was most famous as a Clinton critic. He had been the first and most vocal to denounce Clinton’s conduct as “immoral” in the wake of the Lewinsky confession.

White House press secretary Joe Lockhart walked in on the Clintons on the day Gore announced his choice. What do you think? the president asked.

“I think it’s a way of saying ‘screw you’ to Bill Clinton,” he replied.

A look of satisfaction crossed Hillary Clinton’s face. “I’m glad someone agrees with me,” she said.

The president would hear none of it. “No, no, you’re wrong,” he said. “It’s a great choice.”