Al Gore

• 1. Introduction

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  Al Gore won more votes than his opponent on Election Day 2000, yet still lost the presidency. That outcome, decided by a Supreme Court ruling of 5-4 in Bush v. Gore, placed him among only five presidential candidates in American history to win the popular vote and lose the White House. The margin in Florida that cost him the election was 537 votes. The national popular vote margin he carried was 543,895 votes. Those two numbers, separated by roughly half a million Americans, define much of how Gore is remembered. But they do not explain how he got there: from a summer spent working tobacco fields in Carthage, Tennessee, to the floor of the United States Senate, to the vice presidency, to an Academy Award-winning documentary, to a Nobel Peace Prize. What shaped Al Gore long before that night in December 2000 when he stood before the country and conceded? And what did he do with the decades that followed?

• 2. Tennessee Roots, Washington Education

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  Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born on the 31st of March 1948, in Washington, D.C., the second child of Albert Gore Sr., a man who would serve 18 years in the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from the Vanderbilt University Law School. His ancestry traces to Scots Irish immigrants who settled in Virginia in the mid-17th century and later moved to Tennessee after the Revolutionary War. Gore's childhood split between two distinct worlds. During the school year, his family lived at The Fairfax Hotel in Washington's Embassy Row. During summers, Gore worked the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle. He attended St. Albans School, an elite all-boys college preparatory institution in Washington, from 1956 to 1965. He captained the football team, threw discus for the track and field team, and graduated 25th in a class of 51. He applied to exactly one college: Harvard University. He was accepted. At Harvard, Gore enrolled in 1965 planning to major in English and write novels; he later shifted to government. On his second day on campus, he ran for the freshman student government council and won the presidency. His college roommate was Tommy Lee Jones, the future actor, with whom Gore shared a room in Dunster House. His early academic record was unremarkable; during his first two years, his grades placed him in the bottom fifth of his class. By his junior and senior years he had grown more serious. In his senior year, he took a course with oceanographer Roger Revelle, a global warming theorist, who first lit Gore's interest in climate and environmental science. Gore's senior thesis, titled "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969," earned him an A. He graduated with an A.B. cum laude in June 1969. His older sister, Nancy LaFon Gore, who accompanied him and their parents to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, died of lung cancer in 1984.

• 3. The Vietnam Decision

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  On graduating from Harvard in 1969, Gore faced the military draft. His father, Albert Gore Sr., was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and was running for re-election to the Senate in 1970. Gore believed that finding a way around military service would give his father's Republican opponent a political weapon. His Harvard adviser, Richard Neustadt, recalled Gore saying that "he would have to go as an enlisted man because, he said, 'In Tennessee, that's what most people have to do.'" Tommy Lee Jones remembered Gore saying that "if he found a fancy way of not going, someone else would have to go in his place." Gore enlisted in August 1969 and returned to the Harvard campus in his uniform to say farewell to his adviser. He was jeered by fellow students. He later described the experience as an "emotional field of negativity and disapproval and piercing glances that certainly felt like real hatred." He completed basic training at Fort Dix from August to October, then was assigned as a journalist at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where he was named "Soldier of the Month" in April 1970. His orders to ship to Vietnam were held up for some time, a delay his family suspected was engineered by the Nixon administration, which feared that if something happened to Gore, his father would benefit politically. He was finally sent to Vietnam on the 2nd of January 1971, after his father had already lost his Senate seat, becoming one of roughly a dozen members of the Harvard Class of 1969 who served in Vietnam. He was stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa, working as a journalist for The Castle Courier. He received an honorable discharge in May 1971. Gore later reflected: "I didn't do the most, or run the gravest danger. But I was proud to wear my country's uniform." He also acknowledged that his time in Vietnam changed his understanding of the South Vietnamese people, saying he was "naively unprepared" for how many of them "desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom."

• 4. Reporter, Then Congressman

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  Returning from Vietnam in a state of disillusionment, Gore did not go straight into politics. He enrolled at Vanderbilt University Divinity School on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, attending from 1971 to 1972 to explore, as he later put it, "spiritual issues" and to make sense of social injustices that challenged his religious beliefs. He worked night shifts as an investigative reporter for The Tennessean. His investigations into corruption among Nashville's Metro Council led to the arrest and prosecution of two council members on separate offenses. In 1974, he took a leave of absence to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. Journalism had shown him that he could expose wrongdoing but not change it; the law seemed like the path to something more. He never finished. At the end of February 1976, U.S. Representative Joe L. Evins announced his unexpected retirement from Congress, opening the Tennessee 4th congressional district seat, the same seat his father had once held. Within hours of learning about the announcement from Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler Sr., Gore quit law school to run. He asked his father to stay out of the campaign entirely, telling him: "I must become my own man. I must not be your candidate." His wife, Tipper, who held a job in The Tennessean's photo lab and was working on a master's degree in psychology, joined the campaign with the assurance she could return to her job if he lost. Gore won the Democratic primary with 32 percent of the vote, three percentage points ahead of his nearest rival, and captured 94 percent of the vote in the general election. He was re-elected in 1978, 1980, and 1982, running unopposed twice and winning 79 percent of the vote the third time. In 1984, he moved to the Senate, winning a seat vacated by Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, defeating Republican nominee Victor Ashe and independent Ed McAteer, founder of the Religious Roundtable. He won re-election in 1990, and that victory remains the last time Democrats won a Senate election in Tennessee.

• 5. Atari Democrat and the Information Superhighway

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  On the 19th of March 1979, Gore became the first member of Congress to appear on C-SPAN. He also became one of the politicians known as the "Atari Democrats," a label given to legislators with a passion for technological issues ranging from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the greenhouse effect. He sat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Science and Technology Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee. He chaired the Science Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for four years. In 1982, he introduced the Gore Plan for arms control, which proposed reducing the risk of a nuclear first strike by cutting multiple-warhead missiles and deploying single-warhead mobile launchers. He co-chaired the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future alongside Newt Gingrich. Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn later wrote that as far back as the 1970s, Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as both an economic engine and a tool for improving education. Gore introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986. As a senator, he crafted the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, drawing on the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network, which had been submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central architects of the ARPANET. The bill passed on the 9th of December 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure, which Gore called the "information superhighway." During his vice presidency, he first publicly discussed his plans to emphasize information technology at a speech at UCLA's Superhighway Summit on the 11th of January 1994. The Clinton-Gore administration launched the first official White House website in 1994. Gore's 1999 remark to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, in which he said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," was reshaped by critics into the claim that he said he "invented" the Internet. Vint Cerf later stated plainly: "His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit." At the 2005 Webby Awards, where Gore received a Lifetime Achievement Award "for three decades of contributions to the Internet," he delivered his acceptance speech in exactly five words, following Webby's rules, joking: "Please don't recount this vote."

• 6. A Son's Accident and a Book

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  On the 3rd of April 1989, Gore, his wife Tipper, and their six-year-old son Albert were leaving a baseball game when Albert ran into the street to greet a friend and was struck by a car. The boy was thrown 30 feet and then traveled another 20 feet along the pavement. Gore later recalled the moment: "I ran to his side and held him and called his name, but he was motionless, limp and still, without breath or pulse. His eyes were open with the nothingness stare of death, and we prayed, the two of us, there in the gutter, with only my voice." Two nurses happened to be present and tended to Albert. The Gores spent the following month at the hospital. Gore called the accident a "trauma so shattering" that he considered it "a moment of personal rebirth." In August 1991, he announced that his son's condition had been a factor in his decision not to run for president in 1992, saying: "I would like to be President. But I am also a father, and I feel deeply about my responsibility to my children." During that same period, Gore wrote Earth in the Balance. The book became the first work by a sitting U.S. Senator to reach The New York Times Best Seller list since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

• 7. The 2000 Election and Its Aftermath

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  Gore announced his 2000 presidential candidacy on the 16th of June 1999, in Carthage, Tennessee, introduced by his eldest daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff. His major theme was strengthening the American family. He chose Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate on the 13th of August 2000; Lieberman was "the first person of the Jewish faith to run for the nation's second-highest office." Gore's daughter Karenna and his former Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones formally nominated him at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. During the primaries, Gore became the only non-incumbent presidential candidate in American history to win every single primary and caucus in a party primary, a distinction that still stood as of 2023. He even won the first presidential primary ever held over the Internet, the Arizona Presidential Primary in March 2000. On election night, news networks called Florida for Gore, then retracted that call, then called Florida for Bush, then retracted that call as well. Florida's Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified the state's vote count. The Florida recount was halted on the 12th of December by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 that Florida's recount standards violated the Equal Protection Clause, and ruled 5-4 that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by the December 12 deadline. George W. Bush won Florida's certified count by 537 votes, which delivered Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency. A District of Columbia elector abstained, giving Gore 266 electoral votes to Bush's 271. Gore conceded on the 13th of December 2000, stating: "For the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession." After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Gore chartered two planes to evacuate 270 people from New Orleans, including patients from Charity Hospital, after neurosurgeon Dr. David Kline contacted him through Greg Simon of FasterCures. Gore used his political influence to expedite landing rights in New Orleans and flew on one of the planes himself alongside his son Albert III.

• 8. Climate, the Nobel, and What Followed

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  Gore had been involved with environmental issues since 1976, when as a freshman congressman he held what were described as the first congressional hearings on climate change. By 1990, as a senator, he presided over a three-day conference with legislators from more than 42 countries seeking to create what he called a Global Marshall Plan. His 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, became the subject of widespread attention; in 2007 it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. That same year, Gore was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was named a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year. In 2008, he received the Dan David Prize for Social Responsibility. In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gore co-founded Generation Investment Management in 2004 and serves as its chair. He also founded The Climate Reality Project and became a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading its climate change solutions group. He served on the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. and as a senior adviser to Google. In 2013, he became a vegan, and in a 2014 interview said: "Over a year ago I changed my diet to a vegan diet, really just to experiment to see what it was like. I felt better, so I've continued with it and I'm likely to continue it for the rest of my life." His 2017 documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, documented his continuing work on climate. In 2020, he helped launch Climate TRACE, an initiative to independently monitor global greenhouse gas emissions. In November 2021, he spoke at the early stages of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. In March 2026, speculation about a possible presidential run in 2028 was renewed when Gore appeared as a guest on The Bulwark and did not rule out a candidacy, noting there is a "real desire for another septuagenarian candidate."