— Ch. 1 · The Boy From Carthage —
Al Gore.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
On the 31st of March 1948, Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., the second child of a U.S. Representative and his wife Pauline LaFon Gore. His family lived in The Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row during the school year while spending summers on their tobacco farm in Carthage, Tennessee. He attended St. Albans School from 1956 to 1965, graduating twenty-fifth in a class of fifty-one students before enrolling at Harvard University in 1965. At Harvard, he initially planned to write novels but switched to government studies after joining the freshman student council as its president. His roommate was future actor Tommy Lee Jones, and they shared a dormitory in Dunster House where they watched television and played pool together. Gore struggled with science classes and avoided mathematics during his first two years, placing him in the lower one-fifth of his academic cohort. He later earned As and Bs in his junior and senior years, taking a course with oceanographer Roger Revelle that sparked his lifelong interest in global warming. He graduated cum laude in June 1969 with an A on his thesis about television's impact on the presidency.
The Journalist In Uniform
Gore enlisted in the Army in August 1969, becoming one of only about twelve graduates from the Class of '69 who served in Vietnam. He arrived in Biên Hòa on the 2nd of January 1971, working as a journalist for The Castle Courier while stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade. Although his father had lost his Senate seat earlier that year, Gore received an honorable discharge in May 1971 without seeing full-scale combat. After returning home, he felt dispirited by the war zone experience and the political defeat of his father. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School from 1971 to 1972 on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to explore spiritual issues. In 1971, he began working the night shift for The Tennessean newspaper as an investigative reporter. His investigations into corruption among Nashville Metro Council members led to the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses. He took a leave of absence from the paper in 1974 to attend law school but quit abruptly in 1976 when his father's former House seat became available. He won the 1976 Democratic primary with thirty-two percent of the vote against a single independent opponent.