Review: A rigorous, insightful look at 'Prince' Al Gore

"The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore"
By David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima
Simon & Schuster
Biography
224 pages

In this story: Flying in the face of stereotypes Marijuana and formality RELATED STORIES, SITES

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- In a documentary video produced for the Democratic National Convention, Al Gore describes himself as the fellow "standing behind the president" for the last eight years. The light-hearted self-deprecation may have seemed jarringly at odds with the public perception of the vice president. But those who know him well surely recognized a side of Al Gore rarely put on public display -- the joker, the teller of tales, the deadpan wisecracker. But if that's the "real" Al Gore, who is this guy that has been "standing behind the president" for the last eight years?

That's the central question David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima try to answer in "The Prince of Tennessee." The Washington Post journalists interviewed or corresponded with more than 500 people -- including their subject -- for their portrait of the Democratic presidential nominee. Their insightful examination of what they call "The Rise of Al Gore" goes a long way toward helping the reader understand what makes him tick.

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Much of what the authors discovered flies in the face of the stereotypes that have defined Gore's public persona. Yes, he is the son of a prominent politician who grew up in a Washington hotel, attended fine schools, and followed in his father's professional footsteps.

But Maraniss and Nakashima suggest that knowing those facts sheds little light on the inner life of Gore. They found a complex dynamic at work inside the Gore family. Young Al seemed very much the dutiful and devoted son, yet he had a streak of rebellion and one of recklessness.

The recklessness apparently was most evident when he was driving a car. The rebelliousness was harder to spot. At every step in his early life, he seemed to be doing what his parents wanted -- succeeding at school, working on the family's Tennessee farm each summer. Even during the upheavals of the 1960s, when Gore was attending Harvard, he seemed to follow a middle path between the radicalism of his fellow friends and the establishmentarian liberalism of his father.

After school, however, he asserted himself, sometimes in unexpected ways. He volunteered for duty in Vietnam, even though his father was a vocal critic of the war. He entered law school, as both his parents had, but also studied religion and ethics, without ever earning a graduate degree. He worked as a reporter and editorial writer for the Nashville Tennesseean rather than leaping into politics.

"Here, during his Nashville days between Vietnam and Congress," the authors write, "it would be mistaken to define Gore by the stereotype later applied to him, that of the cautious plodder following a sure and narrow path to advancement. He was not so much an ambitious young man on the rise, doing what was necessary to attain the expected credentials, but more of a restless if occasionally out-of-sorts figure trying out several lives in succession, or sometimes all at once, as newspaperman, ethicist, legal scholar, husband and father, pot-smoking escapist, and sober editorialist."

The many facets of Al Gore's personality are revealed in David Maraniss' and Ellen Nakashima's biography of the presidential hopeful, "The Prince of Tennessee"

Maraniss and Nakashima investigated the future vice president's relationship with marijuana. They conclude he smoked more of it than he has admitted, but no more than many of his contemporaries and newspaper colleagues did. They also examined the origins of the stiff formality that has been a hallmark of his public personality since he first ran for Congress 24 years ago.

They find in it echoes of the courtly manner his father affected in his public life. They also find evidence of what they see as a significant personality trait in Al Gore -- a deep-seated insecurity. They believe he shields his self-doubts behind the rigid mask of his public personality. They conclude that his habit of inflating his own accomplishments (most famously by claiming to invent the Internet) is another manifestation of his insecurity.

"The Prince of Tennessee" is a rigorously researched examination of Al Gore. It penetrates his seemingly cold exterior to find a fiercely intelligent, witty, likeable and often-contradictory person inside. He may have been born to run for president, but the Gore revealed in this biography would be far more comfortable working in the Oval Office than he is campaigning to get there.

Simon & Schuster

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