The longest shot; measuring Al Gore Jr. for the White House.

• Author: Eisendrath, John
• Position: Albert Gore Jr.

THE LONGEST SHOT

The windows were rolled up but Albert Gore Jr. didn't care. The 38-year-old senator from Tennessee, a rising star of the Democratic party, and a man Sen. Jay Rockefeller says simply, "is going to be the president,' sat screaming behind the wheel of his Pontiac 6000 Sedan. "Will you move, please?' Gore yelled to the driver of a car that blocked him in. "Will you please move?'

Gore was parked on M Street in downtown Washington, in front of the CBS television studio where he had just finished taping an interview on the homeless for "Nightwatch.' It was 1:30 on a Thursday afternoon and he had less than ten minutes to get back to the Senate for a vote on a product liability bill. Window down. Scream repeated. Car moved. Gore peeled away from the curb. At K street he ran a red light; at Pennsylvania Avenue, another. After weaving into oncoming traffic, the senator backed down only after seeing an ambulance, sirens blaring, coming head on. "Senator runs into ambulance,' he said, swinging back into the traffic flow. "Senator yields.'

Al Gore rarely yields. Pulling into the Capitol parking lot with time to spare, Gore said, "There's a section in the Constitution that allows for this. A senator on pressing business cannot be stopped.'

Albert Gore, according to friends and enemies alike, is on very pressing business. In four terms in the House of Representatives, Gore made a name for himself for being aggressive, pragmatic, and thorough. "There is no one in public life who sets about learning the issues as systematically and relentlessly as Al,' says Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic and one of Gore's old college professors. "In the next decade Al Gore will be the most talked about Democrat and deservedly so,' says Norman Ornstein, research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Even Republicans applaud Gore. "He's a terrific politician, who's very tenacious and always in control,' says James Henry, chairman of the Tennessee Republican party. Adds Victor Ashe, who was drubbed by Gore in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Howard Baker in 1984: "He's bright, intelligent, and will be on the national ticket within a decade.'

Washington, of course, is a town that thrives on overstatement. Being a political golden boy and being called one can be two very different things. After all, a quick perusal of his legislative record could leave the impression that despite the accolades, Gore is little more than a blow-dried Bob Forehead. In 1984, Gore went on record in favor of organ transplants; in 1985, he lobbied for an Office of Critical Trends Analysis and took the rock band Twisted Sister to task for writing obscene lyrics; this year he has introduced a bill on the homeless and has been named co-chair of a congressional task force on illiteracy. When it comes to motherhood issues, Al Gore takes a stand.

And then there's the grooming. The son of a former senator, Al Gore's resume appears calculatedly perfect. He married his high-school sweetheart and studied political science at Harvard. He went to Vietnam and law school. Gore even went to divinity school, for heaven's sake. Bad habits? Gore jogs every day, doesn't drink coffee, and snacks on apples, pears, and carrots. And he looks like a thoroughbred. His features are sharp and statesmanlike; his eyes deep and sincere. One look at his thick brown hair and you know he's never had a cowlick.

But could a mail-order politician garner such rave reviews? People don't just say Gore is a good politician; they say he's going to be president. Even the most cynical must wonder how this could possibly be.

Politics and war

The place to start looking for the answer is, of course, in a one-room schoolhouse--this one in Possum Hollow, Tennessee. From there, Al Gore's father emerged to become one of the nation's great liberals. Albert Gore Sr. spent 32 years in Congress--14 in the House, 18 in the Senate. Al Sr. and his Tennessee colleague, Sen. Estes Kefauver, "were liberal and sometimes radical on economic matters, all humane on race, all men of national stature,' according to David Halberstam, who covered them as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. Gore was the author of the Interstate Highway Act and a proponent of recognizing communist China long before Richard Nixon got around to it. In 1956, he was one of only a few southern politicians who didn't sign the pro-segregation Southern Manifesto. He went on record in opposition to the Vietnam war in 1964.

There were no one-room schoolhouses for Al Jr. By the time he was born in Washington on March 31, 1948, his father had been a congressman for ten years. Young Al was enrolled at the exclusive St. Albans Episcopal School for Boys in Washington. He was an honors student and captain of the football team.

Later, Gore's time at Harvard coincided with the most turbulent period of college unrest in history. He was there between 1966 and 1969, a time marked by student demonstrations and burned draft cards, and by civil rights marches throughout the South. But don't bother looking for Al Gore in the crowd the next time you see "Woodstock' on TV. "Al was always morally serious,' recalls Peretz. "People had an intense politics then that looked serious, but which was not always as serious as it was intense. Al stood out to me because he didn't get swept up in the elan of the student movement. He had independence of mind.'

Gore's politics were serious. He spent the summer of 1968 working on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign as chairman of Tennessee Youth for McCarthy. And though he aspired to be a writer, he quickly soured on English courses and switched his major to government, weighing in with a 103-page senior thesis titled, "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969.'

Nevertheless, Gore insists that a career in politics was out of the question at that point. "The experiences of Vietnam and the presidency of Richard Nixon left me with the conviction that politics would be the very last profession I entered,' Gore says. A personal experience, coming soon after he graduated from Harvard in 1969, added to this antipathy...