THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE: The Rise of Al Gore.

• Author: MEACHAM, JON
• Position: Review

THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE: The Rise of Al Gore by David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima Simon & Schuster, $23.00

From Caney Fork to Capitol Hill, Al Gore has never stopped striving

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, JUST BEFORE Al Gore joined Bill Clinton on the 1992 ticket, I happened to spend a day with the young senator back home in Tennessee. I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and had been assigned to do a "day in the life" piece on Gore; we spent most of a Friday, as I recall, driving through the Sequatchie Valley, from town meetings and elementary school visits in places like Jasper and Dunlap. Lots of hands to shake, questions to answer, little towns to see, calls to return (we had to stop at a gas station to do that; this was still essentially a pre-cellular era). The senator had been promoting Earth in the Balance, which he actually wrote himself; was commuting between Washington and the state; and had his mind on the Earth Summit in Rio. It seemed a grueling pace, and I remember asking him how he juggled everything--the Senate, family, fundraising, book writing. "You just keep after it," the senator replied. "You don't waste time."

Al Gore has rarely frittered away a moment. The basics of his biography are familiar: the capital childhood in the Fairfax Hotel; the tough summers of farm work in Carthage; the diligent study at St. Albans and Harvard; the anguished choice to go to Vietnam; the years in the newsroom of The Tennessean; the decision to run for his father's old House seat at the age of 28. Though his dad was only a senator and George W. Bush's made it all the way to the White House, Gore has led the vastly more interesting political life, from listening to President Kennedy talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis to navigating conservative waters in the South at the apex of Ronald Reagan's popularity. Yet the vice president is not merely a driven electoral automaton; he's an intriguing human being. Together with Bill Turque's excellent Inventing Al Gore, David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima's The Prince of Tennessee sheds light on an important slice of modern American political history, for the rise of Al Gore is about more than a seemingly stiff Sunbelt boomer who might be president. It's also a compelling (yes, compelling, not a word you often see associated with Gore) personal story of ambition, anxiety, and ambivalence unfolding amid the great events of our time: the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Reagan Revolution, and the Age of Clinton.

In the tradition of First in His Class, Maraniss' magisterial biography of Clinton, The Prince of Tennessee began in the pages of The Washington Post, and it deftly carries the reader through the stages of Gore's life. Expectations were high from the start. He was born on March 31, 1948, almost a decade after his sister Nancy. Pauline Gore said they "had almost despaired of having another child, much less a son" and thought of the baby as "kind of a miracle." From then on, it seems, Al was essentially the center of the Gores' world, both...