Inventing Al Gore

Bill Turque's biography of Vice President Al Gore will probably be remembered mainly for its charge that Gore smoked pot much more often in the 1970s than he has previously acknowledged. Yet this allegation--delivered by apparently credible sources--is just a tiny snippet from Gore's life story, as told by this Newsweek reporter. Turque begins with Gore's childhood years in Washington as the son of a senator and traces his steady climb to become the Democratic Party's favored candidate for president in 2000. The author admires Gore's liberal politics, but is also frustrated by what he considers the vice president's tendency to trim:

Gore is an usually thoughtful politician who has been an important, even prophetic voice on issues like global warming, arms control, and the changes wrought by the Information Age. But his life and career have also been punctuated by separations never quite achieved, and by bold strokes never quite converted into personal or political liberation.

Turque recounts a number of Gore scandals, most notably his questionable fundraising at Buddhist temples and heavy-handed calls to party donors (over which he famously claimed there was "no controlling legal authority"). And these stories clearly trouble Turque: Gore, like President Clinton, plays "games with the truth. But where Clinton's lies have been those of self-protection and survival, Gore's have by and large been ones of self-aggrandizement and glorification." Overall, Inventing Al Gore is a balanced and authoritative portrayal of a man whose most important years may lie ahead. --John J. Miller