Albert Gore Jr.: Son of a senator

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- When Bill Clinton picked Al Gore Jr. as his running mate in 1992, his father, former Sen. Al Gore Sr., famously said, "We trained him for it."

And his parents did, by giving their son a golden education, a sense of duty and obligation, as well as their own example as a powerful political couple in the 1950s and 60s.

In a lifetime of speechmaking, the eulogy for his father in December 1998 may have been the best speech Vice President Al Gore Jr. ever gave.

"My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my life," said Gore.

The Great Depression awakened his father's political conscience. Al Gore Sr., congressman and senator from Tennessee, was a Franklin Roosevelt, New Deal Democrat, a genuine Southern populist.

Gore was a son for whom there were only the highest expectations, political expectations.

As a youngster, he led a divided life. The school year was spent where his father worked - in Washington. The family lived in a hotel. Gore grew up in a world of adults. When his father talked to President John F. Kennedy on the phone, young Albert listened on the extension.

"Al came back into the dining room, it was, 'Whew, Daddy, I didn't know presidents talked like that!" Al Gore Sr. laughed when recounting the story in 1992.

Summers and holidays were the other part, the better part of young Gore's life. Those days were spent on the family farm near the small town of Carthage, Tennessee, in Smith County.

"I think he was affected by being here and having his playmates and they loved him and he loved them," his mother, Pauline Gore, said in 1992. "They played together and he hated to leave them when he'd go back to Washington."

Back in Washington, Gore's private boarding school was the exclusive St. Albans. His friends recall an earnest, but ordinary guy.

"I knew Al the year in which he didn't change socks and I knew him in a year in which he didn't wear any socks," says his classmate Reed Hundt.

In those summers back in Tennessee, Gore did farm work, along with the others who worked for his father. His father worked him hard.

"I said, son, you take the lead," said Al Gore Sr. "None of them will work harder than you do."

"He must have told me a hundred times the importance of learning how to work," Gore said of his father in his eulogy.

Steve Armistead, one of Gore's friends from Carthage, remembers working alongside Gore on the farm. "One year we did the tobacco, one year it looked like the hay was the emphasis and the next year it looked like the cows was the emphasis, that sort of thing," Armistead remembers.

At the farm, Gore also formed lifelong friendships and it is the family farm that today Gore still calls home.

Back at St. Albans, he was captain of the football team and graduated in the middle of his class. Maybe his most enduring achievement at St. Albans was meeting Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, also known as Tipper.

In 1965, Al Gore went to Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

'National madness'

The next year, Tipper followed him to Boston. He smuggled her into his dorm room. He smoked some marijuana. The '60s were becoming the '60s - drugs, riots, assassinations, the draft and Vietnam.

"Throughout our four years at Harvard, the nation's spirits sank," Gore told the Harvard graduating class of 1994 during his commencement speech.

Gore thought the Vietnam War was "national madness." And by the time he was a senior, his father, the senator, was strongly anti-war.

"Twenty-five thousand American men have died," said Al Gore Sr. in a speech at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. "What harvest do we reap from their gallant sacrifice?"

His father's anti-war position presented an excruciating - and unique - problem for Gore, a college student whose draft deferment was running out.

Sen. Gore was up for re-election in 1970 and the Nixon administration was making him a special target. If the son dodged the draft, it was ammunition for the enemies of the father.

"I mean, his father's in trouble in a career that he's had all his life, and it looks like he's probably going to be beat over this being one particular issue," says Armistead. "And it was a family issue for him."

Professor Richard Neustadt, Gore's advisor at Harvard, remembers Gore's decision. "He decided that he would have to go and that he would have to go as an enlisted man because, he said, 'In Tennessee, that's what most people have to do,'" Neustadt explains.

So Gore volunteered for the draft, which meant two years of service. It also meant he would take his chances on combat. But when his order to Vietnam was held up, Gore suspected a political motivation.

"He told me that the Nixon administration held up his orders because his father was in a very, very tight election, and they were afraid, the Nixon administration was afraid that if anything happened to the son, there would be a sympathy vote for the senator and he might win," says Mike O'Hara, who served in Vietnam with Gore.

While he served stateside, Gore married Tipper Aitcheson at Washington's National Cathedral. He also campaigned for his father and even appeared in TV commercials. In one, Gore Sr. and Jr. are riding horseback as the announcer reads, "I may have run ahead of the pack sometimes, he says, but I'm usually headed in the right direction."

Republican Bill Brock ran against the senior Gore.

"People perceived that Sen. Gore was not any longer representing Tennessee, that he didn't come home, hadn't been home," says Brock. "Vietnam was sort of the way you illustrated the point."

Armistead remembers that difficult time. "His father had called [and] asked him to write his victory speech and this was a situation that everybody knew there was not going to be a victory speech," he said.

From his eulogy for his father, Gore said, "The night he lost in 1970, he made me prouder still. ... he turned the old Southern segregationist slogan on its head and declared, 'The truth shall rise again.'"

Sen. Gore's political career was over; his son's military service had not helped. And then Gore received orders to go to Vietnam: Report after Christmas. Before Gore arrived in Vietnam, the men in his unit knew someone with connections was coming.

"He says, 'Look, I just want you to know we're getting a replacement - his name is Al Gore. He's the son of a senator," says Mike O'Hara, a friend from the army. "And I thought, 'So? So what? What difference does it make?'"

Once in Southeast Asia, Gore served an army journalist, writing about other soldiers for military and hometown papers. Friends say he never traded on his family name. But others say he was treated with care.

"The general said that it was not an order, but that he requested that we keep a very close eye on this individual and that we try to keep him out of harm's way," says Alan Leo, then an army photographer.

Leo says the officers did not want Gore in situations where he might be wounded, or worse.

"I actually had some negative feelings toward him before I even met him, for the simple reason that he was getting special treatment," says Leo. "Once I got into the field with him, I just treated him like anybody else."

Like most army journalists, Gore stayed in relatively secure areas. Gore sent some of his articles home. His father, in turn, shared them with the Nashville Tennessean.

"Our first byline from Al Gore came while he was in Vietnam," says Frank Sutherland, an editor for the Tennessean. "He sent a story that he had written about a fire base being overrun to his father."

Gore served in Vietnam less than five months. His total time in the Army amounted to one year and nine months. He was discharged early to go to graduate school.

Finished with Harvard and finished with the Army, he came home to Tennessee with more questions than answers. Gore told his young wife and his friends that he was disillusioned with the political system that had turned away his father and brought about Vietnam. Vietnam would stay with him a long time.

"I want to say on a personal basis, it's been hard for me to find the words with which I can come to terms with what Vietnam and the Vietnam War was all about," Gore told an audience outside the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington.