Rightwing immoral tactic. Take spotlight away from Bush The Liar who should be impeached immediately.
Rightwing Republican whining: Dems have to be pure as the driven snow, one little mistake and they're toast. Republicans can be as disgusting, sexually perverted, corrupt, greedy, thieving and lying as they like.
The Republican Culture of Corruption.
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washingtonpost.com
Al Gore and the Legacy of Race
By Ellen Nakashima and David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 23, 2000; Page W06
Hey guys, I am not Bill Clinton. I'm Al Gore.
The vice president of the United States felt compelled to make that enunciation of the obvious to one curious group he encountered early in his presidential campaign. In this case he was not trying to distance himself from the president's personal waywardness, but rather to acknowledge that he did not possess Clinton's uncommon political ease. The scene was a conference room at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, and the occasion was a gathering of black lawyers and businessmen who had been brought together to meet Gore by one of the nation's leading entrepreneurs, Bob Johnson, founder of the Black Entertainment Network. In this crowd, Gore was still viewed primarily as an appendage to perhaps the most popular modern president ever among African Americans. But what would he be like on his own?
And so the self-evident: He was not Bill Clinton, at least not in style. "He and I have different approaches to how we communicate, how we interact," Gore said. "But on the issues that are most important to you, I will hold my banner high."
The questions coming at Gore that day were what Johnson called litmus tests. They did not involve nuances of policy on affirmative action or criminal justice, but rather were variations on another theme -- access. Is this going to be a campaign where blacks will be in positions of power? Are you going to have blacks in your Cabinet we can reach and talk to? Who are your close black friends? If I get on the phone to the White House, are you going to be surrounded by people who claim not to know me and say I can't talk to you and your high folk? They were in close, "talking candid and frank" about the real deal, as Johnson recalled -- "really taking the measure of the guy," seeing if he would maintain the standard of accessibility set by his boss. Gore worked hard to convince them that he would.
As happened that day with the black professionals, it seems almost inevitable when considering Al Gore in the context of race to measure him in comparison with the president who brought him into the White House. Though they come from different economic circumstances -- Gore from the upper middle class, Clinton from the lower middle class -- they share many characteristics. They are moderate sons of the New South who did not themselves participate in the civil rights movement yet were moved by its idealism. Both grew up in predominantly white environments, yet learned how to communicate in the symbolic language of the black church through their familiarity with scripture. They also both joined in the baby-boom generation's embrace of black music and culture, and became increasingly reliant on the support of black voters as they moved up from provincial to national politics. In all of those realms, it seemed, the difference was notably one of degree, Clinton more fluid and extemporaneous than his contemporary Gore.
The subject of Al Gore and race may never move to the front line of issues in the presidential campaign, but few themes are more central to an understanding of the political impulses and conflicts at the core of his character and why he thinks and acts the way he does. His openness to people of diverse backgrounds, his aversion to risk, the uneasy compromises he has made between his ambition and his ideals -- all of this can be seen through the prism of race.
Long before Bill Clinton came along, Gore lived in the shadow of another dominant politician, his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Many of the deepest tensions of American race relations were played out during the long career of Sen. Gore, whose opposition to the segregated ways of his native South angered many of his constituents and eventually led to his political demise. With one notable exception, when he capitulated to regional sentiment and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the choices he made over more than three decades in Washington were courageous -- and they provided lasting lessons in the political education of the son. If there are as many ways of looking at Al Gore on the issue of race as Wallace Stevens found to look at a blackbird, the first views, shading all the rest, including his relationship with Clinton, come from the life and times of his parents.
Family Lore
In the political narrative of the family Gore, the subject of race appears episodically, often in the form of little morality plays starring the late patriarch, Albert Gore Sr., or his wife, Pauline LaFon Gore. The elder Gore entered politics at a time in the late 1930s when Jim Crow segregation was still a bitter fact of life in the South, and though he was considered a moderate, his positions on race were complicated by the political realities of that time and place. As a member of the House of Representatives, he voted against the imposition of a poll tax in 1942, but there were relatively few blacks in his district in middle Tennessee, especially in contrast to the Memphis region to the west, which was controlled by party boss Ed Crump and his Democratic machine. As venal as Crump's operation was, it included blacks in the power base, spreading money to handpicked black leaders to control the vote. So when Albert Gore and other reformers took on the Crump machine, they also ran the danger of alienating powerful blacks in Memphis.
The Gores personally felt the evils of segregation during the long car trips they began making in 1939 between Carthage, Tenn., and Washington after Albert was elected to Congress. They took along a black nanny, Ocie Bell Hunt, to look after their young daughter, Nancy. On the first drive, according to historian Tony Badger, they could find no restrooms for Hunt to use and had an exhausting time searching for a motel that would lodge an interracial traveling party. Finally they came upon a little motel in east Tennessee that would allow the Gores and Hunt to stay overnight, provided they arrived after dark and left before other guests in the morning. The trips continued in this humiliating fashion year after year, until well after Al Gore Jr. was born in 1948. He said in a recent interview that he thought he had some early memory of those incidents, but added that perhaps he merely remembered being told the stories so many times. "That was a lesson in injustice that was driven home," he said. "And it was reinforced by frequent commentary from my parents."
Racial injustice was a common theme in the conversations of Pauline Gore, who friends say was the one who fed the family's convictions. She was born in west Tennessee, the land of cotton plantations and rigid color lines, and apparently drew a deep personal witness to the harsh effects of racism. When Nancy was old enough, Pauline urged her and a friend to read Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," and then had them read it again until the theme was etched in their memories. The ideal of a Southern lawyer committed to principles of truth and justice that transcended race and prejudice was one that Mrs. Gore thought "really hit at the heart of the whole matter," recalled Nancy Fleming, the daughter's friend. Pauline's sensibility was unusual among her peers: She often recounted the time during the 1940s when she addressed a black acquaintance by the title "Mrs." instead of a condescending first name, and was struck by the look of horror that simple act brought to the face of another Tennessee congressman's wife.
The two most popular stories showing how Gore Sr. imparted lessons on race to his son are essentially true, staples in the vice president's oral autobiography during this campaign, yet with each retelling they seem dipped lightly in the shimmering well of myth. Here is the old man leading young Al up the hill in Carthage -- Keep up, son! Keep up! -- to the Cullem mansion, where the boy stares in bewilderment at his history lesson for the day, the awful ancient slave rings still encrusted to a dingy basement ceiling. It does not diminish that moment to note that Senior had a second motive in making that visit -- he was interested in buying the mansion for his family residence.
And here is Sen. Gore on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1956, taking a dramatic stand against the Southern Manifesto, calling it "the most spurious, inane, insulting" thing he has ever seen and declaiming "Hell no!" while waving away the segregationist document placed before him by colleague Strom Thurmond. It does not lessen the importance of that act to point out that Gore was joined in opposition by his colleague from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, and that the senator's most powerful friends back home, including the editors at the Nashville Tennessean, also opposed the racist proposition and would have criticized Gore had he done anything else.
With every gesture Gore made in support of civil rights came a mailbag of angry letters from segregationists. One year after denouncing the manifesto, he voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act and further enraged racist constituents by nominating two young black students from Memphis for appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy. "I was literally astounded to read that you had appointed two Negroes" to the academy, wrote one voter who called himself Gore's friend. "It appears that some of your staff must have slipped up very badly to make such a mistake as this." While politely thanking the letter writer for "calling this matter to my attention," Gore noted that Selective Service boards did not take race into consideration when calling young men for the draft and so "it had not occurred to me that I should do so" in the case of the Air Force Academy nominations.
Father and Son
Sen. Gore's reputation as a dauntless progressive on matters of race grew so much in later years that it is difficult to think of him as he was back in the early 1960s, at times the most conservative member of his own family. His wife often privately nudged him on racial issues. His daughter was close friends with David Halberstam, Fred Graham and other journalists who had covered the early civil rights movement for the Tennessean, and she brought the commitment and passion of their world into the family orbit. The senator considered himself an economic populist more than anything else. He believed in a gradual approach to desegregation, arguing that it could only happen over time as job and educational opportunities improved. He never claimed to be "a white knight for civil rights," said historian Badger, but rather "a moderate who believed in the Constitution . . . and who had compassion for oppressed fellow Americans."
His cautious approach faced its stiffest test during the Senate deliberations over the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. He feared the act sought to accomplish too much too quickly. While distancing himself from the segregationists who bitterly opposed the measure, he spoke out against it in his own way, arguing that it would place excessive power in the hands of federal bureaucrats who might arbitrarily withhold funding from hospitals and schools perceived to be violating the law. Among the places the senator had to defend his position was within the confines of his own home, the family suite on the eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel, where son Al, 16 years old and a junior at St. Albans, sparred with him in dinner table debates as intense as the ones on the Senate floor. "I, as always, respected what he had to say," Gore said later of his father. "But I disagreed with him."
Civil rights leaders in Tennessee disagreed with Albert Gore also, and briefly turned away from him. The Tennessee Voters Council, an influential statewide black organization, withheld its endorsement in the 1964 Democratic primary, recalled Russell Sugarmon, a founding member of the organization and now a Memphis judge. "It was a way of slapping his wrist. We wanted to make the point, but not so hard that it defeated him in November," Sugarmon said. Indeed, by November he was back on the council's slate. The senator never acknowledged to Al or anyone else that there might have been a political consideration to his vote, that he might have been more fearful of losing white voters than black support that year. "Not openly. Never. Never. It was not in his nature" to confess to political considerations, Al said later of his father. But survival undoubtedly was part of the calculation. Tennessee had already elected one Republican, Howard Baker, to the Senate after the death of Kefauver. A conservative mood was spreading across the state, and Gore seemed increasingly vulnerable.
Lessons of Loss
If Sen. Gore's vote against the Civil Rights Act was in part a realistic assessment of what he had to do to survive, it worked. He won reelection that fall and returned to Washington, where from then on he acted like an unflinching Southern progressive attuned to the needs of his black constituents. He voted for the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, opposed President Nixon's two Southern nominees for the Supreme Court, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, and eventually apologized for his 1964 vote, calling it the biggest mistake of his career. All during that time he took a pounding from segregationists and real estate interests who opposed the open housing laws. As Gore Jr. watched this transformation, he began thinking that perhaps the dinner table debates with his father had had a delayed effect. "I sometimes think that the ferocity, the renewed ferocity that he brought to the civil rights debate in 1965 . . . came out of what might have been his own sense that he made the wrong call on that 1964 vote," Gore said recently. "My analysis is vulnerable to solipsism, but I've actually at times thought that the renewed ferocity that I referred to may have been at least in a tiny part for me."
Beyond that family psychoanalysis, there were larger lessons that young Gore carried away from his father's experience, lessons on the tension between idealism and ambition and on the different meanings of loyalty in black and white America. As Sen. Gore became more outspoken on issues of race and peace over the next six years, his standing in Tennessee deteriorated, his liberal positions were portrayed as contrary to the state's values, and he was defeated in the 1970 election. "The racist part of the campaign against Gore was so subtle that it did not need to be overt," said Charles Bartlett, a veteran journalist from Tennessee. "It was just part of the air down there that year." The same Al Gore who earlier had urged his father to act more boldly on race now saw the devastation of a lost career, a powerful lesson to a young man imbued with equally fierce desires to win and to do the right thing. Later, when he reached Congress himself, he took pains not to repeat his father's mistake of getting too far in front of his constituents.
But he also saw how the relationship between his father and black constituents had strengthened to the point of seeming unbreakable. The 1964 vote was long forgiven and forgotten. Memphian Benjamin Hooks, later executive director of the NAACP, said the vote was regrettable but "understandable" as a means of survival. During the final days of the losing race in 1970, Gore never seemed more invigorated than when he was campaigning in the churches and union halls of the black wards of Memphis, with stops at Universal Life Insurance and historically black LeMoyne-Owen College. He was taken in by the movement and its symbols; he even held an event on the balcony of the Motel Lorraine, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot two years earlier, delivering what his black aide, Walter Bailey, remembered thereafter as his "Give 'em Hell" speech. When Al Gore retraced that same path years later in his own campaigns, he discovered that the Gore name had an unforgettable resonance in the black community, thanks to his father.
An Arrangement of Friends
Pauline Gore believed that her only son should have an enlightened education, and she undertook a modest amount of social engineering to ensure that he was exposed to blacks from an early age. When the family would return to Carthage for the summer, she hired a black youth from the neighborhood, Abe Gainer, the son of a laundry woman, to be Al's companion. Gainer, now a social worker in Chicago, was several years older than Gore, and served as both playmate and babysitter for him during the early 1950s. "We got to the point where we sort of became inseparable," Gainer recalled recently. "I remember that I could not leave in the evening until Al would go to sleep."
There was an altruistic component to Pauline Gore's actions, though she did not step far outside the racial norms of that time. For a semester in 1953, she brought Abe to Washington with the family and enrolled him at Francis Junior High in Northwest Washington, which offered an academic program superior to the segregated little schoolhouse he attended in Carthage. During his semester in Washington, Gainer lived not with the Gores at the Fairfax but with the family of a black hotel worker. After school, he came over to the Gore suite and washed dishes, cleaned rooms and occasionally donned a white jacket to serve dinner guests at the senator's table.
Gore eventually befriended another black teenager, Jerome Powell, who worked as the hotel's doorman and was the lead singer in his own band. In one of Gore's rare explorations of the soul of the city, he persuaded Powell to take him to the Howard Theater to hear James Brown. They drove to the theater at Seventh and T in Powell's little blue 1953 Ford. Gore seemed "happy as a lark," Powell recalled. He was one of only a handful of whites in the audience and stood out as much because of his restraint as the color of his skin. "He would applaud . . . that's about the best Al would do," Powell said. "He wasn't a jump-and-scream-type guy."
The choice of a Washington school for Al was influenced by Pauline Gore's belief that St. Albans, which had begun the process of admitting blacks, was more "liberal" on issues of race than most other Washington prep schools. "I wanted him to know that blacks have the same right to go to school that whites have," she explained in an interview. That is not to say that St. Albans was in the vanguard of racial diversity. There was a lone black student in Gore's class, James Gray, who was so distraught by his singular situation that he frequently broke out in hives during his first year on campus. Gore and Gray were cordial, but not close friends. The first black faculty member, Brooks Johnson, was hired during Gore's years there, first to help coach track and football, then to teach history. Johnson sensed that Gore, unlike many of the other students, seemed "very comfortable around strong black people." Decades later he could recall the memory of a graduation tea in the school courtyard to which Gore and his mother were accompanied by an African American woman who worked for the family. It was, said Johnson, a "very hoity-toity tea, and she came as a member of the family."
Of Malcolm and King
It was Gore himself who made certain that he would interact with blacks at his next school, Harvard. "I actually requested a black roommate, just because I wanted to learn what I didn't know," he said. There were 42 African Americans in the 1965 freshman class, to that point the largest such group ever in Harvard Yard. During their first year, one of Gore's roommates was Ballinger Kemp, a Californian whose knowledge of jazz and blues and the hip scene in Boston enlightened all the white kids at Mower, their freshman dorm. Gore then became closer friends with another black classmate, John Tyson, his roommate in his junior year at Dunster House.
"I learned about black consciousness from Tyson," Gore said. Tyson got him to read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice." Gore said he remembered "loooonnng conversations at night in the bunk beds, top to bottom and back again" about the books, and how and why blacks perceived the world differently from whites. "You know, the way concepts of value and worth and beauty and normality are all defined in a majority culture in ways that can be hurtful. . . . It was really quite an education." Tyson said he and Gore were together on the night of April 4, 1968, when they heard the news that King had been assassinated in Gore's home state. "At the time the big question was, Who are we as Americans?" Tyson recalled. "A country of laws? Of bigotry? God! Who are we? Damn! What's going on? It was disillusionment. Rage. Who are we?"
That week there were services at Memorial Church on campus. Members of the Afro-American Student Association attended a separate march and service, and Tyson remembered having torn feelings about leaving Gore behind. "Al was cool," he said. "He didn't say, 'Hey man, I want to come with you.' " Jeff Howard, who was president of the black student group, recalled that when black students started pressuring Harvard for the creation of an Afro-American studies department in the aftermath of King's death, Gore seemed sympathetic to their demands, though he was not actively involved. Howard's one lasting memory of the senator's son was utterly apolitical, being taken for a ride on the back of Gore's motorcycle in the midnight darkness after a party.
Working With Junior
While Albert Gore Sr. faced several moments when he had to make courageous decisions on race, there were no truly comparable tests of conviction for the son, none thrown up by history and none created by his own initiative. As he followed his father's path from the House to the Senate, he concentrated on a set of issues -- consumer protection, technology, communications, the environment, defense -- that seemed mostly clean and impersonal, removed from the sweat and struggle that come with questions of race in America. Civil rights groups counted on him to vote their way -- for the Voting Rights Act of 1982, the King Holiday bill in 1983, against the Supreme Court nominations of conservatives Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. But he stayed mostly in the background on social issues, always mindful of his father's fate. In the words of Gilbert Merritt, a federal judge in Nashville and a longtime family friend, it was no accident that Gore took "soft positions on hard issues, but hard positions on soft issues."
During his near quarter-century in politics, Gore has worked in subtle ways to solidify his standing among African Americans. He has always hired minorities for his campaign and office staffs and increasingly placed them in key positions during his rise to national prominence, from counsel (Kumiki Gibson) and legislative director (Thurgood Marshall Jr.) in the vice president's office, to manager (Donna Brazile) of his 2000 presidential campaign. Brazile, who had worked previously for candidates ranging from Jesse Jackson to Dick Gephardt, had been cultivated by Gore for a decade before she finally signed on last year. "He just kept calling," she said, and his persistence convinced her that he was interested in her for more than reasons of appearance. Not long into the job as the first black woman ever to hold such a high campaign post, Brazile drew fire for saying that Republicans use Colin Powell and Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts as cover for their lack of commitment to helping minorities. Gore was pressured to fire her, but instead came to her defense, saying her comment was essentially true.
Many of Gore's black aides say he is not naive about the dual meaning of the term colorblind in American society, and how it can be used by whites who want to sound unbiased while ignoring the realities of racism. Yet they also have come to think of him as someone who looks beyond race to see them as talented individuals. "It's not that he's indifferent" to race, said one aide. "I think he really was reared to look at people as people." Greg Duckett, who worked on Gore's Senate staff in the 1980s, was struck by the respect and unpatronizing attitude his boss displayed when meeting with poor and black constituents during endless open meetings in each of Tennessee's 95 counties.
During one of their drives between county seats through the back roads of west Tennessee, Duckett turned to Gore and said wryly, "You know, Al, I'm probably unique in that I can say as a young African American, I've been in every courthouse in west Tennessee and it wasn't for criminal reasons." Gore laughed, and the joke served as an icebreaker for a long conversation about race. With many other moderate Democrats during that period, Gore was trying to develop a New Democratic agenda that promoted economic development as the path to self-sufficiency. He eventually sent Duckett to organize a series of workshops around the state on minority business development. "We saw eye to eye on the old parable," Duckett said. "You can give a person a fish and you've taken care of their needs for a day, but you can teach them to fish and you've taught them how to live a life."... |
