The Life of AL Gore (washingtonpost.com)

Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were never literally roommates at Harvard, as many accounts through the years have implied, but they were at the center of a group of friends who coalesced as freshmen at Mower and later moved on together to Dunster House. The young men in this group were not aesthetes or intellectuals or clubby types, but mostly took their cues from Jones and Gore--jocks with a creative side. One of the lingering memories of many classmates is of the charismatic Jones, who played guard on the football team, pacing along a path near the Charles, wearing a blue velvet jacket and holding a rose, reciting lines from "Coriolanus" in his hard, crackling Texas voice.

Gore also thought of himself as a nascent artist. He told Tipper Aitcheson, his girlfriend, that he intended to be an author, and his letters to her often included stanzas of poetry. For a freshman writing tutorial, he spent countless hours at his desk, gazing into the somber shroud of a Cambridge winter, typing out installments of what he hoped would be a Faulknerian novel about Carthage, the colorful hometown of his Tennessee summers (an untitled and unfinished tome that appears lost to history). Unlike many of his peers, who seemed eager to reinvent themselves into hipper Sixties figures once they reached Cambridge, Gore chose to retreat into his past and re-create it, using the idiosyncratic characters of the small town in the Upper Cumberland to populate his fiction.

His friendship with Jones encouraged Gore to accentuate his southernness, according to Bart Day, who came up to Harvard from St. Albans with Gore and lived with him at Mower B and Dunster. "There was this funny little dynamic going, as if Tommy Lee was the occasion for Al to assert his roots." At one point Gore took to wearing bib overalls as an expression of Dixie hip. But if Jones, who kept his radio tuned to the only country music station in Boston, was the superior actor, he also tended to take himself more seriously than Al. "He was always acting. He was always on, always on stage," said John Tyson. "So what we would do--Al would instigate this--he would say, 'Let's ignore Tommy Lee!' So Tommy Lee would walk in and no one would lift a head up. Then he would start acting and we would ignore him and say, 'Anybody seen Tommy Lee?' After a while he would start screaming. He just couldn't take it. Then we would bust out laughing."

Gore competed with Jones in the telling of down-home tales, and was regarded by most of their friends as the funnier of the two. Among the publications flowing into the suite, along with Sports Illustrated, Time and Playboy, was the Carthage Courier, the little Tennessee weekly whose masthead shouted an irrefutable boast: "The Only Newspaper in the World that Gives a Whoop For Smith County." Gore also gave a whoop, combing the Courier in search of material for his novel and odd stories to read to his pals.

"The Carthage Courier was always a treat," said Mike Kapetan. "Al would read it in Tennessee dialect." Gore loved his Tennessee characters, Kapetan thought, but he also loved to tell stories about his other, far different world, the high culture of St. Albans. One of those tales was about the Washington society family that decided to learn Spanish "the intense way, by not speaking English. So they all sat down to dinner and no one spoke a word."

After rooming their first year on the Yard, Harvard men were distributed among the school's traditional houses, which served as combination dormitories, fraternities and tutorial colleges. Gore and eight friends requested to be assigned to Adams House, which had a literary reputation, but were sent as a group instead to Dunster, named for Harvard's first president, the Rev. Henry Dunster, and regarded as one of the lesser houses, stocked with science grinds and assorted characters who affected a Wild Bunch image, riding motorcycles and staging all-night high-stakes poker games. Dunster was an aging Georgian structure with no elevators, no air conditioning and unreliable hot water heaters, but it had certain advantages, among them its own kitchen and wood-paneled dining room, squash courts and a grill in the basement, an elegant library, fireplaces in many suites, and the privacy that came with being all the way down by the Charles River.

Gore and his St. Albans friend, Bart Day, lived during their sophomore year in what they called the "bird's nest" apartment on the fifth floor, directly above a large suite that housed the others in their gang. They called themselves the "motley crew," and included in their set a few girlfriends, including Tipper. Al and Tipper's relationship had grown increasingly serious since the Christmas break of his freshman year, when he had invited her down to the farm in Carthage to meet his parents. She was still in high school then, and when she graduated he asked her to "please look at schools up here," and she had obliged, enrolling first at Garland, a two-year women's college, before transferring to Boston University.

While he and his friends were becoming increasingly preoccupied with the Vietnam War and the military draft, Gore's interest in politics reached a nadir during his sophomore year. He left it to others to run for house president or representative to the Harvard Policy Committee. When a former Kennedy aide spoke at Dunster and asked, "Who in this room is actually going to go into politics?" Gore kept his hand down. His one notable public act was organizing a protest against the nightly servings of fried chicken and gravy in the dining room; after ballooning to 210 pounds, he successfully lobbied for less fattening fare.

Interviews with several dozen Dunster men from his graduating class revealed a range of impressions about Gore during his college days. Some agreed with one classmate's characterization of him as a "stoic and machinelike" figure, a princeling who had to have "everything in his life orchestrated for him." Even his occasional participation in Dunster's all-night poker games, according to this view, was carefully "arranged for him so that he could experience what it was like to play poker." A few others considered him a dullard and were stunned by his later rise to national power. "There were a few geniuses in the mix and you remember them," said one. "Gore was not that kind of person. He didn't have a magnetic personality. I liked the guy, but president? What a kick!"

Most regarded Gore as neither princeling nor stiff. Dennis Horger remembered him as "a good listener, and with all the egos in a place like that, it was not a quality many people had." Robbie Gass considered him "a straight guy in the best sense of the word. Not as straight arrow, but a good guy. He talked straight. You knew where you stood. He was not a game player." Peter Goldberg thought back on Gore in the dining hall at breakfast leading a "funny and interesting" discussion of what was in that morning's New York Times. But the most common memory of Gore retained by his Dunster classmates placed him down in the basement lounge. It seemed as if he and his pals were there almost every night, playing pool, chomping on hamburgers, watching the news and then Johnny Carson.

By the spring of 1967, the second semester of their sophomore year, beer-chugging contests were a thing of the past and marijuana, as Dunster classmate Jonathan Ritvo recalled, "had almost completely replaced alcohol as the substance of choice." Dunster House had its own in-house grass supplier, and though Gore and his motley crew were not considered potheads, they were known to smoke, and also to consume "magic brownies" laced with marijuana. When the issue of past drug use by presidential candidates first arose during the 1988 campaign, Gore readily acknowledged that he had smoked dope in his college days. Said housemate David Friedman: "A number of us had a joke: It's a good thing Al Gore 'fessed up that he inhaled, because a number of us saw him passed out on the Dunster House couches."

Saved From Chaucer

Gore's academic concentration was English during his first two years at Harvard, but that field grew increasingly difficult for him. He became frustrated by what he called the "headwind" he faced in his literature courses. "The apocryphal story that I tell, which doesn't tell the whole truth, is that Chaucer was okay, but when I began to get into the antecedents of Chaucer, I began to think, 'Is this really for me?' " Gore recalled in a recent interview. "I liked part of it, but I didn't like the rest of it." In fact, he said, if he had "more of a gift for writing," he might have "stayed that course."

After discarding his unfinished novel about Carthage, a place that he loved and romanticized, Gore began looking at his past in a more clinical way, spurred on by a popular course he took called "The Human Life Cycle" taught by Erik Erikson, the legendary psychologist who had written "Childhood and Society" and coined the phrase "identity crisis." Erikson was a proponent of psychobiography, seeking to understand the evolution of human personality and ego through the psychological struggles one faces at each stage of life. He believed that identity was not immutable but could change over a lifetime, depending upon how successfully a person dealt with the tests of each stage.

Gore considered Erikson "a man of tremendous insight" who had "a big influence" on his thinking at what he once called "an awkward stage" in his life. For a course paper, he traveled to Washington and interviewed his father to write a psychobiography of him. Sen. Gore told his son about how his older brother Reginald, in whom the family had invested most of its hopes, was disabled by a gas attack while fighting in France during World War I, and how that setback had motivated Albert to succeed for the family. The themes Gore studied in Erikson's course found their way into conversations he had with his close friend Mike Kapetan, one of six children of working-class parents from Wayne, Mich. "Trying to establish his own identity is what Al was about," Kapetan concluded from their discussions.

"Al took Erikson and the development of the human being and fulfillment of the psyche, he took that very much to heart," Kapetan said. "And I can see why he would. In many ways he was deprived of childhood. The problem of being a famous man's son--he would talk about that. Around our dinner table there were six hungry mouths, around his there were senators and congressmen and ambassadors. Unfortunately, that is where he learned his behavior to be still and sober and circumspect." Kapetan came to understand that Gore envied "the way I talked about my dad and the kind of relationship we had. From the earliest days I could remember I would accompany my dad on Saturday chores. 'Daddy, what is this?' 'Daddy, what is that?' There was always something else to talk about between Al and his dad."

Kapetan and Bart Day both had a sense that their friend was struggling with his past to prepare for his future, that even as he was telling them that he did not intend to follow his father into politics, at some level he knew that it was inevitable. "I guess you might argue that he almost kept it from himself in a way," Day said. And if they were the motley crew, Al was indeed Prince Harry. "There was this pull to something, almost like he was born to it."

The pull became much stronger in his junior year, when Gore took his first class from Richard E. Neustadt, professor of government and director of Harvard's Institute of Politics. Neustadt was a leading presidential scholar whose book "Presidential Power" was already a classic, with the special blessing of the late President John F. Kennedy, Harvard's favorite son. His course on the American presidency attracted hundreds of students, even though by 1967, as Neustadt now says with a certain bemusement, "I was regarded as a sort of semi-reactionary, part of the Washington establishment."

His lectures in Emerson Hall were not a dry recitation of presidential history or theory, nor an attack on establishment politics, but a method of political empathy, in a sense, showing the students how it would feel to sit in the Oval Office and have to deal with an endless array of dilemmas and complex decisions. He used specific stories, some real, others imagined, to illustrate specific points.

Twice a week the students gathered in small sections to role-play many of the dilemmas Neustadt brought up in the lectures. Gore's section man, as teaching assistants were called, was Graham Allison, who was completing a book on the Cuban missile crisis. Allison was fascinated by the way Kennedy reached his decision not to bomb the missile sites but rather impose a blockade against Soviet ships, and how he then sold those decisions to his advisers. In the students' role-playing, Gore was the one who "naturally gravitated to the role of president," Allison recalled. "That was the role he either chose or was chosen for." Gore played JFK, Allison said, "with intensity and seriousness--you could see the political possibilities coming alive. He was very much engaged with the notion of presidential power as the power to persuade."

The experience was "an eye opener," Gore said later, reawakening in him "the same sense of excitement" that Peretz's seminar had stirred in his freshman year. He realized that when he talked about solving problems in government, he suddenly felt more at ease, a sensation overtook him that this was where he belonged, as opposed to when he tried to resolve the same societal problems through writing, when he felt that he was straining.

When he mentioned his fascination with Neustadt's class to his parents, they apparently did not tell him directly how they felt--they tried not to guide his life--but they were privately overjoyed. They had been concerned that he was struggling at Harvard, groping for motivation, showing signs of alienation, turning away from them and the values of public service that Albert and Pauline Gore had so thoroughly inculcated in him. Now, they told friends, with his renewed interest in government, the spark relit by Neustadt, he had been saved--saved from Chaucer, saved from some outer darkness. At least for the moment.

Next: The Tumultuous Summer

Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Lynn Davis contributed to this report.

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