100
PARTISAN REVIEW
Petroleum Reserve was drafted; he learned to love the workers-"the
union was in my bones"-because his mother lullabied him to sleep with
union songs. Before October 6, he had seemed as stiff and unyielding as
if he were tied
to
a rock. Now, his advisors proclaimed, the "real" AI
Gore has come
to
the party. He had been a chained Prometheus. Now,
one of his aides whispers in rapt awe, he is "Prometheus unbound!"
Each Gore twin is a fictive mirror of the other. One hates the Vietnam
war; the other volunteers for it. One wants to study theology and prac–
tice journalism; the other buys a farm in his father's old congressional
district and leaps at the first chance he has
to
dump the other's plans and
run for Congress. One begs his disgraced father not
to
campaign for
him; the other solicits his father's counsel and takes as much money
from his father's friend, Armand Hammer, as he can get. One proclaims
a radical environmentalist message and denounces the internal combus–
tion engine; the other, Turque writes, "cozied up
to
a notorious polluter
for support." After the defeat of Gore One in the presidential primary
of
1988,
Gore Two periodically re-emerged. Mocking politicians as the
usual suspects and trumpeting again his old messianic environmentalism
as "the new central organizing principle of civilization," he wrote
Earth
ill
the Balance.
But even the twins did not provide an adequate supply
of fictions. Midway through the
2000
campaign, he confided
to
Roger
Simon of
U.S. News and World Report
that Simon should "stay tuned"
for "the emergence of the new AI Gore." But, Turque remarks, "The
new Gore sounded suspiciously like the old new Gores." Gore himself
summed up his doubleness succinctly. During the Senate hearings over
Clarence Thomas's confirmation, he said, "There is, quite simply, a pub–
lic and a personal truth"-two Gores, each of whom disguises the other.
Early in his account of how AI Gore was invented, Turque encoun–
ters Gore's assertion
to
Wolf Blitzer that "during my service in the
United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Turque asks: "Why does Gore tell such whoppers?" His answer is:
because it is how his mother and father would have cast the story.
Albert and Pauline Gore made choices for their son with an eye to
how each one would fit into a compelling pre-presidential narra–
tive, and important aspects of Gore's early years were routinely
embroidered for public consumption ... Iduring a time whenl pub–
lic figures could frame their images more or less as they wanted.
Getting the story just right was especially important in the Gore
family, and the Vice President had vivid early lessons in how to
adjust reality if it didn't play properly.
