Record shows Gore Long Embellishing Truth

By Walter V. Robinson and Michael Crowley, Globe Staff, 4/11/2000

Vice President Al Gore brings a remarkable life story to the presidential race: His father was such an unwavering supporter of civil rights that it cost him his Senate seat. His older sister was the first-ever volunteer in the Peace Corps, that heroic outpost on President Kennedy's New Frontier.

By Gore's account: He was raised in hardscrabble Tennessee farm country. He was a brilliant student, in high school and at Harvard. And despite his political pull, he received no special treatment, opting instead to go to Vietnam where he was ''shot at.''

After his Army service, he spent seven years as a journalist, and his reporting at the Tennessean in Nashville put corrupt officials in prison.

As a junior member in the US House, he was a major force: He wrote and then spearheaded passage of the Superfund law. He even authored the US nuclear negotiating position. And at a time when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev faced off on the superpower stage, Gore had his own meeting with Gorbachev.

And, of course, he created the Internet.

At various times in his political career, Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said all those things about himself and his family.

None are quite true.

Some are exaggerations grown up around kernels of biographical fact. Others are simply false. A few, like the boastful claim about the Internet, have become comic fodder, even for Gore.

The mystery, even for Gore's friends, is why he has persistently embroidered a political resume and pedigree that shorn of embellishments are impressive by any measure. Gore did press for early funding of the network that grew into the Internet. He served in Vietnam when he could have arranged a safer setting, unlike his Republican rival, George W. Bush. His journalism did unearth corruption. And in Congress, he exerted uncommon influence on technology and national security matters, notwithstanding his lack of seniority.

But for Gore, the facts have never been quite enough. Starting as a junior congressman and continuing through this year's primaries, Gore has regularly promoted himself, and skewered his opponents, with embroidered, misleading, and occasionally false statements to a degree that even some of his allies concede is rare for a politician of his stature.

Many of Gore's inflated claims have been reported, though only a few prominently. But a review by the Globe of Gore's public statements over more than 20 years, as well as two recent biographies, suggest that the pattern has been more pronounced than previously believed, and that it remains unchecked.

Earlier fears that Gore would be hobbled by President Clinton's character failings have abated. Now, it is Gore's credibility that could become an issue. Behind the scenes, according to sources, top campaign aides have met to consider the issue's potential for damaging Gore's candidacy. His Republican opponent, Texas Governor Bush, has already telegraphed his plans to attack Gore's believability.

Gore's recent campaign rhetoric has invited scrutiny of his sometimes freewheeling treatment of facts. Several times, he misstated his own record and that of his Democratic opponent, former senator Bill Bradley. In Iowa, Gore's misleading claim that Bradley voted against disaster relief for the flood-stricken state dealt a serious blow to Bradley's insurgent candidacy.

''Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?'' Bradley asked Gore at a debate in New Hampshire.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, said she is troubled that Gore sometimes continues to use exaggerated or inaccurate claims even in the face of public evidence that he is wrong.

''You wonder if it's a failure to listen or an impulse to deceive,'' said Jamieson, who monitors the accuracy of political statements. ''The question is, is there a basic personality flaw there that will make it more difficult for him to be president? Is there a tendency to exaggerate? Is there a tendency to reconstruct the past? When you start counting on the fingers of both hands you start to say maybe there's a pattern here.''

Douglas Hattaway, a campaign spokesman, said Gore could not be interviewed on the issue.

''Everybody makes mistakes, and every politician's utterances are pounced upon. But it is not fair to pull out every misstatement and honest mistake and attack him for it,'' Hattaway said.

Many political candidates portray themselves as more effective or courageous than the facts justify and paint their opponents in the worst possible light.

For example, Bush has made claims about his gubernatorial record that are open to challenge. To cite one case, Bush takes credit for a major HMO reform in Texas. In fact, he opposed the bill and it became law without his signature. And during the New York primary, Bush's campaign ran an advertisement that falsely characterized Senator John McCain's record on breast cancer research. Bush narrowly won that election.

But even some of Gore's supporters glumly acknowledge that Gore stands out for the extent to which he has created myths about his life and his record. As the Globe reported in January, the issue so troubled his presidential campaign staff in 1988 that aides twice sent him memos warning him about it.

More recent Gore claims make it clear that the predilection persists. In announcing his candidacy last June, Gore praised his father's courage on civil rights but sidestepped an obvious contradiction: The elder Gore strongly opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. And his sister was a salaried midlevel political appointee at Peace Corps headquarters, and not, as Gore has said on a couple of occasions, a ''volunteer,'' the label reserved for those who serve overseas.

Newsweek reporter Bill Turque, the author of a new biography, ''Inventing Al Gore,'' said Gore is prone to ''self aggrandizement.'' Yet in most instances, Turque noted, the embellishments are not made up out of whole cloth, but involve a ''nugget of fact'' that Gore has embroidered.

''The most bewildering thing is that, in most of the cases, the straight story is as praiseworthy as the one he inflates,'' Turque said last week.

Turque and Bob Zelnick, a former ABC News reporter and the author of a 1999 Gore biography, ''Gore: A Political Life,'' both trace Gore's tendency to exaggerate his resume to the vice president's childhood. They said the child of prominent parents could never quite measure up to their unreasonable expectations.

In his parents' eyes, said Turque, ''it was not enough for him to be good, to be excellent. He had to be transcendent, he had to save the world. This desire of his to please them left him with a compulsion in the retelling to stretch what are honorable, credible accomplishments.''

Dukakis responds

In the 1988 presidential primary campaign, then-Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, needled once too often by Gore, upbraided him during a debate: ''Please get your facts straight. If you want to be president of the United States, you better start by being accurate.'' Another candidate, former Senator Paul Simon, scolded Gore during another debate for making ''sweeping charges.''

In recent interviews, Simon and Dukakis were reluctant to discuss their scrapes with the man who is now their party's standard bearer. But Simon said Gore's rhetorical excesses that year ''could accurately be described as brashness, which obviously didn't get him anywhere. ... It was a combination of youth and inexperience.''

But what raised the most eyebrows in 1988 was not what Gore said about his opponents. It was his inclination, during his first audition on a national stage, to add lustrous detail to his own resume.

Many of the embellishments were unearthed at the time, but attracted little attention because Gore's 1988 campaign proved a hapless effort.

The aides in 1988 who warned Gore about sticking to the facts had plenty to worry about: Gore's claim that he grew up in Carthage, Tenn., when he was reared in a Washington hotel suite; his exaggeration of his farming background; his statements, later debunked, that he had been under fire in Vietnam and that his investigative reporting at the Tennessean in Nashville in the 1970s had sent people to jail; his claim to have been schooled in rural Tennessee and urban Washington, when he was educated at an elite private school in the capital; and his insistence that he had been a homebuilder and small businessman when he had minimal involvement in a small Tennessee subdivision.

Last March, Gore reasserted his claim to have been a developer and small businessman. And, starting in 1994, Gore has added two years to his journalistic experience, upping the figure from the five years he once claimed to seven.

In one 1988 ad, Gore claimed to have been a ''brilliant student,'' but that has been contradicted by Turque's biography. Gore's transcripts show that his high school and college grades were predominantly B's and C's. The same campaign ad also said Gore ''refused any special treatment'' when he joined the Army for two years and went to Vietnam, where he spent five months. Yet Turque discovered evidence that General William C. Westmoreland played some role in Gore's enlistment. And when Gore arrived in Vietnam, Turque reports, his commanding officer issued instructions that Gore be kept away from danger.

Hattaway, Gore's spokesman, said that if there was any preferential treatment, Gore was unaware of it. ''The fact is,'' Hattaway said, ''everyone in Vietnam was in danger. And Al Gore served in Vietnam, when a lot of people were doing their best to avoid it altogether.''

In his campaigns in 1984 and 1988, Gore awarded himself credit for national policy accomplishments that a junior member of the House or Senate could only dream of.

For example, Gore immersed himself in the nuclear arms debate, becoming one of a number of House moderates whose support was coveted by the Reagan administration. The Democrats, led by Representative Les Aspin and Senator Sam Nunn, and backed by Gore, wanted a less destabilizing option than the multiple-warhead MX missile. Their plan, ultimately shelved by the White House, called for the single-warhead Midgetman missile.

Yet when Gore ran for the Senate in 1984, one TV ad proclaimed, ''He wrote the bipartisan plan on arms control that US negotiators will take to the Russians.''

''That is a vast overstatement. He had nothing to do with what we proposed to the Soviets,'' Kenneth Adelman, who was the director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said in an interview. Adelman's view is supported by the two biographies, and by contemporaneous news accounts.

When he ran for president four years later, Gore aired television ads showing him shaking hands with Gorbachev. And he told audiences that he had met with the Soviet leader. But Gore's only ''meeting'' with Gorbachev took place when the two men shook hands during a luncheon Gorbachev had with 26 members of Congress.

And further seeking to highlight his national security credentials in that race, Gore visited the naval base in Norfolk, Va. in February 1988 to chastise his Democratic primary opponents for opposing funds to build new aircraft carriers. As for himself, Gore said, ''I would stand for a strong America.''

Gore neglected to mention that he had voted in the Senate against the funding for carriers.

In two other campaign ads in 1988, Gore awarded himself credit for the landmark 1980 Superfund legislation, saying he ''led the fight to clean up toxic waste'' and was the ''author of a tough Superfund law to protect the environment and crack down on toxic polluters.'' But someone else was the author. Gore played only a supporting role as one of 42 House co-sponsors.

Tobacco is another issue where Gore's statements have been open to question. Despite his assertions, repeated this year, that he worked for tougher restrictions against tobacco, Gore was a reliable vote for tobacco interests while he was in the House.

But it was an emotional speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that biographers like Turque and Zelnick find even more troubling. In it, Gore recounted his sister's death from lung cancer, caused by cigarettes she began smoking at age 13.

''Tomorrow morning, another 13-year-old girl will start smoking. I love her, too,'' Gore declared, bringing tears to the eyes of many listeners. ''Three thousand young people in America will start smoking tomorrow. One thousand of them will die a death not unlike my sister's. And that is why until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.''

A day later, Gore was accused of hypocritically exploiting his sister's death for political gain. The reason: For seven years after his sister died, Gore remained an ally of big tobacco and accepted both tobacco campaign contributions and federal subsidies for the tobacco grown on his farm.

Even in the face of lingering questions about his tendency to embellish, the vice president nevertheless misstated his own record and distorted Bradley's at several critical junctures in the last six months.

Jamieson, the University of Pennsylvania scholar, said this year's most egregious example of Gore's willingness to stretch the truth was his continued repetition of the charge that Bradley had opposed flood relief for midwestern farmers in 1993.

During a Jan. 9 debate in Des Moines, Gore chastised Bradley for opposing flood aid. The attack had been choreographed in advance: Gore asked a local farmer hurt by the floods to stand for dramatic effect.

Soon after, Gore unveiled television advertisements in which Iowa Senator Tom Harkin touted Gore as ''the only Democratic candidate for president who helped make sure that Iowa got the help we desperately needed after those floods.''

Caught off guard in debate, Bradley failed to respond. But Gore was widely criticized when details of the flood votes emerged, showing that Bradley had voted for $4.8 billion in Midwest flood relief and opposed only an amendment to add $900 million more. Even the White House opposed the amendment until the last moment.

Under criticism, the Gore campaign briefly stopped running the ad. But on the weekend before Iowa's caucus, it reappeared on Iowa airwaves. Bradley was badly drubbed in Iowa, sending him into a tailspin from which he never recovered.

Biographer Zelnick, who now teaches at Boston University, called the disaster relief accusation a ''premeditated falsehood.'' That incident, Zelnick said in an interview, ''was far different from speaking off the cuff and having an irresistible impulse to embellish. The farmer was a total plant, and the assertion misrepresented Bill Bradley's position. It is and should be a subject of concern for voters.''

Family members get praise

But it is not just his own life story and record that Gore has selectively rewritten.

Since his father died 16 months ago, the vice president has described the elder Gore in several speeches, including one last April before an NAACP audience, as an early champion for civil rights during his three Senate terms from 1953 to 1971.

''Halfway through this century,'' Gore said, in declaring his candidacy last June, ''when my father saw that thousands of his fellow Tennesseans were forced to obey Jim Crow laws, he knew America could do better. He saw a horizon in which his black and white constituents shared the same hopes in the same world.''

It was a moving tribute, but with a notable omission: The elder Gore voted against the landmark civil rights legislation of his time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which repudiated the Jim Crow laws.

To be sure, Albert Gore Sr. stood out among Southern Democrats in the Senate. He refused to support the Southern Manifesto in the 1950s, supported the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and voted against two Supreme Court nominees who opposed civil rights.

`Those brave stands probably cost him his career,'' Gore told the NAACP audience in Detroit last April 25.

But historians and the elder Gore have attributed his 1970 defeat mostly to his opposition to the Vietnam War. Before other audiences, Gore has cited the war as the issue that cost his father his Senate seat.

And, during his lifetime, the elder Gore made no claims to match his son's recent recollections. Late in his life, he said he regretted his vote against the 1964 measure. In his memoirs, he said he was ''no white knight'' on civil rights.

Hattaway played down the contrast between Gore's claims and his father's record, noting that many civil rights leaders have praised Gore's father's record.

Nancy Gore Hunger, who was 10 years older than her brother, worked as a paid staff aide at Peace Corps headquarters from early 1961, when the agency was founded, until 1964, according to Peace Corps records and several friends.

Yet Gore, in a 1992 appearance on C-SPAN, called his sister ''the very first volunteer for the Peace Corps.'' In 1994, when the University of Tennessee at Knoxville established a chair in her name, Gore said: ''She was the very first volunteer in the Peace Corps. She did so much for so many.''

In 1996, when Gore addressed a meeting of Peace Corps officials, for whom the ''volunteer'' label has special meaning, he did not describe her as a volunteer.

Coates Redmon, author of a book about the Peace Corps and a Peace Corps colleague of Nancy Gore Hunger's, said the agency's first volunteers have always been afforded special status.

For the vice president to describe his sister that way, Redmon said, ''amounts to stretching the truth.''

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 4/11/2000.
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