Bill Turque On "Inventing Al Gore."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 30, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 033001np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Bill Turque Discusses `Inventing Al Gore'
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Al Gore and George W. Bush, the likely nominees for president, are both sons of politicians, and that legacy has shaped their political lives and aspirations. A few months ago, we spoke with the author of a biography of George W. Bush. My guest today is the author of a new biography of Al Gore called "Inventing Al Gore."

Author Bill Turque is a Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and the magazine's former White House correspondent.

Turque describes Gore as both a beneficiary and a prisoner of an extraordinary political education. His father, Albert Gore, was a long-time Democratic senator from Tennessee.

I asked Turque if the young Al Gore was expected to campaign with his father.

BILL TURQUE, "INVENTING AL GORE": I don't think he necessarily played an extremely active role in campaigning per se. I think what was expected was that he conduct himself in a certain way, and conduct himself in a very adult way from the get-go as a kid. And that meant not doing anything to bring dishonor, disrepute to the family, you know, being very well-behaved in school.

And also, I think he was in a way sort of marketed by his parents in little feature stories in the Tennessee papers about this little prodigy who would become a future politician. There's -- one of my favorite stories from the book is about -- it was a story that the Gore family essentially fed to the "Knoxville News Sentinel," and it described when Al Gore sort of talked his father, according to the story, into buying a 98-cent bow and arrow set for him when his father wanted to buy him the cheaper one, the 48-cent brand.

And, you know, the punch line of the story was, you know, Al Gore saying, "Well, I out-talked a senator." And the whole story, the theme was, well, he can out-talk a senator at age 6, you know, he's going to be -- you know, he could be a great politician someday. It was that kind of aura of inevitability, I think, that was really his role, sort of as the heir apparent from a very early age.

GROSS: George W. Bush's image during college was as (inaudible) fraternity house guy, a real frat brother, who hated the anti-war movement and was very uncomfortable about everything concerned the counterculture. What was Al Gore's image in prep school and in college?

TURQUE: Quite serious, businesslike, not unfriendly. I think in college especially, he had a fairly loyal and tight circle of friends and knew how to have fun, liked to play pool, you know, hang out with people, go to movies. He had -- remember, Tipper Gore came -- when -- she was a year behind him, came up and went to school in the Boston area after Gore entered Harvard. And so, you know, he spent a lot of time with his girlfriend, hung out, shot pool, was, you know, serious about aspects of his studies. His grades were not all that great.

But I think there was a certain studiousness and a certain seriousness about him that, as I understand, you know, people describing Bush's years probably wasn't there.

GROSS: Although Al Gore was against the war in Vietnam, he registered during the war. Do you think that that had much to do with his father's reelection campaign?

TURQUE: Yes, I do. I think it primarily had to do with that. I think that -- you know, Al Gore did not -- he was very disturbed about American involvement in Vietnam, like many of his peers, you know, at Harvard University, and -- but he was also extremely concerned about his father's political future. It was 1970, his father was facing a very tough reelection campaign against Bill Brock in Tennessee. His father's anti-war activism, his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was going to be a major part of the Republican attacks against him.

And having a son who would be perceived as evading or contriving to avoid the draft was going to be potentially very damaging to his father. So in many ways, this was Al Gore's first political crisis, deciding how to help his father.

By the same token, I think, you know, it's also -- there was a place inside of him where he was holding the door open to his own political future. There were people who counseled him, Richard Neustadt, his -- one of his government professors at Harvard, friends in Tennessee, who told him that if he did want a future in politics, military service, particularly if he was coming from a state like Tennessee, was almost a compulsory requirement.

So it was a mix of helping his father and holding the door open to his own options.

GROSS: So what years did he serve in Vietnam?

TURQUE: He was in Vietnam only about five months, from January to May of 1971, and he worked as a journalist for an engineering brigade -- it was the 20th Engineers -- and contributed articles, features about the work of the engineers, to a paper called "The Castle Courier," which was the newspaper of the U.S. Army Engineering Command in Vietnam.

GROSS: Now, Al Gore's father, Albert Gore, lost his 1970 reelection campaign, and tell us some of the reasons for that.

TURQUE: Well, I think that it was -- really, he was the victim of the changing demographics of the -- the political demographics of the South. It was becoming gradually a much more Republican place. There was -- the traditional New Deal coalition of lower middle-class whites and African-Americans was fracturing under all sorts of class and racial tensions that were being exploited by the Republicans.

And Albert Gore was seen as someone who was just -- had become too liberal for the state, and had grown sort of out of touch. And I think part of that is legitimate. I think he had grown somewhat out of touch. He'd become very involved in foreign affairs and was perhaps not spending as much time mending the home fences as he should have.

He'd also been a progressive on civil rights, voted for several of the big pieces of civil right legislation -- or rights legislation, although not the 1964 act, but was still regarded -- you know, by Tennessee standards was regarded as very much progressive. And I think that engendered a lot of ill will in Tennessee.

And of course there was the war. He was one of the very early opponents and skeptics of American policy in Vietnam.

So all these things -- the accumulation of all these things sort of combined to make him very vulnerable in 1970.

GROSS: Well, you say the Nixon White House was out to get Gore, and Vice President Agnew described Albert Gore as "the Southern regional chairman of the Eastern liberal establishment."

TURQUE: That's right, in the Nixon White House they were called "radiclibs," radical liberals, and Albert Gore was considered at the top of the list of a faction of senators and congressman, that -- congressman they wanted to get rid of in 1970. And they poured huge resources into Tennessee to help Brock, including $200,000 in illegal campaign contributions that went through a secret White House operation called Operation Townhouse that was later uncovered as part of the Watergate investigations.

And through Operation Townhouse, a lot of very well-heeled conservatives, people like Walter Annenberg, you know, gave money to the Nixon people so that it would be used to basically try to drive liberals out of office. And so there was that.

And the Brock campaign just sort of wrote the playbook, I think, for a lot of campaigns that were to come in the '70s and '80s that was sort of the playbook for driving liberals out. It was very attack-oriented, in many ways personal, mean-spirited.

And Albert Gore really wasn't equipped for this change in the political environment. He was sort of a famously high-road campaigner, did not attack opponents, and sort of let a lot of these attacks go unanswered.

GROSS: What impact did it have on Al Gore to watch his father be defeated in the 1970 election because his father was perceived as too liberal?

TURQUE: I think it had several huge impacts that play out even today. I think that first of all, as you mentioned, politically I think he saw that if he wanted a political career coming from Tennessee, he could not be seen as the same kind of liberal as his father. And while his voting record is more liberal than he cares to characterize it as, it was also very carefully couched in being out front on issues that were not necessarily standard liberal issues, like science, technology, that sort of thing.

He also, I think, took away several other cautionary lessons from that election. His father was badly outspent by the Republicans, and I think he recognized if he was get into politics, he had to remain competitive as a fund raiser, and play the money game very aggressively when he got to Washington. And as we now know, this led him into some of the worst ethical trouble of his career.

And I think it also taught him about the power of attack politics, and how it's important not only to be on the attack but to recognize that an attack unanswered is an attack that can sort of calcify into the truth.

So I think that the lessons of the 1970 campaign were extremely formative for him.

GROSS: You say that when Al Gore's father lost the 1970 reelection campaign, that Al Gore wept and said he had lost all interest in a political career. So how did he end up deciding to run for the House?

TURQUE: Politics was never completely off the screen. But I think when he came back from Vietnam, he was in a place where he wanted to essentially carve out his own identity, having spent really much of his life being Albert Gore's son, you know, even going to Vietnam, going into the Army, to help him with his political career.

And I think he felt that if he was going to go into politics, he had to do it on something more like his own terms and as his own man. So he did several things. He enrolled in graduate divinity school, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, stayed there for a year, and then worked as a reporter at the "Nashville Tennesseean" for almost five years and was quite a good investigative reporter.

GROSS: He ran for Congress in 1976 in a seat that I believe was in his father's district.

TURQUE: That's right, there was a point where he was really waiting for the opportunity to run, and a man named Joe Evans, who had held that seat for more than a quarter century, announced his retirement, and seats like that just don't come open that often in Tennessee, once in a generation. Tennesseans, like everywhere else, they tend to elect people and just keep them in office.

So he knew this was his chance. And literally, the day -- actually, the day before Evans announced his retirement, he had gotten word for -- Gore had gotten word from his boss, John Siegenthaler, the editor of "The Tennessean" (audio interrupt) this announcement was coming, and he immediately decided that he was going to run for that seat.

GROSS: He asked his father not to campaign for him. Why?

TURQUE: Well, I think it goes back to his concern about being seen not as his own man but as Albert Gore's son. Now, the fact of the matter is, there was no concealing who's running in what (ph) district that he was, in fact, he was running as Albert Gore, Jr. It was no secret who he was.

But I also think, you know, Albert Gore had only been out of office for six years, was a very divisive figure, and in a fairly conservative Democratic district, and, you know, would probably be more of a liability than an asset at that point. And so he asked his father to remain behind the scenes.

His father and mother were both very active behind the scenes raising money and sort of marshaling their own organization, such as it was, behind him. But -- and his father was stung by it, it was very hurtful. But later he said he came to understand that it was probably the right decision.

GROSS: Now, you say that during his first campaign, Al Gore tried to reinvent himself as a conservative, considerably more conservative than the editorials that he helped write for the "Nashville Tennessean," the newspaper that he wrote for. Why did he reinvent himself as a more conservative figure?

TURQUE: I think he took a look at that district and realized that he would have a very difficult time winning as sort of a standard off-the-rack liberal, and the district was becoming more conservative over time, and he even told this just plainly to his old friends at the paper, Look, if people think I'm going to take their guns away, that I advocate gun control, people are just not going to vote for me.

So he was opposed to gun control in that campaign. He campaigned as essentially a pro-life candidate. And people who worked with him on the editorial pages, it was one of the most liberal newspapers in the South, and who -- people who remembered as well within the mainstream of that page's politics were sort of struck by the disparity between Gore the editorialist and Gore the candidate.

GROSS: He's since become, you know, publicly pro-gun control and pro-choice. How did he transform his views on guns and abortion?

TURQUE: I think it was incrementally, and you get different perspectives on this in talking to people. You talk to people in the pro-choice community, and they will tell you that this really was sort of a heartfelt, you know, change of view that went step by step as the years went on. But -- and, you know, I don't mean to be too cynical about it, but the fact of the matter is that the closer he got to competing for the Democratic nomination, the more his issues came into line with sort of consensus Democratic views on these issues.

So, you know, he may have had a change -- a real change of heart and -- but there was clearly a strategic -- he had a strategic interest in doing it.

GROSS: My guest is Bill Turque, author of the new book "Inventing Al Gore." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: My guest is Bill Turque, and he's "Newsweek's" Washington correspondent and author of a new biography called "Inventing Al Gore."

Having studied Al Gore's career, what do you think are the most effective things that he did as a congressman or a senator?

TURQUE: A couple of things. I think that the -- he was really the first elected official from the South to in a very public way talk about the health consequences of smoking, and took the lead in negotiating legislation that would -- that changed the language on the health warning labels on cigarettes to make it stronger.

This was in the early 1980s. The label hadn't been changed since 1969, it just said, "The Surgeon General says cigarettes can be harmful to your health."

The legislation he helped craft was more specific, talked about, you know, it being dangerous to pregnant women, talked about -- there was just a number of different labels. And he was sort of a go-between between the tobacco industry and the health community, and the negotiation was very long and arduous, and actually Gore became extremely angry at the tobacco people for dealing with him in what he -- what was clearly bad faith at several points.

But the legislation did pass, and it was an unusually, I think, politically courageous thing to do, to be from a tobacco state -- there were 10,000 tobacco farmers in his congressional district -- to talk about the health consequences of smoking.

So that was, I think, in his house career, that was a major thing.

And I think in the Senate, I would say -- and this didn't necessarily translate into discrete legislation -- but in the late 1980s, he started really talking about climate change and about global warming when it was still considered a bit of a crackpot issue. And he was out front talking about the need to really come to grips with this.

And I think that -- I think that's to his credit, and I think the science, you know, over time has borne him out.

GROSS: Now, you're also a little bit critical of Al Gore on the issue of tobacco. He gave a very moving speech a few years ago at the Democratic convention in which he talked about his sister, who died of lung cancer, and how that really made him very angry about tobacco interest. But you point out that it took several years for him to actually reach that political stand, that anti-tobacco stand.

TURQUE: That's right. His sister, Nancy, died in 1984 at the age of 46 from lung cancer. She was a chain smoker, had smoked since, I think, she was 13. And the vice president made this -- gave this very heart-rending and, you know, excruciatingly detailed account of his sister's death.

And then it came to light afterwards that it had -- in fact had been -- it was seven years after -- seven years after his sister's death, until 1991, he accepted contributions from the tobacco industry, and that he and his father held federally regulated what are called growing allotments that allow you to grow tobacco and sell it on your farm. They held these federal allotments until 1991.

And it was very difficult for people to sort of square that with what they heard in the speech that night. And Gore has said -- has defended this basically in the context of, it takes time for people to change, you know, this was something that we just grew out of gradually, and people don't change overnight.

And I -- you know, I grant him that to a point. But seven years is quite a long time, I think, to try to sort of work that conflict out, it seems to me.

GROSS: My guest is "Newsweek's" Washington correspondent Bill Turque. He's written a new biography of Al Gore, and it's called "Inventing Al Gore."

How well did Al Gore and Bill Clinton know each other before sharing the ticket?

TURQUE: Hardly at all. Bill Clinton was a governor, and basic -- and Al Gore was in the Senate. They essentially traveled in different circles professionally. They knew each other really only in the sense that they sort of eyed each other. They were aware that they were going to be -- could be potential rivals someday. But there was essentially no relationship until Gore began -- ran for president in -- announced his candidacy in 1987, actually went to Little Rock seeking Bill Clinton's endorsement, which he did not get.

GROSS: You say that Bill Clinton thought that Al Gore shared some of the qualities that Clinton most admired and relied on in Hillary. What were those qualities?

TURQUE: Sort of a steadfastness, stubbornness, and most important, I think, to Bill Clinton was loyalty, loyalty through very adverse times, loyalty when times got tough. People told him about -- of Gore that this is somebody -- one of Gore's friends said, "He'll never stab you in the back even if you deserve it."

And I think that that sort of resonated with Clinton, and I think he wanted another political partner like his wife, who would sort of be unstintingly loyal.

GROSS: Gore's father, the former senator from Tennessee, urged Al Gore to have an understanding with Bill Clinton about what Gore's role would be in the White House if they won. And Gore ended up having a written agreement with Bill Clinton about his role. Is that unusual for a vice president?

TURQUE: It's not unprecedented. I think -- I'm not -- if I'm not mistaken, it was -- Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter may have had some kind of agreement. It may not have been codified on paper. But this was clearly the most detailed sort of advance understanding of what the vice president's duties and privileges would be.

And, you know, Gore was, you know -- Gore wanted to make sure that he was not just an ornamental vice president going to the funerals of foreign leaders and just sitting behind the president at the State of the Union address. And he was urged by his father to make sure that he had a substantive role to play.

And the agreement that they laid out had among its features that Gore would be able to have lunch with the president once a week. And he recognized very early that particularly with Bill Clinton, face time was crucial, and that if you got near him, if you had his ear at the right moment, you could if not change a decision he was making, affect the trajectory of it.

And so he -- there were things he insisted upon that would give him maximum access to Clinton and to the Oval Office.

GROSS: What else was in the agreement?

TURQUE: The agreement also made several of Gore's vice presidential staff assistants to the president in -- on the organizational chart, which sounds like sort of a -- just a bureaucratic thing, but actually it was significant, because it gave them access to the morning 7:30 meeting of the senior presidential staff, and -- which -- in which the day's business is conducted, and sort of just basically placed his senior people, including his foreign policy adviser, Leon Fuerth, his chief of staff, Roy Neal, in the decision-making loop in a way that a lot of vice presidential staffs are not.

And so that was one of the principal aspects. The other was an agreement in -- that he would be consulted, and that he would have input into personnel decisions, and in fact the Clinton administration was very well salted early on with Gore people throughout the bureaucracy.

GROSS: Bill Turque is a Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and author of the new book "Inventing Al Gore." He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: Coming up, we continue our discussion with Bill Turque about his new biography of Al Gore. And classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new CD by the late opera singer Tatiana Troyanos.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross, back with Bill Turque, the author of a new biography of Al Gore called "Inventing Al Gore." Turque is a Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and is the magazine's former White House correspondent.

How do you think the Monica Lewinsky scandal affected Gore's relationship with Clinton?

TURQUE: I think it changed it profoundly. I think that in many ways, you know, Gore reacted like a lot of people around him and a lot of people around the country did. They were infuriated that he would exercise such poor judgment and lie about it for so long.

He considered it an enormous betrayal of trust, and, you know, not to mention just putting his political future in jeopardy. And he was angry. And -- but he also knew that this was out of his control, this was nothing he could -- he couldn't really affect the trajectory of this in any way, the legal consequences of it.

So he felt in many ways helpless also, angry and also helpless.

GROSS: Did Al Gore believe Bill Clinton's early denials about Monica Lewinsky?

TURQUE: He intimates -- he's never said explicitly -- he intimates that, you know, like a lot of people around there, they had their doubts, but they had -- really had no choice at the time but to take the president at his word and just sort of go from there.

But I think he probably did not. He took the job, you know, hearing, and he had, like everyone else, knew about the Gennifer Flowers episode, and I don't think he had any illusions about certain aspects of Clinton's padding -- past and private behavior, but still thought it was in his interest to take the job.

So I don't -- you know, I think that he didn't really buy into the story as Clinton first told it.

GROSS: After Al Gore decided to run for president, he moved his campaign headquarters to Tennessee. How much time did he actually spend in Tennessee when he was growing up as the son of a senator?

TURQUE: He spent his summers and school vacations there on the family farm outside of Carthage. Yes, he did -- he grew up in Washington, he grew up in the Fairfax Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue and went to St. Albans, which is a very tony prep school just down the road.

But he did spend in his teen years summers and holidays working on the family farm, and working quite hard. His father viewed his summers on the farm not as a vacation but as sort of a character-building boot camp in which he would be toughened up, would get a taste of some of the hard work and some of the privation his father experienced, you know, growing up in his farm family in Smith County years earlier.

And so some of that -- and he takes a lot of ribbing for that, but he really did, you know, work in the tobacco fields and clean out the hog parlors and do all that stuff. And some -- if you talk to some of the people who were around him during that period, who still live down there, some of them were appalled at how hard his father worked him, and it became -- it was a little element of sadism in it, I think.

And so that was real. And the farm experience was -- you know, he may not chronologically have spent a great deal of time there, but I do think it was a very vivid, resonant experience for him.

GROSS: Al Gore has been questioned about his marijuana use when he was a young man, and he's described his marijuana smoking as "infrequent and rare." You say that he smoked more than that, that his friends say that he smoked maybe three, four times a week when he was in college, but did it with great caution and sometimes paranoia, because of his own political prospects, I guess, and his father's career.

How did you feel about investigating that in the first place?

TURQUE: Well, you know, like a lot of these things, the -- I didn't really go looking for this, I just sort of stumbled across it when I found -- when I came in contact with John Warnecke. I had been in Nashville many times sort of talking to people about his time there in the '70s, and a number of people said, You really ought to talk to John Warnecke, he was one of his closest friends.

And I found John in San Francisco. And John, you know, told this story to me about how, you know, he really liked smoking marijuana. And -- but even then, to me this was not a matter of going back and counting the number of marijuana joints Al Gore had stashed under his coffee table in the '70s or something, but it was a matter of candor. And as a presidential candidate in 1987, he did in fact, according to evidence from Warnecke and other people, he did mischaracterize in a fairly significant way his drug use.

And it went to a larger pattern that I saw as I delved into the research of him stretching and embellishing certain aspects of his past and his career. And so to me it wasn't really a story about drugs or marijuana, which, you know, was not a big story to me, but it was a story about candor, and also about how he treated people.

When he ran for president in 1987, he and Peter Knight, his former chief of staff and then a fund raiser for him, went back to Warnecke when they knew that this was perking around in the press and really essentially browbeat him in a series of phone calls, you know, insisted that he not be forthcoming with reporters.

And so to me it was also an example of a little piece of backstage business in presidential politics and a window into how Gore does business. And so to me, those were the reasons to sort of look into the story.

GROSS: Wouldn't you say Bill Bradley is the first politician, at least on the national scale, to actually try to be reasonably honest about his use of drugs?

TURQUE: Yes. I also think -- I -- in Gore's defense, I think in 1987 it was a little -- I think it was a more scary -- it was a scarier thing for a presidential candidate to talk about smoking marijuana. It's easy to forget, but that's a long time in terms (inaudible), so that's like another generation in presidential politics.

And I think it's just -- it's not as big a deal now, it's no great shakes for a baby boomer candidate to talk about having smoked marijuana. And...

GROSS: Yes, (inaudible), I'm wondering if you think the public and the press were unprepared for honesty back in '87.

TURQUE: I think they were unprepared for honesty on that subject, yes. I just think it was still a little too close to the '70s. I just think that it was -- you know, these things come in increments, and I just think that was a very dangerous area. And I think he felt safe saying that he sort of dabbled in it, but to step in front of a microphone there and said, you know, I inhaled and I enjoyed every minute of it, I think he recognized that that probably was not -- was going to be very problematic for his as a candidate then.

GROSS: A sentence that I think has come back to haunt Al Gore is something that he told Wolf Blitzer in 1998. He said that during his service in Congress, he took the initiative in creating the Internet. How do you interpret that?

TURQUE: Well, I listened to that tape many times, and I know that his people and his defenders say, well, you know, this was just a clumsy choice of words, or maladroit choice of words, he really wasn't trying to say that he created the Internet. But as I watched the tape, it seemed very clear to me that he wanted to leave the casual viewer with the impression that he had more of a role in creating the Internet than he actually did.

And the fact of the matter was that if you just stuck to the straight story, it was a very, you know, interesting and honorable one. He sponsored legislation in 1989 that invested a couple billion dollars in fiberoptic research and other technical changes in the national computer system that did in fact pave the way for the Internet we know today.

But instead, I think he tried to leave viewers with a larger impression of what his impact actually was.

GROSS: And do you see that as part of a pattern, or just a mistake he made on this?

TURQUE: I think it's part of a pattern, I honestly do. I think that he for some reason -- and I don't pretend to know exactly what the psychological reason is -- will go an extra bridge, a bridge too far, in describing his importance in certain things. And you can see this at every point in his life.

One story is not as well known. It goes back to his reporting career in Nashville when he was at city hall and uncovered a fairly big bribery scandal involving members of the city council shaking down land developers in exchange for approving their applications for rezoning land.

And when he was running for president in 1987, he gave an interview in Iowa in which he said, Well, I -- you know, my work got a couple of Nashville city councilmen thrown in jail. Well, in fact, no one was thrown in jail. One coun -- two councilmen were indicted, one was acquitted, and the other was given a suspended sentence.

So you have to wonder, I mean, just describing what really happened would have been a very honorable thing and would have been a high point for any reporter's career. But instead he chose to say that they went to jail. It's just a -- it's a strange sort of almost neurotic tick in the way he describes his life. And I just -- it -- but it was an unmistakable pattern as I went through, went through things in the research.

GROSS: My guest is Bill Turque, author of the new book "Inventing Al Gore." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: Bill Turque is my guest. He's a Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and author of a new biography of Al Gore.

Al Gore is anxious to put his campaign finance scandals behind him. Can you summarize as briefly as possible what those scandals are?

TURQUE: Basically, they grow out of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, and the context of this was that both the president and vice president were extremely worried that they were going to be a one-term administration and that they were going to be outspent by the Republicans. And so they started very early pulling out all the stops in raising money.

And Al Gore was a very aggressive fund raiser. One of the places he went, although he claims he -- that he wasn't there to re -- thin -- he didn't think he was there to raise money, was a place called the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights, which is a suburb of Los Angeles.

He says he thought it was just a community meeting, community outreach was the way he put it. But in fact the sponsors of the event were raising money there, and they were raising it illegally through straw donors. And it's illegal -- first of all, it's illegal under federal law to use a tax-exempt institution like a church for partisan political events. And it is also unlawful to use straw donors. They were essentially having monks and other members of the temple write checks to the Democratic National Committee, and they were being reimbursed for their contributions, which is illegal.

There's ample evidence that -- on the record that the vice president should probably have known that this was a fund raiser. There is no evidence to suggest that he knew that there was any of this illegal straw donor activity going on.

The other big piece of it for the vice president was a series of fund raising phone calls that he made from his West Wing office in 1995 and 1996. And this is a lot murkier legally, but there is a law called -- from the 19th century called the Pendleton Act, which forbids federal officials from soliciting of campaign contributions on government property. It goes back to a period when people basically had to pay their benefactors in government to get their jobs and were essentially shaken down for contributions.

But it was never -- it was a murky legal situation as to whether the president and the vice president were covered under this act. In any event, he made about 70 of these calls over a period of time, and according to some stories, principally one by Bob Woodward in "The Washington Post," many -- some people who got the calls from him felt that there was a coercive aspect to the calls, that, you know, I can't really turn down the vice president, I can't say no.

And these situations led to -- in -- not one but two instances of the attorney general looking at the possibility of recommending the appointment of an independent counsel. She elected not to. But that, in rough sum, is the fund raising situation.

GROSS: What is Al Gore trying to do to put this behind him?

TURQUE: Well, he's trying to take a page from John McCain's playbook and basically say, Look, I made a mistake in judgment, you know, we really pushed the envelope in 1996. We did it for what we thought were honorable reasons. You know, we wanted to keep our agenda from being overtaken by the Republicans in things like health care, the environment, Medicare.

And -- but he's basically saying, I made a mistake, I want to make it right, and has proposed a number of things that -- to reform our campaign finance laws.

GROSS: You say that Gore's at his worst as a campaigner.

TURQUE: I think so, compared to -- and I think there really is a split between Al Gore the office holder and Al Gore the candidate for office. I think -- you know, Al Gore the senator, Al Gore the vice president is a lot more thoughtful sort of measured, considered personality, and I think that as a candidate, I think he's so comfortable in this attack mode that he's in now that there's just a shrillness and sort of a sledgehammer quality to him that is not his most attractive attribute from what I've been able to see.

And I think that he's a career politician for whom the theatrics of politics are never going to come completely naturally. He's never going to be a Bill Clinton. He's never going to have that kind of effect on audiences. I think he thinks he can make up for that basically by sort of sheer energy and aggressiveness.

GROSS: What's he like to cover? Is he open with you as a journalist? Does he have staff that is open with journalists?

TURQUE: Some members of his staff are open. He is especially guarded. When you travel on Air Force Two, there's always a contingent of reporters going with him. Everything that is -- this -- the ground rule is, everything that is said on the plane is off the record. And it's one of the more exasperating aspects of covering him, because he will, on long trips, come back to the press section and shoot the breeze, and you see this private Al Gore (inaudible) can actually be very funny, sometimes subversively funny, relaxed, spontaneous, just things that do not always come through very clearly in public.

But it's off the record, because he's -- you know, lives in fear of saying the wrong thing, you know, or having something misinterpreted. And he's not held many press conferences recently for the same reason. He just doesn't want to step on anything, you know, right now, and does not want to answer any detailed questions about campaign finance situation.

So covering him is a pretty elusive thing right now.

GROSS: What's your impression of what would be at the top of his agenda if he were elected president?

TURQUE: I think at the top of the agenda would be doing whatever he could to keep the economic recovery going. I think that would be job one. And I don't -- I see him as basically pursuing much of the economic plan that the Clinton has, and I would not be surprised if some of the key members of the economic team are held over into a Gore administration.

I think you would also see, maybe not right away, but into a first Gore term, a serious effort to try and assemble a domestic and international coalition around climate change, and to try to get more awareness over the long-term dangers of global warming. And I think he sees that, in many ways, as -- if he were to become president, I think that would become sort of a legacy issue for him because of all that he's written and said about it, all that he wrote about it in his book, "Earth in the Balance."

I also think that he's quite interested in technology issues. I think that he would work fairly aggressively to narrow what's become known as the digital divide and to try and get other people who'd been left out of this information age, you know, more access to things like the Internet.

And finally, I think civil rights is important to him. I think that's something that's definitely carried over from his father. And I think that -- although I can't really tell you exactly what form it would take, my sense is he would be more aggressive on civil rights, and not just racially, but I think gays and lesbians, I think, would see a more aggressive -- have a more aggressive voice in the White House views there (ph).

So I think those are some of the general areas which I think would characterize a Gore presidency.

GROSS: Now, what about his wife, Tipper Gore? What are -- what do you think are some of the issues she'd take on as first lady if he were elected?

TURQUE: I think that -- well, compared to Hillary Clinton, I think she -- first of all, I think she'd be a very different first lady, not nearly as overtly political, politically ambitious in her own right. I think that, though, there are things that are important to her. I think mental health clearly, and treatment for mental health, is clearly important issue for her. She last year acknowledged that she's had struggles with depression, and I think...

GROSS: As did her mother.

TURQUE: As did her mother. And I think that she would continue to try and be an advocate for better access to the health care system and health insurance for people with emotional disorders.

Homelessness is another issue she's gotten involved in. And I think you would see her, you know, work very hard in that realm.

But basically, I -- you know, Tipper Gore, I think, also views her principal role as sort of safeguarding her family from sort of the fishbowl culture of Washington, and I think that she views that really as job one, making sure that her kids had something approaching a normal life. And I think you sort of see that mission continue.

GROSS: One last question. Is this going to be a really long campaign for you?

TURQUE: Nasty, brutish, and long, I think is probably the way to describe it. Yes, it is -- it's going to be very long, and I think it's going to be very negative. And I think both of these candidates risk a real voter backlash if they -- if it is nothing but just sort of unstintingly negative.

But it's going to be a very rough, very closely contested campaign.

GROSS: It is interesting, isn't it, that both of the presidential candidates are from political lineage.

TURQUE: It is, and I -- although superficially there are a lot of similarities, but -- I think that, you know, the Bush lineage does go back a little farther, you know, George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a United States senator. Al Gore's grandfather, Alan Gore was a, you know, was a farmer in Smith County in Tennessee.

So in many ways, I think the Gore story has a little more of a bootstrap aspect to it than the Bush dynastic story. But I grant you that, you know, they are both children of political privilege, and that'll be an ongoing theme, I think, in the campaign.

GROSS: Well, Bill Turque, thank you so much for talking with us.

TURQUE: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Bill Turque is a Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and author of the new book "Inventing Al Gore."

Coming up, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a newly released recital album by the late singer Tatiana Troyanos.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Bill Turque
High: Journalist Bill Turque is Washington correspondent for "Newsweek" and author of the new biography "Inventing Al Gore." Bill Turque discusses the book, which he began in 1997.
Spec: Media; Al Gore; Politics; Elections; Profiles

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Bill Turque Discusses `Inventing Al Gore'

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 30, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 033002NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Lloyd Schwartz Reviews Recital CD of Tatiana Troyanos
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:56

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos was a beloved star of the Metropolitan Opera. She died of cancer in 1993, just short of her 55th birthday.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz says she was as admired for her song recitals as for her operatic roles, but she never recorded a recital album. Now VAI has released the first CD of "Troyanos in Recital" from a live 1985 concert. Here's Lloyd's review.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, RACHMANINOFF SONG, TATIANA TROYANOS)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC: I have warm memories of Tatiana Troyanos. Her Romeo in Bellini's "The Montagues and the Capulets" was one of the greatest opera performances I ever saw, beautifully, richly sung, of course, but also intensely passionate and completely convincing making love to Beverly Sills's Juliet.

Troyanos was equally at home playing boy roles, like Romeo and Hansel, regal matrons like Jocasta, and the sexiest women, Carmen and Cleopatra. There was always that glorious, full-throated outpouring, combined with dazzling coloratura fireworks.

But there was also the dramatic subtlety that could make the mixture of raging teenage hormones and emotional bewilderment of Octavian in "Der Rosenkavalier," or the self-destructive curiosity of Judith in Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle," so believable and moving.

According to the liner notes of this new recital album, Troyanos actually preferred lieder singing to opera because, as she said, it meant developing plot and character in an intense few minutes.

Song recitals in the right hands can certainly demonstrate a singer's versatility better than a single operatic characterization. Often opera stars with their big voices overpower the delicacy of the poetic material, but not Troyanos.

On this live recording from a concert she gave in 1985, accompanied by one of her greatest admirers, Metropolitan Opera director James Levine, she makes something heroic out of Schumann's on-the-edge-of-saccharine song cycle "Frauenliebe und Leben," "A Woman's Love and Life."

She sings four impassioned Rachmaninoff songs of nature and feeling, in perfect Russian, and Ravel's delicious "Five Greek Folk Songs." Like Maria Callas before her, Troyanos was born in New York and had a Greek father.

The last song in the cycle is about the joy of dancing -- "beautiful legs, even the dishes are dancing."

(AUDIO CLIP, SONG EXCERPT, RAVEL'S "FIVE GREEK FOLK SONGS," TATIANA TROYANOS)

SCHWARTZ: Troyanos reveals a delightful comic side too, something she didn't get a chance to do very often in her operatic roles. In Rossini's teasing and suggestive "The Venetian Regatta," Angelina, our heroine, gets very excited over the rowing of her beloved Momelo (ph), who can do it faster than any of the other gondoliers.

(AUDIO CLIP, SONG, ROSSINI'S "THE VENETIAN REGATTA," TATIANA TROYANOS)

SCHWARTZ: The encores are a Mahler song and the "Seguedilla" from "Carmen." You can hear the audience sighing with delighted recognition.

Apparently, James Levine wasn't happy with his own piano playing because he'd been rehearsing his orchestra all day and felt tired the night of the concert. But when he heard the tape, he was so enthralled with Troyanos, he insisted that this recording be issued. That's called being a good friend.

This recital is an important reminder of what a wonderful and irreplaceable singer she was.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of "The Boston Phoenix." He reviewed "Tatiana Troyanos in Recital" on the VAI label.

FRESH AIR's interviews and reviews are produced by Amy Salit, Naomi Person and Phyllis Myers, with Monique Nazareth, Ann Marie Baldonado, and Patty Leswing, research assistance from Brendan Noonam. Sue Spolen (ph) directed the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "SEGUEDILLA," BIZET'S "CARMEN," TATIANA TROYANOS)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, Lloyd Schwartz
Guest:
High: Lloyd Schwartz reviews the first CD to be released of the late mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos from a live 1985 concert.
Spec: Entertainment; Music Industry; Death; Art

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Lloyd Schwartz Reviews Recital CD of Tatiana Troyanos
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.