Chapter One: The Long Road

In the foothills of middle Tennessee there is a little village called Difficult. Whatever hardship that place name was meant to convey, it could not match the resigned lament of the nearby hamlet of Defeated, nor the ache of lonesomeness evoked by a settlement known as Possum Hollow. It was that kind of land, isolated and unforgiving, if hauntingly beautiful, for the farmers and small merchants who settled the region, families of Scots-Irish and Anglo-Irish descent named Hackett and Woodard, Key and Pope, Gibbs and Scurlock, Beasley and Huffines, Silcox and Gore.

For generations one old road, Highway 70, was the main road west and the best way out, weaving through the hills of the Upper Cumberland past the county seats of Carthage and Lebanon and across the barrens of rock and cedar and flat cactus to the capital city of Nashville. Albert Arnold Gore, then a young superintendent of schools in rural Smith County, regularly drove that route in the early 1930s to study at the YMCA night law school, and to loiter at the coffee shop of the nearby Andrew Jackson Hotel, pining for a brilliant young waitress named Pauline LaFon who would forgo her own law career to become his wife and adviser and, some say, his brains.

Now on the morning of December 8, 1998, the whole Gore family was retracing that original journey, traveling west to Nashville through a dreary gray mist. Al Gore Jr. made the trip in a limousine, braced by his mother, his wife, Tipper, and their four children. His father, the former United States senator who gave Al his name and his life's profession, rode ahead as usual this one last time, at the front of the funeral cortege, his body resting within a solid cherry casket inside a black Sayers and Scoville hearse.

Keep up, son! Keep up! The elder Gore used to bark out as he strode briskly down the sidewalks of Carthage or the corridors of the Capitol with young Al, never slowing to a child's pace, determined to teach his boy that the race went to the swift. His race was at long last done. He had died three days earlier at age ninety in a way that any father might wish to go: in his own bed in the big house on the hill above the cold Caney Fork River, his wife of sixty-one years at his side, his only son, vice president of the United States, holding his hand for the final six hours. Senator Gore, as he was commonly known, seemed to linger long enough for the arranging of all that needed to be arranged and the saying of everything that needed to be said. Carthage folks had become accustomed to his occasional bouts of befuddlement in his final years, yet he seemed sentient at the end, and his last words of fatherly advice -- "Always do right," he reportedly whispered -- might have been uttered with posterity in mind. But what was the meaning of the old man's life? That was the question the son grappled with as he rode west through the mist down the ancestral highway, occasionally reading something aloud as he revised the text of a eulogy he had composed on his laptop computer.

He had been at it for twenty-eight and a half hours straight, since four on the morning before when he bolted out of bed and began rummaging through a drawer in the predawn darkness, gathering up loose scraps of paper that he had been tossing in there for weeks, usually after returning from his father's bedside. On each crumpled page he had scribbled a few words that represented something more, a family folk tale or serious political theme -- scraps of paper that, if pieced together, might bring ninety years back to life. He had taken them out once before, but it was too soon after his father's death, and he could think of nothing, not even an outline. The second time, as he sat at the dining room table of his farmhouse retreat across the river from his parents' place, the words began pouring out. My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my life, he began, and he kept writing past dawn and through breakfast and lunch until seven that night, when, as he later recalled, he "showered and shaved and grabbed a bite to eat and went down to the funeral home for the wake and stood in line and shook hands with the people."

Two hours later he was back at the table, writing through the night without feeling tired, until 8:30 the next morning when he packed up his computer, showered and dressed again, and got his family ready for the trip to Nashville for the first memorial service. That Al Gore had pulled an all-nighter was characteristic in one sense. Going back to his prep school days at St. Albans in Washington, when he would persuade classmates to cram for midterm exams while devouring hamburgers past midnight at the twenty-four-hour Little Tavern on Connecticut Avenue, he had shown a propensity for avoiding some subjects until finally focusing on them with seemingly inexhaustible energy. But this eulogy represented more than another essay test. Funerals honor the dead but tend to reveal more about the living. In trying to tell the world who his father was and what he meant to him, Al Gore was explaining his sense of self as well; doubling back on his father's life, he unavoidably encountered many of the markings of his own unfinished biography.

Only two words on a scrap of paper were needed to remind Gore of a story he had to include in the eulogy: Old Peg. This was the tale his father told more than any other, embroidering it through the years with ever more vivid and piteous details, and though by the end Old Peg seemed more comic fable than historical account, the moral revealed something about the early motivations of Senator Gore and the ambition that he passed down to his son.

The year is 1920 and Albert Gore has just finished eighth grade, an age when many farm children quit their formal schooling. He lives with his parents, Allen and Margie, along with his siblings and an orphaned cousin on a farm in Possum Hollow about fifteen miles from Carthage at the edge of Smith County. The Gores moved there when Albert was five, coming down from the Upper Cumberland hills near Granville. Albert has been obsessed with fiddle music for years, so much so that his classmates call him Music Gore. He has his own $5 fiddle and one night there is a hoedown at his parents' house and musicians venture down from the neighboring hills, among them a one-legged traveling mandolin player named Old Peg, who stays the night.

Albert is mesmerized by Old Peg, and the next morning helps hitch up the harness for his horse and buggy. "Each time he told this story, the buggy grew more dilapidated," Al Gore, in his eulogy, said of his father's version of the tale. "Before long it had no top; the harness was mostly baling wire and binding twine. He counted that scrawny horse's ribs a thousand times for me and my sister, and then counted them many more times for his grandchildren." All leading up to the punch line: As they watch sorry Old Peg and his sad-sack horse and crumbling buggy ramble down the road and out of hearing range, Allen Gore, known for being a dead-serious man, puts his arm around his son and deadpans, "There goes your future, Albert."

The difficult life, if not defeated. In retelling the story at his father's funeral, Al Gore used it not just as a reminder of a road not taken, but of the distance this branch of the Gore family had traveled in one generation to reach the heights of national power. People looking at Al Gore today see a product of the American upper crust: a presidential contender born in Washington, reared in a top-floor suite of a hotel along Embassy Row, his father a senator, his mother trained in law, the high-achieving parents grooming their prince for political success at the finest private schools in the East. It was as though his entire future had been laid out in front of him on the direct route he took to school as an adolescent, 1.9 miles up th