With son hospitalized, Gore fussed over shirt

WASHINGTON -- When his son was hit by a car and severely injured 11
years ago, the accident "changed my priorities totally," Al Gore told
Oprah Winfrey last month.

"I remember sitting in the hospital looking at my schedule book for
the first time," said Gore, then a U.S. senator. "All of these things
for the next month had felt so weighty when I put them on the schedule.
When I exhaled they just blew off the schedule, light as feathers. They
didn't matter anymore."

"It was a great lesson for me," he said. "Now family is first."

Al Gore's family, with the young Albert Gore III standing,
second from right.

But not long after Gore says he had his bedside epiphany, he sent his
Senate staff scrambling for a more family-friendly shirt just minutes
before a photo-op he arranged the day his 6-year-old son was discharged
from the hospital, say sources familiar with the 1989 press conference.

Hospital staffers who witnessed the behind-the-scenes maneuvering
were "appalled" at what seemed to be Gore's calculating behavior in the
middle of a heart-rending family crisis -- behavior that would show up
again later in his political life, fitting into a pattern. It was no secret that Gore, coming off a failed bid for the White House in 1988, was angling for another run and seeking more press
exposure.

The staff at the Baltimore hospital where Albert Gore III was treated
were shocked, first, that Gore would want to even hold a press
conference after Tipper Gore had insisted on maintaining their
"privacy," and then, that he almost held up the televised news event
fussing over what style of shirt to wear.

Gore was wearing a dress shirt at the time, but decided it looked too
serious and business-like for the occasion, according to sources. He
wanted a shirt that conveyed a warmer, family image, so he sent his
staff out to find a more casual-looking shirt.

After a trip to a Johns Hopkins Hospital gift shop didn't turn up
what he wanted, a Senate staffer finally brought back from an outside
store a Pendelton-style, or flannel-like, long-sleeve sports shirt that
Gore liked and changed into.

"He was wearing a button-down Oxford-cloth shirt which said, 'Office.
This is a work shirt.' And he decided he wanted a much more casual shirt
which said, 'Home, dad,'" a source who wished to remain anonymous said.

"He didn't like anything in the gift shop," the source added. "So he
sent a staff member out to get another shirt."

Jo Ann Rogers, director of media relations for Johns Hopkins
Hospital, says the press conference took place the day Gore's son was
discharged -- on April 26, 1989. The boy was recovering from a broken
thighbone, broken collarbone, broken ribs, ruptured spleen (some 60
percent of which was removed), bruised lung, bruised pancreas, bruised
kidney and second-degree skin burns from where he was dragged by the
car.

Rogers, who held the same job then, says she doesn't "remember any
details" from the event.

"The only thing I vaguely remember was that when his son was
discharged, his handlers -- his office staff and his press officer --
wanted to have, like, an exit press briefing," Rogers said.

She also remembered that Tipper "didn't want a lot of hoopla."

A group of public-affairs staffers in the Johns Hopkins Children's
Center worked with Gore's staff to set up the press conference, which
was attended by a handful of national press, including TV camera crews
and newspaper photographers.

One source familiar with the frantic discussions over the shirt
doubts Gore was using his son's brush with death to score political
points. It was more a reflex reaction common to politicians, especially
ones like Gore who grew up in politics, the source proffers. Gore's
father was a U.S. senator and he spent much of his childhood in
Washington.

"This is not at all that unusual from a man who grew up in national
politics," said the source, who did not want to be identified. "Even in
this situation, you're thinking what to wear in front of the cameras."

And to be fair, Gore rented a hotel room near the hospital and
visited his son regularly, although he did return to the Senate floor to
vote on a bill and met with lawyer pal and Democratic operative, Nate
Landow, for dinner a couple of times.

While other politicians are image-conscious, critics say Gore is
image-obsessed.

Earlier in the campaign, he paid image consultant Naomi Wolf
thousands of dollars a month to help dress him in more
audience-"reassuring" earth tones, such as olive-colored shirts and
suits.

Gore in full field gear, while serving a 5-month partial tour
of duty as an Army reporter in Vietnam.

Also, some Vietnam war veterans claim campaign photos of soldier Gore
show he even used his uniform for future political advantage.

"I always laugh when I see the wedding picture of Al and Tipper.
There he is in an Army dress blue uniform," said an Army officer and
Vietnam veteran. "Having served during that period, I can say that no
low-ranking or private enlisted man was given a dress blue uniform,
unless he was serving in the company that guarded the tomb of the
unknown (soldier) at Arlington (Va.)."

He concluded: "That uniform was purely designed for a photo-op
political moment."

The Gore campaign is also circulating a supposed combat photo that
shows him wearing a field jacket under all his web gear. Gore was a
reporter who served a partial, five-month (versus the full 12-month)
tour, and did not see combat.

Veterans who did see fighting say it was too hot in the jungle to
wear a field jacket, and they speculate the photo was more a prop for
Sen. Al Gore Sr. to use back home.

Gore Jr. is not averse to using his own family members as props.

In another case of milking a family tragedy to score political
points, Gore tugged at voters' heartstrings during the 1996 Democratic
convention with an extremely personal and graphic account of his late
sister's final struggle with lung cancer. He used the story, which made
his sobbing mother visibly uncomfortable, to illustrate why he's opposed
to Big Tobacco.

Gore recalled that while standing by his sister's deathbed, "she
looked up and from out of that haze, her eyes focused tensely right at
me ... 'Do you bring me hope?' But all I could do was say back to her,
with all the gentleness in my heart, 'I love you.' And then I knelt by
her bed and held her hand. And in a very short time her breathing became
labored and then she breathed her last breath."

"And that is why, until I draw my last breath," Gore vowed in his
prime-time speech, "I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of
protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."

But in 1988 -- four years after his sister died -- Gore bragged about
his tobacco-farming days while campaigning in tobacco country.

"I've hoed it. I've chopped it," Gore crowed. "I've shredded it,
spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it, and sold it."

Then there's the more recent example of using his mother-in-law as a
prop to help sell his Medicare drug plan.

In August, he told a senior-citizens group in Florida that Tipper's
mother pays three times more for a prescription arthritis drug than he
pays for the same drug for his dog.

"That's pretty bad," Gore said, "when you have got to pretend to be a
dog or a cat to get a price break."

Trouble is, Gore used prices from a House Democratic study and
grafted the example onto his mother-in-law as if it were her own
situation.

A Republican critic said Gore's exploitation of family is "creepy."

Al Gore in Vietnam

"Why would you say, if it's not true, that my mother-in-law takes
this drug and pays X and I pay only Y for my dog? There's something odd
about personalizing it that way," former Bush White House aide Bill
Kristol said recently. "It fits into a pattern of his using his family,
which he's done in the past -- his son's accident, his sister's early
death from cancer, his wife's depression -- for political purposes."

Kristol added: "There's something creepy to people about a politician
who is so ruthless and so much wants to win that he uses family members
as props."