Al Gore

45th Vice President of the United States

Former Vice President Al Gore’s political career began when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 where he served eight years representing the then 4th District of Tennessee. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and was re-elected in 1990, becoming the first candidate in modern history — Republican or Democratic — to win all 95 of Tennessee's counties. Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993.

During the administration, Al Gore was a central member of President Clinton’s economic team — helping to design the program that led to the strong U.S. economy, casting the tie-breaking Senate vote for the plan in 1993, helping to pass the first balanced budget in 30 years. He helped usher in the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history — with over 18 million new jobs, wages rising twice the rate of inflation, the lowest African-American and Hispanic poverty on record, the highest level of private home ownership ever, more investment in our cities, and the lowest unemployment in 29 years.

Al Gore served as President of the Senate, a Cabinet member, a member of the National Security Council, and as the leader of a wide range of Administration initiatives, including the fight for the V-Chip, Family and Medical Leave, and more high-quality children’s programming on TV. He has worked to dramatically expand lifelong learning for the 21st Century, and increase investments in quality after-school care. He has taken the lead in Reinventing Government to make it cost less and work better. And he has been a champion of administration efforts to create new jobs and growth in cities across America, to build more livable communities, to fight terrorism and make air travel safer, and to enact the toughest-ever measures to cut off children’s access to tobacco.

Together with Tipper Gore, Al Gore has been one of the strongest voices for America’s families, and their annual Family Reunion policy conference in Nashville has promoted new initiatives strengthening fatherhood, increasing flexibility for mothers and fathers in the workplace, and giving parents more control over information that comes into their homes.
To help create a federal government that works better and costs less, Vice President Gore led the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The initiative has been critical to balancing the federal budget — saving taxpayers more than $137 billion, eliminating 16,000 pages of regulations and 640,000 pages of internal rules, and reduced the size of the federal government to its smallest level since President John F. Kennedy’s Administration. This effort, known as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, has helped to make American government smaller, leaner, and more dynamic — to keep up with the fast-moving global economy and Information Age.

Since his days in the House and Senate, Al Gore’s environmental record is unparalleled. His pioneering efforts to protect the earth’s ozone layer and to clean up toxic-waste dumps were outlined in his best-selling book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992). He led the Clinton Administration’s efforts to protect the environment in a way that also strengthens the economy — such as working with the Big Three auto makers to support the development of a new generation of fuel — and energy-efficient vehicles, and working to combat global warming in a way that also creates new jobs, by helping America lead the estimated $400 billion worldwide market for new technologies that clean up the environment.

Global warming is just one of many issues on which Al Gore was an early and visionary leader — focused on crafting solutions before many in public office were aware of the problems. As a House member, he popularized the term “Information Superhighway,” and was instrumental in fighting for federal funds for what later became the Internet. Also in the House, he held early hearings on biotechnology, and has been a national leader on cutting-edge issues such as genetic discrimination and on-line privacy and security — how to make sure we preserve our oldest and most cherished values, such as privacy and freedom from discrimination, amid fast-changing new discoveries and technologies. In the Senate, Al Gore was a leading expert on arms control, and a strong voice for national defense.
Al Gore has remained an active leader in technology and telecommunications — helping to steer passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promotes private investment and competition in the telecommunications industry; launching a public/private effort to wire every classroom and library in America to the Information Superhighway; and called for the creation of a new Global Information Infrastructure — a network of networks that will send messages and images at the speed of light, across every continent, to expand access to basic phone service and communications, improve the delivery of education and health care, and create new economic opportunity around the world.

Al Gore is a Visiting Professor teaching a course on family centered community building at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. For the past three years, he has also served as Senior Advisor to Google, Inc. In March 2003, he was elected to the Board of Directors of Apple Computers, Inc.

Al Gore was born on March 31, 1948, the son of former U.S. Senator Albert Gore, Sr. and Pauline Gore. Raised in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., he received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in the Vietnam War. Upon returning from Vietnam, Al Gore became an investigative reporter with the Tennessean in Nashville, where he also attended Vanderbilt University's Divinity School and then Law School.

In 1970, Al Gore married the former Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson and together they have four children: Karenna (born August 6, 1973), Kristin (born June 5, 1977), Sarah (born January 7, 1979), and Albert III (born October 19, 1982). On July 4, 1999, Karenna and her husband, Dr. Drew Schiff, gave birth to their first child, Wyatt Gore Schiff. On August 23, 2001, Wyatt’s sister Anna Hunger Schiff was born.