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Why Not, Al?

by Martin Peretz
Spring 2007

There were 15 people in the freshman seminar on Cold War culture that I taught at Harvard starting in the fall of 1965. They were members of the Class of ’69, a class that confronted Robert Mcnamara atop a car in front of Quincy house, a class that conducted a sit-in against a recruiter from Dow Chemical because Dow made napalm.

I remember all of these students, and I am in touch with some of them. They are in a mental frame bounded by the Vietnam War. Some have risen in social class, some have stayed flat; I don’t believe any have descended. One is probably disappointed by his accomplishments. I don’t know whether any of them are academics. Most, surely, are in the humane professions, broadly considered, and I doubt there’s a hedge-fund zillionaire in the group. After all, this was the sixties. And yes, one nearly became President of the United States. I’ll get to him in a second.

But first there are three others who jut out in my mind, probably because they did not follow the season’s path from alienation and dissent and bitterness to something more normal. Or ordinary. Yet they perhaps best explain the context.

One left school, during his junior year I think, to be a carpenter and union organizer (during the days when there was a short revival of the romance of trade unions) in New Haven. He did not return. Another actually graduated but went on to join the spare cohort of Americans who wanted to help make something good of newly independent Africa. A white man and Jewishly intense, he ended up committing suicide at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. The third looked and dressed like a preppy. I recall his light plaid jacket, his chinos, maybe even penny loafers. He had come to Harvard from a New England boarding school. He was the one in the seminar to the right, honest, commanding, in a way, and Attic of wit. By the spring of his senior year he was one of the dozens who actually took over University Hall, unlucky enough to be in the telltale newspaper photograph of a deanling being carried horizontally down the granite steps of the building with the bronze statue of the imagined and truly non-descript John Harvard in front.

Harvard expelled him and did not take him back. A lawyer now, he comes to class reunions. At one of them, he bantered with another returning member of the seminar: “forgotten, but not gone.” Okay, now the one who was nearly—and many argue, was elected—President. (He may yet be, though he protests otherwise.) Al Gore was not as political as others in the class, or rather, not as unconventionally political as others. He did not entrap McNamara on the street. He did not entrap a Dow recruiter in the chemistry building. He was, I remember, “clean for Gene [McCarthy].” He played pool, sang country & western, dated Tipper across the Charles River. Oh yes, he also majored in Government. His father was one of the few anti-war senators, and he lost a fourth term the year after Al graduated from Harvard. He was worried about the war’s toll on America and was against it. He served.

I believe I know how Al’s mind works, and there is a continuum between how it worked then and how it works now. Our seminar was about the culture of the Cold War, its sub-theme being that foreign policy is neither independent of culture nor culture independent of foreign policy. It is apparent to me that he understands the dynamics of these propositions much better than I taught them.

peretz&gore He studied with Richard Neustadt, the great presidential scholar of his—a bit older than my—generation. Gore’s thesis under Neustadt was about television and the presidency. Al had some deep sense (and some anxiety) that television would not enhance the public space for discourse but transform it into show business and pure public relations, that candor would lose its charms, analysis its rigor, eloquence its intimacy. He was right on all three. Maybe he had an intuition that this new medium of communication would put him, never satisfied with a partial question or a partial answer, at some disadvantage. In any case, anyone who really knows him knows also that he doesn’t give partial or slippery answers. A discussion with him is a conversation. In a certain sense then, his discussions with Neustadt (and even his discussions with me) were the beginning of a life’s project. Gore has now done more than 1,000 global warming evenings: talk, film, questions, answers. A big project and a thousand seminars. He won an Oscar for the film, he may win the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaign. But I hope that Al will not be content with winning trophies.

“Project” is not exactly an alluring word, but it is apt for people who want to learn and learn purposefully. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Al’s most influential teacher was Roger Revelle, a professor of environmental sciences and also president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Al had written that Revelle first taught him how little immunity the systems of the earth have from the presence of man. He learned that deeply, and this learning has been his life’s biggest project.

As a senator and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gore made himself a real professional in the theory and strategy of deterrence. His idea for a single-warhead missile turned the nuclear discussion on its head. This too had been an ambitious project. As was his intricate study of Iraq and its relations with the U.S. prior to his voting for the first Iraq war. (Al and I disagree about the second Iraq war.)

The ordinary politician—of whom, for me, Hillary Clinton is the exemplar—has no real sense of humor or irony and no feel for priorities. Her—OK, his, whoever his is—speeches are laundry lists and contrived to make applause lines. They are never exciting because they do not enhance or deepen the listener. This is robotic politics: the candidate as robot, the supporter as robot. Hillary says she wants a “conversation” with the voters. She doesn’t. Do you want such a conversation? I do. Al Gore would really conduct one.

Will he? Well, in one sense, he already is conducting a conversation, both serious and sober. With some fun mixed in. But I do not think the presidency is far from his mind. The front-runners—Hillary, John Edwards (to whom I contributed last time), and Barack Obama (who seems to me to be a really formidable person)—will have to be sorted out in what will be the most frenzied pre-campaign campaign ever. And, given the fact that Hillary has rejected the rules of public financing, which used to be a big issue for her, in favor of feeding from the trough of those hedge-fund managers and Hollywood executives, this will also be the most expensive campaign ever. Imagine, besides, having to please the owners of the 527s, like George Soros, to get many unregulated but enslaving millions.

Every so often, Al Gore recalls for me an embarrassing reading I assigned, or what he knows I now think would be embarrassing, like Herbert Marcuse (if you haven’t heard of him, it’s perfectly alright). It is more than four decades since my seminar assembled at H.H. Richardson’s gloomy Sever Hall in the vortex of deep pessimism and the ambit of exaggerated hope. It is time for some resolve, and Al Gore might just be the one to do it.