THE PRINCE OF TENNESSEE by DAVID MARANISS & ELLEN NAKASHIMA

Author:DAVID MARANISS & ELLEN NAKASHIMA
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R T W E L VE

THE SON SHALL RISE

TIPPER GORE NEARLY HAD what she wanted in the spring of 1976. Her life was balanced between work and home, with a rambunctious two-year-old daughter and a job in the photography department of the Tennessean that gave her opportunities to shoot evocative pictures. Her husband had been saying for years that they would buy a country paper and write books and live in a cabin on the lake, and now he was starting to follow through on that idyllic vision. The Carthage Courier, the little 3,200-circulation weekly that “gave a whoop about Smith County,” had been put up for sale by the widows of the two owners, and Al set about trying to borrow the money to buy it, exacting promises of loans from family and friends. He was one of four potential buyers, but his bid was underfinanced and he lost out to Hershel Lake, who already owned a weekly in Crossett, Arkansas, and had a better sense of what the Courier was worth. “I remember to the penny what I paid for it. It was $157,000. I had to mortgage my house to buy it,” Lake said later. The negotiations began in January and Lake took control the first of March.

Three days earlier, on a Friday morning, Tipper’s world had changed dramatically when her husband had come home from a law class and taken a call from John Seigenthaler. Everything came around and through Siggy sooner or later, usually sooner. As editor of the Tennessean, he was perhaps the best-connected figure in Nashville. He knew all the judges, lawyers, politicians, labor leaders, and financiers, and with his peculiar blend of disparate characteristics, part fearless investigative reporter, part old-style political boss, he could pick up rumors at their inception and move them along to those who needed to know, guiding the flow with the flair of a news virtuoso. Now he had definitive word that Joe L. Evins, the veteran Democratic representative from Tennessee’s fourth district, would announce his retirement on Monday, creating a rare opening in the congressional seat once held by the senior Gore.

After trying unsuccessfully to interest young Gore in some political races in Nashville a few years earlier, Seigenthaler had become convinced that the senator’s son wanted no part of politics and would play out his career in journalism. But there had been signs of a change of heart since then, with the move to the editorial board and enrollment in law school, so now Seigenthaler tried again. There was no need to make the case overtly; he just passed along the news and closed with the line, “You know what I think.”

In that brief second, it all seemed to wash away, all the self-protective defenses that Gore had built up over years and years, his supposed cynicism and disillusionment, his determination to follow his own path, the promises he had made to his wife about living the writer’s life. He hung up the phone and turned to Tipper and said, “I’m going to run for Congress.

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