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Al Gore

Also Known As Albert Arnold Gore Jr

Former Vice President of the United States

Al Gore's profile picture

Albert Arnold Gore Jr is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in the 2000 presidential election. He lost the electoral college vote 266–271 to Republican nominee George W. Bush, despite winning the popular vote by approximately 543,895 votes. The election concluded after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5–4 in Bush v. Gore against a previous ruling by the Supreme Court of Florida on a re-count that would have likely given Gore a razor-thin lead in the state of Florida, had the re-count continued as planned. Gore is one of only five presidential candidates in American history to lose a presidential election despite winning the popular vote.

The son of politician Albert Gore Sr., Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He was a U.S. representative from Tennessee (1977–1985) and from 1985 to 1993 served as a U.S. senator from that state. He served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001, defeating incumbents George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle in 1992, and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1996. As of 2023, Gore's 1990 re-election remains the last time Democrats won a Senate election in Tennessee.

After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him (jointly with the IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore is the founder and current chair of The Climate Reality Project, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, the now-defunct Current TV network, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. and a senior adviser to Google.Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading its climate change solutions group. He has served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He served on the Board of Directors of World Resources Institute.

Gore has received a number of awards that include the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, as well as its 2017 sequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year. In 2008, Gore won the Dan David Prize for Social Responsibility

Early Life

Gore was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the second of two children of Albert Gore Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, and Pauline (LaFon) Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore is a descendant of Scots Irish immigrants who first settled in Virginia in the mid-17th-century and moved to Tennessee after the Revolutionary War. His older sister Nancy LaFon Gore died of lung cancer in 1984.

During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C.During the summer months, he worked on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where the Gores grew tobacco and hay and raised cattle.

Gore attended St. Albans School, an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. He was the captain of the football team, threw discus for the track and field team and participated in basketball, art, and government. He graduated 25th in a class of 51, applied to one college, Harvard University, and was accepted.

Gore met Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson at his St. Albans senior prom in 1965. She was from the nearby St. Agnes School. Tipper followed Gore to Boston to attend college, and they married at the Washington National Cathedral on May 19, 1970.

They have four children; Karenna Gore (b. 1973), Kristin Carlson Gore (b. 1977), Sarah LaFon Gore (b. 1979) and Albert Arnold Gore III (b. 1982).

In June 2010 the Gores announced in an e-mail to friends that after "long and careful consideration" they had made a mutual decision to separate.] In May 2012, it was reported that Gore started dating Elizabeth Keadle of Rancho Santa Fe, California.

He is Baptist, and was a member of Georgetown Baptist Church and Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.. In 2004, he announced he had left the Southern Baptist Convention, but remained a Baptist. In 2007, he received Ethics Daily's "Baptist of the Year" award for his environmental activism. He was a keynote speaker at the 2008 New Baptist Covenant convention.

He is possibly related to the Albert "Al" N. Gore who ran in the 2012 Mississippi Senate election. In some interviews, the candidate described how he might be distantly related to the vice-president by saying the Gore family split into two factions in the 1800s, with one going to Tennessee (and later giving rise to the vice-president and his Tennessee Senator father), and the other going to Mississippi (giving rise to that state's Democratic Senate candidate). Despite the speculation, it has never officially been confirmed if the two are in fact distant relatives.

Education

  • Graduate - Vanderbilt University Law School

Career

  • United States - Former Vice President

Recognition

Gore is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV in 2007, a Webby Award in 2005, the Dan David Prize in 2008 and the Prince of Asturias Award in 2007 for International Cooperation.He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2008. He also starred in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007 and wrote the book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, which won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2009.

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