The Secret Passion of Al Gore

Al Gore had been on Bill Clinton's ticket less than a week in July 1992, and was still feeling his way into the campaign and the relationship as the two were winding up their triumphal six-day bus tour in St. Louis, Mo. The best hope they had of defeating a President who had just won a war was to turn the public's attention to what they called the worst domestic economy since Herbert Hoover. But as tens of thousands of people were gathering in the stifling morning heat outside the city library to hear how the Democrats planned to fix it, Gore was inside the Arkansas Governor's hotel suite persuading him to take a stand on a Balkan dictator most Americans at that point had never even heard of. Within days, Clinton was attacking George Bush for being soft on Slobodan Milosevic and calling for military action. He had started down the road that seven years later led to Kosovo.

Gore has always approached foreign policy more with the passion of a crusader than with the calculation of a campaigner. From his first days in Congress, he devoted time and muscle to issues most lawmakers avoided as too complicated or politically expensive. The conviction that made him drag the spotlight onto Milosevic back then comes back to haunt him now, as the unfolding conflict inspires new Vietnam analogies every day, ones in which Gore plays Hubert Humphrey to Clinton's Lyndon Johnson. And yet rather than going AWOL, Gore has charged into the flames, touting himself as an "active participant" in the policymaking and stating the case for intervention as he campaigns across the country. Kosovo reflects what he has cared about, fought for and forced onto the agenda, even when political prudence would argue for making himself invisible. "He's never ducked on the hard ones," says former National Security Adviser Tony Lake.

Opponents of Clinton's Kosovo operation argue that this conflict has nothing to do with America's vital national interests. But Gore brings to his adviser-in-chief role a different definition of what those interests are and where our enemies lie. While America for a century has fielded armies to defend itself against hostile nations with ever more deadly weaponry, Gore believes the future threats will pose dangers that cannot be measured by throw weight--a poisoned environment, vanishing resources, refugees, disease, hunger, crime and terrorism.

If those are America's 21st century foes, Gore has been training for decades to take them on. He was worrying about global warming back in college, when it was still more a theory than a real threat. His interest in stabilizing post-apartheid South Africa has drawn him to the problems of goat farmers and ways of bringing clean water and solar power to remote villages. In 1994 he ordered the CIA to find out why countries fall apart. After feeding 2 million facts and figures from about 113 instances of national collapse into its computers, the intelligence agency came up with a startling answer: new democracies tend to fail most often when they have a high infant-mortality rate. Clinton's National Security Council quickly found itself boning up on prenatal care.