Democratic Convention: The Daughter Also Rises

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Karenna settled down in her last years in high school and headed off to Harvard. Friends from those years remember her as the girl with long hair and sandals who kept water skis under her bed and the occasional honky-tonk song on the stereo. The Karenna usually on display was a bit of a mess--forgetful and prone to showing up at the last minute with wet hair. One morning, as students turned in papers, Karenna came running through the yard with bedhead and wearing one sock, finally holding her computer disc out to an amused professor. "I can't get this off," she lamented, "You've got to help me!"

But that Ms. McGoo persona belies a focused and rigorous mind. Karenna wrote a thesis on slave narratives from the 1930s that earned a departmental prize. She fiercely held her own in debates with friends, often refusing to back down even to better arguments. As her father entered the vice presidency in her sophomore year, she carried on a constant high-level exchange with him on the computer and over the phone, with Gore sending his speeches. Friends recall Karenna sitting intently in front of the TV during the State of the Union addresses and the disastrous 1994 election returns. She didn't offer expansive opinions to those in the room. She saved those for her father, who would usually call within minutes of the end of political events.

Though Karenna traveled with Tipper during 1992, she spent the last four months of the 1996 re-election campaign with her father on Air Force Two. She considered taking a formal role, until it was explained to her that she would have to talk to those damn journalists. So she kept to the background. While staff members often headed off during speeches to make phone calls or take a break, Karenna always parked herself in the audience, intently watching her father and the faces in the crowd. "Schedule, advance, balloon drop, strategy, speeches, issues, everything," a Veep staff member ticks off, listing the things the 22-year-old put on her radar. "She is her father's daughter, and she has his eye for detail."

In October 1996, on one of the rare times Karenna was not on Gore's plane, she agreed to head over to the Washington home of family friends for a drink. Chris Downey, wife of former Congressman and Gore friend Tom Downey, had been insisting she had someone she wanted Karenna to meet. Downey now says that when Andrew Schiff, a New York doctor and heir of the turn-of-the-century industrialist Jacob Schiff, walked into the room, in a crisp shirt with his hair still wet from the shower, Downey knew from their faces that a wedding was in the offing. By the following July, Karenna, then 23, married Drew in the Washington cathedral where her parents had wed years before. Gore and his daughter danced at the reception to the strains of Tennessee Waltz.