The Great Leader Series No.17 - Al Gore

Al Gore is the man of the moment. Joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, earlier in the month his name was everyone’s lips.

I must admit that until very recently I had only really heard very little about him. I knew he had been Bill Clinton’s Vice president of the USA and that he had lost a very controversial election for the presidency against George W Bush.

His political career has lasted over twenty five years but he has also achieved much as a private citizen.

Albert Arnold Gore Jnr. was born in March 1948, the son of a senator from Tennessee and Pauline Lafon Gore a distinguished lawyer. Although he was born in Washington D.C., his childhood was spilt between Washington and Carthage, Tennessee. During the school he lived with his family in an hotel in Washington and the holidays working on the family farm in Carthage.

Although he was intelligent he had an unspectacular education but he did gain a place at Harvard University, the only university he applied to. His results put him in the bottom twenty per cent two years running until he switched courses from English to Government and graduated with a B.A. honours degree.

Gore opposed the Vietnam war but although opportunities were  created to enable him to dodge the draft, his sense of duty made him serve in some way. He enlisted in August 1969 and served as a military journalist spending five months in Vietnam.

In 1988 when talking about his time in Vietnam, he said,

"didn't change my conclusions about the war being a terrible mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself, really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for."

After the war he applied for an honourable early discharge as his unit was standing down. This was granted and he, then, attended divinity school at Vanderbilt University and he gained a one year Rockefeller Foundation scholarship before marrying in 1970.

Gore spent the next five years as a report for the Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper. He, then, took a leave of absence to go to Law school but before he finished he heard his congressman planned to retire in 1976, after thirty years. So he quit law school in order to run for the United States House of Representatives.

Gore spent eight years in Congress before being elected to the Senate in 1984. He served until 1993 when he became vice president.

In 1988 he ran for president but failed to gain the Democratic nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis. He did not lay the foundation of a presidential campaign for 1992 as he chose to stay with his son during his prolonged recovery from a road accident which nearly took his life.

During this time Gore started writing “Earth in the Balance”, his book on environmental conservation. It became the first book written by a serving senator to make the New York Times’ best seller list since J F Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage”.

In the 1992 presidential elections, Bill Clinton chose Gore to be his running partner. On 9 July 1993 he was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the USA. The pair were re-elected in 1996.

During the eight years of the Clinton/Gore administration, the US government said the economy expanded. The administration worked closely with the Republican led House of Representatives to slow down federal spending and eventually balance the federal budget. One of Gore’s major works was the National Performance Review, which pointed out waste, fraud  and other abuse in federal government. This was a major aid in the battle to downsize.

 In 2000 Al Gore ran for president but lost the election to George W Bush in a highly contentious manner. He received more votes than his opponent but had four fewer electoral votes.

Since deciding not to run for the 2004 election, when he decided that it was the time for fresh faces and new ideas, Gore has donated $6 million to various democratic Party groups.

There was still speculation, amongst his supporters, that he may stand for election in 2008. He has decided not to stand.

Al Gore is one of the first politicians to wholly embrace the issue of global warming. His film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, won an Oscar for the best documentary feature and it is believed to have taken the issue into the homes of the American people. Furthermore he is now leading an initiative to spread awareness of the problems facing us all.

So why have I researched Al Gore’s leadership qualities? It was a decision made before his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. I discovered that he was, indeed a great political leader, whose integrity helped him make tough decisions. He was an integral part of the team that created America’s longest period of sustained economic growth. He is well informed and capable of leading and persuading other leaders.

He is also a business leader involved with successful businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Al Gore’s qualities of  integrity and having a sense of duty that extends beyond the USA, have led him to care about the South African Aids crisis, to make strong representation for sanctions against Saddam Hussein which could have prevented the war in Iraq, and now global warming.

So I would like to congratulate him and his team of eminent scientists on being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.leadersinlondon.com/speaker_biographies_2007.php

Date : 28-10-2007