With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions

The Many Crusades of Tipper Gore

193 In 2003, I was asked by Vanderbilt Magazine to write a profile of Tipper Gore, who had earned her master’s degree from the university. I had met Al Gore briefly on a couple of occasions but never his wife, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I discovered, as often happens in the world of journalism, was a person more formidable than I would have guessed. I was grateful to be writing for Vanderbilt Magazine, one of the best publications of its kind in the country, and a venue where I could discard the cynical prism of political journalism—a mindset that assumes the worst about public figures, then dares them to disprove it if they can. The Many Crusades of Tipper Gore It was a July afternoon in Tipper Gore’s office, one of her rare interviews these days, a moment when the memories came flooding back. There were stories of the Clintons and Nelson Mandela and the infested refugee camps of Rwanda where she witnessed the horrors of a genocidal war. But there were also the stories from closer to home, more personal and immediate, like the homeless woman outside the White House, gesturing, talking, walking in a daze, obviously in need of some kind of help. Tipper Gore was a volunteer at the time with a homeless advocacy organization in Washington, and she often found herself searching the streets, looking for the people with no place to go. She approached the woman near the White House cautiously. “What’s your name?” she said. “How can I help you?” The woman stared back with her large, dark eyes, looking straight into Tipper Gore’s own. She was African American, thin and wispy, maybe five-feet-three, and somewhere imbedded in her quiet desperation there seemed to be a certain sweetness in her smile. “My name is Mary Tudor,” she said. “You can help me get my reality back.” They talked for a while about the places she could go—a downtown shelter where she could get a hot shower and a good hearty 194 With Music and Justice for All meal, and where they could begin to evaluate her mental health. But a cloud passed over the black woman’s face. “I can’t go,” she said. “My husband will worry.” “Who’s your husband?” “President Clinton.” “Oh, I see,” replied Gore, a psychologist by inclination and training . “Well, I know how to get a message to the president. We can tell him you are going with me and it will be okay.” Together they went to the gate of the White House, where Gore introduced Mary to the marine on duty and told him, please, to let the president know she was fine. The marine said he would and the two women headed away to the shelter, where Mary enrolled in emergency housing and soon began treatment at a mental health center. They visited often in the months after that, the vice president’s wife and the woman of the streets. Gore would drop by the shelter to see her, sometimes talking for an hour or more, giving her encouragement as she went through her treatments. Mary (which turned out not to be her real name) came several times to the vice president’s mansion, twice for lunch, and along with other homeless people from the capital, a couple of times to the Gores’ Christmas parties. As the people who have known her through the years will tell you, all of this was vintage Tipper Gore. She has long been a woman given to crusades, sometimes public, sometimes less so, sometimes quixotic in the eyes of her critics. Whatever the case, she has divided her energy, which was always considerable, between the needs of her family and the demands of the causes she has chosen to embrace. It is a pattern in her life that continues even now. At the time of our interview in 2003, she and her husband were, among other things, putting together a national conference on the family—the twelfth in a series of meetings at Vanderbilt, which the two of them started in 1991. “We call them Family Re-Unions,” she said. “We have met a lot of good people there.” She was sitting at the time in her Nashville office, just across the street from the Vanderbilt campus. She was still moving in, her professional life in cardboard boxes, as she prepared for a series of...