IF "NO MAN IS A FAILURE WHO HAS FRIENDS" THEN...:

A week or so later, I was told Gore was one of four finalists, and I should prepare for a final interview. The campaign brass shrewdly decided that someone older and wiser than a twenty-nine-year-old former Gore underling was needed for this sensitive task. They chose Harry McPherson, an old Washington hand, to join me for the last round of questioning. A Texan by birth, McPherson was best known as former president Lyndon Johnson's White House lawyer and chief speechwriter--a tall and stately man who conveyed the easy confidence of someone who had already made his name and neither needed nor wanted anything from anyone.

McPherson and I met at his Connecticut Avenue law office. He wanted a briefing to understand the essence of Al Gore. He asked me a number of questions I was ready for, then one that I wasn't: "Does Al Gore have any friends?" I hesitated before I said anything, slightly stumped. "It's a simple question," McPherson repeated. "Does Al Gore have any friends, because it's not clear to me he does, and if that's the case, I'd be concerned."

In all the spade work I'd done over three months, this wasn't anything I'd given any thought to nor addressed in any of my vetting memos. And yet I sensed he was on to something far more important than Gore's views on the MX missile or noxious greenhouse gases. Looking back on my firsthand campaign experience with Gore, it occurred to me that I couldn't recall a Billy Shore or a Warren Beatty around. And there certainly wasn't the gaggle of friends like I'd seen already on the Clinton campaign--the famous "Friends of Bill"--who had rescued the rocky candidate during the New Hampshire primary by traveling to the state to personally reassure skittish voters of his character and integrity. Their continued efforts afterward were a key reason Clinton cited for his success in securing the nomination.

Gore was different, but I wouldn't say he was friendless. He certainly was friendly, as smart and earnest a politician as any I had dealt with in my nascent political career. Harry, however, couldn't get past it, drawing on the years he had worked closely with LBJ. He had come to understand and value the importance of having a First Friend--and of not having one. On a daily basis, Johnson manifested the power of personality as central to the effective functioning of the presidency. No one could cajole, flatter, berate, or bludgeon another into capitulation as well as Lyndon Johnson. Using his hulking frame almost as a weapon, he would hover over his prey, lean in, and, alternating between whispers and shouts, eventually get his way.

Yet despite LBJ's outsized personality, Harry long believed that the president was, at heart, a solitary figure. He had legions of people around him, but no true, close confidants. Harry recognized that there was a gaping hole in Johnson's life, one that could have been filled with a friend who might have enabled him to be a more successful president. Over his long agonizing debates over Vietnam, for example, Harry had theorized an intimate could have helped clarify his thinking and eased the pressure as the country divided over the war and ultimately forced his early retirement. With Gore, he worried about the same deficiency.

A week later, Gore met with us for the final interview at his parents' apartment in a building across from the Capitol. After some brief pleasantries, Harry began.

"Senator, who are your friends?" he asked.

Gore shot McPherson a look of surprise, with a hint of anger that I knew all too well from the 1988 campaign.

"Harry, what are you asking?" Gore said.

"Senator, who are your friends . . . the people you most like, relax with, travel with, drink with. Your friends."

A few seconds of silence ensued. Gore leaned forward in his armchair.

He looked straight at McPherson and spoke in an assured, senatorial voice.

"Norm Dicks and Tom Downey," he said.

Both men were then members of the House of Representatives, and they had served with Gore during his eight years as a congressman. Harry expected to hear these names, but he wanted more.

"Who besides men you've served with would you describe as close friends? Any friends from Carthage? From Harvard? From Nashville?

From DC outside of Capitol Hill?"

"Well . . . my brother-in-law, Frank Hunger."

McPherson was also expecting that name. "Anyone outside your family?"

Another uncomfortable silence followed. Finally, Gore repeated the same three names.

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