On June 1st, 2010, friends of Albert and Tipper Gore opened an email and had to read it twice before they believed what it said. Thirteen days earlier, on May 19th, the couple had celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary with friends, toasts, and the storybook number that seemed to match their storybook marriage. Now the same friends were reading that the marriage was over. There was no affair, no betrayal anyone could name, no smoking gun.
By every account, it was mutual, a decision made together following a process of long and careful consideration. The most disturbing thing about the Gore marriage was not that it ended. It was that it had never quite been what it appeared to be, and nearly everyone who watched it believed the appearance, including, at times, the two people inside it. The moment the country remembered most came on August 17th, 2000, at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
Al Gore walked onto the stage, swept up his wife of thirty years, and kissed her for six seconds in front of millions of viewers. The interpretation began immediately. Jack Germond called it an X-rated kiss on Meet the Press. Bob Novak called it disgusting.
Maureen Dowd wrote that it seemed better suited to a third date than the fourth night of a convention. In focus groups, however, ordinary Americans read it completely differently. A mental health counselor named Jim Russell told the Boston Globe that you could not fake that kiss, and that it proved Gore really loved his wife. When Matt Lauer asked Gore what he had been thinking, Gore insisted it had been completely spontaneous.
On CBS, he admitted someone had asked whether he was trying to send a message. “Actually,” he said, “I was trying to send a message to Tipper. ”
Both interpretations were true at once. The feeling behind the kiss was genuine, and the staging around it was deliberate.
That combination was the exact condition the Gore marriage occupied for most of its forty years. The campaign understood that Al Gore had a warmth problem. He was stiff on the stump, robotic on camera. The answer was Tipper, who laughed easily and connected with strangers naturally.
The campaign deployed her warmth the way it deployed advertising time, deliberately and everywhere it could. None of that made the affection false. It made the affection useful. To understand what the marriage actually was, one had to start before Al Gore existed, with the girl who was nobody’s wife yet.
Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson was born on August 19th, 1948, in Washington, D. C. Her parents divorced when she was small, and she was raised by her mother and grandmother in Arlington, Virginia, in a household of women shaped by separation and self-sufficiency. She played basketball, softball, and field hockey, and she was the drummer in an all-girl band called The Wild Cats.
Nothing in her early trajectory pointed toward the role she would eventually fill. In 1965, she met Al Gore at his senior prom. When he went north to Harvard, she went north too, first to Garland Junior College, then to Boston University, where she studied psychology. They married on May 19th, 1970, at the National Cathedral in Washington.
She was twenty-one. Al Gore came from a formation as different from hers as the Senate Chamber is from a house full of women in Arlington. His father, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, had served three terms in Washington and was a progressive force on civil rights. Then he opposed the Vietnam War, and in 1970 he was beaten in a loss widely read as punishment for that position.
The lesson the father carried into the son’s upbringing was duty. Al Gore Jr. understood from childhood that his life had a plan involving public service at the highest levels. He graduated from Harvard in 1969, enlisted in the army, and served about six months as a journalist in Vietnam.
He came home, spent a brief period at Vanderbilt Divinity School, then went to work as an investigative reporter for the Tennessean, where Tipper was also working as a photographer. They were colleagues before they were a dynasty. In 1976, at twenty-eight, he ran for Congress and won. The plan was proceeding on schedule.
Tipper was part of the plan, but she had a plan of her own. By 1975, she had completed a master’s degree in psychology at Vanderbilt’s George Peabody College and was doing real professional work as a photographer. Her documentary photographs of homeless families and children in poverty were not the output of a woman killing time while her husband was away. She later organized a traveling exhibit called Homeless in America, donated gallery auction proceeds to organizations serving people living with HIV and AIDS, and published essays that put faces on statistics.
Almost none of that body of work appears in the standard accounts of the Gore marriage, because the standard accounts are about Al. Four children arrived in nine years, while her husband commuted between Nashville and Washington. She founded the Congressional Wives Task Force, an organization defined entirely by its members’ relationships to other people’s careers. She was happy in those years, by her own description.
But the structure was already doing its work. His ambitions were the load-bearing walls. Her ambitions were what fit between them. In 1985, the public started seeing the geometry, though nobody recognized what they were looking at.
Tipper walked past her eleven-year-old daughter Karen’s room and heard “Darling Nikki” from Prince’s Purple Rain coming out of it. She was offended not so much by Prince as by the packaging, by the fact that nothing had warned her about what was inside. She called Susan Baker, the wife of the Treasury Secretary, and together with two other Washington wives, they formed the Parents Music Resource Center. Its leverage came entirely from whose wives the founders were.
On September 19th, 1985, they brought the question of music labeling to a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. Three musicians came to testify against them. Frank Zappa called the proposal an ill-conceived piece of nonsense that infringed the civil liberties of people who were not children. Dee Snider pointed out that his song “Under the Blade” was about surgery, not sadomasochism.
John Denver talked about how his own “Rocky Mountain High” had been misread as a drug anthem when it was a tribute to the mountains of Colorado. The recording industry, rather than risk legislation, agreed to a voluntary labeling system, and the parental advisory sticker was born. It became, as Zappa had predicted, a badge of honor for the exact teenagers it was designed to protect. Zappa publicly branded her a cultural terrorist.
For two decades, in a significant portion of American popular music, the name Tipper Gore functioned as shorthand for politically connected moral policing, and that label attached itself to her husband’s career everywhere he went. Then came April 3rd, 1989, and the event both of them would later describe as the thing that broke something open. Al Gore, by then a senator, took his six-year-old son Albert III to opening day at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. As the crowd dispersed, the boy let go of his father’s hand near the curb and ran into the street.
A car hit him and threw him through the air. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, doctors would eventually remove about sixty percent of his spleen. He spent weeks in the hospital. The accident made Al Gore’s environmental work suddenly personal.
Tipper’s version is harder to find. What she has said over the years is that in the aftermath of her son’s recovery, she found herself in the office of a mental health professional asking for help for herself. She was diagnosed with clinical depression, treated with medication and counseling. Treatment worked, and she kept it private for years.
Throughout the 1990s, while she performed the most public role of her life, Tipper Gore was a woman living with a secret clinical condition and a decade-long habit of compartmentalization. She became Second Lady in 1993, served as mental health policy adviser to President Clinton, worked on children’s issues and homelessness. The disclosure came in May of 1999, when she went public in the Washington Post and told the country she had suffered from depression, that she had been treated, and that she was no longer in treatment. The occasion was her own project, the first White House conference on mental health convened in June of 1999.
The specter of Thomas Eagleton, the vice presidential nominee forced off the 1972 ticket in days over his history of depression treatment, had never fully left American politics. Here was a woman disclosing a diagnosis while her husband was visibly preparing to run for president. For ten years, she protected the secret absolutely. In 1999, when it could do the most good for the household, she let it out.
A woman’s most private wound, dated and scheduled like every other political asset. The 2000 campaign was the marriage’s greatest performance, and the kiss was its climax. Al Gore lost Florida by a certified margin of a few hundred ballots. The Supreme Court ended the recount on December 12th by a vote of five to four.
He had won the national popular vote, and he conceded anyway, graciously, with Tipper at his side. They went home to Tennessee, and for the first time in decades there was no campaign to organize around, no schedule to defer to, no role the marriage was required to perform. Nothing crashed. Nothing exploded.
A structure that had carried a specific load for thirty years simply found itself without it. In 2002, the couple published a book together, Joined at the Heart, about the transformation of the American family. A marriage writing the book about what holds families together while its own arithmetic was already being recomputed. After 2000, Al Gore reinvented himself.
He built his climate lecture into a film with Davis Guggenheim, released An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, and won two Academy Awards. In 2007, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He became, without holding any office, one of the most recognized public figures on the planet, everywhere at once. Tipper, meanwhile, was doing her own thing, though the world was slow to notice because her thing had never been visible from the world’s vantage point.
She was playing the drums again, keeping her own hours for the first time in her adult life. In the spring of 2009, she sat in with the Grateful Dead during the second night of their tour in Nashville, playing on the closing song “Sugar Magnolia. ” She had played with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid and appeared on stage at the Equality Rocks concert in 2000. Tony Coelho, who managed Al’s 2000 campaign, said it most simply: she went and did her thing.
For forty years, her thing had been contextually bound to his thing. The Congressional Wives Task Force existed because she was a congressional wife. The PMRC had leverage because she was a senator’s wife. Her role as mental health advisor existed because he was the vice president.
After 2000, for the first time, she was doing things that had nothing to do with his position, his needs, or his calendar. What slowly emerged, without drama, without blame, without any single event anyone could put a finger on, was the discovery that forty years had produced two people whose separate lives no longer required the same address. The email went out on June 1st, 2010. “This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together, following a process of long and careful consideration,” they wrote.
“We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family. ” The friends who received it were shocked. The phrase people used, over and over, was that they grew apart. Cokie Roberts told Good Morning America that Al Gore, the man who had become the world’s climate conscience, eventually had to come home to a wife who knows he puts his pants on one leg at a time.
The structure had been his career. For three decades, the campaign and the schedule had held the shape of the relationship from the outside. When the presidency was taken away by a few hundred votes, when he found a new global mission that carried him around the world without her, when the children were grown, there was nothing left to hold the shape. What remained was two people who had genuinely loved each other, raised four children together, absorbed real grief and real catastrophe together, and grown separately into adults whose lives had been so fully organized around one person’s purpose that when the purpose detached, the marriage had no engine of its own.
By August of 2012, The New York Times reported that both were dating other people and had no plans to resume the marriage. They remained friendly. There was no war, no property battle anyone could turn into a story. The end was, in every public sense, as tidy as the email that announced it.
And Tipper kept playing. In 2012, she played drums with Herbie Hancock at the twenty-fifth Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Two years after the separation, a woman in her sixties on a stage that had nothing to do with her ex-husband, doing the thing she had done at fifteen in a band called The Wild Cats, before she was anyone’s wife, before the plan absorbed her, before the kiss. The six-second kiss had been real, and the devotion inside the marriage had been authentic.
But authenticity was not the same thing as freedom. The woman held up for a decade as the proof that love could survive American political life did survive it, and then she left it, because the country had only ever seen the six seconds. What she had been heading toward the whole time was a life that would eventually have to be entirely her own. She found it.
It just took forty years and one six-second kiss to get there.