GORE

Forced to leave ABC News in 1998 because he was working on this tendentious book, Zelnick (Backfire: A Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action, 1996) hacks away at Vice President Albert Gore Jr. After a brief prologue that suggests Gore’s loyalty to President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal will hurt his presidential hopes, Zelnick proceeds with a traditional chronological journey through his subject’s life. Although he credits Gore for a variety of accomplishments and personal virtues, the author has come to bury the vice president, not to praise him. Zelnick gleefully repeats every damaging anecdote and allegation: in high school, Gore was twice ejected from football games for unsportsmanlike conduct; in college he smoked marijuana; in Congress, he flip-flopped on tobacco and abortion issues; as vice president he abused the campaign finance laws. At times abandoning all pretense of objectivity, Zelnick labels Gore a “pious moralist,” “Orwellian,” and “self-aggrandizing”; he claims his subject “sold out the interests of the environmentalists,” “purged” from government positions anyone who didn’t agree with him (there’s an entire chapter devoted to this), and wrote a book about environmental issues (Earth in the Balance, 1994) that is “simplistic” and “utterly brainless.” He even suggests that Gore might have done something to prevent the Y2K computer crisis. But when Zelnick accuses Gore of exploiting for political gain the most painful of family tragedies (the death of his sister from smoking-related lung cancer; the severe injuries sustained by his son in an accident), he reveals a core of heartless cynicism that will appeal only to the most zealously partisan readers. This sawed-off-shotgun style does occasionally hit the mark; Zelnick’s account of the 1996 presidential campaign’s fund- raising excesses is troubling, even though it targets only Democrats. A hatchet job that would elicit a smile of admiration from Lizzie Borden.