American political wife of Al Gore. Her husband took the post of U.S. Vice-President 1/20/1993, under Bill Clinton, with whom she shares the same birthday.
The only daughter of a mother who divorced when she was four, Tipper was touchy about having no father when she was growing up, only seeing her dad on Sundays. As an adult, she formed a good relationships with him. Attending a girl’s school in the Washington, D.C. area, she later said that she was raised to do nothing more than marry and have a family.
Tipper (a nickname she was given as a little girl from a lullaby), met Al Gore at his high school senior prom. They dated exclusively while he was in Harvard and she was working on her psychology degree from Boston University. They married on 5/19/1970 before he shipped out for Vietnam. Later she returned to school to earn her M.A.
After Al left the Army, they moved to Tennessee where he worked for a few years as a journalist in Nashville and began divinity school, then law at Vanderbilt. When her husband entered politics in 1976, Tipper gave up her job as a newspaper photographer in Nashville, built a darkroom at their home in Virginia and free-lanced in Washington. She
proved to be an effective political campaigner, though pregnant with their second child. The Gore family increased with the addition of four kids, Karenna, born on 8/06/1973, Kristin, 6/05/1977, Sarah, 1/07/1979, and Albert III, 10/19/1982.
Since Al Gore was first elected to Congress in 1976, Tipper spent most of her time raising their kids in their Arlington, VA home. Al was pursuing the family political dream as established by his dad, which resulted in four terms in Congress, eight years in the Senate, a run for the Oval Office in 1988 and then the vice presidency of the United States.
In 1985 she began her own campaign against sex, drugs and violence in rock lyrics. Not prudish or judgmental, Tipper deplores the lyric content on today’s groups, such as sadism, the denigration of women and hate-filled content. Her campaign was not for censorship, but for record labeling. She herself used to play drums while in high school and loved the R’N’R of the ’60s. She published “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society” in 1987. Being an activist was not a new idea for her, from the time before she married Gore she protested the Vietnam War and worked for civil rights. She threw herself into volunteerism in the mid-1980s when her youngest child was a toddler, with one of her causes being Families for the Homeless.
In April 1989, Al took their six-year-old son, Albert III, to watch a baseball game. The boy ran into traffic and was hit by a car and thrown 30 feet, suffering massive internal injuries. His legs and ribs were broken and his internal organs crushed. For a harrowing month, Al and Tipper barely left their son’s hospital bedside and one of them slept beside him for the next three months. His recovery took months of extensive surgery and therapy. With family counseling, they learned to put more emphasis on partnership and teamwork. Al had to deal with his parental feelings that he should have been better able to protect his son. Having just recently failed his 1988 presidential nomination, he had to reevaluate his political directions as well as what his family meant to him. He decided against another political run in 1992, pulling away from public life to put more time into the strength and solidarity of his family. They go to church on Sunday, and in the evenings all get together for a group dialogue to “get their needs out on the table.”
On 12/28/1999, Tipper underwent surgery to remove a benign nodule discovered on her thyroid gland, remaining in Johns Hopkins Medical Center overnight.
In mid-March 1999, Gore once more hit the campaign trail, stumping for the presidential nomination in Iowa. On 3/07/2000, he defeated his opponent in the primaries, Bill Bradley, to become the Democratic candidate for president, running against Republican George W. Bush.
Elections were held on 11/07/2000, leading to one of the most dramatic and confusing contests ever witnessed. When the issue of uncounted ballots finally went to the Supreme Court, the conclusion was upheld on 12/12/2000 that Bush was the winner by a number of several hundred votes.
The following day, Al Gore made a gracious and stirring speech of concession to George W. Bush.
Her daughter Sarah wed Bill Lee in Beverly Hills, CA on July 14, 2007. On July 30, 2007, her son Al Gore III, pleaded guilty to four drug related charges in an Orange County, CA courtroom. The young Gore had been arrested on July 4, 2007 with 140 Vicodin pills, other prescription drugs, and a small amount of marijuana. As his sentence he must complete a drug rehab program for 90 days.
On June 1, 2010 she and her husband of 40 years announced their decision to end their marriage.
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