hortly before inventing the Internet, Vice President Gore helped pass important civil-rights legislation in the 1960s.

As a teenager, Al Jr. "sparred" with his father, a Democratic senator from Tennessee, over the 1964 Civil Rights Act "in dinner table debates as intense as the ones on the Senate floor," write Ellen Nakashima and David Maraniss in a Washington Post Magazine cover story on the Gores. The father of course, voted against the landmark civil-rights law. "I, as always, respected what he had to say," notes the vice president. "But I disagreed with him."

Although Albert Gore Sr. defended his 1964 stance for many years, he did support the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Turns out that little Al had a role in this: "I sometimes think that the ferocity, the renewed ferocity that he brought to the civil rights debate in 1965 ... came out of what might have been his own sense that he made the wrong call on that 1964 vote," says Gore. "I've actually at times thought that the renewed ferocity that I referred to may have been at least in a tiny part for me."

Confederate Al
April is Confederate History Month in Tennessee. No comment from the Gore campaign.

On The Site
Ramesh Ponnuru talks back to The New Republic. Go.