It was a Friday afternoon in March 1976. Gore was home with his new wife, Tipper, when his editor called with the news leak: Joseph L. Evins, a Tennessee political legend, was retiring from Congress after 30 years.

It was the sort of disclosure that would send most reporters to their keyboards, to bang out an exclusive on the unexpected departure of a longtime congressman. But Gore had another impulse entirely, one bred into him almost from birth, but long suppressed beneath his disgust with American politics after Nixon and Vietnam. For most of his young life, Al Gore Jr. had resisted the role for which he seemed cast: as the bright, inquisitive son and namesake of a US senator. But now, with editor John Seigenthaler's call and encouragement, bowing to the inevitable seemed like just the thing to do.

"Tipper," Gore said. "I think I may run for Congress."

And then, after hanging up the phone, Al Gore did a very Al Gore thing. He dropped to the floor and began doing pushups "sort of reflexively, to get myself in shape for the race," he recalls.

If Gore surprised himself with his sudden ambitions, Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore, who had known her husband since they were teenagers, was shocked. The man she knew had never expressed an interest in public life, particularly after his father lost his Senate seat in 1970 in one of the ugliest campaigns in Tennessee memory. A year later, when Gore began reporting at the Nashville Tennessean, he bluntly told Seigenthaler, "I do not want to cover politics."

And Gore loved his job at the newspaper, where he had risen from the entry-level grind of obituary writing to the city hall beat. He had even broken a big investigative story on influence-peddling in local government, a story which led to several indictments.

But Gore had something else inside, something Seigenthaler had sensed early on. The editor saw real journalistic talent in Gore and assumed he would soon lose him to a bigger paper or to television, "because he looked like Clark Kent." But when Evins called to leak the story of his retirement to the Tennessean newspaper, Seigenthaler's thoughts of Gore quickly clicked from "reporter" to "candidate" and he made the call.

"I guess he knew better than I did that this was something I would be interested in," Gore says.

And interested he was. Gore and Tipper would spend the weekend sounding out friends and family. They invited five friends for Sunday dinner and circled the table sampling their advice.

The consensus was supportive, though Steve Armistead, a childhood friend of Gore's and the only nonpolitical person at the dinner, offered this: "You need to get a haircut and you need to buy new clothes." (Gore has never put much of an emphasis on clothes and "it still shows," Armistead says with a laugh.)

Edward S. Blair, a longtime friend of Gore's, remembers getting a late-night call around that time from his friend, who had all but made up his mind.

"I don't know where that came from, what made him do that," Blair says. "I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was words to the effect that he felt like he could do some good."

Do some good. Vindicate his dad. Choose the road more traveled by. For Al Gore, the life-changing choice was to be Al Gore.

"It was, in fact, a reawakening of this early childhood ambition to be like my dad," Gore says. "But I had to do it on my own terms."

The decision made, Gore was ready to make it public. He went to the steps of the local courthouse to announce his candidacy. But before he began his remarks, this son of a former US senator, this Harvard graduate, Vietnam veteran, and tough-minded investigative reporter, made one quick stop.

He went into the courthouse bathroom and threw up.

Disgust.

The word comes up again and again when Gore's Harvard roommates describe their old friend's attitude about politics.

It was the late 1960s, and the campus was consumed with the Vietnam War and the draft. "Who wasn't disgusted with politics in 1965, '66, '67, '68?" asks Michael Kapetan, a sculptor who roomed with Gore at Harvard. "It was easy to be disgusted."

Other than a brief stint on the freshman council, Gore, like his classmates, had steered clear of student politics. The hotter question in Harvard Yard was: Who would go to war?

Gore, his classmates and friends insist, was neither involved in, nor preparing for, a life in politics. But, like many, he was obsessed by what he should do about the war.

"I think we all know that when you go off to college and you're young, it's such a time of breaking away, looking for your identity," says Mrs. Gore. "Vietnam, Watergate -- all of those things disillusioned him, like it did many of our generation," she says.

"He wasn't very interested in politics. I don't ever remember hearing a word about running for office," says standup comedian Bob Somerby, another Gore roommate.

Nor did Gore's early academic choices suggest that he had inwardly, if not publicly, put himself on a political path. He started out majoring in English literature, and was fascinated by the medieval English poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Later he would shift his major to American government.

And instead of using Harvard's elite population to make political connections, Somerby says, Gore tended to associate with people from working-class backgrounds. "Being a senator's son, you can go to Harvard and do nothing but network. That's not what he did," Somerby says.

But then there was his father, a man Gore decribes as "a hero to me," a man who has been a constant -- if sometimes subconscious -- guiding influence in the younger Gore's life and career.

Gore was deeply proud of his father, and he would often regale his Harvard friends with yarns about his father's political adventures and tricks. John Tyson, another Harvard friend, remembers one tale about how the senior Gore would step up to a podium for dinner speeches with three different forks, to make sure he had covered all the points he wanted to make.

"Every time he finished a point, he would turn the fork over," Tyson says. "And he taught Gore how important it was to end the speech on a high note."

But while at Harvard, when he made his choice to serve in Vietnam, Gore took pains to separate himself, to carve out an identity apart from his family name and fame.

With his famous name, "it would have been pretty easy for him to have slithered out somehow" from going to Vietnam, Somerby says.

He's right. A Congressional Quarterly study at the time found that of the 234 sons of senators and congressmen who reached draft age during the Vietnam era, only 28 served in Vietnam.

But Gore, whom friends say was worried about the potential effect of his decision on the political career of his father -- a leading senatorial opponent of the war -- and by the possibility that some other young man from small-town Carthage, Tenn., would go in his place, signed up for service in Vietnam. He served as a reporter, writing for a military newspaper.

In his brief time in the Army, Gore never saw active combat, says Mike O'Hara, a sportswriter who was also a reporter in Vietnam with Gore. Some recent news reports have suggested that care was taken by the military to screen Gore from dangerous duty. But O'Hara recalls it otherwise, saying Gore went into the field when he could have avoided doing so, and took pains not to bring up his father the senator.

"He was as regular as they come," O'Hara recalls. "Using his dad's name would have been out of bounds."

When his father was defeated in 1970, Gore became embittered, even more turned off from politics as a career. The elder Gore had wanted his son to write his victory speech, Armistead recalls, but there was no win to celebrate.

The senior Gore managed a wry joke at his concession speech, telling supporters "something like, `Al will be back,"' Armistead remembers.

And Al did come back, six years later, but it was the son instead of the father.

It took a brief stint outside politics to lure Gore back into the family business.

On his return from Vietnam, Gore entered the divinity school at Vanderbilt University. It proved the perfect place to spend a year of study for a young man with many more questions than answers about life, and whose natural idealism had been, for a time, sequestered in cynicism.

Then Gore switched course again, after Seigenthaler -- who had known the Gore family for decades and had printed a story Gore had written from Vietnam -- offered the returning soldier a job.

It was while he was at the Tennessean that Gore began to consider the possibility that he might one day run for office. The idea wasn't in the front of his mind -- he hadn't even discussed it with Tipper -- but it had been percolating for years.

Gore had moved up from the police beat, and begun covering city hall and local politics. He attended board meetings and council meetings; he watched local citizens volunteer their time to help their community.

He still loved writing and reporting, but slowly, his attitude toward politics began to thaw. "I began to let myself feel idealism again about the possibility for politics to be a force for good," Gore says.

Reporters at the paper not only thought Gore would ultimately run for office, but they even jokingly came up with slogans for him. "We all just assumed that young Al would follow in the footsteps of his father," says Charles Fontenay, who worked at the Tennessean with Gore.

It took Gore longer to realize his own change of heart.

"My evolution toward thinking about politics had advanced further beneath the surface than I really had given evidence of in talking to people openly about it, even to Tipper," Gore says. "I just hadn't articulated it, even to myself."

He had, however, taken some pains to preserve the choice of politics for himself, should desire and opportunity arise. There was his shift in majors in college, which suggested to his thesis adviser, Richard Neustadt, that he'd had a "stray thought or two" of politics.

And certainly he made his decision about military service well aware of the potential political ramifications of his choice. He even managed to complete a couple of years of law school while he built his portfolio as a journalist.

"He called me a couple of times and said, `Do you think I need a law degree to be a congressman or to go into politics?"' Armistead recalls.

So, the seed of the idea had been planted. The unexpected call from Seigenthaler matched an unexpected sense of calling. Gore was ready. And he won, bringing the family name back to Capitol Hill, launching a political career that would take him to the Senate in 1984 and the vice presidency in 1992.

Tyson would visit his old college friend, shortly after his election to the House. He recalls staring at a picture on Gore's office wall of a huge crowd at Carnegie Hall, applauding.

Gore smiled: "As long as they keep clapping, John, I am still in this business. "