hroughout his political career, Vice President Al Gore has been hounded by suggestions that his decision to enlist in the Army and serve in Vietnam was a cynical move to try to save his father, an antiwar senator, from defeat in Tennessee in 1970.
But a set of 1966 letters from Gore to his future wife make it clear that his evolution from an adamant critic of the war to Vietnam enlistee was driven by a much more complicated and emotional inner drama.
The letters, to be made public next week, reveal that Gore struggled with his decision and was inspired by the ''courage and rashness'' of a Southern classmate at Harvard who left school to fight in Vietnam. Gore, the letters reveal, was also deeply troubled by the scornful reaction of other students to those who defended the war, or fought in it.
His friend, Denmark Groover III, a fellow freshman from Macon, Ga., quit Harvard that year to volunteer for the military in the face of almost monolithic opposition to the war by the student body.
In his letters, the 18-year-old Gore assails the ''intellectual smugness'' on the Harvard campus and says he would be prepared to enlist, himself, at the end of the school year if he could be convinced that the war was righteous.
''I've had a lot of thoughts about the army since Denmark left,'' Gore wrote his girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth ''Tipper'' Aitcheson, in April 1966. ''I'm not sure that he didn't do the right thing. I admire him a great deal; I admire his courage and rashness. I'm not sure at all that he didn't do the right thing. I'm just not sure.''
The correspondence, handwritten on Harvard stationery, reflects some of the same personal agony over the war that a young Bill Clinton described in a 1969 letter thanking an ROTC adviser ''for saving me from the draft.'' The Clinton letter, revealed during the New Hampshire primary campaign in 1992, was cited by his critics as an example of Clinton's cowardice; the candidate's followers hailed Clinton's letter for its thoughtfulness.
Thirty-three years ago, Gore wrote of his own ambivalence:
''What's hard is to reconcile my understanding and admiration of Denmark with my belief about the war. It's wrong, we're wrong. A lot of people won't admit it and never will, but we're wrong.
''If I thought or could be convinced that America was in the right - that Denmark and the rest were fighting for a cause that was worth fighting for, then I think I'd sign up after finals.''
The vice president recently turned over the letters to Douglas Brinkley, a historian and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, in connection with a piece Brinkley was writing for Talk magazine. In the article, which will appear next week, Gore tells Brinkley that he went home to the family farm outside Carthage, Tenn., after graduation to consider whether to serve in the military or to dodge the draft. According to Gore, his mother, Pauline, told him, ''Just don't let your father's campaign be the deciding factor.''
After three terms in the Senate, the elder Gore was embattled in Tennessee because of his outspoken criticism of the war. Support for US intervention still ran strong throughout the South during that period, and the incumbent was being ridiculed as ''the third senator from Massachusetts'' by his Republican opponent, Bill Brock.
The vice president's brother-in-law and close friend, Frank Hunger, said in a telephone interview yesterday that Gore ''did the right thing'' by volunteering for service. ''It was expected of you in the South.''
There was no family pressure on young Gore to enlist because of politics, recalled Hunger, a native of Mississippi. But Hunger and Gore's uncle, Whit LaFon, a retired judge in Tennessee, told the new Harvard graduate that military service ''is the proper thing to do,'' Hunger said.
The region's military tradition apparently weighed heavily on Gore's small circle of Southern friends at Harvard, a group that included his roommate, a Texan named Tommy Lee Jones who would go on to successful acting career in Hollywood.
Writing of Groover's departure for the Army, Gore says:
''Everybody here - except Tom and me - think he's a fool. They're running him down all the time. ... They just can't understand. With all their tremendous vocabulary and intelligence, they just can't understand. They write off Denmark's actions as foolish, and ascribe them to some misunderstanding on Denmark's part. They seemed so smug and confident. It made me furious. Their intellectual smugness compared to Denny's faith and sacrifice.''
Gore told Brinkley he was greeted with condescension, himself, when he returned in uniform to visit Tipper Aitcheson, by then a student at Boston University, after he enlisted in 1970.
''Boston is a city I love - I lived there for four years - and all of a sudden people are looking at me with sheer hatred in their eyes and almost symbolically, without doing so, spitting glances at me because I'm in uniform and my head is shaved,'' Gore says.
''It was a Ralph Ellison moment. Just to experience that side of the attitudes engendered within the anti-war movement was really, really interesting and revelatory. I don't think I was ever the same after that.''
Gore was waiting to ship out to Vietnam when his father was defeated in the fall of 1970. He served five months in the war zone as a journalist for base newsletters and the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
His distant cousin, Gore Vidal, a novelist and acerbic essayist, recently mocked the vice president: ''He never saw action, but he did see to it that, weapon in hand, he was photographed for the Al Gore Jr. Library.''
Hunger dismissed Vidal's remark. ''There's always been some of that said by some people.''
Groover, the son of a Georgia legislator, was not as lucky as Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones. According to one person who knew him, Groover saw combat in Vietnam, returned home disillusioned and disturbed. He finally graduated from Harvard in 1976, but fell into a life of drifting, the friend said.
