Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [17]
Speaking of intimacy, let’s get back to how Gore was buggered by his enemies in the media.
Take the Love Story story, which is really more of a Hate Story story. Or a False Story story. Read on, friend, for the true story of the false, hateful Love Story story.
In 1997, Gore was on Air Force II, chatting late into the night with a couple of reporters, including Karen Tumulty of Time magazine. The conversation turned, as conversations will, to movies and reminiscing about old friends. Gore mentioned that Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, had told the Nashville Tennessean that the characters of Oliver Barrett and Jenny Cavalleri had been based on him and Tipper. As Tumulty later recalled, “He said, ‘all I know is that’s what he [Segal] told reporters in Tennessee.’ ” She casually referred to this in her seven-page profile as follows: “Gore said [Segal] used Al and Tipper as models for the uptight preppy and his free-spirited girlfriend in Love Story.”
Was Gore lying? Imagine how embarrassing it would be if he were! Just thinking about it makes me embarrassed—not just for him, but for every vice president other than Spiro Agnew, and to a lesser extent Dan Quayle. Thank goodness, then, that in 1980 the Nashville Tennessean had indeed quoted Segal as saying that Tipper and Al had been the models for the star-crossed lovers. Phew.
But here’s where it all starts to go terribly, terribly wrong. It turns out the Tennessean had misquoted Erich Segal. And when The New York Times contacted him, Segal confirmed that Oliver Barrett was based partly on Gore and partly on Gore’s roommate Tommy Lee Jones (and, I like to think, a tiny bit on me)—but denied that Tipper was the model for poor Jenny Cavalleri. As anyone who has seen the movie knows, that character was based on Ali MacGraw.
The media went to town. An offhand remark, accurately quoting a seventeen-year-old story from his local paper, would be used against Gore more than a billion times over the next three years.
Here’s an excerpt from the September 19, 2000, Hannity and Colmes program:
HANNITY: This is a big picture we’ve got to look at. Al Gore once told the American people, told the crowd, Love Story was based on his life and Tipper’s life. The author of Love Story says that’s not true.
TALK SHOW HOST NANCY SKINNER: No. That’s not true, Sean—
HANNITY: Absolutely, he’s on record. . . . Did he create the Internet, Nancy?
SKINNER: No, we’re starting with Love Story. . . . Okay, Erich Segal said that indeed Al was the model for the male model—
HANNITY: That’s not true.
SKINNER: But that he never said Tipper was, and that all that Al Gore had ever said—
HANNITY: Not true—
SKINNER:—is that he had read in the Tennessean, a newspaper, that, where Erich Segal had said that he and Tipper were the model. You know what? The Tennessean newspaper did write that. Erich Segal has confirmed that it was Al Gore, but not necessarily Tipper. So there was a minor difference that got blown into—
HANNITY: I don’t have a lot of time to refute every fact here.
Refute every fact? Sean, some of us are more concerned about refuting lies.
So Gore takes credit for a program he championed and funded. And then he accurately quotes from a newspaper. Noticing a pattern here? An insidious, compulsive pattern? It gets worse.
In January of 2000, Gore spoke to a high school in Concord, New Hampshire, about how one individual can help change a community. He told a story about how the actions of one teenage girl from Toone, Tennessee, changed national policy. The girl had contacted Gore’s congressional office about toxic waste in her hometown. Because of her initiative, Gore said, he “called