Al and Tipper Gore’s Shocking Divorce
When it comes to global influence, there are fewer couples who have had more impact on the way the public views crucial social and environmental issues than Al and Tipper Gore.
The news that the two would divorce caught even their friends off-guard. The former vice president and his wife recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary, and were side-by-side at some of his biggest political moments. Few could forget their passionate embrace and kiss in 2000, at the Democratic National Convention, as Al was in the midst of a fierce battle for the presidency.
Now, however, an email that the couple sent out to their family and friends revealed the news, according to the Associated Press. The divorce, according to that email, was “a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration.”
Spokespersons for each confirmed that the email was accurate. The Gores told their friends and family that they had grown apart over the years, and that they had established their own separate lives while in pursuit of their social, political and public goals. Longtime associates of the two say that there were no affairs involved, but rather that they had simply decided to go their separate ways.
“Their lives had gotten more and more separated,” said one of the associates.
The couple was married in May of 1970, in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral, in the presence of Gore’s father, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., who himself was a prominent civil servant.
The couple painted the picture of marital bliss in the time that Al served as Vice President starting in 1992, and as he ran for the presidency in 2000. There was the famous kiss that they shared at the DNC, and there were the interviews that the two shared with the press. Gore said in one interview that Tipper was “someone I’ve loved with my whole heart since the night of my high school senior prom.”
Tipper, during her husband’s presidential campaign in 2000, told the press that Al had learned his lesson since getting her a weed whacker as a birthday present. “He’s very much a gentleman, you know, with me around the house. I know he’s dog tired and he could be sitting down and doing something and I need something across the room, he’ll get up and get it.”
There is a story that one Halloween the Gores dressed in costumes, as was their tradition. Tipper was dressed as a puppy, and Al was dressed as Underdog.
This picture of domesticity was in stark contrast to Al’s former boss, President Bill Clinton, who went through the allegations of affairs and scandal while in the public eye.
Tipper Gore was a champion of parental warning labels on popular music with violent or sexually explicit messages, in the face of outcry from musicians like Frank Zappa and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. (Tipper would later befriend the late Zappa’s wife.)
Now she is a strong advocate for mental health issues.
The couple has four children, all of whom are grown.
