NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Pauline LaFon Gore, mother of former Vice President Al Gore and wife of a longtime senator, died Wednesday at the family home in Carthage, Tenn. She was 92.
Gore was the heart of a powerful Tennessee political family. Her husband, the late Sen. Albert Gore Sr., served in Congress for 32 years and was defeated in 1970 after a bitter campaign that focused on his opposition to the Vietnam War.
"My job is to hold things together," Pauline Gore said in an interview shortly after Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton picked her son as his running mate in 1992. "That's the role of a mother throughout her life."
Gore was a woman who thought like Rose Kennedy but looked like Barbara Bush. She was an intellect who was a controlled force behind both her husband and son's campaigns and a wife who was the straight mind to her husband's one-liners.
Throughout her life, she was proud of her double persona. She was a Southern lady who favored bright beads and bejeweled dresses, hair always in place, who passed down her recipes to her grandchildren.
But she was also one of the South's first women to practice law, a career she choose to give up to throw her support behind her husband's political career. In later years, that support was thrown to her son, offering behind-the-scenes advice on policy and issues.
To Gore, the key was that women should be able to choose whatever they want to do.
"Pauline Gore was one of the wisest, most intelligent women I have ever known," said Mary Sasser, whose husband, former Sen. Jim Sasser, won Albert Gore Sr.'s old Senate seat in 1976, but lost it in the Republican landslide of 1994.
Gore practiced law in Washington after her husband lost his Senate seat, and her political talents were called back into play when her son began his congressional career with election to his father's old House seat in 1976.
She and her husband went on their last campaign trip together in 1992, when they spent seven weeks asking senior citizens in 14 states to help elect their son vice president.
In recent years, she had suffered from numerous health problems.