Karenna Schiff, oldest daughter and closest adviser to Al Gore, smoked cannabis, drank heavily and, when drunk, once encouraged a friend to drive her father's car without a licence, it emerged last week.
One of the Gore daughters was once accosted by police in Chevy Chase, Md., for underage drinking -- she tried the don't-you-know-who-I-am argument -- but the story was largely suppressed. Albert Gore III was summarily dismissed from St. Alban's School (his father's alma mater) for reasons that have never been publicly explained, and just last summer, young Albert III was charged in North Carolina with driving 97 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone.[Rumor is he was caught smoking pot...see below]
During the interview, Tipper Gore voluntarily brought up some difficult, highly publicized problems she'd had with her own children, most memorably the time one of her underage daughters was accused of drinking in public and mouthing off to the cops. Shortly after conducting the interview, but before it ran, the magazine got a furious call from one of the vice president's people, screaming that if any of the sensitive material saw print, the magazine would not only be disinvited to the kids conference, but would never again have access to any White House or administration figures.
In the discussion that followed, I brought up widely circulated--and in England, published--stories about the vice president's son being caught using drugs in 1996 and suspended from school as a result. (Tipper had somehow failed to mention that difficulty during her interview.) As James Adams put it in an October 13, 1996, London Times story, "Reporters all knew...that Albert Gore III, the 13-year-old son of the vice-president, had been suspended from school earlier this year for smoking marijuana. A tearful phone call by Gore to senior editors [at The Washington Post] ensured the story was never published."