Back in the dorm room, Gore was a methodical planner, never seeming to worry much about tests or term papers. Although Gore's staff declined to release his grades or a transcript of his courses, friends said they recall Gore as a superior student. His grades were high enough to qualify him for the Honors Program in government, which allowed him to write a thesis.

The subject: the impact of television on presidential leadership.

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With his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr., appearing on the news almost nightly--particularly because of his eloquent speeches on civil rights and military involvement in Southeast Asia--Gore's interest in television had risen.

He spent February of 1969 on the telephone, interviewing the media literati for his senior thesis.

He turned in a draft in early March, and the final product a few weeks later.

The 86 pages of text with 251 footnotes reads like a lucid exploration of a developing medium, peppered with incisive sound-bite quotations from the New York Times' Tom Wicker and James Reston, Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti.

Gore begins with the notion that presidents since Eisenhower have used television--not newspapers--to communicate to the nation. The thesis attempts to answer why this change took place so rapidly. He considers how one can best master the news medium, what structural factors influence news coverage of the president, and finally, how has presidential leadership changed since 1947, the year that Gore begins his study.