W. AND JR. -- WHAT DID THEY DO IN THE '60S?

WASHINGTON. Pauline Gore was so gung-ho about her son's anti-Vietnam war
views that she was ready to head to Canada with him. Barbara Bush is so
angry about the press's hammering of her son's possible cocaine use that
she's hitting the airwaves to demand "Enough!"

So both these fellows, Al Gore and George W. Bush, have tough mothers. The
query facing voters is what kind of characters they themselves were back in
the late 1960s -- the era when both these boomers became men. How did these
two fellows, similar in so many ways, stand up to the dangers and allures
of the nation's turbulent coming-of-age?

Let's start with the front-runner.

George W. says he has not used cocaine beyond the age of 28. If he didn't
consume the illegal drug prior to that time, his careful denials make no
sense whatsoever.

A hawk on the Vietnam war, the Texas governor joined the Air National Guard
when he graduated from Yale, a step that kept him from the fighting.

When he ran for the presidency the first time in 1988, Al Gore admitted to
past use of marijuana but said that he quit smoking dope at 25.

A dove on the war, Gore nonetheless enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1970 and
served a tour in Vietnam. In his recent biography of the vice president, a
book often critical of Gore, author Bob Zelnick gives his subject ample
credit for combat service:

"Without question, Gore spent plenty of time in the field. While not nearly
as dangerous as the activity of the grunts, it was a decent and honorable
way for him to discharge his obligation to this country during a period of
great domestic disturbance and moral ambiguity.

"It was also far more dangerous than the post-graduate courses and
"essential' jobs to which flocked many future hard-liners whose reverence
for interventionist military policies would grow in direct proportion to
their personal distance from the threat of military service."

Placing these two '60s portraits side-by-side, we get an interesting
comparison.

On the right is the charming, gregarious Bush who avoided the generational
militancy of the '60s, who backed the war but felt no urge to fight in it,
who may have enjoyed the pleasures of the counterculture but not its
intellectual ferment or political revolt.

On the left is the socially reserved Gore. He accepted service in a war he
and his peers detested. He smoked dope but also exposed his young mind to
the issues of his new generation -- from environmental protection to
Pentagon reform.

As a member of the same generation as this pair, I find the picture of
George W. Bush the more familiar, if hardly the more attractive.

But it's hard to give three cheers to a certified hawk, a young and
committed backer of the war, for grabbing for a billet in the
well-recognized safety of the home guard.

The same goes for the drug question. I'll admit to a '60s bias here.
There'll be a lot more issues ahead in the 2000 choice, but I like that
young fellow, Al Gore, who dug deeply into the political and cultural
excitement of that great decade, and not just the dope.