What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  She’d got to the cabin, panting and wailing peals of laughter ... she couldn’t stop. She was flushed and wheezing. He thought she was going hysterical. “What is it? Lee?” He didn’t want to sound worried. “Lee? ... What?”

  “They’re at the gate!” she squeezed out with the last of her breath. She was thinking of the pack, dripping wet, in the lightning; they could have no idea there was shelter anywhere else on the land. “They’re ... sure ... we’re coming ...” She was wiping her eyes, but she couldn’t stop laughing. It wasn’t humor—it was coming out of her in a wail, like a steaming kettle. “So they’re standing ... out ... there ... waiting!”

  Monday, The Miami Herald admitted (in the thirty-second paragraph) that no one was watching Hart’s house in the wee hours of Saturday morning. And no one was watching Hart’s back door from midnight on. In the critical hours during which the Herald alleged that Donna Rice and Hart were locked away in the townhouse, the five-man investigative team was actually Jim McGee, or McGee and a pal from the Washington bureau.

  McGee saw Hart and “the woman” (he didn’t know her name) return to Hart’s townhouse between 11:00 and 11:30 P.M. And then, he didn’t see them come out!

  But if, as Hart said from the first, Donna Rice left his house shortly thereafter, by the back door ... no one could prove him wrong.

  Except, perhaps, Donna Rice.

  Monday, Sue Casey shepherded Donna Rice back to Miami, and at a lawyer’s office, Donna gave a press conference on her liaison with Hart.

  “I don’t know if he was attracted to me, but there was nothing between us,” she said. “I’m more attracted to younger men.”

  She’d met Gary Hart at a party in Aspen, New Year’s Day. She’d run into him, by chance, months later, in a crowd on a boat anchored near Miami. She and her friend, Lynn, went with Hart and Broadhurst on a boat trip to Bimini, to check on Broadhurst’s boat there. And then she didn’t see Hart again until ... well, until this mess.

  She told the small group of reporters, she didn’t stay Friday night at Hart’s house. Their association “was all very innocent. ... If there was anything going on, we would have been cautious, but we had nothing to hide. Nobody did. We were all just pals. If there had been something fishy, we would have been sneaking around.

  “That’s why I’m so surprised about this whole thing. It’s totally bizarre.”

  Of course, they asked if she’d had sexual relations with Hart.

  “No.”

  Uhhnn, Ms. Rice, just to follow up on that, uh ... no?

  “No.”

  Well, did he ask?

  “No.”

  So the only two people who knew what happened in Hart’s Capitol Hill house—i.e., Gary Hart and Donna Rice—said nothing happened. Both said she left, Friday night, through the back door, which the Herald conceded it did not watch.

  Donna answered all the questions. She was calm, friendly, ladylike, and absolutely clear. But the truest measure of her talent, her poise, was what she didn’t say.

  She didn’t say that she hadn’t slept since Saturday night, when Broadhurst told her it was she who’d been followed. Or that she hadn’t known what it was about, what she’d done that was so horrible, but she could see in her mind, all night, for two nights, how Gary had looked at her ... and all she’d wanted was to tell him it wasn’t her, she hadn’t meant to bring this trouble to his door—she didn’t know what had happened ... but they wouldn’t let her talk to Gary—she asked them all, just let her talk to him. (He was the only one she trusted!) ... For two days she hadn’t seen anyone she knew. She’d barely talked to anyone, save to her parents, who were the ones to tell her, her picture was all over TV—that’s how she found out her name had been released. Donna had pleaded with the Hart staff not to give out her name, but Dixon just wanted to know, was there anyone to “run interference” for her, and she hadn’t even known what he meant till he said, “Don’t you have a lawyer?” She’d never had to have a lawyer, so they put her with their lawyer—Tom McAliley—she’d never seen him before. They got to the airport in Miami and all she wanted to do was go home, but they wouldn’t let her go home—there were reporters all over her home—so Casey made her go from the airport straight to McAliley’s office, and they told her, she couldn’t go home ... till she did a press conference—her name was out there now ... so, she did it.

  They still wouldn’t let her talk to Gary.

  But she could show him—with this press conference, she was trying to help him. ... That’s what she couldn’t tell the press—how much she wanted to help him. Couldn’t hint ... that’s what the Hart folks had told her.

  She was backed into a corner. She had to say something—now. She could have told how it really was for her—or she could say what they wanted her to say. So, she said ... well, it was nothing.

  And, of course, that day, she couldn’t see ahead. But what could she possibly be after that, but ... nothing?

  What could she say, about herself, after that?

  The only thing she ever would say in public (and this after more than a year): “I felt like a piece of chum tossed into shark-infested waters.”

  Even in private, to friends, she would never tell—not the way it was, for her. She’d get that serious and faraway look in her eyes, and say:

  “I gave the press conference they told me to give.”

  She did let slip, once, she never heard from Gary Hart again.

  Monday, they started coming out of the woodwork: strangers on the phone knew someone who’d slept with Hart ... or they saw Hart and someone, not his wife ... or they were sure this guy their friend had been seeing was really Hart—with a phony name ... see?

  They called newspapers, they called rival campaigns. They called the Hart campaign!

  The flotsam that washed in at The Washington Post came with a picture—two pictures—and a detective’s report. It was that report on Hart from last December ... the one that said he went into this house on a Saturday night ... and he didn’t come out ... not until Sunday, December 21, when those pictures were taken—there was the woman ... there was the number of the house ... this was the goods!

  Or it looked that way. Tom Edsall was the reporter who got the detective’s report. He bumped it up the ladder—Edsall said he thought this was something the paper had to decide. That meant Ben Bradlee, the maximum boss.

  So Bradlee took a look at this stuff—Chrissake! He knew that gal! ... Well, that was all the decision it required. Ben would check it out. The Big Hound was coming out of the kennel.

  Monday, Hart traveled from Washington to New York—made it to New York, was how he’d say it. He had to drive to Baltimore (the press was staking out Washington National) ... and slip onto a plane to La Guardia—which he left by a back door, to a waiting car, which bore him in blessed anonymity to Gruson’s apartment in Manhattan. Hart canceled a funder in New Jersey that night to work on his speech for the ANPA, the association of newspaper publishers, who’d invited him to speak Tuesday, at the Waldorf.

  Hart was scheduled to unveil there his grand economics speech—Strategic Investment—the last brick in his wall. His issue wonks, Dreyer and Steitz, had done their usual Pyramid-of-Cheops job. The speech attempted nothing less than a redirection of U.S. economic effort. It was true tectonic Hart-thought, the fruit of fifteen years’ cutting through earth, and immense labor over the past six months. (Hart was still buffing the speech, by fax, Saturday morning, when the Herald SWAT team assumed he was in a sweaty tango with Donna Rice.)

  But now, he wrote a new top for the speech—now there was only one issue.

  “Last weekend, a newspaper published a misleading and false story that hurt my family ...”

  Now that the fight had come to him, it was not entirely unwelcome. He’d have hundreds of newspaper nabobs in one room—he’d stick it in their faces. His message was simple: they would have to change.

  That same day, he told a reporter for The Denver Post: “Somebody’s got
to clean up your profession, my friend, or it’s going to drive anyone that’s got an ounce of integrity out.”

  That’s why the professionals in Denver (and all the pros on TV—the Priests of the Process in the interview chairs) thought Hart was nuts, or too iron-headed to get it:

  Did he mean someone had set him a trap?

  Did he mean he didn’t have sex with Donna Rice?

  Did he mean the Herald shouldn’t have been watching his house?

  Or did he mean that even if someone did ... and he did ... and they did ... no one should care?

  That was closest to the truth. He meant all those things—they were all one to him. For Hart, this had become one filthy slurry of unfairness, of allegation, of invasion, of wanton and unworthy attack on his person. It was so apparent to him that they were repulsive ... and the voters—well, Hart always thought the voters were like him.

  He’d made the same case to his friend, his host, the Times-man, Sidney Gruson, a dozen times over the years. And Gruson always tried to tell Hart—there was no way he could make the press change. ... The last time was at dinner in New York, an Italian joint, just a couple of months before—it was Hart, Gruson, Warren Beatty, and two or three fat-cat contributors. Gruson ran through the changes he’d seen in the ethic of the press since the days of JFK. “It’s not the same this time ... and there’s nothing you can do about that.” Hart raised his eyebrows with that look of his—wonder, naïve puzzlement.

  “No matter what I do, they will not change?”

  Gruson answered like he was talking to a child. “No, they won’t change. They’ll do the job they think they have to do.” And Gruson would always remember, Warren Beatty turned to him and said, “Tell him. Tell him again and again and again.”

  Gruson did tell him, but he knew he wasn’t getting through. Hart would do what Hart would do. Gruson liked him too much to make it a fight between them. In the end, Gruson would fall back upon a bit of Irish counsel he’d known since his own childhood in Dublin.

  “Okay,” he’d say. “Fuck ’em, all but six—you need pallbearers.”

  Monday night, Lee Hart was in her kitchen, making spaghetti. She was mincing garlic, with a phone to her ear—Warren Beatty, fourth time that day.

  “I’ve got a great one,” he was telling her. “You go out there and just tell ’em: ‘You want a monk for President, you’re not gonna have me for First Lady!’ ”

  “That’s great, Warren.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, that’s great.”

  Everybody had great things for Lee to say. Everybody knew ... she had to say something. Not that they meant to push, or dictate, but ... the press was making hay with her silence.

  HART’S WIFE WANTS DIVORCE, the New York Post announced. ... “LIVID” LEE HITS CEILING & SKIPS CAMPAIGN TRAIL.

  The phone rang again and Lee jumped for it ... but it was just headquarters, calling for Trippi. “He can’t come to the phone now. He’s chopping onions.” Lee’s joke would show them, she was all right.

  Trippi took the phone. “No,” he said to it. “No. I don’t think so, right now. Uh uh.” He was trying to keep his voice light, as he stood in the kitchen. He didn’t want Lee asking: What’s wrong?

  “We’ll talk,” Trippi said noncommittally. “Yeah. Tomorrow, fine.”

  Of course, what they wanted to know:

  Was she ready?

  When would she make a statement?

  Was she going to meet Gary in New York?

  Trippi didn’t know that Lee already had told Gary: she’d meet him in New York, or anywhere. She’d make whatever statement would help.

  But Gary had never trotted his family out for effect—he wasn’t going to start now. He told Lee she didn’t have to say anything. If they had to act like that ... well, he’d lost.

  He told her, he’d rather quit.

  36

  Tuesday

  HART THOUGHT HIS FATE still hung in the balance, Tuesday, in the ballroom of the Waldorf. He was still ahead of his nearest rival, three-to-one, in national polls. Only ten percent said the Donna Rice affair made it “less likely” they’d vote for Hart. Hart thought his future depended on how the story played—i.e., how soon it died.

  And here were hundreds of publishers, editors (news executives) at tables stretching away from the stage as far as Hart could see. NBC was broadcasting live from the balcony (they cut away from the Iran-contra hearings). In the back of the hall, along the sides—in fact, onto every available foot of floor space—the working press was herded: reporters, columnists, photographers, video crews. ... Waiters with steaming silver gravy boats were sweating through the crush: “Steppahk, pleeese—comin’ tru de food.” they sang out in sonorous Caribbean accents. “Steppahk, gentamen, pleeese—I like you to stay cleeen ahn fresh!” The news nabobs seemed fascinated and horrified at the havoc their employees could create. (For God’s sake, reporters were breathing down their necks! At lunch!) No one paid heed to the Daily News All-Star Jazz Band, or to the rabbi who blessed the swarm and adjured it to recall the founding fathers’ dream of a republic “where the preciousness of personality was cherished.”

  On stage, it was Hart and Bob Dole ... though Dole might as well have stayed in bed. (“You know, I have a feeling,” Dole mused, as he got to the microphone, “I’m not going to make much news today ...”) As for Hart, he thought this must be the moment God made for his fight. In this room, among that crowd, he could win ... if they would join him in denouncing the Herald’s stakeout.

  “Last weekend,” he said at the mike, “a newspaper published a misleading and false story that hurt my family and other innocent people and reflected badly on my own character. This story was written by reporters who, by their own admission, undertook a spotty surveillance; who reached inaccurate conclusions based on incomplete facts; and who, most outrageously, refused to interview the very people who could have given them the facts before filing their story, which we asked and urged them to do. It is now, nonetheless, being repeated by others as if it were true.”

  Hart’s voice was strong in the vast ballroom. He was pale, composed, but his chin jutted out at the darkened crowd with obvious defiance. He was so sure he was bending over backward to accommodate this “process.”

  “Did I make a mistake by putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued? Of course I did. That goes without saying. Did I do anything immoral? I absolutely did not.”

  In the Q&A session after his speech (Hart laid on the full economics text), he acknowledged that voters had a right to ask what kind of man was running for the White House. He acknowledged that he’d put himself at risk.

  “I will accept the responsibility for what I did, and I have done so, and will continue to, and will bear the consequences on that.

  “But if someone’s going to scrutinize me, I want them to scrutinize me. I want them to know all the facts. I guess what, among the other things, disturbed me the most here ... first of all, I sought out the reporters; they didn’t have to come find me. I knew I was being followed, and I went and confronted them, and we offered them all the facts in the story and they refused that until they filed their story to make their Sunday deadline. I leave it for you and the American people to decide who’s at fault there.”

  After that, Dick Capen, the nabob for The Miami Herald, stood and made a speech. He was supposed to ask Hart a question, but he kept referring to Hart in the third person—as if he weren’t there.

  “The issue is not The Miami Herald,” Capen said. “It’s Gary Hart’s judgment. He’s an announced candidate for President of the United States, and he’s a man who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past. We stand by the essential correctness of our story. It’s possible that, at some point along the way, someone could have moved out of the alley door of his house.

  “But the fact of the matter remains that our story reported on Donna Rice, who he met in Aspen, who he subsequently met in Dade County. He ack
nowledged that he telephoned her on a number of occasions. It is a fact that two married men whose spouses were out of town spent a considerable amount of time with these people.

  “It is also true that our reporters saw him and Donna Rice leaving his townhouse on at least three separate occasions. And now, of course, it’s been revealed by Miss Rice that she went with him on a cruise to the Bahamas. ...”

  From that point, it was apparent to Hart that the issue had shifted. The Herald’s six-column, front-page Sunday screamer had averred that Gary Hart and “the Miami woman” spent the night. Now Capen could only allege that Hart and Donna Rice were seen leaving—three times.

  So, at that point, the test was changed: it was not whether Hart had slept with this woman last Friday ... or at any time (to use Capen’s phrase) as “an announced candidate for President.” From that point, the issue had to become anything Hart had ever done with Donna Rice.

  The old hounds at their tables took up the scent:

  What about those phone calls?

  What about that boat trip?

  And Hart made a mortal mistake—he thought he could answer. Imagine!

  Imagine, for a moment, that two people met in March, by happenstance—serendipity, it seemed—in a weekend out of time, a weekend that was a getaway ... and they were charmed, freshened, made to feel more alive ... not least by the un-normality of that meeting, but surely, mostly, by each other ... and it was playful, exciting, with a hint of sex in the air—conquest, anyway, and the play of the eyes, the purr of voice, the happy racket of possibility in head and heart ... but for their own reasons, for good or ill ... for Donna Rice’s ultraserious view of herself, suddenly and literally at sea with a man who, she found out (that day), was married ... or for Gary Hart’s own husbandhood, or his never-unfelt candidacy, his assurance to his white boys (That was not going to be a problem!), or his own metaphysically freighted sense of self ... for whatever reasons of morality, respect, or fear ... imagine ... that what happened between these two people did not come to, did not have to do with, an act of sexual congress.