What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Just suppose this was, for Gary Hart, an argument he’d had with himself on three or four occasions, already, in the brief time he’d spent with Donna Rice ... he knew, right away, and increasingly, how wrong this could be made to look, what someone might say about this ... but he had, at the ready, like repellent for the bugs that would ruin his picnic, the assurance, the certainty, the chin-jutting fact ... that they hadn’t done anything wrong—you know, when you got down to it—all they’d done was have fun, and no one could tell him he wasn’t supposed to have fun, and if they did, if they could, then he had lost, he was a goner! ... So he could see in this woman’s laugh in the sun on the bow of that boat the necessity ... the rightness ... of his independence. He’d said that from the start! And he knew—just imagine, he knew—he shouldn’t make her like him so much, but it hadn’t got to that point, past fun, not for him ... and to tell him to stop was like telling him to stop being himself, and anyway ... they hadn’t done anything wrong!

  So imagine ... the second time they were together, he sensed, then he knew, with a terrible sinking thump in his gut, that it had all gone wrong—all his warnings to himself were true, or it seemed they were true: he’d been set up! And there were snoopers trying to say this was an affair, this woman had spent the night ... but they were too cowardly to ask, they were sneaking around his house, trying to see ... he went out to find them, and he told them: they had it wrong!

  But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—explain.

  Not how it was. How could he?

  And they printed what they thought, anyway.

  Six columns across the front page.

  And they forced him, at the peril of his life’s work, its purpose, to explain how he was with this person, who was just ... fun ... when all he wanted to say—he thought all he really should have to say—was he understood, probably better than they, what was the sin they imagined ... and that was not his—no! And if the sin he did commit, of escape, of courting the rush in his veins, was so awful ... well, couldn’t they see they were driving him to it? They were stripping him away. They were trying to make him small, they were tearing down with their dirty little imaginings everything he had built. What right had they to know the conditions of his marriage, the state of his own heart? Now his wife was under siege, a prisoner in their house ... he himself was running from a mob every time he tried to move ... his staff in Denver questioned him like a criminal, his Campaign Manager had flown away in a rage (after he heard about the Bimini trip) ... and Hart’s ideas could not be heard in this—this din, this ... was unworthy.

  And they called him the sinner.

  Imagine! ... What a stubborn man ... so convinced of himself, of his power to deny his rage, to show himself as he would be ... what kind of a man would try, still, to answer ...

  “Did I do anything immoral? ... I absolutely did not.”

  But matters had got beyond him, now. They changed the question.

  On stage at the Waldorf, Hart said:

  The phone calls were “no more than half a dozen or so. They, in a couple of cases, were returned phone calls that had been placed to me.” Hart said they talked about Donna “marshalling support” from her friends in the “entertainment industry.”

  The boat trip to Bimini was Broadhurst’s idea—he had a boat of his own under repair there ... and “we were joined,” Hart said, “by two or three friends of his and a crew of three, as I recall, in open daylight—there was no effort to conceal anything.” The party was supposed to return that same day, but customs was closed. They stayed overnight, with the women (“the guests,” Hart called them) sleeping on the charter boat, and the men (“my friend and I”) moving over to sleep on Broadhurst’s boat.

  It was only weeks later, Hart figured out the answer he should have given:

  “None of your business.”

  That was the only answer ... as it was for the Herald’s peepers in the alley. Afterward, he could have kicked himself for saying anything else. How could he have been so stupid?

  Who’s the girl?

  Did she stay in your house?

  “It’s none of your damned business!”

  But when the Herald asked him about the phone calls—What were they about?—Hart started a slide he could not stop. He answered:

  “Nothing ...”

  He didn’t think he could explain the truth.

  The sad fact was: Gary Hart, master of the process ... who was so sure he saw through “the system” ... who’d spent the last six years trying to hold himself outside the bubble ... ruined himself, trying to play the game.

  Once he tried to color the truth, to tiptoe around it, by then he was lost. He wasn’t right from the start—he wasn’t bold, clear ... or different. He looked like a squirming pol, lying to the press, and public.

  Alas, that only came clear to him much later. That day, the snarl in his ears kept him from thinking. He was a hunted animal. His denials didn’t settle the pack one whit. ... The press found out while Hart spoke at the Waldorf: the boat on which he and Donna Rice had sailed ... was named Monkey Business.

  That sent the pack over the edge. It was feral. It was without thought. Hart was catching the dread and fatal affliction—he was ridiculous. Even callow wannabe-big-feet could smell blood on the forest floor. Someone was gonna ... take Hart down. Why not them?

  There was an includible logic to the chase: Hart was on the run. They had to show him embattled, fighting the iron ring, or dodging the cameras. That just meant more cameras, more bodies straining in the scrum, more fights, more noise ... more extraordinary video-rodeo to get the tape of Hart fleeing ... which, of course, only made him more furtive, the hunted beast. Meanwhile, the print press had to have Hart women. If they didn’t get one ... some other reporter would ... today!

  There was terrible pressure.

  Every incident of Hart-chase got hotter ... blood pounding in the temples, bodies banging, elbows flying, pressure in the chest until it was hard to catch breath ... and every instant increased the visceral certainty that something huge, historic, horrible ... was happening! They had to do something! They had to have at least a part ... if not, what were they doing? Who were they?

  Before the nabobs’ luncheon broke up, the pack had Sweeney, the Press Secretary, pinned in a side chamber of the ballroom.

  “... I know Mrs. Hart is interested in making a statement,” Sweeney was saying. He was holding his own Pearl-corder in front of his chest, to make sure he could prove it when he was misquoted.

  “I know she is interested in traveling with her husband. ... No, she has an ear infection—I’m sorry, a sinus infection—that ... no, she is very supportive of her husband. She has communicated that to him. She will make a statement, fairly soon.”

  KevinKEVINwhyzzinhetellwhathappenedintheHOUSE?RICE?WHATHAPPENEDFRIDAY?inlightofhisreputation! ...

  “He doesn’t have to answer every detail about something he says is innocent ... he told the Herald the two women stayed at Mr. Broadhurst’s.”

  Fiedler says he never mentioned Broadhurst! ...

  Tom Fiedler, the big-foot for the Herald, was, at that moment, ten yards away, in his own press conference. He was rebutting Sweeney, rebutting Hart. (“Senator Hart is just not telling the truth. ...”) He was insisting the Herald had no ax to grind, and never tried to characterize Hart’s behavior—just reported the facts. (Fiedler would get better play than Sweeney on the networks that night.)

  Reporters ran with Fiedler’s poop to Sweeney—instant reaction! There were thirty or forty reporters shoving in on Sweeney now, and he felt for a chair behind him, like an animal trainer, always facing the beasts. But he had no whip! ... Sweeney stood on the chair.

  “It’s fine to take a day or two off!” he was protesting.

  Debby Orin from the New York Post was shouting: “Kevin! Why didn’t he—KEVIN! Why didn’t he go see his WIFE?”

  “Well, flying to Colorado when he has to then be on the East Coast is illogical for someone who do
es not have a lot of time.”

  Paul Taylor from The Washington Post raised his voice: “He had time to go to BIMINI!”

  At that moment, Hart was leaving the Waldorf in a cops-and-robbers car chase. Mike Stratton, a loyal and longtime friend, had flown in from Denver to take over Advance. He was in charge of Hart’s escape. The video rangers had chase cars waiting. (No one knew where the sonofabitch was staying—prob’ly shacked up somewhere! They had to tail him—see?)

  Stratton got Hart in a car and peeled away from the hotel. The campaign’s crack Advance man, Dennis Walto, pulled a car out behind ... and then he stopped—across two lanes. The video chase crews went nuts! They slammed on their brakes. They slammed on their horns. They started bouncing up over the curbs to get past Walto!

  He’s gettin’ away! ...

  Well, it proved the sonofabitch had something to hide.

  In his car, Hart murmured: “Why do they have to chase me?” He couldn’t understand what they gained. He couldn’t understand why they had to hunt him down. It happened every time he tried to move now—like a bad movie, speeding and dodging, sneaking back to Gruson’s.

  At one point, in the middle of a chase, Hart turned to Gruson with a look that mingled irony and sadness. “I just want to have some fun,” he said. “I’ve never had any fun ...”

  Gruson replied: “Just wait until we get to the White House. I promise you we’ll have fun.”

  Hart just gave him that blank boy’s stare. They were talking about different sorts of fun.

  That was the night they called out for pizza from Troublesome Gulch. Lee had phoned a few friends—a couple of whom stopped and picked up the pies. Andrea had over a couple of her friends. Linda Spangler was still at the cabin. Trisha Cheroutas was back in the kitchen. Trippi’s wife, Katie, came out with their baby girl. It was ten for dinner—six cars on the drive.

  When the pizza arrived, Trippi walked to the gate. He paused to chat with reporters. They gathered around him, then he asked them to wait, while he called over the Pinkerton man. “The guests are all gonna leave in an hour,” he told the guard.

  “Okay, Mr. Trippi!” This was the most important assignment the Pinkerton man had ever had.

  “So when I turn out the lights, nobody in or out, okay?”

  “Nobody, Mr. Trippi!”

  “About an hour, that’s it. We’re goin’ to bed.”

  “Okay, Mr. Trippi!”

  Joe said goodbye to the reporters. Lee and Trisha, watching through the window, saw him pointing down the dirt road for one of them, obviously giving directions.

  It was dark when the cars at the cabin loaded up, and their lights flicked on. Of course, Katie and the baby had to be getting home. And Joe was at the wheel of their van. No one saw Lee Hart, lying on the backseat, holding the baby on top of her as they jounced down the earthen drive.

  As it turned out, Lee didn’t need to hide. Most of the newsmen had abandoned the gate. Lee said to Joe: “What’d you tell them?”

  “I told ’em there was a back entrance.”

  They were laughing as Joe hit the highway and turned toward town. Lee sat up in the backseat—free at last!

  She would sleep at a friend’s house in Denver that night, give a quick statement at the airport the next morning, then board a private jet to New Hampshire, to meet her man.

  That was the night that Hart held a high-dollar funder in Manhattan—about two hundred souls. The white boys were fretting till the moment it began: What if they opened the doors and no one walked in?

  They needn’t have worried. This was New York, after all, and Hart was the talk of the town. They had maybe two cancellations. Everybody else showed up, with their checks. The campaign raised $300,000. The crowd fed Hart’s certainty ... and his victimhood.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “if the candidate is struck down in battle ... or with a knife in the back ...”

  (Hart was now sure he’d been set up. The Herald stakeout was too convenient. There were people who could not afford to let him win.)

  “Because the cause goes on! ... And the crusade continues! ... Anyone who wants to test my character is in for a surprise: I may bend, but I don’t break. I can be bruised and I can be battered, but I will come back ... because this fight must go on.

  “These are hard days, but we will prevail for one single reason—the truth will prevail. ...

  “Fight on, and march on.”

  Sweeney was just about cheering, like the rest of the crowd, his eyes locked on his man at the microphone ... when a woman walked up to him and murmured:

  “Gary said I should talk to you. He told me they were coming after a lot of women he knew. He said I’m next.”

  It turned out Hart was wrong about that. That was the night Paul Taylor got the word from his editor at The Washington Post: the Big Hound was checking out a woman who looked like the real thing.

  Taylor’s marching orders: New Hampshire, tomorrow, with Hart. Stick close.

  37

  Wednesday

  IT WASN’T EVEN HARD for Bradlee. He made one call, Wednesday morning. Not to the woman—Bradlee didn’t want to ask her. He called a friend, a fellow who’d know. He could ask—get a quick answer.

  A couple of answers, actually. That’s all.

  Was it an affair?

  Was it recent?

  Bradlee wasn’t the kind to split ethical hairs. But if it was, you know, seven years ago ... and now it was (in Bradlee-ese) “dormant” ... well, the Big Hound would likely just gnaw that in private.

  Bradlee didn’t have any animus toward Hart—none that he could think of. Guy was kind of a friend!

  Well, almost a friend ... or a guy Ben knew. Ben’s wife, Sally, had done a profile on him—hadn’t she? ... Come to think of it, she did sort of put the shaft to him. ...

  “But there was no anti in me,” Bradlee would recall. “I just come to work with an empty bucket. And someone fills it up every day.

  “That day, it happened to be Hart.”

  Wednesday morning, at the Denver airport, Lee Hart told a half-dozen selected reporters that she loved and trusted her husband. She didn’t ask him about his weekend plans. She didn’t ask him about his phone calls. “In all honesty, if it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.”

  So she approved of Gary’s weekend?

  Lee said: “If I could have planned his weekend schedule, I think I would have scheduled it differently.”

  Then she boarded a Learjet and flew to New Hampshire.

  She had an idea.

  Gary was doing a World Affairs Council speech at Dartmouth. Then he was headed for a showdown press conference—a full Ferraro. Hart had decided he would answer questions until ... until there were no more questions.

  So Lee came up with the idea that Gary ought to interrupt the press conference ... and he’d say: “Excuse me. My wife’s upstairs. I just want to see her for a minute. Excuse me.” He’d leave ...

  Then Lee would paint a big shiner on his eye—and Gary would go back to the press conference with this huge black eye, and say:

  See? She loves me!

  Then she’d come in and give him a big hug.

  Trippi went so far as to call headquarters. “Look, this is gonna sound a little crazy. But this is what she wants, this is the idea ...”

  “Uh, Joe ...” said the white boys on the squawk box in Denver, “that’s a picture that’s gonna be around for a long time.”

  “Yeah, but ...”

  “You know, for years ...”

  “Yeah, I know. Okay.”

  “Years and years ...”

  “Okay, forget it.”

  Anyway, schtick wasn’t Hart’s thing—and there wasn’t time. When he heard Lee was in the campus hotel, Gary went up to the room before the press conference. He walked in with a half-sigh, without fuss, like a man getting home from a hard day at work.

  Downstairs in the press conference room, they were fighting—for
position and for dominance. This was their moment!

  The room should have held eighty to a hundred, but the pack was two hundred strong ... and, of course, there were tripods, cables, long lenses banging shoulders and skulls of the newsmen nearby, boom mikes poking crazily toward the front of the room, lights ablaze on spindly poles or burning hot white on the shoulders of the cameramen. It had to be a hundred degrees. Sunlight pouring down through the windows didn’t help. People in smelly suits, sweating, waiting ... like a New York summer subway, stuck in the tunnel ... C’MON! ... Whatsa HOLDUP?

  When Hart walked in (alone—Lee stayed upstairs), the photographers surged. Stratton and Walto, at the head of the room, had to shove them back, leaning and straining. Stratton thought they’re gonna eat him—he thought of Custer. ... Hart felt the physical threat of the pack. He’d asked for no rostrum—nothing between him and them. But this was too close. Their bodies were too near—their faces were in his face.

  He faced them, and he said:

  “As I’ve made clear to everyone, I have nothing to hide. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve made a serious mistake, in fact. I regret those very much, not just for myself, but for all of those involved, the individuals who have been, I think, unfairly maligned. I think of my own family first of all. And for my supporters ...”

  Hart ticked off his charges against the Herald reporters: they lied about confronting him—he confronted them. They reported he “walked aimlessly” in his neighborhood—he was tracking them down. They missed his comings and goings, in broad daylight. He answered their questions for twenty or thirty minutes, that Saturday night—he didn’t have to. He denied their charges—still, they rushed those charges into print. Later, Bill Broadhurst managed to track down the Herald team at a hotel, and he offered them a chance to talk, in his house, with his two houseguests present ... but the Herald chose instead to file a quick Sunday story.

  “Finally, let me say a word about my wife, Lee: she has been, if anything, under more stress because of these events of the last few days than I have. And she continues to astonish me with her strength and her courage. This is, needless to say, not a pleasant thing for anyone. Not for me. Not for our children. But particularly, not for her. She has said that we have been married for twenty-eight years. I hope we’re married twenty-eight more—if that works out, and I think it will. Over that twenty-eight years, I have to tell you, of the people I have met in the world, friends that I have made, this is the most extraordinary human being I have ever had the pleasure of knowing—not simply as a wife, but as a human being. She is here today and will be with us on the campaign trail.”