All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Now, on Planet Money, a reporter was talking to a behavioral economist named Tim Harford, an Oxford professor who had apparently decided it was worth his time to apply his skills to the phenomenon of adultery. According to Harford, illicit relationships were the function of a simple cost-benefit equation; people stayed in them when the benefits outweighed the costs, and got out of them when the reverse was true. After Harford went on about this theory at some length, the interviewer, in the studiously understated tone of public radio reporters everywhere, asked him a question. Why, if this business about costs and benefits were true, didn’t politicians ever seem to learn from their mistakes? Why cheat on your wife when you know that the cost to your career ambitions would very likely be catastrophic?

  Politicians screwed up his modeling, Harford admitted. Clearly there were mysterious human factors at play, beyond our scientific reach.

  There was, of course, something surreal about hearing this conversation while simultaneously maintaining a respectful distance behind Gary Hart’s red Escape. As anyone alive during the 1980s knew, Hart, the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation, had been taken down and eternally humiliated by a scandal of his own making, an alleged affair with a beautiful blonde whose name, Donna Rice, had entered the cultural lexicon, along with the boat beside which they had been photographed together—Monkey Business. This was Hart’s enduring legacy, the inevitable first line in his front-page obituary, no matter what else he did thereafter, even if he cured cancer or found the unified string theory or went completely bonkers and tried to hijack an airplane midflight.

  When they talked about him now in Washington, Hart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce. A top Democratic strategist in town had once described Hart to me as “the most important politician of his generation who didn’t become president.” But such descriptions were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or athlete or entertainer, that didn’t evoke inevitable comparisons to Hart among reflective commentators. In popular culture, Gary Hart would forever be that archetypal antihero of presidential politics: the iconic adulterer.

  I felt a stab of anxiety now as I stared at the outline of his head, just visible above his car’s cushioned headrest. Hart was exactly the kind of guy who would listen to NPR while traveling back and forth to Denver several times a week; he might not even know that other stations existed. I imagined him now, listening to Professor Harford hold forth with great gravitas on the folly of promiscuous politicians. Perhaps Hart felt tempted to simply yank the wheel to his left and plunge into the steep ravine below, to make sure once and for all that he would never again have to endure the musings of those who professed to know what made a man fit to serve. Or maybe Hart had long ago resigned himself to such discussions and was grateful simply to have escaped, in this instance, the almost automatic allusion to his once promising career.

  • • •

  Soon the expanse of scrub and rock on either side of the canyon road gave way to a village with a five-and-dime, a feed store, an animal hospital, and a nursery, and then Hart turned right onto Troublesome Gulch Road. Old cabins with penned animals sat alongside newish, seven-bedroom monstrosities along the gravel drive, and our tires kicked up plumes of dust as we made our way to the place where the road ended at a wood gate, immediately in front of us. Other than the sign that greeted us—PRIVATE ROAD KEEP OFF—the only hint that anyone of note lived here was the security keypad that Hart now bypassed using some device inside the Escape, so that the gate swung open and he waved for me to follow.

  We rumbled past the old, 1,200-square-foot cabin where Hart and his wife, Lee, used to live, the sparse kind you normally think of when you hear about bygone politicians and their log cabins. That’s where the Harts found themselves barricaded for days in 1987, hiding behind covered windows while choppers circled overhead. Further up the road sat the grander cabin the Harts built almost immediately after his forced retirement. The campaign supporter who had promised to secure a loan for the full 167 acres disappeared after the scandal. It was Warren Beatty, Hart’s close friend from his days on the McGovern campaign and one of the few to stick with him, who lent them the money, which Hart quickly repaid.

  The cabin was a two-level, two-bedroom affair fashioned from one hundred tons of beetle-killed Rocky Mountain pine. Four rambunctious dogs, including one the size of a love seat and another that was missing an eye, jumped and splayed around Lee as she greeted us in the kitchen. “Mrs. Hart,” as her husband unfailingly referred to her (or sometimes “the widow Hart,” if he was feeling sardonic), explained to me that their son, John, kept collecting the dogs from shelters. “Apache, down!” Hart shouted in annoyance as the largest one tried to knock me backward. “C’mon, Patch!” Then to Lee, with exasperation: “Babe, get the dog.”

  Lee was a year older than Hart and still pretty in a timeless, prairie sort of way. The Harts met at Bethany, a small Nazarene college in Oklahoma, where Lee was something of a celebrity, her father having been a church elder and past president of the college (and where Hart very narrowly lost his first political race, for student body president, because he had allegedly been present at a gathering where an open can of beer had been spotted—an allegation he would deny, persuasively, for the rest of his days). Together they had made an unthinkable journey from those days of small-town Bible groups to the halls of Yale, where Hart started at the Divinity School and went on to study law, and ultimately to the Capitol, swept forward by the social upheaval of the age and Hart’s emergence as a political celebrity and then a senator and presidential candidate. They had nearly lost each other in the historical current. But all of that seemed distant now, as Hart and his wife of fifty years wrestled the dogs outside and bustled about the kitchen preparing a lunch of chicken over greens, grandparents given to habitual patter and comforting routine.

  We strolled out onto the front deck, the three of us, and listened to the birds chirping and the stillness beneath. Hart pointed across the meadow to where the rushing creek had recently swelled and washed away a layer of soil, leaving roots perilously exposed beneath towering pines. This was how Troublesome Gulch got its name, he explained. A small fox approached and sat back on its hind legs, peering up at us expectantly. Lee rose and went inside to retrieve a piece of raw chicken, then tossed it like a horseshoe out onto the grass, where the grateful fox snapped it up and did a little dance. The couple looked out at the fox admiringly, Hart making a show of mild disapproval at this daily perversion of nature, but clearly pleased by the spectacle nonetheless.

  It was right about then that we heard an awful thwunk, and Lee Hart gasped. She ran to the window. What had happened was this: in anticipation of my arrival, Lee had lifted the automatic shades on the towering glass windows that spanned the width of the living room, from floor to ceiling. In case we decided to talk indoors, on the couches next to the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s bookstand in Monticello, she had wanted me to be able to take in the view of the meadow and the creek and the old wooden footbridge beyond. But without its shade to blunt the midday glare, the darkened glass wall now reflected the distant trees as faithfully as a mirror, and a small bird had mistaken that reflected image for the real thing and hurled himself into it kamikaze-style. The thing lay there now on the deck, motionless as a dishrag.

  “Oh, no!” Lee said, something cracking inside her. “Oh, no!” she said again. She knelt down, cooing through the onset of tears. The fox turned its head sidelong. The creek burbled on indifferently. I felt powerless and somehow responsible, utterly untrained for such an event. I imagined the Harts might see this as an omen of my return, and maybe it was.

  Hart never flinched. He rushed over and lifted the bird in his cupped hands. He walked toward the edge of the deck and gently stroked the f
eathers, as Lee looked on from one side and I the other. His long torso hovered over the patient and obscured our view as he softly set the bird down on the railing. “He’s breathing,” Hart assured his wife in a soothing, protective tone. Lee finally exhaled, deeply, and retreated a few steps. “He’ll be fine,” Hart said firmly.

  And I believed it, too, until Hart shot me a furtive, conspiratorial look and shook his head quickly, as if to say: Not a chance in hell.

  How I came to return to Troublesome Gulch on that day in 2009, visiting with some washed-up politician at the moment when just about every other political writer in America was absorbed by the ascension of our first African American president, is a story of failure and the hope for redemption, I guess. Not just Hart’s, but mine, too.

  The whole thing began a few weeks before Christmas in 2002, when, as a new writer for The New York Times Magazine, I came across a short newspaper item about how Hart was considering a quixotic comeback bid for the presidency. Like everyone else, I knew Hart only from the memory of scandal—in my case, from reading Newsweek in my college dorm room in 1987—and what motivated such a man to want to rekindle this memory in his advancing years, to want to relive in some way the defining ordeal of his life, struck me as the kind of mystery at the intersection of politics and psychology I found most intriguing. The idea of interviewing Hart after all these years struck my editors and friends as kind of spooky and fun, like attending a séance in the French Quarter.

  I met Hart at the Denver headquarters of the global law firm Coudert Brothers, which, as it happened, consisted of a single nondescript office—Hart’s—and a waiting room, in the corner of which stood a sad little Christmas tree. Hart sat in a swiveling office chair next to his computer and invited me to take a seat a few feet away. He explained, alluding to the modest surroundings, that Coudert Brothers had informed him it intended to close its Denver office—or, in other words, that it no longer needed Hart’s services as an international lawyer, specializing in executing deals in the former Soviet Union. He would soon need to find another professional home. Hart spoke lightly of this conundrum, laughing easily at himself, as if the circumstances of his career had reached a level of absurdity even he couldn’t fail to find amusing. Whatever arrogance he had once possessed, a famous incapacity for suffering those less intellectually inclined than himself, had been replaced in his advancing years by a sense of goodhearted resignation, which had the effect of making him immediately and immensely likable.

  Two things struck me very clearly during that first meeting with Hart. The first, and more surprising, was that he was probably the flat-out smartest politician I had ever met, and I had met quite a few. Not smart in the Newt Gingrich sense, meaning that he had memorized a small library of philosophical and literary texts and could quote them back to you—although Hart had this going for him, too. Nor smart in the Bill Clinton sense, meaning that he could juggle a Sunday crossword puzzle while simultaneously dissecting a point of policy and committing to memory the names of ten strangers in the room, which was a kind of freakishness. Hart didn’t care that much for people’s approval. No, Hart’s gift was to connect politics and culture and theology and history and technology seamlessly and all at once—to draw from all available data points (extemporaneously, it seemed) a larger picture of where everything was headed.

  Richard Ben Cramer, who profiled Hart in What It Takes, had a name for these periodic revelations; he called them “Hart-facts,” because once Hart offered them up, they became self-evident, as if it would have been impossible for anyone to have overlooked them in the first place. Hart himself would tell me, “I have only one talent. I can see farther ahead than other people. And I can put pieces together in constructive ways, both to avoid disaster and to capitalize on change.”

  During that first day in Denver, Hart explained, by way of a brief history of the Middle East, why a war in Iraq, if in fact that’s what George W. Bush was planning, would ultimately be a catastrophe. We might win a quick military victory, he said, but it would become difficult to extricate ourselves, and it would create more terrorists than it would root out. (Decades before, he had insisted that America’s reliance on oil would lead us, inevitably, into a series of desert wars.) He also mused that growing inequality and the recklessness of the markets might well plunge us, sooner or later, into another depression or something very close. By the end of the decade, both of these offhand riffs, which could have been dismissed in the moment as the rants of a gloomy old man, would prove stunningly accurate.

  The second thing I quickly realized was that Hart had no real intention of running for president again, even if he wasn’t yet ready to admit that to himself. The idea had come from some students Hart met during a yearlong sojourn at Oxford. That Hart wouldn’t quite slam the door on the notion was a measure of how much he wanted something else that had nothing to do with the presidency: to be reclaimed. Hart longed to be back in the mix for high-profile assignments or maybe even a cabinet post. He wanted to be the elder statesman he had always imagined he would someday become. If openly mulling a return to the campaign trail was the only way to get someone like me to write about his political ideas, rather than a fifteen-year-old marital infidelity, then so be it.

  “I made a mistake,” Hart told me, which seemed to me as close to admitting an affair with Donna Rice as he had ever come. “I think there are very few people in the world who don’t know that. I’ve apologized.” It was “a single incident fifteen years ago,” Hart said, and because of it he had been denied the opportunity to serve his country ever since. “I think I’ve paid my dues,” he said.

  “I think all I want is some degree of fairness,” Hart said quietly. “I’m not even asking for forgiveness, but fairness.” He shook his head in enduring disbelief. “Perspective,” he said, then repeated the word quietly to himself. “Perspective.”

  Hart didn’t say any of this happily, or even willingly. I did what a reporter is supposed to do. I pushed him on it. I waited the better part of my thirty-hour visit until I felt he was sufficiently comfortable talking to me, and then I bored in on the past, poked at the scar tissue, hoping for … what? A catharsis, maybe. An admission that justice had been done all those years ago, that the truth had won out, as I had been taught to believe it always does. That somehow my role models in journalism—men who had covered that campaign and gone on to become, in some cases, my editors and senior colleagues—had through their tenacity spared the nation something worse than what we ultimately got.

  Hart might have been excused for throwing me out of his office, but instead he patiently pleaded with me to move on. He had invited me to visit for the same reason that he was hopeful of a reentry into political life—because he thought the past might finally be the past, of interest to no one at last. “This whole business of ’87 is flypaper to me,” he told me, throwing up his hands. “It’s so frustrating. It’s like being in a time warp. I want to get unstuck.”

  The three-thousand-word piece I wrote about Hart did nothing to unstick him, although it was about what he should have expected. I revisited the scandal, talked about his tortured journey in the intervening years, cast doubt on his sincerity about the prospect of running again. I repeated the truism (half true at best, as I later came to understand) that Hart had blithely challenged reporters to follow him around back in 1987, and I arrived at the same psychoanalytical conclusion on which a lot of Hart’s contemporaries had settled back then—that Hart had to have harbored some self-destructive impulse to begin with, because otherwise he wouldn’t have risked his lifelong ambitions on some model and then dared his interrogators to prove it.

  I mused on why it was that Hart had become a relic from another time—“the political version of a Members Only jacket” is how I put it—and concluded that Hart mostly had himself to blame. If he was stuck in flypaper while others mired in lesser scandals had managed to escape, it was mostly because he refused to do the things you had to do if you wanted to rehabilitate y
ourself in the modern society—write an apologetic memoir, shed a tear on Oprah, plot out a publicly orchestrated comeback on the cover of People.

  Hart detested the piece, of course, and shortly thereafter he publicly dropped any notion of a presidential campaign. I called him a few times afterward and even asked to have a drink on one of his occasional trips to Washington. I liked him, and it seemed to me his perspective on events would be different from the usual Washington wisdom. Hart was cordial but unavailable, and I stopped pestering him.

  Once, just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, after he had endorsed his friend John Kerry, Hart and I ended up standing next to each other in a huge barn somewhere near Ames, where Kerry was holding a rally. I thought Hart recognized me when I turned to him, but he said little and seemed to look right through me as we shook hands. He wasn’t invited onstage with some of Kerry’s other endorsers, and no one else there seemed to take note of him. We stood awkwardly and in silence throughout much of the rally, our backs pressed up against the wood beams of the barn wall, until I wandered off to say hello to some reporters I knew, and Hart slipped out into the cold, alone.