by Matt Bai
That was the second presidential campaign I had covered, and by then I was beginning to surmise that something critical was missing from our coverage of political candidates—mainly, the candidates themselves. Like a lot of my younger colleagues who’d passed on Wall Street jobs or law degrees so they could go off to small, middling newspapers and pursue elusive careers in journalism, my ambition had been forged by reading (and rereading) influential books: The Making of the President 1960, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, and What It Takes. What made political journalism so alluring, and so important, was the idea that you actually got to know the minds of the public servants you were writing about. You were supposed to share beers at the hotel bar and late-night confidences aboard the chartered plane. You were supposed to understand not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for winning, but also what made them good and worthy of trust, or what didn’t.
There was the danger of getting too close, perhaps, in the way that a young Ben Bradlee ignored—willfully or otherwise—the dubious associations of his friend John Kennedy, or in the way that Richard Harwood, a reporter for The Washington Post, decided to remove himself from Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign because he had grown to like the candidate too much. (Kennedy was killed before Harwood had the chance to follow through.) But such was the challenge that came with sitting in history’s orchestra seats, charged with the sacred task of transmitting all that immediacy to the people crammed into the balcony and watching at home.
By the time my contemporaries and I got there, though, presidential politics—indeed, all of politics—was really nothing like that. With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them. They left the drinking and private dinners to the handlers who were expert in such things, whose job it was to help reporters by “reconstructing” the scenes of the day with self-serving narratives (“And then I heard the senator say, ‘Don’t tell me what the polls say! I care about what’s right!’ ”). Candidates in the age of Oprah “shared” more than ever before, but what they shared of themselves—boxers rather than briefs, allusions to youthful drug use—was trivial and often rehearsed, as authentic as a piece of plastic fruit, and about as illuminating.
Our candidates shared the same planes as their attendant reporters, but unlike their predecessors in the books of our youth, they literally hid behind curtains that divided their cabin from ours. Occasionally, prompted by press aides, they wandered back to have an impromptu, off-the-record conversation, which they conducted with all the fluency and abandon of a North Korean prisoner offering his televised confession. They issued gauzy position papers and used perfunctory interviews to recite their talking points, but they almost never engaged in informal, candid conversations about what they believed and how they had come to believe it. Their existences were guided by a single imperative, which was to say nothing unscripted and expose nothing complex.
Defensively, almost unconsciously, we tried to obscure this new reality from our readers and viewers. Reporters of my generation (some of us more than others) showed up on cable TV all day long and spoke wryly and knowingly of what the politicians thought, in tones that suggested we had just come from a private dinner or a late-night bull session, that we enjoyed the same insight as our role models. As time went on, some Americans who paid close attention to the news began to suspect that we were holding out on them, that our studied detachment was masking deeper convictions about our subjects, things we really knew about the candidates but were afraid to say because we might lose our precious access or jeopardize “cozy relationships,” or because it might violate the outmoded tenets of objectivity. The truth was harder to admit: most of the time, we had no real access, and we really didn’t know anything about the candidates personally you couldn’t have learned from browsing their websites or watching speeches on YouTube. And absent any genuine familiarity or argument of ideas, our glib prognostications sounded cynical and bland. There existed an unbridgeable divide—our own kind of troublesome gulch—between our candidates and our media.
There were lots of reasons that our politics had grown so dispiriting and so destructive over the years. They ranged from the growing dominance of political consultants to the decline of the industrial engine that once drove the American economy. And there were plenty of people, including a lot of campaign operatives, who argued that the shrinking influence of the professional class of political journalists was a good thing, that new technologies had broken the monopoly once held by a handful of self-appointed guardians of the public good, that candidates could now go around the media and speak, unfiltered, to the American voter. But when candidates no longer dared to speak unguardedly, or to explain the evolution of their thinking, or to say anything that might contradict anything else they’d ever said, they lost the ability to grapple with nuanced or controversial topics; essentially, they gave up trying to win the larger debate in the country, choosing to focus solely on the tactics of the next election, instead. New digital tools may have enabled them to reach voters directly, without a middleman, but all those voters were getting were the same old platitudes and scripted evasions, issued in a tweet or a video instead of a press release.
There was no single moment when all of this had suddenly come to pass. But as I chronicled one candidate’s campaign after another, grasping for some moment of authenticity or illumination, it was clear to me that something in the political culture had been badly broken in the years since Cramer had written What It Takes. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, Hart began to creep back into my thoughts.
It started as a stray reflection here and there, the brief connection of synapses as I drove across Iowa under an inky black sky, or as I sat in some god-awful roadside New Hampshire hotel, staring out at the snow-covered interstate at dawn. It grew into a doubt more pressing—a sense of something important that I had left unfinished or unexplored. I noticed how often Hart’s name came up now in the articles about John Edwards or about Tiger Woods, as if his was the most important or immoral one-night stand in the history of one-night stands, the standard of public humiliation against which all others had to be measured. Perspective, I could hear Hart saying. Perspective.
I began to notice how the issues he had first brought to the debate in the early 1980s, like energy independence and Islamic terrorism, were the same ones we were debating now, because so little had been achieved in all the time since. When a friend sent me a link to a sale on eBay, in which some collector was selling the issue of People from 1987 with Donna Rice sprawled across the cover in a bathing suit, I paid fifteen bucks for the plastic-wrapped magazine. I had no real reason to buy it, except that I suddenly felt compelled to take it out of circulation. I figured I was sparing the man one more indignity.
It wasn’t guilt, exactly, this feeling that had led me back to Hart’s cabin almost seven years after my first visit, like an archaeologist searching for shards of a lost political age. What I had written about Hart back then, a story I had now reread so often that I knew it almost by heart, hadn’t been wrong, at least not in any technical sense. But I had now come to believe there was something deeper I had missed, a connection between Hart’s defining moment and the era I inhabited. And I felt pulled to retrace that connection in order to understand how our politicians became so paralyzed and our media so reviled. It was worth figuring out what had really happened at Troublesome Gulch, and why, and how it had led the rest of us here.
For two decades after his abrupt exit from politics, Hart said almost nothing revealing about the incident that had precipitated it. (In a 240-page memoir published in 2010, titled The Thunder and the Sunshine, he dispensed with the entire scandal in a few lines, noting, “The circumstances are too well known, and to some degree, still too painful, to require repetition.”) This was, in part, because people stopped asking. After a few months, the TV producers and reporter
s had moved on to other scandals, and the lecture agents were only calling, sporadically, to see if Hart might want to do some kind of crass confession tour. Eventually the gravel road through Troublesome Gulch, like the ancient city of Petra, became lost to political explorers, too remote for anyone to care.
It was also because Hart thought—foolishly, as it turned out—that the rest of the world would move on faster if he didn’t keep reminding us of what had happened. Sitting in his cabin, far removed from affairs of state and having established himself as a prolific author and a specialist in international law, Hart would occasionally persuade himself that no one really thought about any of this anymore, that he might at last be remembered for his brilliance. Away from Washington, he could go months, even years, without feeling the prurient stares of strangers or the judgment of old friends. Then someone like me would come along, or some other politician or celebrity would be caught in an adulterous affair, and Monkey Business would surface again, tawdry and unsinkable. Even into his seventies, he could not outlast it.
But more than any of this, Hart stayed quiet because he held fast to the central conviction that had guided him, disastrously, through his existential career crisis in 1987—that what happened or didn’t happen with Donna Rice or any other woman was nobody’s goddamn business but his and his wife’s, and about as relevant to his qualifications for higher office as a birthmark or a missing tooth. For more than twenty years, despite the instant opportunity for public redemption it would have afforded him, Hart would not admit to the affair or shed any light on the events that had led to his disgrace—not to interviewers, and not to the friends and former aides who were more reluctant to broach the subject. He believed the entire question, even now, to be an incursion into his zone of privacy, a triviality that it was his duty, as a public figure, not to legitimize.
Once, over drinks, one of Hart’s close aides from the period told me that Rice, like Hart, had steadfastly denied, even in private, having consummated an affair. I asked him whether he was actually suggesting that Hart, despite his reputation for promiscuity at the time, hadn’t slept with the woman who would forever be linked to his ruined ambitions. The former aide looked around the bar and leaned closer to me, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I fear not,” he said, looking genuinely pained.
If this was so, then the historical irony was hard to fathom. Because the story of Hart and the blonde didn’t just prove to be Hart’s undoing; it was the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come. Somehow, political and personal lives had collided overnight to create what was, in hindsight, the first modern political scandal, with all the attendant satellite trucks and saturation coverage and hourly turns in the narrative that Kafka himself could not have dreamed up. The unrelenting assault that Hart and family and their closest advisors had encountered during those five days would become an almost predictable rhythm of political life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and it would spawn an entire industry of experts who knew—or claimed to know—how to navigate it. But it was Hart, the standout prodigy of a new generation, who opened the door.
All these years later, Hart confided, he mostly remembered snippets from that week, painful and disjointed scenes that surfaced only when he allowed them to. Like the moment in New Hampshire when, nearly toppled by the scrum and blinded by flashbulbs, he saw a small boy, maybe four or five, about to be run over by the human crush of cameramen and photographers. Panicked and furious, Hart spotted Ira Wyman, the venerable Newsweek photographer, crouched in front of him. Ira, an amiable, decent man and esteemed photojournalist, had long been with Hart and his wife, through all the days on planes and nights in hotel bars. “Help me,” Hart remembered croaking, in a kind of woozy desperation. He grabbed for Ira’s camera strap. “Ira, help me.”
Flash, came the response from the ground near his knees, as Ira evaded Hart’s grasp. Flash flash flash.
“It was a nightmare,” Hart told me flatly one night as we sat in his upstairs study. “We were in some kind of Oz land. For years and years after, people would stop me in airports and say, ‘You should have stayed in the race.’ I mean, they had no idea.” He paused, shook his head. “They had no idea.”
In his own mind, he had not been driven out of presidential politics, as most everyone else saw it, but rather had walked away disgustedly. He thought of himself as Gary Cooper in that last scene of High Noon, throwing his badge in the dirt, thinking, If this is how it has to be, then find someone else. (Hart preferred not to think about his failed and embarrassing attempt to reenter the race late in 1987, which he would ever after regret.) This had, after all, been the animating theme of the statement he made at the end of that week of scandal, when he came down from the cabin and officially withdrew—a speech that probably should have been remembered, like Eisenhower’s oration on the military-industrial complex, as one of the most prescient warnings in modern American politics, but that, like so much else about the moment, had been almost entirely buried in the public consciousness. Even Hart, perhaps falling back on his usual coping mechanism, claimed barely to remember it.
“I’m not a beaten man—I’m an angry and defiant man,” Hart had declared then, to raucous cheers that he felt the need to quiet. “I said that I bend but I don’t break, and believe me I’m not broken.” Red-cheeked and gripping the lectern, he went on:
In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important.… We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted, that has reporters in bushes, false and inaccurate stories printed, photographers peeking in our windows, swarms of helicopters hovering over our roofs, and my very strong wife close to tears because she can’t even get into her own house at night without being harassed. And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for higher office. Now, I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself. Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or a sporting match. We’d all better do something to make this system work, or we’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
Indeed, what had it gotten us, this violent compression of politics and celebrity and moral policing? You could argue, I guess, that it brought us closer somehow to our politicians, by making their flaws and failings harder to obscure. You could argue, and many have, that we deserved the information necessary to elect politicians who could be moral, trustworthy stewards of our children’s future, and so on. There was a word that encapsulated all of this, a concept that, more than any issue or ideology, came to dominate our campaigns long after Hart had retreated to Troublesome Gulch. That word was character. It wasn’t just about sex, as it was in Hart’s case, but also about whether you uttered a line you wished you could take back or made an investment you probably shouldn’t have, about whether you’d ever gotten stoned or written something idiotic in a school paper. Nothing mattered more in a politician than his essential character, and no shred of private behavior, no moment of weakness or questionable judgment, was too insignificant to illuminate it.
It would be facile to dismiss this new focus on character as being entirely trivial or misrepresentative. In a few cases, unfortunately, it was anything but. Consider the example of John Edwards. In June 2007, as the former North Carolina senator and vice presidential nominee was preparing to run a second time for the presidency, I wrote a highly detailed, eight-thousand-word cover story for The New York Times Magazine about his agenda, weighing with great seriousnes
s his signature plan to combat poverty and inequality. I traveled with him to the devastated Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and I consulted a faculty’s worth of antipoverty experts on his proposals. At the time (and for a long while after), I congratulated myself on having taken the most substantive look at Edwards’s depth and rationale as a candidate, even while pundits continued to ignore his policies in favor of commenting on his floppy hair and his fundraising prowess and his wife’s battle with cancer. This was the kind of long-form examination that voters and candidates complained was lacking from political coverage.
Four months after my cover piece was published, the National Enquirer ran the first in a series of stories alleging that Edwards had fathered a “love child” with a filmmaker who was following him around. Edwards denied the story repeatedly, and the rest of the media mostly ignored it—until the following August, when the Enquirer caught him visiting his lover and his new baby daughter in a Beverly Hills hotel. After that, Edwards went on Nightline—much as Gary Hart had, under different circumstances, twenty-one years earlier—to admit that the child was his. By this time, he was no longer a presidential candidate, having withdrawn after getting drubbed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the early primaries six months earlier. But had things gone a little differently in Iowa or New Hampshire, it was not inconceivable that Edwards could have been the nominee by the time the full measure of his deceit became clear. He was, in any event, a likely pick for attorney general or some other cabinet post.
The revelation about Edwards’s personal behavior struck me as highly relevant to his fitness for office, though not simply because he had been sleazy and dishonest. (Edwards would not have been the first president, or even the second, to have secretly fathered a child out of wedlock.) As I had written in the magazine, most of Edwards’s “new ideas” for combating inequality, his main rationale for running, were in fact leftover proposals from the last century, and they were grounded in the underlying assumption that simply giving poor people more money would eradicate poverty—an assumption that ignored an emerging consensus about the importance of families and communities in that equation. About the only major plank of Edwards’s platform that even hinted at this broader social problem in impoverished communities was his insistence that absentee dads take responsibility for their children. And so here was Edwards, whose agenda included this ardent call for “responsible fatherhood,” refusing to publicly acknowledge his own child.
