All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  And it wasn’t simply the mechanics of the thing, this process of whoring himself out like any other cheap politician, that seemed untenable. It was also the idea that if he ran for president like a front-runner, he wouldn’t actually be able to be president, or at least not in the way he intended. From the early 1980s, Hart had been thinking at least as much about how he would govern as how he would get elected. For example, his chief foreign policy aide, Doug Wilson, had set up something called the “New Leaders” program, which was essentially an annual meeting of up-and-coming politicos from countries around the world; Hart’s idea was that a president should come into office with a network of highly placed friends in other governments, rather than investing the first two years of a presidency in getting to know them. Hart saw himself as a transformational figure who would free the country from the stifling, left-right orthodoxies of the Cold War era. If he campaigned as the vehicle of everyone who wanted to protect the party’s status quo, he complained, then he wouldn’t be able to claim the public mandate he needed to govern like a reformer.

  Then there was the tactical problem inherent in being the front-runner. Alone among major candidates of the modern era, Hart had, by that time, experienced presidential campaigns as both a lead strategist and as a candidate. So however much Hart may have liked to project an image of rising above the media’s game of electoral chess, in truth he was already thinking several moves beyond his younger advisors. Having played a fundamental role in creating the modern primary system, Hart had now seen two long-shot candidates—McGovern and Carter—use it to shock better-known and better-funded opponents, and he himself had come impossibly close to doing the same thing in 1984. So no one understood better than Hart that the most perilous place to be in Democratic politics in the post-reform era was at the pinnacle of the primary field, as the anointed candidate of the establishment. Hart felt sure that if he were to embrace his role as the presumed nominee, he would become as vulnerable in ’88 as Mondale had been in ’84.

  It didn’t help that the emerging group of candidates who hoped to exploit Hart’s vulnerability as the obvious front-runner looked—to use the term privately employed by Hart’s campaign staff—like a bunch of “new Garys.” In 1984, Hart’s chief advantage had been his relative youth, the way in which he marked the arrival of the sixties generation. What his success had done, though, was to clear the path for a new group of his contemporaries, who were already testing their own presidential ambitions—Washington prodigies like Joe Biden and Al Gore in the Senate and Dick Gephardt in the House. (A little known Southern governor named Bill Clinton, whom Hart had once hired to work on the McGovern campaign, was also said to be exploring a run, although he would ultimately demur.)

  Suddenly, these guys, too, were touting their comparative youth and rejecting the liberal orthodoxies of the postwar generation, embracing military reform and the potential of high-tech industries in Hart-like fashion. Known throughout his career as a reformer, Hart, who would be fifty by the time he announced his candidacy, now faced the danger of becoming another establishment retread.

  The extent to which Hart was wrestling with this question—how to be the party’s recognized front-runner without forfeiting his credentials as an antiestablishment Democrat—is evident from a memo he wrote sometime in 1986. At Hart’s request, two of his most trusted aides, Billy Shore and Jeremy Rosner, had written their boss a secret memo laying out an overarching strategy for securing the nomination and then the White House in 1988. That memo is lost to the ages, but Hart’s point-by-point response, written in longhand and all capital letters on a legal pad, offers a fascinating window into the political calculations he was trying to make—and into the depth of his personal involvement in campaign strategy. In the first of his twenty-seven “comments and critiques,” Hart wrote: “I am not an ‘outsider’ out to defeat the party establishment. I am independent from the establishment, uniquely positioned to re-position it and move it forward (c.f. FDR, JFK).” In other words, he intended to make the convoluted argument that he was inside the establishment, but not of it.

  “I have a strong regional base (west) and demographic base (young),” Hart wrote. “Plus my greatest strength as a Democrat is among independents. We must get analysts to understand that. I can broaden the party’s base.” He made it clear that he had no intention of retooling his own political argument. “I do not need to distinguish myself from the ‘new Garys’—they have to distinguish themselves from me,” he wrote. “In every case it will make their nomination less likely. Let’s not go on the defensive!”

  In fact, Hart intended to be very much on the offensive, and he had in mind his own strategy for putting some distance between himself and the Democratic establishment, while simultaneously making all the new Garys seem small and conventional. The big idea was to focus almost exclusively on big ideas, rather than on the usual political machinations. To start with, over three days in June 1986, Hart gave a series of three foreign policy lectures at Georgetown University, in which he outlined, with unusual technicality, the new approach he called “Enlightened Engagement.” Essentially, Hart argued that in the world after the Cold War, where nations would inevitably rise up to determine their own futures, the United States would no longer be able to protect its interests by deploying missiles and propping up repressive states; now it would need to retool its military to respond to stateless threats, and it would have to nurture democratic movements, mainly through economic assistance.

  Twenty-five years later, that all sounds pretty routine. But in the context of 1986, especially for a Democrat, it was both provocative and prescient. Among those who bristled at Hart’s pragmatic vision was his old mentor George McGovern, whom Hart asked to preview the lectures. In a private letter to Hart written in May 1986, the dovish McGovern, echoing other liberals, listed his “reservations” about Hart’s worldview, most notably that he thought Hart overstated Soviet aggression and was too harsh toward Nicaragua’s Communist government. McGovern also objected to a proposal to expand NATO’s conventional forces in the waning years of the Cold War, in order to ease Europe’s reliance on America’s nuclear arsenal. “Is the concept of mutual force reductions dead?” he despaired.

  On the domestic front, Hart countered Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”—the missile shield more popularly known as “Star Wars”—with his own “Strategic Investment Initiative.” The notion here was that the country should take the savings from scaling back its Cold War military buildups and invest it in education, job retraining, and infrastructure programs—all of which would be needed to compete in a more information-based and international economy. (“If you think education is expensive, wait until you find out how much ignorance costs,” Hart was fond of saying.) Hart also proposed higher taxes on corporations and wealthy citizens, as well as a tariff on imported oil, as a way of raising revenue for investments and closing deficits.

  Policy aides went to work on crafting an alternative federal budget, which Hart planned to release after the campaign launch. In the meantime, Hart’s team took both the Georgetown lectures and the investment plan, along with his detailed argument for remaking the military, and bound them together in a ninety-four-page, small-type, heavily footnoted booklet called Reform, Hope, and the Human Factor: Ideas for National Restructuring. Never again would anyone have to ask where the beef was.

  As part of this plan to run on ideas, and not as the usual front-runner would run, Hart informed his team that there were things he simply wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to attend all the must-do fish fries and barbecues in the early primary states that he found about as gratifying as the flu. He wasn’t going to spend time pleading for the endorsements of local party leaders, which he considered meaningless anyway, when he could be sitting with groups of actual voters and making his substantive case, instead. And he wasn’t going to lower his stature by competing in Iowa’s silly straw poll. “Very early in ’87 I must (or Dixon) announce against straw polls�
��perhaps in a letter to state chairs,” Hart wrote in his comments on the strategy memo.

  He wasn’t going to schmooze the urban bosses who hadn’t died off yet, or the various interest groups who felt they had the right to blackmail a nominee before signing off on him. Hart even went to Boca Raton, where the top union leaders were holding an annual gathering, to make sure they understood he opposed the tariffs and quotas they were demanding on steel and other threatened industries—and to make sure the rest of the world understood that he wasn’t going to bow before Labor.

  Oh, and one more thing: Hart let it be known that he wasn’t going to be covered like a presumed nominee, either. He would answer questions, sure—about Enlightened Engagement or the Strategic Investment Initiative. But he wasn’t about to submit to a series of never-ending sit-downs about the latest polls or what the strategy was in Florida. He wasn’t open to blocking off hours for portrait photographers who would stand him up under a white umbrella and tell him to lean this way or try a few more with his hand in his jacket pocket, all so they could put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone, again. He wasn’t going to fall into the classic front-runner’s trap of lapping up all the attention while the new Garys drove the Iowa countryside and camped out on couches like a little band of Che Guevaras.

  You can imagine how this felt to the fortunate reporters from major papers around the country who had managed to get themselves assigned to Hart in those months leading up to his announcement, the rising stars who were now scrambling to write major profiles and previews to mark the start of Hart’s presidential journey. (Other candidates, of course, would have killed for a slew of stories about them and would have sat for interviews until the plane ran out of gas and crashed.) Hart’s high-handedness may not have caused his eventual collision with the media, but it probably eliminated any benefit of the doubt he might have gotten, any perspective to which he might have been entitled. If Hart was acting out of some profound reluctance to become a traditional front-runner, it felt like something different to the reporters, who had a job to do. It felt like arrogance and self-seriousness. It felt like contempt—for the process, and for them.

  In fact, Hart could be plenty arrogant and self-serious. (“I despair, profoundly,” he wrote to his aides in response to a draft op-ed, a line that instantly became legend in the headquarters. “It is absolutely ludicrous for me to consider national office if the people I depend on think this is presidential caliber.”) But he did not have contempt for the media, or at least not for the media as a whole. Like a lot of liberal intellectuals shaped by the sixties, he had long been in awe of what he considered serious journalists, and he enjoyed their company more often than he did the companionship of his fellow senators.

  A telling example concerned Sydney Gruson, who started as a foreign correspondent with The New York Times in the 1940s and eventually rose to become one of the paper’s top corporate executives. Near the end of 1972, Gruson called Hart, who was just then packing up his things at McGovern headquarters, and said that if Hart really was planning to write a book about the campaign (which he was), he should come to New York to meet with editors at the paper’s book division. Hart, who was now a national celebrity in his own right, was nonetheless honored and intimidated by having picked up the phone to find such a well-known Times editor on the line—so much so that, even in retelling the story many years later, he still seemed floored by it. Hart traveled almost immediately to New York, nervously carting along stacks of documents to demonstrate his seriousness of purpose, and he was elated when the Times’s book company agreed to publish his memoir, Right from the Start. He and Gruson forged a lifelong friendship; had Hart won the White House in 1988, Gruson, who was seventy by that time, would have occupied a senior communications role in the administration.

  No, Hart’s complicated relationship with the media, like so much else about his political persona, broke down mostly along generational lines. He felt comfortable dining with guys like Gruson and Woodward and the columnist Jack Germond, old friends he knew from McGovern days or from his early years in the Senate, most of whom still called him “Gary.” (The night after the “Where’s the beef?” debate, for example, found him eating with Germond and a group of other longtime reporters, who spared little of his feelings in telling him just how miserable his performance had been.) He thought these journalists to be genuine truth seekers, and he respected their intellects.

  But now there were these younger reporters, too, the boomers who had first been drawn to journalism watching Redford and Hoffman in All the President’s Men, thirty-something men and women who had recently graduated from the police beat or City Hall to the pinnacle of political coverage. And Hart could find no sure footing with this crowd, no easy rapport or rakish bonhomie. As Richard Ben Cramer noted in What It Takes, the younger cohort continually referred to Hart in print as “cool and aloof” and a “loner,” much as you might describe a serial killer after he is discovered to have plotted his murderous spree in some isolated shed decorated with creepy cutouts of his victims. But the word they used more than any other to summarize him, particularly among themselves, was “weird.”

  It had started in 1984, when Hart suddenly went from marginal candidate to national sensation, and the younger reporters and editors—the ones who hadn’t been around in the early seventies—realized they knew next to nothing about him. In a frenzied effort to vet this guy who suddenly seemed like a possible nominee, the reporters descended on Colorado and Kansas and the halls of the Senate, looking to unearth relevant clues. As Cramer told it, they came away with three crucial fragments of evidence.

  First, it emerged that Hart had shortened his name. In fact, his family had changed it, from “Hartpence” to “Hart,” which is what some of his relatives used, but according to Hart’s sister it was Gary who had talked everybody into it. (As if this weren’t weird enough, Hart had also changed his signature at some point, so that his name in the letters he signed in his forties looked different from the way it had twenty years earlier.) Then there was some question as to when Hart was really born. His official Senate documentation said 1937, but his birth certificate said 1936. Was he forty-seven, or was he forty-eight? Hart himself didn’t seem to think it mattered, until they asked him about his mother and her batty religiosity and what might have led her to obfuscate the circumstances of his birth, and then Hart got angry and said he wasn’t going to talk about his mother when he was in the middle of trying to make an argument about the future of the country. And this struck everyone as completely and incontrovertibly weird.

  “Name, age and momma”—this is how Cramer slyly referred to the holy trinity of questions that surfaced in all the stories about Hart. The constant implication was that Hart was like that doctor in The Fugitive, on the run from something murky and irredeemable in his past, constantly looking over his shoulder for the cops or a one-armed man.

  In retrospect, of course, nothing about the trinity sounds terribly sinister or alarming. Yes, Hart had reinvented himself. However much he might deny it, then and later, it was clear that Hart had wanted to put some distance between the poor, jug-eared, Bible-toting youth he had been in Kansas and the secular, Yale-educated reformer he later became. But that didn’t make him different from a lot of other Americans who grew up in claustrophobic small towns with overbearing parents and later found themselves caught up in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, where personal identities were always evolving. It didn’t make Hart some shadowy, Gatsby-like figure; the salient facts of his upbringing had been well established since he entered public life.

  True to form, Hart himself saw the relentless focus on his biography—and the supposed oddities contained therein—as a kind of autoimmune response of the media establishment, mobilized to repel the political outsider from the body politic. “I’m the only person who’s bucked the system twice,” he told The Washington Post’s David Maraniss just before the 1984 convention, referring to the McGovern campaign a
nd to the one he was about to concede. “I think there is a strong desire to punish the person who does that, to make him appear odd. That’s the only reason I can figure for all the attention on my personal life. You can’t find one article that did that to Walter Mondale. Anywhere in his career. I challenge you to find one article. Can you find one? The answer is no! You can’t find one because they weren’t written. Nobody would care about it. Do you think anybody would care if they found out Walter Mondale was a year older? Do you think anyone would care if Ronald Reagan was a year older? Of course not. The entire focus is on the person who upsets the odds.”

  There was a lot of truth to this rant. The grandfatherly Reagan, after all, had baldly revised entire chapters of his youth, sometimes seeming to confuse himself with the characters he played in the movies, and the boomers in the media seemed unable to summon much outrage. But the real reason reporters latched on to Hart’s dark trinity was probably because it was the best supporting evidence for what they knew in their gut to be true about Hart, what they discussed openly among themselves and would continue to believe decades later. Sure, he was brilliant and dynamic, but there was no escaping it: something about the guy just seemed off.

  The same could have been said of just about any presidential contender, then or later; the vocation does not attract personalities most people would consider essentially normal. But the boomers hadn’t known enough presidential candidates to reach that conclusion, and in any event, they experienced a kind of cultural disconnect when it came to Hart. He had become—by his own design, as much as anyone else’s—a symbol of the boomers’ inevitable ascendance. And so the reporters expected him, reasonably enough, to be a lot like them. Politically that was true enough. But as the young idealists who worked for Hart well understood, temperamentally he belonged to the generation born in 1936, not 1946, and he had never shed (and never would) the reserve and formality of post-Depression Kansas. As Cramer noted, he still called the TV anchors his own age “Mr. Rather” and “Mr. Brokaw,” just as he still referred to his own wife as “Mrs. Hart.” He didn’t swear (ever) or smoke or rock out to the Doors or the Stones.