by Matt Bai
And while this younger cohort expected a politician molded by the sixties to reflect and emote easily—to “share,” in the parlance of the age—Hart found their personal questions distasteful, as most politicians of an earlier generation would have. Every time Hart got near them, it seemed, they wanted to know about his parents’ piety and itinerancy, his spiritual journey—or, worst of all, his marriage. Hart made it clear that he’d rather dangle from the campaign plane.
For the younger reporters, there must have been a kind of cognitive dissonance in hanging around Hart, who was supposed to be their hip contemporary but who insisted on acting and talking like their dads. He seemed to them perpetually unable to be himself, mainly because the boomers expected “himself” to be someone entirely different from who he was.
“Gary Hart constantly pushed toward the cerebral and away from the emotional,” is how E. J. Dionne, who was the top political correspondent at The New York Times then, described him. When Dionne and I talked, it had been more than twenty-five years since the events in which Dionne himself played a pivotal role, and he still sounded dubious about the presidential timber of such a man. “That’s who he is in some deep way. And that created questions—legitimate questions, I would say—in a press corps accustomed to politicians being much more gregarious and emotional.”
Hart may have been personally annoyed by such characterizations, but politically he was unfazed. What others described as aloofness or remoteness seemed to him like traits associated with the classic cowboy heroes of his youth—a romantic ideal that Reagan embodied and that Hart, who would have been his party’s first Western nominee, imagined to be compelling in himself. “These characteristics demonstrate strength, not weakness,” Hart insisted in his memo to Shore and Rosner. “They are attractive to people—if not reporters stuck in the old political categories. Me being a ‘loner’ is like the myth that Reagan couldn’t win because he was too old.”
And yet, by the time Hart was planning his big announcement speech for the first week of April 1987 (the speech he insisted on delivering alone at Red Rocks, which the reporters thought to be beyond weird), the constant questioning of his past and his temperament had become something more than an annoyance. Even with a double-digit lead over his rivals, this notion that Hart was somehow unknowable was now threatening to overwhelm all of the substance in his campaign. The prevailing mood among the media was nicely captured by a Washington Post editorial that ran the day after the announcement. “Mr. Hart has some basis for claiming that he is the candidate of ideas,” the Post grudgingly acknowledged, ticking off some of his proposals on trade and military restructuring. “But ideas are not all there is to a campaign: human beings choose which ideas will govern. And there apparently still is some unease with Gary Hart the person.”
The newspaper then trotted out the mysterious trinity and noted that Hart had managed to win little support among his peers in the Senate—the clear implication being that this was because he was some kind of loner, and not because he routinely challenged the ideological orthodoxies of his party’s establishment and its interest groups, or because he actually wasn’t seeking such endorsements. “Since November’s elections he has been a sure-footed spokesman for his party and his own candidacy,” the Post allowed. “Now comes the examination of his ideas, which he welcomes, and the relentless analysis of his character, with which he still seems uncomfortable.”
Hart’s advisors—most of them in their late twenties or early thirties, children of the sixties who could hear the vortex humming—had long warned him, with increasing urgency, that the new generation of reporters was coming for him, and for the details of his private life, about which they themselves would never have been foolish enough to ask. Now, sensing that they might soon lose control of the story line, Hart’s closest aides—notably Shore, whom the candidate trusted most, and Kevin Sweeney, the earnest twenty-eight-year-old press secretary, a true believer who had been waiting tables in San Francisco only months before—prevailed on him to deviate somewhat from his all-about-the-ideas strategy. Specifically, they wanted him to make two exceptions to the list of things he didn’t want to do; nothing radical or humiliating, just two eminently tolerable things that a normal front-runner could be expected to do. The first thing they had in mind, immediately following the announcement, was for Hart to lead the entire press corps on a tour of his hometown. This could not have been easy for Hart, who had come a long way from his upbringing in Ottawa, who could barely remember most of the Hartpences who lived there, and who detested the idea of descending on this unsuspecting Kansas town with the entire media carnival in tow. But that is exactly what he did, and as Cramer would later recount it, Hart managed to deliver a deeply moving and heartfelt speech at the Ottawa University chapel. He expressed his gratitude for the hardworking community that had raised him—the schools and the railroad, the downtown businesses and the local radio station. Then he talked, finally, about his now dead mom and dad, and the assembled reporters found out that Hart had avoided the topic not because he felt too little for his parents and the life he’d left behind, but because he felt too much.
Surrounded: Hart (trailed by Billy Shore) after officially announcing his second presidential campaign at Red Rocks in April 1987 CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL
“I don’t think there’s anyone in this country who’s ever had better parents than I had,” Hart told the crowd, pausing for long stretches as he struggled to maintain his composure. He called his father, Carl, “as honorable and decent a man as I think ever walked the face of the earth,” and described his much maligned mother, Nina, as a woman who loved life and a good joke. “You often hear the term ‘salt of the earth,’ ” he said haltingly, trying to hold himself together. “And I think that’s what they were. Between them, they represented about the best this society has to offer. And what they gave me I don’t think I can ever repay, except to try and raise my children as well as they raised me.” After that, Hart’s team figured, no one could accuse him of being unable to emote.
The second thing the team needed was Hart’s cooperation with a single, intimate profile, one lengthy treatment, where he would at last sit down and discuss anything the reporter wanted to discuss, up to and including his upbringing and his marriage. If Hart would just open up to one of these younger hotshots, someone he felt he could basically trust, then readers and other reporters (who were an important audience, too) could be reassured that Hart wasn’t actually hiding anything, that he was in fact a relatively normal guy who just happened to prefer talking about his ideas for the country to dissecting his personal life. And Hart would be able to say, ever after, that he had already answered all the People magazine sorts of questions, and it was time to move on to what mattered.
The idea to channel all of this into a definitive magazine profile, rather than cooperate with a book or perhaps submit to a grilling on national TV, may have emerged from Hart himself, although later it would seem to have been a collective decision. Hart’s response to Shore and Rosner contains an intriguing note that looks ominous only in the context of history.
Under point number 20, Hart wrote: “Forget a book length biography. Let’s plan a friendly—but critical—long feature piece. Suggestions?”
Warren Beatty had advised Hart, months earlier, that the longer he avoided giving in-depth interviews to reporters, the more valuable such an interview would become. Beatty knew his public relations. By early 1987, Hart’s aides could have chosen just about any writer or venue for their big curtain-raising profile, since everyone wanted to be first with the big interview. That they chose E. J. Dionne made perfect sense. It wasn’t just that Dionne, who was about to turn thirty-five, was perhaps the most obvious star of the new generation, having already reported from Paris, Beirut, and Rome, while somehow making time to cover two presidential campaigns. Nor was the main factor in the decision that Dionne would write his profile for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, which combined a more literary gravitas
than the newsweeklies with the influence of a large national circulation.
What made Dionne special among the younger crowd, more than any of this, is that Hart actually respected him. Nerdy and sputtering with energy (“harried like a border collie with a bad herd,” in Cramer’s inimical description), Dionne wasn’t just another privileged dilettante in search of some wry observation he could peddle on Nightline. A Catholic school kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, which was no one’s idea of a patrician paradise, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he had earned a doctorate in sociology. He was a serious, first-rate intellect, and to Hart that meant Dionne could be, if not quite coopted, then at least made to see the relevance and urgency of Hart’s agenda. At least Dionne didn’t go dead in the eyes when you talked about economic transformation or the decline of the nation-state, which is more than Hart could say for most of the boomers on the bus.
For his part, Dionne felt conflicted about Hart. As a fairly traditional Northeastern liberal, Dionne was put off by Hart’s larger argument against orthodoxies and interest groups, particularly the way he seemed ready to jettison Labor in the name of some new economic order. He resented Hart’s famous quote from his 1974 Senate campaign, when The Washington Post’s David Broder had posited to Hart that traditional liberalism was about to be vindicated by the election of a new class of young Democrats. “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” Hart said then—a comment for which a lot of liberals, Humphrey among them, would have trouble forgiving him.
In a sense, Dionne and Hart personified the geographic rift in the party—between the old urban centers, with their New Deal ideology and their reliance on industrial and political machines, and the emerging Western and Southern states, where Democrats were more independent-minded and more hopeful about the new economy. It was a divide that would preoccupy the party for much of the next decade and beyond, as “New Democrats” and old ones sought to control the agenda.
And yet Dionne was thoughtful enough to accept the premise that both government and the party were in dire need of modernization. And he genuinely admired Hart, with whom he shared a bookish and theological bent. “There was a part of him I found utterly engaging and totally comprehensible,” Dionne told me. Hart ranked right up there in sheer brilliance with the Harvard and Oxford professors Dionne had known—and he was funny, too, in a mischievous and endearing way. Dionne kept asking Hart, for instance, about the mystery novel he had cowritten with a Republican colleague in the Senate, William Cohen. (It was titled, perhaps ironically given all the questions about Hart’s past, The Double Man.) But every time Dionne raised a passage from the book, Hart would shut him down with that flashing of the eyebrows and a wry: “Oh, Cohen wrote that.” Dionne soon realized that Hart was playing with him and would never own up to having written a word of the book, and after a while it became a comic routine between them.
However much Dionne may have been a man of ideas, he counted himself among a generation of reporters who had been heavily influenced—whether they were scholarly enough to know it or not—by the work of Erik Erikson. The German-born psychologist, who immigrated to the United States when the Nazis came to power and ended up on Harvard’s faculty, is most famous for having pioneered the concept of “identity”—and what he called the “identity crisis”—in the 1950s and 1960s. “If Teddy White can be credited with opening the back room of American politics to the public view,” Dionne said, “a writer like Erik Erikson could be credited for opening the back room of the psyche.”
The most thoughtful works of what came to be known as the New Journalism, books as varied as Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, had this in common: unlike White’s work, which dwelled on the surface of the political process, they burrowed deeply and relentlessly into the subconscious of their subjects, playing psychoanalyst to politicians, sifting through childhoods or scrutinizing mannerisms for the most tenuous clues to their underlying motives and insecurities. What good was it to know a candidate’s stated positions if he had learned from a young age to dissemble or evade? What was the point of dissecting his agenda if he didn’t have the strength of character to follow through?
Dionne found himself fascinated by the obvious tension in Hart’s upbringing and education. He felt certain that if you could understand what had propelled the journey from Ottawa and Bethany College to Yale and Washington, the journey from Hartpence to Hart, then you could understand the inner turmoil that made Hart so confusing a character. “I was trying to figure out, What does it mean to be an existential politician?” Dionne would recall. This is a word that younger intellectuals had been throwing around since the early sixties, when Norman Mailer used it to describe John Kennedy, and while it had an erudite ring to it, Dionne still had some trouble defining it a quarter century later. An existential politician, Dionne told me, is “someone who is detached from traditional forms of faith, whether in God or in the political system, but nonetheless feels an obligation to act, whether the faith exists or not. And I think that Hart had some of that in him.”
It was, for me, a sort of time-bending experience to hear Dionne describe his methodology, or what he could remember of it, more than twenty-five years later—the story behind the famous story that had been written while I was still a freshman in college. I could see myself doing all of the same things the young Dionne had done, the things that anyone writing for an elite, intellectual magazine would have tried to do. Dionne knocked around Ottawa, an explorer in a strange land, searching for the significance of Hart’s origins. He spent a night in southern Illinois engrossed in deep, esoteric discussions with Hart’s favorite philosophy professor from Bethany, Prescott Johnson, whom Hart would always credit with having had a profound effect on his life.
Industriously, Dionne spent many hours delving into the works of some of Hart’s favorite writers and philosophers—Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Plato. “The cave!” Hart exclaimed, laughing, when Dionne brought up Plato’s famous concept in one of their conversations. “Let’s don’t start that. That ain’t going to play in Iowa.” At one point during their travels together, Hart gave Dionne a copy of one of his Kierkegaard texts, a gesture made, you can imagine, as much in frustration as in friendship. (As in: Here, read it for yourself if you’re so damn interested, and stop pestering me.) Dionne held on to the book—Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing—for all the years after.
At his first of two interviews with Hart, aboard a small plane en route from Austin to Denver, Dionne posed precisely the question I might have posed, too, though maybe not as artfully. “Why do you think that we think you’re weird?” he asked. Note the use of the word “we,” rather than “they,” with its implication that it wasn’t just a few cranky journalists who found Hart impossibly strange, but everyone, Dionne included. Note how the question was designed to elicit exactly the kind of response Hart provided, which was to ratify its basic premise. “Please,” Hart replied, “keep your mind open to the possibility that I’m not weird.” That, of course, became Dionne’s lead.
In that interview and in the subsequent one, in the café of a Howard Johnson’s hotel in New Hampshire, Hart went to heroic lengths to take on and conquer, once and for all, questions about his temperament and what urban reporters considered his exotic upbringing. Again and again, Dionne, surrounded by the imposing stacks of paper that represented his atlas of Hart’s intellectual pilgrimage, threw Hart’s own past quotes back at him, like the time in 1972 when, as a thirty-five-year-old operative attracting all kinds of media attention, Hart had mischievously said of himself: “I never reveal who I really am.”
“Do you want a record kept of everything you’ve ever said in your life to anybody and have it thrown back at you fifteen years later?” Hart demanded. “My problem is that I’ve revealed too much about myself.
“See, I think you’ve got the coin reversed,” Hart told Dionne. “I think I�
�m the healthy one. I think you ought to be asking all those other guys who have done nothing but hold public office and have no other sides to their personalities: Why they don’t write novels and why they don’t read Kierkegaard? Why they don’t broaden themselves out? Why is it that somebody like me is thought the oddball?”
Inevitably, by the end of the second interview, Hart was growing testy and impatient. Questioned yet again about his childhood among the Nazarenes, Hart warned Dionne, “I’m going to answer about three more of these, and then I’m not going to answer any more. I was thirteen at the time. It’s nonsense. Who cares what Ronald Reagan was thinking when he was thirteen? Or Joe Biden?
“My struggle was with the institution,” Hart said of the church, trying yet again to be understood. “Thomas Jefferson had that struggle, and so have more than half or more of the thoughtful people in the world. It’s not unique to me. And is it something that plagues me today? No. I am very normal and very healthy.”
Then Hart heard his own words echo, saw Dionne writing in his notebook, and laughed. He laughed heartily, because the conversation seemed absurd, and because he was beginning to realize he could win neither by staying silent nor by trying to explain himself—a conundrum that would grow more pronounced in the weeks ahead. “I can see this,” Hart said, imagining out loud the finished story Dionne would write. “ ‘Hart insists that he is very normal. In a wide-ranging and lengthy interview, Hart insists that he is not weird.’ ”
