All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

Dionne never had any reservation about grilling Hart on his well-known weirdness, because the issue was out there already; it was all anyone talked about—which is to say, it was all other reporters were talking about on the bus or on TV. It was the main thing, Dionne assumed, that people wanted to know about Hart, and the reason Hart had granted him access in the first place.

  In this sense, Dionne was offering what would become, in the ensuing years, the standard rationale for the slew of candidate profiles revolving around psychotherapy and personal behavior, rather than ideas and worldviews. (I myself would employ the same rationale on many occasions.) It wasn’t really up to the writer to decide what questions were relevant. The conversation “out there” had already done that, and all the poor writer could do was to shake his head sadly and try to bring some clarity to it. Surely politics would be better if we could all just refocus the debate on the things that really mattered, but it never seemed to be the journalist’s job to do the refocusing. The given issues were the given issues, in the same way that rivers just flow the way they flow, and all the helpless reporter could do was selflessly hurl himself into the murky current and try to help his readers navigate their way through.

  What did bother Dionne, though, was the far more unseemly question of Hart’s marital fidelity. Like other Washington insiders, he had long assumed that Hart was sleeping around. “Oh, everybody knew who Gary Hart was,” Dionne told me. Asking him about it was something else. Dionne may have fancied himself something of an amateur Erikson, but he was not a trivial guy; he didn’t earn a Ph.D. and survive Beirut only to come home and join the Hollywood paparazzi. He was well aware that no one in his position had ever before pestered a presidential candidate about rumored affairs, let alone written a major piece about it. But he was also well aware that the rumblings about Hart’s sex life were out there, too. And if he ignored them altogether, then his colleagues might find him too credulous. His definitive profile might be derided as anything but.

  “I didn’t want to focus on his sex life,” Dionne recalled when we talked. “I also did not want to write a naïve profile that acted as if I did not know this was potentially an issue. I always had the suspicion that this was the campaign in which it would blow up. And so my solution, as someone who really does not like candidates’ sex lives being central to the dialogue, was to ask him about it in the interview. I probably asked three or four questions. I felt it should be there.”

  And so Dionne raised the issue during the second and final interview. Going back to the well of Hart’s voluminous interviews as a younger man, Dionne reminded him of a painful learning experience. Back in 1972, the journalist Sally Quinn had come to interview Hart for a profile, and Hart, feeling either flirtatious or unnerved or a little of both, gave her an inexplicably dumb quote. “I have almost no personal life at all—I lead a completely political existence,” Hart had said then. “If one party doesn’t share the same interests, you’ve got a problem. Let’s just say I believe in reform marriage.”

  It was, for Dionne, a deft way into the subject of Hart’s so-called womanizing, slashing through the thicket of Hart’s defenses with a machete of his own making. But this was what Hart had signed up for. He knew why they were doing the Times Magazine profile. He knew his marriage was going to come up, and he knew the subject made Dionne uncomfortable. He was ready.

  “It was a very stupid thing to say,” he admitted. “Lee was living in Denver, and I was living in Washington, and I was unhappy because my kids were little and I didn’t see them much. I learned.” Then, again, he turned the question back on Dionne, trying to shame him. “There’s no reward for being candid,” Hart said. “In fact, there are penalties for being candid. People say, ‘Why are politicians such conniving, calculating S.O.B.’s?’ It’s because who knows what oddball thing you say is not going to come back fifteen years later to be some profound insight into your character.”

  As is the case with any magazine piece, then and now, Dionne’s would take several weeks to write, edit, fact-check, and illustrate. (Hart, in keeping with his plan for the campaign, refused to set aside time for a cover shoot. “I will not pose, I will not pose, I will not pose,” he told Sweeney.) Even after Dionne returned to Washington to write his 4,700-word piece, he continued to struggle with the questions about sex—how much to feature the material and where. “I felt it was very important that the piece not be dominated by that, but just tell the readers that this is out there,” Dionne would remember. “I was very torn when I was writing that piece.”

  Dionne was taken with one of the other quotes he’d elicited from Hart, which nicely expressed Hart’s frustration with the entire line of questioning about his marriage. Dionne thought the quote potentially explosive, and he made sure to weave it into the piece—not up high, but in the lower half, where he thought it belonged. When he got the edited draft back from the magazine, however, Dionne couldn’t find that paragraph. As often happens, some less than impressed editor had cut the quote to make space for something else. It was gone, but only for now.

  The Dionne interviews unsettled Hart. The tenor of the questions, coming from a reporter everyone agreed was as thoughtful and substantive as the campaign was likely to find, had the effect of confirming what his advisors had been telling him for months, and of making the campaign he had wanted to run seem futile. On a drive down to Denver from Red Rocks, where Hart had been walking through the announcement site and making final preparations, the normally pensive candidate suddenly unburdened himself to Shore. In a soliloquy both of them would remember long after, Hart said he had been visited by a “premonition,” a sense of dread that the media would never let him campaign on the ideas he had laid out, but rather would insist on making the campaign about him and his persona. In 1987, it was still possible to find such a realization shocking.

  Of course, by that time, Hart also must have known—subconsciously, if not consciously—that he had set events in motion that would make his “premonition” much more likely to come true. He had only recently exposed himself and his campaign to exactly the kind of relentless, trivial scrutiny he feared. But this was something Shore had no way of knowing.

  Running for president in the modern age—like being president—is a uniquely isolating experience. You are surrounded, always, by supporters and handlers, and yet none can fully share in the constant absurdity of being the central figure in a campaign, and none can ever be entirely themselves in your presence. Often they lie to you outright—about next week’s schedule, or about when you’re stopping for lunch, or about how many people will show up at the next rally. You do not go home to your family or take the weekend off; if you’re lucky, you get five hours in a hotel and thirty minutes to exercise before the sun comes up. (There is a surreal scene, in a long-lost Frontline documentary about his 1984 campaign, of Hart, dressed in suit and tie, frantically squeezing in some weightlifting while his aides brief him on strategy.) You become, in a sense, the CEO of your own life, the titular head of an existence that is said to be yours, but that is in every practical sense orchestrated and controlled by other people, some of whose names you can’t remember or never knew.

  And so candidates who reach a certain level of presidential politics tend to draw in someone—a “body man” who knows their flaws and keeps their secrets close, who can smooth over some messes and anticipate others, who can translate gestures and moods for exhausted staff members, and who can help the candidate relax, laugh, and generally feel moored to the world he knew before. (This is to be distinguished from the paid “body man” whom the new beat reporters love to write about every election cycle, the kid who carries around hand sanitizer and snack food and that kind of thing.) Nixon’s number one body man was Bebe Rebozo. Clinton’s traveling alter ego and fixer was Bruce Lindsey. Barack Obama leaned on a Chicago pal named Martin Nesbitt.

  By 1987, Hart had not one, but two such body men. As coincidence would have it, each of them went by the nickname “Billy,” and each embodied a
n opposing side of Hart’s contradictory nature.

  Billy Number One was Shore, the kind-faced and unassuming thirty-two-year-old, who ten years earlier, fresh out of Penn, had wandered into Hart’s Senate office looking for an internship, because he had read about the new young senator who wanted to revitalize liberalism. Shore didn’t meet the senator, or get the internship, but eventually he got hired in the mailroom, and then he worked his way up (because Shore was, if nothing else, immensely competent). And then one day in the early 1980s he found himself sitting at a table in the Senate Dining Room with the boss, whom he really didn’t know very well, and Hart was talking about presidential politics, and he told Shore, “Maybe you ought to go up to New Hampshire and just take a look around.” Just like that, Shore became the senator’s one-man covert operation, gathering intel and recruiting soldiers for years before anyone really caught on.

  Hart was like that. He would evaluate his personnel and formulate a plan gradually, keeping it entirely to himself, and then one day he would offhandedly utter a single line, and your life would be changed forever. It happened to Shore again, in New Hampshire, after the little grassroots campaign had suddenly ignited and grown much too quickly, and the Secret Service agents were getting into it with some of Hart’s staff over logistics, right in front of the candidate, and if you knew Hart, you knew that he’d rather be digging his way through a landfill than referee something like that. “You know, you should probably just stick with me from now on,” Hart said to Shore, almost as an aside, as if the idea had just occurred to him. And that was it. After that, if you wanted something from Gary Hart, everyone knew, it was best to go through Billy.

  Shore’s father had run a congressional office in Pittsburgh, so he had an innate sense for scheduling and staffing, the way the coach’s kid instinctively knows how to turn the double play. But Shore’s real skill and value were in enabling Hart to be the introvert he still was, at least much of the time. Shore provided a force field of protection around Hart’s solitude, sitting nearby with a binder or a book, knowing how to be quiet, silently warding off others who didn’t. And where Hart could be, as the writers never tired of pointing out, “cool and aloof,” Shore was congenitally warm and considerate. Where Hart intended to remain above the indignities of cheap political theater, Shore understood that everyone around a campaign had a job to do; he was happy to help if he could, and genuinely apologetic if he couldn’t. By filling in the gaps in his candidate’s personality, Shore made it possible for Hart to go on being Hart without leaving a trail of scorched egos and resentment in his wake.

  If Billy Number One played to Hart’s pensive side, then Billy Number Two had a different brief. Throughout his adult life, Hart had been inexorably drawn to what he would call “colorful characters”—outsize personalities and raconteurs who seemed to relish the moment and knew how to have fun, which is something the Nazarenes hadn’t taught. Warren Beatty was like that, and so was Hunter Thompson; Hart loved telling the story of sitting in the famous writer’s living room while a wild turkey paraded around the house. Hart had a similar fascination with the blustery Russian poet and dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with whom Hart spent a good deal of time during his 1986 visit to the Soviet Union, and even with world leaders like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom cultivated an air of danger and mystery. In ways he wouldn’t have cared to consider, Hart was still the boy who had learned everything he knew of the outside world sitting in the Carnegie-endowed library back in Ottawa. But if Shore appealed to the side of him that had happily passed those afternoons reading alone, these other figures reminded him of the worldly spies and swashbucklers whose adventures on the page he could only imagine.

  Billy Broadhurst wasn’t a famous actor or a defiant dictator, but he fit this mold nonetheless. Ray Strother, Hart’s adman from 1984, had introduced Hart to his fellow Louisianan—a smooth-talking, silver-haired lobbyist who was an intimate of Louisiana’s roguish governor, Edwin Edwards. Broadhurst would bring New Orleans cuisine back to Washington, where he lived part-time, and would host what he called his “Cajun kitchens” for a group of senators, Hart included, who would drop by after the day’s final votes were cast. He was a voluble storyteller and repository of dirty jokes. Hart found him vastly amusing.

  Broadhurst had a talent—an extremely valuable talent in politics—for discerning what other people wanted, without their having to ask for it. At the time, for instance, Broadhurst was carrying around one of those first-generation cell phones, the size of a woman’s purse, with the pullout antenna and a battery that lasted an hour. Billy Shore wasn’t a guy who cared much about the latest gadget, and he certainly never asked anybody for anything, but for some reason he did secretly covet that phone. And somehow Broadhurst must have noticed him eyeing it, or maybe Shore asked him about it not quite as offhandedly as he’d meant to, because one day Broadhurst showed up with another one. Shore needed it for the campaign, Broadhurst explained. It was a political necessity.

  And so Broadhurst figured out, pretty quickly, that with Hart, when you were out to dinner or on a plane, it was often best to say nothing, to let the man simply be. If Shore wanted nothing so much as that clunky phone, then Hart wanted only respite from the endless, droning small talk, which probably no top-tier candidate since Nixon had found so profoundly draining. Broadhurst was acute enough to know when to shut up and give Hart his room to think, and for this reason he became a near constant traveling companion.

  Broadhurst did have some semiofficial duties on the campaign. Bill Dixon, the campaign manager, had figured that if Broadhurst was going to keep dropping by the Denver headquarters and going to staff meetings here and there, it would be nice to know what he was actually supposed to do, and so Broadhurst had written him a memo with some ideas. The two men agreed that Broadhurst would take some meetings to screen people who wanted to see the candidate, and he would raise some money down South, both of which he delivered on. (Broadhurst, as you might expect, had also taken it upon himself to furnish the headquarters with a nice coffeemaker and microwave oven, which endeared him to everyone.) But Billy Number Two’s real and unspoken job, everyone at the top of the campaign knew, was to keep Hart laughing and relaxed, or at least as relaxed as a guy like Hart could be.

  Broadhurst quietly took responsibility for the downtime Hart kept insisting he needed, and which the schedulers promised to give him but, let’s face it, never would. Hart demanded one weekend off a month—that was it—to unwind and pace himself for the long campaign ahead. And that weekend on the calendar belonged to Broadhurst. If the arrangement raised any alarms with Dixon or Shore or Sweeney, or with any of Hart’s aides, no one would remember it later. What they remembered, instead, was a certain feeling of security in knowing that someone connected to the campaign was keeping an eye on Hart while he was off relaxing. And anyway, there were schedules to set and arrangements to make, speeches to write and reporters to mollify, and long-standing campaign debts from 1984 still shadowing the campaign. (The week of the Red Rocks announcement, federal marshals tasked with collecting those debts raided a fundraiser hosted by Beatty at the Los Angeles home of Marvin Davis, an oil tycoon, carting away $30,000 in cash and creating embarrassing headlines.) No one really had time to wonder what kind of relaxing Hart and Broadhurst had planned.

  It was Broadhurst who conceived of a weekend in Miami at the end of March 1987, a last gasp of rest and freedom before the official campaign announcement that was two weeks away. He accompanied Hart to a fundraising meeting on Friday night in Miami, and on Saturday the two of them went down to the dock at the swank Turnberry Isle resort and boarded Monkey Business, an eighty-three-foot yacht Broadhurst had chartered for the weekend. Hart would later tell me he had intended to use the time for some deep thinking about campaign strategy. “It wasn’t just fun and sun,” he insisted. Whatever the plan, dozens of locals had gathered around to gawk at Hart and shake his hand, when an attractive blonde came up and said she knew him.
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  Actually, Donna Rice was an attractive blonde only in the sense that the Sistine Chapel had some pretty good artwork. She was twenty-nine and positively breathtaking, a model and aspiring actress when she wasn’t selling pharmaceutical products for Wyeth. As fate would have it, she had been walking on the dock when she saw the crowd and decided to investigate.

  Rice reminded Hart that she’d met him only three months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, at the rocker Don Henley’s house in Aspen. She and Henley had been a thing for a while, and Donna had been preparing some food in the kitchen, and that’s when she’d chatted with the handsome older guy who was apparently some kind of big political star, although she’d had no idea until Henley and some of the others had told her. (Lee had been there, too, although Donna didn’t seem to remember that part.) Rice was smart, engaging, and undaunted by celebrity, and she didn’t know a whit about politics. And you can imagine how all of that appealed to Hart, who loved women and thoughtful conversation, but who was feeling suffocated by fame and was tired as hell of talking about New Hampshire and Iowa. He invited Rice to come back to the boat later on. He and Billy were taking a quick lunch cruise to Bimini, where Broadhurst’s boat was being repaired, and it would be great if Rice could come along.

  Rice wasn’t up for joining the excursion by herself, so she called her friend Lynn Armandt, who owned a bikini boutique in Turnberry Isle and who would likely come aboard at a moment’s notice. Of all the bad choices Donna Rice would make in the weeks ahead that would affect her life as much as they did Hart’s, this would prove to be one of the worst. But Armandt said yes, and the four of them—Hart, Broadhurst, Rice, and Armandt—sailed to Bimini, drinking and lunching on lobster salad while Hart went through the plot of his next spy novel. (Rice later said she asked Hart, at one point, if he had ever been married, and he said yes—in fact, he was married.) When they got ashore, they all drank some more, and then all four of them sang and danced onstage at a bar.