All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Then they gathered on the pier, surrounded by tourists, where Rice handed Armandt her camera so she could have some photos by which to remember the trip, and she posed on Hart’s lap. In the days ahead, she would give some of the shots to her pal Lynn, just for fun. This wasn’t an especially sage decision, either, although it would only matter after the fact.

  As Hart would later tell it, what happened next was that Broadhurst’s newly fixed boat got stuck in Bimini, because the customs office had closed for the day, and so, as luck would have it, the four of them had to spend the night. Hart and Rice would later insist the men and women slept apart, with Donna and Lynn on Monkey Business and the men on Broadhurst’s boat. But when Armandt told her story months later to People, which paid her many thousands of dollars for the privilege, she would say that she woke up to find Rice missing from the cabin and assumed she must have been with Hart. Whatever the sleeping arrangements, they all sailed back to Miami in the morning and said their goodbyes—at least for the time being. Broadhurst had talked to Armandt about maybe doing some work for him in Washington, because he had a job open. And he thought there might be a role for Rice, too, doing some fundraising for Hart. He said they should keep in touch.

  In What It Takes, Cramer alluded to the “true believers” in Hart’s camp who would posit, in the months that followed, that everything was Broadhurst’s fault, and not Hart’s—that it was Billy Number Two who stupidly set up the cruise in the first place, and who kept them in Bimini, and who couldn’t just let the women walk off the boat and out of Hart’s life forever. Decades later, Billy Shore would clearly remember a moment in an airport holding room in Iowa, just a few days before Hart met Broadhurst and the two women for a second engagement in Washington. Shore had a stack of those old pink message slips that used to say “While You Were Out” on them, and leafing through the pile, he handed Hart the one from Broadhurst, since he knew Hart would want to return that call. Then Shore left the room for a moment, probably to use the men’s room. When he returned, Hart was on the phone, and Shore could hear only his side of the conversation.

  I don’t know, Billy, I really have to work on that speech this weekend, Shore recalled Hart saying, or something to that effect. (Hart had a major economics address scheduled for the following Tuesday.) I appreciate the thought, but I’m just not sure it’s a good idea. Shore was too kind to blatantly point the finger at anyone all these years later, but the implication of that memory was clear: it was Broadhurst who had engineered a reunion between Hart and Donna Rice that weekend in Washington, and he must have brought Rice over to see Hart despite the boss’s stated reluctance.

  In the many years after Broadhurst disappeared back to the Bayou, never to be heard from in Washington again, this sentiment would intensify and darken, to the point where some Hart loyalists entertained elaborate—if not entirely implausible—conspiracy theories. Could someone have paid Billy Broadhurst or Lynn Armandt to set Hart up? Did the Republicans, whose soon-to-be-nominee was a former CIA director, want to get Hart out of the way, the way Nixon’s guys had managed to knock off Ed Muskie with a dirty trick fifteen years earlier? Did the Mafia, still rattled by disclosures about their ties to Kennedy in the Church Committee report, want to make sure Hart didn’t get to the White House? Hart had been, after all, the committee member most persistent in questioning the Warren Commission’s official report on the Kennedy assassination, and he had publicly promised, several times, to reopen the investigation as president.

  Monkey Business, as it turned out, was owned by a guy named Donald Soffer, who had bought and developed most of Turnberry Isle. Soffer’s friends included the speedboat magnate Donald Aronow, who was in turn a friend and supporter of George H. W. Bush’s. In February 1987, not two months before Hart stepped foot on Monkey Business, Aronow was gunned down in a Mafia-style execution. In Blue Thunder, a sensational investigative book on the Aronow murder published in 1990, journalists Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell alleged that Armandt had been connected to Soffer and to people in the narcotics trade, and they reported that federal agents had found a sheath of Hart’s stump speeches in the safe of Ben Kramer, another local Syndicate figure, after he was arrested.

  What did all of these disparate clues add up to? That was anyone’s guess. Hart would never go as far as to say he believed in a conspiracy, but he didn’t discount it, either; he declared himself “agnostic” on the question. “It was either the most unbelievable tragedy of errors,” he told me once, “or it was a setup. And no one’s ever going to know.”

  Once, an old supporter sent Hart, without comment, a video making the rounds on YouTube, which Hart forwarded to me. The video featured a long interview with Chip Tatum, who claimed, believably, to have been a high-level black-ops agent with the CIA in the late 1980s, and who disappeared in 1998. Tatum said he had worked with Oliver North and carried out orders from then Vice President Bush, including some to assassinate foreign nationals. About an hour into the video, he said he had been asked by the Republican administration to “neutralize” Hart’s campaign, and while he had refused to take such covert action against an American citizen, he assumed someone else had accepted the assignment. (Tatum’s allegation was undercut by his assertion that agents had subsequently taped Hart’s affair with Rice and leaked it to the press, which never actually occurred.)

  To the extent that such wild theories involve the complicity of Billy Broadhurst, though, they probably do him a disservice. Broadhurst was himself humiliated after the events of 1987—“Billy was more careful when he was pimping for me,” his friend Edwin Edwards quipped, unhelpfully, after the scandal broke—and he genuinely seems to have loved Hart. Even when I tracked down Broadhurst twenty-five years later, long after Hart had stopped speaking to him, he sounded shattered by the whole episode. He told me Hart would have made a great president and that he would never publicly discuss anything that happened in 1987 unless Hart personally asked him to. (Hart wouldn’t.)

  And what’s clear, no matter what you want to believe, is that no one could have set up Gary Hart without Hart’s willing participation. It wasn’t Broadhurst who invited Donna Rice to join the cruise to Bimini. And if Rice’s account can be believed, it wasn’t just Broadhurst, but Hart himself, who encouraged her to visit Washington, calling her several times from the road in the weeks after their cruise.

  Why he did something so reckless is a question that no one—not the armchair Eriksons in the press corps, not the aides who were closest to the candidate, not even Hart himself, who had years of painful solitude in which to reflect upon it afterward—would ever be able to fully or persuasively answer. Maybe in his own mind, as he had hinted back in 1972, Hart considered his oft-troubled marriage to Lee more of a political necessity, for both of them, than an enduring commitment to monogamy—and if she didn’t expect him to be faithful after all this time, how could anyone else? (In 1987, remember, it was probably easier to run as an adulterer than as a man who’d just split from his wife.)

  Maybe, as some of his advisors later postulated, Hart saw the official start of the campaign as a kind of wedding night, and his dalliance with Rice was the bachelor party, a last stand before accepting the limitations of the life he had chosen. Maybe Hart had a genuine compulsion, an addiction to sex or at least to flirtation, that most men of his generation wouldn’t have recognized or known how to handle—and that, up until that moment in the life of the society, probably wouldn’t have prevented him from becoming president in any event. A Westerner born in the Depression years wasn’t what you’d call an obvious candidate for addiction therapy, and certainly not in the 1980s.

  What’s certain is that, far from harboring some self-destructive instinct, Hart did not believe he would be caught or that his decisions would be catastrophic. He had been at the center of the media universe not three years earlier, besieged by cameras and skeptical reporters everywhere he went, and no one had even bothered to raise the rumors publicly, even though his escapades were
common knowledge among Washington pundits. He knew for a fact that Mondale had been the subject of similar speculation, because some of his own consultants had come to him claiming to have evidence, but there was no way Hart was going to start that kind of thermonuclear war, and no reporter had followed up on the lead, either. Hart may have credited the aides and friends who warned him that things were different now, that even the appearance of adultery could ruin him, but he could not believe for a second that any creditable reporter would actually go hunting for the evidence.

  Days after the cruise to Bimini, and just a few weeks after his conversations with Dionne, Hart took his first major campaign trip, touring the rural South with a small contingent of aides and reporters. (Hart firmly believed he could win some Southern states in a general election, and he had pointedly rejected Shore and Rosner’s advice to ignore the region.) At dinner one night in Atlanta, where Hart stopped in to see Jimmy Carter, Lee sat at one end of a long table near the two Billys and John Emerson, who had run California for Hart in 1984 and was now his deputy campaign manager. At the other end, out of earshot, Hart sat with his old friend Jack Germond, the columnist and TV commentator who had been a frequent dinner companion since 1972.

  It seemed to Germond on that trip that Hart had at last become an unstoppable force in presidential politics—at ease as a candidate, focused and passionate. And yet he worried about one thing, and he shared it with Hart in a whisper no one else at the table could hear. Personally, he didn’t care whom Hart did or didn’t sleep with, but this stuff about a “zipper problem” was out there, Germond said. What was Hart going to do about it?

  Hart assured Germond, as he had his campaign aides, that he had nothing to worry about there—his adventurous days were in the past. Only later would Germond learn that, on that very trip, Hart had called Donna Rice from a pay phone in Alabama.

  4

  FOLLOW ME AROUND

  IT WAS AROUND 8 P.M. on Monday, April 27, when the phone rang on Tom Fiedler’s desk. If the caller had intended to get his answering machine, then she didn’t know much about Fiedler. He was still in the Miami Herald newsroom, rereading a bunch of notes and campaign speeches.

  “You know, you said in the paper that there were rumors that Gary Hart is a womanizer,” the woman on the other end said. Fiedler would later describe her tone as one of “strained jocularity,” as if she wanted all this to sound absurd and lighthearted, but they both knew it wasn’t. “Those aren’t rumors,” she told him. And then a stunning question: “How much do you guys pay for pictures?”

  The call had come to Fiedler—and not to any of the other dozens of reporters who were following Hart—for two reasons. The first was just good fortune: Fiedler was the top political reporter in Miami, where Hart happened to have hooked up with Donna Rice, and where the caller lived. In those days, before websites and multiple cable news channels, your local paper was your main connection to the world. So if you had a tip, that’s who you called.

  The second reason had to do with Fiedler himself, who had added his own dispatch to a series of controversial media stories since Hart’s formal announcement two weeks earlier, each one affecting the next, setting in motion a cascade of events that would quickly and imperceptibly change the flow of American history.

  It had started, everyone would later agree, with Howard Fineman, who was Newsweek’s top young political writer. The newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek, and to a lesser extent U.S. News & World Report—were still a huge deal in 1987, and they prided themselves on getting to what Newsweek editors called the zeitgeist of a story, as opposed to its more restrictive set of facts. Newspaper reporters, back then, were almost always tethered to the format of “objective” coverage—the who, what, when, where, and why, with little of the analytical voice that later generations would take for granted. For that kind of analysis, you generally had to read one of the glossy “newsmags,” whose editors didn’t mind veering widely into the lane of speculation. There was nothing a Newsweek writer liked better than getting out in front of a story (and generating “buzz” for the magazine) by writing what all the daily guys knew to be obvious but couldn’t actually say.

  And so it made sense that it was Fineman, a sharp and competitive reporter, who went where others on the bus were dying to go, and whose editors let him. “The Harts’ marriage has been a long but precarious one,” he wrote in his story that would be on newsstands when Hart made his announcement at Red Rocks, “and he has been haunted by rumors of womanizing. Friends contend that his dating has been confined to marital separations—he and Lee have had two—nonetheless many political observers expect the rumors to emerge as a campaign issue.” Having thus liberally sprinkled the kerosene, Fineman lit the match with a quote from John McEvoy, who had been one of Hart’s senior aides in the 1984 campaign: “He’s always in jeopardy of having the sex issue raised if he can’t keep his pants on.” (Soon after, Newsweek published a “clarification” from an irate McEvoy, who contended that the quote “was made in a speculative and purely hypothetical context, contrary to the actual facts as I know them.” Which didn’t clarify much, really.)

  What Fineman’s story did, more than anything, was to open the door for everyone else. Stories of Hart’s “womanizing”—a strange word, which made him sound as if he were running through random women and then discarding them on the side of the highway, rather than having squired around some of the better known socialites in Washington—were no longer “out there”; now they were in print, and by the arcane logic of political journalism, that meant they had been legitimized as a campaign issue. And so what happened next is that every reporter who scored a sit-down with Hart in the hours after his announcement, on what was supposed to be a triumphant cross-country tour, kept asking him about the long-standing rumors of his unspecified affairs, which in fact had been just as long-standing and unspecified the week before, but were only now—thanks to Newsweek—considered to have met the definition of news.

  When it got back to Hart that operatives for some of his rivals had been calling reporters in the days leading up to his announcement to fan the flame (what would happen to the party if this stuff came out after he was nominated, when it was too late to get someone else onto the ballot?), Hart couldn’t manage to contain his aggravation. “All I know is what reporters tell me,” Hart seethed in an interview with a Time correspondent aboard the plane. “If it’s true that other campaigns are spreading rumors, I think it’s an issue.”

  This mini-outburst constituted, as Cramer would later put it, a “fatal mistake.” If Newsweek had made it okay for the reporters to interrogate Hart about his legendary infidelity, then Hart’s quote had now made it okay for them to write their own stories on the subject. A candidate accusing rival campaigns of defaming him was a story any day of the week, no matter what the issue—that the issue here was sex, rather than, say, a proposal to tax foreign oil, only made it irresistible.

  It was not the last time Hart would find himself trapped inside a box that candidates and their experts in “crisis management” would try ever after to escape, desperately and in vain. If you refused to answer the questions, you were hiding something, and the story wouldn’t die. But if you tried to refute the premise of the story, you only succeeded in giving it new life, by virtue of the fact that you had “responded” to the allegations. Either way, it was impossible to change the subject. If there were any doubts that the campaign, officially in its first week, was getting away from Hart, the New York Post put them to rest with its front page the next day. GARY: “I’M NO WOMANIZER,” it screamed from the newsstand.

  The following week—exactly fourteen days after the announcement, to be precise—was when Fiedler decided to weigh in. He’d been on the plane, too, and he was troubled. The dinosaurs on the trail, the ones who started as copy boys and learned to write on the job, were mostly “know it when you see it” types—as in, you know a story when you see one, and you know something’s horseshit when it’s horseshit, and you
don’t need a graduate seminar to figure it out. But Fiedler, who was forty-one at the time, was one of these younger, more professional reporters—the kind who learned the business in a classroom and called himself a “journalist.” Fiedler was a guy who thought there should be rules about when something was news and when it wasn’t, codes of ethics that governed the behavior of responsible and objective journalists, just as there were in any licensed profession. And he thought it raised some serious issues, this trafficking in sheer rumor about Hart’s sex life.

  Specifically, Fiedler objected to the kind of innuendo that bled through the New York Post’s piece: “whispers” and “rumors” and “wagging tongues.” If you have the evidence, then by all means produce it, Fiedler thought. But it didn’t seem ethical for reporters to pass along gossip to their readers like some high school cheerleader giggling with her friends.

  Fiedler’s piece on April 27 had run under the headline SEX LIVES BECOME AN ISSUE FOR PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS. The piece was a classic of the “news analysis” genre that enabled daily reporters to stray, though not very far, from the constraints of your basic news story. Fiedler opened with an anecdote about Hart wandering to the back of the plane during the announcement tour, to face the reporters who were demanding he refute the rumors about affairs. “Anybody want to talk about ideas?” Hart had asked them, sardonically. (They didn’t.)

  “This vignette may tell us something about Gary Hart, a man with an opaque past,” Fiedler wrote. He went on to list a series of “real and serious” questions related to media ethics that he felt the Hart case had raised:

  Is it responsible for the media to report damaging rumors if they can’t be substantiated? Or should the media withhold publication until they have solid evidence of infidelity?