All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Even if sexual advances can be proven, do the media have a legitimate interest in a candidate’s private sex life, assuming it doesn’t interfere with doing the job?

  Finally, to go back to Hart’s question, can’t the media stick to analyzing his ideas?

  As was (and is) the style with such news analysis pieces, Fiedler didn’t actually endeavor to answer these questions. “In a harsh light, the media reports themselves are rumor mongering, pure and simple,” he wrote. And yet, he consulted with some professors who suggested that now that such rumors were “out there,” reporters had a duty, really, to investigate them. “You aren’t protecting the people of Miami by refusing to report the rumor,” Bruce Swain, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, assured Fiedler. The analysis ended with a quote from Hart himself. “No one has suggested what you do about vague, unfounded, and unproved rumors,” Hart said in an interview. “I think people are going to get tired of the question.”

  Fiedler couldn’t have known that his anodyne analysis of recent events would, in itself, become a critical part of those events, another step down in the cascade that was carrying political journalism into dark and unexplored waters. When the woman who refused to identify herself called him at his desk on the twenty-seventh, having just read the piece, she said, “Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine,” according to the account Fiedler and his colleagues later wrote. “We don’t need another president who lies like that.”

  Fiedler described himself as being somewhat indignant at the caller’s “mocking” tone. This was the presidency they were talking about, after all, and a man’s career to boot. He said he advised his tipster to sleep on it and call back in the morning if she had any useful information. When she called back the next morning, at 10:30, her tone was more serious. She said she was a “liberal Democrat,” but she was sickened by a candidate who would say one thing and then so blatantly do another. She and Fiedler talked for ninety minutes, during which the caller described to Fiedler the party aboard the chartered boat at Turnberry Isle, her friend’s crush on Hart, the way her friend had flashed around the pictures she had taken of the two of them together. She did not name Donna Rice.

  Then she said there were phone calls. Somehow, she knew from where they had been placed—Georgia, Alabama, Kansas—and precisely when. She claimed that Hart had invited her friend to visit him in Washington, and her friend was going to see him that Friday night. “Maybe you could fly to Washington,” the anonymous caller helpfully suggested, “and get the seat next to her?” She said she’d get him the flight information if she could.

  For decades after Fiedler received that call, just about everyone close to the events of that week—and everyone who wrote about them later—assumed that the caller was Lynn Armandt, the girlfriend Rice brought along on Monkey Business. This was a logical deduction, since it was Armandt who later profited from the photos taken aboard the boat, which the caller offered to sell. When I asked Fiedler about this, however, he told me that while he would continue to protect the identity of his source, which he had learned soon after the fact and had kept secret for twenty-six years, he was willing to say flatly that it was not Armandt. Fiedler volunteered that he thought Rice knew who the tipster really was.

  When I spoke to Rice a few months after that, during the first of two long conversations, she told me that she had never figured out with any certainty who it was that had set all of this in motion back in 1987. But she had come to believe that Armandt was in cahoots with another friend of theirs in Miami—a woman named Dana Weems—who had somehow escaped notice in contemporary accounts of the scandal. Rice had talked to both Armandt and Weems about her dalliance with Hart, and she had shown them the photos taken at Bimini.

  Dana Weems wasn’t especially hard to find in the age of Google. A clothing designer who had done some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com, based in Hollywood, Florida. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I introduced myself and told her I was writing a book about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.

  “Oh my God,” she said. There followed a long pause.

  “Did you make that call to the Herald, Dana?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” Weems said with a sigh. “That was me.”

  She then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems’s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle, which is how the three women met. Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, and even now, through the phone line and all the intervening years, the jealousy she felt for Rice was hard to miss. Weems told me Rice wasn’t nearly as successful a model as she was, that Rice was an artificial beauty who was “Okay for commercials, I guess.” Weems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on that last weekend of March for the impromptu party that Hart was at, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on her, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she had wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled …

  But Donna! Donna had no standards, is how Weems remembered it. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House. After that weekend, Donna wouldn’t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest! It all made Dana Weems sick to her stomach—especially this idea of Hart getting away with it and becoming president. “What an idiot you are!” Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. “You’re gonna want to run the country? You moron!”

  And so when Weems read Fiedler’s April 27 story in the Herald, she decided to make the call, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,” she told me. It was Armandt’s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos Rice had lent her, and that’s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn’t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn’t talked to either woman—Rice or Armandt—since shortly after the scandal. She lived alone and was confined to a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised that her secret had lasted until now.

  “I’m sorry to ruin his life,” she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. “I was young. I didn’t know it would be that way.”

  After he talked to Weems, Fiedler spent the next few days checking the dates she had given him against Hart’s schedule during the previous weeks. It all matched up. He was more dubious about the supposed rendezvous that coming Friday, because Hart was scheduled to be in Kentucky for a Derby party that weekend. But on Friday, not having heard back from his source and “tormented” by the silence, Fiedler called Hart’s headquarters again and found out that the Kentucky event had been scrubbed; Hart would instead be returning to his townhouse on Capitol Hill. He planned to work on that big economics speech he was to deliver in New York the following Tuesday, one of the last major bricks in his wall of ambitious policy ideas. As fate would have it, his audience would be the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

  Fiedler later wrote that what crossed his mind at that moment was the image of a slot machine, with all of the jackpot signs suddenly lining up. That Friday afternoon, he conferred with his editors, who decided that the information he had was enough to go on. They summoned Jim McGee, the paper’s top investigative reporter, into an office at about 5 p.m., and a few minutes later McGee ran out of the building with nothing but his wallet and the clothes he was wearing, and hailed the first cab he saw. In those days before TSA security checks, he just did make it onto one of the last two nonstop flights bound for Washington.

  Fiedler stayed behind for the time being. He worked his phone in the Herald newsroom, trying unsuccessfully to dig up an address for Hart’s Washington townhouse. He was still at it when he happened to get a call from Ken Klein, the press secretary for Bob G
raham, Florida’s junior senator. Klein, as it turned out, knew exactly where Hart’s townhouse was, because Graham’s chief of staff rented the basement. That’s the kind of reporter Tom Fiedler was—the kind who constantly seemed to be lucking into breaks in a story, mostly because he never for a minute stopped hunting for them.

  In some ways, despite his passing consideration of all the deeper questions related to rumor and privacy, Fiedler was a very different kind of reporter from E. J. Dionne, who gravitated toward philosophical questions more than he did breaking news, and who liked to get lost in the esoteric undercurrents of a subject. Soft-spoken and methodical, with a mop of brown curls, Fiedler could seem unimposing, or even meek; his colleagues compared him, not unkindly, to Clark Kent. But to write Fiedler off as some Hollywood-cast pipsqueak would have been a gross underestimation. Fiedler was a bulldog, possessed of the quiet intensity and unflagging persistence one might expect from a descendant of the Puritan leader John Winthrop. Had things gone a different way, he would have been just as happy covering cops or corporate takeovers as he was politicians; the point of the job, for Fiedler, was to find out whatever it was they didn’t want you to know.

  In fact, he had set out to become, of all things, a boating writer. Or rather, that had seemed the most sensible path after growing up on Cape Cod and attending the Merchant Marine Academy, whose graduates were promised a navigable route around combat assignments in Vietnam. The life of a merchant marine had to be served at sea, though, whereas journalism seemed like a perfectly manageable, land-bound existence for a new husband and father. So Fiedler went to graduate school at Boston University and then joined the Sun-Sentinel in Orlando, where he was immediately assigned to the paper’s brand-new “Mickey desk,” covering Disney World.

  Then, in 1972, the paper’s editors, short of reporters to cover the competitive Democratic primary in the state, sent Fiedler out to follow the peripheral candidacy of George Wallace. (It was at that point that Fiedler first met Hart, at a McGovern news conference, though Hart would never have remembered an isolated encounter with a small-time reporter like that.) Wallace went on to win the Florida primary, and suddenly—here was that irrepressible luck again—Fiedler woke up to find that he had gained something of a reputation as a fine political writer. The Herald hired him away, shipping him out first to its West Palm Beach bureau, and then, after the 1976 campaign, sending him to Washington as a junior member of its well-staffed bureau there. Doggedly and with understated ambition, Fiedler kept climbing the ladder.

  By 1987, Fiedler hadn’t quite joined the exclusive cadre of bigfoot reporters from larger regional papers—like Tom Oliphant at The Boston Globe, or Larry Eichel at The Philadelphia Inquirer, or Carl Leubsdorf at The Dallas Morning News—whom any presidential candidate had to know and cultivate. But he was a known presence on the campaign trail, capable of landing major interviews and writing a story to which the rest of the media would have to pay attention. And when it came to the questions he had raised in his piece, Fiedler himself never had any doubt, not for a second, that Hart’s marital infidelity, if it could be substantiated, was a story. Nor, it seems, did anyone else at the Herald, where the question of newsworthiness was raised but quickly dispatched. In the reconstruction of how the story unfolded that Fiedler and his colleagues at the paper later published, there is not a single mention of any debate about whether a candidate’s private life merited investigation.

  As far as Fiedler was concerned, the sex in itself wasn’t newsworthy—or at least that was how he would always frame the argument. Hart could sleep with whomever he wanted. What mattered was that if Hart were indeed cheating on his wife, then that would make him not just a philanderer, but also a liar and a hypocrite. Just fourteen days before Fiedler’s phone rang portentously, Hart had stood up at Red Rocks and promised American voters that he would hold himself to the “very highest possible standards of integrity and ethics.” Never mind that he had been talking about something entirely different, that he was drawing a direct contrast with the Reagan administration, whose ill-advised foray into illegal arms sales to the Iranians was playing out daily in congressional hearings. If he wasn’t being faithful to his wife, and if he was purposely misleading the reporters who questioned him about the rumors, then how could Hart claim to be a moral leader?

  “He was holding himself out to be a person of high ethical standards,” Fiedler told me, looking back later. “And if he wasn’t outright denying it, he was certainly very ambiguous about the idea that he was a womanizer.” (Twenty-six years later, that word sounded oddly retro, as if it had just been exhumed from some archive and dusted off.) “So I think our view was largely shaped on that. There was a contradiction between how he was holding himself out publicly and how he was behaving privately.”

  Fiedler was well aware that no one in his position had ever breached this territory before. Certainly no reporter had even contemplated staking out the home of a presidential contender as if he were some drug runner on an episode of Miami Vice. But Fiedler had developed a theory of the case, a reason for changing the rules. The way Fiedler would explain it, the role of the political press had been dramatically and forever changed by the party reforms that began in 1968—ironically, the very same reforms on which Hart, as a young activist, had made his name and career. Before 1968, the Democratic and Republican nominees had been chosen predominately by party bosses and wealthy patricians, respectively, men who gathered in the proverbial back rooms of American politics and vetted the candidates themselves. These party leaders knew their own candidates intimately, and they were perfectly capable of deciding which of them had the mettle and integrity to be president and which didn’t. The bosses had no need for meddlesome reporters who could present them with exhaustive dossiers on potential nominees.

  What the reforms had done, though, was to create the modern system of primaries and caucuses, in which voters, and not activists, had the ultimate say. And unlike the bosses, the voters had no real familiarity with the candidates who beseeched them, aside from what they saw on television. Someone had to give these candidates a thorough vetting. Someone had to be responsible for making sure the voters didn’t choose a deeply flawed potential president. And the only institution in American life that could move in to fill that vacuum was the media.

  Did it matter if Gary Hart was lying about his sex life? Did it make him less of a leader than, say, Jack Kennedy? On these questions, Fiedler claimed to be disinterested. As far as he was concerned, the relevance of any given data point was entirely up to the voters. Fiedler’s job was simply to offer up as much information as he could that might reasonably pertain to a man’s character and moral fitness, and then let the public decide whether that information disqualified him or not. Fiedler was a hired investigator, paid not to judge the value of whatever unpleasantness he uncovered, but simply to compile and present it.

  You could argue that this theory represented a startling abdication. After all, the role of the media had always been to make choices about which information mattered and which could be overlooked—which belonged on the front page, or inside the paper, or nowhere at all. At its most basic, any newspaper or newscast—or website, for that matter—is one big exercise in prioritizing information; the core role of any reporter or editor is to adjudicate the value of a story, relative to other stories. Floridians didn’t get the Herald dropped in their driveways so they could be assaulted with all the facts that could possibly be considered about a presidential candidate, in no particular order of importance—how he viewed the Soviets, what kind of shampoo he used, whether he changed his name. They expected journalists to exercise a little judgment about whether the information they happened upon was important—or even germane—to the arguments in a campaign.

  To understand where Fiedler was coming from, though, you have to view his rationale through the lens of Watergate, which was still very recent history in 1987—and which probably had a lot more to do with the shift in journalistic mores than t
he electoral reforms of 1968. It wasn’t just that reporters like Fiedler, who had started covering politics in the same year as the break-in at the Watergate, looked to Woodward and Bernstein as examples of the accolades a good scandal story could bring you (although they surely did). It was more that Watergate left the entire country feeling duped and betrayed. Sure, the whole thing ended up elevating the media, as personified by The Washington Post, to heroic stature in much of America. But political reporters had to ask themselves some hard questions in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation. How had a man so deficient in character, a man whose corruption and pettiness were so self-evident on those secretly recorded White House tapes, been able to win two presidential elections? Why had it taken a couple of no-name metro reporters to expose what the elite White House and campaign journalists had somehow missed after covering Nixon for twenty years?

  The new generation wasn’t going to let that same thing happen to them. (And their elders at papers like the Herald were sufficiently chastened that they weren’t about to argue the point.) If reporters like Tom Fiedler were going to err, they were going to err on the side of disclosure, not propriety. The voters might consider the story of a president’s private behavior to be relevant, or maybe they wouldn’t, but never again would they have to wonder ruefully what kind of person they had elected.

  Had Hart been just another of the unknown and uninspiring Democratic hopefuls whom pundits on the new genre of news shows had taken to calling the “Seven Dwarfs,” the rumors about his sex life might not have had so much currency. But Hart wasn’t just another candidate; he was crushing the rest of the field and running comfortably ahead of Bush in the polls, and he had already moved on to an ambitious governing agenda for the next eight years, as if the election itself were a formality. He was, for all practical purposes, a president in waiting. For Fiedler, when it came to this question of whether to find out if the guy was cheating on his wife, it really wasn’t much of a question at all.