All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  • • •

  Fiedler’s phone rang again late Friday night, May 1, this time at home. It was McGee, and he was excited. McGee, who at thirty-four could fairly be called one of the finest investigative reporters in all of American journalism, had spent the flight to Washington stalking his fellow passengers, walking up and down the aisle in search of women who looked as if they could plausibly be on their way to sleep with a presidential candidate. “He wondered how he would decide which woman to follow,” the Herald’s reporters later wrote, without a hint of realizing how creepy that sounded.

  On the ground in Washington, McGee drove to Hart’s home on Capitol Hill and took up a position on a park bench that afforded a clear view of the front door. It was 9:30 p.m. when he saw Hart leave the townhouse with a woman he recognized from the ticket counter in Miami. McGee later described Rice as a “stunning” blonde and reported that when he first spied her at the airport, she had been in the company of another blonde who was “not as attractive.”

  Hart and the young woman promptly drove off, and McGee rushed to a pay phone across the street. He called his editors and Fiedler to ask for backup; the story was unfolding rapidly, and he needed more bodies to help with the surveillance. McGee was still stationed on the street when, about two hours later, Hart and Rice returned from dinner and could be seen reentering the townhouse. McGee didn’t dare leave to get some sleep. He had to make sure the woman spent the night.

  Fiedler later described himself as “dumbfounded” by McGee’s report from the townhouse that Friday night. He awoke Saturday morning and hopped the first flight to Washington. He brought with him McGee’s editor, Jim Savage, and a photographer, Brian Smith. When you added in Doug Clifton, a reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau who had joined McGee for part of the stakeout Friday night, the Herald’s crack undercover team now numbered five, along with no fewer than three rental cars, on a block where maybe one or two residents could be spotted on the sidewalk at any given time in the afternoon. The odds of this kind of surveillance going undetected were not especially high.

  Indeed, the covert operation did not go undetected. At about 8:40 p.m. Saturday, Hart and Rice left the house through the rear door and emerged into the adjacent alleyway, heading for the senator’s car. The idea, apparently, had been to meet Broadhurst and Armandt for dinner. It was then that Hart noticed things were amiss. The first reporter he spotted in the side alley was McGee, a two-hundred-pound man who for some reason had decided to make himself inconspicuous by donning sunglasses and a hooded parka. At night. In May.

  McGee, sensing he’d been made, turned on his heels and ran into Fiedler, who, being the only reporter on the scene whom Hart actually knew from the campaign plane, had disguised himself in a tracksuit and was pretending to jog around every so often. “He’s right behind me,” McGee whispered urgently. Fiedler immediately changed direction and jogged across the street, like a disoriented sprinter.

  Jumpy and alarmed, Hart abandoned the dinner plan and led Rice back inside. He was certain he was being watched but mystified as to who might be watching. He peered out of his second-floor kitchen window and surveyed Fifth Street. Hart was by no means an expert in counterintelligence, but he had traveled behind the Iron Curtain, where Americans were routinely tracked by government agents, and he had spent considerable time in the protection of Secret Service agents who were always scanning the periphery for threats. All of this was more than enough training for Hart to recognize the clownish stakeout that had all but taken over his street. He saw the five participants milling around, pretending to be strangers but then talking to each other, ducking into cars, or—at least in Hart’s telling, though the Herald guys disputed his account—disappearing behind his bushes. His bushes. He thought they had to be reporters, but how could he be sure? Maybe they worked for another campaign, or for the Republicans.

  Hart would later tell me what he had told Cramer not long after the event had taken place, that he felt nothing at that moment so much as sadness, a gloom that descended on him when he realized that this would never stop, that even in his own home he could not be free from the constant invasiveness and speculation. But he must have realized something more than that, too; he must have known, instinctively, that he had wandered into some new frontier and would not be able to retrace his steps. He had stubbornly clung to the idea that the accepted boundaries of privacy would hold, that certain of the old rules he had known would not suddenly disintegrate, as his advisors had warned. But in that moment, staring down at a sidewalk bathed in the floodlights of his own security system, Hart must have known he had been disastrously wrong. The exact ramifications of that miscalculation weren’t clear, and wouldn’t be clear for many days after. That there would be severe ramifications, however, could not have escaped a man as preternaturally intuitive as Gary Hart.

  Hart’s first thought was to call the police. For decades afterward, he would second-guess himself for not having made this simple decision. But what was he going to say, exactly? That people were congregating on his sidewalk and looking through his windows? That he, Gary Hart, was being stalked? That reporters were standing outside the home of a presidential candidate, on a public street? All roads here seemed to end in the same desolate place, which was a spate of stories about how weird Gary Hart was calling District cops and pleading with them to keep the media or his opponents at a comfortable remove.

  Instead, Hart decided, at first anyway, to hunker down and wait. He called Broadhurst, and Broadhurst came over with Armandt and some barbecued chicken. Billy Number Two tried to ease the boss’s mind, but Hart could not be easy now. He needed to be alone, to think, to take some kind of action. Later, when she sold her version of the story to People, Armandt would say that Broadhurst took this opportunity to tell both women what their story was going to be if they were asked—that Rice hadn’t spent Friday night at Hart’s place, that the four of them had been planning an innocent dinner so they could talk about jobs and the campaign. Rice would never discuss this supposed cover-up, but she did tell me, many years later, that Hart was present for the conversation. Afterward, he instructed Broadhurst to gather up the women and leave via the back door. He would never see Donna Rice again.

  If everything leading to that point had been unprecedented in the annals of presidential politics, then what happened next was the stuff of pure fiction, the kind of thing a Hollywood studio might have rejected as straining the bounds of suspended disbelief. It might seem farcical, even now, had a man’s career and the future of the country not been at stake.

  Like a character in one of the spy novels he loved to read and write, Hart decided to outwit his surveillers and flush them into the open. It’s not clear how he thought this was going to end, other than badly, but a cornered man does not think so clearly. Hart put on a white sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over his famous mane. At first, he got into his car and merged into the Capitol Hill traffic. He expected to be followed, and he was—Smith, the photographer, was tailing him close behind. Satisfied with this maneuver, Hart pulled over after a few blocks, emerged from the car and started walking back in the general direction of the townhouse. He detoured down a side street and walked twice around the block.

  Next Hart walked past the rental car where McGee and Savage thought they were safely incognito. In Richard Ben Cramer’s telling, Hart made a show of writing down the license plate number in full view of the two reporters; the Herald didn’t mention this detail, but it did report that Hart seemed “agitated” and appeared to yell over his shoulder, at someone on the other side of the street, as he walked away. Probably both accounts are true. In any event, McGee and Savage cleverly deduced from Hart’s behavior that their undercover stakeout had been compromised. They could not write a story, in any event, without at least trying to get his response. So after quickly conferring, they exited the car, followed Hart’s path back up the alley alongside his row of townhouses, and turned a corner. Both men, according to their own accoun
t, “flinched in surprise.” There was Gary Hart, the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, leaning against a brick wall in his hoodie. He was waiting for them.

  There were no press aides or handlers, no security agents or protocols to be followed. There was no precedent for any reporter accosting any presidential candidate outside his home, demanding the details of what he was doing inside it. It was just Hart and his accusers, or at least two of them for the moment, facing off in an oil-stained alley, all of them trying to find their footing on the suddenly shifting ground of American politics.

  Eight days later, the Herald would publish its front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler, and Savage, the 7,500-plus-word piece—Moby-Dick–type proportions by the standards of a front page—is remarkable reading, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s striking how much the Herald’s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. (“McGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.” And so on.) Clearly, the reporters and editors at the Herald believed themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues believed themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.

  The other fascinating thing about the Herald’s reconstruction is that it captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever. In a sense, the scene that transpired between Hart and his inquisitors in the alley on Saturday night, which at least two of the Herald reporters transcribed in real time, was the antithesis of Johnny Apple watching silently as the famous starlet ascended to President Kennedy’s suite, or Lyndon Johnson joking with reporters about the women he planned to entertain. Even in the dispassionate tone of the Herald’s narrative, you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.

  “Good evening, Senator,” McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. “I’m a reporter from the Miami Herald. We’d like to talk to you.” As the Herald relayed it: “Hart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.” McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.

  “No one is staying in my house,” Hart replied.

  Hart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation, but it’s not as if they weren’t ready. They had already conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall—which was now literally the situation. McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. “You passed me on the street,” McGee said.

  “I may or may not have,” Hart replied.

  McGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.

  “I’m not involved in any relationship,” Hart said carefully.

  So why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?

  “The obvious reason is I’m being set up,” Hart said, his voice quivering. It was a cryptic comment, but telling. Hart was reeling, and at that moment his mind was already revving with possible scenarios. Did Donna Rice know how these reporters got here? Was her friend an operative for some other campaign? Good Lord: Could Broadhurst himself have been less of a friend than he seemed?

  McGee wanted to know if the woman was in Hart’s house at that very moment. “She may or may not be,” is how Hart answered, evading again. Savage then asked to meet her, and Hart said no. For some reason, Hart volunteered that she was in Washington for the weekend, which was the first acknowledgment he gave that he knew her at all.

  McGee offered to explain the situation, as if Hart had just woken up in a hospital or an asylum and might not have had any idea what was happening. He said the house had been under surveillance and that he had observed Hart with the woman the night before, in Hart’s car. Where were they going?

  “I was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying,” Hart said, referring to Broadhurst’s townhouse nearby.

  Now Savage cut in and asked how long Hart had known the woman—“several months” was the response—and what her name was.

  “I would suppose you would find that out,” Hart said.

  McGee demanded to know why Hart and the woman had come back two hours after they left the night before. Hart replied that they had come back to pick up some things she had left at the house, and that she stayed for only ten or fifteen minutes. He couldn’t remember how she’d left his house to return to Broadhurst’s place.

  “Senator, this is important,” Savage said now, as if somehow he and Hart were now in this together, trying to figure out what had actually happened while Hart was comatose in his hospital bed. “Can you remember how she left? Is it possible you called a cab for her?”

  Hart said he didn’t recall. McGee tried again to ask who the woman was. “She is a friend of a friend of mine,” Hart offered, then corrected himself. “A guest of a friend of mine.”

  His voice was steadier now, and the reporters noticed that his composure had returned. As would happen several times throughout the ordeal of the next week, and for long afterward, Hart was lurching between conflicting instincts. There were moments where he thought that if he said just enough, if he issued enough of a denial to explain himself, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing. But then soon enough he would grow defiant, the way he did when Sweeney or one of the other aides tried to explain that the reporters would not stop pressing into his personal life. The hell with them, he would think. They were not entitled to know.

  • • •

  “Hi, Tom,” Hart said now. Fiedler had made his way into the alley and had joined his colleagues, making it three on one (or actually four on one, since Smith, the photographer, was there, too). The Herald’s contemporaneous account made no mention of Hart’s tone of voice when he paused to greet the one reporter on the scene he actually knew. Perhaps his tone betrayed a sense of disbelief at seeing the paper’s top political writer camouflaged in an alley. Perhaps at that point he was just glad to see a familiar face, someone who might listen to reason.

  Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart’s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched. And he would remember his own sense of disbelief. “It was one of those things where I thought, how did I end up here?” Fiedler told me. “At that point, I was considering myself a pretty serious political writer, the kind of writer who grappled with issues of important public policy. And here I am, almost in a disguise, following a tip where I’m not really quite sure it’s all going to come together, and knowing that the story I would write would be kind of a scandal sheet story. Which was so not only out of character, but it was out of my own sense of who I was and what I was doing.”

  And yet, for all that, Fiedler felt compelled to be there; he recalled no doubt about that. Hart’s hypocrisy, the falseness of his moral posturing, was a vital political story, which the Herald had now been tracking for six days. Staking out the townhouse, however unseemly, was the only way for Fiedler to confirm everything he’d been told by the anonymous caller, and this confirmation was something he owed the public—and Hart. “Seeing them together at that point and confronting Senator Hart over it, it just seemed as if it were something we were almost obligated to do,” Fiedler recalled. “As odd and surreal as it felt, it just seemed to us that we had to do it.”

  In fact, Fiedler would always remember that his overriding emoti
on in that alley was anger. He shouldn’t have had to be there, asking about such tawdry details of a man’s private life. He was a respected chronicler of national politics, for Christ’s sake. It was Hart who had set all this in motion, who had dragged Fiedler and the others into the dirt and muck of tabloid journalism, by refusing to tell the truth about who he was. It was Hart who had disappointed and debased Fiedler, not the other way around.

  “I think I felt I’d been deceived all this time,” Fiedler would remember. “And suddenly here it is, and the allegations I was probably hoping would be disproved were turning out to be true. That this is the guy who only a few weeks before had stood up in front of the world—and, in a sense me, because I was there with the press corps—and talked about ethics, and said he wanted to be held to the highest standards and said he was going to run a campaign that exemplified all that. And here I am in an alley, late on a Saturday night, confronting him about a relationship that just seemed completely sordid. And I kind of felt angry about being in that position. I felt stuck, because I was going to end up doing a story that I maybe hoped I wouldn’t do.”

  As Fiedler watched, McGee hit Hart with questions about the phone calls he had made to Rice, which they knew about from the tipster (even though they still hadn’t figured out her identity). Hart, whose suspicions about being set up must have now seemed legitimized, didn’t dare deny the calls, but he characterized them as “casual” and “political” and “general conversation.” Then Fiedler jumped in. He asked Hart if he had taken this woman on a yachting trip in Florida.

  “I don’t remember,” Hart said, dubiously. You can imagine the vertigo he must have been experiencing as the details of his private life, things he had not disclosed even to Shore or other close aides, just kept coming, one after the other. It probably dawned on him, right about then, that he should never have been in the alley, any more than he should have been on the yacht.