All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  This had been going on for several minutes now, and to that point, the questions had been about the kinds of concrete details on which investigative reporters tend to fixate. Who was the woman? Why was she there? Why had he called her? Fiedler was after something else. He sought an acknowledgment of Hart’s essential hypocrisy. He sought some deeper confirmation of the man’s flawed character.

  So now Fiedler stepped forward and reminded Hart that he had been at Red Rocks and had personally heard the speech. He quoted Hart’s own words back to him, right there in the alley, the bit about running a campaign based on integrity and ethics and a higher standard. If that were so, Fiedler wanted to know, then why was Fiedler having to stand in this alley, at this moment, doing something so beneath him? He “implored” Hart, by his own account, to offer some kind of exculpatory evidence. “You, of all people, know the sensitivity of this,” Fiedler said, adding that the Herald was prepared to print a story about what it had uncovered. He pleaded with Hart to be more forthcoming.

  “I’ve been very forthcoming,” Hart said.

  Fiedler asked again about the nature of Hart’s relationship with the woman.

  “I have no personal relationship with the individual you are following,” Hart replied, for at least the third time. (He still seemed not to get that he was the one being followed.) To Fiedler, this non-answer was highly significant. If Hart had said she had some role in his campaign, that they had been talking about enlisting volunteers or fundraising (and, in fact, Rice hoped that the fundraising job Broadhurst had dangled might well be in the offing), then the Herald’s reporters would have had a problem. Fiedler would go as far as to say, years later, that if Hart had claimed she was a colleague in this way, there wouldn’t have been a story to write—or at least not until the reporters had checked into it further. But Hart wouldn’t connect Rice to the campaign. He wouldn’t identify her at all, and that gave the Herald its story.

  When McGee pressed him again about the yacht and whether he was denying having met her there, Hart grew visibly irritated. “I’m not denying anything,” he said. They were missing the point. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny knowing Rice, or having been on a chartered boat. Hart’s stance was that none of it was anybody’s business but his. When the reporters asked Hart to “produce” the woman, or this friend who was supposedly hosting her, Hart said other people had a right to privacy, too.

  “I don’t have to produce anyone,” he told them.

  McGee was an expert in ambushes. He had tried to shock Hart into answering questions, and then he had moved seamlessly into conspiratorial mode, implying that he was there to help Hart out of this, but Hart really needed to help himself. Hart was far too sharp to be taken in by that. Now McGee could see that Hart was getting ready to bolt. So McGee pulled out his last question, the one you save for the moment when there is nothing to be lost by asking it. He put the question point-blank to Hart: Had the senator had sex with the woman in the townhouse?

  “The answer is no,” Hart said, more definitively than he had answered other questions. Then he added, “I’m not going to get into all that.”

  As Hart walked away, shaken and alone, and started back up the alley, Smith, the photographer, started clicking away. Hart whirled around. This yielded the shots of him that would appear in the next day’s paper—rumpled and recoiling, hiding in a hoodie like some perp who was about to have his head forcibly lowered into the backseat of a cruiser.

  “We don’t need any of that,” were Hart’s parting words.

  There was something else Fiedler had raised with Hart during their standoff in the alley, but so much was coming at him that it didn’t really register. When Fiedler was chiding Hart for being a hypocrite, he reminded the candidate that he had just been quoted as saying that reporters should follow him around if they didn’t believe his denials of extramarital affairs. McGee joined in and pressed the point, too. Hart didn’t respond to this directly, and it’s not clear he even knew at that point what they were talking about. He certainly didn’t realize that night that those three little words—“follow me around”—would shadow him for the rest of his days, to the point where they would bury everything else he had ever said in public life.

  In the history of Washington scandal, only a few quotes—“I am not a crook,” “I did not have sex with that woman”—have become as synonymous with a politician. Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now, it is almost universally remembered in the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn’t believe him, and then the Herald took him up on it. Inexplicably, people believe, Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it. In most ways, this received version of events, which I and many other chroniclers reinforced often in the years after the scandal, is technically accurate. In the most important respect, however, it turns out to be, really, an outright lie.

  The whole thing goes back to E. J. Dionne’s second interview, in the New Hampshire hotel restaurant, when Dionne was pressing Hart on the rumors of affairs, and Hart was growing exasperated. Finally, he told Dionne: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” Hart said this in an annoyed and sarcastic sort of way, in an obvious attempt to make a point. He was “serious” about the sentiment, all right, but only to the extent that a man who had been twice separated from his wife and conducted numerous liaisons over the years, with the full knowledge of his friends in the press corps, could have been serious about such a thing. Hart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign, for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him.

  Dionne certainly didn’t take the comment literally. “He did not think of it as a challenge,” Dionne would recall many years later. “And at the time, I did not think of it as a challenge.” Dionne interpreted the comment as Hart saying that he understood that his private life had become a real political vulnerability, and he had shut down, at least for the moment, any activities that might provide fodder for a scandal. That’s how Kevin Sweeney, the press secretary, interpreted it, too. Sitting at the restaurant table during the interview, Sweeney was elated when he heard Hart make such a categorical statement after weeks of refusing to address the rumors; it meant, he thought, that Sweeney and the others had finally gotten through to Hart, and that Hart now understood that the media’s definition of privacy was evolving.

  Nonetheless, Dionne was surprised when his editor struck the quote from the first draft of his profile. Dionne might not have considered it a literal challenge, but he suspected that some other reporter of his generation would—and that if Hart ever did get caught philandering during the campaign, those words would become the noose from which he was hung. Had Dionne simply shrugged at that point and decided to surrender the quote to his editors in order to contest some other disagreement he cared more about (something we aggrieved magazine writers are forced to do all the time), then Hart’s “follow me around” moment would have been the proverbial tree falling in the forest, uttered but never actually heard. Instead, Dionne inserted the quote back into the body of the revised piece, closer to the end than to the beginning. It ended up sticking in the final version.

  As it happened, Dionne’s cover story wasn’t set to appear until Sunday, May 3—the same day the Herald published its front-page exposé. No one at the Herald had a clue that Hart had issued any “challenge” on the Monday night when Fiedler heard from his anonymous tipster, or when he continued to chase the story during the week, or when McGee flew off to Washington and began prowling outside the townhouse on Friday night. All of this they did on their own, without any prodding from Hart.

  In those days before the Internet, however, the Times circulated hard copies of its magazine to other media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it i
n their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. And so it was that when Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne’s story that had been sent to the Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric current to his brain. There it was, staring up at him from the page—Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before.

  At a minimum, Hart’s quote made the Herald’s hard choices, about whether to publish immediately or not, a whole lot easier. By the time Fiedler and his colleagues had finished confronting Hart in the alley that Saturday night and retreated to Fiedler’s room at a nearby Quality Inn, it was after ten, and only a few hours remained until the last edition’s final deadline. That wasn’t much time to debate the merits of printing such an unprecedented story, or to edit it. The Herald’s editors and reporters knew they would face a lot of scrutiny from their own industry and the public for the way they had gone about tailing Hart, and were there enough time to nail down some of the elusive details (like, say, the identity of the woman involved), they would have been in a better position to defend their decisions.

  Fiedler, though, was anxious to bang out what they had so the paper could publish it Sunday morning, and with good reason. He had in mind what had happened to Clark Hoyt and Robert Boyd, reporters for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, in 1972, after they had uncovered proof of Senator Eagleton’s depression. (They, too, had been tipped off by an anonymous caller.) Hoyt and Boyd had held off writing their story for more than twenty-four hours while the campaign promised them an interview with Eagleton to discuss the allegations. But they were double-crossed; McGovern’s aides already knew what Hoyt and Boyd had, and they had no intention of producing the candidate. What they did, instead, was to hold a news conference and disclose the facts themselves, putting their own spin on the story and denying the two reporters the biggest scoop of their careers. (Hoyt and Boyd won a Pulitzer Prize for their story, anyway.)

  McGovern’s campaign manager at that time, of course, had been the same man Fiedler and the others had just accosted outside his home. And Fiedler’s fear was that, given twenty-four hours to strategize, Hart and his team would figure a way to get out in front of the story before the Herald could publish. Probably they would do this by going on the attack against the Herald, accusing the paper of stalking the candidate at his home—an allegation that would quickly turn the story into an argument over the Herald’s tactics, instead of an exposé about Hart’s infidelity. Given how politically adept Hart’s team generally was, and what transpired in the hours ahead, Fiedler was almost certainly right to worry.

  The discovery of Hart’s infamous quote, which the Herald reporters stealthily lifted from the advance copy of the Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster—so that the two articles, carrying the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously—probably negated any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print. By morning, everyone who read the Times would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. So what if the Herald reporters hadn’t even known about it when they put Hart under surveillance? At a glance, Hart’s quote appeared to justify the Herald’s extraordinary investigation, and that’s all that mattered.

  The difference here is far more than a technicality. Over the decades that followed, the narrative implied by the Herald story—that Hart had asked to be tailed, and subsequently was—became the dominant thing most Americans recalled about him, to the point where even political insiders of the period were certain that this is what happened. (When I spoke to Dana Weems, she repeatedly insisted to me that she had only called the Herald after reading Hart’s “follow me around” quote, which was obviously impossible.) And this version of events conveniently enabled the Herald’s reporters and editors to completely sidestep some important and uncomfortable questions. As long as it was Hart, and not the Herald, who had set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who had suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive, personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us. Hart had given the media no choice in the matter—this is what everyone knew.

  I had a chance to talk to Fiedler about this over lunch one day in the spring of 2013. We ate at a French restaurant near the campus of Boston University, where Fiedler, who had gone on to run the Herald before his retirement, was now installed as dean of the College of Communication. About five years earlier, Fiedler and I had sat on a panel together at the University of Florida, and I had watched beforehand as he regaled a small group of students with the story of how he and his colleagues had taken down Hart. Still, Fiedler struck me as a thoroughly gracious and gentle person who cared about doing the right thing. Nothing about him suggested malice, or even a lack of compassion. By the time we met again in Boston, he was an astonishingly young sixty-seven, with the same thicket of dark curls he had sported a quarter century earlier.

  Fiedler readily acknowledged that the order of events in 1987 had since become jumbled in the public mind, and his expression was genuinely regretful. He blamed a lot of this on the way the TV news programs that weekend had juxtaposed the Herald’s reporting with the quote from the Times Magazine, as if one had led to the other. That had really been the beginning of the myth, he said, and from that time on, people were confused about which came first—“follow me around” or the Herald investigation. When I asked why he had never tried to correct the record, Fiedler shrugged sadly. “I don’t know what I would need to do,” he said.

  Then I mentioned to Fiedler that I had Googled him recently and been sent to his biographical page on the BU website. And this is what it said: “In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about marital infidelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart’s campaign-killing affair with a Miami model.” Why did his own webpage explicitly repeat something he knew to be untrue?

  Fiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. “You know what? I didn’t know that,” he said. “Honestly. I’m serious.” He stared at me for another beat, stunned. “Wow.” I knew he meant it. When I visited the same site a month or so later, I was surprised to find that Fiedler hadn’t changed a word.

  The first person Hart tried to reach when he got back inside his home on Saturday night, his pulse racing from the confrontation in the alley, was Bill Dixon, his campaign manager, who was in Denver. Hart got a busy signal.

  So Hart called Billy Shore, who was home alone on a Saturday night in Denver, at the house for which he had just signed an eighteen-month lease. Shore didn’t get a lot of quiet time without the boss being quiet a few feet away, and so he was relishing the last pages of Sue Miller’s novel The Good Mother when the phone rang. Hart’s voice on the other end of the line sounded strained, but nowhere near panic. He said there was a problem: Broadhurst was there with two friends, and some reporters from the Herald had been skulking around, and Hart had just talked to them. Hart wanted Shore to find Dixon.

  To Shore, who was used to fielding irritated calls from the boss at all hours, this didn’t exactly sound like the approach of Armageddon. There was no mention of any woman. He went back to finishing his novel, figuring he could handle this latest annoyance in a few minutes. Five minutes passed, during which it must have occurred to Hart that, just maybe, he had undersold the severity of the situation. Shore’s phone rang again, and this time, Hart’s voice bristled with urgency. This was a big problem, Hart said. Shore needed to get to Dixon. Now.

  Dixon was at home when Shore’s car cam
e roaring into the downtown apartment complex where Dixon lived, which functioned as a kind of second headquarters for the campaign’s high command. Within minutes, several of Hart’s top aides—John Emerson, the deputy campaign manager; Kevin Sweeney, the press secretary; Paul Tully, the political director—were assembled in the campaign manager’s apartment, placing a flurry of urgent phone calls to Washington. Dixon, meanwhile, threw a few things in a bag, humped it down to Stapleton Airport, bought a ticket on the red-eye, and jumped aboard just before the doors closed. The hell with it, he thought—it’s not like he was going to get any sleep, anyway.

  In a lot of ways, Dixon was a man ideally suited to a challenge for which there was no existing playbook. Forty-three at the time, a true-believing child of the sixties, Dixon exuded Midwestern niceness and good humor. But he was also the son of an Irish Catholic cop, with a street savvy that made him one hell of a tough lawyer; in later years, as a partner in one of the Midwest’s top civil rights firms, he would almost never lose a jury trial. (Among the lawyers who ended up working for Dixon and his partners in that Chicago-based firm was a prodigy named Barack Obama.) It was Dixon who, as a staff lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, had written the memos compiling impeachable offenses against Richard Nixon that eventually leaked to the press. Dixon knew something about the ways of Washington and the media, and even more about how to prosecute a case.

  And even before he hit the ground in Washington at dawn on Sunday, Dixon understood that this was precisely what Hart would require—not so much a vigorous defense of his own actions, but rather an all-out prosecution of his accusers. The rumors about Hart were at this point well established; proving his innocence of all charges would be a slog once the Herald’s sensational story got out. But in their zeal to expose Hart’s faulty character, Fiedler and the others had crossed all accepted boundaries of privacy and professional ethics. Dixon intended to put them on trial for it.