All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  He already knew that his client wouldn’t be much help in this regard. In later years, through successive scandals that came to dominate ever shrinking news cycles, a central principle of the political canon would hold that the first thing you do in such situations is to get all the facts directly from the source. Some of Hart’s aides, like Shore, would always regret not having pressed Hart immediately for that information. But when Dixon had talked to Hart on the phone Saturday night, after the alley confrontation, all Hart had said was that the Herald was wrong and there was no story.

  In lawyerly fashion, Dixon was an inveterate, almost unconscious note-taker, and twenty-six years later, sitting on his back porch on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, he shared with me the legal pad on which he had started scribbling that Saturday night and which he carried with him for the next forty-eight hours, creating the only contemporaneous record that endures. On it, Dixon had written that Hart’s phone had to have been tapped, along with the woman’s. “I don’t know who’s setting me up,” Hart told Dixon, according to his notes.

  But that was all Dixon got out of Hart. “Billy’s got the facts,” Hart snapped, before handing the phone over to Broadhurst and washing his hands of the whole fiasco. Hart had the economics address planned for Tuesday in front of the newspaper publishers, the first of what was to be a series of speeches in the same vein over the next month. He intended to hunker down and write. This, Dixon knew, was entirely in character for Hart—trusting in the inevitability of his superior ideas and leaving the tactics to others—and didn’t indicate any special level of avoidance; at this point no one really feared that the campaign itself was in mortal jeopardy. When the reporters started showing up Sunday and pounding on Hart’s door, Dixon arranged to move Hart to the Georgetown home of Steve and Kitty Moses, loyal supporters who were away at the same Kentucky Derby fundraiser Hart had originally been scheduled to attend. Eventually, Shore showed up to keep the boss company. Hart installed himself in Steve Moses’s study, cowboy boots propped defiantly on the desk as he edited drafts in longhand.

  The witnesses Dixon felt he needed to depose were all at Broadhurst’s house, so it was to that address—on A Street Northeast—that he had the cab take him from Dulles Airport on Sunday morning. Broadhurst had been up all night. Within an hour or so of hearing Hart’s story about the alley, Broadhurst had somehow managed to track down Fiedler at the Quality Inn and had offered him a deal: if Fiedler would come to Broadhurst’s townhouse right away, Broadhurst would make the two women staying with him—Rice and Armandt—“available.” He said he couldn’t force them to talk, however—that was up to Fiedler—and Fiedler presumed, probably rightly, that the cagey Broadhurst was just trying to find a way to delay publication of the story. In the end, Broadhurst ended up meeting Fiedler and the other reporters at an all-night restaurant in Chinatown, where he insisted that all of this was a big misunderstanding. By then, however, even had Fiedler believed him (which he didn’t), the Herald had literally stopped its presses and begun rolling out a new front page with the banner headline: MIAMI WOMAN IS LINKED TO HART.

  “Gary Hart, the Democratic presidential candidate who has dismissed allegations of womanizing, spent Friday night and most of Saturday in his Capitol Hill townhouse with a young woman who flew from Miami and met him,” the story began. “Hart denied any impropriety.” The piece noted that Herald reporters had seen Hart and the mystery woman leave and then reenter the house Friday night, and that neither had left the premises again until they reemerged together Saturday night. The story didn’t need to speculate on what was going on inside all that time, although from the tone of things, one could imagine it involved bearskin rugs and lots of mirrors.

  Broadhurst told Dixon the story wasn’t true. As he had explained to Fiedler, Broadhurst had supervised the construction of a new deck at Hart’s house, and so he had the codes to the garage and the back door and could come and go as he liked; he had shown both women the deck and had taken them home via the back door at about midnight Friday. Both women, he swore, had stayed in spare bedrooms at his place. (Dixon had no reason to disbelieve this, especially when he himself stayed Sunday night in the same room Rice had supposedly stayed in the night before, and he watched the housekeeper change the rumpled linen.) On Saturday, Broadhurst told him, he and the two women had driven around Alexandria, Virginia, so Armandt could look for a place to live.

  Broadhurst disclosed that he and Hart and the two women had partied with a large crowd on a yacht in Miami, but at that point he said nothing about an overnight cruise to Bimini. Neither did Rice, who seemed to Dixon naïve and startled, a nice girl who genuinely liked Hart and couldn’t really understand what was happening. Dixon went at her as hard as a lawyer could go after a friendly witness whom he didn’t want to become a hostile one. She said she’d taken an interest in the campaign because she was impressed with Hart’s positions (a line that would have given late-night comedians weeks of material had it been made public). Ever thorough, Dixon wanted to know which positions, and Rice cited “nuclear arms and his new ideas.” She said she’d come to Washington hoping to work for the campaign.

  By early Sunday afternoon, reporters were descending on Broadhurst’s townhouse, rapping on doors and windows. It occurred to Dixon that he would have to step outside and make a statement, something that might choke off the momentum of the story. “Recent accusations about Senator Hart’s personal life are preposterous and inaccurate in their entirety,” Dixon said when he confronted the small assemblage. “They have taken a casual acquaintance and a simple dinner with three friends and political supporters and attempted to make a story where there is none.” Then Dixon got to the core of his case.

  “The system, when reduced to hiding in bushes, peaking in windows, and personal harassment, has clearly run amok,” he said. These were the specific phrases—“hiding in bushes” and “peeking in windows”—that he and the other aides had agreed to repeat until none of them could stand to say the words any longer. “Senator Hart accepts the scrutiny that comes with his leadership role in the Democratic Party and the country. But scrutiny and questions of character are one thing; character assassinations are entirely another. Those who cover politics have some duty of self-restraint; here the boundaries of journalistic ethics have clearly been crossed.”

  In addition to this ethical argument, Dixon was already developing a second plank in his case against the Herald. Many years before, he had worked his way through the University of Buffalo as a garbage collector by night and as a licensed private investigator by day. And so Dixon had actually done quite a few stakeouts, and once he got the facts as Broadhurst told them and took a look at Hart’s townhouse, he concluded that even at twenty-one he would have known how to do a more credible job than the Herald had. Specifically, these geniuses had forgotten that townhouses have back doors; otherwise, they would have seen Broadhurst and Armandt coming and going. In fact, Dixon had good reason to think that even the front-door surveillance had been spotty, since Ron Elving, Hart’s press aide in the Senate, had stopped by a few times that Saturday with revised drafts of the economics speech and had somehow evaded the Herald’s dragnet. No self-respecting private dick would have vouched for a surveillance report on a house that had only been half watched, at best.

  So in Denver, Sweeney and the others started pushing back with the other reporters who were calling in a mad frenzy. Not only should the Herald never have been spying in the first place, they said, but this so-called surveillance was a joke. Someone needed to ask these guys why they hadn’t been watching the blessed back door.

  The two-pronged assault on the Herald story was as much for the benefit of the reporters—and their editors—as it was for their readers. In order to contain the damage, Hart’s team knew, they needed to isolate the Herald, to make sure it became an outlier among reputable news organizations. After years of changing cultural attitudes about adultery and privacy, after more than a decade of considering Watergate’s le
ssons when it came to the fitness of candidates, after months of building innuendo about Hart’s flawed character, the Herald had at last taken political journalism into what had previously been tabloid territory. But on this question of whether presidential candidates should be given the same treatment as a Jim Bakker or a Fawn Hall, the soap opera stars of nightly newscasts in the spring of 1987, the rest of the media still hung in the balance.

  Fiedler had made his choice. Now his colleagues on the campaign bus needed to make theirs.

  5

  “I DO NOT THINK THAT’S A FAIR QUESTION”

  FOR MOST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, information in America was controlled and disseminated by a select group of elite institutions. By the end of the 1970s, if you lived in a typical American city, you read about national events in your local paper (if you were lucky, you had a choice between two), or perhaps in the copy of Time or Newsweek that arrived in the mailbox every Tuesday. Any other newspaper would have to be purchased, probably a day late, at the out-of-town newsstand. The locally owned newspaper—whose status as a paragon of civic virtue would be mythologized by journalists and media critics in later years, after faceless conglomerates had gobbled up most of the American media—exercised as much of a monopoly over information in some cities as the power company had over transformers and wires. Thus was it possible, as late as 1968, for some Indiana voters to know little of the Democratic primary campaign being waged in their own state, simply because the Indianapolis Star—whose publisher, Eugene C. Pulliam, had been a Lyndon Johnson supporter—all but refused to acknowledge Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign.

  The most immediate means by which information traversed regional borders was, of course, the television. But this venue, too, was limited in its offerings, and, unless a network made the extraordinary decision to preempt its regular programming, not all that immediate. In big cities, you could watch the local news at six and then choose from three nightly newscasts, aired at the same time every night by the same three networks. But if a story unfolding elsewhere in the country hadn’t appeared in your morning paper, and if it didn’t rate a mention that night by one of the three somber-sounding anchormen who spoke from the pixelated ether like gods from some distant civilization, then it essentially didn’t exist, as far as you knew.

  Within about a decade or so of Gary Hart’s spectacular collapse, new technologies—first the satellite revolution that made twenty-four-hour news possible, and then the advent of the Internet and the rapid spread of broadband technology—would obliterate this old order, creating a new world of instantaneous and borderless information. But the first signs of change, what you might call the advance guard of the communications revolution, were just beginning to arrive on the scene in 1987.

  CNN, which was still in its infancy, had burst into the national consciousness when it carried the only live footage of the space shuttle Challenger exploding moments after launch in January 1986. Later that same year, Fox audaciously unveiled a fourth American broadcast network to compete with the giants who had monopolized the airways since the golden age of radio: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox’s first prime-time lineup, built around the sitcom Married … with Children and a sketch comedy show hosted by the comedienne Tracey Ullman (and featuring a recurring cartoon called The Simpsons) debuted about a week before Hart gave his announcement speech at Red Rocks. Within a few years, both of these ventures—the offspring of two visionary media moguls, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch—would lead the way toward a more diversified media landscape, and one that often blurred the boundaries between news and entertainment.

  The first technological innovation to erode the dominance of institutional media, however, and the one that made its impact felt almost immediately during that tumultuous first week of May 1987, had nothing to do with television. It was the series of clicks, whirs, and beeps known as the fax machine.

  Faxes had been proliferating, commercially, since the early 1980s, but it had only been in recent years—since the 1984 campaign, in fact—that Japanese manufacturers had managed to make them small and inexpensive enough for your average office, and even for some homes. “From office workers to rock stars, more and more people are answering yes to the question, Do you have a fax?” Time reported in August 1987. “Once considered too bulky and costly to be practical, fax machines have shrunk to half the size of personal computers and dropped sharply in price, to less than $1,000 for one model.” According to Time, it cost $14 to send a one-page letter through an overnight carrier but only 50 cents to fax it instantly through your phone line. Sharp had even introduced a model that could double as an ordinary phone.

  The implications of this, for news and politics, were enormous. In 1987, a Republican operative named Doug Bailey teamed up with a Democratic strategist, Roger Craver, to create something called The Hotline—a nonideological compendium of political news from the various papers around the country, plus some polling and late-night political jokes, faxed directly to subscribers every morning. (During that first year, according to an obituary of Bailey that appeared in The New York Times after his death in 2013, prospective customers always asked him three questions: “You’re going to do what?,” “You want me to pay how much?,” and “What’s a fax?”) In a few years, The Hotline would become as much required reading in Washington as any of the big newspapers or magazines, and virtually every news bureau and political office in town would pay thousands of dollars to get it. Purchased by the National Journal in 1996, it formed the template for all the web-based aggregators that would later come along to replace it, from blogs and newsletters to The Huffington Post and Politico’s “Playbook.”

  Hart’s lead advance man in 1987, Michael Stratton, had taken to carrying around what was known in those days as a portable telecopier machine—essentially a bulky, primitive version of the all-in-one machines that would later be commonplace in home offices. The machine enabled him, if everything worked just right, to send revised schedules or local news clippings to Denver and Washington instantaneously, rather than relying on overnight mail that might show up after the campaign had already left town. Press aides used a fax machine to do what campaigns had never been able to do with telephones—blast their statements out to a hundred media organizations at once, simply by programming a list of newsroom phone numbers into the machine and walking away.

  In effect, fax technology did in a limited and rudimentary way what blogs and social media would do twenty years later. It enabled large numbers of people outside the elite media to get and exchange information, and it vastly reduced the amount of time it took for that information to get around. This is how Hart’s staff at the Denver headquarters got their copy of the Herald’s exposé on that first Sunday morning in May, with aides standing around in suspended dread as the machine slowly spat out the instrument of their fate. And it’s how they sent Dixon the typed statement he would read on the steps of Broadhurst’s townhouse that morning, after he and his team in Denver had gone over what he should say. When we met in Madison, Dixon gave me the yellowed, crinkly fax sheet he had saved in a box for a quarter century, with a time stamp of 9:19 a.m. and a name he had scribbled underneath the typed, four-paragraph statement: “Miss Donna Rice.”

  The fax was also how the Herald’s story found its way into newsrooms around the country well before the wire services that served most local papers even had a chance to assess it. When the Herald’s Jim McGee went to Broadhurst’s townhouse late Sunday morning after the story had been published, to try to interview the woman he had spied in Hart’s home the night before, he was surprised to find a reporter from The Denver Post’s Washington bureau knocking on the door. (No one answered.) Reporters weren’t accustomed to news ricocheting across time zones that fast. In retrospect, this sighting was the first visible drop of rain in a violent storm system that was just at that moment beginning to coalesce in newsrooms around the country.

  Nowhere, probably, was that drop in air pressure more acutely felt than at the legendary headquar
ters of The Washington Post, a few blocks north of McPherson Square. Ten years after the cinematic adaptation of All the President’s Men, the Post was now widely considered the premier political paper in the country, and the only one ever to force a president from office. The Post and its celebrated editor, Ben Bradlee, now immortalized in the public mind by Jason Robards in the film, did not like to get beat on major, breaking stories involving presidential candidates. They especially didn’t like to get beat on stories unfolding in their own city, in this case a ten-minute subway ride from the newsroom, by some beachfront paper whose readers probably thought the Watergate was a swim-up bar.

  Paul Taylor, the Post’s man on Hart, got the call at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, early Sunday afternoon. An editor proceeded to read him the Herald story in its entirety. Any reporter who has ever worked a competitive beat knows the sinking sensation Taylor had to feel as another journalist’s breathless prose tumbled out at him like accusations over the phone line—the embarrassment of being blindsided by a rival, the instinct to rationalize it away, the desolation as you realize that the next twenty-four hours, at least, are going to be spent slogging through the muddy tracks left by some other intrepid reporter. And then, in Taylor’s case, the question that had vexed him for months and that must have occurred to him again the minute he hung up the phone and regained his equilibrium: Was this really the kind of story you wanted to own?

  There was nothing fortuitous or stealthy about Taylor’s rise to the top of the political journalism establishment, nothing that even hinted at a lucky break. He seemed destined for it. If the new generation of idealistic, highly educated, professional journalists had needed a standard-bearer, Taylor could easily have filled the role.