by Matt Bai
Although he still talked a little like the Brooklyn native that he was (fast and lyrical, as if litigating a dispute over cab fare), Taylor had spent much of his early childhood in Japan and Vietnam, where his dad worked as an American diplomat. He went to Yale and ran the Yale Daily News, did his prerequisite couple of years of training at the highly regarded Winston-Salem Journal in the early 1970s, and then latched on with The Philadelphia Inquirer, where by 1980 he was the paper’s top campaign reporter, wooed by both the Times and the Post. Most reporters who joined the Post from other papers had to punch their tickets on metro or some other less than glamorous section, where the paper stockpiled a warehouse worth of younger reporters whose life’s ambition was to ride the campaign bus. Taylor, at thirty-two, walked in the door—cool and confident, looking like a young Elliott Gould—as a roving national political reporter. By the end of the ’84 campaign, he was the heir apparent to David Broder, the Post’s marquee columnist and elder statesman.
And so, naturally, as the next campaign approached, Taylor drew the best assignment in the newsroom. Hart was his guy.
Initially, at least, Taylor thought he and the front-runner had, in his words, “hit it off.” This is how he put it in the book he would write immediately after the 1988 campaign, titled See How They Run. In that little remembered but thoughtful and highly readable account, Taylor offered this cringingly honest description of his own reporting style: “I’m a ‘good cop’ interviewer. I try to ease, tease, coax and wheedle information from sources. With body language, facial expression, tone of voice and other verbal and nonverbal cues, I hope to let them know that I see the same world they see; that I empathize with them; that, beneath my aloof reporter’s exterior, I may even secretly admire them.” It’s doubtful that a politician as experienced and perceptive as Hart was taken in by the “I’m your biggest fan” routine (most politicians are, if nothing else, better instantaneous readers of people than we often give them credit for), but he always appreciated a well-read journalist who seemed actually to be listening, and he liked Taylor enough to sit through several interviews and a long dinner in 1986.
However calculated his approach might have been, Taylor found himself drawn to Hart for much the same reason E. J. Dionne found him compelling: there was a part of Hart that was journalistic in temperament. He had an ability—an inclination, even—to take himself out of the action and see the entire political process as an observer, to appreciate the absurdity of the political spectacle in a way that a sophisticated reporter could appreciate.
But then something shifted. In early March, six weeks or so before his official announcement, Hart gave a speech at the Maryland statehouse, and afterward Taylor rode with him and Billy Shore in the back of a car to the private airstrip nearby. Notebook flipped open, Taylor started asking him why people perceived Hart to be a loner, and why he didn’t have the support of his colleagues in the Senate, and why he wasn’t having much success lining up endorsements. And you can imagine how this played with Hart, who divided the political world into two camps: those few who got that he was running a nontraditional, idea-driven, antiestablishment campaign, and all the rest, who could only see the narrower political reality. As Hart would have seen it, Taylor had been talking to him for a year, and yet somehow he still didn’t get it! He thought Hart needed to line up the establishment behind him, as if this were 1960, when that was precisely the thing that would make him most vulnerable to an insurgent campaign.
Taylor slid into the role of political counselor, in the way that some journalists will; he suggested that Hart should be forcibly extracting endorsements by telling party leaders that the proverbial train was leaving the station and demanding that they get on board. Hart couldn’t contain his contempt. “That’s so ridiculous!” Hart blurted, according to Taylor’s account of the conversation. “Nobody does it. Nobody does it anymore! If they do, they’re either going to get a punch in the nose or a horse laugh.”
“I wondered,” Taylor later wrote, “Do I know him well enough to tell him, ‘Cut the crap’? Or is it possible he’s serious?” Of course, Hart couldn’t have been more serious if he’d been ordering a nuclear strike, and Taylor wisely chose discretion.
Taylor walked away from that encounter feeling that his relationship with Hart had been poisoned. Hart now saw him, he concluded, as “a prisoner of the Washington mind-set—a small-bore, nearsighted, all-tactics political junkie.” Taylor, who not surprisingly considered himself a creative and complex thinker, found the implication deeply insulting. It would probably be too much to say that this one moment, in which Hart allowed his resentment of the pack mentality to undo his budding relationship with an important reporter, changed the course of events that were about to unfold. But certainly Hart had squandered a reservoir of goodwill that, looking back on it later, might have been crucial.
The other thing Taylor took away from the conversation was that the normally placid Hart was clearly anxious now—that all the background chatter about his character, this business about the weirdness and the “womanizing,” was pulling his internal strings ever tighter as the actual campaign approached. Like the other reporters who followed Hart closely, Taylor had long heard the rumors about, say, Hart having women in his hotel rooms on the road, and he accepted them as largely, if not entirely, true. Only recently, he’d heard a story from a trusted source in Texas who said that Hart had invited the hostess of a fundraiser to his hotel room for a thank-you lunch the next day, and that the hostess in question had since been telling anyone who would listen that she had enjoyed a fling with the next president.
Taylor wasn’t quite sure what to do with such leads. He was, by his own self-reckoning, an explainer of the larger political and policy debates, rather than someone who spent a lot of time digging for hidden fragments of truth. There was no context, really, in which Taylor could imagine himself staking out a candidate’s house the way Fiedler later did. At the same time, if Hart’s character was going to become a central issue in the primary campaign, then could the Post simply clap its hands over its ears and pretend the campaign was about something else?
In early April, about a month before the Herald’s exposé, Taylor and a group of senior editors and reporters sat down in Ben Bradlee’s office to discuss this dilemma. That Bradlee ended up the man to preside over such a meeting was ironic, to put it mildly. In his youth, as Newsweek’s dashing Washington bureau chief, Bradlee had lived next door to then senator John Kennedy, and their children had played together. Later, when Kennedy occupied the White House, Bradlee and his wife were frequent dinner guests, and when Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963, Bradlee comforted his shocked widow at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they brought the president’s body to be autopsied. Bradlee would always maintain that he hadn’t known about any of Kennedy’s extramarital activities (even though rumors had been rampant, and it was later revealed that Bradlee’s own sister-in-law, who was mysteriously murdered in 1964, had been one of Kennedy’s liaisons). But probably no journalist alive better embodied the last era of political coverage, where politicians trusted journalists to observe certain boundaries, and where journalists expected politicians to be both human and accessible.
The journalists assembled around Bradlee’s desk wrestled with a series of questions that would have been imponderable in Kennedy’s day, and which could have consumed an entire yearlong course in any journalism school. In his post-campaign book, Taylor summarized them this way:
If a candidate for president is believed to be a womanizer, but there’s no suggestion that his sexual activities have ever interfered with his public duties, is it even worth investigating, much less publishing? Is there a statute of limitations, or is screwing around in the past tense just as newsworthy as in the present? Is a series of one-night stands more reportable than a single long-term extramarital affair? Does it matter if a candidate has an open-marriage understanding with his spouse? Is Hart a special case, or if we begin looking into his mating habits, m
ust we do the same with everyone else running for president?
Taylor recalled that he and his colleagues also spent some time discussing the extreme difficulty of even reporting such a story. The two people having the affair wouldn’t talk, and corroborating witnesses would be almost impossible to come by, and “most reporters don’t want to be Peeping Toms.” (As it turned out, of course, the operative word there was “most.”)
And then there was the Woodward issue to consider. The way Woodward always told the story, yes, Hart had crashed at his place during his first separation from Lee, but it’s not like they were acting out the Odd Couple or something; Hart was over at a girlfriend’s most of the time and basically used Woodward’s place as a forwarding address. After some weeks of this, Woodward grew uneasy and asked his buddy Gary to camp elsewhere, and that was the extent of it. Still, if everyone in Bradlee’s office knew this story, that meant that half of Capitol Hill did, too. And if the Post ignored the constant gossip about Hart, and it later came to light that he was still fooling around, then the paper might face allegations that it essentially took a pass in order to spare Woodward’s buddy—and perhaps even Woodward himself—any embarrassment.
It was Broder, the voice of experience and wisdom, who formulated a compromise. The Post would shortly be in the process of compiling its in-depth profiles of all the candidates, which by that time was a quadrennial rite. There was no need, Broder suggested, for the Post to start hunting around in every candidate’s sex life just because the issue was swirling around Hart. What they needed to do was commence their exhaustive reporting on Hart’s profile and see what came up. If the reporter assigned to the piece decided there was any troubling pattern of behavior when it came to women, something that called Hart’s judgment or stability into question, they could figure out how to deal with it then.
“In ways that I thought were very inappropriate, the fact that he had a womanizing problem was becoming part of who he was as a candidate and now the front-runner coming into this next presidential campaign,” Taylor reflected when we talked many years later. “I was very uncomfortable with that. And at the Post, we said, You know, we’re not going to go there, and it’s irresponsible to present it that way. It’s rumormongering. But we can’t close our eyes to the fact that that’s part of the world we know very well—the journalists, the candidates, the consultants, the opponents, Hart’s own staff. It’s all part of their world. It’s real, in that sense. It may well make its way into becoming part of this thing. So let’s see what there is.”
As it happened, the reporter assigned to do the Hart profile, the talented David Maraniss, was at that point wrapping up another assignment. He was just turning his sights on Hart when the Herald story hit.
There was an assumption inherent in the Post’s deliberations, which was that the Post, along with a handful of other elite news organizations, would be the ones who got to decide whether Hart’s personal life should be an issue of national prominence or not. That’s pretty much how it had worked, to that point, in political journalism. If the Post or the Times or The Wall Street Journal—or, to a lesser extent, the three broadcast networks, who tended to follow the lead of the major print outlets—didn’t think a story rose to the level of serious news, then it remained a regional story or an unreported rumor. Bradlee had every reason to be deliberate before reaching a determination on Hart’s “pattern of behavior,” because he and a small group of other editors ultimately set the agenda for everyone else, no matter what a less influential paper like the Herald had to say about it.
That’s also why it was possible to think, if you woke up in Washington that Monday morning, May 4, that the story about Hart and Donna Rice, which was now twenty-four hours old, might be short-lived. Taylor had coauthored a piece about the allegations on the Post’s Monday front page, but it didn’t do much to legitimize the Herald piece as important news. NEWSPAPER STAKEOUT INFURIATES HART, the headline declared, followed by the subhead: “Report on Female House Guest Called Character Assassination.” The Times, meanwhile, included a small item inside the national section, the tone of which suggested that editors had placed it there with a pair of tongs so as not to sully themselves. Dixon still found himself surrounded, at Billy Broadhurst’s place, by reporters and camera crews, but this was an assemblage of political reporters, most of whom still felt uneasy about the story and who readily observed the traditional rules of decorum.
By that point, however, it was becoming clear that outside Washington something else was happening—something entirely unfamiliar in the political media. Until that moment, you have to remember, Hollywood and its attendant paparazzi had existed in a separate universe from the coverage of American campaigns. No tabloid photographer bothered stalking some boring politician or trying to snap a photo of him in a bathing suit—who would have paid for such a pathetic picture, anyway? But now, as Neil Postman had so brilliantly predicted in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the lines between entertainment and politics had become harder to discern. The more political coverage focused on the personalities of candidates, and the more those candidates tried to broaden their own celebrity by showing up on the sets of TV shows, the more People and the National Enquirer started to think of them as stars in a national drama, just like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. As Warren Beatty had understood and tried to explain to Hart, the same paparazzi who had already made privacy obsolete in Hollywood were readying for an incursion onto political turf. All they needed was a reason.
The first sign came Sunday, sometime around noon, at the cabin in Troublesome Gulch. That’s when the wave of newfangled satellite trucks lumbered up the gravel drive like a line of tanks rumbling through the desert, disturbing the quiet hum of spring. Lee had taken the weekend off from the campaign trail, because she had a sinus infection that had swollen half her face, and she couldn’t fly. Hart had called her Saturday night from Washington to say that there was an ugly story coming, but that he’d done nothing wrong, and Lee told him she believed in him and didn’t need the details. But nobody was going to believe that if they saw her puffy face on TV, as if she’d been up all night bawling.
And so, surrounded by her daughter and a bevy of girlfriends who arrived to see her through, Lee hid in the kitchen as these TV trucks barricaded her inside her own home, the telephone on the kitchen wall her only means of reaching her husband or the outside world. (Among the few outsiders who called the cabin to check on her during this time was Hart’s rival Jesse Jackson—an act of compassion Lee would never forget.) The words “crowd control” and “perimeter” weren’t part of the standard political lexicon in 1987; Lee simply watched through the kitchen window, like some heroine in a zombie movie, as each new photographer to arrive tried to scale her fence or climb a tree just fifty yards from where she stood.
Alarmed by Lee’s panicked calls to headquarters, John Emerson grabbed Joe Trippi, the deputy political director, and gave him an instant (if dubious) promotion: chief of staff to the candidate’s wife. Trippi’s job was to secure the premises and, ultimately, to get Lee out of Troublesome Gulch without her being chased down the mountain by careening camera trucks. Thus it’s fair to say that Trippi, who was thirty at the time, became the first campaign operative in American history to personally confront the collision of politics and tabloid media and the sudden mobilization of a satellite-wielding army.
Trippi would forever remember being accosted by a guy, as he tried to get through the front gate, who identified himself as a reporter for A Current Affair. The syndicated show, hosted by the gossipy Maury Povich, had started airing a year earlier. Trippi, whose mind was on his candidate’s alleged adultery—and who, like most political operatives, had never heard of anything called A Current Affair—was incredulous. “You mean they have an entire show for that now?” he stammered.
If anybody swept up in this whole fiasco should have understood how to navigate the rabid, explosive culture of celebrity media, you would think it would have been Donna Rice. She had
dated Don Henley and Prince Albert of Monaco, had appeared on numerous soap operas and TV dramas, including Miami Vice and the outrageously popular Dallas. She was represented by agents in New York and Miami. If you were writing the purely fictional account of the Hart scandal, you might imagine Rice in the mold of Nicole Kidman’s character in the movie To Die For—gorgeous and manipulative, lusting for stardom, indifferent to how she got there or who got trampled in the process.
In reality, Rice was, as she described herself, a “typical Southern girl”—a former Miss South Carolina and head cheerleader, yes, but also a magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of South Carolina, with a major in biology and a minor in business, and her district’s top saleswoman of Wyeth products. She felt swept away by Hart, despite only having known him for a few weeks, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt his campaign, about which she knew almost nothing. When the reporters started congregating at Broadhurst’s townhouse, Rice repeatedly begged to talk to Hart, who was the only one in the bunch she trusted. She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t had anything to do with tipping off the Herald, and then she wanted to go home.
So did Armandt. Unlike Rice, she knew exactly how the Herald guys had come to be at Hart’s townhouse, and you can only imagine how uncomfortable she must have been holed up in Broadhurst’s place, like a mob informant at the moment when the cops show up. Before she managed to make her escape, however, Armandt had a private chat with Broadhurst, and then Broadhurst sat Rice down for a serious talk. He told her the campaign had a sensitive question for her: Was there anything embarrassing in her past, anything at all that might surface in the hours ahead?
Rice steeled herself. She really did want to help Hart. So she offered up two deeply personal and painful facts about her life that not even her parents or most of her closest friends knew. First, she had an ex-boyfriend who was in jail for drug charges. And second, a fashion photographer in Miami had once taken photos of her wrapped in an American flag, with a half of one breast exposed. And there it was—the seamy lining of her life, turned inside out. Broadhurst prevailed on her to repeat her admissions for Dixon and a few other campaign aides. From that moment on, Rice felt that, as far as the Hart people were concerned, she was the one on trial, the one whose character was suspect.
