All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  In exchange for these tidbits about herself, Rice wanted only one thing. She pleaded with Broadhurst not to let the campaign release her name to the media. All she wanted was to escape this thing without anybody knowing who she was or trying to ask her questions about it. She was devastated when, on the phone a few hours later, her mother asked her why she was all over the TV news and what was going on; in the interest of getting all the facts out at once, the campaign had released her name. By that time, the paparazzi were already arriving at Rice’s condo in Miami, waiting to ambush her. Her parents’ house in South Carolina would soon be surrounded, too. The Hart team pressed her for the name of someone who could “run interference” for her—meaning a family lawyer or an agent. Rice had no idea what that meant. She had no one like that. Most normal people didn’t.

  There was no page in the political manual—at least not yet—for what to do with a woman in Rice’s position. So there, too, the Hart team had to improvise. They flew in Sue Casey, Hart’s scheduler and longtime aide, who was around Rice’s age, and had Casey stay with her Sunday night in a hotel at Dulles Airport, then fly with her back to Miami. Dixon had enlisted the help of Tom McAliley, a cigar-chomping trial lawyer and raconteur who was Hart’s point man in Florida, and McAliley met the two women at the airport Monday morning and spirited Rice directly to his office. McAliley’s plan was first to assemble about a half dozen handpicked reporters and let them question Rice in his conference room. Rice pleaded with him to spare her this ordeal and let her go home, but she was like a captive now; she had promised to do whatever they needed her to do if it would make all of this go away. McAliley had to sequester her in his office, because the photographers and reporters had started to besiege the building. When Rice made the mistake of trying to use the women’s room by herself, they descended on her like a pack of wolves, right there in the hallway.

  It stung Rice, then and for all the many years after, to find that the reporters gathered in McAliley’s conference room already knew both of the embarrassing, intimate details of her life she had shared, privately, with the campaign. Clearly, Hart’s people had decided to get out in front of any further disclosures. But outwardly, Rice never seemed rattled. Rather, she was eerily disarming, sweet, relaxed. “I was a professional,” she told me many years later, by which she meant that she had learned, as an actress, to set aside her fear and read her lines.

  Right up front, according to notes from the session that later ended up in the AP archives, Rice said she was nervous, and she tried to impress upon the reporters that she was a serious person, someone who once “had the opportunity to go to any graduate school I wanted to.” She said she hadn’t spent the night at Hart’s place, but rather had left by the back door, just as Dixon had been saying. She said they were “pals,” nothing more, that she preferred younger men, and that “if I had felt there were anything more in his intentions I would have been very upset.” (This last bit was, to put it nicely, a complete lie.) “If there had been something fishy,” she cannily assured the reporters, “we would have been sneaking around.”

  When they asked her outright if she’d had “sexual relations” with Hart, Rice was as direct and final as she could be. “No” was her answer—three separate times. As if to call this answer further into question, however, Rice did confirm for the reporters a rumor that had been circulating ever since the Herald had heard from its tipster about photographs taken on a private yacht. At McAliley’s urging, Rice told the media contingent about the chartered boat and the overnight stay in Bimini, which she described as innocent, but which guaranteed another daily news cycle of salacious headlines.

  Twenty-six years later, Rice still wouldn’t say how much of her performance that day had been just that—mere performance, rather than the truth. But she allowed that she had been eager to prove that she wasn’t the one who had betrayed Hart. “I did what I felt like I had to do based on a difficult situation that I was put in, that I never should have been in,” she told me. “I shared the information that I was expected to share and that was in the best interests of the campaign.”

  Afterward, Rice returned at last to her dockside condo in North Bay Village and was stunned by what she returned to. Cameramen blocked the entrance and shot through her windows from rented boats in the waterway. A helicopter hovered overhead. Neighbors had rented their apartments to reporters. Unable to go out, she tried to order pizza, but the delivery guy was practically mugged at the entrance and didn’t make it upstairs. McAliley had scheduled a larger news conference for the next day; he said the only way for Rice to get her normal life back was to meet the full force of the media head-on and exhaust their curiosity. But sitting in her condo, where she sought advice from a friend who worked in Hollywood public relations, Rice understood all too clearly that her normal life wasn’t coming back. She called McAliley and told him to cancel Tuesday’s news conference. She wasn’t talking to anyone else.

  Later, when all of this was a distant memory, Donna Rice would say that she was lucky to have been thrown into the hands of Tom McAliley, a man who, despite his obvious interest in Hart’s political success, came to be a kind of father figure to her in the months and years after the scandal. (McAliley died from an aneurysm in 1994.) He told Rice it was fine if she didn’t want to hold a news conference, but she couldn’t stay in Miami, barricaded in her building with only a doorman for protection. The next morning, he had a staff member shepherd her through the media crush and drive her to the airport, chased at high speed by a TV crew. McAliley had a private plane waiting, and Rice got on board and anxiously strapped herself in. She had no idea where she was bound.

  Whenever Hart came through New York, he preferred to stay with his Times pal Sydney Gruson on the Upper East Side. As it happened, Gruson was holding a dinner party for some other elite Manhattanites Monday night. So it came as quite a jolt to his guests when the front door opened, midway through dinner, and in walked the most talked about man in America at the moment, who was said to be in seclusion and not making any public comment. (Hart had his own key to the place.) Hart called out a hello to Gruson and waved mischievously to the dinner guests, taking a moment to savor the stunned expressions on their faces, before heading to the back bedroom where he could work in peace. It was the last bit of tranquillity Hart would know for some time.

  After all, Hart wasn’t in Washington anymore; this was New York, center of the media world and the hub of tabloid journalism in particular. And what was waiting for him in New York made the chaotic scenes in Troublesome Gulch and Miami look like bingo night at the rest home. Stratton, the lead advance man on the campaign, had worked for Hart, on and off, since 1974 and was now embarking on his third presidential campaign, but he had never seen anything like what he encountered Tuesday morning when he tried to deliver Hart to the Waldorf-Astoria, where the newspaper publishers were meeting. Camera crews blocked his car’s path, while paparazzi photographers literally hurled themselves onto the windshield. It was more like a perp walk than a grand entrance.

  Inside, Hart sat on the dais next to his fellow senator and presidential hopeful on the Republican side, Bob Dole, staring out at hundreds of newspaper executives and almost as many reporters who had overwhelmed the ballroom and were standing in a crush at the back. Dole had accepted that there was going to be little focus on economics at the lunch, and even less on himself. “Hell of a deal, Gary, hell of a deal,” Dole said, shaking his head.

  As Hart sat there, squinting into the overhead lights and waiting for his turn to speak, he noticed a familiar, carefully coiffed figure enter the balcony, where a lot of the broadcast crews had claimed their turf. He stared harder in disbelief. Could that really be Tom—Tom Brokaw, that is—getting ready to do a stand-up? The same Brokaw who, along with his wife, had dined, in happier times, with the Harts in Washington? Who was enough of a personal friend to have exchanged Christmas presents with Hart? Tuesday, coincidentally, was the first day of the long anticipated congressional hearin
gs on the Iran-contra scandal back in Washington, and yet here was a serious man like Tom Brokaw, the sole anchor of NBC Nightly News, choosing instead to cover a banquet in New York where Hart might or might not make his first public comments about an alleged sexual encounter with a small-time actress. Hart’s gloom deepened.

  His plan at the luncheon, aside from delivering the economics lecture he had come there to deliver, was to drive a wedge between the serious media and the outliers—to appeal to the sense of idealism and decency he had long known to be lurking under the tough hides of men like Sydney Gruson and Jack Germond and Tom Brokaw, too. That Hart had been handed this opportunity—that he found himself, by quirk of the calendar, appearing before an assemblage from the very industry that now controlled his fate—seemed a stroke of providence too precious to waste. Arrayed before him were the leading executives of what was still at that time the dominant source of news in America, and surely they could be made to see the folly of letting a single, midsize newspaper change all the rules of political journalism, of allowing any sense of privacy to be obliterated by an impossibly narrow definition of “character.” Surely, if he laid out his case succinctly and persuasively, as he knew how to do better than anyone in politics, the publishers—and even the reporters hovering in the shadows behind them—would swing his way.

  The public, Hart felt sure, already had. Polling in the first days after the story broke showed that Hart was still the overwhelming favorite among Democratic voters. In a Gallup poll commissioned by Newsweek that week and published the following weekend, a majority of Democrats (55 percent) thought he was telling the truth about what happened, and a plurality (44 percent) described themselves as unconcerned about it. Fifty-three percent of voters overall said marital infidelity had nothing to do with a candidate’s ability to handle the presidency; 64 percent thought the media was being unfair to Hart; and 70 percent said they disapproved of the media using covert surveillance. If Hart thought he was winning, it’s because, at that point, he surely was.

  “Last weekend, a newspaper published a misleading and false story that hurt my family and other innocent people and reflected badly on my character,” Hart told the publishers when he at last took center stage. “This story was written by reporters who, by their own admission, undertook a spotty surveillance, who reached inaccurate conclusions based on incomplete facts, who, after publishing a false story, now concede they may have gotten it wrong. And who, most outrageously, refused to interview the very people who could have given them the facts before filing their story, which we asked and urged them to do.”

  Hart blasted the Herald reporters for going to press before even interviewing the woman involved, even though he said they were offered the chance. And then he waded ever so tentatively into the filmy waters of his personal life, which he still believed should be walled off from intrusion. He noted his twenty-eight-year marriage to Lee, whom he described as “a woman with an inexhaustible reservoir of affection, caring and patience,” and said they had come through their separations with a stronger marriage. Then he turned the harsh interrogation light, again, on his listeners.

  “You, ladies and gentlemen, have the honor of leading the only industry singled out for protection under the Constitution of the United States,” Hart said, his granite chin held high in defiance. “That signifies enormous power. But it also places upon each of you a very heavy responsibility. What is right and truthful? In that spirit, I hope you’ll ask yourselves some searching questions: about what is right and what is truthful; about the propriety of a newspaper conducting a questionable and inadequate surveillance of one presidential candidate; about whether the urgency of meeting a deadline is subordinate to hearing the truth; and about whether it’s right or good journalism to draw an extraordinary conclusion before hearing some rather ordinary facts.”

  Hart warned that the time was coming when the voters would demand fairness from their media. “As I struggle to retain my integrity and my honor—and believe me, I will—I hope you will also struggle to save our political system from all of its worst instincts,” he said. “For that is the real issue. Not one person’s public career, but a nation’s public life.”

  Near the end of this hastily written preamble, Hart tried to strike a delicate balance—between showing some grudging contrition for his own behavior, on one hand, and making clear he had no intention of being derailed by it, on the other. At that time, the public apology was not yet the staple of political discourse and scandal recovery it would become in ensuing years. And while Hart intended to take his share of the responsibility, he was hardly the guy to set some new standard in groveling before his inquisitors.

  He concluded:

  Since the very first day I entered public life, I have always held myself to a high standard of public and private conduct, and I always will. But the events of the past few days have also taught me that, for some of us in public life, even the most commonplace, appropriate behavior can be misconstrued by some to be improper. This just means that I have to raise my own personal standard even higher.

  Did I make a mistake by putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued? Of course I did. That goes without saying. Did I do anything immoral? I absolutely did not.

  Those who seek national leadership submit themselves to many tests of personal character and fortitude, of integrity and substance, but also of determination and will, of commitment to the nation’s interest. I’m here today to restate my intention to insist that whatever may be delivered by the more brutal side of politics, this contest must and will focus on this nation’s future. For that and that alone is what’s at stake in 1988.

  Satisfied with his argument, Hart plunged forcefully into his economics plan. He and his staff had worked on the speech for weeks, and it was one of the rare occasions where the uneasy speechwriters and policy aides were the ones who kept wanting to revise it, while the candidate reassured them that they had gotten it right; usually, it was the other way around.

  Hart began by making the case that the nation’s problems were not cyclical, as they seemed, but rather “fundamental and structural in nature”—that the country had yet to come to terms with the winding down of its industrial dominance, the decay of its infrastructure and public education systems, the accumulation of public and private debt. He went on to reject both the liberal vision of limitless public spending and the conservative vision of limited government, calling instead for deficit reduction balanced with new investment. He offered some innovative ideas, like the “individual training accounts” for workers who wanted to learn skills for the new economy and the military reforms he had championed for a decade, which he argued would reduce spending while also making the country safer and more prepared for the post–Cold War era. It was a speech—a platform of policies—years ahead of its time, an agenda that neatly presaged the two decades of political debate that followed.

  But of course, by that point, no one in the room was listening; Hart might as well have been reading aloud from The Chronicles of Narnia, for all anyone cared. Twenty-five years later, you could Google Hart’s preamble about his sex life in about six seconds, but there was no record anywhere of the actual speech he gave that day. Even Hart’s closest aides—hell, even Hart himself—couldn’t say with any certainty later whether he had actually gone through with the economics part of his program or just scrapped it altogether. I was able to read it only after Mark Steitz, a policy aide at the time, went to the trouble of tracking down an ancient version written in WordPerfect and preserved on a hard drive.

  Instead, when at last he finished to polite applause, and it came time for the question-and-answer portion of the program, Hart found himself drawn inexorably into a debate with the nation’s leading publishers about the calls he had made to Donna Rice (they were about fundraising, Hart lied), and about Bimini (Hart, like Rice, said they slept on separate boats). His answers satisfied no one. They sounded small and evasive.

  Somehow, even as he
lectured them on their responsibilities, Hart had assumed that the largely conservative, older businessmen who ran America’s papers, these pillars of civic life in their communities, would see the reason in his appeal, that they would not want their money used by a new breed of reporter to snoop around in front hedges and alleyways, trying to expose private behavior that most of these men themselves would be in no position to vilify. What he hadn’t counted on, though, was the tribalism of the media, especially after Watergate, when an American president had effectively declared war on the entire Fourth Estate. Hart had gone after one of their own, publicly and pointedly, and the publishers were now scrambling to honor their unspoken mutual defense pact. You couldn’t hope to make this about the behavior of a single newspaper or a couple of reporters; an attack on the Herald was an attack on all of them.

  In short order, the Herald’s fifty-one-year-old publisher, Dick Capen, rose from the audience to speak. (Capen, a staunch Republican and social conservative, would later be made ambassador to Spain by George H. W. Bush, which did little to quiet the conspiracy theories among Hart loyalists.) “The issue is not the Miami Herald,” Capen said. “It’s Gary Hart’s judgment.” The utter disrespect in this one line was hard to miss. Capen was talking about “Gary Hart”—not “Senator Hart”—as if he weren’t even in the room. He meant not to counter Hart’s speech so much as to hijack it altogether.