All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  “He’s an announced candidate for president of the United States, and he’s a man who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past,” Capen went on. “We stand by the essential correctness of our story. It’s possible that, at some point along the way, someone could have moved out of the alley door of his house. But the fact of the matter remains that our story reported on Donna Rice, who he met in Aspen, who he subsequently met in Dade County—he acknowledged that he telephoned her on a number of occasions. It is a fact that two married men whose spouses were out of town spent a considerable amount of time with these people. It is also true that our reporters saw him and Donna Rice leaving his townhouse on at least three separate occasions.”

  Capen’s soliloquy was remarkable for a couple of reasons. He had now plainly admitted what Fiedler had written, obliquely, the day before—that Bill Dixon was right, and that the Herald’s reporters actually had no way of knowing whether Rice had stayed in the townhouse Friday night or not, because they hadn’t watched the back door. But Capen had also asserted, for the first time, that it didn’t actually matter, because what mattered was precisely the reverse of what the Herald had written—that, in fact, Rice had been seen leaving the house on several occasions, and it was this, and not her having stayed inside the house with him, that constituted the truly damning evidence. And Hart must have understood, at that point, that he had chosen a field of play on which he couldn’t possibly win. Whether Rice had stayed in his townhouse or hadn’t, the conclusion was apparently going to be the same.

  Hart couldn’t get out of that hotel fast enough. And if he didn’t know by then that political journalism was changing in ways he couldn’t begin to comprehend, he probably got the point when the photographers chased his car from the Waldorf, like something out of the new Beverly Hills Cop movie. This time, Stratton was ready; he had set up drivers in two follow cars to obstruct and mislead the cameramen. When the follow cars swerved across Park Avenue to block the route, one of the pursuing vans actually hurdled the median divider in an effort to catch up. Hart was genuinely perplexed, and afraid. As Richard Ben Cramer later relayed it, Hart, in the lead car with Stratton, muttered a question that was probably more philosophical than literal.

  “Why do they have to chase me?” he wondered aloud.

  Back in the ballroom at the Waldorf, meanwhile, a different kind of chase was on. It was always a matter of time before the press found out what even Hart’s aides didn’t know—that the name of Don Soffer’s chartered yacht was Monkey Business. Broadhurst apparently hadn’t thought it essential to disclose earlier, and Hart hadn’t even remembered. “I didn’t look at the name of the boat,” Hart would tell me years later, despite having been photographed in a Monkey Business T-shirt. “In this whole business of judgment, it was, Didn’t this stupid guy know what the name of the boat was? Well, the answer was, No, I didn’t. Should I have? Yes. Would I have gotten off it if I’d known what the name was?” He shrugged. “I didn’t think about stuff like that. I just didn’t think about it.”

  As luck would have it, this little tidbit had just surfaced in Miami, and thanks to reporters talking to their editors on the hotel pay phones, it was just then ricocheting through the assembled press corps. Whatever solemnity Hart had hoped to inject into the discussion over his personal life had now been cleared from the ballroom as thoroughly as the overcooked chicken and half-empty coffee mugs.

  A scene was now unfolding unlike any that had ever been witnessed in the coverage of a presidential campaign. On one side of the cavernous ballroom, Kevin Sweeney was trying to hold off a press pack that Cramer later described as “feral,” answering questions about the unfortunately named boat and how Hart had ended up on it. Among the reporters pressing in with tape recorders and shouting inquiries was the Post’s Paul Taylor, who demanded to know how it was that Hart had managed a trip to Bimini when he maintained that he hadn’t had time to visit his wife.

  Simultaneously, about ten yards away, Tom Fiedler found himself surrounded by his own shifting amoeba of cameras and recorders and boom mikes, holding what amounted to a dueling press conference. He had come there, like any other campaign reporter, to cover the story, but by the time Hart finished attacking the Herald from the podium, Fiedler had become a central part of it. Later it would seem obvious to Fiedler that he really shouldn’t have been there if he didn’t want to get personally caught up in the controversy, but like everything else related to the Hart saga, this was only clear in hindsight. Before 1987, no campaign reporter had ever imagined finding himself at the center of the scrum.

  In fact, from that moment on, Fiedler was a national star, pictured in the pages of newsweeklies and beamed into millions of living rooms. That night, his name made all the evening news shows and then he appeared live, along with his Herald colleague Jim McGee, on ABC’s Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. (The Hart story led the half hour program, followed by a segment on the opening of the Iran-contra hearings.) As he had in the ballroom, Fiedler nervously presented himself as a disinterested reporter who was simply following the story where it led, doing what any reporter would do when tasked with the responsibility of vetting candidates and their character. But Koppel, one of the toughest and most respected newsmen in America, showed little patience for this routine. In fact, he seemed rather disgusted by the entire story.

  When Fiedler flippantly tried to dismiss a question about the back door of the townhouse—“If we are conceding that we are not as good as the F.B.I. in conducting a surveillance, I don’t think we have any problem agreeing to that,” Fiedler joked—Koppel abruptly cut him off.

  “Well, hold on,” the anchor huffed. “That’s kind of cute, but that’s not the point. The point is, did she spend the night with him or didn’t she spend the night with him? And if, in fact, she left, let’s say a half hour after she got there, which is what she claims, then she would not have spent the night with him.” Koppel wasn’t finished—he also hammered Fiedler about his casual and repeated reference to the supposed “relationship” between Hart and Rice. Decades later, Fiedler would describe this first appearance on national television as one of the worst moments of his life.

  As Fiedler was bumbling through his appearance on Nightline, Doug Wilson was waiting at the China Air terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. Hart’s trusted foreign policy advisor, who had negotiated and attended Hart’s remarkable meeting in Mikhail Gorbachev’s office at the Kremlin five months earlier, had been depressed and expecting the worst from the moment he heard about the Herald story Sunday morning. Now, after some hesitation, he was waiting to board a flight for Taiwan, for the start of a long scheduled visit with political leaders in the Far East who were eager to know more about Reagan’s likely successor. Lee Hart had been scheduled to go with him, but her sinus infection had made that impossible. So Wilson was leading the small delegation, and he was waiting to be joined at the terminal by one of the campaign’s top fundraisers, Weston Frank.

  Just before 11:30, Frank burst into the terminal, beaming. He explained breathlessly that Hart, having recovered from his car chase earlier in the day, had just rallied hundreds of supporters with another defiant speech at a fundraiser held by Ted Sorensen, the former Kennedy aide. (“The cause goes on!” Hart had assured them, echoing Ted Kennedy’s famous speech at the 1980 convention. “The crusade continues!”) Frank was gushing about what a great night it was, about how Hart had turned a corner.

  What do you know? Wilson thought to himself, his mood suddenly brightening. Maybe he had been wrong to think that a scandal this tawdry could overtake the candidate’s lofty appeal to ideas.

  Then Wilson looked up at the mounted TV in the terminal, which wasn’t tuned to ABC and Koppel, but rather to NBC and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Just as the power of a single advertising line—“Where’s the beef?”—would probably elude modern media consumers, so, too, might today’s fans of Conan O’Brien or Jon Stewart have a hard time understanding the cultural
power Carson still possessed in 1987, almost twenty-five years after he took over the show from Jack Paar. In the age of three networks, before ubiquitous cable or the Internet, Carson effectively owned America’s last waking moments, after the local newscasts at eleven. Koppel, whose show had quickly become one of the most successful news programs in American history, couldn’t begin to compete with Carson when it came to the number of viewers or the sheer power to shape public perception.

  So there was Carson, coming out to do the monologue everyone would be talking about tomorrow in the office, before moving on to the night’s interviews with George C. Scott and a gymnast named Kristie Phillips. And this is how he started: “By the way, before the monologue begins, if Gary Hart is watching, you might want to hit the ‘mute’ button on your remote control.

  “I really don’t need a monologue tonight,” Carson said. “I think I’ll just bring out and read the front pages of the newspapers around the country. It is getting so wild that people standing in supermarkets are rushing out to buy regular newspapers.

  “Now, we have a lot of people here in the studio. Can I ask a favor of you? I am going to ask you tonight to leave by the front entrance because I don’t want anyone saying we’ve spent the night together.”

  On it went like that, for several minutes, while the studio audience roared. And then Doug Wilson knew with certainty that he hadn’t been wrong, after all.

  By this time, Bill Dixon was back in Denver. He might have been watching either Koppel or Carson, had he not consciously decided to check out completely from anything that mattered.

  In his book, Paul Taylor would write that Dixon had grown despondent when he heard about the Bimini cruise from Rice’s news conference, rather than from his own candidate, and that he had fled town in a funk, having concluded that his friend and client had betrayed everything they believed in. This was partly true, but only partly. Dixon had, in fact, heard about the Bimini piece of the story earlier Monday, when he sat Broadhurst down and made him go through the entire story again. “Jesus Christ, Billy,” he said, when Broadhurst finally came clean about the pleasure cruise. As a skilled lawyer, Dixon instinctively understood that he needed to get all the facts out, and get them out fast. He had made real progress in the first twenty-four hours after the story broke, identifying the weakness in the Herald’s investigation and forcing the paper to take a step back, and now all of that would be lost in another news cycle focused on sex.

  But it was a gross oversimplification to assume that Dixon was just angry at Hart when he decided to leave Washington that Monday. He felt then and later that he had no actual evidence that Hart was lying to him, no reason to assume that his friend of fifteen years had made a patsy of him in the press. Dixon wasn’t the type to think the worst of someone he admired, and Hart was someone he admired very much.

  It was guilt, as much as anything, that knocked the air out of Dixon’s lungs. In the months leading up to the announcement, he had gone out and personally recruited a team of brilliant and devoted aides, many of whom had left jobs and sold houses, taken their kids out of school and signed long-term leases—all because Bill Dixon assured them that Hart intended to go all the way, or at least that’s how Dixon saw it. And now it was clear that while Dixon was vouching for Hart’s seriousness of purpose, Hart was drinking margaritas in Bimini with a model twenty years his junior. It crushed Dixon, the thought that all of the promises he had made might evaporate, because of this.

  And he was disgusted, too, with a media that seemed to him, just in the last twenty-four hours, to have somehow gone insane. Like Hart, Dixon had known reporters his entire adult life, and felt well served by them. He’d proudly played a key role in the greatest political story of all time, the exposing and punishing of a corrupt president. Were these the same reporters, the ones who were stalking a candidate in the alley behind his home, who were writing speculative stories about what he did in his private time and following his children around to school? Had the world turned completely upside down?

  Now he was fielding a rumor every five minutes, it seemed, some fresh call from headquarters or a state supporter who had heard something damning. Hart had been seen hitting on coeds in Florida. Or he had been spotted hounding in Georgia, or with another woman in Washington. For even a fraction of it to be true, Hart would have had to do nothing with his time but hop from one city to the next, bedding any woman he could find, and even then he would probably have had to be cloned. What about the looming threat of nuclear war, Dixon wanted to know? What about the rising number of homeless on America’s streets?

  It was all of this, Dixon would say many years later, when he finally talked about it at all, that shook the faith from deep in his bones that Monday, left him feeling exhausted and melancholy. There was simply nothing more to be done, nothing more to give. After twenty years in politics, he felt suddenly and shockingly adrift. And so when Dixon landed in Denver Tuesday afternoon, at around the same time Hart was indicting the media at the Waldorf, he didn’t go to headquarters to reassure his troops on the front line, who badly needed some reassurance. Instead, he went to his apartment and instructed his twenty-three-year-old son, who was staying with him, to take the phone off the hook. He popped open some beers, turned on a baseball game. He told no one at the campaign where he was or when he might return. For the next two days, while the political universe as he had known it spun apart, Dixon did something utterly unthinkable for a political operative in his position. He disappeared.

  And in those first hours of his self-imposed isolation, Dixon made a promise to himself—that he would never again set foot in Washington, a city where a man of Gary Hart’s integrity could be effectively executed for nothing but the most trivial transgressions, just for sport. And in all the years that followed, despite the steady flow of invitations to weddings and funerals and even the inauguration of his friend and legal associate Barack Obama, Bill Dixon never broke that vow.

  While Fiedler sparred with Koppel on one channel and Carson bitingly ridiculed Hart on the other, the phone rang in Paul Taylor’s Manhattan hotel room. The Post’s political editor, Ann Devroy, was on the line, and filled in her star reporter on the strange things that had been transpiring back in Washington.

  In the days after the Herald broke its story, the Post, like other major papers, had been deluged with anonymous tips of all kinds. One stood out. It was an envelope that contained a private investigator’s report. Someone had hired the investigator to tail Hart. And so, on a Saturday in December 1986, days after Hart and Doug Wilson returned from Moscow, the private eye had followed Hart as he gave the Democratic response to Reagan’s weekly radio address in a Virginia studio, then to his townhouse and a bookstore, and then finally to the home of a woman who was a well-known lobbyist in town. Hart had apparently spent the night with this woman, who was rumored to have been involved with him on and off for many years, going back to his separations from Lee.

  Who sent the envelope, or why, wasn’t known. (Bizarrely, Dixon had heard, and campaign aides always believed, that one of Hart’s colleagues in the Senate, Maryland’s Joe Tydings, had hired the investigator because he feared that Hart was sleeping with his then wife, who was a close friend of Lee’s and worked for her on the campaign. Tydings denied it at the time.) But it was exactly what editors at the Post needed in order to reestablish the rightful order of things—the break that might transfer ownership of the entire story over to the nation’s most storied political paper. Of course Bradlee knew the woman in the photos personally (or at least he knew someone who knew her), and he even volunteered to confront her and get the truth. The Post was waiting on Bradlee’s confirmation, and in the meantime Devroy wanted to make sure that Taylor was staying close to Hart, in case he needed to get a quick response from the candidate.

  As it happened, Hart had decided to finally confront the press at a news conference the following afternoon, Wednesday, at a hotel in New Hampshire, on the Dartmouth campus—an event he hoped
might put the whole affair to rest and allow him to go on campaigning. Taylor arrived in New Hampshire, as he later put it, in an “uncharitable frame of mind” toward the candidate, having overcome whatever qualms he had once had about delving into Hart’s personal life. Taylor had been “brooding” on Hart’s speech in New York, and he was angry about it. Here Hart might have explained himself, been contrite, shown some humility and candor. But instead, he had chastised the media like you might a kindergarten class, and he had claimed the moral high ground despite the obvious fact—at least it was obvious to Taylor and the other reporters—that he had lied about having sex with Rice. As far as Taylor was concerned, he would later recount in his book, “Hart’s protestations that the relationship was strictly platonic were instantly rendered laughable” once the news about Bimini and Monkey Business had come out. “The only question was how long it would take him to realize it.”

  You can imagine that some of Taylor’s irritation at the speech was probably residual, too. Even in his moment of disgrace, Hart had somehow managed to affect exactly the condescending tone that had so stung Taylor when he had pressed Hart about endorsements on the tarmac in Maryland months earlier. Once again, Hart’s manner suggested that he alone saw the bigger picture but was being forced to endure the smallness of shallow minds.

  But it’s also not hard for a fellow reporter, looking back through the lens of time, to discern another motive, aside from his own irritation, that Taylor might have had for confronting Hart that Wednesday afternoon at Dartmouth. After talking to Devroy, Taylor had to have sensed that he was on the cusp of a huge story—one that would redeem his paper and might, at the same time, make him more famous than Fiedler had suddenly become. But as it stood, Taylor’s impending scoop (if the private investigator’s finding could be verified) amounted to little more than a crass story about illicit sex, which was exactly the kind of thing for which he did not imagine himself becoming known. All it would prove was that Hart had been involved with a woman who was not his wife. Hart had never actually claimed unwavering fidelity to Lee—all he had said was that they had been separated and that he wouldn’t respond to rumors—and, this being 1987, no one had even considered asking him directly whether he had ever been a disloyal husband.