All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  If Hart could be cornered into denying publicly that he had ever stepped out on his wife, however, then the issue of the investigator’s report would become much weightier than mere sex. Then Hart would be exposed as a liar and a hypocrite, someone who claimed to hold himself to a “high moral standard” even as he blatantly deceived the press and the public about his “womanizing.” That would make him a man of shoddy character whose presidency could imperil the country, just as Nixon’s had. If you were already writing that story in your head, as Taylor surely was when he arrived in New Hampshire that afternoon, the difference was clear. A story about Hart having an affair was little more than titillating. But a story that proved he had baldly lied about that same affair could be construed as serious journalism. It was, arguably, a public service.

  And so that is precisely what Paul Taylor set out to do, in a way that would shock the political world and forever shift the boundaries of campaign journalism, every bit as much as the Herald had.

  If the scene in New York had disoriented Hart, then New Hampshire was like some planet with zero gravity, where nothing behaved according to the natural and immutable laws of politics. Actually, the insanity had begun at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, Wednesday morning, even before they got off the ground, when Mike Stratton, who had now hired a group of Pinkerton guards to protect the candidate, had to drive out onto the tarmac to avoid the bevy of photographers and reporters in the terminal; somehow they had learned of the flight Hart was taking and were preparing to board it, like raging barbarians brandishing cardboard tickets instead of swords. Upon boarding the plane with Hart, Stratton, dressed in a suit and tie and possessed of an air of authority, suggested to a flight attendant, with some urgency, that it might be about time to depart. The agent assumed, reasonably enough, that Stratton and his rented security retinue were Secret Service agents (in fact, it was too early in the campaign for Hart to have received federal protection, and he would have resisted it in any event), and she immediately relayed Stratton’s message to the pilot, who abruptly took the plane up while the stranded reporters watched with horror from the gate.

  By the time they landed in Manchester an hour later, the FBI was waiting to question Stratton, who stood accused of having impersonated a federal agent. The investigation, in fact, would linger on for many months, tormenting Stratton, until federal authorities finally decided not to charge him. (Among those who spoke to FBI agents on his behalf was Richard Ben Cramer, who was along for the ride and witnessed the incident. Cramer kept the entire episode out of his book, for fear that, even years later, the government might not be finished with Stratton and would use the account against him.)

  Up to then, in the seventy-two hours since the Herald story had first come spilling out of fax machines all over the country, there had been, in effect, two distinct press corps following the story: the campaign reporters, who were now consumed with all aspects of Hart’s character but who otherwise observed the general rules of decency, and the tabloid press, who cared not a whit about politics but whose photographers flung themselves onto windshields, heedless in their pursuit of the salable shot. Idyllic little New Hampshire was the place where the two media strains finally merged into a single organism. The paparazzi and the Current Affair types would do anything to get near Hart—leap over bushes, hop in front of oncoming cars, elbow and claw their way into the center of the swarm. But this time the stunned political reporters and network crews weren’t about to get shoved aside; this was their story, and New Hampshire was their turf.

  Adding to the mayhem was the fact that, for the first time, all these TV guys had brand-new handheld cameras that carried videotape instead of film, and didn’t have to be plugged into a portable deck or require constant tape changing, which meant the cameramen could sprint or leap or hunker down in pursuit of their target. A press horde twice the size of what anyone in politics expected was now completely out of control, laying siege to ordinary voters and to each other, trampling any patch of land that lay between them and the candidate.

  In subsequent years, the advance staff on a major political campaign would be trained to behave almost like a mobile security force, similar to the entourage that envelops a rapper or sports hero in public. They would learn to enforce the kind of distance once reserved only for presidents and Hollywood starlets. But in New Hampshire in 1987, at the moment when political media became subsumed into some larger cultural phenomenon, it was just Stratton and Shore and Sweeney, all uncommonly peaceful souls, trying in vain to hold off a human crush that seemed indifferent to their desperate pleas for calm. Hart wanted to shake hands and hold conversations with the voters who came out to see him; his strategy, as he would later describe it, was to “keep going, keep going, keep going.” But it was like trying to read a book while the plane you were on was crash-landing. He couldn’t hear, or move, or think.

  The pack only got more frenzied after word spread that Lee had arrived. Trippi had smuggled her out of Troublesome Gulch under cover of darkness Tuesday night, by driving his wife and baby daughter down the gravel drive and past the waiting horde at the gate—with Lee lying on the floor, under the little girl’s feet. That’s how the wife of the nation’s leading presidential candidate came to be at the Denver airport the next morning, boarding a plane to New Hampshire, where she finally gave a statement to a local reporter. “I know Gary better than anyone else, and when Gary said nothing happened, nothing happened,” Lee said. “If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.” She added a broadside against the Herald for its “tremendous breach of journalistic ethics.”

  This was about as unambiguous a statement of support as any wife could have given, short of vowing to avenge her husband by killing his enemies with her bare hands, but the media wasn’t about to take it at face value. As Taylor wrote after the fact: “The words were brave, but Lee’s face, still swollen from the infection, was a picture of pain and betrayal.”

  The Harts reunited upstairs at the Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth campus, not long before the news conference that was to be held downstairs. Trippi, who had made the trip east with the candidate’s wife, would recall that Lee arrived to find her husband inside a suite, sullen and wearied. “Hi, babe,” he sighed, before she closed the door behind her, shutting the staff outside. Lee wanted to take the stage with Hart, even make a joke of the whole controversy by painting a fake black eye on him with a marker, but Hart insisted on facing the press alone. He was adamant that Lee shouldn’t act as some stage prop, planted at his side to vouch for his rectitude.

  The plan for the news conference, like everything else about the New Hampshire trip, was hopelessly quaint, further demonstrating that Hart’s campaign aides, the best in the business, hadn’t even begun to acclimate to the allegorical rabbit hole they’d fallen into. Rather than put Hart on some kind of ballroom dais, above the assembled press and removed from them, Stratton and Sweeney had situated him on the floor of a small event space with no protective zone at all, so that the reporters were almost literally on top of him. (At one point, Stratton, in desperation, got down on all fours and tried to make himself a human buffer, so Hart could stand his ground.) With more than a hundred reporters and photographers packed into the room, and more than a dozen cameras rolling under white-hot klieg lights, the temperature soared to an almost unbearable level. Hart was on his heels, dripping sweat, penned in on all sides. He looked less like a statesman than a Roman prisoner in flight from the lions.

  Nonetheless, for twenty minutes or so, Hart was masterful. He opened his remarks by calling Lee “the most extraordinary human being I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.” Then he parried question after question deftly. When the reporters demanded to know whether Hart’s judgment had been called into question by all of this, Hart allowed that it had, but he told them that a man’s judgment had to be measured over fifteen years in public life, not by a single weekend. When they wanted to know why these stories about his womanizing per
sisted and were believed, Hart—rather than advising the reporters to look in the mirror, which he might fairly have done—calmly explained, instead, that he had friends who were women, and that he and Lee had been up-front about their separations. He’d written spy novels, Hart noted wryly, eyebrows dancing, and if he were going to have a secret affair, he’d have done a better job of it.

  Would Hart take a lie detector test? one reporter asked. No, Hart replied easily and quickly—he thought the voters were a pretty good lie detector test. As Cramer later described Hart in this moment, “his mind was working on every level” and with “shocking clarity.” Hart saw what he took to be the rage in his inquisitors’ faces, their determination to punish him for this character flaw he had exhibited, but even with their breath and the odor of sweat in his face, he retained his evenness. He knew what they were going to ask before they asked it. He could see around the corner once again.

  And that’s when Paul Taylor hit him with The Question. He spoke hoarsely but intensely, almost in a whisper, his voice quavering with the gravity of what he was about to do. He spoke at unusual length for a reporter in such a setting, as if he and Hart were having another philosophical conversation in the back of a car, rather than a terse exchange in a packed and sweat-soaked banquet room.

  “Senator, in your remarks yesterday you raised the issue of morality, and you raised the issue of truthfulness,” Taylor began. “Let me ask you what you mean when you talk about morality, and let me be very specific. I have a series of questions about it.”

  If this prelude alarmed Hart, he didn’t object.

  “When you said you did nothing immoral,” Taylor went on, “did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or at any other time that you were with her?”

  “That is correct,” Hart replied, unflinching. “That’s correct.”

  Taylor took his time, with lawyerly skill. “Do you believe that adultery is immoral?” he asked next.

  “Yes,” Hart said immediately. He must have been sensing the danger at that point, aware that he was being outflanked but unsure of how to head it off. And then Taylor just came out with it.

  “Have you ever committed adultery?” he rasped, while reporters gaped, and while the campaign aides standing off to the side looked at each other in amazement.

  Almost three decades later, it sounds like a plausible political inquiry, if not a routine one. Have you ever committed adultery? What would you do if your wife was raped? How did it feel when your child was killed? But in the context of 1987, to Hart and his aides and to the older reporters in the room who would always remember it as a watershed moment, Taylor might as well have asked him to disrobe right there and submit to a cavity search. No reporter had ever asked a presidential candidate that kind of personal, sexual, broad question. Campaign aides had guessed that someone might, but hearing it was still a surreal experience.

  Hart froze. You could see it in his eyes, the sudden loss of focus. You could hear it in the room—a long silence that sounded like the end of something, several blank seconds that lingered like a month, during which all his life’s ambitions and grand ideas seemed to flutter away. Sweeney had actually warned him, aboard the plane to New Hampshire, when they were rehearsing an exchange the way candidates and aides often do, that someone might ask him the question. Hart’s reply then had been a terse and outraged, “I don’t have to answer that!” That was perfect, as far as Sweeney was concerned—that was exactly the right response. But somehow, in the moment, Hart’s self-righteousness and fluency deserted him. He retreated, instead, into the recesses of his mind.

  In those several seconds, Hart, the former divinity student, began to mull the biblical definition of adultery. Was it, as the Old Testament said, limited to intercourse when one party was married? Or could it be, as Jesus taught, a lusting in the heart? Did it count if you were separated? Or if it didn’t amount to intercourse at all? Could there be a simple answer to this question?

  “Ahh,” Hart finally stammered. “I do not think that’s a fair question.”

  “Well,” Taylor retorted, “it seems to me the question of morality—”

  “You can get into some very fine distinctions,” Hart said.

  “—was introduced by you.”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Hart said, stalling.

  “And it’s incumbent upon us to know what your definition of morality is,” Taylor pressed.

  “Well, it includes adultery.”

  “So that you believe adultery is immoral.”

  “Yes, I do,” Hart said again. And so Taylor returned to his original question.

  “Have you ever committed adultery?”

  Here’s what Hart would always remember: looking up at the faces of reporters, twisted with disdain and sanctimony, and seeing in his mind a flash of images from the 1984 campaign. He happened to know, thanks to the inevitable gossip among campaign aides, who in this crowd had hooked up with whom. Even decades later, Hart still wouldn’t say which of the journalists he had in mind—their sex lives, he still believed, should remain private, just like his. But casual, ill-advised “campaign sex” was rampant in those days (even more so than in the still boozy campaigns I covered later), and some of the reporters involved were, inevitably, married. Hart saw some of them now, awaiting his response to Taylor’s question, these reporters who dared to call him a hypocrite.

  The scene at the Hanover Inn on May 6, 1987 with Paul Taylor (circled) attending. He asked the question that would change politics forever. CREDIT: JIM COLE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

  “I do not know—I’m not going to get into a theological definition of what constitutes adultery,” he said. “In some people’s minds it’s people being married and having relationships with other people, so …”

  Taylor wasn’t through. He had the floor, having jolted most of his colleagues into silence, and he had Hart on the defensive. They weren’t in the back of Hart’s limo anymore.

  “Can I ask you,” Taylor said, “whether you and your wife have an understanding about whether or not you can have relationships, you can have sexual encounters with—”

  “My inclination is to say no, you can’t ask me that question,” Hart said. It was too late for that, however, and he knew it. “But the answer is no, we don’t have any such understanding. We have an understanding of faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty.”

  The press horde was waiting for Hart after the news conference so they could stalk him all the way to Littleton for his final event of the day—the kind of Q&A with voters that would later be known as a “town hall.” But Hart wasn’t waiting for them. Instead, he somehow got himself behind the wheel of a supporter’s white Jeep and came barreling out of the Hanover Inn and past the assembled press as if reenacting a scene from The A-Team, one arm on the wheel and the other holding his wife. (Hart had been campaigning in New Hampshire since 1972—he didn’t need a map.) In Littleton, the campaign closed the doors before the cameras could catch up, and Hart answered questions about Gorbachev and the proposed oil import tax—but, notably, not a single one about Donna Rice. Then he went out to dinner with Lee and the staff, where they kicked around a bunch of ever-narrowing strategic options, and where Hart learned for the first time, from Lee, that reporters had staked out his daughter at her college lecture hall in Denver.

  Taylor, meanwhile, hung back in Hanover to write. For the first time in a campaign, the Post had given him and other reporters these new laptop computers—heavy, briefcase-size things that you could use for basic word processing and then, if you had the right cable and access number and everything worked just right, send your copy remotely across a telephone line. He pulled off this minor miracle in the filing center at the Hanover Inn early Wednesday evening, transmitting his story for Thursday without having to call the political desk and dictate it to a clerk.

  “The extraordinary intimacy of the questions made Hart and the more than 150 journalists crowded into a small lounge at th
e Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth campus palpably uncomfortable,” Taylor wrote near the top of his story, as if he were a mere observer of the process. “For better or worse, new ground was broken in the nature of questions put to a presidential candidate.” The use of the passive voice here (“new ground was broken”) should have conjured Reagan’s infamous phrase about the Iran-contra affair four months earlier: “Mistakes were made.” In keeping with the journalistic convention of the time, Taylor didn’t dare note for his readers that he was the one who had wielded the groundbreaking shovel.

  As this story was making its way across the cables, Taylor learned from his editors, on another line, that Bradlee had spoken with his buddy who was also close to Hart’s mystery woman. And, sure enough, she had confirmed the affair. She was desperate to keep her name out of the paper—which Bradlee was glad to do, but he wasn’t going to tell Hart that. Instead, he wanted Taylor to get his ass to Littleton and get a comment from the candidate.

  Quoting the journalist James “Scotty” Reston, Taylor later described himself as being caught up in an “exhilarating chase” as he drove the seventy-plus miles to Littleton in the dark, through a series of rustic towns that had already retired for the night. Amped up and nervous, he talked to himself in the car, running through Hart’s likely responses and his best rebuttals to those responses. When at last he arrived at the hotel where the campaign and press were staying, he saw Sweeney sitting at the bar with three other reporters, one of whom was Bill Peterson, a colleague of Taylor’s from the Post. Taylor described himself as “delighted” to see Peterson. He wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of confronting Hart in his hotel room alone, and instantly hatched a plan for them to double-team the candidate.