All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  The problem was that Peterson, about five years older than Taylor and one of the best liked and most admired journalists on the trail, wanted nothing to do with this escapade. As Taylor summed up Peterson’s objections, “He thought the hour was late, the tip was weak and the story was sleazy.” Taylor and Peterson argued a bit in the lobby and “agreed to disagree.” Taylor, who was by this point nearly hyperventilating with nerves, headed back into the bar, alone, to grab Sweeney and tell him that he needed to see the candidate immediately.

  In his own retelling of the event, Taylor didn’t mention his colleague again. But according to Cramer’s account in What It Takes, Peterson and Taylor had one more significant exchange. Taylor had just sat down with Sweeney, and was trying to marshal his breathing so he could explain the situation to the press secretary, when Peterson burst back into the lobby and tried once more to stop him. “We’re not doing this,” Peterson said, according to Cramer’s account. “Paul, you don’t have to do this. You don’t … have … to do this.”

  “Bill,” Taylor replied with finality, “there’s just a lot of pressure.” (Peterson died of cancer three years later, at forty-seven. His own recollection of this event was never written.)

  At last, Taylor told Sweeney that the Post had evidence of another affair and he needed to see Hart. After hearing the details, Sweeney deflated; he had been with Hart on the day that was the subject of the investigator’s report, but he’d had no idea where Hart had gone after dropping him off at home. Sweeney repaired to his room, ostensibly to see what he could do about arranging an interview for Taylor. It wasn’t until hours later, around midnight, when Taylor confronted him again, that Sweeney finally revealed to Taylor that Hart wasn’t actually in the hotel. The Harts, it turned out, wanted to be nowhere near the press and had been quietly rerouted to a hotel across the border in Vermont. Taylor would have to wait until morning, at least.

  What Taylor didn’t yet know was that, in those intervening hours, a crestfallen Sweeney had called John Emerson in Denver, and Emerson had called (of course) Billy Shore in Vermont, and Shore had taken the long walk down to Hart’s door at the hotel—it was one of those two-tiered, motor-inn type structures. Shore apologized and told Hart he really needed to call Sweeney right away, and once they were on the phone, Sweeney told Hart the details of what the Post had.

  “This isn’t going to end, is it?” Hart asked.

  “You would know better than I would,” Sweeney said coldly.

  “Let’s go home” was all Hart could say. He had concluded that he would never be able to survive another revelation, would never be able to keep campaigning or raise the money he needed. But almost as much as this, both Hart and his aides would later say, he was increasingly distraught by the idea that all the women he had known, some romantically but most not, would soon find their own private lives exposed in the pages of papers as notable as the Post. Hart told me that he had already gotten a note from a woman he had seen during his separation from Lee; she wanted him to know that if the reporters came knocking at her door, she would kill herself.

  Early Thursday morning, they boarded Hart secretly onto the same private plane that had taken Lee to New Hampshire, while Sweeney and Trippi announced to the press, after considerable misdirection, that Hart had left the state and was suspending his campaign. (Many years later, the draft of that statement, with Hart’s handwritten notes, hung framed in Trippi’s office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—a reminder of what might have been.) Hart read Tolstoy’s Resurrection on the plane, which had to be rerouted away from Stapleton Airport in Denver because of all the media camped out there, and which ended up landing at a smaller airport that was besieged by yet more media. Hart wasn’t sure what to expect when they landed, but the NBC helicopter that hovered above his car as he raced through Bear Creek Canyon, pursued by cameramen, pretty much answered the question. He could barely get through the front gate at Troublesome Gulch with all the lenses swarming around the car and banging up against the windows, like giant, predatory insects that literally rocked the car.

  When he and Lee were back in the cabin, an empathetic photographer slipped a note under the door. It said the cameramen had telephoto lenses and could see through the windows into the kitchen. They were surreptitiously shooting the family. So the Harts pinned sheets and blankets over the windows and sat by themselves in the dark.

  • • •

  Hart’s official withdrawal the next day, an astonishing five days after the Herald story hit and before he could even lose his perch atop the national polls, robbed the Post of its opportunity to take down another would-be president—at least as far as the public knew. Once it was clear that Hart would step aside, there was no rationale for publishing the story about his affair, and Bradlee assured an emissary from the campaign that the Post would drop it. It was time to call the dogs off Hart because, as Cramer memorably quoted Bradlee as saying: “The coon’s up a tree!”

  This outcome didn’t seem to bother either Bradlee or Taylor much, though. Taylor described himself as “relieved, then triumphant” when he heard that Hart was bowing to reality, adding, “The interview I never got had worked out fine. Just fine.” The way Taylor saw it, he and his colleagues had managed to protect the nation from another rogue and liar who aspired to the presidency, and he had acquitted himself well in the competitive chase for the story. But he hadn’t come to The Washington Post so he could make a career of trafficking in sex lives and marital disputes. And when the adrenaline of the fast-breaking story started to subside, Taylor didn’t do much boasting about it. Like E. J. Dionne and Tom Fiedler, Taylor would say that he had done what he’d had to do in the modern political environment, but he had done so joylessly, the same way a veterinarian might get paid to euthanize an injured horse.

  Upon his retirement from the Post, about four years after the Hart episode, Bradlee granted a lengthy interview to the British journalist David Frost. (Like Bradlee, Frost had become famous in America for his connection to Watergate; he managed to force an apology out of Nixon during a series of sit-downs with the disgraced former president in 1977, which later became the basis for the play and movie titled Frost/Nixon.) The hour-long, edited interview with Bradlee, conducted in stateroom-type armchairs at the editor’s home in Georgetown, was part of a public television series called Talking with David Frost, and like a lot of taped shows that didn’t cry out for digital conversion, it’s long since disappeared from most archives. I was able to view it one day in a back room of the Library of Congress, wearing bulbous earphones attached to a suitcase-size, push-button videotape-editing machine that looked as if it hadn’t been manufactured since 1984. Lines of horizontal static buzzed across the screen, bringing back distant memories of Betamax and rabbit-ear antennas.

  Several minutes into the interview, Frost asked the silver-haired Bradlee to name his most significant failures in a quarter century of running the Post. “There were plenty of mistakes,” Bradlee shrugged. Frost tried the question another way.

  “Is there anybody,” he asked, “you feel is right to have a grudge against the Post in the last twenty-six years? A rightful grudge?”

  “That we have really ruined without cause?” Bradlee asked. Frost nodded. Bradlee seemed to hesitate.

  “Well. Gary Hart thinks that. He really is sore at us.” He then added, quickly, “I don’t think with reason,” although the mere fact that he had chosen to bring up Hart, with no prodding and with twenty-six years of material from which to choose, suggests that Bradlee had some conflicting thoughts about this. Having raised the subject, Bradlee then seemed eager to move on, but Frost was intrigued and wouldn’t let it drop.

  “Do you think the lines you drew on a politician’s personal life, that you drew them about right over Gary Hart? And since?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think we made a mistake in that,” Bradlee said. He allowed that a politician’s private life might not, by itself, have much to do with the public business, “but if you lie
about it, I think it’s public domain.”

  “So the crime is getting found out?” Frost asked dubiously.

  “Yeah,” Bradlee replied.

  Frost was an excellent interviewer, and he let this answer echo for a moment, in all its hollowness. And then at last Bradlee seemed to open up a bit. In doing so, he offered what was probably the clearest window into what he and his colleagues at the Post had come to accept during that frenzied week in 1987.

  “I’ll tell you what makes this argument hard,” he said. “It’s that someone’s gonna do it. You can get on your ethical perch and make Solomonic judgments, and then some little paper’s gonna run it. And then the AP’s gonna run it. And then you don’t run it, because you made the original decision not to run it. Then someone will write a story about how you refused to do it, even though the AP has done it. And then it’s on television that the Post yesterday refused to name …”

  Bradlee’s voice trailed off, and he waved his arm in disgust. “It takes it out of your hands,” he said finally, “and you end up looking silly.”

  In other words, Bradlee, the most influential and recognized editor of his generation, had been forced to accept that a behemoth like The Washington Post could no longer decide what was and wasn’t a story for the rest of the media world. Now those decisions were made for him, and all the Post or anyone else could do was try to keep up.

  Not five minutes after this exchange, Frost, whose mind was clearly still on Hart, brought up John Kennedy and the revelations about his personal life that had surfaced since 1963. Bradlee admitted that the stories about Kennedy’s myriad affairs—including one with a prominent mobster’s girlfriend who may or may not have passed messages between the president and the mob boss—were certainly troubling, and he said Kennedy had concealed them from him, as he had from most everyone else.

  Then Frost reminded Bradlee of what he had written at the time of Kennedy’s death—that America was “a lesser land for the loss of JFK.” How long, Frost wanted to know, had Bradlee gone on believing that?

  “I still believe that,” Bradlee said.

  6

  ALL THE TRUTH IS OUT

  HART WROTE HIS FIERY WITHDRAWAL SPEECH, the one where he talked about the hunters and the hunted and warned that America might “get the kind of leaders we deserve,” after a late-night consultation with Warren Beatty, and it reflected the same vision of political integrity Beatty would later explore in his movie Bulworth—the impulse of the caged politician to come out and say exactly what he’s thinking, consequences be damned. (Hart’s staff had given him a version of the withdrawal speech that was more of an abject apology, and it made him want to vomit.) Among the media who were its target, Hart’s tirade immediately met with a collective howl of mockery and contempt. In one much discussed column, the man who had until recently been Ben Bradlee’s counterpart atop The New York Times, Abe Rosenthal, attacked Fiedler and the other Herald reporters, whom he said had “damaged journalistic self-respect by skulking around Mr. Hart’s house all night.” But Rosenthal reserved the bulk of his criticism for Hart’s ungracious withdrawal.

  “Instead of saying goodbye with a measure of dignity, regret and introspection, Gary Hart told us he had decided that Gary Hart was a wonderful man after all and that everybody was responsible for Gary Hart’s political demise except Gary Hart,” Rosenthal wrote in that Sunday’s Times. “He almost managed to make the Miami Herald look good and it is not his fault he didn’t succeed.”

  As if this kind of criticism from a journalistic paragon he admired wasn’t enough to make Hart despair, he received some positive reinforcement from someone he could hardly have admired less. “This is just a line to tell you how I thought you handled a very difficult situation uncommonly well,” began the note from Richard Nixon, whose supposedly last political press conference in 1962 (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”) had been considered, to that point anyway, the most petulant on record. “What you said about the media needed to be said. They demand the right to ruthlessly question the ethics of everyone else. But when anyone else dares to question their ethics, they hide behind the shield of freedom of speech.”

  If Hart thought he’d weathered the worst of what the media could rain down on him, though, he was wrong. Because now that the Hart-Rice liaison had become the biggest story in the country, Lynn Armandt saw no reason why she shouldn’t cash in on her supposed friendship with Rice. Armandt sold her story, which differed in significant and sensational ways from Rice’s, to People for $150,000, and she sold some of the pictures Rice had lent her to the National Enquirer for about half that much. From the minute the photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap appeared in the Enquirer at the end of May—she wearing a short white dress, and he the MONKEY BUSINESS CREW T-shirt and a crooked, startled grin—it became the defining image of Hart in the public mind, then and forever.

  Years later, most Americans who lived through the scandal would recall, erroneously, that the iconic photo had ended Hart’s candidacy. The truth was that it didn’t appear until weeks after the fact and had nothing to do with Hart’s aborted campaign. At that moment of shared experience, just before the technological Big Bang that would shatter America’s media into thousands of fragments and audiences, a single photograph still had that kind of power—to become so deeply embedded in the culture that it actually transformed our memory of the event.

  Hart, meanwhile, found himself preoccupied, for the first time in his life, with making money. Whatever aspersions people wanted to cast now on his character, Hart hadn’t managed to get in on any land deals or stock sales during a career in public service. His only job now, outside of running for president, was at the Denver-based law firm of Davis Graham & Stubbs, from which he had taken a leave that just about everyone had assumed to be permanent. So at 8 a.m. that Monday after his withdrawal speech, Hart strolled through the doors of his firm without so much as a heads-up call to the partners, and settled in behind his desk as if he’d never left. For that whole week, he sat there half petrified, ears alert to the shuffle of feet in the hall, fearing the moment when the managing partner would poke his head into the office and tell Hart that his presence was a distraction, that maybe it was time to go their separate ways. In fact, no one knew quite what to say to Hart, and they mostly left him alone. He opened mail and took the occasional call from a well-wisher. Most times the phone rang, it was some reporter wanting an interview. Hart wouldn’t grant them.

  There were small kindnesses he would always remember, notes and advice from old friends and some of the world leaders he had met in his travels. None were more unexpected, or more important, then the signals of support from Mikhail Gorbachev, who watched all of this unfold from the Kremlin, and who would have been within his rights to jettison altogether this failed American candidate he had befriended.

  When Hart had shown up at the Kremlin at the end of 1986, he brought along his daughter, Andrea, who was then a college student. Hart just wanted her to see the place in all its shimmering, Easter-egg brilliance, since she was majoring in international relations, and few Westerners had ever set foot inside. He intended for Andrea to wait outside while the two leaders and their aides met. But Gorbachev had insisted she join them during their hours-long meeting, asking questions about her education and her plans, and then he had invited her to return after graduation so she could study in the Soviet Union as his personal guest—an opportunity that seemed almost as inconceivable in 1987 as it would have been, twenty-five years later, to study in North Korea at the invitation of Kim Jong-un. Hart was practically kicking Andrea under the table in a way that said: “For God’s sake, say yes.” Which of course she did.

  Now, in his shock and despair, Hart was preoccupied with what would happen to Andrea’s dream. Had he ruined that, too? Clearly Gorbachev had made an offhand gesture of political goodwill when he offered to personally lift the Iron Curtain for an American college student, and it was a gesture that could no longer advance any ca
use. So, with a sick feeling that any father could appreciate, Hart called a Soviet emissary in Washington and told him that he understood if the arrangement was no longer possible, that he just needed to confirm as much for Andrea’s sake. A call soon came back relaying a message from Gorbachev himself: By all means, Andrea was to come as his guest, just as they had planned. Gorbachev was a father, too.

  In fact, Gorbachev had developed an affinity for Hart that would make a concrete difference in Hart’s post-campaign life. The Soviet premier helped rescue Hart financially, by personally steering to him the legal business involved in getting American telecommunications companies to string up wires across the newly liberated Soviet republics. Those contracts not only made Hart a viable contributor to his law firm, but they kept him traveling and engaged firsthand in Russian affairs for years after his withdrawal from public life—a gift that had value well beyond what could ever be listed on a legal bill.

  At home in those first weeks, after a long day of not much work, it was just Hart and Lee and the unendurable quiet that descended after Hart’s official withdrawal sent the paparazzi home. Hart told his wife that she could have one day to interrogate him, to ask any questions, to talk through the anger and then return to their semi-normal lives. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his days feeling ashamed and accused by the silence. It sounds pretty self-absorbed now; here Lee had been humiliated on a national scale unlike any political spouse before her, and he was going to set a time limit on how long she would be allowed to resent him for it. But Lee understood. He couldn’t take any more judgment. They had to move on.

  Some of Hart’s aides moved on, too. The political director, Paul Tully, wound up with the eventual nominee, Mike Dukakis, while Joe Trippi, who had been Tully’s deputy before rescuing Lee, wandered over to Dick Gephardt’s camp. Others, like Bill Dixon and Kevin Sweeney, withdrew from politics altogether; for a while, Sweeney went back to waiting tables in San Francisco. But a small cadre of longtime loyalists—Billy Shore, Sue Casey, Mike Stratton—became accustomed to getting periodic calls from Troublesome Gulch, where Hart was watching his former rivals in the Democratic race vie for legitimacy. It was obvious to Hart’s confidants that while he might have departed the race corporeally, his spirit remained very much engaged. Quietly, they put out the word to their most devoted organizers in Iowa and New Hampshire: Stay neutral and wait. Hart still had time to change his mind, or so he thought.