by Matt Bai
Later, Hart would say that he had been unable to walk away from the race once and for all because of his children, who believed he had given up too soon. He wanted to prove to them, as any father would, that he wasn’t a quitter. But as touching a sentiment as that is, Hart’s aides knew he was still paying attention to the polls. And really, it would have been hard for him not to. At the end of June, almost two months after Hart’s withdrawal, Gallup found that Jesse Jackson, fueled by strong African American support, was leading the Democratic field with 18 percent. You couldn’t have found a political insider anywhere who thought any black candidate had a realistic chance of becoming president in 1988, much less a reverend with a history of controversial statements. And yet the only other Democrat who even broke into double digits was Dukakis, the unknown governor of Massachusetts, with 11 percent.
A month after that, at the end of July, Gallup tested Hart as part of the Democratic field. Even disgraced and out of sight, Hart finished first, with 25 percent of the vote. Among the so-called Seven Dwarfs, only Jackson broke the 10 percent barrier. And by now it was clear that there would be no savior—no Mario Cuomo or Lee Iacocca or Ted Kennedy—to swoop in and spare the party a fragmented and uninspiring primary season.
Hart wanted to believe that the numbers told a story about a disconnect between the media and Democratic voters. He wanted to believe that the polling, in a sense, ratified everything he had been saying for years about the power of insurgency and anti-establishmentarianism in the modern era of picking a president. The elite media, along with party insiders and campaign funders, had written him off as tainted and irrelevant, and this had only legitimized his standing as a true outsider. In fact, Hart convinced himself that the inverse was true, as well—that it had been his challenge to the status quo, the power of his ideas, that had prompted the media and political establishments to try to discredit his character and drive him from the race. And for all their efforts to kill him, the polling was telling him, they had failed.
In reality, as it would turn out, the polling did tell a story—but it wasn’t the one to which Hart clung. Because Hart had been the front-runner going back to the closing days of 1984, and because his rivals, with the exception of Jackson, remained so obscure in the public mind, Hart’s was the only politician’s name that primary voters recognized. What they were telling the pollsters is that they hadn’t yet warmed to any of these faceless or flawed candidates, and they still wanted an alternative who excited them as much as Hart had before the scandal. But it wasn’t really him they were looking for.
Nonetheless, Hart spent the fall testing the climate for a comeback, while the media eagerly awaited the spectacle of his return. In September, still sore from the beating he got for his withdrawal speech three and a half months earlier, Hart decided to go on Nightline and show his softer, more contrite side. (He agreed to the interview only after ABC agreed to let him sit alongside Koppel on the set, as a peer, rather than appearing from a remote studio.) After “Mr. Koppel,” as Hart still insisted on calling him, offered him the chance to make an opening statement, Hart assured the audience he was sorry for his own behavior.
“I will always bear a burden of responsibility—and I assume total responsibility—for those actions and for what transpired that led to the end of that campaign,” he said. “I do not blame anyone else and I have never tried to shift blame away from myself. I am totally and fully responsible for my own actions and I want to say to all of you how sorry I am and apologize to you for those actions.” Then, in characteristic fashion, he closed his preamble by quoting the historian John Buchan from a biography of the Scottish patriot Montrose, on the necessity of infusing old ideologies with new passion. One can only imagine what Koppel’s audience, the largest since he had interviewed Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker months earlier, made of this.
It didn’t take long for Hart’s highbrow literary references to devolve into sensational admissions. Picking up where Taylor had left off months earlier, Koppel confronted Hart about whether he had committed adultery. “It was a terribly awkward question,” Koppel later said in an ABC retrospective about his years as a host, “but there was no way of doing that particular interview without asking it, because it had become the central issue of his candidacy.” And so Hart became the first politician on national television to say, yes, he had cheated on his wife. But he refused to say whether this applied in the case of Donna Rice. There had to be a line somewhere.
“I don’t care what questions are asked tonight or anytime in the future,” Hart told Koppel. “I’m not going to answer them on any specific incidents. Now, I’ve been made, forced—I have been made to make a declaration here that I think is unprecedented in American political history, and I regret it. That question should have never been asked, and I shouldn’t have to answer it.” (Hart left unclear whether he regretted the adultery, or whether he regretted answering Koppel’s question.) Whether he did or didn’t sleep with Rice, Hart said, “was nobody’s business”—which, of course, was the answer he wished he’d given Taylor months earlier.
Hart finally got back into the race, officially, on a glacier-cold December day in New Hampshire, standing in front of the statehouse in Concord. “When I suspended my campaign last spring, I believed other national leaders would enter this race, and I hoped that my ideas for strategic investment economics, for military reform, and for enlightened engagement would be adopted and put forward by others,” Hart, hatless and coatless as always, told the assembled camera crews. “After more than six months, neither of these things has happened.” Submitting his $1,000 registration fee as a candidate in the February primary, he said he had no headquarters, no staff, and no consultants to tell him what to do—as if he ever would have listened to them, anyway. “I have the power of ideas, and I can govern this country,” he declared. “Let’s let the people decide!”
They decided, and rather quickly—that Hart was just too damaged, too much of a traveling freak show, too “unelectable.” If they had any doubts, all they had to do was turn on the TV. “In, out, in, out—isn’t that what got him in trouble in the first place?” David Letterman asked on his late-night show. Carson joked that the nomination would fall into Hart’s lap—if there was any room left there. On the highly rated sitcom Golden Girls, one of the little old ladies commented of another character: “She’s Gary Hart’s campaign manager. It doesn’t pay much, but you don’t have to get out of bed to do it.” Tom Paxton, the folk singer, was breaking up his audiences that fall with a song he’d just written called “Ballad of Gary Hart,” which featured lyrics like: “Who’s that running down the alley in the dead of Friday night, as he zippers up his trousers in the inky, slinky light.”
The sudden collision of sex and presidential politics had unleashed something latent in the popular culture, some powerful impulse toward gossip and ridicule that couldn’t be restrained. When it came to Gary Hart, the entire country seemed to be engaged in a game of free association. No mention of his name could fail to elicit something base and whimsical.
“I don’t know how to ask this, except to ask it,” Chris Wallace, hosting NBC’s Meet the Press, told Hart in New Hampshire just before the primary. “Aren’t you concerned at all that you may become an embarrassing figure?”
In the end, Hart couldn’t wrest even half a percentage point of the vote in Iowa. In New Hampshire, the state where Hart had blindsided Mondale four years earlier, he finished dead last with only 4 percent. After that, Hart told his aides and loyal supporters that they were released from their obligations and should probably go do something else. Hart intended to stay in the race through Super Tuesday, to fulfill his pledge to let the voters have their say, but he was through with the trappings of an actual campaign. He was just going to ride around and talk to people, instead.
And that’s what he did. He found voters, mostly on college campuses, who didn’t really care so much about sex and scandal, who just wanted to hear the man talk and debate, and he regal
ed them with a kind of traveling seminar about the emerging digital economy and the outmoded military, about the detailed, alternative federal budget that he had, at last, released. It was pilgrimage and penance sewn into one—a lonely conversation with whichever voters were left, because he had promised to give them the substance they deserved, and he wouldn’t relent now. Then he’d go out to dinner and drink with whoever was on that particular leg of his journey—Lee or one of the kids, local supporters who had been with him forever, the stalwart aide whose job it was to advance the trip and drive, although now there were no cameras left to chase Hart and no crush of outstretched hands to navigate.
Among these few unpaid, lingering loyalists was Martin O’Malley. A twenty-five-year-old law student who had first gotten to know Hart as a volunteer on the 1984 campaign, O’Malley had become ever more integral to the Hart operation as everyone more senior deserted. He had lived an itinerant life since Hart reentered the campaign, having been handed the formidable task of making sure that Hart got on the ballot in every primary state, starting with Illinois and Pennsylvania. Then O’Malley took charge of the calamitous campaign in Iowa. (When he apologized to Hart for officially registering zero percent on the night of the caucuses, Hart told him dryly: “Martin, this was not an organizational problem.”)
After New Hampshire, O’Malley hung around, driving his mentor through long nights on stretches of blackened highway. They shared a bond that bridged the difference in years and that would endure for decades. O’Malley, a serious-minded graduate of Jesuit schools and Catholic University, shared Hart’s deep appreciation for history, poetry, and theology. And, of course, for politics.
They were driving in Virginia one night, just the two of them, in O’Malley’s yellow 1972 Pontiac Catalina, on their way from a debate in Williamsburg to Richmond. O’Malley worked up his courage and told Hart that a lot of his supporters were frustrated, that they believed in him still and wanted to go through the motions of running an actual campaign, if nothing else. Couldn’t they at least put up lawn signs, or knock on some doors?
Hart shook his head. It would be his name on those signs, he reminded O’Malley, and he had already made his decision about the way he would play out this final stage of his candidacy. He was going to make his argument to as many people as would show up and listen, and if O’Malley wanted to stay by his side and be a part of that, Hart was happy for the company. But Hart had no use for advice or pep talks. If volunteers needed to unleash their creative energy, he said, let them find some other outlet.
Chastened, O’Malley nodded and kept driving. Silence swallowed the air in the cavernous car. And then, after a few minutes, Hart turned and looked at O’Malley again.
“Have you ever read the William Butler Yeats poem ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’?” Hart asked.
O’Malley said no. Hart proceeded to recite it, slowly.
By the time O’Malley told me this story, more than twenty-five years later, he was in his second term as Maryland’s governor, frequently talked about as a presidential contender in his own right. In the basement of the governor’s mansion, next to the pool table, he had hung a Hart campaign poster from 1984, and taped to the back, where no one could see it, was a copy of Yeats’s poem, which he had long ago committed to memory himself.
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
When Hart had spoken the last line, he peered over at O’Malley in the driver’s seat, eyebrows pirouetting.
“It is a very, very good poem” was all he said.
To the editor:
I’m the Washington Post reporter who put the question to Gary Hart that offended so many New York Times columnists. I suspect it offended other folks, too. It’s not hard to see why. The question—“Have you ever committed adultery”—seemed to turn me, and by extension my profession, into some kind of morals police. That’s not a comfortable role for anyone.
So began the letter from Paul Taylor that appeared in the Times at the end of May 1987, the same week the photo of Rice sitting in Hart’s lap made its way onto every newsstand in America. This was an extraordinary thing—a reporter from one nationally renowned paper defending himself in the pages of its chief competitor. But Taylor couldn’t stomach being pilloried by colleagues who portrayed him as sleazy and superficial. He pointed out, as so many others had by now, that Hart had promised to hold himself to a high standard of moral conduct.
“Your columnists raise questions about proportionality, civility and privacy,” he wrote. “It is not the job of a journalist to win plaudits for civility (though it’s certainly nicer when we do). Nor is it our job to pry into the most private matters—except when public figures, in conducting and discussing their private affairs publicly, force our hand. Sometimes this job demands that we raise questions we’d rather not ask. Your columnists suggest I broke some kind of gentleman’s code in this instance. I say, poppycock. What I did was ask Gary Hart the question he asked for.”
If the scandal had reduced Hart to a “farcical figure,” as Taylor would later write in See How They Run, then Taylor hadn’t understood how profoundly it would affect his own life. The first inkling came on the day after he asked the adultery question, when he returned to the Post newsroom and talked to Bradlee, whom he assumed had paid close attention to the news conference in New Hampshire. “You were the one who asked that question?” Bradlee asked, astonished. “Sheee-yit!” Then Koppel called Taylor at home, while he was playing with his kids, and personally asked him to come on Nightline, as Fiedler had done a few days earlier. Taylor demurred. He told Koppel he was a reporter and wasn’t comfortable being in the middle of the story.
Comfortable or not, Taylor would soon come to understand that he was no longer Paul Taylor, hottest young political reporter in Washington. He was now Paul Taylor, the Guy Who Asked The Question.
Hart’s undoing—and the role that both the Herald and Post had played in it—touched off an anguished debate in American journalism. Newsrooms were deeply conflicted, and nowhere was this conflict more apparent (or more confusing, perhaps) than in the pages of The New York Times. The editorial page, which carried a tremendous amount of influence in 1987, called the Herald’s stakeout “eminently justified.” The paper’s Washington bureau chief, Craig Whitney, sent a reporter to the other campaigns to find out how the rest of the candidates would handle inevitable questions about adultery. “I’m not offended by any question,” Whitney told a reporter for the Post. “There’s no question that should be regarded as out-of-bounds.”
On the op-ed page, however, the liberal Anthony Lewis said he felt “degraded in my profession” by the Herald stakeout and that Taylor’s big moment marked a “low point” for political coverage. The conservative columnist William Safire slammed Taylor as one of the “titillaters” who was “demeaning” journalism. Abe Rosenthal, the Times’s former executive editor, called Taylor’s question “nauseating.” Years later, Tom Fiedler would tell me what he had heard from higher-ups at the Herald that year—that a disgusted Rosenthal had made clear to them that if the Herald so much as nominated its Hart story for a Pulitzer Prize, he would use his influence to block the paper from receiving any Pulitzers at all. Whether or not this was the reason, the Herald chose not to nominate its scandal coverage. (It did win two Pulitzers for other stories.)
Perhaps the most cogent critique of the media came from Hendrik Hertzber
g, the former speechwriter for President Carter who was now writing for The New Republic. “Gary Hart has now become the first American victim of Islamic justice” is how Hertzberg began his essay, titled “Sluicegate,” a few weeks after Hart’s first withdrawal. He went on:
He has been politically stoned to death for adultery. The difference is that in Iran, the mullahs do not insult the condemned prisoner by telling him that he is being executed not for adultery but because of “concerns about his character,” “questions about his judgment,” or “doubts about his candor.”
As far as I can determine, Gary Hart is the first presidential candidate, president, prime minister, Cabinet member, congressional committee chairman, party leader, or television evangelist, American or foreign, ever to be destroyed solely because of what David S. Broder, the dean of American political reporters, calls “screwing.”
Hertzberg didn’t bother trying to defend Hart against the allegations at hand, which he assumed to be true. But almost alone among the commentators in that moment, he intuited that the casualty of all this character appraisal would be the broader concept of character itself—that everything else a politician had done or been in his life would now be swept away, routinely, by a single, sensational revelation. “The fact that a person will lie in the context of adultery proves nothing about his general propensity to lie,” Hertzberg wrote. “The point is that if Hart is a liar there must be one or two more lies among the millions of words he has spoken as a public man. Let them be produced.” None were, then or later.
