All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Eventually, as the media moved on, and as issues of “character” became the recurrent and dominant theme in our elections, there emerged an uneasy consensus among most influential senior columnists and editors about what had transpired in 1987. While they were reluctant to criticize colleagues, they didn’t really approve of the decisions that reporters for the Herald and the Post made that week. They didn’t think sex mattered, or that reporters should spend time delving into who spent the night where. And yet, at the same time, they basically decided that Hart had deserved what he’d gotten, because while sex didn’t matter, judgment certainly did. And what the events of 1987 had proven was that Hart didn’t have the stability or steadiness to be president. He was a loner who didn’t take anyone’s counsel or care what anyone thought, a ladies’ man who couldn’t control his impulses—or who was, worse yet, drawn to avoidable peril. And this was something the public needed to know about him.

  It was a confounding issue for American journalism, and it remained so. A quarter century later, when I interviewed some of the reporters from that time, I found that they would often struggle and contradict themselves in an effort to make sense of the rules they had constructed.

  “I hated that week,” E. J. Dionne told me. “I hated everything about this story. The stakeout bothered me. I really respect Fiedler, and I don’t want to get into the business of criticizing somebody else. But the stakeout is something I just could not have done. I knew in my gut that we journalists were opening up a can of worms, that we were sort of sexualizing politics in a way we hadn’t before. And given that I’m basically much more of a policy and ideas guy, I felt like we were just pulling politics away from what I think politics ought to be about.

  “And yet I was also mad at Hart,” Dionne said, reflecting on the “follow me around” quote that ended up stalking Hart through the years. “Because I thought that, A, he should have listened to the folks who were telling him that you can’t get away with it this time. And B, why in the world did he say that to me? Why did he choose to put it that way to me?”

  I found Jack Germond, who once counted Hart a personal friend, but who hadn’t spoken to him in years, to be similarly conflicted when I visited his home in West Virginia, on the banks of the Shenandoah River. This was three months before his death in August 2013, at the age of eighty-five.

  “I don’t think I would have done the reporting Tom Fiedler did,” Germond told me. Nor could he envision himself asking the question Taylor asked. “He’s asking what you did on that boat, or in the bedroom, or in the apartment,” he told me. “And we don’t need to know that. I thought that was an unfair question, in the sense that it did not advance the story in any serious way. Paul Taylor was a very good reporter, but I did not agree with that question.” Germond told me that as a younger reporter he used to know a lot about which candidates were sleeping around, and with whom, but he never considered it anyone’s business.

  None of that, however, kept him from believing that the scandal that forced Hart from politics had revealed something essential about the man he’d known since 1972. “If Gary Hart’s going to fuck every woman he sees when he walks down the street, then he doesn’t deserve to be president,” Germond said bluntly. “It’s good to know this stuff.”

  Most Americans probably would have agreed. And yet if you think about it for more than a minute, you can see that the argument that became the norm in political journalism after 1987—“we care about a candidate’s judgment, not his sex life”—required an acrobatic contortion of logic. After all, if the media didn’t care about the sex lives of candidates, and in fact had never written about them before, then how could it have been such abhorrent judgment for a candidate to engage in extramarital sex? If reporters didn’t actually find adultery by itself newsworthy, then what was so stupid and self-destructive about carrying on with a woman in the privacy of your own home? As Hertzberg put it: “If judgment, not sex, were truly ‘the issue,’ as we have been told over and over, then Hart’s campaign would still be alive. And the headline in the New York Post would have been HART’S JUDGMENT REVEALED AS FAULTY, not GARY’S LOVE BOAT FOLLIES.”

  The truth was that all of this business about judgment and character was a rationalization, and not a very persuasive one. The political media may not actually have cared much about sex, but it was clear now that the popular culture did, and this exerted a powerful force of gravity. What really happened in 1987 was that the finest political journalists of a generation surrendered all at once to the idea that politics had become another form of celebrity-driven entertainment, while simultaneously disdaining the kind of reporting that such a thirst for entertainment made necessary.

  Where the journalism establishment ultimately netted out on the decisions made in 1987 is probably best illustrated by the career arcs of those who found themselves caught up in the moment. Tom Fiedler wasn’t immediately feted the way Woodward and Bernstein were by his sanctimonious colleagues, and after he read Rosenthal’s comments, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to make the jump to The New York Times—something he had been seriously discussing with the paper’s Miami bureau chief. But Fiedler did get his Pulitzer a few years later, for his part in an impressive investigation into an extremist cult. He went on to become both editorial page editor and executive editor of the Herald and then, after his retirement, a leading academic, oft quoted on journalistic ethics and integrity, well liked and well respected.

  Among Fiedler’s colleagues on the stakeout, Jim McGee moved on to become a top investigative reporter for The Washington Post (and later a senior investigator for a congressional committee on homeland security), while Doug Clifton later became the top editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. E. J. Dionne ended up an op-ed columnist for the Post and one of the most admired liberal theorists in Washington. Howard Fineman, who set the whole thing in motion by reporting rumors of Hart’s affairs, became not just the last of Newsweek’s great political writers (before moving on to The Huffington Post) but one of the most ubiquitous pundits on cable TV. Just about everyone who had any role, integral or passing, in taking Hart down went on to scale the heights of national and political journalism.

  Everyone, that is, except Paul Taylor. He emerged from the Hart scandal and the 1988 election as a famous and sought-after correspondent, clear heir to the Post’s storied political franchise. He would never cover a campaign again.

  Taylor was gracious but notably unenthusiastic when I emailed him in the spring of 2013 and asked if I could come by and talk about the ancient history of 1987. Now sixty-four, Taylor still lived in Washington and had spent the last decade at the Pew Research Center, where his title was executive vice president for special projects. This meant that he spent a lot of his time studying polls and putting together reports on social and demographic trends in the electorate—writing incisively and substantively about the larger undercurrent of politics, in other words, without having to interrogate any more politicians.

  Taylor seemed uncomfortable revisiting the events of that week, and he told me more than once, after I sat down and started asking him about it, that he didn’t remember much other than what he wrote at the time. But he did take me through the months and years after the scandal. He told me that after the 1988 campaign he had gone off to Princeton for a year to teach journalism and work on his book. But by the time he finished reliving that campaign, he found he simply had no stomach for another one. One day he walked back into the Post and told his editors he didn’t want to write about politics anymore. He was taking himself off the fast track to political preeminence.

  It wasn’t that Taylor was driven from political reporting by his guilt about Hart or his embarrassment about the crucial role he had played in the scandal, as Hart’s former aides always believed (or wanted to believe). Nor was it that he felt too scalded by the criticism he had endured after the scandal, although that clearly left a mark.

  What motivated Taylor, really, was that he could sense a change coming
in the atmosphere of political journalism. Taylor was a down-the-middle reporter who prided himself on being an observer of history, rather than a shaper of it. He had never envisioned himself sitting in judgment of politicians or becoming the kind of columnist who wrote about their moral failings, as his father sometimes urged him to do. But now colleagues were talking about Hart’s demise and how Taylor had “put a notch in his belt,” which was nothing like the way he looked at it, and suddenly the whole focus seemed to be on what was wrong with candidates, what was flawed or indecent about them as people, rather than on what they believed or what they could accomplish, which is what mattered to Taylor.

  “More and more, it was all just, these guys are a bunch of … you know … and it’s our job to expose their follies,” Taylor told me. “And you know, if you’re a clever writer you can build a following around that. And I didn’t want to go there.” The day hadn’t quite arrived when reporters would spend chunks of their days on cable TV, tossing out glib and knowing insights into the character of candidates, but it wasn’t so far off that Taylor couldn’t glimpse it on the horizon.

  “I could see that that would be a way to get ahead,” he told me. “To have that sort of snarky, contemptuous, clever way. If you’re good enough and you’ve established a good enough relationship and you get deep into their world, then you can kind of give them a little elbow now and then, and be clever about it, and live to fight another day. You know, I didn’t want to go there. I think much of political coverage has gone there, to the detriment of politics and political journalism.”

  By the time Bill Clinton was running to unseat George H. W. Bush in 1992, Taylor had gotten as far away from American politics as you could physically get. He chose an assignment as the Post’s correspondent in South Africa, where apartheid was unraveling, and where no one could question the seriousness of the work he was doing. If there was any doubt about that, it was pretty much settled in his first week on the job, when he was shot near the collarbone and very nearly killed. (Fortunately, he made a full recovery.) When he returned to the States four years later, Taylor left the Post and journalism altogether and founded an organization dedicated to electoral reform, mainly by changing the laws around campaign spending and TV advertising.

  You could have seen that as a kind of atonement for sins past, but Taylor told me he was at peace with the decisions he had made in 1987 and didn’t regret having asked The Question. He had done what he had to do as a reporter covering a story, and he was satisfied that he had acquitted himself as well as anyone could have, and there was nothing more to it than that. “You get to cover the three-alarm fire, you go cover the three-alarm fire,” is how Taylor put it, with obvious ambivalence.

  “Every circumstance, every story kind of develops its own logic and its own momentum, and it seemed to me that that’s where we were in that story,” Taylor told me. “It was the right question to ask, and it was the right topic to raise. But if it never gets asked again, no one will be happier about that than me.”

  I pointed out that it did get asked—or at least some version of it—all the time. Taylor nodded.

  “Many people made this point that we’re sort of debasing the political process if we use this as a lens to judge character,” Taylor said. “And I get that as a problem. So my response to that would be, ‘Agreed.’ Let’s not go there. Let’s do respect people’s privacy. And let’s do understand that private morality and public morality, they may influence each other, but they are separate entities. I think that’s the right starting point.

  “But rules have exceptions,” Taylor said with a shrug. “And shit happens. And there we were.”

  I asked Taylor if he had ever talked to Hart after the moment in New Hampshire when they faced one another twenty-six years ago, and he shook his head. He said he had written Hart a letter in the months after, asking to talk, and had received a polite reply from Hart saying he wasn’t interested.

  “You know, there’s a time where I thought it would be nice, just on a human level, to bring some quote-unquote closure to it,” Taylor said. “But I don’t know what I would say. I have no burning desire to say anything to him. I expect he doesn’t think too highly of me. That’s the nature of the beast, and I’m okay with that.”

  What Taylor seemed not to be okay with, what clearly still gnawed at him after all these years, was the idea that this one question, among the thousands he had asked of politicians in more than a decade of political reporting, was still the thing that defined his career. Not infrequently, if you mentioned the Hart scandal to political insiders who lived through it, one of the first people they mentioned, with a knowing smile, was Paul Taylor. Like Hart himself, Taylor had become stuck in an inglorious moment, and for a guy who considered himself intellectual and idealistic about politics, this was understandably hard to stomach.

  “This is my life and career, and I take it pretty seriously,” Taylor told me. “If everybody gets to choose their fifteen minutes, this wouldn’t have been mine.”

  In the 1980s, at the height of what Neil Postman called the Age of Show Business, the old adage about life imitating art was almost literally true. Virtually every aspect of the culture was informed by entertainment. Michael Jackson debuted his “Billie Jean” video in 1983, and thanks to MTV and NBC’s Friday Night Videos, every American under thirty was soon moonwalking his way to the bathroom. After the movie Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as a renegade fighter pilot, exploded into the American consciousness in 1986 (along with aviator glasses and bomber jackets), the Navy reported a sharp increase in the enlistment of aspiring pilots. So naturally the first televised sex scandal in American politics, the five-day miniseries starring Hart and a sexy model that gripped the nation in 1987, had immediate repercussions in politics and journalism, and not just on the presidential level. In congressional districts and statehouses across the country, reporters were suddenly looking to stage their own versions of this new morality play, and politicians were desperately seeking ways to avoid a starring role.

  Within a few weeks of Hart’s withdrawal speech in Denver, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, announced that he was gay. Frank said he took a look around and guessed he wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for long. He was probably right. “The more the discussion is trivialized and sensationalized, the less you’ll get serious, substantive discussion,” Frank warned. “At the rate we’re going, the National Enquirer will be up for the Pulitzer Prize.” (In fact, that wouldn’t happen until 2008, when the Enquirer won plaudits and serious Pulitzer consideration for nailing John Edwards.)

  A few weeks after Frank’s admission, Richard Celeste, the Democratic governor of Ohio and one of the party’s more promising national talents, had to give up any hope of a presidential run after the Plain Dealer wrote about his extramarital affairs. Celeste had been asked at a routine news conference about rumors of his “Gary Hart–type problem,” and he had denied them. The Plain Dealer’s editors—who, of course, knew, along with half of Columbus, that Celeste wasn’t being entirely forthcoming—considered this his version of “follow me around,” and promptly set out to prove him a man of faulty character. Celeste was finished in national politics, although he later served as ambassador to India.

  By that time, as Taylor would later write, reporters on the campaign trail were already delving into the sex lives of Jesse Jackson and George H. W. Bush, following up on a bevy of rumors. Jackson was now alleged to be sleeping with the actress Debra Winger, although that bit of gossip never actually became a story. (Nineteen years later, Jackson was forced to admit having fathered an illegitimate daughter by another woman.) In Bush’s case, the rumors were persistent enough that his oldest son, George W., felt the need to call Fineman at Newsweek to set the record straight—a move that served only to intensify speculation, which lasted right up until Election Day.

  Meanwhile, a rumor that Kitty Dukakis had once separated from her husband, Michael, just as Lee and Gary Hart had, for
ced the soon-to-be-nominee’s wife to publicly disclose her treatment for addiction to diet pills. She figured it was better to admit she had been treated at a Minnesota clinic for a month, thus explaining her prolonged absence from Massachusetts, than to let gossip about marital problems overshadow her husband’s campaign.

  The Dukakis story prompted E. J. Dionne to write in the Times that Hart’s downfall seemed to have triggered a new era of “confessional politics,” in which “candidates and their spouses are being pushed, by their advisors or their own apprehensions, to disclose aspects of their lives that in another era would have remained private.” Eddie Mahe, a Republican consultant, told Dionne, “The press has collectively made a decision that when any information is presented to them and documented, they will publish it. So the new rule on these things is: you’d better talk about it, and you’d better talk about it first.” The impact of this reached even beyond national borders. By 1989, Paul Taylor noted, heads of state in Greece and Japan were being forced from office at least partly because of sex scandals.

  On a rainy day near the end of March 2013, I sat in the back of a shabby Capitol Hill bar with Joe Trippi, discussing this period in the late 1980s. After smuggling Lee Hart out of Troublesome Gulch on the floorboards of his car, Trippi had gone on to become a leading adman and strategist in Democratic campaigns, although usually in the role of a renegade assaulting the party establishment. He masterminded the tech-savvy presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 (at least until a very public breakup late in the campaign, after Dean ran out of money), and then advised Edwards in his 2008 run.