by Matt Bai
Trippi told me that almost exactly a year after Hart left the race the first time, he got a frantic call from one of his closest friends, Tom Pappas, with whom he had worked as a kid on Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign. Pappas was now chief of staff to Roy Dyson, a Maryland congressman, who was being investigated by the Federal Election Commission for campaign spending violations. Pappas, it turned out, had received a six-figure consulting fee from Dyson’s campaign and failed to disclose it. But what had Pappas so distraught, the reason he had called Trippi for help, had nothing to do with money. He said The Washington Post was preparing to run a story that Sunday saying he was gay. Trippi had been dealing with reporters for years and was known to have good, mutually respectful relationships with them. He called one of the reporters working on the story and tried to talk him out of running it.
“Sunday morning, I’m shooting commercials in West Virginia for a gubernatorial candidate, when the front page of The Washington Post …” At this, Trippi’s voice suddenly caught, and to my surprise, he started to weep right there in the bar. “… When the front page of The Washington Post says he’s gay.…”
That story, which I later retrieved, was actually more complicated than Trippi remembered. The piece was ostensibly about Pappas’s strange and demanding behavior toward male aides, like one he had allegedly fired just for leaving a party. The reporters never actually came out and said Pappas was gay, but the subtext was clear. They mentioned, for instance, that Pappas was divorced and that his boss was single, and that Pappas often stayed with the congressman at his house.
“Killed himself,” Trippi told me then, choking on those two words after all these years. “Jumped out of a twenty-four-floor building. He jumped. He was in New York.” In fact, I would later learn, Pappas had hurled himself from a window at the Helmsley Palace Hotel near Grand Central Station minutes after hearing about the story. Trippi got the news from one of the Post reporters, who tracked him down that Sunday morning. “The question was not, How did I like the story or you know, something like that,” Trippi said. “It was: I need to ask you some questions for a story we’re doing for Monday. Today Tom Pappas threw himself out of a building and killed himself. What do you have to say?” He shook his head in disbelief. “That was the press.”
Trippi swigged from his Miller Lite and rubbed his eyes clear. “It just kills me, every time I even remember that guy,” he said. “I just don’t understand it. Even if it was true, it wasn’t fucking front-page news. We were just going through this whole thing where the personal stuff just wasn’t out of bounds anymore. The Hart thing just unleashed this really crazy period.”
Then and forever after, Hart’s name would be linked with every sex scandal in politics, no matter how tenuous the connection. And yet the Hart Effect, if you can call it that, wasn’t solely, or even chiefly, about sex. In fact, the very purpose of political journalism—the prime directive, as any Star Trek fan might put it—had now been redefined. As Hart himself had predicted, and as Taylor had astutely observed, political journalism was now concerned almost entirely with exposing lies and unearthing character flaws, sexual or not. Coverage had been trending this way, of course, ever since Watergate, and the bookish generation now ascending into the highest ranks of journalism had always taken a less trusting, more adversarial approach than the hard-drinking old guys. But Hart’s downfall was the thing that tipped the scales completely, the catalyst that made it okay—even necessary—for all aspiring political reporters to cast themselves as amateur PI’s and psychotherapists. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would have been: We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.
Often, it must be said, the stories this new culture spawned had genuine value. A senior congressional aide who routinely harassed staffers clearly had something to answer for, and the fact that these stories might have gone unreported in years past didn’t make them any less relevant. The media had good reason to be more skeptical in a society that had already felt the cost of trusting its leaders too much and where carefully choreographed, patriotic TV images could obscure a lot that mattered about a candidate.
The problem, as Hendrik Hertzberg understood, was that along with discretion, the media had discarded any sense of context, too. Once the public heard about your misstep, that was all the public would hear about you—or about anything else, if the story were big enough—until you did your duty and disappeared, or until the mob simply exhausted itself and left you lying in the dust. As with Hart, even the intimation of scandal could displace anything else you’d ever done as a measure of character. It was reasonable to argue that Tom Pappas’s profiting illegally from political campaigns—or even his sexuality, if in fact it pertained to repeated mistreatment of the men who worked for him—were newsworthy facts. But looking down from the twenty-fourth floor of the Helmsley Palace that Sunday morning, it must have seemed to Pappas that this was all anyone would ever know of him again, the totality of his career in public service reduced to a single headline he might never outlive.
And, of course, it didn’t take long for political operatives to grasp both the peril and the opportunity of this new order. If reporters were ever in search of the single embarrassing fact, however personal or trivial, that could destroy the hard-won reputation of your candidate overnight, then those same reporters could destroy your opponent just as quickly—if you could find his vulnerability first and slyly maneuver it into the right hands. Once politicians and operatives understood the destructive force that had been unleashed, like some sorcerer’s elixir, by this obsession with character, there was no containing it.
The second casualty of the 1988 campaign, after Hart, was Joe Biden, who was perhaps the most promising of the New Garys vying to fill the vacuum in the field. Biden prided himself on hailing from a kind of loquacious, freewheeling tradition of Irish storytelling, and in Iowa he had warmed to a riff from Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader in England, about being the “first in a thousand generations” of his family to graduate college. Normally, Biden would credit Kinnock when he got to this part of his shtick, but on at least one occasion, during a debate in Iowa, he carelessly neglected to source the citation. And so, less than four months after the Hart scandal, John Sasso, who was Dukakis’s chief strategist, quietly slipped a videotape of that debate to Maureen Dowd at The New York Times.
It took all of eleven days for the frenzy that followed this small story to claim Biden’s candidacy, during which it was revealed that he had also lifted isolated passages from the Kennedys in the past—which hardly differentiated him from any other Democrat of his generation—and that once, in law school, twenty-odd years earlier, he had been accused of plagiarism. (Sasso, too, would be forced to resign from the campaign after his role in the scandal came to light, although he later returned to help Dukakis during the general election.) In Biden’s case, as in Hart’s, all the truth was out. It just wasn’t clear that all the truth was actually illuminating.
In early 1989, after Bush survived rumors of his own infidelity and won the White House, he nominated John Tower, the former senator from Texas, to be his defense secretary. Confirmation hearings in the Senate were thought to be a formality—until the conservative activists who had long disdained Tower (mainly because he had supported Gerald Ford against Ronald Reagan in 1976) accused him of drinking and “womanizing” and turned the hearings into a referendum on his “moral character.” After weeks of debate and breathless coverage, Tower’s former colleagues, by a narrow margin, made him the first cabinet pick of any newly elected president to be rejected by the Senate.
In See How They Run, Paul Taylor pointed to the Tower episode as an example of admirable restraint on the media’s part, because reporters “let the Senate take the lead role” in investigating Tower’s personal proclivities. But this was probably beside the point. Senators and their ideological allies understood now, in the wake of the Hart scandal, that if they could manage to instigate a debate about someone’s charac
ter, whether having to do with sex or some other private lapse, the media would lock on to it like a laser beam, and nothing more substantive would ever be discussed. Reporters had “let the Senate take the lead” only in the sense that the guy who pins your arms down is letting another thug take the lead in beating the tar out of you. The relationship between personally ruinous politics and scandal-obsessed journalism was symbiotic.
If Tower’s implosion marked the start of a more personally perilous chapter in the life of the Senate, it was downright genteel next to what was transpiring down the hall in the House of Representatives. By end of 1989, as Taylor noted, “no fewer than four members of the U.S. House of Representatives were being investigated by the House ethics committee for alleged sexual misconduct.” (One of these was Barney Frank, who, it was revealed, had been allowing an escort he had hired and befriended to operate a male prostitution ring in his home.) Meanwhile, the Democratic House speaker, Jim Wright of Texas, was fending off a separate investigation into his own lapse in integrity, which centered on a charge that he had conspired to accept more money in royalties from his memoir than he was allowed to accept under House rules. Wright resigned in June 1989, making him the only speaker in history to be forced from office by scandal. (It would be less than a decade before another man who was about to become speaker, Robert Livingston, would have to bow out over allegations of adultery.)
Historically speaking, the Wright scandal was as significant for the career it most elevated as it was for the man whose ambitions were dashed. It was a conservative and combative congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich who brought the initial charges against Wright and used the case as a platform. In some ways, Gingrich, while seven years younger, was Hart’s generational opposite. Erudite and reflective, with a doctoral degree in history, Gingrich embraced Hart’s concept for military reform early on, and like the Atari Democrats, he was enamored of the new digital technologies that were about to transform the American economy. Like Hart, he was a prolific writer who prided himself on being able to peer around corners—although Gingrich would long be ridiculed for some of the wackier predictions he floated, like the idea that American factories would soon be making metal alloys in space.
But where Hart studied military history and literature for insights into how he might win campaigns (he was fond, during the McGovern campaign in 1972, of citing the insurgent General Kutuzov from War and Peace, whose strategy was to “attack and retreat, attack and retreat”), Gingrich studied them mainly for the purpose of destroying his enemies. If Hart was Kutuzov, then Gingrich more closely resembled Napoleon. And after 1987, Gingrich clearly understood that the evolving political culture could work to his advantage.
Republicans had been a minority in the House for more than thirty years. But what Gingrich saw immediately in the post-Hart moment was that it would now be far easier to take your adversaries down in a surge of scandal—or, more precisely, multiple scandals—than it would be to unseat them at the polls. You were never going to get rid of a giant like Jim Wright by out-campaigning him, but you might succeed by finding the moral transgression that could be used to taint his character and tantalize the media. After Wright, Gingrich went after the entire Democratic majority this way, exposing their personal venality when it came to writing bad checks off the House bank or using the Congressional Post Office for campaign mail. (In fact, about 320 members and former members of Congress from both parties had written checks that required overdraft protection on their account—including Gingrich himself.)
Eventually, Newt, as he was universally known, would lead a Republican takeover of the House and become the party’s first speaker since 1955. And history would cast him as the principal adversary of the first president of the boomer generation, a man whose own faulty character would obliterate all other political discussion in the waning years of the American century.
Among Democratic insiders of the period, it’s often been said that Bill Clinton could not have existed without Gary Hart. This is true in more than one sense. Hart’s essential argument to Democrats in the 1980s—that a party grounded in New Deal industrial policies and Vietnam-era pacifism had to modernize and rethink if it wanted to remain relevant—formed the basis of the electoral and governing philosophy that would come to be known as Clintonism. But just as important, Hart’s shocking ruination meant that the new culture of political journalism was no longer a shock to anyone else. Had Clinton, a notoriously flawed husband, been the first to encounter tabloid-style journalism and satellite-driven coverage of his private life, he almost certainly would have been consumed by the same kind of media inferno that claimed Hart. As it was, coming four years after the Monkey Business blowup, Clinton knew exactly what to expect, and he had a better sense of how to navigate it—or, more precisely, how not to.
In fact, Clinton was thinking hard about this issue in the run-up to his own presidential campaign. Sometime around 1990, Tom Fiedler spoke about media ethics at a panel in Little Rock, where state legislators happened to be meeting. Afterward, an aide to Governor Clinton approached and asked Fiedler to spend some time with the governor. In a suite at the Excelsior Hotel (the same hotel where Clinton would later be accused of having sexually harassed a woman named Paula Jones), Clinton questioned Fiedler about where he and his fellow reporters would draw the line on extramarital affairs. Was it news, he wanted to know, if a presidential candidate had cheated on his wife in the past, but wasn’t doing it currently? (Fiedler thought not.) What was the media’s statute of limitations likely to be? Fiedler found himself in the uncomfortable position of being consulted as an expert on the new category of sex scandal—which, of course, he was.
Later, Fiedler, like many others, would consider Clinton’s career in national politics proof that the Hart episode had not, in fact, led to an era where imperfections of character would overwhelm everything else. Fiedler had maintained all along that it wasn’t the reporter’s job to decide which aspects of a candidate’s life or persona were relevant to his abilities and which weren’t; those decisions were best left to the voters, who would ultimately be able to work through these disclosures and put them in context. As Fiedler saw it, in the case of marital infidelity, the voters had taken four years to process what had happened with Hart, and by 1992 they had decided that simply having cheated on your wife (and even having lied about it) was not, by itself, a disqualifying factor for a presidential candidate. Hart was the first, and perhaps he was treated more harshly because of it, but America had not become the place he warned of in his acid farewell, where politics existed only as treacherous sport. Rather, we had quickly evolved into a more forgiving society with a more complex notion of character.
There was a lot of validity in this. In the years after Clinton won not one but two terms in the White House, the list of politicians who would manage to rebound from sex scandals that made Hart’s look quaint grew almost as long as the list of those who hadn’t. Americans became desensitized to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex or drug use or cheating on a college exam. You could disappoint us, certainly, but we were now a very hard country to shock.
And when politicians didn’t rebound, you could generally make a pretty good case that their moral transgressions were worth our knowing about. Did Eliot Spitzer deserve to be New York’s governor—and a moralizing one, at that—after it was revealed that he had routinely rendezvoused with hookers while traveling on the taxpayers’ bill? Should we not have cared that Anthony Weiner, the brash candidate for mayor of New York, was “sexting” young women, even after he had been drummed out of Congress for it and had promised to get the habit under control? It was reasonable to suggest that this hinted at some deeper compulsion or insecurity that was not unrelated to—and, in fact, was probably central to—his craving for public validation.
Perhaps, in the years after 1987, the electorate had become worldlier and more discerning, as Fielder suggested. At the same time, though, when it came to the presidency, mere surviva
l had replaced any actual record as the central test of success. Sure, Clinton managed in 1992 to avoid the calamitous judgment that had befallen Hart an election cycle earlier. But despite presiding over a surging high-tech economy, his presidency would mostly be remembered as a series of personal scandals and evasive maneuvers that would have been unthinkable in another era—things like “Troopergate” and “Whitewater” and some silly affair involving the White House Travel Office that no one even remembers now, not to mention a blue dress with semen stains and the first actual impeachment in 130 years.
In the age of what Clinton himself termed, with notable clarity, “the politics of personal destruction,” independent prosecutors were far more numerous than significant triumphs of legislation. More than one Clinton aide would tell me, after the fact, that Clinton would have pushed hard to reform industrial age entitlement programs in his second term had it not been for the impeachment saga that sapped his presidency. Whether or not that was true, by that point Clinton could only hope to last out his second term and nothing more. It’s telling that the most authoritative book about Clinton’s presidency, written by the journalist John Harris, was called not “The Reformer” or “The Progressive,” as Clinton might have hoped back in 1992, but rather The Survivor.
Just as important, Clinton embodied a profound change in the nature of candidacies after Hart and how they were evaluated. Clinton didn’t succeed where Hart had failed so miserably simply because a few years had passed and no one really cared anymore, as Fiedler suggested. He succeeded because he was an entirely different genre of politician, with an entirely different skill set. Hart was cerebral and certain of himself, prone to trust his own counsel, someone who clung stubbornly to his own idea of principle, even when it did him no good. He held himself at a certain emotional remove. These were qualities that, for most of the life of the republic, were considered the traits of strong leadership. This is why being called a loner in the media never alarmed Hart as much as it did his younger aides; to him, it conjured images of Lincoln and Kennedy and perhaps even Reagan—men of resolve, self-reliance, and at times a certain inscrutability.
