All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Clinton was a whole other type. Like Hart, Clinton made a point of saying he didn’t think any candidate should have to discuss the cracks in his marital life, but then he did exactly that—at length, expertly and disarmingly, with his wife pointedly by his side. Clinton was all too willing to emote about the “pain in his marriage” on 60 Minutes, to play the saxophone like some street-corner hustler on The Arsenio Hall Show, to share the intimate details of his underwear choices on MTV. Clinton openly yearned for approval and acceptance, for any kind of physical contact, any hand outstretched. He was famous for telling whoever was in the room last whatever he wanted to hear. As the country would find out later, Clinton was also willing to lie, outright, when it came to behavior he considered irrelevant or couldn’t face in himself. Clinton was a brilliant and complex thinker, a magnetic personality, but also frustratingly needy and malleable.

  These were exactly the attributes it took to get hit in the face with roiling wave after roiling wave, revelations and innuendo and attacks on your integrity, and then pop back up in the surf, fully expecting to get hit again. But they were not necessarily the qualities one needed to lead the country steadily through an economic and global transformation unlike any in a century. This was not the psychological makeup of a president who would tell people the hard truths they didn’t want to know, or who would forge ahead with modernizing old systems even when popular sentiment turned the other way.

  To be clear, the events of 1987 weren’t the only thing that caused Americans to redefine the essential qualities we looked for in a national leader. Other equally large and ominous trends were just then emerging in politics, too, and have been written about at great length: the proliferation of cable news, the professionalization of polling, the surge of big money in political campaigns. But beginning with Hart’s demise, we in the media made this shift explicit.

  There had been plenty of “horse race” journalism before the 1980s, stories about who was likely to win which primaries and all of that, but the candidates themselves were discussed mostly for their arguments and strategies, rather than for their skills as evaders and salesmen. In the Age of Show Business, however, the measure of a leader became his hunger for the game, his talent for dazzling crowds, his deftness at surviving an unreasonably brutal and small-minded process. We openly admired roguish candidates who could dexterously deflect assaults on their character—from their adversaries, and from us—and disdained those who thought themselves above it. We set traps and then marveled at those who could escape them with Houdini-like grace, which is why Clinton came to be known, almost universally, as the most talented statesman of the age, despite having achieved relatively little of his governing agenda. In short, we came to confuse actual leadership with the capacity to endure, and to entertain.

  The first presidential candidate I covered was the former senator Bill Bradley, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2000 and lost badly. Because Al Gore, the sitting vice president, was assumed to be the inevitable Democratic nominee that year (an assumption that seemed very much in peril by late 1999, when for a few pivotal months Gore lagged behind in fundraising and polling and started to look a lot like Mondale in 1984), Bradley’s campaign drew a cadre of young, eager reporters, many of whom were new to the campaign trail and eager to imitate our older colleagues.

  Bradley was, by any contemporary standard, a remarkably accessible candidate; he granted me several long sit-down interviews, including one on the day he withdrew. And yet, much like Hart, Bradley, who had been a basketball legend long before he ever entered politics, exuded the sense that there were things he valued more in the world than becoming president—namely his privacy and his notion of dignity. This baffled us. Though we thought the candidate a nice enough guy, we couldn’t help fixating on his refusal to talk about his religious beliefs or his medical history, his general aloofness and obvious aversion to political theater. Writing for Newsweek, I wasted few words on Bradley’s actual proposals (I barely remember them now), but I wrote disdainful stories about his stubborn refusal to “go negative” on Al Gore, who smeared Bradley as hostile to Iowa farmers. The consensus among reporters on the bus was that Bradley lacked the showmanship and utter desperation necessary to run a modern presidential campaign. We were right.

  It wasn’t until several years later, after I met a long-retired politician in the foothills of Denver, that I began to reconsider my own notions of what constituted political genius, and to wonder whether we might be getting the leaders we deserved, after all.

  7

  EXILE

  ON EASTER SUNDAY 1995, Gary Hart had something of a religious experience. He found himself standing on a windswept mountain, staring into the awful eyes of God.

  Hart awoke that morning in the cabin, piled his two chows, the black Samson and the silver Delilah, into the truck, and drove into town for his Sunday New York Times, as he had on most mornings since returning to his home for good seven years earlier. But when Hart arrived back at the cabin a few minutes later and popped open the back of the truck, Samson, as peaceful a dog as you will ever meet, leaped out and took off down the gravel road at a dead run, heading east. Then, as Samson scaled the almost sheer wall of dirt and rock that loomed just behind the cabin and the road, and as his confused owner squinted into the morning sun, the dog let go a piercing howl of alarm, which bounced off the opposite hill and rattled around in the still morning air like some primeval roar.

  This isn’t about a deer or a rabbit, Hart thought to himself.

  Hart, who had hiked just about every inch of this land, and who at fifty-eight still possessed the ruggedness he’d honed driving railroad spikes in the summer as a teenager, walked down the road 150 yards or so, just to the first bend, and started ascending. He didn’t hear howling or barking above him now. He didn’t hear anything but his own breath. He began to feel a sickly fear for his four-year-old companion. He steeled himself for what he might see when at last he came to level ground, near the trees and shrubs under which a wounded animal might crawl to die.

  About forty yards up the hill, he found himself standing before the base of a large tree. Under it he saw Samson, unhurt but agitated, crawling and sniffing and pawing at the dirt. Then Hart heard a long, slow rumble, a growl that was more like the coming of a distant train.

  Slowly Hart looked up, and there, perched on a branch maybe ten feet above and directly in front of him, was a full-grown, magnificently muscular, tawny brown mountain lion. Hart wasn’t a hunter (who could ever shoot a thing like that?), but his father had taught him to track game as a boy in Kansas, and he estimated the beast’s weight at about 150 pounds, maybe 175. It was prone, as if to leap. And it had taken note of his arrival.

  Hart knew exactly what to do in such a situation. Make yourself large. Don’t run. Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact. He knew how the cat would kill him—not by mauling, but by snapping his neck cleanly, as a boot heel snaps a twig. Not six miles away, a mountain lion—maybe this mountain lion—had not long before broken into a house, killed the owner’s dogs and dragged them into the cold. Hart had always had a premonition, as a child, that he would die young, like his favorite uncle, who succumbed to brain cancer at forty-four. He was no longer so young, but maybe it was the suddenness of his death he had sensed, the violent end to an unsettled life.

  But Hart couldn’t look away, didn’t want to. Instead, he stared directly, mesmerized, into the yellow eyes, which seemed to regard him thoughtfully. They were like-minded creatures, the two of them, intense and brooding, bound by their natures to do what they must. Hart was resigned to his fate. Let it be, he thought. Just do what you came here to do.

  For those five seconds, which felt to the frozen Hart like many minutes, it was as if the lion were trying to decide whether this tormented man had ambled over the ridge with a wish to meet his judgment, or whether he was simply too bone tired to turn around and leave.

  At long last, the lion turned his head away. Then he soared—t
hat was the only word that described it. He soared through the thin, mile-high air and landed, maybe twenty-five or thirty feet from Hart. And then he bounded away. Hart breathed deeply, but it wasn’t relief he felt. Rather, it was a sense of awe and privilege, or maybe transformation. He felt, for that moment, as if he had stepped backward into Eden, to an untamed wilderness and a time before sin.

  Hart had broken with the Nazarenes almost forty years earlier, after he left his Bible college on the Plains for the worldlier confines of New Haven. He had essentially abandoned religion, at least in an organized sense, when he made the switch from Yale Divinity to the law school—and the pursuit of politics—a few years later. He remained a believer, but he had never quite found a church in the foothills that made him entirely comfortable, a minister who could manage to fuse his dueling impulses toward the spiritual and the political. And so he spent his Sundays communing with Lee and his dogs and the Times, instead.

  But he wondered, in the hours and days after he stumbled back down the hill and took stock of his life, whether God was trying to tell him something now, about his present circumstances and the road ahead. He could have died on that ridge, but he didn’t, and the awareness of that unexpected mercy filled Hart with an emotion he had almost relinquished: hope. What if the creator wasn’t finished with him, after all? What if the journey didn’t just end here, at this place of bottomless regret, but there were turns still to be revealed?

  Several times over the years, Hart would remind me of that story, as if wanting to relive it. Each time, his eyes would get moist and pink, his voice thinner. He would look to that ridge and remember. He would see that lion soar and feel redeemed.

  • • •

  “Accept your death and become dangerous.”

  A supporter sent Hart that note, one of hundreds he received and cherished during those first few months after the scandal, when there was little to do but open mail in the law office. The writer said it was a Native American proverb, which made Hart like it all the more; he had always had a deep affinity for the tribes he represented as a senator. And it resonated with him, this idea that the establishment he had always challenged still might be made to regret marginalizing and lampooning him. Hart had little, really, left to lose, and history was replete with great men—his idol Robert Kennedy among them—who had found in their depression and isolation the resolve they needed to confront the system.

  The problem for Hart, it turned out, was that he just couldn’t seem to accept his political death. He may have disdained the Democratic establishment in Washington, but he valued what only the establishment could offer—the chance to serve in some kind of formal capacity, to be inside the room when vital decisions were made. Hart was a dissenter, yes, but not a bomb-thrower, and he respected the institutions of government and media too much to jettison any hope of the legitimacy they conferred. He had already given up any thought of ever again running for office by the time he bowed out finally in 1988; if he couldn’t be president, there was no point in enduring the tedium of more campaigns. But having just passed fifty-one at that time, Hart was far from ready to relinquish his status as a visionary in his own party, and especially on the global stage. He wanted badly to serve, once the cloud of disgrace had dissipated.

  What Hart couldn’t know—what no one could know—was exactly how long that might take. After all, no politician of Hart’s stature had ever endured this particular kind of national humiliation. The closest analogue was probably Nixon, who retreated to San Clemente after his resignation and set about writing a memoir and plotting his rehabilitation (yet again) as a kind of policy sage. But Hart could never have identified with Nixon, and anyway he had committed no high crimes or misdemeanors, nothing he felt required him to be rehabilitated.

  Instead, typically, Hart drew his inspiration from history and philosophy. He reached through the ages and found a kindred spirit in Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Italian diplomat and public official who was arrested and subsequently exiled by the Medici who conquered Florence. Yearning to be of service to the new regime, Machiavelli wrote a series of essays about the exercise of power and governance to a young member of the Medici clan, a collection of which was later published as The Prince—the work that made him immortal.

  Although Hart would never come out and make the comparison explicitly, clearly he felt that he, too, had been banished, and that he, too, might best prove his value to the political class by issuing grand thoughts on paper from his own remote estate. Ensconced in his book-lined, cedar-paneled study upstairs, overlooking the living room and picture windows, Hart wrote no fewer than five books in the decade after the 1988 campaign (including the first of two novels published under a pseudonym, “John Blackthorn,” so that they might be taken seriously). The third of these books, The Patriot, published in 1996, was Hart’s explicit homage to The Prince, except that his version was addressed to a young American leader. It featured a rather pretentious subtitle—An Exhortation to Liberate America from the Barbarians—and opened with a quote from Machiavelli himself: “Fortune has decided that I must speak about the state.”

  Hart’s real-life prince, however, the contemporary to whom he addressed his most important correspondence on issues of the state, was Bill Clinton. In theory, at least, it was a stroke of good fortune for Hart that Clinton, rather than some other Democrat, rose to fill the vacuum in the party that Hart’s disappearance had created. The two had known one another since 1972, when Hart, as McGovern’s campaign manager, gave Clinton, then a twenty-five-year-old law student, his first job in politics, as McGovern’s Texas coordinator. They had remained in touch over the years, and both had gravitated to the anti-orthodox, more reformist movement inside the party. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which served as Clinton’s platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s, had taken a lot of its economic and foreign policy ideas directly from Hart’s campaigns. What Clinton called the “New Democrats” in 1992 were indistinguishable from the “neoliberals” for whom Hart had spoken in the 1980s.

  Plus, there was a good deal of continuity between Hart’s inner circle and the team that Clinton put together. One of the loyal Hart acolytes who ended up close to Clinton was John Emerson, the Californian who had been Dixon’s number two at the top of the Hart command. In September 1992, after Clinton had accepted the party’s nomination and appeared weeks away from unseating the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush, Hart sent Emerson a three-page memorandum recommending policies and strategies to deal with the pressing challenges of recession, energy dependence, and defense spending. The greatest challenge facing the country, Hart wrote, was to fundamentally restructure the society before it faced “a depression or economic catastrophe.”

  After Clinton took office, Emerson, who now had a senior job in the West Wing, brought Hart in for a private and warm talk with the new president. Hart was too proud to come out and ask the president to return the favor of twenty years before, and the subject of a specific job never came up. But it was clear that Hart still had value, both for his expertise on policy and for his connections in both parties and across several continents. And clearly he coveted some role in public life that would help erase the stain of what had become a comic scandal beyond any reasonable proportion. All he needed to do, Hart figured, was to keep the lines of communication open.

  Thus began a trail of occasional letters, usually policy-laden but at times more personal, that would last, on and off, for many years. (Hart shared both sides of this correspondence with me only after Clinton, who was by then out of office, assented.) Hart’s immediate thoughts were on Russia, where he’d spent a good deal of time doing legal work since 1989; the first of his post-scandal books, written in 1991, was Russia Shakes the World: The Second Russian Revolution and Its Impact on the West. Twice in 1993, Hart sent Clinton his thoughts on dealing with Russia—and offering his services in any way they might be needed. Clinton responded politely both times and invited Hart to join the board of
a new government fund for investment in Russia. This wasn’t exactly the kind of senior posting Hart had in mind, although he accepted.

  Hart decided, apparently, to try a different tack. In July 1994, when Clinton was taking a pounding over allegations of sexual harassment and of a shady land deal while he was governor, Hart sat down at his desk and wrote him a personal letter of support—in longhand and all capital letters, just like the memos he used to send his Senate staff. “Dear Mr. President,” he began. “The tallest nail gets hit the hardest and longest. The issue is whether it will be driven flat like all the others. This is the true character issue.” Hart continued:

  You are right to believe you are being criticized more harshly and unfairly than your modern predecessors. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were hated by much of the business community, but over philosophical differences. It requires a return to Lincoln and Jefferson to find precedent for the meanness of your vilification.

  It is partly a decline of civility in our age. But it is also ad hominem, a result of your critics’ failure to have the wit or grace to debate the merits of your reforms. You are the victim of your own exceptionalism which inexplicably draws irrational fire.… My conviction is that, some years from now, you will be judged a very great president. Your continued perseverance is the only response this note requires.

  Clinton responded in kind, days later. “Dear Gary,” he scrawled in longhand, “Your letter was generous, thoughtful, and a boost for me, beyond the call—thanks.” He asked Hart to send him more ideas for “how I might better articulate and communicate what I’m trying to do.”