All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  Hart didn’t need a second invitation. The next month, he sent Clinton a dense, three-page memo on the negotiations over Britain’s control of Northern Ireland. Referring to himself, characteristically, in the third person, so as not to appear presumptuous, Hart wrote that “the author” had several initiatives in mind, the first of which went like this: “After consultation with all parties, you should appoint a ‘personal representative’ to observe, monitor, and report to you on the progress of further peace negotiations, with an emphasis on seeking new formulas to facilitate progress.” Hart didn’t spell out who might fill this role of presidential envoy, but he noted his “long-term personal friendship” with one of the British prime minister’s most trusted advisors on the issue. Contrary to the long-standing British policy of opposing such a mediator, Hart expressed confidence that the British might secretly welcome his intervention.

  Clinton replied about three weeks later and shot down the idea. “For the moment,” the president wrote, “and especially in light of recent developments, I believe the U.S. can be most helpful by supporting the process through existing channels with strong White House involvement.” Underneath the official letter, as was his custom, Clinton penned a more personal note, as if to soften the blow. “Some of your specific recommendations may yet be needed,” he wrote, “but at least we have a breakthrough we’re working toward.”

  In fact, less than a year later, Clinton did take Hart’s suggestion to name a personal representative in the talks, but the man he named was George Mitchell, Hart’s former colleague in the Senate. (Mitchell would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest honor, for his work on the issue and would thereafter be considered a kind of roving senior statesman—precisely the dream Hart fostered for himself.) Hart’s determination to get back in the game never flagged, but his ambitions grew more modest and his attempts a bit more desperate. Having been rebuffed on Russia and Northern Ireland, Hart proposed to Clinton—more than once during Clinton’s second term—that he be engaged to work out a formal peace agreement between Russia and Japan. (Apparently, the two countries hadn’t reconciled in the fifty years since World War II and were technically still at war.)

  “I urge you to give serious consideration to this proposal and, as always, wish you the very best success,” Hart wrote the president in April 1998, upon renewing this request. A month later, he received another awkward, staff-written reply from Clinton rejecting his proposal, along with another handwritten note under the signature. “I agree that you could help resolve this if they were willing to have outside help,” Clinton scribbled, a bit more brusquely than in previous letters. “For different domestic reasons, they don’t appear to be at this time.”

  Emerson and others who had been close to Hart, and who now worked for Clinton, continued to push his case inside the West Wing and at some cabinet agencies—namely Defense—during the nineties. At times, his former aides despaired at what they saw as Hart’s impossible pride and self-regard, the fact that he considered most open jobs beneath him, and that he refused to lobby administration officials on his own behalf. But as the exchange of letters shows, Hart was willing to lobby, at least directly with the man whose opinion mattered most.

  The more salient problem, as one of Hart’s allies finally told him, was that whenever his name would surface in any high-level discussion, someone on the political side of the White House would dismiss the idea immediately. (“That’s hard to know,” Hart said of this bit of intelligence.) The last thing Clinton needed was to invite a raft of new cartoons and late-night jokes about the world’s most famous adulterer taking on the world’s second most famous adulterer as a running buddy. In the public mind, Hart stood for one thing, and it happened to be the one thing Clinton spent most of his presidency trying frantically to transcend.

  For Hart, it was a decade of profound disappointment. He had to watch, from his cabin in the hills, as Clinton got credit for modernizing and moderating liberalism, which is what Hart had been proposing to do since the 1970s. And although Al From, who had founded the Democratic Leadership Council and recruited Clinton to be its spokesman, would always credit Hart with having inspired the New Democrat movement, Hart himself rejected the comparison; he developed contempt for Clinton’s “third way,” which he saw increasingly as a cynical strategy, a way of simply stealing the conservative argument that liberalism was dead, rather than breathing life back into the liberal ideal. Hart admired Clinton’s political skill, but if he had ever really believed what he wrote in 1994, that Clinton would be remembered as a great president, he did not believe it for long.

  You can imagine, though, that what really anguished Hart had less to do with Clinton’s policies than with the universal injustice his endurance as a politician seemed to represent. After all, it wasn’t as if Clinton had succeeded, becoming the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two terms, because he had avoided making the same mistakes Hart had made—far from it. By 1998, it was clear that Clinton’s personal transgressions made Hart look like a eunuch by comparison. The creepiest thing any woman had ever said about Hart was that he had once answered his hotel door in a bathrobe when a reporter knocked on it during the 1984 campaign, which was a long way from groping random women or enjoying fellatio from an intern while talking on the phone with world leaders—all of which were part of Clinton’s legend by the end of his presidency.

  And yet, somehow, Clinton’s hubris and his sexual personality disorder (there was really no other way to look at it) came to be seen as proving his immense political talent, rather than negating it. He emerged in the public mind as roguish and irrepressible, in the way made famous by leading men on TV dramas—a man too dynamic and insatiable for his own good, but not necessarily for ours. As the decade came to a close, Gary Hart remained the political equivalent of Hester Prynne, cast out and humiliated because of a single lingering photo. Bill Clinton, who endured impeachment for wagging his finger and lying to the country about his long dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-three-year-old woman in his charge, left office with an approval rating of 68 percent.

  In September 1998, when Clinton was finally forced to give a speech confessing to his sins and his months-long deception about them, he publicly apologized to Lewinsky and her family for the ordeal he had put them through. (The Washington Post had broken news of the president’s sex-capade, more than a decade after Paul Taylor’s question and more than six years after Ben Bradlee’s retirement.) Weeks later, although he would later say the two things weren’t connected, Hart sat at his oak desk in the study and stared at a phone number on a sheet of paper. Then he picked up the phone, listened for a dial tone, and punched in the 703 number a longtime supporter had found for him—a number in Northern Virginia.

  After a few rings, during which he probably considered hanging up, Donna Rice answered the phone.

  Hart hadn’t seen Rice since the confusing night in 1987 when he watched Billy Broadhurst shepherd her and Lynn Armandt toward the back door of the townhouse he had long since sold. For some time, Hart wondered—as Rice guessed he did—if she might have been involved in some plot to derail his campaign. (She had pleaded with McAliley to tell Hart she hadn’t known, and she had personally assured Hart of the same thing during a private phone call in McAliley’s office a few weeks after the scandal broke, which was the last time the two had talked.) But as years passed, that theory seemed less and less plausible to Hart, and eventually he added her to the list of people he felt deserved his remorse, whose lives would have been different had he made some wiser decisions. Whatever the nature of their bond to that point, Hart and Rice were united ever after by a shared experience that few others, if any, could really understand. They knew what it was to be transformed into tabloid caricatures overnight.

  The life of the Donna Rice who was sitting on Hart’s lap in the dockside photo had essentially ended on the morning two days after the Herald story broke, and twenty-four hours after the campaign h
ad released her name to the media, when she climbed aboard the twin-engine plane that Tom McAliley had secretly chartered, with little more than some hastily packed clothes and a toothbrush. The plane, it turned out, was headed to the Florida Panhandle, where McAliley had a friend whose place was empty. That’s where Rice watched TV as Hart withdrew from the race, and as the picture taken with her own camera, by a woman she had thought to be a friend, became ubiquitous. She stayed there, in hiding, for weeks. Eventually, she went back to work for Wyeth, but reporters followed her on her sales calls to doctors’ offices, and one doctor even tried to sell her business card, and when it was clear after a few months that her notoriety wasn’t going to fade, her bosses made it equally clear that she should probably resign. After that, she had no income, no privacy, and nowhere to go.

  She had always talked about moving to L.A., where she had friends. She thought she could have a career as a TV actress, or maybe even a writer. So Rice moved out West and signed on with a talent agency. For the rest of 1987, and especially after Hart reentered the race, the offers flew at her. Playboy was willing to start at $1 million—really it was a blank check, she was made to understand—if she would consent to do a simple Q&A, with a tastefully done headshot and nothing more. ABC would pay at least that much for her cooperation with a made-for-TV movie. CBS brought in all of its division heads—news, entertainment, and so on—to meet her, because it was said that the network’s president, Laurence Tisch, had decreed he wanted her on the network, and he didn’t care how.

  What most of the media wanted, though, wasn’t Donna Rice; it was her story. Networks and magazines were more than willing to make her wealthier than the daughter of a federal highway engineer had ever dreamed of becoming—if only she would give them the real goods on Gary Hart.

  Rice wouldn’t go there, not for any amount of money. Her grandmother counseled her that she had already been blamed for ruining this man’s ambitions once. She couldn’t allow herself to be held responsible for doing it again.

  She did give some cautious interviews to Barbara Walters, because the anchor seemed genuinely interested in who she really was, and that was as close as Rice could get to trusting anyone. She did an ad campaign, too, for “No Excuses” jeans—a decision she immediately regretted. The problem was that what Rice yearned for now wasn’t money or onscreen fame, however much she had coveted all that in a former life. Rather, she wanted the one thing the world wasn’t offering. She wanted to prove she was a good, decent person—not this loose, partying swimsuit model with a smoky look on the cover of People. She wanted to believe that all of this had some meaning or purpose, that something redeeming would ultimately come from the shame and ridicule.

  And that’s when Donna Rice rediscovered Jesus—not in the eyes of a mountain lion, but in the hiss of a cassette tape. Actually, it was her mother and her grandmother who first put the idea in her head, who told her she “needed to get right with God.” Then a friend from high school, a girl she hadn’t talked to in years, sent her a package through her family. The note said she didn’t know if all this stuff she was reading was true, or what had happened to the Donna Rice she knew. But it didn’t matter, because it was never too late to ask forgiveness and change your life; she enclosed a tape of herself singing songs they had sung together in a Christian youth group many years earlier. The way Rice would later explain it, the Lord worked his miracle through that tape. He made sure, also, to steer her into the company of other devout Christians who had no agenda, other than to take her in and heal her.

  There were no role models for Donna Rice, you have to remember—no women made famous by political scandal who had somehow found their way back to respectability. The closest thing she found during those months, the only example that inspired her to carry on, was a memoir by Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure who had been born again in prison and ultimately became a minister. And so it seemed like God’s plan at work when Rice, at the invitation of one of her new Christian friends, came to Washington for the National Prayer Breakfast in early 1989 and found herself in the company of some of the people who had rallied around Colson and who had even offered to serve his prison time for him, had the system allowed it. Not just the kind of people who had supported him, mind you, but the very same ones. They wanted to support her, too.

  And so Rice ended up falling into the comforting embrace of what was known as “the Fellowship” or sometimes simply “the Family,” a group of religious activists who sought to keep national leaders on a righteous path. As she had during those nightmarish days when Hart’s coterie of aides had smuggled her from one place to the next and told her what she had to do, Rice trusted her fate to others, people who knew what to do.

  She moved to Northern Virginia, lived with a Christian family, and did volunteer work. Eventually, Dee Jepsen, the wife of a retired conservative senator, recruited Rice to work for her new group Enough Is Enough, which was crusading against pornography. In 1994, Rice became the communications director and began a long, noble fight against the emerging world of Internet child porn and sexual predators. Eventually, she rose to become the executive director. She married a conservative businessman named Jack Hughes and lived in tony McLean (epicenter of wealthy, conservative Washington), pinned her blond hair back, and dressed in classic business suits. The congressmen and senators who worked closely with her on the first major Internet porn bill in the mid-1990s didn’t even realize that Donna Rice-Hughes was that Donna Rice until The New York Times profiled her and let everyone know. Donna’s mother had begged her to drop the “Rice” when she got married, because of all the baggage it carried, but by then it didn’t matter. Donna Rice was, as ever, smart and beautiful and beguiling, and in any way that mattered, she, like Chuck Colson, had been reborn.

  Rice wasn’t shocked on that fall day in 1998 when the shaky voice on the other end of the phone, ringing with a familiar mountain twang, identified himself as Gary Hart. An intermediary had already contacted Rice to confirm the number and to let her know Hart would be calling. She was curious as to his purpose, but not especially nervous; the truth was she didn’t think about him much anymore. She had really liked him back in 1987—trusted him, as she was inclined to do with older, interesting, self-certain men—and he had jettisoned her completely, thrown her to the media wolves with little more than a glance. But Rice had practiced forgiving. She felt sorry for him. She had completely reimagined her life, while Hart had simply disappeared.

  But here he was, an oddly familiar voice, saying what he probably should have said a decade ago. Hart said he was sorry for all the bad things that had happened to her back then. He said he had always felt responsible and that she hadn’t deserved any of it—he knew that. She thanked him. They talked for a while more, said some things that no one else needed to hear, that would stay between the two of them.

  Through all the years of their estrangement, Rice thought she could hear the pain and loneliness in his voice. She thought he sounded lost in regret. So she told him about the Fellowship. They had a place in Northern Virginia where the devout and politically connected, along with the occasional pop star or world leader, came together to eat and pray. Maybe he would think about coming to dinner there with her and her family, Rice said. Maybe they could help him.

  Hart thanked her for the invitation. “And that was it,” he told me later. He sounded sorrowful, as if he had hoped the conversation might come to some more enlightening end. “I said, ‘We’ll see.’ But that was it.”

  Clinton actually did do Hart a significant favor before leaving office, although it didn’t seem like much at the time. Along with his proposals for intervention in Northern Ireland and in the contested Kuril Islands between Japan and Russia, Hart had been pushing Clinton to establish some kind of commission to rethink America’s national security policies for the period after the Cold War. This was in the unstable period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when longsimmering ethnic rivalries were boiling over in parts of the world like
the former Yugoslavia, and there was much confusion about what role the United States should play. Clinton evidenced no more interest in this suggestion than he had in the others, but it turned out that, once again, Newt Gingrich had been eyeing the same horizon as Hart. In 1998, with Clinton reeling from scandal and desperate for an agreement on anything substantive, Gingrich talked him into creating the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Among the fourteen commissioners were Gingrich and Hart.

  The commission seemed like just another of these shapeless, blue-ribbon panels whose main purpose is to give a few deep thinkers something about which to pontificate. It was to be chaired by two of Hart’s former colleagues in the Senate, both recently retired: the Republican Warren Rudman and the Democrat David Boren. But then Boren, who was by that time president of the University of Oklahoma, realized he was too busy to chair another of these invisible commissions. As luck would have it (and Hart was certainly entitled to some), Clinton’s second-term secretary of defense was Bill Cohen, Hart’s friend and onetime coauthor. The two had remained close, and so Cohen stepped up where no one else in the administration had. He recommended that Hart be elevated to cochairman, in part because he was better qualified than almost anyone else, but also because he seemed to have a lot more time on his hands than most of the other commissioners. Clinton agreed.

  Hart was tentative at first. It had been more than a decade since he had served alongside men and women he respected, and he didn’t know how much of their respect he might still command. More than one member of the commission noticed that Hart had trouble finding the voice that had once seemed so compelling to his contemporaries. But as the old confidence returned, so, too, did the trademark sharpness of mind and intensity. Newly energized, Hart traveled more than any commission member and surprised his staff by rewriting much of one report himself.