All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  The final, highly cogent result—a series of three reports, released between September 1999 and January 2001—was collaborative, but it bore more of Hart’s signature than it did any other member of the commission. And not surprisingly, the findings were penetrating, in many cases echoing themes Hart had been talking about since the early 1980s. Among the commission’s central findings was that the main threat of the twenty-first century would emanate not from any government, but rather from stateless terrorism. “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers,” the first report warned in 1999. The commission recommended that Congress create a new federal agency to grapple with “homeland security”—a phrase that had not yet entered the American lexicon.

  All of this barely elicited a yawn from the media at the time the reports were released. But that was before the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, when suddenly everyone wanted to know how this could have happened and whether there was any blame to be assigned, and within days it came to light that, yes, there was this report that had all but predicted the attacks, and no one in the Bush administration had wanted to listen. (In fact, Hart had personally lobbied senior officials, Donald Rumsfeld among them, to pay attention to the commission’s findings, but Bush had subsequently announced that, instead, Vice President Dick Cheney would be studying the issue of terrorism all over again.) And just like that, in America’s darkest hour, Gary Hart was back. This time, there were no late-night monologues, no cameramen hurling themselves onto windshields, no moralizing from the keepers of the op-ed pages. Serious times had returned—and with them, it seemed, a serious man.

  Hart was all over TV and quoted in the papers, without a single mention, for once, of Donna Rice. He was on the speaking circuit again, touring the country with a sixteen-minute speech that seemed perfectly calibrated to scare his audiences into a collective cardiac arrest. The next bomb would probably be biological, Hart said, or maybe chemical. It might be shipped from Singapore to Long Beach, put on a train bound for Newark and detonated, remotely, in Chicago. The attack might strike not at New York or even Los Angeles, but at multiple cities at once—maybe Denver or Cleveland or Dallas. Hart warned his newly rapt audiences that an invasion of Iraq, which Bush was readying to undertake, would prove costly in casualties and would achieve little to make the country safer.

  When, in the spring of 2002, the former Democratic congressman Steve Solarz asked Hart to sign a letter to Bush from Democratic statesmen who supported a potential invasion, the idea being that pro-war Democrats in Congress needed some political cover from respected voices inside their own party, Hart fired back a note that, read with the benefit of history, now sounds chillingly accurate. “Though I am flattered to have been on the distribution list for your proposed letter to President Bush,” Hart began, “the last thing in the world I’m going to do, as a Democrat or as an American, is give this administration a blank check to make war on any country.” He concluded:

  Once it has been established that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, there will be plenty of time to enact appropriate U.N. resolutions authorizing the international community to act in concert to remove them.

  With all due respect, Steve, and there is plenty of that, I think this proposed letter is unwise and ill-conceived. If unqualified, open-ended, mindless support for whatever [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Richard] Perle have on their minds is such a good idea, Democrats in Congress won’t need us to make it easier for them. This letter will come back to haunt all who sign it.

  Hart had, indeed, found his voice on issues of the day. The question was what to do with it. Even as he had cochaired the presidential commission in hopes of reentering public life in some way, Hart had been pursuing another, long-deferred dream of sorts; in 2001, he earned a doctorate in political science at Oxford. (His thesis, later published as a book, centered on the Jeffersonian ideal in twenty-first-century politics.) While he was there, Hart became something of a hero to a group of American students who were there on Rhodes Scholarships, who were blown away by his intellect and who were too young to remember or care much about the events of 1987. And after the tragedy of 2001, when Hart became, if only briefly, a voice of conscience again, the students hatched a plan. They started pushing Hart to run for president once more. And when he didn’t immediately shut down the idea, they managed to get a story written in The New Republic, just to float the idea.

  That’s when I met Hart in Troublesome Gulch, at the end of 2002. At sixty-six, an age when most of his contemporaries were retiring from politics, Hart was enjoying what he hoped might be a resurgence. “Walter Mondale can just go away,” Hart explained to me then, or tried to explain, as he and Lee and I stood around the island in his kitchen. “John Glenn can go away. Michael Dukakis can go away. I can’t just go away.”

  It was Lee who asked him why—not for my benefit, but because she genuinely wanted to understand, and it wasn’t every day she could get him to reflect on it.

  “I don’t know,” Hart said candidly, shaking his head. He repeated this phrase a few more times. Then he turned to me.

  “If I weren’t doing this,” he asked, meaning publicly entertaining another campaign, “would you be here right now?”

  I said probably not.

  “Well, there are only two places to be in American life,” Hart said. “On the sidelines or on the playing field. I don’t need to run for president. But I do want to be heard.”

  Hart always knew it wasn’t a viable idea, this notion of another presidential campaign fifteen years after the last one imploded. He had no money, no real agenda, no staff or base of support beyond a handful of students. He had never loved the business of campaigning, anyway. After he abandoned the pretext, some Colorado Democrats tried to recruit him to run for his old Senate seat, but Hart demurred on that one, too, and more quickly. All he really wanted—really all he had ever wanted, after it became clear that his presidential hopes were shot forever—was to be a Wise Man of the sort the country used to regularly produce, a George Mitchell–type figure on whom presidents and secretaries of state would call for advice and sensitive missions. In truth, as Hart had proven on the national security commission, he was more than qualified for such a role.

  He hoped that John Kerry, who had been a colleague and then a personal friend, would at long last help him fulfill this ambition. Perhaps, had Kerry won the presidency in 2004, which he very nearly did, he would have tapped Hart for some senior appointment. Perhaps Hart had every reason to believe that he might get the same consideration four years later, when he jumped in early in the primary season and endorsed Barack Obama on his way to the presidency. But as the decade wore on, it must have occurred to Hart, even if he was too proud to say as much, that he had misjudged the extent of his reclamation, especially in Washington.

  Sure, the commission and all the attention it received had for a while reestablished Hart as a brilliant thinker, especially among an elite set of policymakers. But Hart’s intellectual firepower had never been in question. It was his character that the media had declared beyond remediation, and nothing about the events of 2001 seemed to have altered that. His Wikipedia page, while it contained a healthy section on the national security commission, still led with the scandal and still featured that infernal photo from the dock at Bimini, and no amount of editing ever managed to erase it for long. Hart confided once that he could feel the stigma, still, when he ran into old friends, journalists or former lawmakers, on the streets of Washington. He could see it in the way they looked at him. It was one of the reasons he came back less and less.

  At Troublesome Gulch, near Hart’s home, 2003 CREDIT: ANDREA MODICA

  A few months after Obama’s victory in 2008, I ran into Hart on my way into the restaurant at the Hay-Adams, across from the White House. Hart always tried to stay at the august old hotel, where he had bargained for a closet-size room in exchange for a reduced rate. He was just lea
ving a breakfast, and I was meeting a couple of Democratic contributors from New York for coffee.

  Hart and I chatted for a moment about the president-elect’s transition, and then I headed over to the table where my hosts had already been seated. My mind was still on my previous conversation. “You know, that was Gary Hart I was talking to,” I said as I unfolded my napkin.

  The older man, who was probably in his eighties, smiled broadly. “You mean from the Funny Business?” he asked me, chuckling.

  “Actually, it was the Monkey Business,” I muttered reflexively, almost to myself. I spent the rest of the meeting distracted, staring out absently at Lafayette Park and the majestic columns of the White House. I found myself returning to the three words Hart had once jotted on a memo, to the amusement of his aides, so many years ago:

  I despair, profoundly.

  Why, in the end, did Hart remain stuck in time? After all, redemption and reinvention were everywhere in twenty-first-century America, as much a part of the modern culture as Starbucks and televised talent shows. Bill Clinton wasn’t the only scandalized politician who managed to make people forget his transgressions, or at least not care so much about them. Consider the case of Mark Sanford, who as South Carolina’s governor had abandoned both his state and his wife because of a new love. Or Governor Spitzer, who was busted for paying for sex. Both found their way back to public life (if not, in Spitzer’s case, to public office), just as ballplayers who used steroids got to keep on playing or coaching, and movie stars who went to jail got to keep playing leading roles. And yet somehow Hart remained trapped on a boat in 1987, which sailed on forever in the public mind.

  It’s true that, apart from his letters to Clinton, Hart was too proud to plead for jobs that might have restored his legitimacy—he would say he believed in a meritocracy and wanted to be asked. “Averell Harriman would never have said, Me, me, me” is the way Hart put it. Sometimes he seemed, in his brokenness, to fear rejection more than he feared his continuing exile. Obama’s election, for example, seemed likely to open a door for him back into public office; one of Obama’s closest advisors, David Axelrod, had covered Hart as a reporter in 1984 and still considered him a visionary, and some of Hart’s former aides were pushing for him to be considered for a top Defense post or ambassador to Russia.

  But then Hart flipped through the nine-page questionnaire that the new administration was handing out to job seekers, and on the last page, under “Miscellaneous,” he spotted this question: “Have you had any association with any person, group or business venture that could be used—even unfairly—to impugn or attack your character and qualifications for government service?” Hart actually laughed out loud when he recalled this moment. He said he had considered writing underneath: “Are you kidding me?” Instead, he tossed the papers aside, and that was that.

  It was true, too, that Hart resisted the modern ethos of image rehabilitation. He understood, in those first months and years after the scandal, that the quickest path out of exile lay in some kind of public reckoning, maybe an apologetic memoir or a series of cathartic interviews. He might have become the go- to expert on scandal coverage and how it felt to be in the center of it, had he been able to stomach it. “I could have dined out for years and years on privacy, the role of the press,” he told me. “You know, any controversy that comes up, I’ll get a call. My secretary takes it. She just knows not to even …” His voice trailed off and he waved the rest of the sentence away.

  “Oh, the theme of the last five or ten years has been, How do you recover from setback?” Hart started laughing convulsively again. To a lot of my contemporaries, rehabilitating oneself by counseling others in this way would have seemed quite natural, but it struck Hart as terribly funny. “I could have gone out on the lecture circuit and made a fortune on ‘recovering from setback’!” He paused, catching his breath. “Can you imagine?”

  But Hart’s old-world sense of decorum, his refusal to beg for work or devise some transparent PR campaign on his own behalf, was something we might just as easily have admired about him, rather than disdained. None of that fully explained the peculiar way in which not just the political establishment, but the culture as a whole, had emphatically, almost maliciously reduced Hart’s life’s work to an irresistible punch line from the past, as if the very idea of him had been ridiculous from the start. There is a book Stephen King wrote in 2004, the seventh installment in his Dark Tower fantasy series, in which a character named Susannah finds herself transported to an alternate version of 1980s New York where Ronald Reagan was never elected president. When she asks her friend Eddie who the president is, he tells her it’s Gary Hart. “He almost dropped out of the race in 1980—over that ‘Monkey Business’ business,” Eddie says. “Then he said ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke’ and hung in there. Ended up winning in a landslide.”

  The most likely explanation, when you come down to it, is that we ridiculed Hart because he embarrassed us. It wasn’t just that Hart belonged to that bleak, hopelessly uncool period in the eighties from which nothing emerged that wasn’t ever after referenced with a sense of parody—shoulder pads and parachute pants, A Flock of Seagulls and the sitcom ALF, wine coolers and New Coke. It wasn’t simply that he had the misfortune of melting down at exactly the moment when just about every cultural hallmark became ossified in time, because we hadn’t yet figured out how to embrace modernity without making everything around us seem tacky and synthetic.

  No, it was also that Hart served to remind us of the decisions we had collectively made, the moment when the nation and its media took a hard turn toward abject triviality. In some way, it was easier for us to sneer at Hart than to grant him the perspective he kept asking for, easier to proclaim him unfit than to consider the contributions he might have made. On some unconscious level, perhaps, we needed to blame Hart for having come along and created this new obsession with character flaws and tabloid scandals. That way we never had to cringe at the meaningless, destructive brand of politics we had created. We never had to consider all the history that otherwise might have been, or how we had since come to a place where most Americans considered politics to be dysfunctional and debased.

  And in our need to dismiss Hart, to consign him to some purgatory for the politically lost, not only had we failed to reckon with the larger forces at work in the culture, but we had also denied ourselves whatever service the man might have rendered. Maybe it was true that Hart’s essential temperament was wrong for the modern presidency, and it was entirely possible, whatever the poll numbers suggested in early 1987, that he would ultimately have lost the election for the same reason. Introverts haven’t generally fared well in presidential politics since the advent of the primary process in the early 1970s, and by 1988 it was already a cliché among pundits that voters had to be able to envision themselves sharing a beer with a candidate in order for him to succeed. (Although it should be noted that neither of the eventual nominees that year, Michael Dukakis or George H. W. Bush, had a whole lot to brag about in the likability column.)

  But whether or not Hart would ultimately have become president—and even if you believed he should have come down off his mountain, literally, and pleaded for his own redemption in the years afterward—it was hard not to conclude that his long exile cost us something. He was widely acknowledged to possess one of the great political minds of his time, had been the first to hold up a torch and illuminate the darkened passage just ahead, the challenges that would confound us in the age after East–West showdowns and factories churning on triple shifts. A quarter century after Hart’s exit from politics, neither his party nor the nation had really figured out clear approaches to moving beyond the combustion engine, or modernizing rusted cities, or retooling schools for a different kind of economy. We hadn’t simply marginalized a politician; somehow, we had marginalized the things he had tried to make us see.

  It seemed a waste that Hart himself hadn’t been put to more meaningful work on any of these issues, b
eyond serving on some commissions and sending off the occasional op-ed. I made this exact point to Hart during one of our conversations at the cabin. It was a late winter’s day, and the light was fading from the study, so that his face was only half illuminated as he leaned forward in his chair, his white mane silhouetted against the darkening sky. He seemed to be disappearing before me.

  “It is a waste, but not in a way that others might see it,” Hart told me quietly, haltingly. “This is very complicated to talk about. This gets into spirituality for me, and one’s purpose for being.”

  He paused, and for a long moment I thought he might be seeing that lion again.

  “I think I mentioned,” Hart said, “that of the parables in the New Testament, the one that means the most to me is the one of the master and the three servants.” He hadn’t mentioned this, but I nodded anyway. “And Jesus tells the story of the master going on a trip. And he gives the three servants talents, a talent being a form of money. And to one he gave ten talents, to one he gave five, and to one he gave one. And he said, ‘You are to be the stewards of these talents. And manage them wisely for me.’

  “He comes back from the trip and he asks all of the three servants how they managed the money that he’d given them. The ten-talent man had invested it and made some money. The five-talent man had wisely invested. But the one-talent man was afraid to lose it, and he buried it, and he just had the one talent to give back. And the master condemned him and said, ‘You are not a faithful servant, because you didn’t … uh …’ ”

  Hart’s voice, already trembling a bit, caught momentarily. “ ‘Because you didn’t use your talents wisely,’ ” he managed finally.

  “Well, this haunts me,” Hart said, looking directly at me in the darkness, his eyes brimming and red. “Because I think you are given certain talents. And you are judged by how you use those talents. And to the degree I believe in some kind of hereafter or transmigration of the soul, I will be judged by how I did or did not use the talents that I was given. And I don’t think I’ve used them very well.”