All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  I reminded Hart of what he had said back in 1987, during the cathartic rant that formally ended his campaign and infuriated his critics in the press—that a system bent on destroying people’s integrity would ultimately destroy itself, that politics would become just another sport staged for our entertainment. I wondered if he thought his prediction had come to pass.

  Hart shrugged sadly. Whatever other emotions he may have felt when he looked back over the years, he had long since given up on the prospect of vindication. When he thought back on it now, he said, the two words that became most prevalent in the political media after 1987 were “scrutiny” and “scandal.” Scrutiny, he said, became an excuse for going through your telephone logs from a hotel you’d stayed in, or checking which movies you’d rented, back in the days when people did such things. And scandal as a concept became omnipresent and overused—a deplorable word.

  “A scandal, to me, is a child living in poverty,” Hart said quietly. “An elderly person without medicine. Unemployed workers. Those are scandals.” This was the kind of rhetoric one sometimes heard from syrupy politicians these days, but there was no performance in the way Hart said it. “People’s sex lives or their personal lives are scandals only in the sense of tabloid journalism, but not in the sense of ethics,” he said. “They’re not bribery. They’re not some under-the-table exchange of money, buying votes. Those, I suppose, would be real political scandals. At least that’s what they were called throughout most of American history.”

  I asked Hart if he had been right to suggest, back in 1987, that if we continued in the direction we were going, we would end up with the leaders we deserved. He paused for a long moment.

  “I’ll let the record speak for itself,” he said finally. “The Congress and the Senate today is not the one I joined in 1975.” He tossed out the names of some of his colleagues back then: Mansfield, Muskie, Mathias, Jackson, Javits, Case. “I just don’t think the caliber and quality of members of Congress, generally, is what it was in those days.”

  We talked about the issues that Hart thought would—or at least should—be central in the 2016 campaign: groping the way toward a new fiscal policy, redefining America’s role as a global power, setting a course toward energy independence. These were, of course, the same issues that Hart had evangelized and thought deeply about back in the 1980s and had been talking about ever since, and yet little about them had fundamentally changed or been settled. One of the core problems, as Hart saw it, is that even the best and boldest political leaders no longer believe they can make complex ideas understood through a media obsessed with personalities and scandals. And if you couldn’t utilize the machinery of persuasion, then it was hard to do anything but talk to the people who already agreed with you.

  “The genius of democracy, in my mind, is the ability of an individual to sense the temper and the mood of an electorate and to respond to it and to help shape it,” Hart told me. “And once that’s gone, once a leader loses confidence in his ability to shape and mold, in a positive sense, public opinion and attitudes, there is no leadership.”

  Occasionally during this conversation, the last in a series of formal and informal interviews over several years, Hart stole a quick glance toward the bar. Hart’s son, John, had chosen the Dubliner for us to meet because in a few minutes a handful of Hart alumni would be meeting at the pub for a reunion of sorts, over several rounds of Hart’s favorite whiskey, Jameson.

  This was the kind of thing Hart relished. His impact as a politician may have been lost through the years, but as a spotter of talent and an inspiration to the brightest minds of the boomer vanguard, probably no public figure alive could claim to rival Hart’s legacy. It was almost certainly Hart’s most lasting achievement, and the one in which he took the most pride—the list of young, idealistic Democrats he had mentored during those heady years as a national figure who had gone on to distinguished careers not only in politics, but as purveyors of social change.

  Martin O’Malley, who as a law student had driven Hart through the South and Plains on that last, funereal stretch as a candidate in 1988 (and who would soon slip into the Dubliner, virtually unnoticed, after debating Texas governor Rick Perry on Crossfire in a studio down the block), was now Maryland’s governor. Billy Shore, one of the more universally admired men in Washington, had founded and grown Share Our Strength, the nation’s premier anti-hunger organization and a model for social entrepreneurship. John Emerson, in addition to serving in the Clinton White House, had become a venture capitalist and major Democratic fundraiser, and as Hart and I sat at the Dubliner, he was assuming his new post as ambassador to Germany. Jeanne Shaheen, who as a grassroots organizer had helped orchestrate Hart’s stunning victory in New Hampshire in 1984, was now that state’s senior senator and former governor. Doug Wilson, who had been Hart’s principal foreign policy aide, had just left his second senior stint at the Defense Department, this time as assistant secretary for public affairs.

  Another Hart aide from back in the day, Alan Khazei, cofounded City Year, which became the inspiration for Clinton’s AmeriCorps program. The late Eli Segal, who had run Hart’s fundraising operation in 1987, had been the first CEO of AmeriCorps’ parent program, the Corporation for National and Community Service. Sue Casey, the trusted advisor who spirited Donna Rice out of Washington, later served on the Denver City Council and ran for mayor. Kevin Sweeney, Hart’s press secretary in 1987, became a leading consultant in the field of corporate responsibility. Kathy Bushkin Calvin, who was Hart’s press secretary in 1984, now served as president of the United Nations Foundation. And on went the list, which Hart could proudly recite.

  Not all of these Hart alums kept in touch with the boss (although a substantial number still called and emailed regularly). Not all had managed to get beyond the resentment they felt at his having acted recklessly and squandered their faith, just as he had never fully gotten beyond his own feelings of intense regret. But to an astonishing degree, most of these former aides, who were now nearing their own retirements, still thought of themselves principally as “Hart people” and would describe themselves that way for the rest of their lives.

  One question remained unanswered as we sat at the Dubliner, a piece of unfinished business that lingered in the space between us, as it had now through years of uncomfortably personal conversations about the events of 1987. Hart had pointed out to me many times that his was the only political sex scandal in which “both parties”—that was how he referred to himself and Donna Rice—had denied, then and ever after, the existence of “a relationship.” But he did not define what he meant by that, nor did he ever come close to confiding in me about what had actually gone on in that townhouse, and whether Rice had, in fact, spent the night or left through the back door as they both maintained. He did not, in other words, volunteer any more intimate details of the episode than he had for the previous decades, and I stopped short of asking for them.

  Even so, I was aware that a reader might have curiosity about this part of the story. Often during this time, when I would tell a friend or a fellow writer about my project on Hart, he or she would immediately grin and ask some variation on what seemed to be the obvious question: “So did he finally come clean? Are you going to get the real story?” Even for those who were involved in the events that led to Hart’s banishment, the absence of an abject confession—Hart’s refusal to “tell his story” in the redemptive way of modern culture—remained a source of frustration.

  When I had lunch with Tom Fiedler in 2013, I asked him what he would say to Hart, after all the intervening years, if he had a chance to talk with him now. I expected him to say something about wanting Hart to know he had only been doing his job, or that he bore no ill will. But instead, Fiedler told me: “What I wish I could say to him, and what I wish I could trust if he answered, is what is it he feels we didn’t get right, and what did we get right? I suppose I always would want just the truth. And if we didn’t get the truth or a close approximation of it, w
hat did we get wrong?”

  My own interest in the details had less to do with anything lurid than with the historical implications of what Hart did or didn’t do. What if Hart hadn’t actually spent the night entwined with Rice? What if, as some of his closest aides still privately believed, he had fooled around with her a few times but hadn’t actually consummated the affair? (If Bill Clinton taught us anything, it was that politicians, like the rest of America, tend to define sex with various degrees of technicality.) If that were the case, then the course of our political history would have been forever changed because of a widely held assumption that wasn’t even true. It would mean that the rules of political coverage had been overturned not because Hart had carried on some wild affair, but because he was too damn stubborn to set the record straight.

  When she spoke to me, Donna Rice certainly implied that she had lied at the time when she claimed nothing untoward had happened. It was an impossible situation, Rice told me, and she had said what she thought she was expected to say. But even twenty-six years later, she declined to be any more specific than that. When I asked her why she continued to shield Hart, long after anyone but me really cared, she sighed.

  “I guess it’s hard to explain,” Rice told me. “Just imagine that your whole life is out of control. Everything completely out of control. And the only thing you have any control over are your own choices going forward. You’ve made a decision that you want to take the high road, that you want to be seen as a person of integrity and character, in spite of the perception that has formed about you in the media and the public’s mind. And so every choice that I made was toward one that would not play into that image.”

  In other words, it wasn’t only Hart’s reputation that Rice continued to try, with her silence, to salvage from the wreckage of history. It was also her own.

  I was conflicted all along about whether to broach this subject with Hart, or whether to just to let it be. I hadn’t wanted to trip that particular emotional wire during our days of conversation on the front porch of the cabin or in the study, and certainly not while Lee was around. I didn’t look forward to enduring a lecture about how we journalists were all the same, and I feared that Hart would shut down and stop talking altogether. And so I waited, just as E. J. Dionne had done all those years ago, until all the other questions were asked. And by the time I arrived at the Dubliner, already partway through writing the book and intending for this to be our last interview, I was still trying to decide whether I had a responsibility to fully interrogate Hart about the sordid missing details of his story.

  I can’t say he didn’t give me an opening, either, when he repeated his line, yet again and without my asking, about both parties denying there had been a relationship. I could have told him then that Donna Rice made clear she had obscured the truth. I could hear myself telling him that he had one last opportunity to get right with history, and he needed to take advantage of it.

  As we sat there at the dimly lit table in back, though, it occurred to me that I was about to follow the same path, for the same reasons, as all the older journalists who had helped lead our politics into the vacuous black hole it had become. I would be reduced to saying, essentially, that the story of Hart’s affair was already “out there,” that it needed at long last to be verified or disputed. I would tell him that I didn’t want to ask about such things—I had, in fact, spent my entire career avoiding them—but my readers expected me to ask and deserved to know. It would be my turn to argue that I really didn’t have a choice but to go where the story led.

  But of course, I did have a choice. We all did, and we always had. This was exactly the point I had been stumbling toward all along. And so, as our talk wound down and Hart’s old aides began to drift into the pub, I closed my notebook and considered for a long moment this man across the table from me, still with the tailored suit and perfectly knotted tie of a statesman, still clutching his satchel of agenda items pertaining to the nation’s business.

  For twenty-six years, he had maintained an unwavering silence about the seamy events of that week, and the myriad reasons for this weren’t really that hard to deduce, if you knew him at all. He stayed silent partly out of pride and arrogance—a refusal to acknowledge that he had been less than entirely truthful, even with himself. But he stayed silent, too, because he had already played a role in destroying the reputation of a young woman he barely knew, and he didn’t think it his prerogative to drag her through it again. Because the truth would only cause more pain to the devoted wife he had loved, in some deep and spiritual way, since they were teenagers, and the children whose admiration he cherished and had never lost. Because he harbored a fierce conviction that private affairs had no place in the public arena, and he was going to hold fast to that conviction until his dying breath, no matter how anachronistic it seemed to others.

  There’s a way to describe a man who holds that tightly to principle, whatever the cost. The word is character.

  A NOTE ON SOURCING

  I’ve chosen to cite the sources for my material in the text of the book itself, rather than annotating them separately. At the core of the book are more than twenty hours of conversation with Gary Hart, as well as dozens of interviews with aides, reporters, and other participants in the events of 1987 and afterward. Oral histories, though, can be misleading; years have a way of dulling some memories and cementing some myths. So wherever possible I’ve confirmed accounts with more than one source or with news accounts from the time. Where the recollections of sources conflict in ways that can’t really be reconciled, I’ve tried to be transparent in pointing that out.

  I relied heavily on several books from the period, most notably Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes and Paul Taylor’s See How They Run, both of which offered excellent accounts. Along with these and the additional books I’ve cited throughout these pages, a handful of others informed my thinking in ways more general or tangential, and they deserve some mention, too. These include: The Neoliberals by Randall Rothenberg (on the rethinking of Democratic orthodoxy undertaken by Hart and his contemporaries); Boyd by Robert Coram (on the father of military reform); and Star by Peter Biskind (on the life and times of Warren Beatty).

  Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death served as a kind of North Star for my evaluation of media and social trends in the 1980s. It’s a brilliant, enduring work, and anyone who cares about the state of our public discourse should read it.

  As I’ve learned, sometimes painfully, over the years, no work of reportage is flawless. Where sources have inadvertently led me astray, or where I may have mischaracterized or overlooked the accounts of others, I alone am responsible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Gary and Lee Hart, without whose immense courage and kindness this book could not have been written. Senator Hart is as sincere, patriotic, and thoughtful a man as I have encountered in American politics, and I hope this book causes others to reevaluate his legacy. He deserves that.

  Many of those who worked for Hart or wrote about him in the 1980s took time to share their thoughts and memories. A few deserve special mention. Doug Wilson was the one who first encouraged me to think differently about Hart’s undoing when we met back in 2002, and he has been a constant source of encouragement ever since. Billy Shore answered countless queries with the same patience and consideration that endeared him to an earlier generation of campaign reporters. Bill Dixon and Kevin Sweeney shared their invaluable personal archives with me, and Kevin very kindly critiqued some early chapters for accuracy’s sake.

  Many people went out of their way to track down long-lost primary sources or other leads for me, among them Andrea Owen of ABC News, Max Culhane (formerly of ABC), Valerie Komor and Monika Mathur of the Associated Press, Betsy Fischer of NBC News, Joshua Glasser, Neal McAliley, Tyler Bridges, the helpful folks at Carson Entertainment Group, and the outstanding staff of the Library of Congress. I am grateful, too, to Keith Wessel and Andrea Modica for so graciously making t
heir beautiful photographs available.

  I could not have finished writing without the critical and timely support of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, under the leadership of Jane Harman, Robert Litwak, and Michael Van Dusen. The Wilson Center is a beacon of intellectual integrity in a city riven by ideological extremes, and I am honored to count myself among its extended family. The Hoover Institution at Stanford generously hosted me for a week during the earliest phase of my research, as well.

  Several terrific researchers contributed mightily to this book. The historian and writer Jack Bohrer offered excellent material and thoughts on the history of presidents and their personal lives. Brock Groesbeck, my research assistant at the Wilson Center, insisted he knew nothing of politics, but if that’s true, he’s an awfully fast learner. Janet Spikes in the Wilson Center’s library dazzled me with her database wizardry. Kitty Bennett of The New York Times made time to assist me in tracking down elusive sources. And my friend Lucy Shackelford, the very best in the business, expertly scoured the manuscript for factual errors.

  Two of the most gifted nonfiction writers in America today, Paul Tough and Neil Swidey, read finished drafts of the manuscript and helped me improve it. So did Joan Cramer, who honored me with her incisive notes and avid support at a time when she had far more pressing concerns. Richard Ehrenberg very patiently walked me through the section on electronic newsgathering. Several deep thinkers who lived through the events of 1987 let me bounce ideas off them early in the process, including David Kennedy, Evan Thomas, Mike McCurry, Gina Glantz, Robert Reich, and Anita Dunn.