The Front Runner

But more than any of this, Hart stayed quiet because he held fast to the central conviction that had guided him, disastrously, through his existential career crisis in 1987—that what happened or didn’t happen with Donna Rice or any other woman was nobody’s goddamn business but his and his wife’s, and about as relevant to his qualifications for higher office as a birthmark or a missing tooth. For more than twenty years, despite the instant opportunity for public redemption it would have afforded him, Hart would not admit to the affair or shed any light on the events that had led to his disgrace—not to interviewers, and not to the friends and former aides who were more reluctant to broach the subject. He believed the entire question, even now, to be an incursion into his zone of privacy, a triviality that it was his duty, as a public figure, not to legitimize.

Once, over drinks, one of Hart’s close aides from the period told me that Rice, like Hart, had steadfastly denied, even in private, having consummated an affair. I asked him whether he was actually suggesting that Hart, despite his reputation for promiscuity at the time, hadn’t slept with the woman who would forever be linked to his ruined ambitions. The former aide looked around the bar and leaned closer to me, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I fear not,” he said, looking genuinely pained.

If this was so, then the historical irony was hard to fathom. Because the story of Hart and the blonde didn’t just prove to be Hart’s undoing; it was the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come. Somehow, political and personal lives had collided overnight to create what was, in hindsight, the first modern political scandal, with all the attendant satellite trucks and saturation coverage and hourly turns in the narrative that Kafka himself could not have dreamed up. The unrelenting assault that Hart and family and their closest advisors had encountered during those five days would become an almost predictable rhythm of political life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and it would spawn an entire industry of experts who knew—or claimed to know—how to navigate it. But it was Hart, the standout prodigy of a new generation, who opened the door.

All these years later, Hart confided, he mostly remembered snippets from that week, painful and disjointed scenes that surfaced only when he allowed them to. Like the moment in New Hampshire when, nearly toppled by the scrum and blinded by flashbulbs, he saw a small boy, maybe four or five, about to be run over by the human crush of cameramen and photographers. Panicked and furious, Hart spotted Ira Wyman, the venerable Newsweek photographer, crouched in front of him. Ira, an amiable, decent man and esteemed photojournalist, had long been with Hart and his wife, through all the days on planes and nights in hotel bars. “Help me,” Hart remembered croaking, in a kind of woozy desperation. He grabbed for Ira’s camera strap. “Ira, help me.”

Flash, came the response from the ground near his knees, as Ira evaded Hart’s grasp. Flash flash flash.

“It was a nightmare,” Hart told me flatly one night as we sat in his upstairs study. “We were in some kind of Oz land. For years and years after, people would stop me in airports and say, ‘You should have stayed in the race.’ I mean, they had no idea.” He paused, shook his head. “They had no idea.”

In his own mind, he had not been driven out of presidential politics, as most everyone else saw it, but rather had walked away disgustedly. He thought of himself as Gary Cooper in that last scene of High Noon, throwing his badge in the dirt, thinking, If this is how it has to be, then find someone else. (Hart preferred not to think about his failed and embarrassing attempt to reenter the race late in 1987, which he would ever after regret.) This had, after all, been the animating theme of the statement he made at the end of that week of scandal, when he came down from the cabin and officially withdrew—a speech that probably should have been remembered, like Eisenhower’s oration on the military-industrial complex, as one of the most prescient warnings in modern American politics, but that, like so much else about the moment, had been almost entirely buried in the public consciousness. Even Hart, perhaps falling back on his usual coping mechanism, claimed barely to remember it.

“I’m not a beaten man—I’m an angry and defiant man,” Hart had declared then, to raucous cheers that he felt the need to quiet. “I said that I bend but I don’t break, and believe me I’m not broken.” Red-cheeked and gripping the lectern, he went on:

In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important. … We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted, that has reporters in bushes, false and inaccurate stories printed, photographers peeking in our windows, swarms of helicopters hovering over our roofs, and my very strong wife close to tears because she can’t even get into her own house at night without being harassed. And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for higher office. Now, I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself. Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or a sporting match. We’d all better do something to make this system work, or we’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”

Indeed, what had it gotten us, this violent compression of politics and celebrity and moral policing? You could argue, I guess, that it brought us closer somehow to our politicians, by making their flaws and failings harder to obscure. You could argue, and many have, that we deserved the information necessary to elect politicians who could be moral, trustworthy stewards of our children’s future, and so on. There was a word that encapsulated all of this, a concept that, more than any issue or ideology, came to dominate our campaigns long after Hart had retreated to Troublesome Gulch. That word was character. It wasn’t just about sex, as it was in Hart’s case, but also about whether you uttered a line you wished you could take back or made an investment you probably shouldn’t have, about whether you’d ever gotten stoned or written something idiotic in a school paper. Nothing mattered more in a politician than his essential character, and no shred of private behavior, no moment of weakness or questionable judgment, was too insignificant to illuminate it.

It would be facile to dismiss this new focus on character as being entirely trivial or misrepresentative. In a few cases, unfortunately, it was anything but. Consider the example of John Edwards. In June 2007, as the former North Carolina senator and vice presidential nominee was preparing to run a second time for the presidency, I wrote a highly detailed, eight-thousand-word cover story for The New York Times Magazine about his agenda, weighing with great seriousness his signature plan to combat poverty and inequality. I traveled with him to the devastated Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and I consulted a faculty’s worth of antipoverty experts on his proposals. At the time (and for a long while after), I congratulated myself on having taken the most substantive look at Edwards’s depth and rationale as a candidate, even while pundits continued to ignore his policies in favor of commenting on his floppy hair and his fundraising prowess and his wife’s battle with cancer. This was the kind of long-form examination that voters and candidates complained was lacking from political coverage.

Four months after my cover piece was published, the National Enquirer ran the first in a series of stories alleging that Edwards had fathered a “love child” with a filmmaker who was following him around. Edwards denied the story repeatedly, and the rest of the media mostly ignored it—until the following August, when the Enquirer caught him visiting his lover and his new baby daughter in a Beverly Hills hotel. After that, Edwards went on Nightline—much as Gary Hart had, under different circumstances, twenty-one years earlier—to admit that the child was his. By this time, he was no longer a presidential candidate, having withdrawn after getting drubbed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the early primaries six months earlier. But had things gone a little differently in Iowa or New Hampshire, it was not inconceivable that Edwards could have been the nominee by the time the full measure of his deceit became clear. He was, in any event, a likely pick for attorney general or some other cabinet post.

The revelation about Edwards’s personal behavior struck me as highly relevant to his fitness for office, though not simply because he had been sleazy and dishonest. (Edwards would not have been the first president, or even the second, to have secretly fathered a child out of wedlock.) As I had written in the magazine, most of Edwards’s “new ideas” for combating inequality, his main rationale for running, were in fact leftover proposals from the last century, and they were grounded in the underlying assumption that simply giving poor people more money would eradicate poverty—an assumption that ignored an emerging consensus about the importance of families and communities in that equation. About the only major plank of Edwards’s platform that even hinted at this broader social problem in impoverished communities was his insistence that absentee dads take responsibility for their children. And so here was Edwards, whose agenda included this ardent call for “responsible fatherhood,” refusing to publicly acknowledge his own child.

I could think of no condition under which I would have felt obliged to stake out the Beverly Hilton, waiting to confirm that John Edwards (or anyone else) was visiting his paramour and his illegitimate child. But at the same time, I found it impossible to argue that what the National Enquirer had done constituted any less of a service to the voters than my own exhaustive reporting on Edwards; if anything, the opposite was true. How could it matter whether Edwards had the right ideas about poverty if he could so readily jettison his convictions for his own self-interest? In this particular instance, it seemed pointless to wrestle with the intellectual questions I had posed without also considering the question of Edwards’s dubious character.

And yet, while there were these isolated cases where the character of a politician clearly informed everything else about his candidacy, never before in our political life had the concept of character been so narrowly defined. American history is rife with examples of people who were crappy husbands or shady dealers but great stewards of the state, just as we’ve had thoroughly decent men who couldn’t summon the executive skills to run a bake sale. Hart’s humiliation had been the first in a seemingly endless parade of exaggerated scandals and public floggings, the harbinger of an age when the threat of instant destruction would mute any thoughtful debate, and when even the perception of some personal imperfection could obliterate, or at least eclipse, whatever else had accumulated in the public record. And all this transpired while a series of more genuine tests of character for a nation and its leaders—challenges posed by industrial collapse, the digital revolution, energy crises, and stateless terrorism—went unmet, with tragic consequences.

It was hard to say whether the man sitting in front of me in his study, made wiser and softer now by age and ill fortune, would have been the good president so many Americans at the time had believed he would be, let alone a great one. But it was hard, too, not to feel some sense of loss as I listened to him describe the plan he had carried with him during that doomed campaign. How he would send an emissary to Moscow after the election to begin secretly negotiating an immediate end to the arms race. How he planned to then invite Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom he had bonded on a mission abroad, when both men had been young and ambitious and pushing up against the hardened ideologies of their elders (“They call me the Russian Gary Hart,” Gorbachev had informed him), to join him at his swearing-in, making him the first Soviet premier to witness democracy’s proudest moment. How he and Gorbachev could have used that moment, with the world watching, to sign a historic agreement to drastically scale back their nuclear arsenals. How years later, after a warm embrace and plenty of drinks with his old friend during a trip to Russia, Gorbachev had said yes, of course he would have accepted this proposal in an instant. Quite possibly the Cold War would have ended right there, in one dramatic gesture, rather than gradually winding down as the “new world order” slipped away.

Who knew what might have been possible in the afterglow of such a thing? And who knew how many other bold and creative ideas had been sacrificed to these years of human wreckage, when so many less conventional, less timid thinkers had drifted away from politics, ceding government to the dogmatic and dully predictable? Sitting in Hart’s study all these years later, it would have been easy to feel sorry for him, and sometimes I did. But I felt sorrier for the rest of us.

At one point, I asked Hart whether he ever felt a sense of relief at having not actually become president. He shook his head emphatically.

“It was a huge disappointment,” Hart said. “A huge disappointment.”

Lee had entered the study and was refilling our water glasses, and she overheard him.

“That’s why he accepts every invitation where someone wants him to speak,” she told me, interrupting him. “Every time he can make any kind of a contribution, he does it, because he thinks he’s salving his conscience. Or salving his place after death or something.” She appeared to try to stop herself from continuing, but couldn’t quite do it. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been very difficult.”

“Is that why I give speeches?” Hart said, in an accusatory tone.

“No, no,” Lee answered quickly. “But you do things when you’re tired to the bone that you shouldn’t be doing.”

“Why not?” Hart asked.

“But people keep asking him,” she said, turning again to me. “I mean, they’re all good things.”

“I’m flattered, babe,” Hart said testily. It was not the only time I would see the two of them do this—work through years of unspoken tension under the pretext of answering my questions. I asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.

“I don’t feel guilty,” Hart snapped. “She’s accusing me of salving my conscience.”

“No, I don’t mean your conscience,” Lee stammered.

“You said it wrong, babe.”

“I said it wrong.”

I asked Lee what she had meant to say.

“What did you mean?” Hart asked, his tone a warning.

“Gary feels guilty,” Lee said finally. “Because he feels like he could have been a very good president.”

“I wouldn’t call it guilt,” Hart said.

“No. Well.”

“It’s not guilt, babe,” he protested. “It’s a sense of obligation.”

“Yeah, okay,” Lee said, sounding relieved. “That’s better. Perfect.”

“You don’t have to be president to care about what you care about,” Hart said.

“It’s what he could have done for this country,” Lee said, “that I think bothers him to this very day.”

“Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within twelve years’ time.

“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating.

“You have to live with that, you know?”

2

TILTING TOWARD CULTURE DEATH

THE HART EPISODE is almost universally remembered, on the rare occasion that anyone bothers to remember it at all, as the tale of classic hubris I mentioned earlier. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? Was he actually trying to get caught? During the years after Hart entered my consciousness, I found myself moved to mention my fascination with him to scores of people, and almost invariably I heard some version of the same dismissive response from anyone who was alive at the time, to the point where I could almost finish the sentences for them. How could such a smart guy have been that stupid?

Of course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart’s lifetime, all Democratic presidents remembered as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson had all been adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the twentieth century, made John Kennedy and most of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour.

“What was later written about Kennedy and women bothered White but little,” he wrote. “He knew that Kennedy loved his wife—but that Kennedy, the politician, exuded that musk odor of power which acts as an aphrodisiac to many women. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac—Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners.” (Yes, White wrote his memoir in the reportorial third-person voice, and he used terms like “musk odor.” It was a different time.)

Just after the Hart scandal broke in 1987, The New York Times’s R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the preeminent political writer of his day, wrote a piece in which he tried to explain how disconnected the moment was from what had come before. Apple described what was probably a fairly typical experience for reporters covering the Kennedy White House:

In early 1963, for example, a fledgling reporter for this newspaper was assigned to patrol the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel while President Kennedy was visiting New York City. The reporter’s job was to observe the comings and goings of politicians, but what he saw was the comings and going of a prominent actress, so that was what he reported to his editor. “No story there,” said the editor, and the matter was dropped.

It was this very understanding between politicians and chroniclers—that just because something was sleazy didn’t make it a story—that emboldened presidents and presidential candidates to keep reporters close when it came to the more weighty business of governing. There was little reason to fear being ambushed on the personal front while trying to make oneself accessible on the political front. In a 2012 letter to The New Yorker, Hal Wingo, who was a Life correspondent in the early 1960s, recalled spending New Year’s Eve 1963 with the newly inaugurated Lyndon Johnson and a group of other reporters. Johnson put his hand on Wingo’s knee and said, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but just remember, that is none of your business.” They remembered, and they complied.

No one should pretend that character wasn’t always a part of politics, of course, and there were times when private lives became genuine political issues. When Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s governor and a Republican presidential hopeful, divorced his wife of thirty-one years in 1962, and then married a former staff member, “Happy,” who was eighteen years his junior and the mother of four small children, the story became inseparable from Rocky’s political prospects. You couldn’t do a credible job of covering the Republican schism in those years without delving at least somewhat into Rockefeller’s private life. When a lit-up Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, killing twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy’s private recklessness became a relevant and enduring political story; no politician, let alone a newspaper editor, would seriously have argued otherwise. When Thomas Eagleton, shortly after joining George McGovern on the Democratic ticket in 1972, was revealed to have undergone shock treatment for depression, his temperament became a legitimate news story, along with the fact that he had neglected to mention it.

But reporters didn’t go looking for a politician’s private transgressions; they covered such things only when they rose to the level of political relevance. And even when personal lives did explode into public scandal in those days, it didn’t necessarily overwhelm everything else there was to know about a man. Whether a politician took bribes, whether he stood on conscience or took direction from powerful backers, whether he lied to voters or had the courage to tell hard truths, whether he stood up to power or whether he bothered showing up for votes—all of this had been, for at least a hundred years, more critical to a politician’s public standing than his marital fidelity or his drinking habits or his doctor’s records. Scandalous behavior mattered, but so did the larger context.

In fact, for most of the twentieth century, while a private scandal might complicate your ambitions for the moment, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that permanently derailed a promising political career. Consider the case of the three scandalized politicians I just mentioned. Rockefeller failed in his presidential bid in 1964—in large part because of the uproar over his marital situation—and again in 1968, when he dithered long enough to allow Richard Nixon’s resurgence. But by 1974, in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, when the country desperately needed the reassurance of trusted leadership, Rocky’s personal controversy had faded to the point where Gerald Ford thought him worthy of the vice presidency. He might well have been a leading candidate for the presidency again had Ford stepped aside in 1976.

Eagleton would always be best known for hiding his electroshock therapy, and any hope he had of holding national office evaporated after his disastrous, eighteen-day stint as McGovern’s running mate in 1972. But that humiliation hardly finished him as a viable and serious politician of the era. He went on to win two more Senate elections before retiring as something of an elder statesman in 1986; his name adorns the federal courthouse in St. Louis.

And then there’s Ted Kennedy, whose career not only survived the haunted waters off Chappaquiddick, but which had only just begun its historic ascent. By 1980, Kennedy felt sufficiently rehabilitated in the public mind not only to run for president, but to challenge the sitting president of his own party. In fact, Kennedy entered the race with a significant advantage in the polls, and while Chappaquiddick surfaced repeatedly, it was an intellectual failure that cast the most doubt on his prospects—mainly that he couldn’t articulate, in an interview with the newsman Roger Mudd, why he actually wanted the job that his brother once held. When he died in 2009, having served in the Senate for four decades after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was celebrated as one of the most consequential political figures of the century, his passion and conviction lauded even by those who disagreed with him. Remarkably, somehow, he had come to embody the idea of character, at least in the public arena.