All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (10 page)

First, it emerged that Hart had shortened his name. In fact, his family had changed it, from “Hartpence” to “Hart,” which is what some of his relatives used, but according to Hart’s sister it was Gary who had talked everybody into it. (As if this weren’t weird enough, Hart had also changed his signature at some point, so that his name in the letters he signed in his forties looked different from the way it had twenty years earlier.) Then there was some question as to when Hart was really born. His official Senate documentation said 1937, but his birth certificate said 1936. Was he forty-seven, or was he forty-eight? Hart himself didn’t seem to think it mattered, until they asked him about his mother and her batty religiosity and what might have led her to obfuscate the circumstances of his birth, and then Hart got angry and said he wasn’t going to talk about his mother when he was in the middle of trying to make an argument about the future of the country. And this struck everyone as completely and incontrovertibly weird.

“Name, age and momma”—this is how Cramer slyly referred to the holy trinity of questions that surfaced in all the stories about Hart. The constant implication was that Hart was like that doctor in
The Fugitive
, on the run from something murky and irredeemable in his past, constantly looking over his shoulder for the cops or a one-armed man.

In retrospect, of course, nothing about the trinity sounds terribly sinister or alarming. Yes, Hart had reinvented himself. However much he might deny it, then and later, it was clear that Hart had wanted to put some distance between the poor, jug-eared, Bible-toting youth he had been in Kansas and the secular, Yale-educated reformer he later became. But that didn’t make him different from a lot of other Americans who grew up in claustrophobic small towns with overbearing parents and later found themselves caught up in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, where personal identities were
always evolving. It didn’t make Hart some shadowy, Gatsby-like figure; the salient facts of his upbringing had been well established since he entered public life.

True to form, Hart himself saw the relentless focus on his biography—and the supposed oddities contained therein—as a kind of autoimmune response of the media establishment, mobilized to repel the political outsider from the body politic. “I’m the only person who’s bucked the system twice,” he told
The Washington Post
’s David Maraniss just before the 1984 convention, referring to the McGovern campaign and to the one he was about to concede. “I think there is a strong desire to punish the person who does that, to make him appear odd. That’s the only reason I can figure for all the attention on my personal life. You can’t find one article that did that to Walter Mondale. Anywhere in his career. I challenge you to find one article. Can you find one? The answer is no! You can’t find one because they weren’t written. Nobody would care about it. Do you think anybody would care if they found out Walter Mondale was a year older? Do you think anyone would care if Ronald Reagan was a year older? Of course not. The entire focus is on the person who upsets the odds.”

There was a lot of truth to this rant. The grandfatherly Reagan, after all, had baldly revised entire chapters of his youth, sometimes seeming to confuse himself with the characters he played in the movies, and the boomers in the media seemed unable to summon much outrage. But the real reason reporters latched on to Hart’s dark trinity was probably because it was the best supporting evidence for what they knew in their gut to be true about Hart, what they discussed openly among themselves and would continue to believe decades later. Sure, he was brilliant and dynamic, but there was no escaping it: something about the guy just seemed
off
.

The same could have been said of just about any presidential contender, then or later; the vocation does not attract personalities most people would consider essentially normal. But the boomers hadn’t known enough presidential candidates to reach that conclusion, and in any event, they experienced a kind of cultural disconnect when it came to Hart. He had become—by his own design, as much
as anyone else’s—a symbol of the boomers’ inevitable ascendance. And so the reporters expected him, reasonably enough, to be a lot like them. Politically that was true enough. But as the young idealists who worked for Hart well understood, temperamentally he belonged to the generation born in 1936, not 1946, and he had never shed (and never would) the reserve and formality of post-Depression Kansas. As Cramer noted, he still called the TV anchors his own age “Mr. Rather” and “Mr. Brokaw,” just as he still referred to his own wife as “Mrs. Hart.” He didn’t swear (ever) or smoke or rock out to the Doors or the Stones.

And while this younger cohort expected a politician molded by the sixties to reflect and emote easily—to “share,” in the parlance of the age—Hart found their personal questions distasteful, as most politicians of an earlier generation would have. Every time Hart got near them, it seemed, they wanted to know about his parents’ piety and itinerancy, his spiritual journey—or, worst of all, his marriage. Hart made it clear that he’d rather dangle from the campaign plane.

For the younger reporters, there must have been a kind of cognitive dissonance in hanging around Hart, who was supposed to be their hip contemporary but who insisted on acting and talking like their dads. He seemed to them perpetually unable to be himself, mainly because the boomers expected “himself” to be someone entirely different from who he was.

“Gary Hart constantly pushed toward the cerebral and away from the emotional,” is how E. J. Dionne, who was the top political correspondent at
The New York Times
then, described him. When Dionne and I talked, it had been more than twenty-five years since the events in which Dionne himself played a pivotal role, and he still sounded dubious about the presidential timber of such a man. “That’s who he is in some deep way. And that created questions—legitimate questions, I would say—in a press corps accustomed to politicians being much more gregarious and emotional.”

Hart may have been personally annoyed by such characterizations, but politically he was unfazed. What others described as aloofness or remoteness seemed to him like traits associated with the classic cowboy heroes of his youth—a romantic ideal that Reagan
embodied and that Hart, who would have been his party’s first Western nominee, imagined to be compelling in himself. “These characteristics demonstrate strength, not weakness,” Hart insisted in his memo to Shore and Rosner. “They are attractive to people—if not reporters stuck in the old political categories. Me being a ‘loner’ is like the myth that Reagan couldn’t win because he was too old.”

And yet, by the time Hart was planning his big announcement speech for the first week of April 1987 (the speech he insisted on delivering alone at Red Rocks, which the reporters thought to be beyond weird), the constant questioning of his past and his temperament had become something more than an annoyance. Even with a double-digit lead over his rivals, this notion that Hart was somehow unknowable was now threatening to overwhelm all of the substance in his campaign. The prevailing mood among the media was nicely captured by a
Washington Post
editorial that ran the day after the announcement. “Mr. Hart has some basis for claiming that he is the candidate of ideas,” the
Post
grudgingly acknowledged, ticking off some of his proposals on trade and military restructuring. “But ideas are not all there is to a campaign: human beings choose which ideas will govern. And there apparently still is some unease with Gary Hart the person.”

The newspaper then trotted out the mysterious trinity and noted that Hart had managed to win little support among his peers in the Senate—the clear implication being that this was because he was some kind of loner, and not because he routinely challenged the ideological orthodoxies of his party’s establishment and its interest groups, or because he actually wasn’t seeking such endorsements. “Since November’s elections he has been a sure-footed spokesman for his party and his own candidacy,” the
Post
allowed. “Now comes the examination of his ideas, which he welcomes, and the relentless analysis of his character, with which he still seems uncomfortable.”

Hart’s advisors—most of them in their late twenties or early thirties, children of the sixties who could hear the vortex humming—had long warned him, with increasing urgency, that the new generation of reporters was coming for him, and for the details of his private life, about which they themselves would never have been foolish enough to ask. Now, sensing that they might soon lose control of the story line, Hart’s closest aides—notably Shore, whom the candidate trusted most, and Kevin Sweeney, the earnest twenty-eight-year-old press secretary, a true believer who had been waiting tables in San Francisco only months before—prevailed on him to deviate somewhat from his all-about-the-ideas strategy. Specifically, they wanted him to make two exceptions to the list of things he didn’t want to do; nothing radical or humiliating, just two eminently tolerable things that a normal front-runner could be expected to do. The first thing they had in mind, immediately following the announcement, was for Hart to lead the entire press corps on a tour of his hometown. This could not have been easy for Hart, who had come a long way from his upbringing in Ottawa, who could barely
remember most of the Hartpences who lived there, and who detested the idea of descending on this unsuspecting Kansas town with the entire media carnival in tow. But that is exactly what he did, and as Cramer would later recount it, Hart managed to deliver a deeply moving and heartfelt speech at the Ottawa University chapel. He expressed his gratitude for the hardworking community that had raised him—the schools and the railroad, the downtown businesses and the local radio station. Then he talked, finally, about his now dead mom and dad, and the assembled reporters found out that Hart had avoided the topic not because he felt too little for his parents and the life he’d left behind, but because he felt too much.

Surrounded: Hart (trailed by Billy Shore) after officially announcing his second presidential campaign at Red Rocks in April 1987
CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL

“I don’t think there’s anyone in this country who’s ever had better parents than I had,” Hart told the crowd, pausing for long stretches as he struggled to maintain his composure. He called his father, Carl, “as honorable and decent a man as I think ever walked the face of the earth,” and described his much maligned mother, Nina, as a woman who loved life and a good joke. “You often hear the term ‘salt of the earth,’ ” he said haltingly, trying to hold himself together. “And I think that’s what they were. Between them, they represented about the best this society has to offer. And what they gave me I don’t think I can ever repay, except to try and raise my children as well as they raised me.” After that, Hart’s team figured, no one could accuse him of being unable to emote.

The second thing the team needed was Hart’s cooperation with a single, intimate profile, one lengthy treatment, where he would at last sit down and discuss anything the reporter wanted to discuss, up to and including his upbringing and his marriage. If Hart would just open up to one of these younger hotshots, someone he felt he could basically trust, then readers and other reporters (who were an important audience, too) could be reassured that Hart wasn’t actually hiding anything, that he was in fact a relatively normal guy who just happened to prefer talking about his ideas for the country to dissecting his personal life. And Hart would be able to say, ever after, that he had already answered all the
People
magazine sorts of questions, and it was time to move on to what mattered.

The idea to channel all of this into a definitive magazine profile, rather than cooperate with a book or perhaps submit to a grilling on national TV, may have emerged from Hart himself, although later it would seem to have been a collective decision. Hart’s response to Shore and Rosner contains an intriguing note that looks ominous only in the context of history.

Under point number 20, Hart wrote: “Forget a book length biography. Let’s plan a friendly—but critical—long feature piece. Suggestions?”

Warren Beatty had advised Hart, months earlier, that the longer he avoided giving in-depth interviews to reporters, the more valuable such an interview would become. Beatty knew his public relations. By early 1987, Hart’s aides could have chosen just about any writer or venue for their big curtain-raising profile, since everyone wanted to be first with the big interview. That they chose E. J. Dionne made perfect sense. It wasn’t just that Dionne, who was about to turn thirty-five, was perhaps the most obvious star of the new generation, having already reported from Paris, Beirut, and Rome, while somehow making time to cover two presidential campaigns. Nor was the main factor in the decision that Dionne would write his profile for the cover of
The New York Times Magazine
, which combined a more literary gravitas than the newsweeklies with the influence of a large national circulation.

What made Dionne special among the younger crowd, more than any of this, is that Hart actually respected him. Nerdy and sputtering with energy (“harried like a border collie with a bad herd,” in Cramer’s inimical description), Dionne wasn’t just another privileged dilettante in search of some wry observation he could peddle on
Nightline
. A Catholic school kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, which was no one’s idea of a patrician paradise, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he had earned a doctorate in sociology. He was a serious, first-rate intellect, and to Hart that meant Dionne could be, if not quite coopted,
then at least made to see the relevance and urgency of Hart’s agenda. At least Dionne didn’t go dead in the eyes when you talked about economic transformation or the decline of the nation-state, which is more than Hart could say for most of the boomers on the bus.