All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (16 page)

Next Hart walked past the rental car where McGee and Savage thought they were safely incognito. In Richard Ben Cramer’s telling, Hart made a show of writing down the license plate number in full view of the two reporters; the
Herald
didn’t mention this detail, but it did report that Hart seemed “agitated” and appeared to yell over his shoulder, at someone on the other side of the street, as he walked away. Probably both accounts are true. In any event, McGee and Savage cleverly deduced from Hart’s behavior that their undercover stakeout had been compromised. They could not write a story, in any event, without at least trying to get his response. So after quickly conferring, they exited the car, followed Hart’s path back up the alley alongside his row of townhouses, and turned a corner. Both men, according to their own account, “flinched in surprise.” There was Gary Hart, the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, leaning against a brick wall in his hoodie. He was waiting for them.

There were no press aides or handlers, no security agents or protocols to be followed. There was no precedent for any reporter accosting any presidential candidate outside his home, demanding the details of what he was doing inside it. It was just Hart and his accusers, or at least two of them for the moment, facing off in an oil-stained alley, all of them trying to find their footing on the suddenly shifting ground of American politics.

Eight days later, the
Herald
would publish its front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler, and Savage, the 7,500-plus-word piece—
Moby-Dick–
type proportions by the standards of a front page—is remarkable reading, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s striking how much the
Herald
’s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
. (“McGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.” And so on.) Clearly, the reporters and editors at the
Herald
believed themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues believed themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.

The other fascinating thing about the
Herald
’s reconstruction is that it captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever. In a sense, the scene that transpired between Hart and his inquisitors in the alley on Saturday night, which at least two of the
Herald
reporters transcribed in real time, was the antithesis of Johnny Apple watching silently as the famous starlet ascended to President Kennedy’s suite, or Lyndon Johnson joking with reporters about the women he planned to entertain. Even in the dispassionate tone of the
Herald
’s narrative,
you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.

“Good evening, Senator,” McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. “I’m a reporter from the
Miami Herald
. We’d like to talk to you.” As the
Herald
relayed it: “Hart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.” McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.

“No one is staying in my house,” Hart replied.

Hart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation, but it’s not as if they weren’t ready. They had already conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall—which was now literally the situation. McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. “You passed me on the street,” McGee said.

“I may or may not have,” Hart replied.

McGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.

“I’m not involved in any relationship,” Hart said carefully.

So why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?

“The obvious reason is I’m being set up,” Hart said, his voice quivering. It was a cryptic comment, but telling. Hart was reeling, and at that moment his mind was already revving with possible scenarios. Did Donna Rice know how these reporters got here? Was her friend an operative for some other campaign? Good Lord: Could Broadhurst himself have been less of a friend than he seemed?

McGee wanted to know if the woman was in Hart’s house at that very moment. “She may or may not be,” is how Hart answered, evading again. Savage then asked to meet her, and Hart said no. For some reason, Hart volunteered that she was in Washington for the weekend, which was the first acknowledgment he gave that he knew her at all.

McGee offered to explain the situation, as if Hart had just woken up in a hospital or an asylum and might not have had any idea what
was happening. He said the house had been under surveillance and that he had observed Hart with the woman the night before, in Hart’s car. Where were they going?

“I was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying,” Hart said, referring to Broadhurst’s townhouse nearby.

Now Savage cut in and asked how long Hart had known the woman—“several months” was the response—and what her name was.

“I would suppose you would find that out,” Hart said.

McGee demanded to know why Hart and the woman had come back two hours after they left the night before. Hart replied that they had come back to pick up some things she had left at the house, and that she stayed for only ten or fifteen minutes. He couldn’t remember how she’d left his house to return to Broadhurst’s place.

“Senator, this is important,” Savage said now, as if somehow he and Hart were now in this together, trying to figure out what had actually happened while Hart was comatose in his hospital bed. “Can you remember how she left? Is it possible you called a cab for her?”

Hart said he didn’t recall. McGee tried again to ask who the woman was. “She is a friend of a friend of mine,” Hart offered, then corrected himself. “A guest of a friend of mine.”

His voice was steadier now, and the reporters noticed that his composure had returned. As would happen several times throughout the ordeal of the next week, and for long afterward, Hart was lurching between conflicting instincts. There were moments where he thought that if he said just enough, if he issued enough of a denial to explain himself, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing. But then soon enough he would grow defiant, the way he did when Sweeney or one of the other aides tried to explain that the reporters would not stop pressing into his personal life. The hell with them, he would think. They were not
entitled
to know.

• • •

“Hi, Tom,” Hart said now. Fiedler had made his way into the alley and had joined his colleagues, making it three on one (or actually four on one, since Smith, the photographer, was there, too). The
Herald
’s contemporaneous account made no mention of Hart’s tone of voice when he paused to greet the one reporter on the scene he actually knew. Perhaps his tone betrayed a sense of disbelief at seeing the paper’s top political writer camouflaged in an alley. Perhaps at that point he was just glad to see a familiar face, someone who might listen to reason.

Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart’s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched. And he would remember his own sense of disbelief. “It was one of those things where I thought, how did I end up here?” Fiedler told me. “At that point, I was considering myself a pretty serious political writer, the kind of writer who grappled with issues of important public policy. And here I am, almost in a disguise, following a tip where I’m not really quite sure it’s all going to come together, and knowing that the story I would write would be kind of a scandal sheet story. Which was so not only out of character, but it was out of my own sense of who I was and what I was doing.”

And yet, for all that, Fiedler felt compelled to be there; he recalled no doubt about that. Hart’s hypocrisy, the falseness of his moral posturing, was a vital political story, which the
Herald
had now been tracking for six days. Staking out the townhouse, however unseemly, was the only way for Fiedler to confirm everything he’d been told by the anonymous caller, and this confirmation was something he owed the public—and Hart. “Seeing them together at that point and confronting Senator Hart over it, it just seemed as if it were something we were almost obligated to do,” Fiedler recalled. “As odd and surreal as it felt, it just seemed to us that we had to do it.”

In fact, Fiedler would always remember that his overriding emotion in that alley was anger. He shouldn’t have
had
to be there, asking about such tawdry details of a man’s private life. He was a respected chronicler of national politics, for Christ’s sake. It was Hart who had set all this in motion, who had dragged Fiedler and the others into
the dirt and muck of tabloid journalism, by refusing to tell the truth about who he was. It was Hart who had disappointed and debased Fiedler, not the other way around.

“I think I felt I’d been deceived all this time,” Fiedler would remember. “And suddenly here it is, and the allegations I was probably hoping would be disproved were turning out to be true. That this is the guy who only a few weeks before had stood up in front of the world—and, in a sense me, because I was there with the press corps—and talked about ethics, and said he wanted to be held to the highest standards and said he was going to run a campaign that exemplified all that. And here I am in an alley, late on a Saturday night, confronting him about a relationship that just seemed completely sordid. And I kind of felt angry about being in that position. I felt stuck, because I was going to end up doing a story that I maybe hoped I wouldn’t do.”

As Fiedler watched, McGee hit Hart with questions about the phone calls he had made to Rice, which they knew about from the tipster (even though they still hadn’t figured out her identity). Hart, whose suspicions about being set up must have now seemed legitimized, didn’t dare deny the calls, but he characterized them as “casual” and “political” and “general conversation.” Then Fiedler jumped in. He asked Hart if he had taken this woman on a yachting trip in Florida.

“I don’t remember,” Hart said, dubiously. You can imagine the vertigo he must have been experiencing as the details of his private life, things he had not disclosed even to Shore or other close aides, just kept coming, one after the other. It probably dawned on him, right about then, that he should never have been in the alley, any more than he should have been on the yacht.

This had been going on for several minutes now, and to that point, the questions had been about the kinds of concrete details on which investigative reporters tend to fixate. Who was the woman? Why was she there? Why had he called her? Fiedler was after something else. He sought an acknowledgment of Hart’s essential hypocrisy. He sought some deeper confirmation of the man’s flawed character.

So now Fiedler stepped forward and reminded Hart that he had
been at Red Rocks and had personally heard the speech. He quoted Hart’s own words back to him, right there in the alley, the bit about running a campaign based on integrity and ethics and a higher standard. If that were so, Fiedler wanted to know, then why was Fiedler having to stand in this alley, at this moment, doing something so beneath him? He “implored” Hart, by his own account, to offer some kind of exculpatory evidence. “You, of all people, know the sensitivity of this,” Fiedler said, adding that the
Herald
was prepared to print a story about what it had uncovered. He pleaded with Hart to be more forthcoming.

“I’ve been very forthcoming,” Hart said.

Fiedler asked again about the nature of Hart’s relationship with the woman.

“I have no personal relationship with the individual you are following,” Hart replied, for at least the third time. (He still seemed not to get that he was the one being followed.) To Fiedler, this non-answer was highly significant. If Hart had said she had some role in his campaign, that they had been talking about enlisting volunteers or fundraising (and, in fact, Rice hoped that the fundraising job Broadhurst had dangled might well be in the offing), then the
Herald
’s reporters would have had a problem. Fiedler would go as far as to say, years later, that if Hart had claimed she was a colleague in this way, there wouldn’t have been a story to write—or at least not until the reporters had checked into it further. But Hart wouldn’t connect Rice to the campaign. He wouldn’t identify her at all, and that gave the
Herald
its story.

When McGee pressed him again about the yacht and whether he was denying having met her there, Hart grew visibly irritated. “I’m not denying anything,” he said. They were missing the point. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny knowing Rice, or having been on a chartered boat. Hart’s stance was that none of it was anybody’s business but his. When the reporters asked Hart to “produce” the woman, or this friend who was supposedly hosting her, Hart said other people had a right to privacy, too.

“I don’t have to produce anyone,” he told them.

McGee was an expert in ambushes. He had tried to shock Hart
into answering questions, and then he had moved seamlessly into conspiratorial mode, implying that he was there to help Hart out of this, but Hart really needed to help himself. Hart was far too sharp to be taken in by that. Now McGee could see that Hart was getting ready to bolt. So McGee pulled out his last question, the one you save for the moment when there is nothing to be lost by asking it. He put the question point-blank to Hart: Had the senator had sex with the woman in the townhouse?