All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (19 page)

The implications of this, for news and politics, were enormous. In 1987, a Republican operative named Doug Bailey teamed up with a Democratic strategist, Roger Craver, to create something called
The Hotline
—a nonideological compendium of political news from the various papers around the country, plus some polling and late-night political jokes, faxed directly to subscribers every morning. (During that first year, according to an obituary of Bailey that appeared in
The New York Times
after his death in 2013, prospective customers always asked him three questions: “You’re going to do what?,” “You want me to pay how much?,” and “What’s a fax?”) In a few years,
The Hotline
would become as much required reading in Washington as any of the big newspapers or magazines, and virtually every news bureau and political office in town would pay thousands of dollars to get it. Purchased by the
National Journal
in 1996, it formed the template for all the web-based aggregators that would later come along to replace it, from blogs and newsletters to
The Huffington Post
and
Politico
’s “Playbook.”

Hart’s lead advance man in 1987, Michael Stratton, had taken to carrying around what was known in those days as a portable telecopier machine—essentially a bulky, primitive version of the all-in-one machines that would later be commonplace in home offices. The machine enabled him, if everything worked just right, to send revised schedules or local news clippings to Denver and Washington
instantaneously, rather than relying on overnight mail that might show up after the campaign had already left town. Press aides used a fax machine to do what campaigns had never been able to do with telephones—blast their statements out to a hundred media organizations at once, simply by programming a list of newsroom phone numbers into the machine and walking away.

In effect, fax technology did in a limited and rudimentary way what blogs and social media would do twenty years later. It enabled large numbers of people outside the elite media to get and exchange information, and it vastly reduced the amount of time it took for that information to get around. This is how Hart’s staff at the Denver headquarters got their copy of the
Herald
’s exposé on that first Sunday morning in May, with aides standing around in suspended dread as the machine slowly spat out the instrument of their fate. And it’s how they sent Dixon the typed statement he would read on the steps of Broadhurst’s townhouse that morning, after he and his team in Denver had gone over what he should say. When we met in Madison, Dixon gave me the yellowed, crinkly fax sheet he had saved in a box for a quarter century, with a time stamp of 9:19 a.m. and a name he had scribbled underneath the typed, four-paragraph statement: “Miss Donna Rice.”

The fax was also how the
Herald
’s story found its way into newsrooms around the country well before the wire services that served most local papers even had a chance to assess it. When the
Herald
’s Jim McGee went to Broadhurst’s townhouse late Sunday morning after the story had been published, to try to interview the woman he had spied in Hart’s home the night before, he was surprised to find a reporter from
The Denver Post
’s Washington bureau knocking on the door. (No one answered.) Reporters weren’t accustomed to news ricocheting across time zones that fast. In retrospect, this sighting was the first visible drop of rain in a violent storm system that was just at that moment beginning to coalesce in newsrooms around the country.

Nowhere, probably, was that drop in air pressure more acutely felt than at the legendary headquarters of
The Washington Post
, a few blocks north of McPherson Square. Ten years after the cinematic
adaptation of
All the President’s Men
, the
Post
was now widely considered the premier political paper in the country, and the only one ever to force a president from office. The
Post
and its celebrated editor, Ben Bradlee, now immortalized in the public mind by Jason Robards in the film, did not like to get beat on major, breaking stories involving presidential candidates. They especially didn’t like to get beat on stories unfolding in their own city, in this case a ten-minute subway ride from the newsroom, by some beachfront paper whose readers probably thought the Watergate was a swim-up bar.

Paul Taylor, the
Post
’s man on Hart, got the call at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, early Sunday afternoon. An editor proceeded to read him the
Herald
story in its entirety. Any reporter who has ever worked a competitive beat knows the sinking sensation Taylor had to feel as another journalist’s breathless prose tumbled out at him like accusations over the phone line—the embarrassment of being blindsided by a rival, the instinct to rationalize it away, the desolation as you realize that the next twenty-four hours, at least, are going to be spent slogging through the muddy tracks left by some other intrepid reporter. And then, in Taylor’s case, the question that had vexed him for months and that must have occurred to him again the minute he hung up the phone and regained his equilibrium: Was this really the kind of story you wanted to own?

There was nothing fortuitous or stealthy about Taylor’s rise to the top of the political journalism establishment, nothing that even hinted at a lucky break. He seemed destined for it. If the new generation of idealistic, highly educated,
professional
journalists had needed a standard-bearer, Taylor could easily have filled the role.

Although he still talked a little like the Brooklyn native that he was (fast and lyrical, as if litigating a dispute over cab fare), Taylor had spent much of his early childhood in Japan and Vietnam, where his dad worked as an American diplomat. He went to Yale and ran the
Yale Daily News
, did his prerequisite couple of years of training at the highly regarded
Winston-Salem Journal
in the early 1970s, and then latched on with
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, where by
1980 he was the paper’s top campaign reporter, wooed by both the
Times
and the
Post
. Most reporters who joined the
Post
from other papers had to punch their tickets on metro or some other less than glamorous section, where the paper stockpiled a warehouse worth of younger reporters whose life’s ambition was to ride the campaign bus. Taylor, at thirty-two, walked in the door—cool and confident, looking like a young Elliott Gould—as a roving national political reporter. By the end of the ’84 campaign, he was the heir apparent to David Broder, the
Post
’s marquee columnist and elder statesman.

And so, naturally, as the next campaign approached, Taylor drew the best assignment in the newsroom. Hart was his guy.

Initially, at least, Taylor thought he and the front-runner had, in his words, “hit it off.” This is how he put it in the book he would write immediately after the 1988 campaign, titled
See How They Run
. In that little remembered but thoughtful and highly readable account, Taylor offered this cringingly honest description of his own reporting style: “I’m a ‘good cop’ interviewer. I try to ease, tease, coax and wheedle information from sources. With body language, facial expression, tone of voice and other verbal and nonverbal cues, I hope to let them know that I see the same world they see; that I empathize with them; that, beneath my aloof reporter’s exterior, I may even secretly admire them.” It’s doubtful that a politician as experienced and perceptive as Hart was taken in by the “I’m your biggest fan” routine (most politicians are, if nothing else, better instantaneous readers of people than we often give them credit for), but he always appreciated a well-read journalist who seemed actually to be listening, and he liked Taylor enough to sit through several interviews and a long dinner in 1986.

However calculated his approach might have been, Taylor found himself drawn to Hart for much the same reason E. J. Dionne found him compelling: there was a part of Hart that was journalistic in temperament. He had an ability—an inclination, even—to take himself out of the action and see the entire political process as an observer, to appreciate the absurdity of the political spectacle in a way that a sophisticated reporter could appreciate.

But then something shifted. In early March, six weeks or so before
his official announcement, Hart gave a speech at the Maryland statehouse, and afterward Taylor rode with him and Billy Shore in the back of a car to the private airstrip nearby. Notebook flipped open, Taylor started asking him why people perceived Hart to be a loner, and why he didn’t have the support of his colleagues in the Senate, and why he wasn’t having much success lining up endorsements. And you can imagine how this played with Hart, who divided the political world into two camps: those few who got that he was running a nontraditional, idea-driven, antiestablishment campaign, and all the rest, who could only see the narrower political reality. As Hart would have seen it, Taylor had been talking to him for a year, and yet somehow he
still
didn’t get it! He thought Hart needed to line up the establishment behind him, as if this were 1960, when that was precisely the thing that would make him most vulnerable to an insurgent campaign.

Taylor slid into the role of political counselor, in the way that some journalists will; he suggested that Hart should be forcibly extracting endorsements by telling party leaders that the proverbial train was leaving the station and demanding that they get on board. Hart couldn’t contain his contempt. “That’s so ridiculous!” Hart blurted, according to Taylor’s account of the conversation. “Nobody does it. Nobody does it anymore! If they do, they’re either going to get a punch in the nose or a horse laugh.”

“I wondered,” Taylor later wrote, “Do I know him well enough to tell him, ‘Cut the crap’? Or is it possible he’s serious?” Of course, Hart couldn’t have been more serious if he’d been ordering a nuclear strike, and Taylor wisely chose discretion.

Taylor walked away from that encounter feeling that his relationship with Hart had been poisoned. Hart now saw him, he concluded, as “a prisoner of the Washington mind-set—a small-bore, nearsighted, all-tactics political junkie.” Taylor, who not surprisingly considered himself a creative and complex thinker, found the implication deeply insulting. It would probably be too much to say that this one moment, in which Hart allowed his resentment of the pack mentality to undo his budding relationship with an important reporter, changed the course of events that were about to unfold. But
certainly Hart had squandered a reservoir of goodwill that, looking back on it later, might have been crucial.

The other thing Taylor took away from the conversation was that the normally placid Hart was clearly anxious now—that all the background chatter about his character, this business about the weirdness and the “womanizing,” was pulling his internal strings ever tighter as the actual campaign approached. Like the other reporters who followed Hart closely, Taylor had long heard the rumors about, say, Hart having women in his hotel rooms on the road, and he accepted them as largely, if not entirely, true. Only recently, he’d heard a story from a trusted source in Texas who said that Hart had invited the hostess of a fundraiser to his hotel room for a thank-you lunch the next day, and that the hostess in question had since been telling anyone who would listen that she had enjoyed a fling with the next president.

Taylor wasn’t quite sure what to do with such leads. He was, by his own self-reckoning, an explainer of the larger political and policy debates, rather than someone who spent a lot of time digging for hidden fragments of truth. There was no context, really, in which Taylor could imagine himself staking out a candidate’s house the way Fiedler later did. At the same time, if Hart’s character was going to become a central issue in the primary campaign, then could the
Post
simply clap its hands over its ears and pretend the campaign was about something else?

In early April, about a month before the
Herald
’s exposé, Taylor and a group of senior editors and reporters sat down in Ben Bradlee’s office to discuss this dilemma. That Bradlee ended up the man to preside over such a meeting was ironic, to put it mildly. In his youth, as
Newsweek
’s dashing Washington bureau chief, Bradlee had lived next door to then senator John Kennedy, and their children had played together. Later, when Kennedy occupied the White House, Bradlee and his wife were frequent dinner guests, and when Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963, Bradlee comforted his shocked widow at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they brought the president’s body to be autopsied. Bradlee would always maintain that he hadn’t known about any of Kennedy’s extramarital activities (even
though rumors had been rampant, and it was later revealed that Bradlee’s own sister-in-law, who was mysteriously murdered in 1964, had been one of Kennedy’s liaisons). But probably no journalist alive better embodied the last era of political coverage, where politicians trusted journalists to observe certain boundaries, and where journalists expected politicians to be both human and accessible.

The journalists assembled around Bradlee’s desk wrestled with a series of questions that would have been imponderable in Kennedy’s day, and which could have consumed an entire yearlong course in any journalism school. In his post-campaign book, Taylor summarized them this way:

Taylor recalled that he and his colleagues also spent some time discussing the extreme difficulty of even reporting such a story. The two people having the affair wouldn’t talk, and corroborating witnesses would be almost impossible to come by, and “most reporters don’t want to be Peeping Toms.” (As it turned out, of course, the operative word there was “most.”)