All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (24 page)

And that’s when Paul Taylor hit him with The Question. He spoke hoarsely but intensely, almost in a whisper, his voice quavering with the gravity of what he was about to do. He spoke at unusual length for a reporter in such a setting, as if he and Hart were having another philosophical conversation in the back of a car, rather than a terse exchange in a packed and sweat-soaked banquet room.

“Senator, in your remarks yesterday you raised the issue of morality, and you raised the issue of truthfulness,” Taylor began. “Let me ask you what you mean when you talk about morality, and let me be very specific. I have a series of questions about it.”

If this prelude alarmed Hart, he didn’t object.

“When you said you did nothing immoral,” Taylor went on, “did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or at any other time that you were with her?”

“That is correct,” Hart replied, unflinching. “That’s correct.”

Taylor took his time, with lawyerly skill. “Do you believe that adultery is immoral?” he asked next.

“Yes,” Hart said immediately. He must have been sensing the danger at that point, aware that he was being outflanked but unsure of how to head it off. And then Taylor just came out with it.

“Have you ever committed adultery?” he rasped, while reporters gaped, and while the campaign aides standing off to the side looked at each other in amazement.

Almost three decades later, it sounds like a plausible political inquiry, if not a routine one. Have you ever committed adultery? What would you do if your wife was raped? How did it feel when your child was killed? But in the context of 1987, to Hart and his aides and to the older reporters in the room who would always remember it as a watershed moment, Taylor might as well have asked him to disrobe right there and submit to a cavity search. No reporter had
ever asked a presidential candidate that kind of personal, sexual, broad question. Campaign aides had guessed that someone might, but hearing it was still a surreal experience.

Hart froze. You could see it in his eyes, the sudden loss of focus. You could hear it in the room—a long silence that sounded like the end of something, several blank seconds that lingered like a month, during which all his life’s ambitions and grand ideas seemed to flutter away. Sweeney had actually warned him, aboard the plane to New Hampshire, when they were rehearsing an exchange the way candidates and aides often do, that someone might ask him the question. Hart’s reply then had been a terse and outraged, “I don’t have to answer that!” That was perfect, as far as Sweeney was concerned—that was exactly the right response. But somehow, in the moment, Hart’s self-righteousness and fluency deserted him. He retreated, instead, into the recesses of his mind.

In those several seconds, Hart, the former divinity student, began to mull the biblical definition of adultery. Was it, as the Old Testament said, limited to intercourse when one party was married? Or could it be, as Jesus taught, a lusting in the heart? Did it count if you were separated? Or if it didn’t amount to intercourse at all? Could there be a simple answer to this question?

“Ahh,” Hart finally stammered. “I do not think that’s a fair question.”

“Well,” Taylor retorted, “it seems to me the question of morality—”

“You can get into some very fine distinctions,” Hart said.

“—was introduced by
you
.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Hart said, stalling.

“And it’s incumbent upon us to know what your definition of morality is,” Taylor pressed.

“Well, it includes adultery.”

“So that you believe adultery is immoral.”

“Yes, I do,” Hart said again. And so Taylor returned to his original question.

“Have you ever committed adultery?”

Here’s what Hart would always remember: looking up at the faces of reporters, twisted with disdain and sanctimony, and seeing in his mind a flash of images from the 1984 campaign. He happened to know, thanks to the inevitable gossip among campaign aides, who in this crowd had hooked up with whom. Even decades later, Hart still wouldn’t say which of the journalists he had in mind—their sex lives, he still believed, should remain private, just like his. But casual, ill-advised “campaign sex” was rampant in those days (even more so than in the still boozy campaigns I covered later), and some of the reporters involved were, inevitably, married. Hart saw some of them now, awaiting his response to Taylor’s question, these reporters who dared to call
him
a hypocrite.

The scene at the Hanover Inn on May 6, 1987 with Paul Taylor (circled) attending. He asked the question that would change politics forever.
CREDIT: JIM COLE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I do not know—I’m not going to get into a theological definition of what constitutes adultery,” he said. “In some people’s minds it’s people being married and having relationships with other people, so …”

Taylor wasn’t through. He had the floor, having jolted most of his colleagues into silence, and he had Hart on the defensive. They weren’t in the back of Hart’s limo anymore.

“Can I ask you,” Taylor said, “whether you and your wife have an understanding about whether or not you can have relationships, you can have sexual encounters with—”

“My inclination is to say no, you can’t ask me that question,” Hart said. It was too late for that, however, and he knew it. “But the answer is no, we don’t have any such understanding. We have an understanding of faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty.”

The press horde was waiting for Hart after the news conference so they could stalk him all the way to Littleton for his final event of the day—the kind of Q&A with voters that would later be known as a “town hall.” But Hart wasn’t waiting for
them
. Instead, he somehow got himself behind the wheel of a supporter’s white Jeep and came barreling out of the Hanover Inn and past the assembled press as if reenacting a scene from
The A-Team
, one arm on the wheel and the other holding his wife. (Hart had been campaigning in New Hampshire since 1972—he didn’t need a map.) In Littleton, the campaign closed the doors before the cameras could catch up, and Hart answered questions about Gorbachev and the proposed oil import tax—but, notably, not a single one about Donna Rice. Then he went out to dinner with Lee and the staff, where they kicked around a bunch of ever-narrowing strategic options, and where Hart learned for the first time, from Lee, that reporters had staked out his daughter at her college lecture hall in Denver.

Taylor, meanwhile, hung back in Hanover to write. For the first time in a campaign, the
Post
had given him and other reporters these new laptop computers—heavy, briefcase-size things that you could use for basic word processing and then, if you had the right cable and access number and everything worked just right, send your copy remotely across a telephone line. He pulled off this minor miracle in the filing center at the Hanover Inn early Wednesday evening, transmitting his story for Thursday without having to call the political desk and dictate it to a clerk.

“The extraordinary intimacy of the questions made Hart and the more than 150 journalists crowded into a small lounge at the
Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth campus palpably uncomfortable,” Taylor wrote near the top of his story, as if he were a mere observer of the process. “For better or worse, new ground was broken in the nature of questions put to a presidential candidate.” The use of the passive voice here (“new ground was broken”) should have conjured Reagan’s infamous phrase about the Iran-contra affair four months earlier: “Mistakes were made.” In keeping with the journalistic convention of the time, Taylor didn’t dare note for his readers that he was the one who had wielded the groundbreaking shovel.

As this story was making its way across the cables, Taylor learned from his editors, on another line, that Bradlee had spoken with his buddy who was also close to Hart’s mystery woman. And, sure enough, she had confirmed the affair. She was desperate to keep her name out of the paper—which Bradlee was glad to do, but he wasn’t going to tell Hart that. Instead, he wanted Taylor to get his ass to Littleton and get a comment from the candidate.

Quoting the journalist James “Scotty” Reston, Taylor later described himself as being caught up in an “exhilarating chase” as he drove the seventy-plus miles to Littleton in the dark, through a series of rustic towns that had already retired for the night. Amped up and nervous, he talked to himself in the car, running through Hart’s likely responses and his best rebuttals to those responses. When at last he arrived at the hotel where the campaign and press were staying, he saw Sweeney sitting at the bar with three other reporters, one of whom was Bill Peterson, a colleague of Taylor’s from the
Post
. Taylor described himself as “delighted” to see Peterson. He wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of confronting Hart in his hotel room alone, and instantly hatched a plan for them to double-team the candidate.

The problem was that Peterson, about five years older than Taylor and one of the best liked and most admired journalists on the trail, wanted nothing to do with this escapade. As Taylor summed up Peterson’s objections, “He thought the hour was late, the tip was weak and the story was sleazy.” Taylor and Peterson argued a bit in the lobby and “agreed to disagree.” Taylor, who was by this point nearly hyperventilating with nerves, headed back into the bar,
alone, to grab Sweeney and tell him that he needed to see the candidate immediately.

In his own retelling of the event, Taylor didn’t mention his colleague again. But according to Cramer’s account in
What It Takes
, Peterson and Taylor had one more significant exchange. Taylor had just sat down with Sweeney, and was trying to marshal his breathing so he could explain the situation to the press secretary, when Peterson burst back into the lobby and tried once more to stop him. “We’re not doing this,” Peterson said, according to Cramer’s account. “Paul, you don’t have to do this. You don’t … have … to
do
this.”

“Bill,” Taylor replied with finality, “there’s just a lot of pressure.” (Peterson died of cancer three years later, at forty-seven. His own recollection of this event was never written.)

At last, Taylor told Sweeney that the
Post
had evidence of another affair and he needed to see Hart. After hearing the details, Sweeney deflated; he had been with Hart on the day that was the subject of the investigator’s report, but he’d had no idea where Hart had gone after dropping him off at home. Sweeney repaired to his room, ostensibly to see what he could do about arranging an interview for Taylor. It wasn’t until hours later, around midnight, when Taylor confronted him again, that Sweeney finally revealed to Taylor that Hart wasn’t actually in the hotel. The Harts, it turned out, wanted to be nowhere near the press and had been quietly rerouted to a hotel across the border in Vermont. Taylor would have to wait until morning, at least.

What Taylor didn’t yet know was that, in those intervening hours, a crestfallen Sweeney had called John Emerson in Denver, and Emerson had called (of course) Billy Shore in Vermont, and Shore had taken the long walk down to Hart’s door at the hotel—it was one of those two-tiered, motor-inn type structures. Shore apologized and told Hart he really needed to call Sweeney right away, and once they were on the phone, Sweeney told Hart the details of what the
Post
had.

“This isn’t going to end, is it?” Hart asked.

“You would know better than I would,” Sweeney said coldly.

“Let’s go home” was all Hart could say. He had concluded that he would never be able to survive another revelation, would never be able to keep campaigning or raise the money he needed. But almost as much as this, both Hart and his aides would later say, he was increasingly distraught by the idea that all the women he had known, some romantically but most not, would soon find their own private lives exposed in the pages of papers as notable as the
Post
. Hart told me that he had already gotten a note from a woman he had seen during his separation from Lee; she wanted him to know that if the reporters came knocking at her door, she would kill herself.

Early Thursday morning, they boarded Hart secretly onto the same private plane that had taken Lee to New Hampshire, while Sweeney and Trippi announced to the press, after considerable misdirection, that Hart had left the state and was suspending his campaign. (Many years later, the draft of that statement, with Hart’s handwritten notes, hung framed in Trippi’s office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—a reminder of what might have been.) Hart read Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
on the plane, which had to be rerouted away from Stapleton Airport in Denver because of all the media camped out there, and which ended up landing at a smaller airport that was besieged by yet more media. Hart wasn’t sure what to expect when they landed, but the NBC helicopter that hovered above his car as he raced through Bear Creek Canyon, pursued by cameramen, pretty much answered the question. He could barely get through the front gate at Troublesome Gulch with all the lenses swarming around the car and banging up against the windows, like giant, predatory insects that literally rocked the car.