All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (27 page)

“Your columnists raise questions about proportionality, civility and privacy,” he wrote. “It is not the job of a journalist to win plaudits for civility (though it’s certainly nicer when we do). Nor is it our job to pry into the most private matters—except when public figures, in conducting and discussing their private affairs publicly, force our hand. Sometimes this job demands that we raise questions
we’d rather not ask. Your columnists suggest I broke some kind of gentleman’s code in this instance. I say, poppycock. What I did was ask Gary Hart the question he asked for.”

If the scandal had reduced Hart to a “farcical figure,” as Taylor would later write in
See How They Run
, then Taylor hadn’t understood how profoundly it would affect his own life. The first inkling came on the day after he asked the adultery question, when he returned to the
Post
newsroom and talked to Bradlee, whom he assumed had paid close attention to the news conference in New Hampshire. “You were the one who asked that question?” Bradlee asked, astonished. “Sheee-yit!” Then Koppel called Taylor at home, while he was playing with his kids, and personally asked him to come on
Nightline
, as Fiedler had done a few days earlier. Taylor demurred. He told Koppel he was a reporter and wasn’t comfortable being in the middle of the story.

Comfortable or not, Taylor would soon come to understand that he was no longer Paul Taylor, hottest young political reporter in Washington. He was now Paul Taylor, the Guy Who Asked The Question.

Hart’s undoing—and the role that both the
Herald
and
Post
had played in it—touched off an anguished debate in American journalism. Newsrooms were deeply conflicted, and nowhere was this conflict more apparent (or more confusing, perhaps) than in the pages of
The New York Times
. The editorial page, which carried a tremendous amount of influence in 1987, called the
Herald
’s stakeout “eminently justified.” The paper’s Washington bureau chief, Craig Whitney, sent a reporter to the other campaigns to find out how the rest of the candidates would handle inevitable questions about adultery. “I’m not offended by any question,” Whitney told a reporter for the
Post
. “There’s no question that should be regarded as out-of-bounds.”

On the op-ed page, however, the liberal Anthony Lewis said he felt “degraded in my profession” by the
Herald
stakeout and that Taylor’s big moment marked a “low point” for political coverage. The conservative columnist William Safire slammed Taylor as one of the “titillaters” who was “demeaning” journalism. Abe Rosenthal,
the
Times
’s former executive editor, called Taylor’s question “nauseating.” Years later, Tom Fiedler would tell me what he had heard from higher-ups at the
Herald
that year—that a disgusted Rosenthal had made clear to them that if the
Herald
so much as nominated its Hart story for a Pulitzer Prize, he would use his influence to block the paper from receiving any Pulitzers at all. Whether or not this was the reason, the
Herald
chose not to nominate its scandal coverage. (It did win two Pulitzers for other stories.)

Perhaps the most cogent critique of the media came from Hendrik Hertzberg, the former speechwriter for President Carter who was now writing for
The New Republic
. “Gary Hart has now become the first American victim of Islamic justice” is how Hertzberg began his essay, titled “Sluicegate,” a few weeks after Hart’s first withdrawal. He went on:

Hertzberg didn’t bother trying to defend Hart against the allegations at hand, which he assumed to be true. But almost alone among the commentators in that moment, he intuited that the casualty of all this character appraisal would be the broader concept of character itself—that everything else a politician had done or been in his life would now be swept away, routinely, by a single, sensational revelation. “The fact that a person will lie in the context of adultery proves nothing about his general propensity to lie,” Hertzberg wrote. “The point is that if Hart is a liar there must be one or two
more lies among the millions of words he has spoken as a public man. Let them be produced.” None were, then or later.

Eventually, as the media moved on, and as issues of “character” became the recurrent and dominant theme in our elections, there emerged an uneasy consensus among most influential senior columnists and editors about what had transpired in 1987. While they were reluctant to criticize colleagues, they didn’t really approve of the decisions that reporters for the
Herald
and the
Post
made that week. They didn’t think sex mattered, or that reporters should spend time delving into who spent the night where. And yet, at the same time, they basically decided that Hart had deserved what he’d gotten, because while sex didn’t matter, judgment certainly did. And what the events of 1987 had proven was that Hart didn’t have the stability or steadiness to be president. He was a loner who didn’t take anyone’s counsel or care what anyone thought, a ladies’ man who couldn’t control his impulses—or who was, worse yet, drawn to avoidable peril. And this was something the public needed to know about him.

It was a confounding issue for American journalism, and it remained so. A quarter century later, when I interviewed some of the reporters from that time, I found that they would often struggle and contradict themselves in an effort to make sense of the rules they had constructed.

“I hated that week,” E. J. Dionne told me. “I hated everything about this story. The stakeout bothered me. I really respect Fiedler, and I don’t want to get into the business of criticizing somebody else. But the stakeout is something I just could not have done. I knew in my gut that we journalists were opening up a can of worms, that we were sort of sexualizing politics in a way we hadn’t before. And given that I’m basically much more of a policy and ideas guy, I felt like we were just pulling politics away from what I think politics ought to be about.

“And yet I was also mad at Hart,” Dionne said, reflecting on the “follow me around” quote that ended up stalking Hart through the years. “Because I thought that, A, he should have listened to the folks who were telling him that you can’t get away with it this time.
And B, why in the world did he say that to me? Why did he choose to put it that way to me?”

I found Jack Germond, who once counted Hart a personal friend, but who hadn’t spoken to him in years, to be similarly conflicted when I visited his home in West Virginia, on the banks of the Shenandoah River. This was three months before his death in August 2013, at the age of eighty-five.

“I don’t think I would have done the reporting Tom Fiedler did,” Germond told me. Nor could he envision himself asking the question Taylor asked. “He’s asking what you did on that boat, or in the bedroom, or in the apartment,” he told me. “And we don’t need to know that. I thought that was an unfair question, in the sense that it did not advance the story in any serious way. Paul Taylor was a very good reporter, but I did not agree with that question.” Germond told me that as a younger reporter he used to know a lot about which candidates were sleeping around, and with whom, but he never considered it anyone’s business.

None of that, however, kept him from believing that the scandal that forced Hart from politics had revealed something essential about the man he’d known since 1972. “If Gary Hart’s going to fuck every woman he sees when he walks down the street, then he doesn’t deserve to be president,” Germond said bluntly. “It’s good to know this stuff.”

Most Americans probably would have agreed. And yet if you think about it for more than a minute, you can see that the argument that became the norm in political journalism after 1987—“we care about a candidate’s judgment, not his sex life”—required an acrobatic contortion of logic. After all, if the media didn’t care about the sex lives of candidates, and in fact had never written about them before, then how could it have been such abhorrent judgment for a candidate to engage in extramarital sex? If reporters didn’t actually find adultery by itself newsworthy, then what was so stupid and self-destructive about carrying on with a woman in the privacy of your own home? As Hertzberg put it: “If judgment, not sex, were truly ‘the issue,’ as we have been told over and over, then Hart’s campaign would still be alive. And the headline in the
New York Post
would
have been
HART’S JUDGMENT REVEALED AS FAULTY
, not
GARY’S LOVE BOAT FOLLIES.”

The truth was that all of this business about judgment and character was a rationalization, and not a very persuasive one. The political media may not actually have cared much about sex, but it was clear now that the popular culture did, and this exerted a powerful force of gravity. What really happened in 1987 was that the finest political journalists of a generation surrendered all at once to the idea that politics had become another form of celebrity-driven entertainment, while simultaneously disdaining the kind of reporting that such a thirst for entertainment made necessary.

Where the journalism establishment ultimately netted out on the decisions made in 1987 is probably best illustrated by the career arcs of those who found themselves caught up in the moment. Tom Fiedler wasn’t immediately feted the way Woodward and Bernstein were by his sanctimonious colleagues, and after he read Rosenthal’s comments, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to make the jump to
The New York Times—something
he had been seriously discussing with the paper’s Miami bureau chief. But Fiedler did get his Pulitzer a few years later, for his part in an impressive investigation into an extremist cult. He went on to become both editorial page editor and executive editor of the
Herald
and then, after his retirement, a leading academic, oft quoted on journalistic ethics and integrity, well liked and well respected.

Among Fiedler’s colleagues on the stakeout, Jim McGee moved on to become a top investigative reporter for
The Washington Post
(and later a senior investigator for a congressional committee on homeland security), while Doug Clifton later became the top editor at the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
. E. J. Dionne ended up an op-ed columnist for the
Post
and one of the most admired liberal theorists in Washington. Howard Fineman, who set the whole thing in motion by reporting rumors of Hart’s affairs, became not just the last of
Newsweek
’s great political writers (before moving on to
The Huffington Post
) but one of the most ubiquitous pundits on cable TV. Just about everyone who had any role, integral or passing, in taking
Hart down went on to scale the heights of national and political journalism.

Everyone, that is, except Paul Taylor. He emerged from the Hart scandal and the 1988 election as a famous and sought-after correspondent, clear heir to the
Post
’s storied political franchise. He would never cover a campaign again.

Taylor was gracious but notably unenthusiastic when I emailed him in the spring of 2013 and asked if I could come by and talk about the ancient history of 1987. Now sixty-four, Taylor still lived in Washington and had spent the last decade at the Pew Research Center, where his title was executive vice president for special projects. This meant that he spent a lot of his time studying polls and putting together reports on social and demographic trends in the electorate—writing incisively and substantively about the larger undercurrent of politics, in other words, without having to interrogate any more politicians.

Taylor seemed uncomfortable revisiting the events of that week, and he told me more than once, after I sat down and started asking him about it, that he didn’t remember much other than what he wrote at the time. But he did take me through the months and years after the scandal. He told me that after the 1988 campaign he had gone off to Princeton for a year to teach journalism and work on his book. But by the time he finished reliving that campaign, he found he simply had no stomach for another one. One day he walked back into the
Post
and told his editors he didn’t want to write about politics anymore. He was taking himself off the fast track to political preeminence.

It wasn’t that Taylor was driven from political reporting by his guilt about Hart or his embarrassment about the crucial role he had played in the scandal, as Hart’s former aides always believed (or wanted to believe). Nor was it that he felt too scalded by the criticism he had endured after the scandal, although that clearly left a mark.

What motivated Taylor, really, was that he could sense a change coming in the atmosphere of political journalism. Taylor was a
down-the-middle reporter who prided himself on being an observer of history, rather than a shaper of it. He had never envisioned himself sitting in judgment of politicians or becoming the kind of columnist who wrote about their moral failings, as his father sometimes urged him to do. But now colleagues were talking about Hart’s demise and how Taylor had “put a notch in his belt,” which was nothing like the way he looked at it, and suddenly the whole focus seemed to be on what was wrong with candidates, what was flawed or indecent about them as people, rather than on what they believed or what they could accomplish, which is what mattered to Taylor.

“More and more, it was all just, these guys are a bunch of … 
you know
 … and it’s our job to expose their follies,” Taylor told me. “And you know, if you’re a clever writer you can build a following around that. And I didn’t want to go there.” The day hadn’t quite arrived when reporters would spend chunks of their days on cable TV, tossing out glib and knowing insights into the character of candidates, but it wasn’t so far off that Taylor couldn’t glimpse it on the horizon.