All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (3 page)

“Oh, no!” Lee said, something cracking inside her. “Oh, no!” she said again. She knelt down, cooing through the onset of tears. The fox turned its head sidelong. The creek burbled on indifferently. I felt powerless and somehow responsible, utterly untrained for such an event. I imagined the Harts might see this as an omen of my return, and maybe it was.

Hart never flinched. He rushed over and lifted the bird in his cupped hands. He walked toward the edge of the deck and gently stroked the feathers, as Lee looked on from one side and I the other. His long torso hovered over the patient and obscured our view as he softly set the bird down on the railing. “He’s breathing,” Hart assured his wife in a soothing, protective tone. Lee finally exhaled, deeply, and retreated a few steps. “He’ll be fine,” Hart said firmly.

And I believed it, too, until Hart shot me a furtive, conspiratorial look and shook his head quickly, as if to say: Not a chance in hell.

How I came to return to Troublesome Gulch on that day in 2009, visiting with some washed-up politician at the moment when just about every other political writer in America was absorbed by the ascension of our first African American president, is a story of failure and the hope for redemption, I guess. Not just Hart’s, but mine, too.

The whole thing began a few weeks before Christmas in 2002, when, as a new writer for
The New York Times Magazine
, I came across a short newspaper item about how Hart was considering a quixotic comeback bid for the presidency. Like everyone else, I knew Hart only from the memory of scandal—in my case, from reading
Newsweek
in my college dorm room in 1987—and what motivated such a man to want to rekindle this memory in his advancing years, to want to relive in some way the defining ordeal of his life, struck me as the kind of mystery at the intersection of politics and psychology I found most intriguing. The idea of interviewing Hart after all
these years struck my editors and friends as kind of spooky and fun, like attending a séance in the French Quarter.

I met Hart at the Denver headquarters of the global law firm Coudert Brothers, which, as it happened, consisted of a single nondescript office—Hart’s—and a waiting room, in the corner of which stood a sad little Christmas tree. Hart sat in a swiveling office chair next to his computer and invited me to take a seat a few feet away. He explained, alluding to the modest surroundings, that Coudert Brothers had informed him it intended to close its Denver office—or, in other words, that it no longer needed Hart’s services as an international lawyer, specializing in executing deals in the former Soviet Union. He would soon need to find another professional home. Hart spoke lightly of this conundrum, laughing easily at himself, as if the circumstances of his career had reached a level of absurdity even he couldn’t fail to find amusing. Whatever arrogance he had once possessed, a famous incapacity for suffering those less intellectually inclined than himself, had been replaced in his advancing years by a sense of goodhearted resignation, which had the effect of making him immediately and immensely likable.

Two things struck me very clearly during that first meeting with Hart. The first, and more surprising, was that he was probably the flat-out smartest politician I had ever met, and I had met quite a few. Not smart in the Newt Gingrich sense, meaning that he had memorized a small library of philosophical and literary texts and could quote them back to you—although Hart had this going for him, too. Nor smart in the Bill Clinton sense, meaning that he could juggle a Sunday crossword puzzle while simultaneously dissecting a point of policy and committing to memory the names of ten strangers in the room, which was a kind of freakishness. Hart didn’t care that much for people’s approval. No, Hart’s gift was to connect politics and culture and theology and history and technology seamlessly and all at once—to draw from all available data points (extemporaneously, it seemed) a larger picture of where
everything
was headed.

Richard Ben Cramer, who profiled Hart in
What It Takes
, had a name for these periodic revelations; he called them “Hart-facts,” because once Hart offered them up, they became self-evident, as if
it would have been impossible for anyone to have overlooked them in the first place. Hart himself would tell me, “I have only one talent. I can see farther ahead than other people. And I can put pieces together in constructive ways, both to avoid disaster and to capitalize on change.”

During that first day in Denver, Hart explained, by way of a brief history of the Middle East, why a war in Iraq, if in fact that’s what George W. Bush was planning, would ultimately be a catastrophe. We might win a quick military victory, he said, but it would become difficult to extricate ourselves, and it would create more terrorists than it would root out. (Decades before, he had insisted that America’s reliance on oil would lead us, inevitably, into a series of desert wars.) He also mused that growing inequality and the recklessness of the markets might well plunge us, sooner or later, into another depression or something very close. By the end of the decade, both of these offhand riffs, which could have been dismissed in the moment as the rants of a gloomy old man, would prove stunningly accurate.

The second thing I quickly realized was that Hart had no real intention of running for president again, even if he wasn’t yet ready to admit that to himself. The idea had come from some students Hart met during a yearlong sojourn at Oxford. That Hart wouldn’t quite slam the door on the notion was a measure of how much he wanted something else that had nothing to do with the presidency: to be reclaimed. Hart longed to be back in the mix for high-profile assignments or maybe even a cabinet post. He wanted to be the elder statesman he had always imagined he would someday become. If openly mulling a return to the campaign trail was the only way to get someone like me to write about his political ideas, rather than a fifteen-year-old marital infidelity, then so be it.

“I made a mistake,” Hart told me, which seemed to me as close to admitting an affair with Donna Rice as he had ever come. “I think there are very few people in the world who don’t know that. I’ve apologized.” It was “a single incident fifteen years ago,” Hart said, and because of it he had been denied the opportunity to serve his country ever since. “I think I’ve paid my dues,” he said.

“I think all I want is some degree of fairness,” Hart said quietly.
“I’m not even asking for forgiveness, but fairness.” He shook his head in enduring disbelief. “Perspective,” he said, then repeated the word quietly to himself. “Perspective.”

Hart didn’t say any of this happily, or even willingly. I did what a reporter is supposed to do. I pushed him on it. I waited the better part of my thirty-hour visit until I felt he was sufficiently comfortable talking to me, and then I bored in on the past, poked at the scar tissue, hoping for … what? A catharsis, maybe. An admission that justice had been done all those years ago, that the truth had won out, as I had been taught to believe it always does. That somehow my role models in journalism—men who had covered that campaign and gone on to become, in some cases, my editors and senior colleagues—had through their tenacity spared the nation something worse than what we ultimately got.

Hart might have been excused for throwing me out of his office, but instead he patiently pleaded with me to move on. He had invited me to visit for the same reason that he was hopeful of a reentry into political life—because he thought the past might finally be the past, of interest to no one at last. “This whole business of ’87 is flypaper to me,” he told me, throwing up his hands. “It’s so frustrating. It’s like being in a time warp. I want to get unstuck.”

The three-thousand-word piece I wrote about Hart did nothing to unstick him, although it was about what he should have expected. I revisited the scandal, talked about his tortured journey in the intervening years, cast doubt on his sincerity about the prospect of running again. I repeated the truism (half true at best, as I later came to understand) that Hart had blithely challenged reporters to follow him around back in 1987, and I arrived at the same psychoanalytical conclusion on which a lot of Hart’s contemporaries had settled back then—that Hart had to have harbored some self-destructive impulse to begin with, because otherwise he wouldn’t have risked his lifelong ambitions on some model and then dared his interrogators to prove it.

I mused on why it was that Hart had become a relic from another time—“the political version of a Members Only jacket” is how I put it—and concluded that Hart mostly had himself to blame. If he was
stuck in flypaper while others mired in lesser scandals had managed to escape, it was mostly because he refused to do the things you had to do if you wanted to rehabilitate yourself in the modern society—write an apologetic memoir, shed a tear on
Oprah
, plot out a publicly orchestrated comeback on the cover of
People
.

Hart detested the piece, of course, and shortly thereafter he publicly dropped any notion of a presidential campaign. I called him a few times afterward and even asked to have a drink on one of his occasional trips to Washington. I liked him, and it seemed to me his perspective on events would be different from the usual Washington wisdom. Hart was cordial but unavailable, and I stopped pestering him.

Once, just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, after he had endorsed his friend John Kerry, Hart and I ended up standing next to each other in a huge barn somewhere near Ames, where Kerry was holding a rally. I thought Hart recognized me when I turned to him, but he said little and seemed to look right through me as we shook hands. He wasn’t invited onstage with some of Kerry’s other endorsers, and no one else there seemed to take note of him. We stood awkwardly and in silence throughout much of the rally, our backs pressed up against the wood beams of the barn wall, until I wandered off to say hello to some reporters I knew, and Hart slipped out into the cold, alone.

That was the second presidential campaign I had covered, and by then I was beginning to surmise that something critical was missing from our coverage of political candidates—mainly, the candidates themselves. Like a lot of my younger colleagues who’d passed on Wall Street jobs or law degrees so they could go off to small, middling newspapers and pursue elusive careers in journalism, my ambition had been forged by reading (and rereading) influential books:
The Making of the President 1960, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
, and
What It Takes
. What made political journalism so alluring, and so important, was the idea that you actually got to know the minds of the public servants you were writing about. You were supposed to share beers at the hotel bar and late-night confidences aboard the chartered plane. You were supposed to
understand not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for winning, but also what made them good and worthy of trust, or what didn’t.

There was the danger of getting too close, perhaps, in the way that a young Ben Bradlee ignored—willfully or otherwise—the dubious associations of his friend John Kennedy, or in the way that Richard Harwood, a reporter for
The Washington Post
, decided to remove himself from Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign because he had grown to like the candidate too much. (Kennedy was killed before Harwood had the chance to follow through.) But such was the challenge that came with sitting in history’s orchestra seats, charged with the sacred task of transmitting all that immediacy to the people crammed into the balcony and watching at home.

By the time my contemporaries and I got there, though, presidential politics—indeed, all of politics—was really nothing like that. With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them. They left the drinking and private dinners to the handlers who were expert in such things, whose job it was to help reporters by “reconstructing” the scenes of the day with self-serving narratives (
“And then I heard the senator say, ‘Don’t tell me what the polls say! I care about what’s right!’ ”
). Candidates in the age of Oprah “shared” more than ever before, but what they shared of themselves—boxers rather than briefs, allusions to youthful drug use—was trivial and often rehearsed, as authentic as a piece of plastic fruit, and about as illuminating.

Our candidates shared the same planes as their attendant reporters, but unlike their predecessors in the books of our youth, they literally hid behind curtains that divided their cabin from ours. Occasionally, prompted by press aides, they wandered back to have an impromptu, off-the-record conversation, which they conducted with all the fluency and abandon of a North Korean prisoner offering his televised confession. They issued gauzy position papers and used perfunctory interviews to recite their talking points, but they almost never engaged in informal, candid conversations about
what they believed and how they had come to believe it. Their existences were guided by a single imperative, which was to say nothing unscripted and expose nothing complex.

Defensively, almost unconsciously, we tried to obscure this new reality from our readers and viewers. Reporters of my generation (some of us more than others) showed up on cable TV all day long and spoke wryly and knowingly of what the politicians thought, in tones that suggested we had just come from a private dinner or a late-night bull session, that we enjoyed the same insight as our role models. As time went on, some Americans who paid close attention to the news began to suspect that we were holding out on them, that our studied detachment was masking deeper convictions about our subjects, things we really knew about the candidates but were afraid to say because we might lose our precious access or jeopardize “cozy relationships,” or because it might violate the outmoded tenets of objectivity. The truth was harder to admit: most of the time, we had no real access, and we really didn’t know anything about the candidates personally you couldn’t have learned from browsing their websites or watching speeches on YouTube. And absent any genuine familiarity or argument of ideas, our glib prognostications sounded cynical and bland. There existed an unbridgeable divide—our own kind of troublesome gulch—between our candidates and our media.