All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (33 page)

At Troublesome Gulch, near Hart’s home, 2003
CREDIT: ANDREA MODICA

A few months after Obama’s victory in 2008, I ran into Hart on my way into the restaurant at the Hay-Adams, across from the White House. Hart always tried to stay at the august old hotel, where he had bargained for a closet-size room in exchange for a reduced rate. He was just leaving a breakfast, and I was meeting a couple of Democratic contributors from New York for coffee.

Hart and I chatted for a moment about the president-elect’s transition, and then I headed over to the table where my hosts had already been seated. My mind was still on my previous conversation. “You know, that was Gary Hart I was talking to,” I said as I unfolded my napkin.

The older man, who was probably in his eighties, smiled broadly. “You mean from the
Funny Business
?” he asked me, chuckling.

“Actually, it was the
Monkey Business
,” I muttered reflexively, almost to myself. I spent the rest of the meeting distracted, staring out absently at Lafayette Park and the majestic columns of the White House. I found myself returning to the three words Hart had once jotted on a memo, to the amusement of his aides, so many years ago:

I despair, profoundly.

Why, in the end, did Hart remain stuck in time? After all, redemption and reinvention were everywhere in twenty-first-century America, as much a part of the modern culture as Starbucks and televised talent shows. Bill Clinton wasn’t the only scandalized politician who managed to make people forget his transgressions, or at least not care so much about them. Consider the case of Mark Sanford, who as South Carolina’s governor had abandoned both his state and his wife because of a new love. Or Governor Spitzer, who was busted for paying for sex. Both found their way back to public life (if not, in Spitzer’s case, to public office), just as ballplayers who used steroids got to keep on playing or coaching, and movie stars who went to jail got to keep playing leading roles. And yet somehow Hart remained trapped on a boat in 1987, which sailed on forever in the public mind.

It’s true that, apart from his letters to Clinton, Hart was too proud to plead for jobs that might have restored his legitimacy—he would say he believed in a meritocracy and wanted to be asked. “Averell Harriman would never have said, Me, me, me” is the way Hart put it. Sometimes he seemed, in his brokenness, to fear rejection more than he feared his continuing exile. Obama’s election, for example, seemed likely to open a door for him back into public office; one of Obama’s closest advisors, David Axelrod, had covered Hart as a reporter in 1984 and still considered him a visionary, and some of Hart’s former aides were pushing for him to be considered for a top Defense post or ambassador to Russia.

But then Hart flipped through the nine-page questionnaire that the new administration was handing out to job seekers, and on the last page, under “Miscellaneous,” he spotted this question: “Have you had any association with any person, group or business venture that could be used—even unfairly—to impugn or attack your character and qualifications for government service?” Hart actually laughed out loud when he recalled this moment. He said he had considered writing underneath: “Are you kidding me?” Instead, he tossed the papers aside, and that was that.

It was true, too, that Hart resisted the modern ethos of image rehabilitation. He understood, in those first months and years after the scandal, that the quickest path out of exile lay in some kind of public reckoning, maybe an apologetic memoir or a series of cathartic interviews. He might have become the go- to expert on scandal coverage and how it felt to be in the center of it, had he been able to stomach it. “I could have dined out for years and years on privacy, the role of the press,” he told me. “You know, any controversy that comes up, I’ll get a call. My secretary takes it. She just knows not to even …” His voice trailed off and he waved the rest of the sentence away.

“Oh, the theme of the last five or ten years has been, How do you recover from setback?” Hart started laughing convulsively again. To a lot of my contemporaries, rehabilitating oneself by counseling others in this way would have seemed quite natural, but it struck
Hart as terribly funny. “I could have gone out on the lecture circuit and made a fortune on ‘recovering from setback’!” He paused, catching his breath. “Can you
imagine
?”

But Hart’s old-world sense of decorum, his refusal to beg for work or devise some transparent PR campaign on his own behalf, was something we might just as easily have admired about him, rather than disdained. None of that fully explained the peculiar way in which not just the political establishment, but the culture as a whole, had emphatically, almost maliciously reduced Hart’s life’s work to an irresistible punch line from the past, as if the very idea of him had been ridiculous from the start. There is a book Stephen King wrote in 2004, the seventh installment in his
Dark Tower
fantasy series, in which a character named Susannah finds herself transported to an alternate version of 1980s New York where Ronald Reagan was never elected president. When she asks her friend Eddie who the president is, he tells her it’s Gary Hart. “He almost dropped out of the race in 1980—over that ‘Monkey Business’ business,” Eddie says. “Then he said ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke’ and hung in there. Ended up winning in a landslide.”

The most likely explanation, when you come down to it, is that we ridiculed Hart because he embarrassed us. It wasn’t just that Hart belonged to that bleak, hopelessly uncool period in the eighties from which nothing emerged that wasn’t ever after referenced with a sense of parody—shoulder pads and parachute pants, A Flock of Seagulls and the sitcom
ALF
, wine coolers and New Coke. It wasn’t simply that he had the misfortune of melting down at exactly the moment when just about every cultural hallmark became ossified in time, because we hadn’t yet figured out how to embrace modernity without making everything around us seem tacky and synthetic.

No, it was also that Hart served to remind us of the decisions we had collectively made, the moment when the nation and its media took a hard turn toward abject triviality. In some way, it was easier for us to sneer at Hart than to grant him the perspective he kept asking for, easier to proclaim him unfit than to consider the contributions he might have made. On some unconscious level, perhaps, we needed to blame Hart for having come along and created this new
obsession with character flaws and tabloid scandals. That way we never had to cringe at the meaningless, destructive brand of politics we had created. We never had to consider all the history that otherwise might have been, or how we had since come to a place where most Americans considered politics to be dysfunctional and debased.

And in our need to dismiss Hart, to consign him to some purgatory for the politically lost, not only had we failed to reckon with the larger forces at work in the culture, but we had also denied ourselves whatever service the man might have rendered. Maybe it was true that Hart’s essential temperament was wrong for the modern presidency, and it was entirely possible, whatever the poll numbers suggested in early 1987, that he would ultimately have lost the election for the same reason. Introverts haven’t generally fared well in presidential politics since the advent of the primary process in the early 1970s, and by 1988 it was already a cliché among pundits that voters had to be able to envision themselves sharing a beer with a candidate in order for him to succeed. (Although it should be noted that neither of the eventual nominees that year, Michael Dukakis or George H. W. Bush, had a whole lot to brag about in the likability column.)

But whether or not Hart would ultimately have become president—and even if you believed he should have come down off his mountain, literally, and pleaded for his own redemption in the years afterward—it was hard not to conclude that his long exile cost us something. He was widely acknowledged to possess one of the great political minds of his time, had been the first to hold up a torch and illuminate the darkened passage just ahead, the challenges that would confound us in the age after East–West showdowns and factories churning on triple shifts. A quarter century after Hart’s exit from politics, neither his party nor the nation had really figured out clear approaches to moving beyond the combustion engine, or modernizing rusted cities, or retooling schools for a different kind of economy. We hadn’t simply marginalized a politician; somehow, we had marginalized the things he had tried to make us see.

It seemed a waste that Hart himself hadn’t been put to more
meaningful work on any of these issues, beyond serving on some commissions and sending off the occasional op-ed. I made this exact point to Hart during one of our conversations at the cabin. It was a late winter’s day, and the light was fading from the study, so that his face was only half illuminated as he leaned forward in his chair, his white mane silhouetted against the darkening sky. He seemed to be disappearing before me.

“It is a waste, but not in a way that others might see it,” Hart told me quietly, haltingly. “This is very complicated to talk about. This gets into spirituality for me, and one’s purpose for being.”

He paused, and for a long moment I thought he might be seeing that lion again.

“I think I mentioned,” Hart said, “that of the parables in the New Testament, the one that means the most to me is the one of the master and the three servants.” He hadn’t mentioned this, but I nodded anyway. “And Jesus tells the story of the master going on a trip. And he gives the three servants talents, a talent being a form of money. And to one he gave ten talents, to one he gave five, and to one he gave one. And he said, ‘You are to be the stewards of these talents. And manage them wisely for me.’

“He comes back from the trip and he asks all of the three servants how they managed the money that he’d given them. The ten-talent man had invested it and made some money. The five-talent man had wisely invested. But the one-talent man was afraid to lose it, and he buried it, and he just had the one talent to give back. And the master condemned him and said, ‘You are not a faithful servant, because you didn’t … uh …’ ”

Hart’s voice, already trembling a bit, caught momentarily. “ ‘Because you didn’t use your talents wisely,’ ” he managed finally.

“Well, this haunts me,” Hart said, looking directly at me in the darkness, his eyes brimming and red. “Because I think you are given certain talents. And you are judged by how you use those talents. And to the degree I believe in some kind of hereafter or transmigration of the soul, I will be judged by how I did or did not use the talents that I was given. And I don’t think I’ve used them very well.”

THESE DAYS, WHEN I CONSIDER
what’s happened to political journalism in the years that I’ve been doing it, going back to the late 1990s, I think of my strange experience with John Kerry. At the time he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, after a plodding but efficient run through the party’s raucous primaries, Kerry seemed like a decent bet to unseat George W. Bush—which was precisely why Democratic voters had chosen him over more exciting candidates like John Edwards and Howard Dean. Here was a decorated Vietnam veteran and an experienced hand at foreign policy, an unobjectionable if uninspiring alternative, running at a moment of deep anxiety over terrorism and the flagging war in Iraq. His record of service and patriotism seemed unassailable, which was exactly the message he sought to underscore in the only truly memorable line from his acceptance speech in Boston: “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty!”

And yet, to Kerry’s great surprise, the coverage of his campaign focused almost entirely on questions of his character. In Kerry’s case, the issue wasn’t sex or recklessness, but rather chronic insecurity and inconstancy. He had signed up to fight in Vietnam and gotten himself a plethora of combat medals (which, Republicans asserted in an unconscionable attack, he hadn’t actually earned), but then he had turned around and thrown those medals over the White House
fence when public opinion shifted. He had, according to his own infamous admission, voted for the war appropriation in Iraq before he voted against it. He was a Massachusetts liberal masquerading as a Clintonian centrist, a wealthy windsurfer with a mansion on Nantucket who pretended to be a regular guy. To the modern media horde, every candidate was a hypocrite waiting to be exposed, and Kerry’s brand of hypocrisy was that he claimed to believe in things but never really did.

That summer, my editors at the
Times Magazine
had the idea for a long cover piece about Kerry’s philosophy when it came to terrorism and national security generally. Although most Democrats in Washington thought it was enough just to know that Kerry wasn’t Bush, and they assumed the electorate could be made to feel the same way, the candidate’s specific views on the most pressing topic in American life remained maddeningly opaque. (He resorted mostly to vapid lines like, “The future doesn’t belong to fear, it belongs to freedom,” and so forth.) And this inability to clarify an argument seemed to be adding to the sense that he was a man without conviction, generally. In a
Washington Post
poll that fall, only 37 percent of voters agreed with the statement that Kerry would make the country safer. A
Times
poll, meanwhile, found that while half the respondents thought Bush would make the right choices to protect the country from terrorists, only 26 percent said the same of Kerry.