What It Takes (90 page)

He told her, he’d rather quit.

H
ART THOUGHT HIS FATE
still hung in the balance, Tuesday, in the ballroom of the Waldorf. He was still ahead of his nearest rival, three-to-one, in national polls. Only ten percent said the Donna Rice affair made it “less likely” they’d vote for Hart. Hart thought his future depended on how the story played—i.e., how soon it died.

And here were hundreds of publishers, editors (news
executives
) at tables stretching away from the stage as far as Hart could see. NBC was broadcasting live from the balcony (they cut away from the Iran-contra hearings). In the back of the hall, along the sides—in fact, onto every available foot of floor space—the working press was herded: reporters, columnists, photographers, video crews. ... Waiters with steaming silver gravy boats were sweating through the crush: “
Steppahk, pleeese
—
comin’ tru de food
.” they sang out in sonorous Caribbean accents. “
Steppahk, gentamen, pleeese
—
I like you to stay cleeen ahn fresh!
” The news nabobs seemed fascinated and horrified at the havoc their employees could create. (For God’s sake,
reporters
were breathing down their
necks
!
At lunch
!) No one paid heed to the Daily News All-Star Jazz Band, or to the rabbi who blessed the swarm and adjured it to recall the founding fathers’ dream of a republic “where the preciousness of personality was cherished.”

On stage, it was Hart and Bob Dole ... though Dole might as well have stayed in bed. (“You know, I have a feeling,” Dole mused, as he got to the microphone, “I’m not going to make much news today ...”) As for Hart, he thought this must be the moment God made for his fight. In this room, among that crowd, he could
win
... if they would join him in denouncing the
Herald
’s stakeout.

“Last weekend,” he said at the mike, “a newspaper published a misleading and false story that hurt my family and other innocent people and reflected badly on my own character. This story was written by reporters who, by their own admission, undertook a spotty surveillance; who reached inaccurate conclusions based on incomplete facts; and who, most outrageously, refused to interview the very people who could have given them the facts before filing their story, which we asked and urged them to do. It is now, nonetheless, being repeated by others as if it were true.”

Hart’s voice was strong in the vast ballroom. He was pale, composed, but his chin jutted out at the darkened crowd with obvious defiance. He was so sure he was bending over
backward
to accommodate this “process.”

“Did I make a mistake by putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued? Of course I did. That goes without saying. Did I do anything immoral? I absolutely did not.”

In the Q&A session after his speech (Hart laid on the full economics text), he acknowledged that voters had a right to ask what kind of man was running for the White House. He acknowledged that he’d put himself at risk.

“I will accept the responsibility for what I did, and I have done so, and will continue to, and will bear the consequences on that.

“But if someone’s going to scrutinize me, I want them to scrutinize me. I want them to know all the facts. I guess what, among the other things, disturbed me the most here ... first of all, I sought out the reporters; they didn’t have to come find me. I knew I was being followed, and I went and confronted them, and we offered them all the facts in the story and they refused that until they filed their story to make their Sunday deadline. I leave it for you and the American people to decide who’s at fault there.”

After that, Dick Capen, the nabob for
The Miami Herald
, stood and made a speech. He was supposed to ask Hart a question, but he kept referring to Hart in the third person—as if he weren’t there.

“The issue is not
The Miami Herald
,” Capen said. “It’s Gary Hart’s judgment. He’s an announced candidate for President of the United States, and he’s a man who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past. We stand by the essential correctness of our story. It’s possible that, at some point along the way, someone could have moved out of the alley door of his house.

“But the fact of the matter remains that our story reported on Donna Rice, who he met in Aspen, who he subsequently met in Dade County. He acknowledged that he telephoned her on a number of occasions. It is a fact that two married men whose spouses were out of town spent a considerable amount of time with these people.

“It is also true that our reporters saw him and Donna Rice leaving his townhouse on at least three separate occasions. And now, of course, it’s been revealed by Miss Rice that she went with him on a cruise to the Bahamas. ...”

From that point, it was apparent to Hart that the issue had shifted. The
Herald’s
six-column, front-page Sunday screamer had averred that Gary Hart and “the Miami woman” spent the night. Now Capen could only allege that Hart and Donna Rice were
seen leaving
—three times.

So, at that point, the test was changed: it was not whether Hart had slept with this woman last Friday ... or at any time (to use Capen’s phrase) as “an announced candidate for President.” From that point, the issue had to become
anything
Hart had
ever
done with Donna Rice.

The old hounds at their tables took up the scent:

What about those phone calls?

What about that boat trip?

And Hart made a mortal mistake—he thought he could
answer.
Imagine!

Imagine, for a moment, that two people met in March, by happenstance—serendipity, it seemed—in a weekend out of time, a weekend that was a getaway ... and they were charmed, freshened, made to feel more alive ... not least by the un-normality of that meeting, but surely, mostly, by each other ... and it was playful, exciting, with a hint of sex in the air—conquest, anyway, and the play of the eyes, the purr of voice, the happy racket of possibility in head and heart ... but for their own reasons, for good or ill ... for Donna Rice’s ultraserious view of herself, suddenly and literally at sea with a man who, she found out (that day), was married ... or for Gary Hart’s own husbandhood, or his never-unfelt candidacy, his assurance to his white boys (
That
was not going to be a problem!), or his own metaphysically freighted sense of self ... for whatever reasons of morality, respect, or fear ... imagine ... that what happened between these two people did not come to, did not have to do with, an act of sexual congress.

Just suppose this was, for Gary Hart, an argument he’d had with himself on three or four occasions, already, in the brief time he’d spent with Donna Rice ... he knew, right away, and increasingly, how wrong this could be made to look, what someone might say about this ... but he had, at the ready, like repellent for the bugs that would ruin his picnic, the assurance, the
certainty
, the chin-jutting
fact
... that they hadn’t done anything wrong—you know, when you got down to it—all they’d done was have fun, and no one could tell him he wasn’t supposed to have fun, and if they did, if they could, then he had lost, he was a goner! ... So he could see in this woman’s laugh in the sun on the bow of that boat the
necessity ... the rightness
... of his independence. He’d said that from the start! And he knew—just imagine, he knew—he shouldn’t make her like him so much, but it hadn’t
got
to that point, past fun, not for him ... and to tell him to stop was like telling him to stop being himself, and anyway ... they hadn’t done anything wrong!

So imagine ... the second time they were together, he sensed, then he knew, with a terrible sinking thump in his gut, that it had all gone wrong—all his warnings to himself were true, or it seemed they were true: he’d been set up! And there were snoopers trying to say this was an
affair
, this woman had
spent the night
... but they were too cowardly to ask, they were sneaking around his house, trying to see ... he went out to find them, and he
told
them: they had it wrong!

But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—explain.

Not how it was. How could he?

And they printed what they thought, anyway.

Six columns across the front page.

And they forced him, at the peril of his life’s work, its purpose, to explain how he was with this person, who was just ... fun ... when all he wanted to say—he thought all he really should have to say—was he understood, probably better than they, what was the sin they imagined ... and that was not his—no! And if the sin he
did
commit, of escape, of courting the rush in his veins, was so awful ... well, couldn’t they see they were driving him to it? They were stripping him away. They were trying to make him small, they were tearing down with their dirty little imaginings everything he had built. What right had they to know the conditions of his marriage, the state of his own heart? Now his wife was under siege, a prisoner in their house ... he himself was running from a mob every time he tried to move ... his staff in Denver questioned him like a criminal, his Campaign Manager had flown away in a rage (after he heard about the Bimini trip) ... and Hart’s ideas could not be heard in this—this din, this ... was
unworthy
.

And they called
him
the sinner.

Imagine! ... What a stubborn man ... so convinced of himself, of his power to deny his rage, to show himself as he would be ... what kind of a man would try, still, to answer ...

“Did I do anything immoral? ... I absolutely did not.”

But matters had got beyond him, now. They changed the question.

On stage at the Waldorf, Hart said:

The phone calls were “no more than half a dozen or so. They, in a couple of cases, were returned phone calls that had been placed to me.” Hart said they talked about Donna “marshalling support” from her friends in the “entertainment industry.”

The boat trip to Bimini was Broadhurst’s idea—he had a boat of his own under repair there ... and “we were joined,” Hart said, “by two or three friends of his and a crew of three, as I recall, in open daylight—there was no effort to conceal anything.” The party was supposed to return that same day, but customs was closed. They stayed overnight, with the women (“the guests,” Hart called them) sleeping on the charter boat, and the men (“my friend and I”) moving over to sleep on Broadhurst’s boat.

It was only weeks later, Hart figured out the answer he should have given:

“None of your business.”

That was the
only
answer ... as it was for the
Herald
’s peepers in the alley. Afterward, he could have
kicked himself
for saying anything else. How could he have been so
stupid
?

Who’s the girl?

Did she stay in your house?

“It’s none of your damned business!”

But when the
Herald
asked him about the phone calls—What were they about?—Hart started a slide he could not stop. He answered:

“Nothing ...”

He didn’t think he could explain the truth.

The sad fact was: Gary Hart, master of the process ... who was so sure he saw through “the system” ... who’d spent the last six years trying to hold himself outside the bubble ... ruined himself, trying to play the game.

Once he tried to color the truth, to tiptoe around it, by then he was lost. He wasn’t right from the start—he wasn’t bold, clear ... or different. He looked like a squirming pol, lying to the press, and public.

Alas, that only came clear to him much later. That day, the snarl in his ears kept him from thinking. He was a hunted animal. His denials didn’t settle the pack one whit. ... The press found out while Hart spoke at the Waldorf: the boat on which he and Donna Rice had sailed ... was named
Monkey Business.

That sent the pack over the edge. It was feral. It was without thought. Hart was catching the dread and fatal affliction—he was ridiculous. Even callow wannabe-big-feet could smell blood on the forest floor. Someone was gonna ...
take Hart down
. Why not them?

There was an includible logic to the chase: Hart was on the run. They had to show him embattled, fighting the iron ring, or dodging the cameras. That just meant more cameras, more bodies straining in the scrum, more fights, more noise ... more extraordinary video-rodeo to get the tape of Hart fleeing ... which, of course, only made him more furtive, the hunted beast. Meanwhile, the print press had to have Hart
women
. If they didn’t get one ... some other reporter
would ... today
!

There was terrible pressure.

Every incident of Hart-chase got hotter ... blood pounding in the temples, bodies banging, elbows flying, pressure in the chest until it was hard to catch breath ... and every
instant
increased the visceral certainty that something huge, historic, horrible ...
was happening
! They had to
do something
! They had to have
at least a part
... if not, what were they doing? Who were they?

Before the nabobs’ luncheon broke up, the pack had Sweeney, the Press Secretary, pinned in a side chamber of the ballroom.

“... I know Mrs. Hart is interested in making a statement,” Sweeney was saying. He was holding his own Pearl-corder in front of his chest, to make sure he could prove it when he was misquoted.

“I know she is interested in traveling with her husband. ... No, she has an ear infection—I’m sorry, a sinus infection—that ... no, she is very supportive of her husband. She has communicated that to him. She will make a statement, fairly soon.”

KevinKEVINwhyzzinhetellwhathappenedintheHOUSE?RICE?WHATHAPPENEDFRIDAY?inlightofhisreputation! ...

“He doesn’t have to answer every detail about something he says is innocent ... he told the
Herald
the two women stayed at Mr. Broadhurst’s.”

Fiedler says he never mentioned Broadhurst!
...

Tom Fiedler, the big-foot for the
Herald
, was, at that moment, ten yards away, in his own press conference. He was rebutting Sweeney, rebutting Hart. (“Senator Hart is just not telling the truth. ...”) He was insisting the
Herald
had no ax to grind, and never tried to characterize Hart’s behavior—just reported the facts. (Fiedler would get better play than Sweeney on the networks that night.)