All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (14 page)

The following week—exactly fourteen days after the announcement, to be precise—was when Fiedler decided to weigh in. He’d been on the plane, too, and he was troubled. The dinosaurs on the trail, the ones who started as copy boys and learned to write on the job, were mostly “know it when you see it” types—as in, you know a story when you see one, and you know something’s horseshit when it’s horseshit, and you don’t need a graduate seminar to figure it out. But Fiedler, who was forty-one at the time, was one of these younger, more professional reporters—the kind who learned the business in a classroom and called himself a “journalist.” Fiedler was a guy who thought there should be rules about when something was news and when it wasn’t, codes of ethics that governed the behavior of responsible and objective journalists, just as there were in any licensed profession. And he thought it raised some serious issues, this trafficking in sheer rumor about Hart’s sex life.

Specifically, Fiedler objected to the kind of innuendo that bled through the
New York Post
’s piece: “whispers” and “rumors” and “wagging tongues.” If you have the evidence, then by all means produce it, Fiedler thought. But it didn’t seem ethical for reporters to pass along gossip to their readers like some high school cheerleader giggling with her friends.

Fiedler’s piece on April 27 had run under the headline
SEX LIVES BECOME AN ISSUE FOR PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS
. The piece was a classic of the “news analysis” genre that enabled daily reporters to stray, though not very far, from the constraints of your basic news story. Fiedler opened with an anecdote about Hart wandering to the back of the plane during the announcement tour, to face the reporters who were demanding he refute the rumors about affairs. “Anybody want to talk about ideas?” Hart had asked them, sardonically. (They didn’t.)

“This vignette may tell us something about Gary Hart, a man with an opaque past,” Fiedler wrote. He went on to list a series of
“real and serious” questions related to media ethics that he felt the Hart case had raised:

As was (and is) the style with such news analysis pieces, Fiedler didn’t actually endeavor to answer these questions. “In a harsh light, the media reports themselves are rumor mongering, pure and simple,” he wrote. And yet, he consulted with some professors who suggested that now that such rumors were “out there,” reporters had a duty, really, to investigate them. “You aren’t protecting the people of Miami by refusing to report the rumor,” Bruce Swain, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, assured Fiedler. The analysis ended with a quote from Hart himself. “No one has suggested what you do about vague, unfounded, and unproved rumors,” Hart said in an interview. “I think people are going to get tired of the question.”

Fiedler couldn’t have known that his anodyne analysis of recent events would, in itself, become a critical part of those events, another step down in the cascade that was carrying political journalism into dark and unexplored waters. When the woman who refused to identify herself called him at his desk on the twenty-seventh, having just read the piece, she said, “Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine,” according to the account Fiedler and his colleagues later wrote. “We don’t need another president who lies like that.”

Fiedler described himself as being somewhat indignant at the caller’s “mocking” tone. This was the presidency they were talking about, after all, and a man’s career to boot. He said he advised his
tipster to sleep on it and call back in the morning if she had any useful information. When she called back the next morning, at 10:30, her tone was more serious. She said she was a “liberal Democrat,” but she was sickened by a candidate who would say one thing and then so blatantly do another. She and Fiedler talked for ninety minutes, during which the caller described to Fiedler the party aboard the chartered boat at Turnberry Isle, her friend’s crush on Hart, the way her friend had flashed around the pictures she had taken of the two of them together. She did not name Donna Rice.

Then she said there were phone calls. Somehow, she knew from where they had been placed—Georgia, Alabama, Kansas—and precisely when. She claimed that Hart had invited her friend to visit him in Washington, and her friend was going to see him that Friday night. “Maybe you could fly to Washington,” the anonymous caller helpfully suggested, “and get the seat next to her?” She said she’d get him the flight information if she could.

For decades after Fiedler received that call, just about everyone close to the events of that week—and everyone who wrote about them later—assumed that the caller was Lynn Armandt, the girlfriend Rice brought along on
Monkey Business
. This was a logical deduction, since it was Armandt who later profited from the photos taken aboard the boat, which the caller offered to sell. When I asked Fiedler about this, however, he told me that while he would continue to protect the identity of his source, which he had learned soon after the fact and had kept secret for twenty-six years, he was willing to say flatly that it was
not
Armandt. Fiedler volunteered that he thought Rice knew who the tipster really was.

When I spoke to Rice a few months after that, during the first of two long conversations, she told me that she had never figured out with any certainty who it was that had set all of this in motion back in 1987. But she had come to believe that Armandt was in cahoots with another friend of theirs in Miami—a woman named Dana Weems—who had somehow escaped notice in contemporary
accounts of the scandal. Rice had talked to both Armandt and Weems about her dalliance with Hart, and she had shown them the photos taken at Bimini.

Dana Weems wasn’t especially hard to find in the age of Google. A clothing designer who had done some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com, based in Hollywood, Florida. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I introduced myself and told her I was writing a book about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.

“Oh my God,” she said. There followed a long pause.

“Did you make that call to the
Herald
, Dana?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” Weems said with a sigh. “That was me.”

She then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems’s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle, which is how the three women met. Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, and even now, through the phone line and all the intervening years, the jealousy she felt for Rice was hard to miss. Weems told me Rice wasn’t nearly as successful a model as she was, that Rice was an artificial beauty who was “Okay for commercials, I guess.” Weems recalled going aboard
Monkey Business
on that last weekend of March for the impromptu party that Hart was at, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on
her
, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she had wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled …

But Donna! Donna had no standards, is how Weems remembered it. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House. After that weekend, Donna wouldn’t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest! It all made Dana Weems sick to her stomach—especially this idea of Hart getting away with it and becoming president. “What an idiot you are!” Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. “You’re gonna want to run the country? You moron!”

And so when Weems read Fiedler’s April 27 story in the
Herald
, she decided to make the call, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,” she told me. It was Armandt’s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos Rice had lent her, and that’s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn’t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn’t talked to either woman—Rice or Armandt—since shortly after the scandal. She lived alone and was confined to a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised that her secret had lasted until now.

“I’m sorry to ruin his life,” she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. “I was young. I didn’t know it would be that way.”

After he talked to Weems, Fiedler spent the next few days checking the dates she had given him against Hart’s schedule during the previous weeks. It all matched up. He was more dubious about the supposed rendezvous that coming Friday, because Hart was scheduled to be in Kentucky for a Derby party that weekend. But on Friday, not having heard back from his source and “tormented” by the silence, Fiedler called Hart’s headquarters again and found out that the Kentucky event had been scrubbed; Hart would instead be returning to his townhouse on Capitol Hill. He planned to work on that big economics speech he was to deliver in New York the following Tuesday, one of the last major bricks in his wall of ambitious policy ideas. As fate would have it, his audience would be the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

Fiedler later wrote that what crossed his mind at that moment was the image of a slot machine, with all of the jackpot signs suddenly lining up. That Friday afternoon, he conferred with his editors, who decided that the information he had was enough to go on. They summoned Jim McGee, the paper’s top investigative reporter, into an office at about 5 p.m., and a few minutes later McGee ran out
of the building with nothing but his wallet and the clothes he was wearing, and hailed the first cab he saw. In those days before TSA security checks, he just did make it onto one of the last two nonstop flights bound for Washington.

Fiedler stayed behind for the time being. He worked his phone in the
Herald
newsroom, trying unsuccessfully to dig up an address for Hart’s Washington townhouse. He was still at it when he happened to get a call from Ken Klein, the press secretary for Bob Graham, Florida’s junior senator. Klein, as it turned out, knew exactly where Hart’s townhouse was, because Graham’s chief of staff rented the basement. That’s the kind of reporter Tom Fiedler was—the kind who constantly seemed to be lucking into breaks in a story, mostly because he never for a minute stopped hunting for them.

In some ways, despite his passing consideration of all the deeper questions related to rumor and privacy, Fiedler was a very different kind of reporter from E. J. Dionne, who gravitated toward philosophical questions more than he did breaking news, and who liked to get lost in the esoteric undercurrents of a subject. Soft-spoken and methodical, with a mop of brown curls, Fiedler could seem unimposing, or even meek; his colleagues compared him, not unkindly, to Clark Kent. But to write Fiedler off as some Hollywood-cast pipsqueak would have been a gross underestimation. Fiedler was a bulldog, possessed of the quiet intensity and unflagging persistence one might expect from a descendant of the Puritan leader John Winthrop. Had things gone a different way, he would have been just as happy covering cops or corporate takeovers as he was politicians; the point of the job, for Fiedler, was to find out whatever it was they didn’t want you to know.

In fact, he had set out to become, of all things, a boating writer. Or rather, that had seemed the most sensible path after growing up on Cape Cod and attending the Merchant Marine Academy, whose graduates were promised a navigable route around combat assignments in Vietnam. The life of a merchant marine had to be served at sea, though, whereas journalism seemed like a perfectly manageable, land-bound existence for a new husband and father. So Fiedler
went to graduate school at Boston University and then joined the
Sun-Sentinel
in Orlando, where he was immediately assigned to the paper’s brand-new “Mickey desk,” covering Disney World.

Then, in 1972, the paper’s editors, short of reporters to cover the competitive Democratic primary in the state, sent Fiedler out to follow the peripheral candidacy of George Wallace. (It was at that point that Fiedler first met Hart, at a McGovern news conference, though Hart would never have remembered an isolated encounter with a small-time reporter like that.) Wallace went on to win the Florida primary, and suddenly—here was that irrepressible luck again—Fiedler woke up to find that he had gained something of a reputation as a fine political writer. The
Herald
hired him away, shipping him out first to its West Palm Beach bureau, and then, after the 1976 campaign, sending him to Washington as a junior member of its well-staffed bureau there. Doggedly and with understated ambition, Fiedler kept climbing the ladder.

By 1987, Fiedler hadn’t quite joined the exclusive cadre of bigfoot reporters from larger regional papers—like Tom Oliphant at
The Boston Globe
, or Larry Eichel at
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, or Carl Leubsdorf at
The Dallas Morning
News—whom any presidential candidate had to know and cultivate. But he was a known presence on the campaign trail, capable of landing major interviews and writing a story to which the rest of the media would have to pay attention. And when it came to the questions he had raised in his piece, Fiedler himself never had any doubt, not for a second, that Hart’s marital infidelity, if it could be substantiated, was a story. Nor, it seems, did anyone else at the
Herald
, where the question of newsworthiness was raised but quickly dispatched. In the reconstruction of how the story unfolded that Fiedler and his colleagues at the paper later published, there is not a single mention of any debate about whether a candidate’s private life merited investigation.