All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (23 page)

And in those first hours of his self-imposed isolation, Dixon made a promise to himself—that he would never again set foot in Washington, a city where a man of Gary Hart’s integrity could be effectively executed for nothing but the most trivial transgressions, just for sport. And in all the years that followed, despite the steady flow of invitations to weddings and funerals and even the inauguration of his friend and legal associate Barack Obama, Bill Dixon never broke that vow.

While Fiedler sparred with Koppel on one channel and Carson bitingly ridiculed Hart on the other, the phone rang in Paul Taylor’s Manhattan hotel room. The
Post
’s political editor, Ann Devroy, was on the line, and filled in her star reporter on the strange things that had been transpiring back in Washington.

In the days after the
Herald
broke its story, the
Post
, like other
major papers, had been deluged with anonymous tips of all kinds. One stood out. It was an envelope that contained a private investigator’s report. Someone had hired the investigator to tail Hart. And so, on a Saturday in December 1986, days after Hart and Doug Wilson returned from Moscow, the private eye had followed Hart as he gave the Democratic response to Reagan’s weekly radio address in a Virginia studio, then to his townhouse and a bookstore, and then finally to the home of a woman who was a well-known lobbyist in town. Hart had apparently spent the night with this woman, who was rumored to have been involved with him on and off for many years, going back to his separations from Lee.

Who sent the envelope, or why, wasn’t known. (Bizarrely, Dixon had heard, and campaign aides always believed, that one of Hart’s colleagues in the Senate, Maryland’s Joe Tydings, had hired the investigator because he feared that Hart was sleeping with his then wife, who was a close friend of Lee’s and worked for her on the campaign. Tydings denied it at the time.) But it was exactly what editors at the
Post
needed in order to reestablish the rightful order of things—the break that might transfer ownership of the entire story over to the nation’s most storied political paper. Of course Bradlee knew the woman in the photos personally (or at least he knew someone who knew her), and he even volunteered to confront her and get the truth. The
Post
was waiting on Bradlee’s confirmation, and in the meantime Devroy wanted to make sure that Taylor was staying close to Hart, in case he needed to get a quick response from the candidate.

As it happened, Hart had decided to finally confront the press at a news conference the following afternoon, Wednesday, at a hotel in New Hampshire, on the Dartmouth campus—an event he hoped might put the whole affair to rest and allow him to go on campaigning. Taylor arrived in New Hampshire, as he later put it, in an “uncharitable frame of mind” toward the candidate, having overcome whatever qualms he had once had about delving into Hart’s personal life. Taylor had been “brooding” on Hart’s speech in New York, and he was angry about it. Here Hart might have explained himself, been contrite, shown some humility and candor. But
instead, he had chastised the media like you might a kindergarten class, and he had claimed the moral high ground despite the obvious fact—at least it was obvious to Taylor and the other reporters—that he had lied about having sex with Rice. As far as Taylor was concerned, he would later recount in his book, “Hart’s protestations that the relationship was strictly platonic were instantly rendered laughable” once the news about Bimini and
Monkey Business
had come out. “The only question was how long it would take him to realize it.”

You can imagine that some of Taylor’s irritation at the speech was probably residual, too. Even in his moment of disgrace, Hart had somehow managed to affect exactly the condescending tone that had so stung Taylor when he had pressed Hart about endorsements on the tarmac in Maryland months earlier. Once again, Hart’s manner suggested that he alone saw the bigger picture but was being forced to endure the smallness of shallow minds.

But it’s also not hard for a fellow reporter, looking back through the lens of time, to discern another motive, aside from his own irritation, that Taylor might have had for confronting Hart that Wednesday afternoon at Dartmouth. After talking to Devroy, Taylor had to have sensed that he was on the cusp of a huge story—one that would redeem his paper and might, at the same time, make him more famous than Fiedler had suddenly become. But as it stood, Taylor’s impending scoop (if the private investigator’s finding could be verified) amounted to little more than a crass story about illicit sex, which was exactly the kind of thing for which he did not imagine himself becoming known. All it would prove was that Hart had been involved with a woman who was not his wife. Hart had never actually claimed unwavering fidelity to Lee—all he had said was that they had been separated and that he wouldn’t respond to rumors—and, this being 1987, no one had even considered asking him directly whether he had ever been a disloyal husband.

If Hart could be cornered into denying publicly that he had
ever
stepped out on his wife, however, then the issue of the investigator’s report would become much weightier than mere sex. Then Hart would be exposed as a liar and a hypocrite, someone who claimed
to hold himself to a “high moral standard” even as he blatantly deceived the press and the public about his “womanizing.” That would make him a man of shoddy character whose presidency could imperil the country, just as Nixon’s had. If you were already writing that story in your head, as Taylor surely was when he arrived in New Hampshire that afternoon, the difference was clear. A story about Hart having an affair was little more than titillating. But a story that proved he had baldly lied about that same affair could be construed as serious journalism. It was, arguably, a public service.

And so that is precisely what Paul Taylor set out to do, in a way that would shock the political world and forever shift the boundaries of campaign journalism, every bit as much as the
Herald
had.

If the scene in New York had disoriented Hart, then New Hampshire was like some planet with zero gravity, where nothing behaved according to the natural and immutable laws of politics. Actually, the insanity had begun at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, Wednesday morning, even before they got off the ground, when Mike Stratton, who had now hired a group of Pinkerton guards to protect the candidate, had to drive out onto the tarmac to avoid the bevy of photographers and reporters in the terminal; somehow they had learned of the flight Hart was taking and were preparing to board it, like raging barbarians brandishing cardboard tickets instead of swords. Upon boarding the plane with Hart, Stratton, dressed in a suit and tie and possessed of an air of authority, suggested to a flight attendant, with some urgency, that it might be about time to depart. The agent assumed, reasonably enough, that Stratton and his rented security retinue were Secret Service agents (in fact, it was too early in the campaign for Hart to have received federal protection, and he would have resisted it in any event), and she immediately relayed Stratton’s message to the pilot, who abruptly took the plane up while the stranded reporters watched with horror from the gate.

By the time they landed in Manchester an hour later, the FBI was waiting to question Stratton, who stood accused of having impersonated a federal agent. The investigation, in fact, would linger on
for many months, tormenting Stratton, until federal authorities finally decided not to charge him. (Among those who spoke to FBI agents on his behalf was Richard Ben Cramer, who was along for the ride and witnessed the incident. Cramer kept the entire episode out of his book, for fear that, even years later, the government might not be finished with Stratton and would use the account against him.)

Up to then, in the seventy-two hours since the
Herald
story had first come spilling out of fax machines all over the country, there had been, in effect, two distinct press corps following the story: the campaign reporters, who were now consumed with all aspects of Hart’s character but who otherwise observed the general rules of decency, and the tabloid press, who cared not a whit about politics but whose photographers flung themselves onto windshields, heedless in their pursuit of the salable shot. Idyllic little New Hampshire was the place where the two media strains finally merged into a single organism. The paparazzi and the
Current Affair
types would do anything to get near Hart—leap over bushes, hop in front of oncoming cars, elbow and claw their way into the center of the swarm. But this time the stunned political reporters and network crews weren’t about to get shoved aside; this was
their
story, and New Hampshire was their turf.

Adding to the mayhem was the fact that, for the first time, all these TV guys had brand-new handheld cameras that carried videotape instead of film, and didn’t have to be plugged into a portable deck or require constant tape changing, which meant the cameramen could sprint or leap or hunker down in pursuit of their target. A press horde twice the size of what anyone in politics expected was now completely out of control, laying siege to ordinary voters and to each other, trampling any patch of land that lay between them and the candidate.

In subsequent years, the advance staff on a major political campaign would be trained to behave almost like a mobile security force, similar to the entourage that envelops a rapper or sports hero in public. They would learn to enforce the kind of distance once reserved only for presidents and Hollywood starlets. But in New Hampshire in 1987, at the moment when political media became
subsumed into some larger cultural phenomenon, it was just Stratton and Shore and Sweeney, all uncommonly peaceful souls, trying in vain to hold off a human crush that seemed indifferent to their desperate pleas for calm. Hart wanted to shake hands and hold conversations with the voters who came out to see him; his strategy, as he would later describe it, was to “keep going, keep going, keep going.” But it was like trying to read a book while the plane you were on was crash-landing. He couldn’t hear, or move, or think.

The pack only got more frenzied after word spread that Lee had arrived. Trippi had smuggled her out of Troublesome Gulch under cover of darkness Tuesday night, by driving his wife and baby daughter down the gravel drive and past the waiting horde at the gate—with Lee lying on the floor, under the little girl’s feet. That’s how the wife of the nation’s leading presidential candidate came to be at the Denver airport the next morning, boarding a plane to New Hampshire, where she finally gave a statement to a local reporter. “I know Gary better than anyone else, and when Gary said nothing happened, nothing happened,” Lee said. “If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.” She added a broadside against the
Herald
for its “tremendous breach of journalistic ethics.”

This was about as unambiguous a statement of support as any wife could have given, short of vowing to avenge her husband by killing his enemies with her bare hands, but the media wasn’t about to take it at face value. As Taylor wrote after the fact: “The words were brave, but Lee’s face, still swollen from the infection, was a picture of pain and betrayal.”

The Harts reunited upstairs at the Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth campus, not long before the news conference that was to be held downstairs. Trippi, who had made the trip east with the candidate’s wife, would recall that Lee arrived to find her husband inside a suite, sullen and wearied. “Hi, babe,” he sighed, before she closed the door behind her, shutting the staff outside. Lee wanted to take the stage with Hart, even make a joke of the whole controversy by painting a fake black eye on him with a marker, but Hart insisted on facing the press alone. He was adamant that Lee shouldn’t act as some stage prop, planted at his side to vouch for his rectitude.

The plan for the news conference, like everything else about the New Hampshire trip, was hopelessly quaint, further demonstrating that Hart’s campaign aides, the best in the business, hadn’t even begun to acclimate to the allegorical rabbit hole they’d fallen into. Rather than put Hart on some kind of ballroom dais, above the assembled press and removed from them, Stratton and Sweeney had situated him on the floor of a small event space with no protective zone at all, so that the reporters were almost literally on top of him. (At one point, Stratton, in desperation, got down on all fours and tried to make himself a human buffer, so Hart could stand his ground.) With more than a hundred reporters and photographers packed into the room, and more than a dozen cameras rolling under white-hot klieg lights, the temperature soared to an almost unbearable level. Hart was on his heels, dripping sweat, penned in on all sides. He looked less like a statesman than a Roman prisoner in flight from the lions.

Nonetheless, for twenty minutes or so, Hart was masterful. He opened his remarks by calling Lee “the most extraordinary human being I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.” Then he parried question after question deftly. When the reporters demanded to know whether Hart’s judgment had been called into question by all of this, Hart allowed that it had, but he told them that a man’s judgment had to be measured over fifteen years in public life, not by a single weekend. When they wanted to know why these stories about his womanizing persisted and were believed, Hart—rather than advising the reporters to look in the mirror, which he might fairly have done—calmly explained, instead, that he had friends who were women, and that he and Lee had been up-front about their separations. He’d written spy novels, Hart noted wryly, eyebrows dancing, and if he were going to have a secret affair, he’d have done a better job of it.

Would Hart take a lie detector test? one reporter asked. No, Hart replied easily and quickly—he thought the voters were a pretty good lie detector test. As Cramer later described Hart in this moment, “his mind was working on every level” and with “shocking clarity.”
Hart saw what he took to be the rage in his inquisitors’ faces, their determination to punish him for this character flaw he had exhibited, but even with their breath and the odor of sweat in his face, he retained his evenness. He knew what they were going to ask before they asked it. He could see around the corner once again.