What It Takes (91 page)

Reporters ran with Fiedler’s poop to Sweeney—instant reaction! There were thirty or forty reporters shoving in on Sweeney now, and he felt for a chair behind him, like an animal trainer, always facing the beasts. But he had no whip! ... Sweeney stood on the chair.

“It’s fine to take a day or two off!” he was protesting.

Debby Orin from the
New York Post
was shouting: “Kevin! Why didn’t he—KEVIN! Why didn’t he go see his WIFE?”

“Well, flying to Colorado when he has to then be on the East Coast is illogical for someone who does not have a lot of time.”

Paul Taylor from
The Washington Post
raised his voice: “He had time to go to BIMINI!”

At that moment, Hart was leaving the Waldorf in a cops-and-robbers car chase. Mike Stratton, a loyal and longtime friend, had flown in from Denver to take over Advance. He was in charge of Hart’s escape. The video rangers had chase cars waiting. (No one knew where the sonofabitch was
staying
—prob’ly shacked up somewhere! They
had to tail him
—see?)

Stratton got Hart in a car and peeled away from the hotel. The campaign’s crack Advance man, Dennis Walto, pulled a car out behind ... and then he stopped—
across two lanes
. The video chase crews went nuts! They slammed on their brakes. They slammed on their horns. They started bouncing up over the curbs to get past Walto!

He’s gettin’ away!
...

Well, it
proved
the sonofabitch had something to hide.

In his car, Hart murmured: “Why do they have to chase me?” He couldn’t understand what they gained. He couldn’t understand why they had to hunt him down. It happened every time he tried to move now—like a bad movie, speeding and dodging, sneaking back to Gruson’s.

At one point, in the middle of a chase, Hart turned to Gruson with a look that mingled irony and sadness. “I just want to have some fun,” he said. “I’ve never had any fun ...”

Gruson replied: “Just wait until we get to the White House. I promise you we’ll have fun.”

Hart just gave him that blank boy’s stare. They were talking about different sorts of fun.

That was the night they called out for pizza from Troublesome Gulch. Lee had phoned a few friends—a couple of whom stopped and picked up the pies. Andrea had over a couple of her friends. Linda Spangler was still at the cabin. Trisha Cheroutas was back in the kitchen. Trippi’s wife, Katie, came out with their baby girl. It was ten for dinner—six cars on the drive.

When the pizza arrived, Trippi walked to the gate. He paused to chat with reporters. They gathered around him, then he asked them to wait, while he called over the Pinkerton man. “The guests are all gonna leave in an hour,” he told the guard.

“Okay, Mr. Trippi!” This was the most important assignment the Pinkerton man had ever had.

“So when I turn out the lights, nobody in or out, okay?”

“Nobody, Mr. Trippi!”

“About an hour, that’s it. We’re goin’ to bed.”

“Okay, Mr. Trippi!”

Joe said goodbye to the reporters. Lee and Trisha, watching through the window, saw him pointing down the dirt road for one of them, obviously giving directions.

It was dark when the cars at the cabin loaded up, and their lights flicked on. Of course, Katie and the baby had to be getting home. And Joe was at the wheel of their van. No one saw Lee Hart, lying on the backseat, holding the baby on top of her as they jounced down the earthen drive.

As it turned out, Lee didn’t need to hide. Most of the newsmen had abandoned the gate. Lee said to Joe: “What’d you tell them?”

“I told ’em there was a back entrance.”

They were laughing as Joe hit the highway and turned toward town. Lee sat up in the backseat—free at last!

She would sleep at a friend’s house in Denver that night, give a quick statement at the airport the next morning, then board a private jet to New Hampshire, to meet her man.

That was the night that Hart held a high-dollar funder in Manhattan—about two hundred souls. The white boys were fretting till the moment it began: What if they opened the doors and no one walked in?

They needn’t have worried. This was New York, after all, and Hart was the talk of the town. They had maybe two cancellations. Everybody else showed up, with their checks. The campaign raised $300,000. The crowd fed Hart’s certainty ... and his victimhood.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “if the candidate is struck down in battle ... or with a
knife in the back
...”

(Hart was now sure he’d been set up. The
Herald
stakeout was too convenient. There were people who could not afford to let him win.)

“Because the cause goes on! ... And the crusade continues! ... Anyone who wants to test my character is in for a surprise: I may bend, but I don’t break. I can be bruised and I can be battered, but I
will come back
... because this fight must go on.

“These are hard days, but we will prevail for one single reason—the truth will prevail. ...

“Fight on, and march on.”

Sweeney was just about cheering, like the rest of the crowd, his eyes locked on his man at the microphone ... when a woman walked up to him and murmured:

“Gary said I should talk to you. He told me they were coming after a lot of women he knew. He said I’m next.”

It turned out Hart was wrong about that. That was the night Paul Taylor got the word from his editor at
The Washington Post
: the Big Hound was checking out a woman who looked like the real thing.

Taylor’s marching orders: New Hampshire, tomorrow, with Hart. Stick close.

I
T WASN’T EVEN HARD
for Bradlee. He made one call, Wednesday morning. Not to the woman—Bradlee didn’t want to ask her. He called a friend, a fellow who’d know.
He
could ask—get a quick answer.

A couple of answers, actually. That’s all.

Was it an affair?

Was it recent?

Bradlee wasn’t the kind to split ethical hairs. But if it was, you know, seven
years
ago ... and now it was (in Bradlee-ese) “dormant” ... well, the Big Hound would likely just gnaw that in private.

Bradlee didn’t have any animus toward Hart—none that he could think of. Guy was kind of a friend!

Well, almost a friend ... or a guy Ben knew. Ben’s wife, Sally, had done a profile on him—hadn’t she? ... Come to think of it, she did sort of put the shaft to him. ...

“But there was no
anti
in me,” Bradlee would recall. “I just come to work with an empty bucket. And someone fills it up every day.

“That day, it happened to be Hart.”

Wednesday morning, at the Denver airport, Lee Hart told a half-dozen selected reporters that she loved and trusted her husband. She didn’t ask him about his weekend plans. She didn’t ask him about his phone calls. “In all honesty, if it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.”

So she approved of Gary’s weekend?

Lee said: “If I could have planned his weekend schedule, I think I would have scheduled it differently.”

Then she boarded a Learjet and flew to New Hampshire.

She had an idea.

Gary was doing a World Affairs Council speech at Dartmouth. Then he was headed for a showdown press conference—a full Ferraro. Hart had decided he would answer questions until ... until there were no more questions.

So Lee came up with the idea that Gary ought to
interrupt
the press conference ... and he’d say: “Excuse me. My wife’s upstairs. I just want to see her for a minute. Excuse me.” He’d leave ...

Then Lee would paint a
big shiner
on his eye—and Gary would go back to the press conference with this huge black eye, and say:

See? She loves me!

Then she’d come in and give him a big hug.

Trippi went so far as to call headquarters. “Look, this is gonna sound a little crazy. But this is what she wants, this is the idea ...”

“Uh, Joe ...” said the white boys on the squawk box in Denver, “that’s a picture that’s gonna be around for a long time.”

“Yeah, but ...”

“You know, for years ...”

“Yeah, I know. Okay.”

“Years and years ...”

“Okay, forget it.”

Anyway, schtick wasn’t Hart’s thing—and there wasn’t time. When he heard Lee was in the campus hotel, Gary went up to the room before the press conference. He walked in with a half-sigh, without fuss, like a man getting home from a hard day at work.

Downstairs in the press conference room, they were fighting—for position and for dominance. This was their moment!

The room should have held eighty to a hundred, but the pack was two hundred strong ... and, of course, there were tripods, cables, long lenses banging shoulders and skulls of the newsmen nearby, boom mikes poking crazily toward the front of the room, lights ablaze on spindly poles or burning hot white on the shoulders of the cameramen. It had to be a hundred degrees. Sunlight pouring down through the windows didn’t help. People in smelly suits, sweating, waiting ... like a New York summer subway, stuck in the tunnel ...
C’MON! ... Whatsa HOLDUP?

When Hart walked in (alone—Lee stayed upstairs), the photographers surged. Stratton and Walto, at the head of the room, had to shove them back, leaning and straining. Stratton thought
they’re gonna eat him
—he thought of Custer. ... Hart felt the physical threat of the pack. He’d asked for no rostrum—nothing between him and them. But this was too close. Their bodies were too near—their faces were in his face.

He faced them, and he said:

“As I’ve made clear to everyone, I have nothing to hide. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve made a serious mistake, in fact. I regret those very much, not just for myself, but for all of those involved, the individuals who have been, I think, unfairly maligned. I think of my own family first of all. And for my supporters ...”

Hart ticked off his charges against the
Herald
reporters: they lied about confronting him—he confronted them. They reported he “walked aimlessly” in his neighborhood—he was tracking them down. They missed his comings and goings, in broad daylight. He answered their questions for twenty or thirty minutes, that Saturday night—he didn’t have to. He denied their charges—still, they rushed those charges into print. Later, Bill Broadhurst managed to track down the
Herald
team at a hotel, and he offered them a chance to talk, in his house, with his two houseguests present ... but the
Herald
chose instead to file a quick Sunday story.

“Finally, let me say a word about my wife, Lee: she has been, if anything, under more stress because of these events of the last few days than I have. And she continues to astonish me with her strength and her courage. This is, needless to say, not a pleasant thing for anyone. Not for me. Not for our children. But particularly, not for her. She has said that we have been married for twenty-eight years. I hope we’re married twenty-eight more—if that works out, and I think it will. Over that twenty-eight years, I have to tell you, of the people I have met in the world, friends that I have made, this is the most extraordinary human being I have ever had the pleasure of knowing—not simply as a wife, but as a human being. She is here today and will be with us on the campaign trail.”

Then Hart turned his chin to the questions.

Doesn’t this raise doubts about your judgment?

Yes, Hart said, but judgment was more than one weekend. Judgment, like character, had to take into account thousands of decisions over fifteen years of political leadership.

You complain about the reporters
—
but you wouldn’t let them talk to the woman in your house.

Right, Hart said. And that was a judgment. There were three people in his house, none of whom had given him permission to involve them in a press imbroglio.

Everybody’s heard the rumors about you. Haven’t there been other times, with other women ... just like this?

No, Hart said, though he’d had many women friends.

So why do so many believe the stories about you?

Goes with the territory. He and Lee had been open about their separations. But if he did mean to have an affair with this young woman—he’d written spy novels, he wasn’t stupid—he wouldn’t have done it like this.

Of course, they didn’t believe
that
... they grilled him on the phone calls, the boat trip, the ins and outs of Saturday, the alley, the front door, the car, the garage ...

Hart’s answers were quick and sure. But they didn’t take the steam out of the room. Hart was determined to do this—as long as it took. But it came clear, now, he would
never
answer: they didn’t believe the answers, or they didn’t want to. It wasn’t about that Friday night, or even about Donna Rice. It was just him—anything they could get on him.

Why were you going to jetset parties?

Would you take a lie-detector test?

Didn’t you say, “I love danger”?

(“I don’t love it that much,” Hart said.)

His mind was working on every level—shocking clarity ... like he saw himself from the ceiling, a figure surrounded, but firm against the mass focused on him ... at the same time his lawyer-brain raced to the end of their questions while their mouths still labored on set-up and premise ... at the same time, within, he worked his will on his eyes and voice—keep them steady!

He watched their faces.
They
were out of control. They were past reason. This
thing
... had ahold of them. The look in their eyes as they stared at him—it was
anger
.

It was
rage
!

What had he done to them?

Now it had got to
character
—i.e., anything they could get. Why? Why now? His eyes found Jack Germond, searched for David Broder—where was Witcover? Shogan? ... He’d known those guys—they’d known
him
—fifteen years, since he started as a young volunteer for McGovern. Till now—a candidate for President of the United States. Fifteen years! Germond and Jules wrote a
book
with him in it. They never called him a liar before. They didn’t see him as a “bad character” fifteen years ago, or ten, or five.