All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (11 page)

For his part, Dionne felt conflicted about Hart. As a fairly traditional Northeastern liberal, Dionne was put off by Hart’s larger argument against orthodoxies and interest groups, particularly the way he seemed ready to jettison Labor in the name of some new economic order. He resented Hart’s famous quote from his 1974 Senate campaign, when
The Washington Post
’s David Broder had posited to Hart that traditional liberalism was about to be vindicated by the election of a new class of young Democrats. “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” Hart said then—a comment for which a lot of liberals, Humphrey among them, would have trouble forgiving him.

In a sense, Dionne and Hart personified the geographic rift in the party—between the old urban centers, with their New Deal ideology and their reliance on industrial and political machines, and the emerging Western and Southern states, where Democrats were more independent-minded and more hopeful about the new economy. It was a divide that would preoccupy the party for much of the next decade and beyond, as “New Democrats” and old ones sought to control the agenda.

And yet Dionne was thoughtful enough to accept the premise that both government and the party were in dire need of modernization. And he genuinely admired Hart, with whom he shared a bookish and theological bent. “There was a part of him I found utterly engaging and totally comprehensible,” Dionne told me. Hart ranked right up there in sheer brilliance with the Harvard and Oxford professors Dionne had known—and he was funny, too, in a mischievous and endearing way. Dionne kept asking Hart, for instance, about the mystery novel he had cowritten with a Republican colleague in the Senate, William Cohen. (It was titled, perhaps ironically given all the questions about Hart’s past,
The Double Man
.) But every time
Dionne raised a passage from the book, Hart would shut him down with that flashing of the eyebrows and a wry: “Oh, Cohen wrote that.” Dionne soon realized that Hart was playing with him and would never own up to having written a word of the book, and after a while it became a comic routine between them.

However much Dionne may have been a man of ideas, he counted himself among a generation of reporters who had been heavily influenced—whether they were scholarly enough to know it or not—by the work of Erik Erikson. The German-born psychologist, who immigrated to the United States when the Nazis came to power and ended up on Harvard’s faculty, is most famous for having pioneered the concept of “identity”—and what he called the “identity crisis”—in the 1950s and 1960s. “If Teddy White can be credited with opening the back room of American politics to the public view,” Dionne said, “a writer like Erik Erikson could be credited for opening the back room of the psyche.”

The most thoughtful works of what came to be known as the New Journalism, books as varied as Garry Wills’s
Nixon Agonistes
and Hunter S. Thompson’s
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
, had this in common: unlike White’s work, which dwelled on the surface of the political process, they burrowed deeply and relentlessly into the subconscious of their subjects, playing psychoanalyst to politicians, sifting through childhoods or scrutinizing mannerisms for the most tenuous clues to their underlying motives and insecurities. What good was it to know a candidate’s stated positions if he had learned from a young age to dissemble or evade? What was the point of dissecting his agenda if he didn’t have the strength of character to follow through?

Dionne found himself fascinated by the obvious tension in Hart’s upbringing and education. He felt certain that if you could understand what had propelled the journey from Ottawa and Bethany College to Yale and Washington, the journey from Hartpence to Hart, then you could understand the inner turmoil that made Hart so confusing a character. “I was trying to figure out, What does it mean to be an existential politician?” Dionne would recall. This is a word that younger intellectuals had been throwing around since
the early sixties, when Norman Mailer used it to describe John Kennedy, and while it had an erudite ring to it, Dionne still had some trouble defining it a quarter century later. An existential politician, Dionne told me, is “someone who is detached from traditional forms of faith, whether in God or in the political system, but nonetheless feels an obligation to act, whether the faith exists or not. And I think that Hart had some of that in him.”

It was, for me, a sort of time-bending experience to hear Dionne describe his methodology, or what he could remember of it, more than twenty-five years later—the story behind the famous story that had been written while I was still a freshman in college. I could see myself doing all of the same things the young Dionne had done, the things that anyone writing for an elite, intellectual magazine would have tried to do. Dionne knocked around Ottawa, an explorer in a strange land, searching for the significance of Hart’s origins. He spent a night in southern Illinois engrossed in deep, esoteric discussions with Hart’s favorite philosophy professor from Bethany, Prescott Johnson, whom Hart would always credit with having had a profound effect on his life.

Industriously, Dionne spent many hours delving into the works of some of Hart’s favorite writers and philosophers—Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Plato. “The cave!” Hart exclaimed, laughing, when Dionne brought up Plato’s famous concept in one of their conversations. “Let’s don’t start that. That ain’t going to play in Iowa.” At one point during their travels together, Hart gave Dionne a copy of one of his Kierkegaard texts, a gesture made, you can imagine, as much in frustration as in friendship. (As in: Here, read it for yourself if you’re so damn interested, and stop pestering me.) Dionne held on to the book
—Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing—
for all the years after.

At his first of two interviews with Hart, aboard a small plane en route from Austin to Denver, Dionne posed precisely the question I might have posed, too, though maybe not as artfully. “Why do
you
think that
we
think you’re weird?” he asked. Note the use of the word “we,” rather than “they,” with its implication that it wasn’t just a few cranky journalists who found Hart impossibly strange, but
everyone, Dionne included. Note how the question was designed to elicit exactly the kind of response Hart provided, which was to ratify its basic premise. “Please,” Hart replied, “keep your mind open to the possibility that I’m not weird.” That, of course, became Dionne’s lead.

In that interview and in the subsequent one, in the café of a Howard Johnson’s hotel in New Hampshire, Hart went to heroic lengths to take on and conquer, once and for all, questions about his temperament and what urban reporters considered his exotic upbringing. Again and again, Dionne, surrounded by the imposing stacks of paper that represented his atlas of Hart’s intellectual pilgrimage, threw Hart’s own past quotes back at him, like the time in 1972 when, as a thirty-five-year-old operative attracting all kinds of media attention, Hart had mischievously said of himself: “I never reveal who I really am.”

“Do you want a record kept of everything you’ve ever said in your life to anybody and have it thrown back at you fifteen years later?” Hart demanded. “My problem is that I’ve revealed too much about myself.

“See, I think you’ve got the coin reversed,” Hart told Dionne. “I think I’m the healthy one. I think you ought to be asking all those other guys who have done nothing but hold public office and have no other sides to their personalities: Why they don’t write novels and why they don’t read Kierkegaard? Why they don’t broaden themselves out? Why is it that somebody like me is thought the oddball?”

Inevitably, by the end of the second interview, Hart was growing testy and impatient. Questioned yet again about his childhood among the Nazarenes, Hart warned Dionne, “I’m going to answer about three more of these, and then I’m not going to answer any more. I was thirteen at the time. It’s nonsense. Who cares what Ronald Reagan was thinking when he was thirteen? Or Joe Biden?

“My struggle was with the institution,” Hart said of the church, trying yet again to be understood. “Thomas Jefferson had that struggle, and so have more than half or more of the thoughtful people in the world. It’s not unique to me. And is it something that plagues me today? No. I am very normal and very healthy.”

Then Hart heard his own words echo, saw Dionne writing in his notebook, and laughed. He laughed heartily, because the conversation seemed absurd, and because he was beginning to realize he could win neither by staying silent nor by trying to explain himself—a conundrum that would grow more pronounced in the weeks ahead. “I can see this,” Hart said, imagining out loud the finished story Dionne would write. “ ‘Hart insists that he is very normal. In a wide-ranging and lengthy interview, Hart insists that he is not weird.’ ”

Dionne never had any reservation about grilling Hart on his well-known weirdness, because the issue was out there already; it was all anyone talked about—which is to say, it was all other reporters were talking about on the bus or on TV. It was the main thing, Dionne assumed, that people wanted to know about Hart, and the reason Hart had granted him access in the first place.

In this sense, Dionne was offering what would become, in the ensuing years, the standard rationale for the slew of candidate profiles revolving around psychotherapy and personal behavior, rather than ideas and worldviews. (I myself would employ the same rationale on many occasions.) It wasn’t really up to the writer to decide what questions were relevant. The conversation “out there” had already done that, and all the poor writer could do was to shake his head sadly and try to bring some clarity to it. Surely politics would be better if we could all just refocus the debate on the things that
really mattered
, but it never seemed to be the journalist’s job to do the refocusing. The given issues were the given issues, in the same way that rivers just flow the way they flow, and all the helpless reporter could do was selflessly hurl himself into the murky current and try to help his readers navigate their way through.

What did bother Dionne, though, was the far more unseemly question of Hart’s marital fidelity. Like other Washington insiders, he had long assumed that Hart was sleeping around. “Oh, everybody knew who Gary Hart was,” Dionne told me. Asking him about it was something else. Dionne may have fancied himself something of an amateur Erikson, but he was not a trivial guy; he didn’t earn a Ph.D. and survive Beirut only to come home and join the Hollywood
paparazzi. He was well aware that no one in his position had ever before pestered a presidential candidate about rumored affairs, let alone written a major piece about it. But he was also well aware that the rumblings about Hart’s sex life were out there, too. And if he ignored them altogether, then his colleagues might find him too credulous. His definitive profile might be derided as anything but.

“I didn’t want to focus on his sex life,” Dionne recalled when we talked. “I also did not want to write a naïve profile that acted as if I did not know this was potentially an issue. I always had the suspicion that this was the campaign in which it would blow up. And so my solution, as someone who really does not like candidates’ sex lives being central to the dialogue, was to ask him about it in the interview. I probably asked three or four questions. I felt it should be there.”

And so Dionne raised the issue during the second and final interview. Going back to the well of Hart’s voluminous interviews as a younger man, Dionne reminded him of a painful learning experience. Back in 1972, the journalist Sally Quinn had come to interview Hart for a profile, and Hart, feeling either flirtatious or unnerved or a little of both, gave her an inexplicably dumb quote. “I have almost no personal life at all—I lead a completely political existence,” Hart had said then. “If one party doesn’t share the same interests, you’ve got a problem. Let’s just say I believe in reform marriage.”

It was, for Dionne, a deft way into the subject of Hart’s so-called womanizing, slashing through the thicket of Hart’s defenses with a machete of his own making. But this was what Hart had signed up for. He knew why they were doing the
Times Magazine
profile. He knew his marriage was going to come up, and he knew the subject made Dionne uncomfortable. He was ready.

“It was a very stupid thing to say,” he admitted. “Lee was living in Denver, and I was living in Washington, and I was unhappy because my kids were little and I didn’t see them much. I learned.” Then, again, he turned the question back on Dionne, trying to shame him. “There’s no reward for being candid,” Hart said. “In fact, there are penalties for being candid. People say, ‘Why are politicians such conniving, calculating S.O.B.’s?’ It’s because who knows what oddball
thing you say is not going to come back fifteen years later to be some profound insight into your character.”

As is the case with any magazine piece, then and now, Dionne’s would take several weeks to write, edit, fact-check, and illustrate. (Hart, in keeping with his plan for the campaign, refused to set aside time for a cover shoot. “I will not pose, I will not pose, I will not pose,” he told Sweeney.) Even after Dionne returned to Washington to write his 4,700-word piece, he continued to struggle with the questions about sex—how much to feature the material and where. “I felt it was very important that the piece not be dominated by that, but just tell the readers that this is out there,” Dionne would remember. “I was very torn when I was writing that piece.”

Dionne was taken with one of the other quotes he’d elicited from Hart, which nicely expressed Hart’s frustration with the entire line of questioning about his marriage. Dionne thought the quote potentially explosive, and he made sure to weave it into the piece—not up high, but in the lower half, where he thought it belonged. When he got the edited draft back from the magazine, however, Dionne couldn’t find that paragraph. As often happens, some less than impressed editor had cut the quote to make space for something else. It was gone, but only for now.

The Dionne interviews unsettled Hart. The tenor of the questions, coming from a reporter everyone agreed was as thoughtful and substantive as the campaign was likely to find, had the effect of confirming what his advisors had been telling him for months, and of making the campaign he had wanted to run seem futile. On a drive down to Denver from Red Rocks, where Hart had been walking through the announcement site and making final preparations, the normally pensive candidate suddenly unburdened himself to Shore. In a soliloquy both of them would remember long after, Hart said he had been visited by a “premonition,” a sense of dread that the media would never let him campaign on the ideas he had laid out, but rather would insist on making the campaign about him and his persona. In 1987, it was still possible to find such a realization shocking.