All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (18 page)

In a lot of ways, Dixon was a man ideally suited to a challenge for which there was no existing playbook. Forty-three at the time, a true-believing child of the sixties, Dixon exuded Midwestern niceness and good humor. But he was also the son of an Irish Catholic cop, with a street savvy that made him one hell of a tough lawyer; in later years, as a partner in one of the Midwest’s top civil rights firms,
he would almost never lose a jury trial. (Among the lawyers who ended up working for Dixon and his partners in that Chicago-based firm was a prodigy named Barack Obama.) It was Dixon who, as a staff lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, had written the memos compiling impeachable offenses against Richard Nixon that eventually leaked to the press. Dixon knew something about the ways of Washington and the media, and even more about how to prosecute a case.

And even before he hit the ground in Washington at dawn on Sunday, Dixon understood that this was precisely what Hart would require—not so much a vigorous defense of his own actions, but rather an all-out prosecution of his accusers. The rumors about Hart were at this point well established; proving his innocence of all charges would be a slog once the
Herald
’s sensational story got out. But in their zeal to expose Hart’s faulty character, Fiedler and the others had crossed all accepted boundaries of privacy and professional ethics. Dixon intended to put them on trial for it.

He already knew that his client wouldn’t be much help in this regard. In later years, through successive scandals that came to dominate ever shrinking news cycles, a central principle of the political canon would hold that the first thing you do in such situations is to get all the facts directly from the source. Some of Hart’s aides, like Shore, would always regret not having pressed Hart immediately for that information. But when Dixon had talked to Hart on the phone Saturday night, after the alley confrontation, all Hart had said was that the
Herald
was wrong and there was no story.

In lawyerly fashion, Dixon was an inveterate, almost unconscious note-taker, and twenty-six years later, sitting on his back porch on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, he shared with me the legal pad on which he had started scribbling that Saturday night and which he carried with him for the next forty-eight hours, creating the only contemporaneous record that endures. On it, Dixon had written that Hart’s phone had to have been tapped, along with the woman’s. “I don’t know who’s setting me up,” Hart told Dixon, according to his notes.

But that was all Dixon got out of Hart. “Billy’s got the facts,” Hart
snapped, before handing the phone over to Broadhurst and washing his hands of the whole fiasco. Hart had the economics address planned for Tuesday in front of the newspaper publishers, the first of what was to be a series of speeches in the same vein over the next month. He intended to hunker down and write. This, Dixon knew, was entirely in character for Hart—trusting in the inevitability of his superior ideas and leaving the tactics to others—and didn’t indicate any special level of avoidance; at this point no one really feared that the campaign itself was in mortal jeopardy. When the reporters started showing up Sunday and pounding on Hart’s door, Dixon arranged to move Hart to the Georgetown home of Steve and Kitty Moses, loyal supporters who were away at the same Kentucky Derby fundraiser Hart had originally been scheduled to attend. Eventually, Shore showed up to keep the boss company. Hart installed himself in Steve Moses’s study, cowboy boots propped defiantly on the desk as he edited drafts in longhand.

The witnesses Dixon felt he needed to depose were all at Broadhurst’s house, so it was to that address—on A Street Northeast—that he had the cab take him from Dulles Airport on Sunday morning. Broadhurst had been up all night. Within an hour or so of hearing Hart’s story about the alley, Broadhurst had somehow managed to track down Fiedler at the Quality Inn and had offered him a deal: if Fiedler would come to Broadhurst’s townhouse right away, Broadhurst would make the two women staying with him—Rice and Armandt—“available.” He said he couldn’t force them to talk, however—that was up to Fiedler—and Fiedler presumed, probably rightly, that the cagey Broadhurst was just trying to find a way to delay publication of the story. In the end, Broadhurst ended up meeting Fiedler and the other reporters at an all-night restaurant in Chinatown, where he insisted that all of this was a big misunderstanding. By then, however, even had Fiedler believed him (which he didn’t), the
Herald
had literally stopped its presses and begun rolling out a new front page with the banner headline:
MIAMI WOMAN IS LINKED TO HART
.

“Gary Hart, the Democratic presidential candidate who has dismissed allegations of womanizing, spent Friday night and most of
Saturday in his Capitol Hill townhouse with a young woman who flew from Miami and met him,” the story began. “Hart denied any impropriety.” The piece noted that
Herald
reporters had seen Hart and the mystery woman leave and then reenter the house Friday night, and that neither had left the premises again until they reemerged together Saturday night. The story didn’t need to speculate on what was going on inside all that time, although from the tone of things, one could imagine it involved bearskin rugs and lots of mirrors.

Broadhurst told Dixon the story wasn’t true. As he had explained to Fiedler, Broadhurst had supervised the construction of a new deck at Hart’s house, and so he had the codes to the garage and the back door and could come and go as he liked; he had shown both women the deck and had taken them home via the back door at about midnight Friday. Both women, he swore, had stayed in spare bedrooms at his place. (Dixon had no reason to disbelieve this, especially when he himself stayed Sunday night in the same room Rice had supposedly stayed in the night before, and he watched the housekeeper change the rumpled linen.) On Saturday, Broadhurst told him, he and the two women had driven around Alexandria, Virginia, so Armandt could look for a place to live.

Broadhurst disclosed that he and Hart and the two women had partied with a large crowd on a yacht in Miami, but at that point he said nothing about an overnight cruise to Bimini. Neither did Rice, who seemed to Dixon naïve and startled, a nice girl who genuinely liked Hart and couldn’t really understand what was happening. Dixon went at her as hard as a lawyer could go after a friendly witness whom he didn’t want to become a hostile one. She said she’d taken an interest in the campaign because she was impressed with Hart’s positions (a line that would have given late-night comedians weeks of material had it been made public). Ever thorough, Dixon wanted to know which positions, and Rice cited “nuclear arms and his new ideas.” She said she’d come to Washington hoping to work for the campaign.

By early Sunday afternoon, reporters were descending on Broadhurst’s townhouse, rapping on doors and windows. It occurred to
Dixon that he would have to step outside and make a statement, something that might choke off the momentum of the story. “Recent accusations about Senator Hart’s personal life are preposterous and inaccurate in their entirety,” Dixon said when he confronted the small assemblage. “They have taken a casual acquaintance and a simple dinner with three friends and political supporters and attempted to make a story where there is none.” Then Dixon got to the core of his case.

“The system, when reduced to hiding in bushes, peaking in windows, and personal harassment, has clearly run amok,” he said. These were the specific phrases—“hiding in bushes” and “peeking in windows”—that he and the other aides had agreed to repeat until none of them could stand to say the words any longer. “Senator Hart accepts the scrutiny that comes with his leadership role in the Democratic Party and the country. But scrutiny and questions of character are one thing; character assassinations are entirely another. Those who cover politics have some duty of self-restraint; here the boundaries of journalistic ethics have clearly been crossed.”

In addition to this ethical argument, Dixon was already developing a second plank in his case against the
Herald
. Many years before, he had worked his way through the University of Buffalo as a garbage collector by night and as a licensed private investigator by day. And so Dixon had actually done quite a few stakeouts, and once he got the facts as Broadhurst told them and took a look at Hart’s townhouse, he concluded that even at twenty-one he would have known how to do a more credible job than the
Herald
had. Specifically, these geniuses had forgotten that townhouses have back doors; otherwise, they would have seen Broadhurst and Armandt coming and going. In fact, Dixon had good reason to think that even the front-door surveillance had been spotty, since Ron Elving, Hart’s press aide in the Senate, had stopped by a few times that Saturday with revised drafts of the economics speech and had somehow evaded the
Herald
’s dragnet. No self-respecting private dick would have vouched for a surveillance report on a house that had only been half watched, at best.

So in Denver, Sweeney and the others started pushing back with
the other reporters who were calling in a mad frenzy. Not only should the
Herald
never have been spying in the first place, they said, but this so-called surveillance was a joke. Someone needed to ask these guys why they hadn’t been watching the blessed back door.

The two-pronged assault on the
Herald
story was as much for the benefit of the reporters—and their editors—as it was for their readers. In order to contain the damage, Hart’s team knew, they needed to isolate the
Herald
, to make sure it became an outlier among reputable news organizations. After years of changing cultural attitudes about adultery and privacy, after more than a decade of considering Watergate’s lessons when it came to the fitness of candidates, after months of building innuendo about Hart’s flawed character, the
Herald
had at last taken political journalism into what had previously been tabloid territory. But on this question of whether presidential candidates should be given the same treatment as a Jim Bakker or a Fawn Hall, the soap opera stars of nightly newscasts in the spring of 1987, the rest of the media still hung in the balance.

Fiedler had made his choice. Now his colleagues on the campaign bus needed to make theirs.

FOR MOST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
,
information in America was controlled and disseminated by a select group of elite institutions. By the end of the 1970s, if you lived in a typical American city, you read about national events in your local paper (if you were lucky, you had a choice between two), or perhaps in the copy of
Time
or
Newsweek
that arrived in the mailbox every Tuesday. Any other newspaper would have to be purchased, probably a day late, at the out-of-town newsstand. The locally owned newspaper—whose status as a paragon of civic virtue would be mythologized by journalists and media critics in later years, after faceless conglomerates had gobbled up most of the American media—exercised as much of a monopoly over information in some cities as the power company had over transformers and wires. Thus was it possible, as late as 1968, for some Indiana voters to know little of the Democratic primary campaign being waged in their own state, simply because the
Indianapolis Star
—whose publisher, Eugene C. Pulliam, had been a Lyndon Johnson supporter—all but refused to acknowledge Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign.

The most immediate means by which information traversed regional borders was, of course, the television. But this venue, too, was limited in its offerings, and, unless a network made the extraordinary decision to preempt its regular programming, not all that
immediate. In big cities, you could watch the local news at six and then choose from three nightly newscasts, aired at the same time every night by the same three networks. But if a story unfolding elsewhere in the country hadn’t appeared in your morning paper, and if it didn’t rate a mention that night by one of the three somber-sounding anchormen who spoke from the pixelated ether like gods from some distant civilization, then it essentially didn’t exist, as far as you knew.

Within about a decade or so of Gary Hart’s spectacular collapse, new technologies—first the satellite revolution that made twenty-four-hour news possible, and then the advent of the Internet and the rapid spread of broadband technology—would obliterate this old order, creating a new world of instantaneous and borderless information. But the first signs of change, what you might call the advance guard of the communications revolution, were just beginning to arrive on the scene in 1987.

CNN, which was still in its infancy, had burst into the national consciousness when it carried the only live footage of the space shuttle
Challenger
exploding moments after launch in January 1986. Later that same year, Fox audaciously unveiled a fourth American broadcast network to compete with the giants who had monopolized the airways since the golden age of radio: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox’s first prime-time lineup, built around the sitcom
Married … with Children
and a sketch comedy show hosted by the comedienne Tracey Ullman (and featuring a recurring cartoon called
The Simpsons
) debuted about a week before Hart gave his announcement speech at Red Rocks. Within a few years, both of these ventures—the offspring of two visionary media moguls, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch—would lead the way toward a more diversified media landscape, and one that often blurred the boundaries between news and entertainment.

The first technological innovation to erode the dominance of institutional media, however, and the one that made its impact felt almost immediately during that tumultuous first week of May 1987, had nothing to do with television. It was the series of clicks, whirs, and beeps known as the fax machine.

Faxes had been proliferating, commercially, since the early 1980s, but it had only been in recent years—since the 1984 campaign, in fact—that Japanese manufacturers had managed to make them small and inexpensive enough for your average office, and even for some homes. “From office workers to rock stars, more and more people are answering yes to the question, Do you have a fax?”
Time
reported in August 1987. “Once considered too bulky and costly to be practical, fax machines have shrunk to half the size of personal computers and dropped sharply in price, to less than $1,000 for one model.” According to
Time
, it cost $14 to send a one-page letter through an overnight carrier but only 50 cents to fax it instantly through your phone line. Sharp had even introduced a model that could double as an ordinary phone.