All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (31 page)

After Clinton took office, Emerson, who now had a senior job in the West Wing, brought Hart in for a private and warm talk with the new president. Hart was too proud to come out and ask the president to return the favor of twenty years before, and the subject of a specific job never came up. But it was clear that Hart still had value, both for his expertise on policy and for his connections in both parties and across several continents. And clearly he coveted some role in public life that would help erase the stain of what had become a comic scandal beyond any reasonable proportion. All he needed to do, Hart figured, was to keep the lines of communication open.

Thus began a trail of occasional letters, usually policy-laden but at times more personal, that would last, on and off, for many years. (Hart shared both sides of this correspondence with me only after Clinton, who was by then out of office, assented.) Hart’s immediate thoughts were on Russia, where he’d spent a good deal of time doing legal work since 1989; the first of his post-scandal books, written in 1991, was
Russia Shakes the World: The Second Russian Revolution and Its Impact on the West
. Twice in 1993, Hart sent Clinton his thoughts on dealing with Russia—and offering his services in any way they might be needed. Clinton responded politely both times
and invited Hart to join the board of a new government fund for investment in Russia. This wasn’t exactly the kind of senior posting Hart had in mind, although he accepted.

Hart decided, apparently, to try a different tack. In July 1994, when Clinton was taking a pounding over allegations of sexual harassment and of a shady land deal while he was governor, Hart sat down at his desk and wrote him a personal letter of support—in longhand and all capital letters, just like the memos he used to send his Senate staff. “Dear Mr. President,” he began. “The tallest nail gets hit the hardest and longest. The issue is whether it will be driven flat like all the others. This is the true character issue.” Hart continued:

Clinton responded in kind, days later. “Dear Gary,” he scrawled in longhand, “Your letter was generous, thoughtful, and a boost for me, beyond the call—thanks.” He asked Hart to send him more ideas for “how I might better articulate and communicate what I’m trying to do.”

Hart didn’t need a second invitation. The next month, he sent Clinton a dense, three-page memo on the negotiations over Britain’s control of Northern Ireland. Referring to himself, characteristically, in the third person, so as not to appear presumptuous, Hart wrote that “the author” had several initiatives in mind, the first of which went like this: “After consultation with all parties, you should
appoint a ‘personal representative’ to observe, monitor, and report to you on the progress of further peace negotiations, with an emphasis on seeking new formulas to facilitate progress.” Hart didn’t spell out who might fill this role of presidential envoy, but he noted his “long-term personal friendship” with one of the British prime minister’s most trusted advisors on the issue. Contrary to the long-standing British policy of opposing such a mediator, Hart expressed confidence that the British might secretly welcome his intervention.

Clinton replied about three weeks later and shot down the idea. “For the moment,” the president wrote, “and especially in light of recent developments, I believe the U.S. can be most helpful by supporting the process through existing channels with strong White House involvement.” Underneath the official letter, as was his custom, Clinton penned a more personal note, as if to soften the blow. “Some of your specific recommendations may yet be needed,” he wrote, “but at least we have a breakthrough we’re working toward.”

In fact, less than a year later, Clinton did take Hart’s suggestion to name a personal representative in the talks, but the man he named was George Mitchell, Hart’s former colleague in the Senate. (Mitchell would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest honor, for his work on the issue and would thereafter be considered a kind of roving senior statesman—precisely the dream Hart fostered for himself.) Hart’s determination to get back in the game never flagged, but his ambitions grew more modest and his attempts a bit more desperate. Having been rebuffed on Russia and Northern Ireland, Hart proposed to Clinton—more than once during Clinton’s second term—that he be engaged to work out a formal peace agreement between Russia and Japan. (Apparently, the two countries hadn’t reconciled in the fifty years since World War II and were technically still at war.)

“I urge you to give serious consideration to this proposal and, as always, wish you the very best success,” Hart wrote the president in April 1998, upon renewing this request. A month later, he received another awkward, staff-written reply from Clinton rejecting his proposal, along with another handwritten note under the signature. “I agree that you could help resolve this if they were willing to have
outside help,” Clinton scribbled, a bit more brusquely than in previous letters. “For different domestic reasons, they don’t appear to be at this time.”

Emerson and others who had been close to Hart, and who now worked for Clinton, continued to push his case inside the West Wing and at some cabinet agencies—namely Defense—during the nineties. At times, his former aides despaired at what they saw as Hart’s impossible pride and self-regard, the fact that he considered most open jobs beneath him, and that he refused to lobby administration officials on his own behalf. But as the exchange of letters shows, Hart
was
willing to lobby, at least directly with the man whose opinion mattered most.

The more salient problem, as one of Hart’s allies finally told him, was that whenever his name would surface in any high-level discussion, someone on the political side of the White House would dismiss the idea immediately. (“That’s hard to know,” Hart said of this bit of intelligence.) The last thing Clinton needed was to invite a raft of new cartoons and late-night jokes about the world’s most famous adulterer taking on the world’s second most famous adulterer as a running buddy. In the public mind, Hart stood for one thing, and it happened to be the one thing Clinton spent most of his presidency trying frantically to transcend.

For Hart, it was a decade of profound disappointment. He had to watch, from his cabin in the hills, as Clinton got credit for modernizing and moderating liberalism, which is what Hart had been proposing to do since the 1970s. And although Al From, who had founded the Democratic Leadership Council and recruited Clinton to be its spokesman, would always credit Hart with having inspired the New Democrat movement, Hart himself rejected the comparison; he developed contempt for Clinton’s “third way,” which he saw increasingly as a cynical strategy, a way of simply stealing the conservative argument that liberalism was dead, rather than breathing life back into the liberal ideal. Hart admired Clinton’s political skill, but if he had ever really believed what he wrote in 1994, that Clinton would be remembered as a great president, he did not believe it for long.

You can imagine, though, that what really anguished Hart had less to do with Clinton’s policies than with the universal injustice his endurance as a politician seemed to represent. After all, it wasn’t as if Clinton had succeeded, becoming the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two terms, because he had avoided making the same mistakes Hart had made—far from it. By 1998, it was clear that Clinton’s personal transgressions made Hart look like a eunuch by comparison. The creepiest thing any woman had ever said about Hart was that he had once answered his hotel door in a bathrobe when a reporter knocked on it during the 1984 campaign, which was a long way from groping random women or enjoying fellatio from an intern while talking on the phone with world leaders—all of which were part of Clinton’s legend by the end of his presidency.

And yet, somehow, Clinton’s hubris and his sexual personality disorder (there was really no other way to look at it) came to be seen as proving his immense political talent, rather than negating it. He emerged in the public mind as roguish and irrepressible, in the way made famous by leading men on TV dramas—a man too dynamic and insatiable for his own good, but not necessarily for ours. As the decade came to a close, Gary Hart remained the political equivalent of Hester Prynne, cast out and humiliated because of a single lingering photo. Bill Clinton, who endured impeachment for wagging his finger and lying to the country about his long dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-three-year-old woman in his charge, left office with an approval rating of 68 percent.

In September 1998, when Clinton was finally forced to give a speech confessing to his sins and his months-long deception about them, he publicly apologized to Lewinsky and her family for the ordeal he had put them through. (
The Washington Post
had broken news of the president’s sex-capade, more than a decade after Paul Taylor’s question and more than six years after Ben Bradlee’s retirement.) Weeks later, although he would later say the two things weren’t connected, Hart sat at his oak desk in the study and stared at a phone number on a sheet of paper. Then he picked up the phone, listened
for a dial tone, and punched in the 703 number a longtime supporter had found for him—a number in Northern Virginia.

After a few rings, during which he probably considered hanging up, Donna Rice answered the phone.

Hart hadn’t seen Rice since the confusing night in 1987 when he watched Billy Broadhurst shepherd her and Lynn Armandt toward the back door of the townhouse he had long since sold. For some time, Hart wondered—as Rice guessed he did—if she might have been involved in some plot to derail his campaign. (She had pleaded with McAliley to tell Hart she hadn’t known, and she had personally assured Hart of the same thing during a private phone call in McAliley’s office a few weeks after the scandal broke, which was the last time the two had talked.) But as years passed, that theory seemed less and less plausible to Hart, and eventually he added her to the list of people he felt deserved his remorse, whose lives would have been different had he made some wiser decisions. Whatever the nature of their bond to that point, Hart and Rice were united ever after by a shared experience that few others, if any, could really understand. They knew what it was to be transformed into tabloid caricatures overnight.

The life of the Donna Rice who was sitting on Hart’s lap in the dockside photo had essentially ended on the morning two days after the
Herald
story broke, and twenty-four hours after the campaign had released her name to the media, when she climbed aboard the twin-engine plane that Tom McAliley had secretly chartered, with little more than some hastily packed clothes and a toothbrush. The plane, it turned out, was headed to the Florida Panhandle, where McAliley had a friend whose place was empty. That’s where Rice watched TV as Hart withdrew from the race, and as the picture taken with her own camera, by a woman she had thought to be a friend, became ubiquitous. She stayed there, in hiding, for weeks. Eventually, she went back to work for Wyeth, but reporters followed her on her sales calls to doctors’ offices, and one doctor even tried to sell her business card, and when it was clear after a few months that her notoriety wasn’t going to fade, her bosses made it equally clear
that she should probably resign. After that, she had no income, no privacy, and nowhere to go.

She had always talked about moving to L.A., where she had friends. She thought she could have a career as a TV actress, or maybe even a writer. So Rice moved out West and signed on with a talent agency. For the rest of 1987, and especially after Hart reentered the race, the offers flew at her.
Playboy
was willing to start at $1 million—really it was a blank check, she was made to understand—if she would consent to do a simple Q&A, with a tastefully done headshot and nothing more. ABC would pay at least that much for her cooperation with a made-for-TV movie. CBS brought in all of its division heads—news, entertainment, and so on—to meet her, because it was said that the network’s president, Laurence Tisch, had decreed he wanted her on the network, and he didn’t care how.

What most of the media wanted, though, wasn’t Donna Rice; it was her story. Networks and magazines were more than willing to make her wealthier than the daughter of a federal highway engineer had ever dreamed of becoming—if only she would give them the real goods on Gary Hart.

Rice wouldn’t go there, not for any amount of money. Her grandmother counseled her that she had already been blamed for ruining this man’s ambitions once. She couldn’t allow herself to be held responsible for doing it again.

She did give some cautious interviews to Barbara Walters, because the anchor seemed genuinely interested in who she really was, and that was as close as Rice could get to trusting anyone. She did an ad campaign, too, for “No Excuses” jeans—a decision she immediately regretted. The problem was that what Rice yearned for now wasn’t money or onscreen fame, however much she had coveted all that in a former life. Rather, she wanted the one thing the world wasn’t offering. She wanted to prove she was a good, decent person—not this loose, partying swimsuit model with a smoky look on the cover of
People
. She wanted to believe that all of this had some meaning or purpose, that something redeeming would ultimately come from the shame and ridicule.

And that’s when Donna Rice rediscovered Jesus—not in the eyes of a mountain lion, but in the hiss of a cassette tape. Actually, it was her mother and her grandmother who first put the idea in her head, who told her she “needed to get right with God.” Then a friend from high school, a girl she hadn’t talked to in years, sent her a package through her family. The note said she didn’t know if all this stuff she was reading was true, or what had happened to the Donna Rice she knew. But it didn’t matter, because it was never too late to ask forgiveness and change your life; she enclosed a tape of herself singing songs they had sung together in a Christian youth group many years earlier. The way Rice would later explain it, the Lord worked his miracle through that tape. He made sure, also, to steer her into the company of other devout Christians who had no agenda, other than to take her in and heal her.