All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (5 page)

I could think of no condition under which I would have felt obliged to stake out the Beverly Hilton, waiting to confirm that John Edwards (or anyone else) was visiting his paramour and his illegitimate child. But at the same time, I found it impossible to argue that what the
National Enquirer
had done constituted any less of a service to the voters than my own exhaustive reporting on Edwards; if anything, the opposite was true. How could it matter whether Edwards had the right ideas about poverty if he could so readily jettison his convictions for his own self-interest? In this particular instance, it seemed pointless to wrestle with the intellectual questions I had posed without also considering the question of Edwards’s dubious character.

And yet, while there were these isolated cases where the character of a politician clearly informed everything else about his candidacy, never before in our political life had the concept of character been so narrowly defined. American history is rife with examples of people who were crappy husbands or shady dealers but great stewards of the state, just as we’ve had thoroughly decent men who couldn’t
summon the executive skills to run a bake sale. Hart’s humiliation had been the first in a seemingly endless parade of exaggerated scandals and public floggings, the harbinger of an age when the threat of instant destruction would mute any thoughtful debate, and when even the perception of some personal imperfection could obliterate, or at least eclipse, whatever else had accumulated in the public record. And all this transpired while a series of more genuine tests of character for a nation and its leaders—challenges posed by industrial collapse, the digital revolution, energy crises, and stateless terrorism—went unmet, with tragic consequences.

It was hard to say whether the man sitting in front of me in his study, made wiser and softer now by age and ill fortune, would have been the good president so many Americans at the time had believed he would be, let alone a great one. But it was hard, too, not to feel some sense of loss as I listened to him describe the plan he had carried with him during that doomed campaign. How he would send an emissary to Moscow after the election to begin secretly negotiating an immediate end to the arms race. How he planned to then invite Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom he had bonded on a mission abroad, when both men had been young and ambitious and pushing up against the hardened ideologies of their elders (“They call me the Russian Gary Hart,” Gorbachev had informed him), to join him at his swearing-in, making him the first Soviet premier to witness democracy’s proudest moment. How he and Gorbachev could have used that moment, with the world watching, to sign a historic agreement to drastically scale back their nuclear arsenals. How years later, after a warm embrace and plenty of drinks with his old friend during a trip to Russia, Gorbachev had said yes, of course he would have accepted this proposal in an instant. Quite possibly the Cold War would have ended right there, in one dramatic gesture, rather than gradually winding down as the “new world order” slipped away.

Who knew what might have been possible in the afterglow of such a thing? And who knew how many other bold and creative ideas had been sacrificed to these years of human wreckage, when so many less conventional, less timid thinkers had drifted away from politics,
ceding government to the dogmatic and dully predictable? Sitting in Hart’s study all these years later, it would have been easy to feel sorry for him, and sometimes I did. But I felt sorrier for the rest of us.

At one point, I asked Hart whether he ever felt a sense of relief at having not actually become president. He shook his head emphatically.

“It was a huge disappointment,” Hart said. “A huge disappointment.”

Lee had entered the study and was refilling our water glasses, and she overheard him.

“That’s why he accepts every invitation where someone wants him to speak,” she told me, interrupting him. “Every time he can make any kind of a contribution, he does it, because he thinks he’s salving his conscience. Or salving his place after death or something.” She appeared to try to stop herself from continuing, but couldn’t quite do it. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been very difficult.”

“Is that why I give speeches?” Hart said, in an accusatory tone.

“No, no,” Lee answered quickly. “But you do things when you’re tired to the bone that you shouldn’t be doing.”

“Why not?” Hart asked.

“But people keep asking him,” she said, turning again to me. “I mean, they’re all good things.”

“I’m flattered, babe,” Hart said testily. It was not the only time I would see the two of them do this—work through years of unspoken tension under the pretext of answering my questions. I asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.

“I don’t feel guilty,” Hart snapped. “She’s accusing me of salving my conscience.”

“No, I don’t mean your conscience,” Lee stammered.

“You said it wrong, babe.”

“I said it wrong.”

I asked Lee what she had meant to say.

“What
did
you mean?” Hart asked, his tone a warning.

“Gary feels guilty,” Lee said finally. “Because he feels like he could have been a very good president.”

“I wouldn’t call it guilt,” Hart said.

“No. Well.”

“It’s not guilt, babe,” he protested. “It’s a sense of obligation.”

“Yeah, okay,” Lee said, sounding relieved. “That’s better. Perfect.”

“You don’t have to be president to care about what you care about,” Hart said.

“It’s what he could have done for this country,” Lee said, “that I think bothers him to this very day.”

“Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within twelve years’ time.

“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating.

“You have to live with that, you know?”

THE HART EPISODE
is almost universally remembered, on the rare occasion that anyone bothers to remember it at all, as the tale of classic hubris I mentioned earlier. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated.
How could he not have known this would happen? Was he actually
trying
to get caught?
During the years after Hart entered my consciousness, I found myself moved to mention my fascination with him to scores of people, and almost invariably I heard some version of the same dismissive response from anyone who was alive at the time, to the point where I could almost finish the sentences for them.
How could such a smart guy have been that stupid?

Of course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart’s lifetime, all Democratic presidents remembered as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson had all been adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the twentieth century, made John Kennedy and
most of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour.

“What was later written about Kennedy and women bothered White but little,” he wrote. “He knew that Kennedy loved his wife—but that Kennedy, the politician, exuded that musk odor of power which acts as an aphrodisiac to many women. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac—Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners.” (Yes, White wrote his memoir in the reportorial third-person voice, and he used terms like “musk odor.” It was a different time.)

Just after the Hart scandal broke in 1987,
The New York Times
’s R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the preeminent political writer of his day, wrote a piece in which he tried to explain how disconnected the moment was from what had come before. Apple described what was probably a fairly typical experience for reporters covering the Kennedy White House:

It was this very understanding between politicians and chroniclers—that just because something was sleazy didn’t make it a story—that emboldened presidents and presidential candidates to keep reporters close when it came to the more weighty business of governing. There was little reason to fear being ambushed on the personal front while trying to make oneself accessible on the political front. In a 2012 letter to
The New Yorker
, Hal Wingo, who was a
Life
correspondent in the early 1960s, recalled spending New Year’s Eve 1963 with the newly inaugurated Lyndon Johnson and a group of other reporters. Johnson put his hand on Wingo’s knee and said, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but just remember, that is none of your business.” They remembered, and they complied.

No one should pretend that character wasn’t always a part of politics, of course, and there were times when private lives became genuine political issues. When Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s governor and a Republican presidential hopeful, divorced his wife of thirty-one years in 1962, and then married a staff member, “Happy,” who was eighteen years his junior and the mother of four small children, the story became inseparable from Rocky’s political prospects. You couldn’t do a credible job of covering the Republican schism in those years without delving at least somewhat into Rockefeller’s private life. When a lit-up Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, killing twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy’s private recklessness became a relevant and enduring political story; no politician, let alone a newspaper editor, would seriously have argued otherwise. When Thomas Eagleton, shortly after joining George McGovern on the Democratic ticket in 1972, was revealed to have undergone shock treatment for depression, his temperament became a legitimate news story, along with the fact that he had neglected to mention it.

But reporters didn’t go looking for a politician’s private transgressions; they covered such things only when they rose to the level of political relevance. And even when personal lives did explode into public scandal in those days, it didn’t necessarily overwhelm everything else there was to know about a man. Whether a politician took bribes, whether he stood on conscience or took direction from powerful backers, whether he lied to voters or had the courage to tell hard truths, whether he stood up to power or whether he bothered showing up for votes—all of this had been, for at least a
hundred years, more critical to a politician’s public standing than his marital fidelity or his drinking habits or his doctor’s records. Scandalous behavior mattered, but so did the larger context.

In fact, for most of the twentieth century, while a private scandal might complicate your ambitions for the moment, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that permanently derailed a promising political career. Consider the case of the three scandalized politicians I just mentioned. Rockefeller failed in his presidential bid in 1964—in large part because of the uproar over his marital situation—and again in 1968, when he dithered long enough to allow Richard Nixon’s resurgence. But by 1974, in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, when the country desperately needed the reassurance of trusted leadership, Rocky’s personal controversy had faded to the point where Gerald Ford thought him worthy of the vice presidency. He might well have been a leading candidate for the presidency again had Ford stepped aside in 1976.

Eagleton would always be best known for hiding his electroshock therapy, and any hope he had of holding national office evaporated after his disastrous, eighteen-day stint as McGovern’s running mate in 1972. But that humiliation hardly finished him as a viable and serious politician of the era. He went on to win two more Senate elections before retiring as something of an elder statesman in 1986; his name adorns the federal courthouse in St. Louis.

And then there’s Ted Kennedy, whose career not only survived the haunted waters off Chappaquiddick, but which had only just begun its historic ascent. By 1980, Kennedy felt sufficiently rehabilitated in the public mind not only to run for president, but to challenge the sitting president of his own party. In fact, Kennedy entered the race with a significant advantage in the polls, and while Chappaquiddick surfaced repeatedly, it was an intellectual failure that cast the most doubt on his prospects—mainly that he couldn’t articulate, in an interview with the newsman Roger Mudd, why he actually wanted the job that his brother once held. When he died in 2009, having served in the Senate for four decades after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was celebrated as one of the most consequential political figures of the century, his passion and conviction lauded even by
those who disagreed with him. Remarkably, somehow, he had come to embody the idea of character, at least in the public arena.