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First published as All the Truth Is Out in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2014

This edition HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

© Matt Bai 2014

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DEDICATION

For Ellen

EPIGRAPH

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PREFACE What It Took

1 Troublesome Gulch

2 Tilting Toward Culture Death

3 Out There

4 Follow Me Around

5 “I Do Not Think That’s a Fair Question”

6 All the Truth Is Out

7 Exile

8 A Lesser Land

A Note on Sourcing

Acknowledgments

List of Searchable Terms

Praise

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE
WHAT IT TOOK

ONE OF THE FIRST PEOPLE I CALLED after I decided to write this book in 2009 was Richard Ben Cramer. This was not a call I made lightly. I had, by this time, been writing about politics for The New York Times Magazine for the better part of a decade, so I was not exactly a journalistic unknown. But Richard was in a different category altogether. He was one of the greatest nonfiction writers of this or any age, and his seminal, 1,047-page chronicle of the 1988 presidential campaign—What It Takes: The Way to the White House—was arguably the greatest and most ambitious work of political journalism in American history.

We had talked by phone in the past, and I had written about him once, but never before had I sought his counsel. I feared finding out that one of my literary heroes was just another dismissive egoist—the business is full of them—who didn’t have time to dole out advice.

About thirty seconds into the conversation, Richard invited me to lunch at the old farmhouse he shared with his girlfriend (and later wife), Joan, on Maryland’s idyllic Eastern Shore. Anytime I liked, he said, just pick a day, he wasn’t doing much other than writing. The grace of that invitation wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew him.

The next week, I drove the ninety minutes down to Chestertown, where Richard treated me to a cheeseburger as we talked about the craft of journalism and the book I intended to write. I had come to believe that there was something misunderstood and significant in the story of Gary Hart, whose spectacular collapse Richard had followed in What It Takes. I thought the forces that led to Hart’s undoing were more complicated and more consequential, looking back now, than anybody had really appreciated at the time. I had in mind a book not simply about a single, captivating episode in American politics, but also about the cultural transformation it portended.

I confessed that I had begun to doubt myself, however. Almost invariably, when I mentioned this idea to colleagues and friends in Washington, they reacted as if I might be teasing them—as if I had just said I was going to write my next book about bird migration or the Treaty of Westphalia. How could a discarded and discredited figure like Gary Hart possibly matter in the age of Obama? What did any of that have to do with the health care debate or the upcoming midterm elections? Maybe I should listen to the skeptics, I said to Richard. It seemed to me that there was a fine line between being visionary and being obstinate (Hart, more than anyone I could think of, illustrated this point), and most of us ended up on the wrong side of it most of the time.

Richard took all of this in, occasionally stroking his wispy beard or fiddling with his John Lennon–like glasses. And then he seemed to be in the grasp of a revelation, and he leaned back for a long moment and assessed me.

“You don’t want my advice!” Richard said at last. “You want my permission!”

It was true. I did want his permission—not to drill more deeply into the rich seam he had first mined back in 1987, but rather to defy the conventions of my peers.

Richard told me to honor my instincts, that the last people on earth who could discern the deeper currents of our politics were the people who covered and practiced it on a daily basis, obsessing over every poll and campaign filing. (Richard answered email only sporadically, and he probably never read a tweet in his life.) He reminded me that most of the nation’s journalism establishment had dismissed What It Takes, at the time it was published, as overwritten and impossibly long, and the book had all but disappeared for many years before a new generation discovered it. Why in the world, Richard asked me, would I listen to those people?

You didn’t write a memorable book, he said, by giving people the story they were clamoring to read. You had to tell them the story they needed to hear.

What It Takes is an astounding work—a contemporaneous biography of six different candidates, all portrayed from deep within their own psyches. Over the years, I have probably talked with a few dozen people who were subjects or sources in Richard’s book, and not one has ever complained of a single inaccuracy. The question you hear most often, when the subject of the book comes up, is how Richard did it. How did he get so many politicians and so many of their aides to open up the way they did? How did he come to find himself in their rooms, and in their cars, and frequently even on their couches for the night?

To know Richard was to know part of the answer, at least. His mind was open, his curiosity genuine and boundless. I have known celebrated reporters who give entire seminars on the art of eliciting candor from their subjects—how to put someone at ease, how to structure the questions, where to put the digital recorder. Richard trafficked in none of this witchery. His only trick was his sincerity, a yearning to understand the vantage point of whomever he was talking to. He listened, which is the most underrated skill in journalism, and probably in life.

But had Richard come along ten or even five years after he did, it’s doubtful that all the sincerity in the world could have yielded a book like What It Takes. Although this wasn’t clear at the time, Richard undertook his life’s defining project at precisely the moment when the rules of politics and political journalism were about to change; his book was, in a sense, a bridge between the last moment, when generations of politicians had trusted most journalists and had aspired to be understood, and the next, when they would retreat behind iron walls of bland rhetoric, heavily guarded by cynical consultants.

You could argue, with some merit, that Richard actually helped bring about this shift in the political ethos, or at least hastened it. What It Takes spawned legions of imitators who sought to penetrate the minds of candidates in exactly the same all-knowing way. But most often they mistook the point of Richard’s work; where he was most interested in illuminating worldviews and reconstructing the experiences that shaped them, his disciples were increasingly obsessed with personalities and unflattering revelations, the portrayal of politicians as flawed celebrities. Where Richard built his work on mutual trust, the generation that came after him started with the opposite assumption. And the more these journalists tried to re-create the intimacy of What It Takes, the more unattainable their aspirations became.

After Richard died abruptly in early 2013, from the fast-spreading cancer he had essentially willed away for many months, two memorial services were held. At the small remembrance in Chestertown, the last eulogy was offered by Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s governor, who had met Richard as a twenty-one-year-old operative and had stayed close to him ever after. (During O’Malley’s first run for mayor of Baltimore, Richard would call him on his cell phone, barking out advice.) The featured speaker at the second service, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, was the sitting vice president, Joe Biden, whom Richard had profiled, heartbreakingly, in What It Takes, and whom he still called “Joey” twenty years later. Biden made the trip from Washington on a weekend, despite the fact that his presence would go unnoted by anyone outside the room.

It’s almost inconceivable that any journalist of my generation could elicit such respect from leading politicians of the day, or could boast of true and lasting friendships with the people we write about. And most of my contemporaries would probably say that’s as it should be. Those of us who gathered in Chestertown or New York weren’t only saying goodbye to Richard. Whether we thought about it or not, we were also closing the door on the political era whose last days he managed to capture.

During the last year or two of his life, Richard enjoyed something of a resurgence among a new set of young, web-savvy journalists in Washington who admired him as I did and who made the pilgrimage east to meet the master. He loved their passion and enjoyed their company, but he found the new political journalism perplexing, with its incessant focus on granular data and emerging demographics, its emphasis on constantly predicting winners and losers. The last time I saw him, for a public event we did together in Chestertown a few months before his death, we spent a few hours at his house, talking over tea. Richard, who had long ago given up writing about politics for writing about baseball, was weak and much thinner than when I’d seen him last, but he asked me the same questions he had asked me before.

What had happened to old-fashioned political journalism? Richard wanted to know. Where was the sense of watching history reveal itself? Where, for Christ’s sake, was the humanity?

Although he never had the chance to read it, this book is my best attempt to answer those questions, or at least to make more people consider them. It’s a story of the moment when the worlds of public service and tabloid entertainment, which had been gradually orbiting closer to one another, finally collided, and of the man who found himself improbably trapped in that collision, and of the way that moment reverberated through the years and through the life of the nation.

While revisiting the tragic arc of Gary Hart’s career, I found myself, inevitably, revisiting much of Richard’s prose, too. The lines that stuck with me, and that were most quintessentially Richard’s, actually didn’t come from What It Takes. They appeared in another of Richard’s staggeringly good books, What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?

He wanted fame, and he wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America’s dust.

1
TROUBLESOME GULCH

TO GET TO THE TINY VILLAGE of Kittredge, Colorado, which for five days in 1987 became the unlikely center of the political solar system, you have to take the interstate about ten miles west of Denver and then follow Bear Creek Avenue as it winds its way up the mountain. Your average navigation device will get you pretty close, but Gary Hart, despite having once been an evangelist for the digital age, doesn’t really believe in such wizardry, so he insisted I follow him from downtown. This was a clear July day in 2009, with the heat visibly baking the city sidewalk. He poked his head into my driver’s side window like a nervous father, genuine concern in his gray-blue eyes as he ran through the list of turns we would soon be taking and which I couldn’t possibly have remembered. Then he jumped into his red Ford Escape—a hybrid, of course—and started toward the entrance to I-70.

I followed him for twenty minutes or so, until just before we hit Bear Creek Canyon, near a row of touristy restaurants and gift shops. There he unexpectedly alit, leaving the Escape idling in the middle of the road with the door wide open, and approached my window. “Did I show you Red Rocks last time you were up here?” he asked. I mentally winced, remembering my last trip out here to interview him, almost seven years earlier, and the painful story that had come of it. Hart now professed not to remember that incident in our relationship, and I came to see that this was his most common defense mechanism; when he wished not to revisit something in his life, he often affected a kind of fogginess about it, as if it existed only in his mind and could somehow be expunged. I said no, I hadn’t seen Red Rocks, and he assured me it was worth a look.

And so we headed for Red Rocks Park and brought our cars to a stop in a deserted gravel lot, maybe a hundred yards from the breathtaking copper cliffs and boulders—the kind of thing one can find only in the American West or the Arabian desert—into which Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA had ingeniously carved what is now a famous American amphitheater. The rocks were brilliantly lit in the midday sun, which burned our uncovered heads as we trudged up a steep incline toward the amphitheater’s entrance.

I found myself breathing heavily in the mile-high air, but I was more aware of Hart, who labored audibly despite his legendary ruggedness. Wouldn’t it be his luck to collapse in the company of a journalist, a member of the fraternity he had resented all these years? The most famous picture from Hart’s first presidential campaign, where he came from nowhere in 1984 to stalemate Walter Mondale and overturn the aging Democratic establishment in the process, was the one from New Hampshire in which the flannel-clad candidate had just managed to hurl an ax through a log from a distance of forty feet. (At least Hart remembered it as being forty feet. No one was going to quibble with him now.) Hart had been youthful even in middle age, his chestnut hair evocatively Kennedyesque, his smile magnetic and knowing.

Glancing sidelong at the seventy-two-year-old Hart now, though, I saw that he had developed a paunch and was slightly stooped, his arms swinging crookedly at his sides. He wore black pants and a black Nike polo shirt, from which tufts of chest hair sprouted near the unbuttoned collar. His famous mane, still intact but now white and unruly, framed a sunburned, square-jawed face. From a short distance, you could easily have mistaken this older Hart for Charlton Heston.

“When I announced for president in 1987, we did it right up there,” Hart said, pointing toward a rock formation at the top of the hill. He had a strange mannerism, which some of his longtime acolytes still liked to ape good-naturedly, in which he would raise his bushy eyebrows several times in quick succession before making some wry observation. Flicker flicker flicker, the eyebrows went. “Those reporters looked like they were going to drop,” he said in his Kansas-bred twang.

I tried to imagine the podium set against the red rocks and blue sky, the crush of cameras and the palpable sense of history. Hart’s aides had wanted him to do something more conventional, with a ballroom and streamers and all of that, but he had insisted on standing alone against the mountainous backdrop, near the amphitheater he had called “a symbol of what a benevolent government can do.” Pledging to run a campaign of ideas, he had added, in words that later seemed ominous: “Since we are running for the highest and most important office in the land, all of us must try to hold ourselves to the very highest possible standards of integrity and ethics, and soundness of judgment and ideas, of policies, of imagination, and vision for the future.”

Standing amid that outcropping, Hart had been as close to a lock for the nomination—and likely the presidency—as any challenger of the modern era. According to Gallup, the leading polling firm of the day, Hart had a double-digit lead over the rest of the potential Democratic field; the second and third most popular choices, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca and New York governor Mario Cuomo, weren’t even running. In a preview of the general election against the presumed Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Hart was polling over 50 percent among registered voters and beating Bush by thirteen points, with only 11 percent saying they were undecided.

In its annual survey the previous year, Gallup placed Hart fourteenth on the list of the most admired men in America, a few places ahead of Bill Cosby, Tip O’Neill and Clint Eastwood, and within striking distance of Ted Kennedy and the Bishop Desmond Tutu. He would have been hard to stop.

“Must have been a hell of a backdrop,” I said. Hart said nothing further, and after an awkward moment, I let it drop.

We took a quick tour of the amphitheater, and then Hart led me back onto the road. Here the mountain pass serpentined for miles as it climbed to seven thousand feet above sea level, with nothing but rock facings and fir trees for long stretches of the ride. I flipped on the radio in my rented four-wheeler and hit the “seek” button until I landed on the public radio station one can almost always find in such places, nestled near the low end of the dial. The American media at that moment was obsessed with the case of Mark Sanford, South Carolina’s governor and a guy who had been considered a likely Republican presidential candidate until his life had recently unraveled on national television. Sanford, who had been quite the moralizer during the scandal over Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern years earlier, had apparently been carrying on his own long extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman, which came to light when he disappeared from the state for several days, apparently because he had fallen deeply in love and lost all sense of time or self-preservation.

Now, on Planet Money, a reporter was talking to a behavioral economist named Tim Harford, an Oxford professor who had apparently decided it was worth his time to apply his skills to the phenomenon of adultery. According to Harford, illicit relationships were the function of a simple cost-benefit equation; people stayed in them when the benefits outweighed the costs, and got out of them when the reverse was true. After Harford went on about this theory at some length, the interviewer, in the studiously understated tone of public radio reporters everywhere, asked him a question. Why, if this business about costs and benefits were true, didn’t politicians ever seem to learn from their mistakes? Why cheat on your wife when you know that the cost to your career ambitions would very likely be catastrophic?

Politicians screwed up his modeling, Harford admitted. Clearly there were mysterious human factors at play, beyond our scientific reach.

There was, of course, something surreal about hearing this conversation while simultaneously maintaining a respectful distance behind Gary Hart’s red Escape. As anyone alive during the 1980s knew, Hart, the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation, had been taken down and eternally humiliated by a scandal of his own making, an alleged affair with a beautiful blonde whose name, Donna Rice, had entered the cultural lexicon, along with the boat beside which they had been photographed together—Monkey Business. This was Hart’s enduring legacy, the inevitable first line in his front-page obituary, no matter what else he did thereafter, even if he cured cancer or found the unified string theory or went completely bonkers and tried to hijack an airplane midflight.

When they talked about him now in Washington, Hart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce. A top Democratic strategist in town had once described Hart to me as “the most important politician of his generation who didn’t become president.” But such descriptions were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or athlete or entertainer, that didn’t evoke inevitable comparisons to Hart among reflective commentators. In popular culture, Gary Hart would forever be that archetypal antihero of presidential politics: the iconic adulterer.

I felt a stab of anxiety now as I stared at the outline of his head, just visible above his car’s cushioned headrest. Hart was exactly the kind of guy who would listen to NPR while traveling back and forth to Denver several times a week; he might not even know that other stations existed. I imagined him now, listening to Professor Harford hold forth with great gravitas on the folly of promiscuous politicians. Perhaps Hart felt tempted to simply yank the wheel to his left and plunge into the steep ravine below, to make sure once and for all that he would never again have to endure the musings of those who professed to know what made a man fit to serve. Or maybe Hart had long ago resigned himself to such discussions and was grateful simply to have escaped, in this instance, the almost automatic allusion to his once promising career.

Soon the expanse of scrub and rock on either side of the canyon road gave way to a village with a five-and-dime, a feed store, an animal hospital, and a nursery, and then Hart turned right onto Troublesome Gulch Road. Old cabins with penned animals sat alongside newish, seven-bedroom monstrosities along the gravel drive, and our tires kicked up plumes of dust as we made our way to the place where the road ended at a wood gate, immediately in front of us. Other than the sign that greeted us—PRIVATE ROAD KEEP OFF—the only hint that anyone of note lived here was the security keypad that Hart now bypassed using some device inside the Escape, so that the gate swung open and he waved for me to follow.

We rumbled past the old, 1,200-square-foot cabin where Hart and his wife, Lee, used to live, the sparse kind you normally think of when you hear about bygone politicians and their log cabins. That’s where the Harts found themselves barricaded for days in 1987, hiding behind covered windows while choppers circled overhead. Further up the road sat the grander cabin the Harts built almost immediately after his forced retirement. The campaign supporter who had promised to secure a loan for the full 167 acres disappeared after the scandal. It was Warren Beatty, Hart’s close friend from his days on the McGovern campaign and one of the few to stick with him, who lent them the money, which Hart quickly repaid.

The cabin was a two-level, two-bedroom affair fashioned from one hundred tons of beetle-killed Rocky Mountain pine. Four rambunctious dogs, including one the size of a love seat and another that was missing an eye, jumped and splayed around Lee as she greeted us in the kitchen. “Mrs. Hart,” as her husband unfailingly referred to her (or sometimes “the widow Hart,” if he was feeling sardonic), explained to me that their son, John, kept collecting the dogs from shelters. “Apache, down!” Hart shouted in annoyance as the largest one tried to knock me backward. “C’mon, Patch!” Then to Lee, with exasperation: “Babe, get the dog.”

Lee was a year older than Hart and still pretty in a timeless, prairie sort of way. The Harts met at Bethany, a small Nazarene college in Oklahoma, where Lee was something of a celebrity, her father having been a church elder and past president of the college (and where Hart very narrowly lost his first political race, for student body president, because he had allegedly been present at a gathering where an open can of beer had been spotted—an allegation he would deny, persuasively, for the rest of his days). Together they had made an unthinkable journey from those days of small-town Bible groups to the halls of Yale, where Hart started at the Divinity School and went on to study law, and ultimately to the Capitol, swept forward by the social upheaval of the age and Hart’s emergence as a political celebrity and then a senator and presidential candidate. They had nearly lost each other in the historical current. But all of that seemed distant now, as Hart and his wife of fifty years wrestled the dogs outside and bustled about the kitchen preparing a lunch of chicken over greens, grandparents given to habitual patter and comforting routine.

We strolled out onto the front deck, the three of us, and listened to the birds chirping and the stillness beneath. Hart pointed across the meadow to where the rushing creek had recently swelled and washed away a layer of soil, leaving roots perilously exposed beneath towering pines. This was how Troublesome Gulch got its name, he explained. A small fox approached and sat back on its hind legs, peering up at us expectantly. Lee rose and went inside to retrieve a piece of raw chicken, then tossed it like a horseshoe out onto the grass, where the grateful fox snapped it up and did a little dance. The couple looked out at the fox admiringly, Hart making a show of mild disapproval at this daily perversion of nature, but clearly pleased by the spectacle nonetheless.

It was right about then that we heard an awful thwunk, and Lee Hart gasped. She ran to the window. What had happened was this: in anticipation of my arrival, Lee had lifted the automatic shades on the towering glass windows that spanned the width of the living room, from floor to ceiling. In case we decided to talk indoors, on the couches next to the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s bookstand in Monticello, she had wanted me to be able to take in the view of the meadow and the creek and the old wooden footbridge beyond. But without its shade to blunt the midday glare, the darkened glass wall now reflected the distant trees as faithfully as a mirror, and a small bird had mistaken that reflected image for the real thing and hurled himself into it kamikaze-style. The thing lay there now on the deck, motionless as a dishrag.

“Oh, no!” Lee said, something cracking inside her. “Oh, no!” she said again. She knelt down, cooing through the onset of tears. The fox turned its head sidelong. The creek burbled on indifferently. I felt powerless and somehow responsible, utterly untrained for such an event. I imagined the Harts might see this as an omen of my return, and maybe it was.

Hart never flinched. He rushed over and lifted the bird in his cupped hands. He walked toward the edge of the deck and gently stroked the feathers, as Lee looked on from one side and I the other. His long torso hovered over the patient and obscured our view as he softly set the bird down on the railing. “He’s breathing,” Hart assured his wife in a soothing, protective tone. Lee finally exhaled, deeply, and retreated a few steps. “He’ll be fine,” Hart said firmly.

And I believed it, too, until Hart shot me a furtive, conspiratorial look and shook his head quickly, as if to say: Not a chance in hell.

How I came to return to Troublesome Gulch on that day in 2009, visiting with some washed-up politician at the moment when just about every other political writer in America was absorbed by the ascension of our first African American president, is a story of failure and the hope for redemption, I guess. Not just Hart’s, but mine, too.

The whole thing began a few weeks before Christmas in 2002, when, as a new writer for The New York Times Magazine, I came across a short newspaper item about how Hart was considering a quixotic comeback bid for the presidency. Like everyone else, I knew Hart only from the memory of scandal—in my case, from reading Newsweek in my college dorm room in 1987—and what motivated such a man to want to rekindle this memory in his advancing years, to want to relive in some way the defining ordeal of his life, struck me as the kind of mystery at the intersection of politics and psychology I found most intriguing. The idea of interviewing Hart after all these years struck my editors and friends as kind of spooky and fun, like attending a séance in the French Quarter.

I met Hart at the Denver headquarters of the global law firm Coudert Brothers, which, as it happened, consisted of a single nondescript office—Hart’s—and a waiting room, in the corner of which stood a sad little Christmas tree. Hart sat in a swiveling office chair next to his computer and invited me to take a seat a few feet away. He explained, alluding to the modest surroundings, that Coudert Brothers had informed him it intended to close its Denver office—or, in other words, that it no longer needed Hart’s services as an international lawyer, specializing in executing deals in the former Soviet Union. He would soon need to find another professional home. Hart spoke lightly of this conundrum, laughing easily at himself, as if the circumstances of his career had reached a level of absurdity even he couldn’t fail to find amusing. Whatever arrogance he had once possessed, a famous incapacity for suffering those less intellectually inclined than himself, had been replaced in his advancing years by a sense of goodhearted resignation, which had the effect of making him immediately and immensely likable.

Two things struck me very clearly during that first meeting with Hart. The first, and more surprising, was that he was probably the flat-out smartest politician I had ever met, and I had met quite a few. Not smart in the Newt Gingrich sense, meaning that he had memorized a small library of philosophical and literary texts and could quote them back to you—although Hart had this going for him, too. Nor smart in the Bill Clinton sense, meaning that he could juggle a Sunday crossword puzzle while simultaneously dissecting a point of policy and committing to memory the names of ten strangers in the room, which was a kind of freakishness. Hart didn’t care that much for people’s approval. No, Hart’s gift was to connect politics and culture and theology and history and technology seamlessly and all at once—to draw from all available data points (extemporaneously, it seemed) a larger picture of where everything was headed.

Richard Ben Cramer, who profiled Hart in What It Takes, had a name for these periodic revelations; he called them “Hart-facts,” because once Hart offered them up, they became self-evident, as if it would have been impossible for anyone to have overlooked them in the first place. Hart himself would tell me, “I have only one talent. I can see farther ahead than other people. And I can put pieces together in constructive ways, both to avoid disaster and to capitalize on change.”

During that first day in Denver, Hart explained, by way of a brief history of the Middle East, why a war in Iraq, if in fact that’s what George W. Bush was planning, would ultimately be a catastrophe. We might win a quick military victory, he said, but it would become difficult to extricate ourselves, and it would create more terrorists than it would root out. (Decades before, he had insisted that America’s reliance on oil would lead us, inevitably, into a series of desert wars.) He also mused that growing inequality and the recklessness of the markets might well plunge us, sooner or later, into another depression or something very close. By the end of the decade, both of these offhand riffs, which could have been dismissed in the moment as the rants of a gloomy old man, would prove stunningly accurate.

The second thing I quickly realized was that Hart had no real intention of running for president again, even if he wasn’t yet ready to admit that to himself. The idea had come from some students Hart met during a yearlong sojourn at Oxford. That Hart wouldn’t quite slam the door on the notion was a measure of how much he wanted something else that had nothing to do with the presidency: to be reclaimed. Hart longed to be back in the mix for high-profile assignments or maybe even a cabinet post. He wanted to be the elder statesman he had always imagined he would someday become. If openly mulling a return to the campaign trail was the only way to get someone like me to write about his political ideas, rather than a fifteen-year-old marital infidelity, then so be it.

“I made a mistake,” Hart told me, which seemed to me as close to admitting an affair with Donna Rice as he had ever come. “I think there are very few people in the world who don’t know that. I’ve apologized.” It was “a single incident fifteen years ago,” Hart said, and because of it he had been denied the opportunity to serve his country ever since. “I think I’ve paid my dues,” he said.

“I think all I want is some degree of fairness,” Hart said quietly. “I’m not even asking for forgiveness, but fairness.” He shook his head in enduring disbelief. “Perspective,” he said, then repeated the word quietly to himself. “Perspective.”

Hart didn’t say any of this happily, or even willingly. I did what a reporter is supposed to do. I pushed him on it. I waited the better part of my thirty-hour visit until I felt he was sufficiently comfortable talking to me, and then I bored in on the past, poked at the scar tissue, hoping for … what? A catharsis, maybe. An admission that justice had been done all those years ago, that the truth had won out, as I had been taught to believe it always does. That somehow my role models in journalism—men who had covered that campaign and gone on to become, in some cases, my editors and senior colleagues—had through their tenacity spared the nation something worse than what we ultimately got.

Hart might have been excused for throwing me out of his office, but instead he patiently pleaded with me to move on. He had invited me to visit for the same reason that he was hopeful of a reentry into political life—because he thought the past might finally be the past, of interest to no one at last. “This whole business of ’87 is flypaper to me,” he told me, throwing up his hands. “It’s so frustrating. It’s like being in a time warp. I want to get unstuck.”

The three-thousand-word piece I wrote about Hart did nothing to unstick him, although it was about what he should have expected. I revisited the scandal, talked about his tortured journey in the intervening years, cast doubt on his sincerity about the prospect of running again. I repeated the truism (half true at best, as I later came to understand) that Hart had blithely challenged reporters to follow him around back in 1987, and I arrived at the same psychoanalytical conclusion on which a lot of Hart’s contemporaries had settled back then—that Hart had to have harbored some self-destructive impulse to begin with, because otherwise he wouldn’t have risked his lifelong ambitions on some model and then dared his interrogators to prove it.

I mused on why it was that Hart had become a relic from another time—“the political version of a Members Only jacket” is how I put it—and concluded that Hart mostly had himself to blame. If he was stuck in flypaper while others mired in lesser scandals had managed to escape, it was mostly because he refused to do the things you had to do if you wanted to rehabilitate yourself in the modern society—write an apologetic memoir, shed a tear on Oprah, plot out a publicly orchestrated comeback on the cover of People.

Hart detested the piece, of course, and shortly thereafter he publicly dropped any notion of a presidential campaign. I called him a few times afterward and even asked to have a drink on one of his occasional trips to Washington. I liked him, and it seemed to me his perspective on events would be different from the usual Washington wisdom. Hart was cordial but unavailable, and I stopped pestering him.

Once, just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, after he had endorsed his friend John Kerry, Hart and I ended up standing next to each other in a huge barn somewhere near Ames, where Kerry was holding a rally. I thought Hart recognized me when I turned to him, but he said little and seemed to look right through me as we shook hands. He wasn’t invited onstage with some of Kerry’s other endorsers, and no one else there seemed to take note of him. We stood awkwardly and in silence throughout much of the rally, our backs pressed up against the wood beams of the barn wall, until I wandered off to say hello to some reporters I knew, and Hart slipped out into the cold, alone.

That was the second presidential campaign I had covered, and by then I was beginning to surmise that something critical was missing from our coverage of political candidates—mainly, the candidates themselves. Like a lot of my younger colleagues who’d passed on Wall Street jobs or law degrees so they could go off to small, middling newspapers and pursue elusive careers in journalism, my ambition had been forged by reading (and rereading) influential books: The Making of the President 1960, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, and What It Takes. What made political journalism so alluring, and so important, was the idea that you actually got to know the minds of the public servants you were writing about. You were supposed to share beers at the hotel bar and late-night confidences aboard the chartered plane. You were supposed to understand not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for winning, but also what made them good and worthy of trust, or what didn’t.

There was the danger of getting too close, perhaps, in the way that a young Ben Bradlee ignored—willfully or otherwise—the dubious associations of his friend John Kennedy, or in the way that Richard Harwood, a reporter for The Washington Post, decided to remove himself from Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign because he had grown to like the candidate too much. (Kennedy was killed before Harwood had the chance to follow through.) But such was the challenge that came with sitting in history’s orchestra seats, charged with the sacred task of transmitting all that immediacy to the people crammed into the balcony and watching at home.

By the time my contemporaries and I got there, though, presidential politics—indeed, all of politics—was really nothing like that. With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them. They left the drinking and private dinners to the handlers who were expert in such things, whose job it was to help reporters by “reconstructing” the scenes of the day with self-serving narratives (“And then I heard the senator say, ‘Don’t tell me what the polls say! I care about what’s right!’”). Candidates in the age of Oprah “shared” more than ever before, but what they shared of themselves—boxers rather than briefs, allusions to youthful drug use—was trivial and often rehearsed, as authentic as a piece of plastic fruit, and about as illuminating.

Our candidates shared the same planes as their attendant reporters, but unlike their predecessors in the books of our youth, they literally hid behind curtains that divided their cabin from ours. Occasionally, prompted by press aides, they wandered back to have an impromptu, off-the-record conversation, which they conducted with all the fluency and abandon of a North Korean prisoner offering his televised confession. They issued gauzy position papers and used perfunctory interviews to recite their talking points, but they almost never engaged in informal, candid conversations about what they believed and how they had come to believe it. Their existences were guided by a single imperative, which was to say nothing unscripted and expose nothing complex.

Defensively, almost unconsciously, we tried to obscure this new reality from our readers and viewers. Reporters of my generation (some of us more than others) showed up on cable TV all day long and spoke wryly and knowingly of what the politicians thought, in tones that suggested we had just come from a private dinner or a late-night bull session, that we enjoyed the same insight as our role models. As time went on, some Americans who paid close attention to the news began to suspect that we were holding out on them, that our studied detachment was masking deeper convictions about our subjects, things we really knew about the candidates but were afraid to say because we might lose our precious access or jeopardize “cozy relationships,” or because it might violate the outmoded tenets of objectivity. The truth was harder to admit: most of the time, we had no real access, and we really didn’t know anything about the candidates personally you couldn’t have learned from browsing their websites or watching speeches on YouTube. And absent any genuine familiarity or argument of ideas, our glib prognostications sounded cynical and bland. There existed an unbridgeable divide—our own kind of troublesome gulch—between our candidates and our media.

There were lots of reasons that our politics had grown so dispiriting and so destructive over the years. They ranged from the growing dominance of political consultants to the decline of the industrial engine that once drove the American economy. And there were plenty of people, including a lot of campaign operatives, who argued that the shrinking influence of the professional class of political journalists was a good thing, that new technologies had broken the monopoly once held by a handful of self-appointed guardians of the public good, that candidates could now go around the media and speak, unfiltered, to the American voter. But when candidates no longer dared to speak unguardedly, or to explain the evolution of their thinking, or to say anything that might contradict anything else they’d ever said, they lost the ability to grapple with nuanced or controversial topics; essentially, they gave up trying to win the larger debate in the country, choosing to focus solely on the tactics of the next election, instead. New digital tools may have enabled them to reach voters directly, without a middleman, but all those voters were getting were the same old platitudes and scripted evasions, issued in a tweet or a video instead of a press release.

There was no single moment when all of this had suddenly come to pass. But as I chronicled one candidate’s campaign after another, grasping for some moment of authenticity or illumination, it was clear to me that something in the political culture had been badly broken in the years since Cramer had written What It Takes. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, Hart began to creep back into my thoughts.

It started as a stray reflection here and there, the brief connection of synapses as I drove across Iowa under an inky black sky, or as I sat in some god-awful roadside New Hampshire hotel, staring out at the snow-covered interstate at dawn. It grew into a doubt more pressing—a sense of something important that I had left unfinished or unexplored. I noticed how often Hart’s name came up now in the articles about John Edwards or about Tiger Woods, as if his was the most important or immoral one-night stand in the history of one-night stands, the standard of public humiliation against which all others had to be measured. Perspective, I could hear Hart saying. Perspective.

I began to notice how the issues he had first brought to the debate in the early 1980s, like energy independence and Islamic terrorism, were the same ones we were debating now, because so little had been achieved in all the time since. When a friend sent me a link to a sale on eBay, in which some collector was selling the issue of People from 1987 with Donna Rice sprawled across the cover in a bathing suit, I paid fifteen bucks for the plastic-wrapped magazine. I had no real reason to buy it, except that I suddenly felt compelled to take it out of circulation. I figured I was sparing the man one more indignity.

It wasn’t guilt, exactly, this feeling that had led me back to Hart’s cabin almost seven years after my first visit, like an archaeologist searching for shards of a lost political age. What I had written about Hart back then, a story I had now reread so often that I knew it almost by heart, hadn’t been wrong, at least not in any technical sense. But I had now come to believe there was something deeper I had missed, a connection between Hart’s defining moment and the era I inhabited. And I felt pulled to retrace that connection in order to understand how our politicians became so paralyzed and our media so reviled. It was worth figuring out what had really happened at Troublesome Gulch, and why, and how it had led the rest of us here.

For two decades after his abrupt exit from politics, Hart said almost nothing revealing about the incident that had precipitated it. (In a 240-page memoir published in 2010, titled The Thunder and the Sunshine, he dispensed with the entire scandal in a few lines, noting, “The circumstances are too well known, and to some degree, still too painful, to require repetition.”) This was, in part, because people stopped asking. After a few months, the TV producers and reporters had moved on to other scandals, and the lecture agents were only calling, sporadically, to see if Hart might want to do some kind of crass confession tour. Eventually the gravel road through Troublesome Gulch, like the ancient city of Petra, became lost to political explorers, too remote for anyone to care.

It was also because Hart thought—foolishly, as it turned out—that the rest of the world would move on faster if he didn’t keep reminding us of what had happened. Sitting in his cabin, far removed from affairs of state and having established himself as a prolific author and a specialist in international law, Hart would occasionally persuade himself that no one really thought about any of this anymore, that he might at last be remembered for his brilliance. Away from Washington, he could go months, even years, without feeling the prurient stares of strangers or the judgment of old friends. Then someone like me would come along, or some other politician or celebrity would be caught in an adulterous affair, and Monkey Business would surface again, tawdry and unsinkable. Even into his seventies, he could not outlast it.

But more than any of this, Hart stayed quiet because he held fast to the central conviction that had guided him, disastrously, through his existential career crisis in 1987—that what happened or didn’t happen with Donna Rice or any other woman was nobody’s goddamn business but his and his wife’s, and about as relevant to his qualifications for higher office as a birthmark or a missing tooth. For more than twenty years, despite the instant opportunity for public redemption it would have afforded him, Hart would not admit to the affair or shed any light on the events that had led to his disgrace—not to interviewers, and not to the friends and former aides who were more reluctant to broach the subject. He believed the entire question, even now, to be an incursion into his zone of privacy, a triviality that it was his duty, as a public figure, not to legitimize.

Once, over drinks, one of Hart’s close aides from the period told me that Rice, like Hart, had steadfastly denied, even in private, having consummated an affair. I asked him whether he was actually suggesting that Hart, despite his reputation for promiscuity at the time, hadn’t slept with the woman who would forever be linked to his ruined ambitions. The former aide looked around the bar and leaned closer to me, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I fear not,” he said, looking genuinely pained.

If this was so, then the historical irony was hard to fathom. Because the story of Hart and the blonde didn’t just prove to be Hart’s undoing; it was the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come. Somehow, political and personal lives had collided overnight to create what was, in hindsight, the first modern political scandal, with all the attendant satellite trucks and saturation coverage and hourly turns in the narrative that Kafka himself could not have dreamed up. The unrelenting assault that Hart and family and their closest advisors had encountered during those five days would become an almost predictable rhythm of political life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and it would spawn an entire industry of experts who knew—or claimed to know—how to navigate it. But it was Hart, the standout prodigy of a new generation, who opened the door.

All these years later, Hart confided, he mostly remembered snippets from that week, painful and disjointed scenes that surfaced only when he allowed them to. Like the moment in New Hampshire when, nearly toppled by the scrum and blinded by flashbulbs, he saw a small boy, maybe four or five, about to be run over by the human crush of cameramen and photographers. Panicked and furious, Hart spotted Ira Wyman, the venerable Newsweek photographer, crouched in front of him. Ira, an amiable, decent man and esteemed photojournalist, had long been with Hart and his wife, through all the days on planes and nights in hotel bars. “Help me,” Hart remembered croaking, in a kind of woozy desperation. He grabbed for Ira’s camera strap. “Ira, help me.”

Flash, came the response from the ground near his knees, as Ira evaded Hart’s grasp. Flash flash flash.

“It was a nightmare,” Hart told me flatly one night as we sat in his upstairs study. “We were in some kind of Oz land. For years and years after, people would stop me in airports and say, ‘You should have stayed in the race.’ I mean, they had no idea.” He paused, shook his head. “They had no idea.”

In his own mind, he had not been driven out of presidential politics, as most everyone else saw it, but rather had walked away disgustedly. He thought of himself as Gary Cooper in that last scene of High Noon, throwing his badge in the dirt, thinking, If this is how it has to be, then find someone else. (Hart preferred not to think about his failed and embarrassing attempt to reenter the race late in 1987, which he would ever after regret.) This had, after all, been the animating theme of the statement he made at the end of that week of scandal, when he came down from the cabin and officially withdrew—a speech that probably should have been remembered, like Eisenhower’s oration on the military-industrial complex, as one of the most prescient warnings in modern American politics, but that, like so much else about the moment, had been almost entirely buried in the public consciousness. Even Hart, perhaps falling back on his usual coping mechanism, claimed barely to remember it.

“I’m not a beaten man—I’m an angry and defiant man,” Hart had declared then, to raucous cheers that he felt the need to quiet. “I said that I bend but I don’t break, and believe me I’m not broken.” Red-cheeked and gripping the lectern, he went on:

In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important. … We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted, that has reporters in bushes, false and inaccurate stories printed, photographers peeking in our windows, swarms of helicopters hovering over our roofs, and my very strong wife close to tears because she can’t even get into her own house at night without being harassed. And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for higher office. Now, I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself. Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or a sporting match. We’d all better do something to make this system work, or we’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”

Indeed, what had it gotten us, this violent compression of politics and celebrity and moral policing? You could argue, I guess, that it brought us closer somehow to our politicians, by making their flaws and failings harder to obscure. You could argue, and many have, that we deserved the information necessary to elect politicians who could be moral, trustworthy stewards of our children’s future, and so on. There was a word that encapsulated all of this, a concept that, more than any issue or ideology, came to dominate our campaigns long after Hart had retreated to Troublesome Gulch. That word was character. It wasn’t just about sex, as it was in Hart’s case, but also about whether you uttered a line you wished you could take back or made an investment you probably shouldn’t have, about whether you’d ever gotten stoned or written something idiotic in a school paper. Nothing mattered more in a politician than his essential character, and no shred of private behavior, no moment of weakness or questionable judgment, was too insignificant to illuminate it.

It would be facile to dismiss this new focus on character as being entirely trivial or misrepresentative. In a few cases, unfortunately, it was anything but. Consider the example of John Edwards. In June 2007, as the former North Carolina senator and vice presidential nominee was preparing to run a second time for the presidency, I wrote a highly detailed, eight-thousand-word cover story for The New York Times Magazine about his agenda, weighing with great seriousness his signature plan to combat poverty and inequality. I traveled with him to the devastated Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and I consulted a faculty’s worth of antipoverty experts on his proposals. At the time (and for a long while after), I congratulated myself on having taken the most substantive look at Edwards’s depth and rationale as a candidate, even while pundits continued to ignore his policies in favor of commenting on his floppy hair and his fundraising prowess and his wife’s battle with cancer. This was the kind of long-form examination that voters and candidates complained was lacking from political coverage.

Four months after my cover piece was published, the National Enquirer ran the first in a series of stories alleging that Edwards had fathered a “love child” with a filmmaker who was following him around. Edwards denied the story repeatedly, and the rest of the media mostly ignored it—until the following August, when the Enquirer caught him visiting his lover and his new baby daughter in a Beverly Hills hotel. After that, Edwards went on Nightline—much as Gary Hart had, under different circumstances, twenty-one years earlier—to admit that the child was his. By this time, he was no longer a presidential candidate, having withdrawn after getting drubbed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the early primaries six months earlier. But had things gone a little differently in Iowa or New Hampshire, it was not inconceivable that Edwards could have been the nominee by the time the full measure of his deceit became clear. He was, in any event, a likely pick for attorney general or some other cabinet post.

The revelation about Edwards’s personal behavior struck me as highly relevant to his fitness for office, though not simply because he had been sleazy and dishonest. (Edwards would not have been the first president, or even the second, to have secretly fathered a child out of wedlock.) As I had written in the magazine, most of Edwards’s “new ideas” for combating inequality, his main rationale for running, were in fact leftover proposals from the last century, and they were grounded in the underlying assumption that simply giving poor people more money would eradicate poverty—an assumption that ignored an emerging consensus about the importance of families and communities in that equation. About the only major plank of Edwards’s platform that even hinted at this broader social problem in impoverished communities was his insistence that absentee dads take responsibility for their children. And so here was Edwards, whose agenda included this ardent call for “responsible fatherhood,” refusing to publicly acknowledge his own child.

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?”

2
TILTING TOWARD CULTURE DEATH

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:

In early 1963, for example, a fledgling reporter for this newspaper was assigned to patrol the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel while President Kennedy was visiting New York City. The reporter’s job was to observe the comings and goings of politicians, but what he saw was the comings and going of a prominent actress, so that was what he reported to his editor. “No story there,” said the editor, and the matter was dropped.

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 former 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.

From the start, though, Hart’s downfall was of an entirely different genre than any of these other scandals, which had afforded their protagonists some room for redemption—not simply a modern variation on a timeless theme, but a new kind of political narrative altogether. What befell Hart in that spring of 1987 was swift, spiraling, and irreversible, as instantly ruinous and blackening as the fiercest hurricane. It washed away any sense of proportion or doubt. It blew away decades of precedent in a matter of hours.

In the strangeness of that moment, as Time’s Walter Shapiro described it, Hart would find himself at the center of “the most harrowing public ordeal ever endured by a modern presidential candidate.” The old rules going back to FDR and before were suddenly upended. This time, the reporters would go searching for evidence of Hart’s indiscretion, staking out his Washington townhouse like something out of Starsky and Hutch. And the evidence they would uncover, however tawdry and circumstantial, would manage, with staggering speed, to eclipse every other aspect of Hart’s otherwise unblemished career. What no one could fully explain, at the time, was why.

Often, as a society, we assign credit or blame for tectonic shifts in the political culture to whichever politician becomes the first to expose or capitalize on them, rather than recognizing that the reverse is true—that political careers are made and lost by underlying forces that have little to do with individual politicians. We tend to think of the “Great Communicator” Ronald Reagan, for instance, as the man who masterfully reinvented the presidency for the television age, expertly manipulating public opinion with sound bites and imagery, when in fact television had been transforming the presidency for twenty years before Reagan ever got to Washington, which is why a movie actor could get himself elected in the first place. We credit Barack Obama with having broken down the whites-only barrier to the Oval Office, when in fact icons of popular culture had been trampling racial boundaries for years before Obama came along, so that much of the country was entranced by a candidate who might do the same thing in politics. (Obama’s candidacy, based on little by way of experience or substance, might well have been less resonant or realistic had he been white.)

The dominance of broadcast television made Reagan possible, just as changed racial attitudes made the Obama presidency plausible, and not the other way around. As the cliché says, if these men hadn’t already existed as near perfect reflections of what was already churning in the larger culture, we would have had to invent them.

And so it is, in a less heroic way, with Gary Hart. We marvel at his stupidity because we blame him, in a sense, for having brought on all this triviality and personal destruction, for having literally invited the media to poke around in his personal business, and by extension everyone else’s. Before Hart there was almost none of this incessant “character” business in our presidential campaigns, which must mean he was the first leading candidate dumb enough to get caught, and after that there was no escaping the issue. But what you can see now, some twenty-five years on, is that a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding by the late 1980s, and this was creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn’t create that vortex. He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.

The organizing principle of politics itself was changing in 1987. The country was about to witness its first presidential campaign in forty years that didn’t revolve in large part around the global stalemate between East and West. Glasnost and perestroika in Moscow were beginning to thaw the Cold War, and while that would ultimately lead to some disjointed talk of a “peace dividend” and whatever else came next, it was also bound to leave a sizable vacuum in the national political debate. If an election wasn’t going to be about peace-through-strength versus disarmament, about how to deal with the perennial threat of Communist domination, then it was going to have to be about something else.

Inevitably, that something was going to include a new kind of discussion about “character.” The concept had been gaining currency at least since 1972, when the political scientist James David Barber first published his influential textbook, The Presidential Character, in which he tried to place the presidents on a graph depicting two highly subjective axes: “positive-negative” and “active-passive.” (Barber put John Kennedy, incidentally, in the most exalted category of “positive-active,” rumors of his affairs notwithstanding.) By the time the third edition of Barber’s book was published in 1985, the conversation about character in politics had taken on more immediacy.

The nation was still feeling the residual effects of Watergate, which thirteen years earlier had led to the first resignation of a sitting president. Richard Nixon’s fall had been shocking, not least because it was more personal than it was political, the result of instability and pettiness rather than pure ideology. And for this reason Watergate, along with the deception over what was really happening in Vietnam, had injected into presidential politics a new focus on personal morality. Jimmy Carter had come from nowhere to occupy the White House mostly on the strength of his religiosity and rectitude, the promise to always be candid and upright. His failed presidency had given way to Reagan, who relied on an emerging army of religious zealots, “culture warriors” bent on restoring American values of godliness. After Nixon, Americans wanted a president they could not only trust with the nuclear codes, but whom they could trust as a friend or a father figure, too. Judging from history as Teddy White and others had witnessed it, this was no small ambition.

Social mores were changing, too. For most of the twentieth century, adultery as a practice—at least for men—had been rarely discussed but widely accepted. Kennedy and Johnson had governed during the era Mad Men would later portray, when the powerful man’s meaningless tryst with a secretary was no less common than the three-martini lunch. (Kennedy, it would later be said, had no problem with his friends and aides cheating on their wives, provided they never got confused about the order of things and decided to break up their marriages.) Of course Johnny Apple’s editor would tell him there was no story in the president taking strange women into his hotel room; like smoking, adultery in the early 1960s was considered more of a minor vice than a moral crime.

Twenty years later, however, social forces on both the left and right, unleashed by the tumult of the 1960s, were rising up to contest this view. Feminism and the “women’s lib” movement had transformed expectations for a woman’s role in a marriage, just as the civil rights movement had changed prevailing attitudes toward African Americans. As America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women well into the 1980s, younger liberals—the same permissive generation that had ushered in the sexual revolution and free love and all of that—were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal, and one that needed to be exposed. And in this, at least, they had common cause with the new breed of conservative culture warriors, who saw their main brief as reversing America’s moral decline wherever they found it.

In the past, perhaps, a politician’s record on gender equality or moral issues—whether he supported the ERA or prayer in school or whatever—had been the only metric by which activists in either party took his measure. But everywhere you looked in American politics now, the tolerance for this long-standing dissonance between public principles and private behavior was wearing thin. For the sixties generation, as the feminists liked to say, the personal was the political, and it was fast becoming impossible to separate the two. “This is the last time a candidate will be able to treat women as bimbos,” is how the famous feminist Betty Friedan put it after Hart’s withdrawal. (If only she’d known.)

Perhaps most salient, though, the nation’s media was changing in profound ways. When giants like White came up through the newspaper business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power, and the information and insight once derived from having it, was the currency of the trade. And success, in the age of print dominance, meant having a secure job with decent pay and significant prestige in your city; national celebrity was for Hollywood starlets, not reporters.

By the 1980s, however, Watergate and television had combined to awaken an entirely new kind of career ambition. If you were an aspiring journalist born in the 1950s, when the baby boom was in full swing, then you entered the business at almost exactly the moment when The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the cinematic version of the two journalists’ first book, All the President’s Men—were becoming not just the most celebrated reporters of their day, but very likely the wealthiest and most famous journalists in American history (with the possible exception of Walter Cronkite). And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn’t proximity, but scandal. They had actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they had come to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.

It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League–educated boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become other than Woodward and Bernstein—which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.

For decades after the break-in at the Watergate complex, virtually every political scandal of note would be instantly packaged using the same evocative suffix that had made heroes of Woodward and Bernstein, even though generations of Americans couldn’t have told you what its actual origin was; the media trumpeted the arrival of “Contragate” and “Troopergate” and “Monicagate.” In a sense, the Hart fiasco, coming thirteen years after Nixon’s resignation, marked the inescapable end point of all the post-Watergate idolatry in the media, and the logical next phase in our political coverage. It marked the start of an era when reporters would vie endlessly to re-create the drama and glory of the industry’s most mythologized moment, no matter how petty or insignificant the excuse.

And even if you couldn’t be Woodward or Bernstein, exactly, you might still have a shot at getting relatively rich and famous, thanks to the evolving ethos of TV news. Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, and within two years the network began airing what would become its signature program: Crossfire. The initial hosts of this televised debate were the liberal journalist Tom Braden and the conservative Pat Buchanan (who would interrupt his tenure, between 1985 and 1987, to serve as Reagan’s communications director). But the evolving cast mattered less than the conceit, which in many ways gave rise to the modern scourge of unending Washington punditry, with glib debate as a cheap replacement for actual news; within a few years, even the staid network Sunday shows that had been around for decades would come to resemble Crossfire in their penchant for partisan clashes and valueless prognostication. (Any thought that CNN, in hindsight, might regret what it had wrought on the political culture was banished in 2013, when the network decided to bring back the show, with Newt Gingrich on the right and Stephanie Cutter, a sharp-tongued Democratic aide, on the left.)

The same year that Crossfire premiered, a local Washington station started syndicating a weekend show called The McLaughlin Group, on which the host, the former Nixon advisor John McLaughlin, fired off abrupt questions at a panel of print journalists who were supposed to opine on all things political, like clairvoyants at a carnival show. The show would become enough of a pop culture sensation that by 1990 Saturday Night Live would be spoofing it regularly, with Dana Carvey doing a dead-on impersonation of the way McLaughlin bullied his guests to weigh in on every imaginable topic. Issue number three: life after death! Some pundits say it doesn’t exist! Theologians disagree! Is there an afterlife?

The boomer brand of newspaperman, cocky and overeducated compared to his predecessors, coveted a cameo on Crossfire or a seat on McLaughlin’s stage, which conferred a new kind of instant celebrity—at least among your colleagues. Shows like these ratcheted up the pressure on reporters to separate themselves from the pack by whatever means they could. And such venues contributed mightily to a shallower conversation about politicians generally, since, increasingly as the years went on, puffed-up panelists were just as likely to speculate on the personalities of candidates—more likely, in fact—as they were on the ideas and issues that were ostensibly under discussion.

And CNN’s existence itself had only been made viable by two relatively recent and revolutionary innovations: the replacement of film with modern videotape, and the proliferation of mobile satellite dishes that could bring news to you instantly, from anywhere. Until the late 1970s, the only way a network could “go live” from the scene of breaking news was to get the telephone company to install expensive audio and video lines—a process that took weeks to complete. You could manage that for an inauguration or an Olympics or some other planned event, but if you wanted to report today’s unscheduled news from some remote location, then you needed to hand the film to some guy on a motorcycle … who would speed it to a studio … where it would be developed, synced with sound, and fed into a Telecine machine that converted film into video … and ultimately couriered or transmitted on permanent lines back to editors in New York, or maybe edited in some local studio—by which time the deadline for the evening news might well have passed.

But then came the advent of what was known in the business as “ENG”—electronic news gathering—which relied on lighter and more portable videotape cameras, freeing networks from the shackles of film. And now that videotape could be transmitted, almost miraculously, from a new generation of mobile satellites. The first satellite dishes, unwieldy and temperamental, arrived strapped to the roofs of bulky trucks (with their own onboard generators) in the early 1980s. In 1986, CNN began issuing its correspondents “flyaway dishes” that could fold up and move around the world, which were destined to become the industry standard. The 1988 campaign would be the first where the three networks and this new, twenty-four-hour cable channel would be able to easily bring you updates and interviews from any location relevant to a breaking story.

When Joe Trippi, then a young aide on the Hart campaign, arrived in the remote reaches of Troublesome Gulch to rescue Lee Hart on the first full day of the scandal, he was stunned to find a row of dishes lined up on the gravel drive like an invading army at the gate. Within a few years, this would be a familiar sight even to Americans who had nothing to do with making or covering the news, but in 1987 it seemed as if aliens had landed from Mars. “Holy shit,” Trippi remembered thinking. “They move now.”

As Trippi and his colleagues on the campaign were about to learn, videotape and satellite technology had tremendous implications not just for the transmission of news—that is, how it literally got on air, and how fast—but also for the industry’s notion of what constituted it. Before the mid-eighties, which stories got on the air, and how prominently they were featured, depended almost entirely on their objective news value—that is, on how relevant they were to the public interest. But now that calculation had a lot more to do with immediacy; suddenly a story could be captivating without being especially important. After all, how could you lead with economic data when a little girl was lost in some God-forsaken well, and your correspondent was live on the scene?

What might have been a minor story in years past could now explode into a national event, within hours, provided it had the element of human drama necessary to keep viewers planted in their seats. Even as Hart prepared to announce his campaign at Red Rock, for instance, the media had become thoroughly obsessed with two sensational stories. The first concerned Fawn Hall, who worked as a secretary for Colonel Oliver North, the star of the Iran-contra hearings, and who had smuggled documents out of the White House in her boots and the back of her skirt. (The facts of the Iran-contra scandal itself, having to do with illegal arms sales to Iran in order to secretly finance an insurgency in Nicaragua, made for less compelling TV and weren’t as widely known.) The second story had to do with the disgrace and supposed extortion of Jim Bakker, a television evangelist accused of rape and adultery, and with his wife, Tammy Faye, whose blubbering, mascara-streaked face transfixed the nation for days.

It was an omen of things to come.

You could argue that all of this hinted at something corrosive not just in American media at the time, but in the culture as a whole. In 1985, the New York University professor Neil Postman published his treatise on the television age, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which stands even now as a stunning work of social criticism. Postman’s central thesis is worth revisiting. He declared that George Orwell’s fear for humanity, as depicted in 1984, had not come to pass; obviously, Americans in 1984 did not labor under the repression of an authoritarian, mind-controlling regime, nor did anything like that seem imminent. But Postman posited that by the mid-1980s we were well on our way, instead, to realizing Aldous Huxley’s disturbing vision in Brave New World—that of a citizenry lulled into docility and self-destruction by a never-ending parade of mindless entertainment.

Expanding on the theories of the sixties philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman explained that the dominant media in any given society didn’t just convey news and ideas neutrally, but in fact defined the very concepts of news and ideas in its time. During what Postman called the Age of Exposition, which saw America through its birth and lasted well into the twentieth century, all of our metaphors and frames of reference had come from the printed word. When political candidates debated issues, for instance, as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously did in 1858, they debated in what were essentially entire paragraphs and essays, because this was the only way they knew to receive and impart information. But that era had now given way to the Age of Show Business, in which television was the undisputed king of media. (At the time of Postman’s writing, at the dawn of cable and before the Internet, some ninety million Americans were said to watch TV every night.) And in a television-dominated society, Postman theorized, news and politics had to be entertaining in order for anyone to really pay attention.

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television,” Postman wrote. The mere fact that TV news shows called themselves “shows” at all, Postman pointed out, hinted at the way they were transforming the expository culture of journalism. He went on:

No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.

Postman noted the list of political figures who had now achieved the status of TV celebrity. Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of the Watergate hearings, was doing ads for American Express. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were popping up on Dynasty. George McGovern was hosting Saturday Night Live, and New York mayor Ed Koch (also an SNL host) was actually playing a fight manager in a made-for-TV movie. “Would anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on Hill Street Blues?” Postman wondered. (Actually, Hart’s star turn came the year after Postman’s book, on an episode of the sitcom Cheers.) The problem with all of this, he believed, was that Americans were bound to lose hold of the distinction between those who were supposed to be doing the country’s serious business, on one hand, and those who were supposed to make them laugh or cry or buy mouthwash, on the other. Soon policymakers would be nothing more than characters in a national soap opera.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman warned, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

There isn’t much about Postman’s attack on the show business society that isn’t accepted as plain fact today. But in the 1980s, when most Americans still trusted their evening news anchor and their congressman to explain and grapple with serious issues, his argument was provocative and, viewed now through the prism of time, visionary. In fact, in many ways, the 1988 campaign—occurring just as political consulting was becoming a millionaire-making industry, and just before Americans and their media had really gotten savvy about what these consultants were trying to do—marked the nadir of televised politics. When it was over, Americans would remember only three things about the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis: the silly image of him riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet; his flat answer when asked about the hypothetical rape of his wife; and the racially charged ad that claimed he had let a convicted killer, Willie Horton, go free on furlough. Each was an enduring image made specifically for television, the stuff of cheap drama or sitcom farce, and none had very much to do with governing the country. (It probably isn’t incidental that just over 50 percent of Americans bothered to show up at the polls on Election Day—the lowest voting rate in a presidential election in more than sixty years.)

All of these disparate, emerging forces in the society—a vacuum in the political debate, changing ideas about morality, a new generational ethos and new technologies in the media, the tabloidization of every aspect of American life—were coming together by the spring of 1987. The vortex was spinning madly and gaining speed. If Gary Hart hadn’t been the first to get sucked into it, someone else—Bill Clinton, surely—would have found himself there before long.

And yet, it was Hart who was about to lead the way into the modern age of political destruction, consigning himself to disgrace and infamy in the process. And this was more than a mere accident of history. If anyone had been designed to attract the vortex, to pull all of its currents together in a single violent tempest, it was Hart. On the issues of the day, Hart could see around corners with more clarity than any political figure of his time, or for some time after. But when it came to this shift in the way the society vetted its leaders, he remained disastrously, even willfully clueless.

To his younger supporters, Hart was emblematic of the generational shift that was reshaping America—and not a moment too soon. The rebellious teens of the sixties were just now moving into middle age, with all the angst and self-absorption that had characterized their youth. (The second most popular sitcom in America, after The Cosby Show, was Family Ties, in which two former hippies struggled with their Reagan-loving teenage son, played by Michael J. Fox.) They had, in many ways, remade the popular culture already, creating an entirely new template for social justice through movies and TV, literature and music; Cosby himself was a transformational figure, drawing a huge number of white Americans into the story of the emerging black middle class. But when it came to political leadership, the Man still wasn’t getting out of the way. By the dawn of 1987, President Reagan was seventy-five (and finally starting to look it), and his main Democratic foil, House speaker Tip O’Neill, was seventy-four. Reagan’s likely successor among Republicans, George H. W. Bush, was a comparatively sprightly sixty-two. Someone had to kick open the door to Washington and let the sixties generation come rushing through. And even before his thrilling run in 1984, Hart had been first in line.

After all, wherever politics—and Democratic politics specifically—had been headed in the two tumultuous decades before 1987, Hart had managed to lead the way. In 1969, when Hart was an unknown Denver lawyer with some ideas about reforming the electoral system, George McGovern picked him to serve on the commission that would institute the primary system for choosing Democratic nominees—an innovation that transformed presidential politics almost immediately by taking power from the old urban bosses and handing it to a new generation of activists, including women and African Americans. A few years later, McGovern, seeking to take advantage of the new primary system, tapped Hart to assemble and run his improbable, antiwar presidential campaign. McGovern overturned the party establishment on his way to the nomination (and a crushing defeat in the general election), and Hart became famous as the young, brilliant operative in cowboy boots, straddling the motorcycle of his new pal, Hunter S. Thompson.

Gary Hart, at right, as Senator George McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential election: thirty-five and a celebrity CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL

Hart got himself elected to the Senate just two years later, making him, at thirty-eight, its second youngest member. (Joe Biden, who got there in 1972, was six years younger.) Some older colleagues expected the glamorous ex-strategist to fashion himself as a left-wing revolutionary. But Hart was from the burgeoning West, where the party’s Eastern orthodoxies were always viewed with some contempt, and he was, by nature, too inquisitive to follow the crowd. Instead, he made a name for himself by leading the emerging movement to modernize the Cold War military. (Among those who shared his passion was a young Georgia congressman by the name of Newt Gingrich, who joined Hart’s new “military reform caucus.”) Hart’s foray into advances in modern weaponry led him, inevitably, to start thinking about the silicon chip and what it would mean for industry and education, too. Years later, Hart would remember an eye-opening lunch near Stanford with a couple of scruffy entrepreneurs named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had recently set up a company called Apple in Jobs’s garage.

By the early eighties, having been reelected despite the Reagan tide that wiped out nine of his Democratic colleagues (including McGovern), Hart was the front man for a small group of younger, mostly Western lawmakers whom the media dubbed the “Atari Democrats.” Their main preoccupation—which few politicians of the time understood, much less talked about—was how to transition the country and its military from the industrial economy to the computer-based world of the twenty-first century. This was dangerous ground for a Democrat in the 1980s, when industrial states and labor unions still threw around immense political power. Whenever anyone would ask Hart about whether his challenge to the status quo made him a liberal or a centrist, he would answer by drawing a simple graph on the back of a napkin or whatever else might be handy, sketching out a horizontal axis for notions of left and right, and then a vertical axis that represented the past and the future. Hart always placed himself in the upper left quadrant—progressive, yes, but tilting strongly toward a new set of policies to match up with new realities.

This is precisely how Hart positioned himself in 1984, when his underfunded and undermanned campaign erupted in New Hampshire and swept the West—as the young, forward-thinking alternative to his party’s aging liberal establishment. “Not since the Beatles had stormed onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show twenty years before had any new face so quickly captivated the popular culture,” The Washington Post’s Paul Taylor later wrote of the 1984 campaign. “Indeed, the velocity of Hart’s rise in the polls was unprecedented in American political history.” Except that Hart’s youthful image belied what was, in retrospect, a critical distinction between the candidate and a lot of those who were assumed to be his contemporaries—the activists, operatives, and reporters who represented the vanguard of the boomers. The baby boom had technically commenced in 1946. Hart, on the other hand, had been born a full decade earlier, in 1936. And those particular ten years happened to make a very big difference, temperamentally and philosophically, in the life of an American.

Those ten years meant that Hart’s essential worldview and personality were shaped more by his upbringing in the post-Depression Dust Bowl than by the beatniks or the social movements that later rocked Southern cities and college campuses. (Hart read about civil rights while doing his graduate studies in New Haven, but he never marched.) They meant that Hart, unlike his younger compatriots, didn’t see the personal as the political; to him, the personal was the personal, and nobody else’s business, and it wasn’t polite to ask too many questions. His grandfather sat silently on his front porch all day with a Bible in hand, and nobody badgered him about it. (When a neighbor finally did dare to ask what exactly he was doing out there, the old man answered: “Cramming for the finals.”) Though Hart’s father spent the war in Kansas, running through a succession of small businesses and houses, some of Hart’s uncles had returned from the Battle of the Bulge as hardened, silent men who drank too much and rode the rails for months at a time. They were his boyhood idols, and he knew better than to ask where they’d been or what they’d seen.

Like the role models of his youth, and like the taciturn railroad men he met during his first summers in Denver, where an uncle helped Hart land a job driving spikes in the ninety-degree heat, Hart learned to value reticence and privacy. And like his political heroes, the Kennedys, Hart believed that the political arena was constructed around recognized rules and boundaries, much like the societal rules and boundaries that had governed his upbringing.

This belief had only been reinforced by his experiences in public life. As a young senator (too young, really, to have merited such a prized assignment), Hart had served on the legendary Church Committee, which investigated the intelligence agencies’ secret activities on American soil. The committee had uncovered the first tangible evidence of John Kennedy’s sexual escapades and even his connections to Mafia figures, none of which had ever been publicly reported, despite its obvious availability. From his days at the McGovern campaign, Hart knew all the big-time reporters in Washington well enough to drink with them late into the night, but in his experience what was said at the hotel bar always stayed at the hotel bar.

It was well known around Washington, or at least well accepted, that Hart liked women, and that not all the women he liked were his wife. After all, Gary and Lee Hart had fallen in love and married as kids, in the confines of a strict church where even dancing was prohibited. It wasn’t just that Hart had never played the field before marriage; he’d never even stepped onto it. And so here he was, young and famous and sturdily good-looking, powerful in a city where power was everything, and friends knew that he and Lee—as so often happens with college sweethearts—had matured into different people, that she spent long periods back in Denver with the two kids, that she could drive him absolutely crazy at times. Twice he and Lee quietly agreed to separate for months at a time, and during one of those separations Hart had even moved in with his pal Bob Woodward and slept on the couch—at least when he wasn’t gone for nights at a time. No one in Woodward’s newsroom, or anyone else for that matter, ever thought to ask for details or to write a word about it. Why would they? Whose business was it, anyway?

A sense of remove from public life was crucial for Hart, and not simply, or even mostly, because of whatever women he was or wasn’t spending the night with. You could see it in the way he’d walk into any room, maybe a Hollywood cocktail party or a Manhattan fundraiser, and immediately plant himself in a corner somewhere, or over by the fireplace, watching and waiting for others to approach, just as he had been impelled to do at the church mixers as a boy. Ideas and rhetorical flourishes came easily to him, but not celebrity. “I am an obscure man, and I intend to remain that way,” Hart told the writer Gail Sheehy during the 1984 campaign. Hart was an introvert who needed space to breathe and think and be alone, and he had risen through a political world where such a thing was not antithetical to success.

Once, during that first presidential campaign, when the presidency had suddenly and miraculously seemed within reach, Hart had sat down the lead agent on his Secret Service detail and quizzed him. What if Hart were president, and one day he wanted to fly off to, say, Boulder, and wander through the downtown by himself, talk to some voters, maybe buy a few books, and then hop back on the plane and return to Washington? Would the cameras need to follow? Would “Redwood”—that was Hart’s Secret Service code name—really need the motorcade and the full detail and the rest of the traveling show? Yes, came the solemn reply—he would need all of it. And it was hard for Hart to argue the point after the convention in San Francisco, when the agents had stopped the elevator of the St. Francis Hotel and hustled him back upstairs, because, it turned out, some kid with a loaded .22 in his backpack had been waiting outside. (Word came back from the Secret Service that the hapless gunman, apparently not much of a reader, hadn’t gotten the word that Hart wasn’t the nominee.)

Hart wrestled with this issue of privacy all the time, even after his friend Warren Beatty, who had come by such wisdom firsthand, told him flatly: “There is no privacy.” Hart would say he felt called to the White House, in the way the Nazarenes spoke of a calling—compelled to serve, in the way the Kennedys had been compelled. He wanted the job as badly as any man, and he believed, as any good candidate must, that he was singularly qualified to hold it. But he did worry about being miserable. More and more, as time went on, Hart wasn’t content with the idea of simply becoming president. He meant to become president his way.

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