All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (15 page)

As far as Fiedler was concerned, the sex in itself wasn’t newsworthy—or at least that was how he would always frame the argument. Hart could sleep with whomever he wanted. What mattered was that if Hart were indeed cheating on his wife, then that would make him not just a philanderer, but also a liar and a hypocrite.
Just fourteen days before Fiedler’s phone rang portentously, Hart had stood up at Red Rocks and promised American voters that he would hold himself to the “very highest possible standards of integrity and ethics.” Never mind that he had been talking about something entirely different, that he was drawing a direct contrast with the Reagan administration, whose ill-advised foray into illegal arms sales to the Iranians was playing out daily in congressional hearings. If he wasn’t being faithful to his wife, and if he was purposely misleading the reporters who questioned him about the rumors, then how could Hart claim to be a moral leader?

“He was holding himself out to be a person of high ethical standards,” Fiedler told me, looking back later. “And if he wasn’t outright denying it, he was certainly very ambiguous about the idea that he was a womanizer.” (Twenty-six years later, that word sounded oddly retro, as if it had just been exhumed from some archive and dusted off.) “So I think our view was largely shaped on that. There was a contradiction between how he was holding himself out publicly and how he was behaving privately.”

Fiedler was well aware that no one in his position had ever breached this territory before. Certainly no reporter had even contemplated staking out the home of a presidential contender as if he were some drug runner on an episode of
Miami Vice
. But Fiedler had developed a theory of the case, a reason for changing the rules. The way Fiedler would explain it, the role of the political press had been dramatically and forever changed by the party reforms that began in 1968—ironically, the very same reforms on which Hart, as a young activist, had made his name and career. Before 1968, the Democratic and Republican nominees had been chosen predominately by party bosses and wealthy patricians, respectively, men who gathered in the proverbial back rooms of American politics and vetted the candidates themselves. These party leaders knew their own candidates intimately, and they were perfectly capable of deciding which of them had the mettle and integrity to be president and which didn’t. The bosses had no need for meddlesome reporters who could present them with exhaustive dossiers on potential nominees.

What the reforms had done, though, was to create the modern system of primaries and caucuses, in which voters, and not activists, had the ultimate say. And unlike the bosses, the voters had no real familiarity with the candidates who beseeched them, aside from what they saw on television.
Someone
had to give these candidates a thorough vetting.
Someone
had to be responsible for making sure the voters didn’t choose a deeply flawed potential president. And the only institution in American life that could move in to fill that vacuum was the media.

Did it matter if Gary Hart was lying about his sex life? Did it make him less of a leader than, say, Jack Kennedy? On these questions, Fiedler claimed to be disinterested. As far as he was concerned, the relevance of any given data point was entirely up to the voters. Fiedler’s job was simply to offer up as much information as he could that might reasonably pertain to a man’s character and moral fitness, and then let the public decide whether that information disqualified him or not. Fiedler was a hired investigator, paid not to judge the value of whatever unpleasantness he uncovered, but simply to compile and present it.

You could argue that this theory represented a startling abdication. After all, the role of the media had always been to make choices about which information mattered and which could be overlooked—which belonged on the front page, or inside the paper, or nowhere at all. At its most basic, any newspaper or newscast—or website, for that matter—is one big exercise in prioritizing information; the core role of any reporter or editor is to adjudicate the value of a story, relative to other stories. Floridians didn’t get the
Herald
dropped in their driveways so they could be assaulted with all the facts that could possibly be considered about a presidential candidate, in no particular order of importance—how he viewed the Soviets, what kind of shampoo he used, whether he changed his name. They expected journalists to exercise a little judgment about whether the information they happened upon was important—or even germane—to the arguments in a campaign.

To understand where Fiedler was coming from, though, you have to view his rationale through the lens of Watergate, which was still
very recent history in 1987—and which probably had a lot more to do with the shift in journalistic mores than the electoral reforms of 1968. It wasn’t just that reporters like Fiedler, who had started covering politics in the same year as the break-in at the Watergate, looked to Woodward and Bernstein as examples of the accolades a good scandal story could bring you (although they surely did). It was more that Watergate left the entire country feeling duped and betrayed. Sure, the whole thing ended up elevating the media, as personified by
The Washington Post
, to heroic stature in much of America. But political reporters had to ask themselves some hard questions in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation. How had a man so deficient in character, a man whose corruption and pettiness were so self-evident on those secretly recorded White House tapes, been able to win two presidential elections? Why had it taken a couple of no-name metro reporters to expose what the elite White House and campaign journalists had somehow missed after covering Nixon for twenty years?

The new generation wasn’t going to let that same thing happen to them. (And their elders at papers like the
Herald
were sufficiently chastened that they weren’t about to argue the point.) If reporters like Tom Fiedler were going to err, they were going to err on the side of disclosure, not propriety. The voters might consider the story of a president’s private behavior to be relevant, or maybe they wouldn’t, but never again would they have to wonder ruefully what kind of person they had elected.

Had Hart been just another of the unknown and uninspiring Democratic hopefuls whom pundits on the new genre of news shows had taken to calling the “Seven Dwarfs,” the rumors about his sex life might not have had so much currency. But Hart wasn’t just another candidate; he was crushing the rest of the field and running comfortably ahead of Bush in the polls, and he had already moved on to an ambitious governing agenda for the next eight years, as if the election itself were a formality. He was, for all practical purposes, a president in waiting. For Fiedler, when it came to this question of whether to find out if the guy was cheating on his wife, it really wasn’t much of a question at all.

• • •

Fiedler’s phone rang again late Friday night, May 1, this time at home. It was McGee, and he was excited. McGee, who at thirty-four could fairly be called one of the finest investigative reporters in all of American journalism, had spent the flight to Washington stalking his fellow passengers, walking up and down the aisle in search of women who looked as if they could plausibly be on their way to sleep with a presidential candidate. “He wondered how he would decide which woman to follow,” the
Herald
’s reporters later wrote, without a hint of realizing how creepy that sounded.

On the ground in Washington, McGee drove to Hart’s home on Capitol Hill and took up a position on a park bench that afforded a clear view of the front door. It was 9:30 p.m. when he saw Hart leave the townhouse with a woman he recognized from the ticket counter in Miami. McGee later described Rice as a “stunning” blonde and reported that when he first spied her at the airport, she had been in the company of another blonde who was “not as attractive.”

Hart and the young woman promptly drove off, and McGee rushed to a pay phone across the street. He called his editors and Fiedler to ask for backup; the story was unfolding rapidly, and he needed more bodies to help with the surveillance. McGee was still stationed on the street when, about two hours later, Hart and Rice returned from dinner and could be seen reentering the townhouse. McGee didn’t dare leave to get some sleep. He had to make sure the woman spent the night.

Fiedler later described himself as “dumbfounded” by McGee’s report from the townhouse that Friday night. He awoke Saturday morning and hopped the first flight to Washington. He brought with him McGee’s editor, Jim Savage, and a photographer, Brian Smith. When you added in Doug Clifton, a reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau who had joined McGee for part of the stakeout Friday night, the
Herald
’s crack undercover team now numbered five, along with no fewer than three rental cars, on a block where maybe one or two residents could be spotted on the sidewalk at any
given time in the afternoon. The odds of this kind of surveillance going undetected were not especially high.

Indeed, the covert operation did not go undetected. At about 8:40 p.m. Saturday, Hart and Rice left the house through the rear door and emerged into the adjacent alleyway, heading for the senator’s car. The idea, apparently, had been to meet Broadhurst and Armandt for dinner. It was then that Hart noticed things were amiss. The first reporter he spotted in the side alley was McGee, a two-hundred-pound man who for some reason had decided to make himself inconspicuous by donning sunglasses and a hooded parka. At night. In May.

McGee, sensing he’d been made, turned on his heels and ran into Fiedler, who, being the only reporter on the scene whom Hart actually knew from the campaign plane, had disguised himself in a tracksuit and was pretending to jog around every so often. “He’s right behind me,” McGee whispered urgently. Fiedler immediately changed direction and jogged across the street, like a disoriented sprinter.

Jumpy and alarmed, Hart abandoned the dinner plan and led Rice back inside. He was certain he was being watched but mystified as to who might be watching. He peered out of his second-floor kitchen window and surveyed Fifth Street. Hart was by no means an expert in counterintelligence, but he had traveled behind the Iron Curtain, where Americans were routinely tracked by government agents, and he had spent considerable time in the protection of Secret Service agents who were always scanning the periphery for threats. All of this was more than enough training for Hart to recognize the clownish stakeout that had all but taken over his street. He saw the five participants milling around, pretending to be strangers but then talking to each other, ducking into cars, or—at least in Hart’s telling, though the
Herald
guys disputed his account—disappearing behind his bushes.
His bushes
. He thought they had to be reporters, but how could he be sure? Maybe they worked for another campaign, or for the Republicans.

Hart would later tell me what he had told Cramer not long after
the event had taken place, that he felt nothing at that moment so much as sadness, a gloom that descended on him when he realized that this would never stop, that even in his own home he could not be free from the constant invasiveness and speculation. But he must have realized something more than that, too; he must have known, instinctively, that he had wandered into some new frontier and would not be able to retrace his steps. He had stubbornly clung to the idea that the accepted boundaries of privacy would hold, that certain of the old rules he had known would not suddenly disintegrate, as his advisors had warned. But in that moment, staring down at a sidewalk bathed in the floodlights of his own security system, Hart must have known he had been disastrously wrong. The exact ramifications of that miscalculation weren’t clear, and wouldn’t be clear for many days after. That there would be severe ramifications, however, could not have escaped a man as preternaturally intuitive as Gary Hart.

Hart’s first thought was to call the police. For decades afterward, he would second-guess himself for not having made this simple decision. But what was he going to say, exactly? That people were congregating on his sidewalk and looking through his windows? That he, Gary Hart, was being stalked? That reporters were standing outside the home of a presidential candidate, on a public street? All roads here seemed to end in the same desolate place, which was a spate of stories about how weird Gary Hart was calling District cops and pleading with them to keep the media or his opponents at a comfortable remove.

Instead, Hart decided, at first anyway, to hunker down and wait. He called Broadhurst, and Broadhurst came over with Armandt and some barbecued chicken. Billy Number Two tried to ease the boss’s mind, but Hart could not be easy now. He needed to be alone, to think, to take some kind of action. Later, when she sold her version of the story to
People
, Armandt would say that Broadhurst took this opportunity to tell both women what their story was going to be if they were asked—that Rice hadn’t spent Friday night at Hart’s place, that the four of them had been planning an innocent dinner so they could talk about jobs and the campaign. Rice would never
discuss this supposed cover-up, but she did tell me, many years later, that Hart was present for the conversation. Afterward, he instructed Broadhurst to gather up the women and leave via the back door. He would never see Donna Rice again.

If everything leading to that point had been unprecedented in the annals of presidential politics, then what happened next was the stuff of pure fiction, the kind of thing a Hollywood studio might have rejected as straining the bounds of suspended disbelief. It might seem farcical, even now, had a man’s career and the future of the country not been at stake.

Like a character in one of the spy novels he loved to read and write, Hart decided to outwit his surveillers and flush them into the open. It’s not clear how he thought this was going to end, other than badly, but a cornered man does not think so clearly. Hart put on a white sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over his famous mane. At first, he got into his car and merged into the Capitol Hill traffic. He expected to be followed, and he was—Smith, the photographer, was tailing him close behind. Satisfied with this maneuver, Hart pulled over after a few blocks, emerged from the car and started walking back in the general direction of the townhouse. He detoured down a side street and walked twice around the block.