All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (20 page)

And then there was the Woodward issue to consider. The way Woodward always told the story, yes, Hart had crashed at his place during his first separation from Lee, but it’s not like they were acting out the Odd Couple or something; Hart was over at a girlfriend’s most of the time and basically used Woodward’s place as a forwarding address. After some weeks of this, Woodward grew uneasy and asked his buddy Gary to camp elsewhere, and that was the extent
of it. Still, if everyone in Bradlee’s office knew this story, that meant that half of Capitol Hill did, too. And if the
Post
ignored the constant gossip about Hart, and it later came to light that he was still fooling around, then the paper might face allegations that it essentially took a pass in order to spare Woodward’s buddy—and perhaps even Woodward himself—any embarrassment.

It was Broder, the voice of experience and wisdom, who formulated a compromise. The
Post
would shortly be in the process of compiling its in-depth profiles of all the candidates, which by that time was a quadrennial rite. There was no need, Broder suggested, for the
Post
to start hunting around in every candidate’s sex life just because the issue was swirling around Hart. What they needed to do was commence their exhaustive reporting on Hart’s profile and see what came up. If the reporter assigned to the piece decided there was any troubling pattern of behavior when it came to women, something that called Hart’s judgment or stability into question, they could figure out how to deal with it then.

“In ways that I thought were very inappropriate, the fact that he had a womanizing problem was becoming part of who he was as a candidate and now the front-runner coming into this next presidential campaign,” Taylor reflected when we talked many years later. “I was very uncomfortable with that. And at the
Post
, we said, You know, we’re not going to go there, and it’s irresponsible to present it that way. It’s rumormongering. But we can’t close our eyes to the fact that that’s part of the world we know very well—the journalists, the candidates, the consultants, the opponents, Hart’s own staff. It’s all part of their world. It’s real, in that sense. It may well make its way into becoming part of this thing. So let’s see what there is.”

As it happened, the reporter assigned to do the Hart profile, the talented David Maraniss, was at that point wrapping up another assignment. He was just turning his sights on Hart when the
Herald
story hit.

There was an assumption inherent in the
Post
’s deliberations, which was that the
Post
, along with a handful of other elite news organizations,
would be the ones who got to decide whether Hart’s personal life should be an issue of national prominence or not. That’s pretty much how it had worked, to that point, in political journalism. If the
Post
or the
Times
or
The Wall Street Journal
—or, to a lesser extent, the three broadcast networks, who tended to follow the lead of the major print outlets—didn’t think a story rose to the level of serious news, then it remained a regional story or an unreported rumor. Bradlee had every reason to be deliberate before reaching a determination on Hart’s “pattern of behavior,” because he and a small group of other editors ultimately set the agenda for everyone else, no matter what a less influential paper like the
Herald
had to say about it.

That’s also why it was possible to think, if you woke up in Washington that Monday morning, May 4, that the story about Hart and Donna Rice, which was now twenty-four hours old, might be short-lived. Taylor had coauthored a piece about the allegations on the
Post
’s Monday front page, but it didn’t do much to legitimize the
Herald
piece as important news.
NEWSPAPER STAKEOUT INFURIATES HART
, the headline declared, followed by the subhead: “Report on Female House Guest Called Character Assassination.” The
Times
, meanwhile, included a small item inside the national section, the tone of which suggested that editors had placed it there with a pair of tongs so as not to sully themselves. Dixon still found himself surrounded, at Billy Broadhurst’s place, by reporters and camera crews, but this was an assemblage of political reporters, most of whom still felt uneasy about the story and who readily observed the traditional rules of decorum.

By that point, however, it was becoming clear that outside Washington something else was happening—something entirely unfamiliar in the political media. Until that moment, you have to remember, Hollywood and its attendant paparazzi had existed in a separate universe from the coverage of American campaigns. No tabloid photographer bothered stalking some boring politician or trying to snap a photo of him in a bathing suit—who would have paid for such a pathetic picture, anyway? But now, as Neil Postman had so brilliantly predicted in
Amusing Ourselves to Death
, the lines between entertainment and politics had become harder to discern. The more
political coverage focused on the personalities of candidates, and the more those candidates tried to broaden their own celebrity by showing up on the sets of TV shows, the more
People
and the
National Enquirer
started to think of them as stars in a national drama, just like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. As Warren Beatty had understood and tried to explain to Hart, the same paparazzi who had already made privacy obsolete in Hollywood were readying for an incursion onto political turf. All they needed was a reason.

The first sign came Sunday, sometime around noon, at the cabin in Troublesome Gulch. That’s when the wave of newfangled satellite trucks lumbered up the gravel drive like a line of tanks rumbling through the desert, disturbing the quiet hum of spring. Lee had taken the weekend off from the campaign trail, because she had a sinus infection that had swollen half her face, and she couldn’t fly. Hart had called her Saturday night from Washington to say that there was an ugly story coming, but that he’d done nothing wrong, and Lee told him she believed in him and didn’t need the details. But nobody was going to believe that if they saw her puffy face on TV, as if she’d been up all night bawling.

And so, surrounded by her daughter and a bevy of girlfriends who arrived to see her through, Lee hid in the kitchen as these TV trucks barricaded her inside her own home, the telephone on the kitchen wall her only means of reaching her husband or the outside world. (Among the few outsiders who called the cabin to check on her during this time was Hart’s rival Jesse Jackson—an act of compassion Lee would never forget.) The words “crowd control” and “perimeter” weren’t part of the standard political lexicon in 1987; Lee simply watched through the kitchen window, like some heroine in a zombie movie, as each new photographer to arrive tried to scale her fence or climb a tree just fifty yards from where she stood.

Alarmed by Lee’s panicked calls to headquarters, John Emerson grabbed Joe Trippi, the deputy political director, and gave him an instant (if dubious) promotion: chief of staff to the candidate’s wife. Trippi’s job was to secure the premises and, ultimately, to get Lee out of Troublesome Gulch without her being chased down the mountain
by careening camera trucks. Thus it’s fair to say that Trippi, who was thirty at the time, became the first campaign operative in American history to personally confront the collision of politics and tabloid media and the sudden mobilization of a satellite-wielding army.

Trippi would forever remember being accosted by a guy, as he tried to get through the front gate, who identified himself as a reporter for
A Current Affair
. The syndicated show, hosted by the gossipy Maury Povich, had started airing a year earlier. Trippi, whose mind was on his candidate’s alleged adultery—and who, like most political operatives, had never heard of anything called
A Current Affair
—was incredulous. “You mean they have an entire
show
for that now?” he stammered.

If anybody swept up in this whole fiasco should have understood how to navigate the rabid, explosive culture of celebrity media, you would think it would have been Donna Rice. She had dated Don Henley and Prince Albert of Monaco, had appeared on numerous soap operas and TV dramas, including
Miami Vice
and the outrageously popular
Dallas
. She was represented by agents in New York and Miami. If you were writing the purely fictional account of the Hart scandal, you might imagine Rice in the mold of Nicole Kidman’s character in the movie
To Die For
—gorgeous and manipulative, lusting for stardom, indifferent to how she got there or who got trampled in the process.

In reality, Rice was, as she described herself, a “typical Southern girl”—a former Miss South Carolina and head cheerleader, yes, but also a magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of South Carolina, with a major in biology and a minor in business, and her district’s top saleswoman of Wyeth products. She felt swept away by Hart, despite only having known him for a few weeks, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt his campaign, about which she knew almost nothing. When the reporters started congregating at Broadhurst’s townhouse, Rice repeatedly begged to talk to Hart, who was the only one in the bunch she trusted. She
wanted to tell him that she hadn’t had anything to do with tipping off the
Herald
, and then she wanted to go home.

So did Armandt. Unlike Rice, she knew exactly how the
Herald
guys had come to be at Hart’s townhouse, and you can only imagine how uncomfortable she must have been holed up in Broadhurst’s place, like a mob informant at the moment when the cops show up. Before she managed to make her escape, however, Armandt had a private chat with Broadhurst, and then Broadhurst sat Rice down for a serious talk. He told her the campaign had a sensitive question for her: Was there anything embarrassing in her past, anything at all that might surface in the hours ahead?

Rice steeled herself. She really did want to help Hart. So she offered up two deeply personal and painful facts about her life that not even her parents or most of her closest friends knew. First, she had an ex-boyfriend who was in jail for drug charges. And second, a fashion photographer in Miami had once taken photos of her wrapped in an American flag, with a half of one breast exposed. And there it was—the seamy lining of her life, turned inside out. Broadhurst prevailed on her to repeat her admissions for Dixon and a few other campaign aides. From that moment on, Rice felt that, as far as the Hart people were concerned, she was the one on trial, the one whose character was suspect.

In exchange for these tidbits about herself, Rice wanted only one thing. She pleaded with Broadhurst not to let the campaign release her name to the media. All she wanted was to escape this thing without anybody knowing who she was or trying to ask her questions about it. She was devastated when, on the phone a few hours later, her mother asked her why she was all over the TV news and what was going on; in the interest of getting all the facts out at once, the campaign had released her name. By that time, the paparazzi were already arriving at Rice’s condo in Miami, waiting to ambush her. Her parents’ house in South Carolina would soon be surrounded, too. The Hart team pressed her for the name of someone who could “run interference” for her—meaning a family lawyer or an agent. Rice had no idea what that meant. She had no one like that. Most normal people didn’t.

There was no page in the political manual—at least not yet—for what to do with a woman in Rice’s position. So there, too, the Hart team had to improvise. They flew in Sue Casey, Hart’s scheduler and longtime aide, who was around Rice’s age, and had Casey stay with her Sunday night in a hotel at Dulles Airport, then fly with her back to Miami. Dixon had enlisted the help of Tom McAliley, a cigar-chomping trial lawyer and raconteur who was Hart’s point man in Florida, and McAliley met the two women at the airport Monday morning and spirited Rice directly to his office. McAliley’s plan was first to assemble about a half dozen handpicked reporters and let them question Rice in his conference room. Rice pleaded with him to spare her this ordeal and let her go home, but she was like a captive now; she had promised to do whatever they needed her to do if it would make all of this go away. McAliley had to sequester her in his office, because the photographers and reporters had started to besiege the building. When Rice made the mistake of trying to use the women’s room by herself, they descended on her like a pack of wolves, right there in the hallway.

It stung Rice, then and for all the many years after, to find that the reporters gathered in McAliley’s conference room already knew both of the embarrassing, intimate details of her life she had shared, privately, with the campaign. Clearly, Hart’s people had decided to get out in front of any further disclosures. But outwardly, Rice never seemed rattled. Rather, she was eerily disarming, sweet, relaxed. “I was a professional,” she told me many years later, by which she meant that she had learned, as an actress, to set aside her fear and read her lines.

Right up front, according to notes from the session that later ended up in the AP archives, Rice said she was nervous, and she tried to impress upon the reporters that she was a serious person, someone who once “had the opportunity to go to any graduate school I wanted to.” She said she hadn’t spent the night at Hart’s place, but rather had left by the back door, just as Dixon had been saying. She said they were “pals,” nothing more, that she preferred younger men, and that “if I had felt there were anything more in his intentions I would have been very upset.” (This last bit was, to put it
nicely, a complete lie.) “If there had been something fishy,” she cannily assured the reporters, “we would have been sneaking around.”

When they asked her outright if she’d had “sexual relations” with Hart, Rice was as direct and final as she could be. “No” was her answer—three separate times. As if to call this answer further into question, however, Rice did confirm for the reporters a rumor that had been circulating ever since the
Herald
had heard from its tipster about photographs taken on a private yacht. At McAliley’s urging, Rice told the media contingent about the chartered boat and the overnight stay in Bimini, which she described as innocent, but which guaranteed another daily news cycle of salacious headlines.