Perhaps you’re one of the many millions who believe something has gone sadly wrong in national politics. Maybe you wonder how the media transformed itself into the Gotcha Patrol, the Character Police, and what price the country has paid for this mutation.
If so, All the Truth Is Out is for you. Matt Bai, former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and now national political correspondent for Yahoo News, brilliantly explores “the moment when the worlds of public service and tabloid entertainment … finally collided, and of the man who found himself improbably trapped in that collision.” The sorry downfall of Gary Hart, Bai believes, was “the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come.”
Hart, a Democratic senator from Colorado, jumped into the 1984 presidential campaign late but still won several primaries and took 1,200 delegates to the Democratic National Convention before bowing to Walter Mondale, who was crushed by Ronald Reagan in November. Three years later, Hart seemed inevitable. He quickly built a double-digit poll lead over rivals such as Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and Joe Biden. Polls showed him beating Vice President George H.W. Bush by 13 points.
But those “character” questions began to nag: Hart had changed his last name (from Hartpence), sometimes shaved a year off his birth date and, shock of shocks, had changed his signature several times. He had also separated twice from his wife.
As a result, many press types were already suspicious of Hart in April 1987, when the Miami Herald got an anonymous tip alleging that the senator had taken an overnight yacht trip from Miami to Bimini with a former Miss South Carolina (and Phil Beta Kappa scholar) named Donna Rice.
The Herald launched its now-infamous stakeout of Hart’s Washington townhouse, spotting Rice entering the residence and apparently spending the night.
The rest is tragicomedy. After the media firestorm, Hart withdrew from the race, consigned to a custom-made hell: a serious, reflective man of ideas who saw himself as a transformational figure, exiled from power and reduced to R-rated joke-bait for Johnny Carson.
Unlike others who fell from grace, Hart has remained stuck in scandal hell because he shunned our culture’s voyeuristic rites of cleansing. He refused to “write an apologetic memoir, shed a tear on Oprah, plot out a publicly orchestrated comeback on the cover of People.” In Bai’s view, however, we the voters are the real losers, inheriting a poisoned well of political discourse.
While Bai had access to Hart and his wife, Lee, for this book — and he records poignant and painful moments with Hart, now 78 — he also examines the social and historical forces behind the events that destroyed Hart with such dizzying speed. These included Nixon’s Watergate betrayal, which increased focus on candidates’ personal lives; the passing of the Mad Men ethic that viewed casual adultery as a trivial matter; the rise of TV shows like CNN’s Crossfire, harbinger of “the modern scourge of unending Washington punditry;” and the advent of portable satellite dishes that allowed the press to follow a story — or a quarry — anywhere.
As if to teach by example, Bai’s book is refreshingly free of the snark and bile that too often passes for political debate these days. Unlike some of the media kingpins he interviews, Bai seems deeply committed to understanding the reverberations of the Hart scandal, not whitewashing the sins of his profession. He sees the debacle as a kind of tragedy — for Hart and for the nation — though he never tries to absolve Hart of all wrongdoing.
“Too much of [the system] is just a mockery,” a furious Hart said in his withdrawal speech. “And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then the system will eventually destroy itself.” Who knows whether his words will prove prophetic?
Dallas writer Chris Tucker teaches politics and history in the Emeritus Program at Richland College.
books@dallasnews.com
All the Truth Is Out
The Week Politics Went Tabloid
Matt Bai
(Knopf, $26.95)
