The Front Runner

The Front Runner
Matt Bai

Now a major motion picture starring Hugh Jackman.When politics went tabloid…In May 1987, Colorado Senator Gary Hart seemed like a no-brainer for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. He was articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive and led George H. W. Bush by double digits in the polls. However, he was also a deeply private man, uneasy when attention moved away from his political views to his personal life. Then, in one tumultuous week, it all came crashing down. Rumours of marital infidelity, a photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully-named yacht, and a newspaper’s stakeout of Hart’s home resulted in a media frenzy the likes of which had never been seen before.Through the spellbindingly reported story of the Senator’s fall from grace, Matt Bai, Yahoo News columnist and former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, revisits the Gary Hart affair and unpicks how one man’s tragedy forever changed the nature of political media and, by extension, politics itself. This was the moment when the paradigm shifted – private lives became public; news became entertainment; and politics became tabloid.

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_bd4c454a-4983-502e-a3cd-19e373398f1a)

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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

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Motion Picture Artwork (cover) © 2018 CTMG. All Rights Reserved

Author photograph © Robyn Twomey

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Matt Bai asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008333218

Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008333225

Version 2018-12-13

DEDICATION (#ulink_ff996bbc-bb20-574b-acf9-65323cb1bfe2)

For Ellen

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_20ae58a6-dd13-5518-bcdd-1b6e088515d7)

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 (#u2a2374fe-0bd0-57c4-8f16-d76da6ece6a3)

Title Page (#u132ef9dd-8049-5eba-bffc-88fd8c505f2e)

Copyright (#ulink_b159f19d-83e7-578f-8426-bd59101e2956)

Dedication (#ulink_c49af815-d370-5feb-b97d-7ea8199347a3)

Epigraph (#ulink_d4c07ce8-c0f0-5a00-9588-c5a4227f6251)

PREFACE What It Took (#ulink_399dc607-f7d0-5af1-b3e4-8348ed7149e5)

1 Troublesome Gulch (#ulink_3a8af9d6-5cdb-5f87-99b0-9be09cd69562)

2 Tilting Toward Culture Death (#ulink_a4f9dbe3-7d47-5a8e-ac0a-2f050f3fba67)

3 Out There (#ulink_3aa1bf41-8e77-52fd-80e1-c37fbc6ade11)

4 Follow Me Around (#litres_trial_promo)

5 “I Do Not Think That’s a Fair Question” (#litres_trial_promo)

6 All the Truth Is Out (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Exile (#litres_trial_promo)

8 A Lesser Land (#litres_trial_promo)

A Note on Sourcing (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

List of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PREFACE (#ulink_c8e5175e-2064-52e9-8594-b2baf72e4b9b)

WHAT IT TOOK (#ulink_c8e5175e-2064-52e9-8594-b2baf72e4b9b)

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.