The Front Runner

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 (#ulink_591be863-7749-5c5e-83f0-6a90c36b71d4)

TROUBLESOME GULCH (#ulink_591be863-7749-5c5e-83f0-6a90c36b71d4)

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.