The Front Runner

What might have been a minor story in years past could now explode into a national event, within hours, provided it had the element of human drama necessary to keep viewers planted in their seats. Even as Hart prepared to announce his campaign at Red Rock, for instance, the media had become thoroughly obsessed with two sensational stories. The first concerned Fawn Hall, who worked as a secretary for Colonel Oliver North, the star of the Iran-contra hearings, and who had smuggled documents out of the White House in her boots and the back of her skirt. (The facts of the Iran-contra scandal itself, having to do with illegal arms sales to Iran in order to secretly finance an insurgency in Nicaragua, made for less compelling TV and weren’t as widely known.) The second story had to do with the disgrace and supposed extortion of Jim Bakker, a television evangelist accused of rape and adultery, and with his wife, Tammy Faye, whose blubbering, mascara-streaked face transfixed the nation for days.

It was an omen of things to come.

You could argue that all of this hinted at something corrosive not just in American media at the time, but in the culture as a whole. In 1985, the New York University professor Neil Postman published his treatise on the television age, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which stands even now as a stunning work of social criticism. Postman’s central thesis is worth revisiting. He declared that George Orwell’s fear for humanity, as depicted in 1984, had not come to pass; obviously, Americans in 1984 did not labor under the repression of an authoritarian, mind-controlling regime, nor did anything like that seem imminent. But Postman posited that by the mid-1980s we were well on our way, instead, to realizing Aldous Huxley’s disturbing vision in Brave New World—that of a citizenry lulled into docility and self-destruction by a never-ending parade of mindless entertainment.

Expanding on the theories of the sixties philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman explained that the dominant media in any given society didn’t just convey news and ideas neutrally, but in fact defined the very concepts of news and ideas in its time. During what Postman called the Age of Exposition, which saw America through its birth and lasted well into the twentieth century, all of our metaphors and frames of reference had come from the printed word. When political candidates debated issues, for instance, as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously did in 1858, they debated in what were essentially entire paragraphs and essays, because this was the only way they knew to receive and impart information. But that era had now given way to the Age of Show Business, in which television was the undisputed king of media. (At the time of Postman’s writing, at the dawn of cable and before the Internet, some ninety million Americans were said to watch TV every night.) And in a television-dominated society, Postman theorized, news and politics had to be entertaining in order for anyone to really pay attention.

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television,” Postman wrote. The mere fact that TV news shows called themselves “shows” at all, Postman pointed out, hinted at the way they were transforming the expository culture of journalism. He went on:

No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.

Postman noted the list of political figures who had now achieved the status of TV celebrity. Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of the Watergate hearings, was doing ads for American Express. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were popping up on Dynasty. George McGovern was hosting Saturday Night Live, and New York mayor Ed Koch (also an SNL host) was actually playing a fight manager in a made-for-TV movie. “Would anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on Hill Street Blues?” Postman wondered. (Actually, Hart’s star turn came the year after Postman’s book, on an episode of the sitcom Cheers.) The problem with all of this, he believed, was that Americans were bound to lose hold of the distinction between those who were supposed to be doing the country’s serious business, on one hand, and those who were supposed to make them laugh or cry or buy mouthwash, on the other. Soon policymakers would be nothing more than characters in a national soap opera.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman warned, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

There isn’t much about Postman’s attack on the show business society that isn’t accepted as plain fact today. But in the 1980s, when most Americans still trusted their evening news anchor and their congressman to explain and grapple with serious issues, his argument was provocative and, viewed now through the prism of time, visionary. In fact, in many ways, the 1988 campaign—occurring just as political consulting was becoming a millionaire-making industry, and just before Americans and their media had really gotten savvy about what these consultants were trying to do—marked the nadir of televised politics. When it was over, Americans would remember only three things about the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis: the silly image of him riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet; his flat answer when asked about the hypothetical rape of his wife; and the racially charged ad that claimed he had let a convicted killer, Willie Horton, go free on furlough. Each was an enduring image made specifically for television, the stuff of cheap drama or sitcom farce, and none had very much to do with governing the country. (It probably isn’t incidental that just over 50 percent of Americans bothered to show up at the polls on Election Day—the lowest voting rate in a presidential election in more than sixty years.)

All of these disparate, emerging forces in the society—a vacuum in the political debate, changing ideas about morality, a new generational ethos and new technologies in the media, the tabloidization of every aspect of American life—were coming together by the spring of 1987. The vortex was spinning madly and gaining speed. If Gary Hart hadn’t been the first to get sucked into it, someone else—Bill Clinton, surely—would have found himself there before long.

And yet, it was Hart who was about to lead the way into the modern age of political destruction, consigning himself to disgrace and infamy in the process. And this was more than a mere accident of history. If anyone had been designed to attract the vortex, to pull all of its currents together in a single violent tempest, it was Hart. On the issues of the day, Hart could see around corners with more clarity than any political figure of his time, or for some time after. But when it came to this shift in the way the society vetted its leaders, he remained disastrously, even willfully clueless.

To his younger supporters, Hart was emblematic of the generational shift that was reshaping America—and not a moment too soon. The rebellious teens of the sixties were just now moving into middle age, with all the angst and self-absorption that had characterized their youth. (The second most popular sitcom in America, after The Cosby Show, was Family Ties, in which two former hippies struggled with their Reagan-loving teenage son, played by Michael J. Fox.) They had, in many ways, remade the popular culture already, creating an entirely new template for social justice through movies and TV, literature and music; Cosby himself was a transformational figure, drawing a huge number of white Americans into the story of the emerging black middle class. But when it came to political leadership, the Man still wasn’t getting out of the way. By the dawn of 1987, President Reagan was seventy-five (and finally starting to look it), and his main Democratic foil, House speaker Tip O’Neill, was seventy-four. Reagan’s likely successor among Republicans, George H. W. Bush, was a comparatively sprightly sixty-two. Someone had to kick open the door to Washington and let the sixties generation come rushing through. And even before his thrilling run in 1984, Hart had been first in line.

After all, wherever politics—and Democratic politics specifically—had been headed in the two tumultuous decades before 1987, Hart had managed to lead the way. In 1969, when Hart was an unknown Denver lawyer with some ideas about reforming the electoral system, George McGovern picked him to serve on the commission that would institute the primary system for choosing Democratic nominees—an innovation that transformed presidential politics almost immediately by taking power from the old urban bosses and handing it to a new generation of activists, including women and African Americans. A few years later, McGovern, seeking to take advantage of the new primary system, tapped Hart to assemble and run his improbable, antiwar presidential campaign. McGovern overturned the party establishment on his way to the nomination (and a crushing defeat in the general election), and Hart became famous as the young, brilliant operative in cowboy boots, straddling the motorcycle of his new pal, Hunter S. Thompson.

Gary Hart, at right, as Senator George McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential election: thirty-five and a celebrity CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL

Hart got himself elected to the Senate just two years later, making him, at thirty-eight, its second youngest member. (Joe Biden, who got there in 1972, was six years younger.) Some older colleagues expected the glamorous ex-strategist to fashion himself as a left-wing revolutionary. But Hart was from the burgeoning West, where the party’s Eastern orthodoxies were always viewed with some contempt, and he was, by nature, too inquisitive to follow the crowd. Instead, he made a name for himself by leading the emerging movement to modernize the Cold War military. (Among those who shared his passion was a young Georgia congressman by the name of Newt Gingrich, who joined Hart’s new “military reform caucus.”) Hart’s foray into advances in modern weaponry led him, inevitably, to start thinking about the silicon chip and what it would mean for industry and education, too. Years later, Hart would remember an eye-opening lunch near Stanford with a couple of scruffy entrepreneurs named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had recently set up a company called Apple in Jobs’s garage.

By the early eighties, having been reelected despite the Reagan tide that wiped out nine of his Democratic colleagues (including McGovern), Hart was the front man for a small group of younger, mostly Western lawmakers whom the media dubbed the “Atari Democrats.” Their main preoccupation—which few politicians of the time understood, much less talked about—was how to transition the country and its military from the industrial economy to the computer-based world of the twenty-first century. This was dangerous ground for a Democrat in the 1980s, when industrial states and labor unions still threw around immense political power. Whenever anyone would ask Hart about whether his challenge to the status quo made him a liberal or a centrist, he would answer by drawing a simple graph on the back of a napkin or whatever else might be handy, sketching out a horizontal axis for notions of left and right, and then a vertical axis that represented the past and the future. Hart always placed himself in the upper left quadrant—progressive, yes, but tilting strongly toward a new set of policies to match up with new realities.

This is precisely how Hart positioned himself in 1984, when his underfunded and undermanned campaign erupted in New Hampshire and swept the West—as the young, forward-thinking alternative to his party’s aging liberal establishment. “Not since the Beatles had stormed onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show twenty years before had any new face so quickly captivated the popular culture,” The Washington Post’s Paul Taylor later wrote of the 1984 campaign. “Indeed, the velocity of Hart’s rise in the polls was unprecedented in American political history.” Except that Hart’s youthful image belied what was, in retrospect, a critical distinction between the candidate and a lot of those who were assumed to be his contemporaries—the activists, operatives, and reporters who represented the vanguard of the boomers. The baby boom had technically commenced in 1946. Hart, on the other hand, had been born a full decade earlier, in 1936. And those particular ten years happened to make a very big difference, temperamentally and philosophically, in the life of an American.

Those ten years meant that Hart’s essential worldview and personality were shaped more by his upbringing in the post-Depression Dust Bowl than by the beatniks or the social movements that later rocked Southern cities and college campuses. (Hart read about civil rights while doing his graduate studies in New Haven, but he never marched.) They meant that Hart, unlike his younger compatriots, didn’t see the personal as the political; to him, the personal was the personal, and nobody else’s business, and it wasn’t polite to ask too many questions. His grandfather sat silently on his front porch all day with a Bible in hand, and nobody badgered him about it. (When a neighbor finally did dare to ask what exactly he was doing out there, the old man answered: “Cramming for the finals.”) Though Hart’s father spent the war in Kansas, running through a succession of small businesses and houses, some of Hart’s uncles had returned from the Battle of the Bulge as hardened, silent men who drank too much and rode the rails for months at a time. They were his boyhood idols, and he knew better than to ask where they’d been or what they’d seen.

Like the role models of his youth, and like the taciturn railroad men he met during his first summers in Denver, where an uncle helped Hart land a job driving spikes in the ninety-degree heat, Hart learned to value reticence and privacy. And like his political heroes, the Kennedys, Hart believed that the political arena was constructed around recognized rules and boundaries, much like the societal rules and boundaries that had governed his upbringing.

This belief had only been reinforced by his experiences in public life. As a young senator (too young, really, to have merited such a prized assignment), Hart had served on the legendary Church Committee, which investigated the intelligence agencies’ secret activities on American soil. The committee had uncovered the first tangible evidence of John Kennedy’s sexual escapades and even his connections to Mafia figures, none of which had ever been publicly reported, despite its obvious availability. From his days at the McGovern campaign, Hart knew all the big-time reporters in Washington well enough to drink with them late into the night, but in his experience what was said at the hotel bar always stayed at the hotel bar.

It was well known around Washington, or at least well accepted, that Hart liked women, and that not all the women he liked were his wife. After all, Gary and Lee Hart had fallen in love and married as kids, in the confines of a strict church where even dancing was prohibited. It wasn’t just that Hart had never played the field before marriage; he’d never even stepped onto it. And so here he was, young and famous and sturdily good-looking, powerful in a city where power was everything, and friends knew that he and Lee—as so often happens with college sweethearts—had matured into different people, that she spent long periods back in Denver with the two kids, that she could drive him absolutely crazy at times. Twice he and Lee quietly agreed to separate for months at a time, and during one of those separations Hart had even moved in with his pal Bob Woodward and slept on the couch—at least when he wasn’t gone for nights at a time. No one in Woodward’s newsroom, or anyone else for that matter, ever thought to ask for details or to write a word about it. Why would they? Whose business was it, anyway?

A sense of remove from public life was crucial for Hart, and not simply, or even mostly, because of whatever women he was or wasn’t spending the night with. You could see it in the way he’d walk into any room, maybe a Hollywood cocktail party or a Manhattan fundraiser, and immediately plant himself in a corner somewhere, or over by the fireplace, watching and waiting for others to approach, just as he had been impelled to do at the church mixers as a boy. Ideas and rhetorical flourishes came easily to him, but not celebrity. “I am an obscure man, and I intend to remain that way,” Hart told the writer Gail Sheehy during the 1984 campaign. Hart was an introvert who needed space to breathe and think and be alone, and he had risen through a political world where such a thing was not antithetical to success.

Once, during that first presidential campaign, when the presidency had suddenly and miraculously seemed within reach, Hart had sat down the lead agent on his Secret Service detail and quizzed him. What if Hart were president, and one day he wanted to fly off to, say, Boulder, and wander through the downtown by himself, talk to some voters, maybe buy a few books, and then hop back on the plane and return to Washington? Would the cameras need to follow? Would “Redwood”—that was Hart’s Secret Service code name—really need the motorcade and the full detail and the rest of the traveling show? Yes, came the solemn reply—he would need all of it. And it was hard for Hart to argue the point after the convention in San Francisco, when the agents had stopped the elevator of the St. Francis Hotel and hustled him back upstairs, because, it turned out, some kid with a loaded .22 in his backpack had been waiting outside. (Word came back from the Secret Service that the hapless gunman, apparently not much of a reader, hadn’t gotten the word that Hart wasn’t the nominee.)

Hart wrestled with this issue of privacy all the time, even after his friend Warren Beatty, who had come by such wisdom firsthand, told him flatly: “There is no privacy.” Hart would say he felt called to the White House, in the way the Nazarenes spoke of a calling—compelled to serve, in the way the Kennedys had been compelled. He wanted the job as badly as any man, and he believed, as any good candidate must, that he was singularly qualified to hold it. But he did worry about being miserable. More and more, as time went on, Hart wasn’t content with the idea of simply becoming president. He meant to become president his way.

3 (#ulink_4b9dcd3f-b4f8-55ca-9d7d-1a41473af71d)

OUT THERE (#ulink_4b9dcd3f-b4f8-55ca-9d7d-1a41473af71d)

IT STUNG BADLY, that moment in 1984 when Hart’s soaring campaign took a direct hit, when he started to lose altitude and never fully recovered. It was March, less than two weeks after his stunning, ten-point thrashing of Walter Mondale in New Hampshire, and the two men were seated next to each other during a televised debate at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. A confident Hart was giving it to the former vice president pretty good, going on about the younger Americans who had entered the process in the previous decade, how weary they were of an aging Democratic establishment that cared only about keeping its interest groups happy, how badly they wanted new ideas. It was a theme that Hart had been sounding since 1973, when he wrote, in the closing pages of his memoir of the McGovern campaign, that “American liberalism was near bankruptcy.” Despite President Kennedy’s poetry, Hart had written then, the torch wasn’t passed from one generation to the next—it had to be seized.

The fifty-six-year-old Mondale was no rookie, though, and he was ready with a canned one-liner that had been written for him by Bob Beckel, his sharp-tongued strategist (and later another cohost of Crossfire). The laconic former vice president had to wind up and start delivering the line several times, since he couldn’t get Hart to shut up already and let him do it the way he’d practiced. “When I hear your new ideas,” Mondale finally said, in his flat Midwestern accent, “I’m reminded of that ad. ‘Where’s the beef?’”

It’s probably hard for any American born after, say, 1980 to appreciate how devastating a line like that could be. This was before ubiquitous cable or DVRs or the phrase “audience fragmentation.” Most American families watched one of the same three networks at the same time every night, so no one watching the debate at home could have missed what was then the most talked about advertising campaign in the country—that Wendy’s ad where one old woman kept talking about how big the bun was on the typical fast-food burger, while her tiny, white-haired companion blurted out: “Where’s the beef?” Mondale’s laugh line instantly became one of the seminal moments in the history of American debates. It recast him, instantly, as somehow more current and less of a cardboard cutout. And, more important, it underscored how little Democrats really knew about this young interloper who was on the verge of upending their party.

Hart’s 1984 campaign had been, from the start, something of an amateur enterprise; he had hovered around 3 percent in the polls for most of the campaign before New Hampshire. He hadn’t yet figured out a facile way of communicating his worldview in a few sentences, and even if he had, his campaign lacked the funding and sophistication needed to get it across. Mondale had seen Hart’s vulnerability and struck at it. The blow didn’t stop Hart from going on to win most of the remaining states, including California on the final day of voting before the convention. But Mondale’s one great debate moment did arrest his precipitous slide long enough to keep the party regulars—and most notably the newly created “superdelegates”—in line, and it was they who ultimately ensured his path to the nomination.

There was never any question that Hart would run again, nor was there any question that he would be the presumed nominee, especially after his warnings about the party’s dying establishment proved well founded. The first thing he did, the day after Reagan thoroughly humiliated Mondale at the polls that November by taking every state but Mondale’s native Minnesota, was to call Bill Dixon, Wisconsin’s banking commissioner and his old friend from McGovern days, and ask him to come to Washington. The plan was for Dixon, a Wisconsin lawyer who had worked on several presidential campaigns and run the 1980 convention for Jimmy Carter, to run Hart’s Senate office until his second term expired at the end of 1986. Then Hart would retire from the Senate to focus his energy on running, and Dixon would be charged with doing what he was really there to do in the first place, which was to build a truly top-flight presidential campaign for 1988, the kind that couldn’t be so easily caricatured by well-paid consultants with a single well-placed zinger.

“Where’s the beef?”: Hart and Mondale share a laugh before the 1984 campaign. Mondale would use the phrase to devastating effect. CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL

In the more than thirty years since the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment, which limited the president to two full terms in office, neither party had yet managed to win a third consecutive election, as Republicans would need to do in order to deny Hart the White House. Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose. And he was going to have the campaign he needed in order to beat the sitting vice president, George H. W. Bush, and end the Reagan era once and for all.

By the time 1986 rolled around, though, Hart was deeply ambivalent about his new status as the party’s leading man. In part, his concerns were temperamental. For the first time in his political life, going back to the 1960s, Hart was now the Man, rather than the insurgent, and the role was unfamiliar and uncomfortable for him. No one had ever accused him of telling ward leaders or union bosses what they wanted to hear, or of cozying up to other powerful interests; if anything, he leaned too hard toward the opposite approach. But now that he was assumed to be the nominee, everybody wanted a sit-down meeting or a quick grip-and-greet, some commitment to protect steel jobs or oppose nukes or whatever. Now all the influential organizers and fundraisers in the early primary states, the guys who had shunned him last time around, were looking for a lunch with the candidate and a photo with the kids. Like so many other Americans whose self-image was grounded in the sixties, Hart in his middle age found himself struggling not to become the very thing he had once disdained.

And it wasn’t simply the mechanics of the thing, this process of whoring himself out like any other cheap politician, that seemed untenable. It was also the idea that if he ran for president like a front-runner, he wouldn’t actually be able to be president, or at least not in the way he intended. From the early 1980s, Hart had been thinking at least as much about how he would govern as how he would get elected. For example, his chief foreign policy aide, Doug Wilson, had set up something called the “New Leaders” program, which was essentially an annual meeting of up-and-coming politicos from countries around the world; Hart’s idea was that a president should come into office with a network of highly placed friends in other governments, rather than investing the first two years of a presidency in getting to know them. Hart saw himself as a transformational figure who would free the country from the stifling, left-right orthodoxies of the Cold War era. If he campaigned as the vehicle of everyone who wanted to protect the party’s status quo, he complained, then he wouldn’t be able to claim the public mandate he needed to govern like a reformer.

Then there was the tactical problem inherent in being the front-runner. Alone among major candidates of the modern era, Hart had, by that time, experienced presidential campaigns as both a lead strategist and as a candidate. So however much Hart may have liked to project an image of rising above the media’s game of electoral chess, in truth he was already thinking several moves beyond his younger advisors. Having played a fundamental role in creating the modern primary system, Hart had now seen two long-shot candidates—McGovern and Carter—use it to shock better-known and better-funded opponents, and he himself had come impossibly close to doing the same thing in 1984. So no one understood better than Hart that the most perilous place to be in Democratic politics in the post-reform era was at the pinnacle of the primary field, as the anointed candidate of the establishment. Hart felt sure that if he were to embrace his role as the presumed nominee, he would become as vulnerable in ’88 as Mondale had been in ’84.

It didn’t help that the emerging group of candidates who hoped to exploit Hart’s vulnerability as the obvious front-runner looked—to use the term privately employed by Hart’s campaign staff—like a bunch of “new Garys.” In 1984, Hart’s chief advantage had been his relative youth, the way in which he marked the arrival of the sixties generation. What his success had done, though, was to clear the path for a new group of his contemporaries, who were already testing their own presidential ambitions—Washington prodigies like Joe Biden and Al Gore in the Senate and Dick Gephardt in the House. (A little known Southern governor named Bill Clinton, whom Hart had once hired to work on the McGovern campaign, was also said to be exploring a run, although he would ultimately demur.)

Suddenly, these guys, too, were touting their comparative youth and rejecting the liberal orthodoxies of the postwar generation, embracing military reform and the potential of high-tech industries in Hart-like fashion. Known throughout his career as a reformer, Hart, who would be fifty by the time he announced his candidacy, now faced the danger of becoming another establishment retread.

The extent to which Hart was wrestling with this question—how to be the party’s recognized front-runner without forfeiting his credentials as an antiestablishment Democrat—is evident from a memo he wrote sometime in 1986. At Hart’s request, two of his most trusted aides, Billy Shore and Jeremy Rosner, had written their boss a secret memo laying out an overarching strategy for securing the nomination and then the White House in 1988. That memo is lost to the ages, but Hart’s point-by-point response, written in longhand and all capital letters on a legal pad, offers a fascinating window into the political calculations he was trying to make—and into the depth of his personal involvement in campaign strategy. In the first of his twenty-seven “comments and critiques,” Hart wrote: “I am not an ‘outsider’ out to defeat the party establishment. I am independent from the establishment, uniquely positioned to re-position it and move it forward (c.f. FDR, JFK).” In other words, he intended to make the convoluted argument that he was inside the establishment, but not of it.

“I have a strong regional base (west) and demographic base (young),” Hart wrote. “Plus my greatest strength as a Democrat is among independents. We must get analysts to understand that. I can broaden the party’s base.” He made it clear that he had no intention of retooling his own political argument. “I do not need to distinguish myself from the ‘new Garys’—they have to distinguish themselves from me,” he wrote. “In every case it will make their nomination less likely. Let’s not go on the defensive!”

In fact, Hart intended to be very much on the offensive, and he had in mind his own strategy for putting some distance between himself and the Democratic establishment, while simultaneously making all the new Garys seem small and conventional. The big idea was to focus almost exclusively on big ideas, rather than on the usual political machinations. To start with, over three days in June 1986, Hart gave a series of three foreign policy lectures at Georgetown University, in which he outlined, with unusual technicality, the new approach he called “Enlightened Engagement.” Essentially, Hart argued that in the world after the Cold War, where nations would inevitably rise up to determine their own futures, the United States would no longer be able to protect its interests by deploying missiles and propping up repressive states; now it would need to retool its military to respond to stateless threats, and it would have to nurture democratic movements, mainly through economic assistance.

Twenty-five years later, that all sounds pretty routine. But in the context of 1986, especially for a Democrat, it was both provocative and prescient. Among those who bristled at Hart’s pragmatic vision was his old mentor George McGovern, whom Hart asked to preview the lectures. In a private letter to Hart written in May 1986, the dovish McGovern, echoing other liberals, listed his “reservations” about Hart’s worldview, most notably that he thought Hart overstated Soviet aggression and was too harsh toward Nicaragua’s Communist government. McGovern also objected to a proposal to expand NATO’s conventional forces in the waning years of the Cold War, in order to ease Europe’s reliance on America’s nuclear arsenal. “Is the concept of mutual force reductions dead?” he despaired.

On the domestic front, Hart countered Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”—the missile shield more popularly known as “Star Wars”—with his own “Strategic Investment Initiative.” The notion here was that the country should take the savings from scaling back its Cold War military buildups and invest it in education, job retraining, and infrastructure programs—all of which would be needed to compete in a more information-based and international economy. (“If you think education is expensive, wait until you find out how much ignorance costs,” Hart was fond of saying.) Hart also proposed higher taxes on corporations and wealthy citizens, as well as a tariff on imported oil, as a way of raising revenue for investments and closing deficits.

Policy aides went to work on crafting an alternative federal budget, which Hart planned to release after the campaign launch. In the meantime, Hart’s team took both the Georgetown lectures and the investment plan, along with his detailed argument for remaking the military, and bound them together in a ninety-four-page, small-type, heavily footnoted booklet called Reform, Hope, and theHuman Factor: Ideas for National Restructuring. Never again would anyone have to ask where the beef was.

As part of this plan to run on ideas, and not as the usual front-runner would run, Hart informed his team that there were things he simply wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to attend all the must-do fish fries and barbecues in the early primary states that he found about as gratifying as the flu. He wasn’t going to spend time pleading for the endorsements of local party leaders, which he considered meaningless anyway, when he could be sitting with groups of actual voters and making his substantive case, instead. And he wasn’t going to lower his stature by competing in Iowa’s silly straw poll. “Very early in ’87 I must (or Dixon) announce against straw polls—perhaps in a letter to state chairs,” Hart wrote in his comments on the strategy memo.

He wasn’t going to schmooze the urban bosses who hadn’t died off yet, or the various interest groups who felt they had the right to blackmail a nominee before signing off on him. Hart even went to Boca Raton, where the top union leaders were holding an annual gathering, to make sure they understood he opposed the tariffs and quotas they were demanding on steel and other threatened industries—and to make sure the rest of the world understood that he wasn’t going to bow before Labor.

Oh, and one more thing: Hart let it be known that he wasn’t going to be covered like a presumed nominee, either. He would answer questions, sure—about Enlightened Engagement or the Strategic Investment Initiative. But he wasn’t about to submit to a series of never-ending sit-downs about the latest polls or what the strategy was in Florida. He wasn’t open to blocking off hours for portrait photographers who would stand him up under a white umbrella and tell him to lean this way or try a few more with his hand in his jacket pocket, all so they could put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone, again. He wasn’t going to fall into the classic front-runner’s trap of lapping up all the attention while the new Garys drove the Iowa countryside and camped out on couches like a little band of Che Guevaras.

You can imagine how this felt to the fortunate reporters from major papers around the country who had managed to get themselves assigned to Hart in those months leading up to his announcement, the rising stars who were now scrambling to write major profiles and previews to mark the start of Hart’s presidential journey. (Other candidates, of course, would have killed for a slew of stories about them and would have sat for interviews until the plane ran out of gas and crashed.) Hart’s high-handedness may not have caused his eventual collision with the media, but it probably eliminated any benefit of the doubt he might have gotten, any perspective to which he might have been entitled. If Hart was acting out of some profound reluctance to become a traditional front-runner, it felt like something different to the reporters, who had a job to do. It felt like arrogance and self-seriousness. It felt like contempt—for the process, and for them.

In fact, Hart could be plenty arrogant and self-serious. (“I despair, profoundly,” he wrote to his aides in response to a draft op-ed, a line that instantly became legend in the headquarters. “It is absolutely ludicrous for me to consider national office if the people I depend on think this is presidential caliber.”) But he did not have contempt for the media, or at least not for the media as a whole. Like a lot of liberal intellectuals shaped by the sixties, he had long been in awe of what he considered serious journalists, and he enjoyed their company more often than he did the companionship of his fellow senators.

A telling example concerned Sydney Gruson, who started as a foreign correspondent with The New York Times in the 1940s and eventually rose to become one of the paper’s top corporate executives. Near the end of 1972, Gruson called Hart, who was just then packing up his things at McGovern headquarters, and said that if Hart really was planning to write a book about the campaign (which he was), he should come to New York to meet with editors at the paper’s book division. Hart, who was now a national celebrity in his own right, was nonetheless honored and intimidated by having picked up the phone to find such a well-known Times editor on the line—so much so that, even in retelling the story many years later, he still seemed floored by it. Hart traveled almost immediately to New York, nervously carting along stacks of documents to demonstrate his seriousness of purpose, and he was elated when the Times’s book company agreed to publish his memoir, Right from the Start. He and Gruson forged a lifelong friendship; had Hart won the White House in 1988, Gruson, who was seventy by that time, would have occupied a senior communications role in the administration.