The Front Runner

No, Hart’s complicated relationship with the media, like so much else about his political persona, broke down mostly along generational lines. He felt comfortable dining with guys like Gruson and Woodward and the columnist Jack Germond, old friends he knew from McGovern days or from his early years in the Senate, most of whom still called him “Gary.” (The night after the “Where’s the beef?” debate, for example, found him eating with Germond and a group of other longtime reporters, who spared little of his feelings in telling him just how miserable his performance had been.) He thought these journalists to be genuine truth seekers, and he respected their intellects.

But now there were these younger reporters, too, the boomers who had first been drawn to journalism watching Redford and Hoffman in All the President’s Men, thirty-something men and women who had recently graduated from the police beat or City Hall to the pinnacle of political coverage. And Hart could find no sure footing with this crowd, no easy rapport or rakish bonhomie. As Richard Ben Cramer noted in What It Takes, the younger cohort continually referred to Hart in print as “cool and aloof” and a “loner,” much as you might describe a serial killer after he is discovered to have plotted his murderous spree in some isolated shed decorated with creepy cutouts of his victims. But the word they used more than any other to summarize him, particularly among themselves, was “weird.”

It had started in 1984, when Hart suddenly went from marginal candidate to national sensation, and the younger reporters and editors—the ones who hadn’t been around in the early seventies—realized they knew next to nothing about him. In a frenzied effort to vet this guy who suddenly seemed like a possible nominee, the reporters descended on Colorado and Kansas and the halls of the Senate, looking to unearth relevant clues. As Cramer told it, they came away with three crucial fragments of evidence.

First, it emerged that Hart had shortened his name. In fact, his family had changed it, from “Hartpence” to “Hart,” which is what some of his relatives used, but according to Hart’s sister it was Gary who had talked everybody into it. (As if this weren’t weird enough, Hart had also changed his signature at some point, so that his name in the letters he signed in his forties looked different from the way it had twenty years earlier.) Then there was some question as to when Hart was really born. His official Senate documentation said 1937, but his birth certificate said 1936. Was he forty-seven, or was he forty-eight? Hart himself didn’t seem to think it mattered, until they asked him about his mother and her batty religiosity and what might have led her to obfuscate the circumstances of his birth, and then Hart got angry and said he wasn’t going to talk about his mother when he was in the middle of trying to make an argument about the future of the country. And this struck everyone as completely and incontrovertibly weird.

“Name, age and momma”—this is how Cramer slyly referred to the holy trinity of questions that surfaced in all the stories about Hart. The constant implication was that Hart was like that doctor in The Fugitive, on the run from something murky and irredeemable in his past, constantly looking over his shoulder for the cops or a one-armed man.

In retrospect, of course, nothing about the trinity sounds terribly sinister or alarming. Yes, Hart had reinvented himself. However much he might deny it, then and later, it was clear that Hart had wanted to put some distance between the poor, jug-eared, Bible-toting youth he had been in Kansas and the secular, Yale-educated reformer he later became. But that didn’t make him different from a lot of other Americans who grew up in claustrophobic small towns with overbearing parents and later found themselves caught up in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, where personal identities were always evolving. It didn’t make Hart some shadowy, Gatsby-like figure; the salient facts of his upbringing had been well established since he entered public life.

True to form, Hart himself saw the relentless focus on his biography—and the supposed oddities contained therein—as a kind of autoimmune response of the media establishment, mobilized to repel the political outsider from the body politic. “I’m the only person who’s bucked the system twice,” he told The Washington Post’s David Maraniss just before the 1984 convention, referring to the McGovern campaign and to the one he was about to concede. “I think there is a strong desire to punish the person who does that, to make him appear odd. That’s the only reason I can figure for all the attention on my personal life. You can’t find one article that did that to Walter Mondale. Anywhere in his career. I challenge you to find one article. Can you find one? The answer is no! You can’t find one because they weren’t written. Nobody would care about it. Do you think anybody would care if they found out Walter Mondale was a year older? Do you think anyone would care if Ronald Reagan was a year older? Of course not. The entire focus is on the person who upsets the odds.”

There was a lot of truth to this rant. The grandfatherly Reagan, after all, had baldly revised entire chapters of his youth, sometimes seeming to confuse himself with the characters he played in the movies, and the boomers in the media seemed unable to summon much outrage. But the real reason reporters latched on to Hart’s dark trinity was probably because it was the best supporting evidence for what they knew in their gut to be true about Hart, what they discussed openly among themselves and would continue to believe decades later. Sure, he was brilliant and dynamic, but there was no escaping it: something about the guy just seemed off.

The same could have been said of just about any presidential contender, then or later; the vocation does not attract personalities most people would consider essentially normal. But the boomers hadn’t known enough presidential candidates to reach that conclusion, and in any event, they experienced a kind of cultural disconnect when it came to Hart. He had become—by his own design, as much as anyone else’s—a symbol of the boomers’ inevitable ascendance. And so the reporters expected him, reasonably enough, to be a lot like them. Politically that was true enough. But as the young idealists who worked for Hart well understood, temperamentally he belonged to the generation born in 1936, not 1946, and he had never shed (and never would) the reserve and formality of post-Depression Kansas. As Cramer noted, he still called the TV anchors his own age “Mr. Rather” and “Mr. Brokaw,” just as he still referred to his own wife as “Mrs. Hart.” He didn’t swear (ever) or smoke or rock out to the Doors or the Stones.

And while this younger cohort expected a politician molded by the sixties to reflect and emote easily—to “share,” in the parlance of the age—Hart found their personal questions distasteful, as most politicians of an earlier generation would have. Every time Hart got near them, it seemed, they wanted to know about his parents’ piety and itinerancy, his spiritual journey—or, worst of all, his marriage. Hart made it clear that he’d rather dangle from the campaign plane.