monkey business yacht senator

30 Years Ago: Gary Hart's Monkey Business, and How a Candidate Got Caught

Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President.

In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that they should follow me around. . . . They’ll be very bored. As the NBC anchor John Chancellor explained a few days later, "We did. We weren’t."

Seldom if ever has a major presidential candidacy crashed and burned so quickly. On May 8, 1987, a mere five days after issuing his challenge, the Colorado senator withdrew as a candidate. He would reenter the race the following December, but he would then withdraw a second time after winning just 4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary in February 1988. His political career was over.

Hart, the son of a farm-equipment salesman, was born in Ottawa, Kansas, in 1936, with the surname Hartpence (he legally changed it in 1965). He attended a local college and then went to both Yale Divinity School and Yale Law School. He practiced law for several years in Denver and then took on the task of running the very long-shot campaign of Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

It made his political reputation, for it turned out that the McGovern campaign had a secret weapon. After the 1968 Democratic Convention was marred by riots in the streets of Chicago outside and near chaos inside, the Democratic Party established a commission to reform the nominating process.

Its recommendations, adopted by the party, sharply curtailed the power of elected officials and party insiders to choose delegates, increased the importance of caucuses and primary elections, and mandated quotas for blacks, women, and youth. The chairman of the commission, Sen. George McGovern, understood far better than the other candidates how much the rules had changed the political landscape. Hart exploited that understanding to the hilt.

While McGovern took only one state and the District of Columbia against Richard Nixon, no one blamed this on Hart. Two years later, Hart captured a Colorado Senate seat in the Democratic landslide of 1974, and he was reelected easily in 1980. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, and though he lost out to the more senior Walter Mondale, who had served as Jimmy Carter's Vice President, he established himself as a serious candidate who was young, attractive, articulate, and seemed to offer new ideas.

He declined to run for reelection to the Senate in 1986 in order to devote his full attention to winning the 1988 Democratic nomination for President. Against a lackluster field, polls soon showed him far ahead of his nearest rival, more than 20 points in some polls. But he had a major problem, a persistent buzz of rumor regarding his private life and being a womanizer. He and his wife, Lee, had been married for more than 25 years and had two children, but the marriage was apparently a troubled one. They had separated twice and reconciled twice.

A story in Newsweek around the time he formally announced his candidacy, on April 13, 1987, highlighted these rumors, and while it made no specific allegations, it quoted a former adviser as saying that Hart was going to be in trouble if he can't keep his pants on. This produced a barrage of stories in other newspapers and magazines but, again, nothing concrete.

Then, two weeks after Hart’s announcement, the executive editor of the Miami Herald , Tom Fiedler, got an anonymous phone call. The caller said she had proof that Hart was having an affair.

Fiedler was not, at first, impressed. Told that the caller had photographs of Hart and a friend of hers, an attractive blonde in the Miami area, Fiedler said that politicians had their photographs taken with strangers all the time; it proved nothing. But then the caller told him about phone calls her friend had received from Hart from various places over the past few months, and the dates when those phone calls had been received.

Fiedler was easily able to check them against Hart’s schedule, and they coincided. If it was a crank call, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the tip appear genuine. But he was wary of a professional dirty trick. She then told him that her friend was flying up to Washington that Friday, May 1, to spend the weekend with Hart at his Washington, D.C., townhouse. Fiedler knew that Hart was scheduled to be in Iowa Friday and then in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday, which was Derby day. He also thought that Hart lived in Bethesda, Maryland, not in the District. But checking the next day, he learned that Hart had sold the house in Bethesda and had indeed moved to Washington, to a townhouse on Capitol Hill. He also learned that the Kentucky stop had been cancelled; Hart was spending the weekend in the District of Columbia. Fiedler’s journalistic instincts told him he was on to something big.

He and a senior editor decided that Jim McGee, an investigative reporter, should catch a Friday afternoon plane to Washington—the flight most likely to have the mystery woman—and stake out Hart’s house. McGee barely made the 5:30 flight. On it he noticed one particularly striking blonde. Could this be her?

Staking out Hart’s house that evening, McGee saw Hart’s front door open at about 9:30 and a man and woman emerge. It was Hart and the blonde on the plane.

The next morning Fiedler and a photographer arrived on the scene. They thought it crucial to have the sighting confirmed, and that evening they saw Senator Hart and the woman emerge from the back entrance of the townhouse. The couple went to Hart’s car, which was parked a short distance away, but then returned to the house through the front entrance. Hart seemed agitated, as if he sensed he was being followed. When he came back out the back entrance, the reporters decided to confront him.

He denied that the woman had spent the night at his house and gave several lawyer-like denials of any impropriety. The reporters, facing a rapidly approaching deadline, decided to go with the story, which appeared in the Sunday, May 3, edition of the paper, with the headline Miami Woman Is Linked to Hart. It caused a sensation.

It soon emerged that the woman’s name was Donna Rice, and she had met Hart at a New Years Eve party in Colorado. She had later accompanied him on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini on an 83-foot luxury yacht with the you-cant-make-this-stuff-up name of Monkey Business . A picture soon appeared in the National Enquirer , and then in hundreds of newspapers, showing Donna Rice sitting in Hart’s lap, with Hart in a Monkey Business T-shirt.

At a press conference on May 6, the senator furiously denied doing anything wrong. If I had intended a relationship with this woman, he said, believe me . . . I wouldn’t have done it this way.

But contributions to his campaign were rapidly drying up, and his lead in an overnight poll in New Hampshire fell by half. The Washington Post informed the campaign that it had good information on another liaison of his. On Thursday he flew home to Colorado, and on Friday, May 8, he announced his withdrawal from the race.

Gary Hart’s political career began with the crucial insight that the rules of the game with regard to getting delegates to the Democratic convention had fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of the 1968 Chicago convention. His political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.

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The True Story Behind <i>The Front Runner</i>: How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

The True Story Behind The Front Runner : How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

O nce the results of the U.S. midterm elections this Tuesday are official , politicos will turn to the 2020 presidential election.

And the new movie The Front Runner — which is getting a limited election-week release before it opens nationwide on Nov. 21 — offers a cautionary tale for future candidates.

It’s based on the true story of the fall from grace of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Played by Hugh Jackman, he was “the clear front runner for the Democratic nomination” in the 1988 presidential election, according to TIME, until he was forced to drop out of the race. The scandal hit just over 30 years ago, after the Miami Herald revealed that the married man had been spending nights with another woman — Donna Rice, a 29-year-old model.

Hart’s political career ended rather quickly. On Monday, April 27, 1987, Miami Herald politics editor Tom Fielder received an anonymous tip that in late March, Hart had attended an overnight trip on a yacht rented by lawyer-lobbyist William Broadhurst named Monkey Business . According to the tip, as they sailed from Miami to Bimini, he hit it off with a woman who was not his wife. The tipster — later revealed to be clothing designer Dana Weems — offered photos to prove it and said Rice was going to fly up to Washington, D.C., to see him.

By May 1, Herald investigative reporter Jim McGee was on a plane, and had staked out Hart’s D.C. townhouse. Hart was seen leaving the building with a woman who was not his wife shortly after 9 p.m., returning with her shortly after 11 p.m., and then leaving with her the next evening.

When the Herald confronted him, Hart denied that he was having an affair with the woman and said only that he was taking her back to where she was staying. On May 3, 1987, their story appeared in the Herald with photographic evidence of the two together from the stakeout. At a televised press conference in New Hampshire, a Washington Post reporter asked Hart point-blank whether he had ever committed adultery. “I don’t have to answer that,” Hart responded . Donna Rice, in another press conference with reporters, said she and Hart were “just pals” and added that she preferred “younger men.”

And yet two days later, Hart suspended his campaign. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes.”

Just over two weeks later, the National Enquire r published a photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap.

In the case of Gary Hart, the problem wasn’t what he did, but how he did it. Americans didn’t like hypocrites. They couldn’t rally around a candidate whom they felt wasn’t being straight with them, pundits observed. A TIME poll conducted shortly after the news broke found that when Americans were asked what bothered them more, extramarital sex or “not telling the truth,” 69% said the latter and 7% said the former.

TIME’s May 18, 1987, cover story on the scandal described the perception of hypocrisy that did Hart in:

Yet the facts, as ambiguous as some of them are, make clear that Hart brought on his own downfall. Ever since he reconciled for the second time with his wife Lee in 1982, Hart has portrayed himself as a dutiful husband whose 28-year marriage was strengthened by the stress of separation. But in his private conduct, Hart challenged the moralistic conventions of political behavior and ultimately paid the price for his apostasy. Until the very end Hart seemed oblivious to the reality that his actions had consequences. He denied there was anything improper about his friendship with Donna Rice, even though it is far from customary for 50-year-old men to spend weekends away from their wives hanging out with comely actresses who have appeared on Miami Vice . Hart jeopardized his reputation for veracity by angrily denying the persistent rumors about his womanizing… Rather than wrestling with the complexities of arms control and a troubled economy, the public tends to look for personalities they can trust, whose judgment and integrity make them feel comfortable.

The scandal marked a turning point in how the media covered the private lives of public figures. “Political journalism may never be the same,” TIME said. Some media experts thought the Herald ‘s stakeout was too forward for a mainstream news outlet; TIME and other news outlets said Hart was asking for the comeuppance because of his earlier challenge to the New York Times magazine that reporters could feel free to “put a tail on me,” and his warning that they’d be “bored.”

TIME argued that journalism had simply evolved and adapted to societal changes, on top of a plummeting trust in government because of the Vietnam War. Historically, when journalists found out that public-office-holders like President John F. Kennedy were having affairs , they didn’t report on them because such trysts weren’t considered newsworthy. However, TIME observed, “with the breakdown of sexual taboos in the 1960s, public discussion of such topics became more acceptable. At the same time, with the changing status of women, society has grown less tolerant of the macho dalliances of married men.” The more candidates and politicians appeared on TV, the more that the line between movie stars and political figures became “blurred,” and the more there was a need for media consultants who could create this image of the politico for the general public. Now the job of journalists was to find out who these people really were.

As for what happened to the main characters, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the 1988 presidential election to George H.W. Bush. Gary Hart went back to practicing law, serving on a variety of advisory councils, and was the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland in the Obama administration; he is still married to his wife Lee. Donna Rice Hughes married in 1994 and is an activist who works to rid the Internet of child pornography — and who has made it clear that she will have more to say in the future. In a recent statement about the 2018 film, she wrote that she is working on a memoir, that “all the truth is not out, as I have never told my own story.”

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected]

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How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart’s Presidential Bid

By: Becky Little

Published: November 7, 2018

Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Yet according to Gail Sheehy , a journalist who covered Hart for Vanity Fair in the 1980s , the real story was bigger than just one affair—it was about Hart’s fundamental character, and whether a man like him should be president.

Stories of Hart’s affairs had circulated long before his scandal broke in the spring of 1987 (those weeks are depicted in the new film The Front Runner , starring Hugh Jackman as Hart). The rumors had trailed him the first time he campaigned to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, and even stretched back to his time as the national campaign director for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid.

“The wife of a very prominent Duke political scientist told me that he would just take every one of the college girls who volunteered [at the McGovern campaign] to bed,” Sheehy says. “And the next day, she would be hanging on her chance to talk to him, and he would walk right past her as if he’d never seen her before. He did that over and over and over again.”

Hart also sexually harassed at least one female reporter. When journalist Patricia O’Brien went to his hotel room to interview him during his 1984 campaign, he greeted her in a short bathrobe, then got “huffy” when she asked him to put some clothes on, Richard Ben Cramer reported in his book, What It Takes: The Way to the White House .

Hart wasn’t discreet about his affairs, either, according to Sheehy. At one point during his 1984 campaign when the media was focused on him as a major contender, a “veteran political mistress he’d been seeing since 1982 was startled to have him turn up on her Washington doorstep,” Sheehy wrote for Vanity Fair in September 1988. “She could see the Secret Service van parked right down the street. Hart stayed the night and blithely walked out her front door the next morning.”

Covering both of his presidential campaigns in the ‘80s, Sheehy caught him in several lies; not just about his affairs, but also seemingly unimportant details like whether he played varsity sports in high school. When reporters asked the Democratic candidate for president whether he had ever committed adultery in the spring of 1987, he not only denied it, but challenged them to prove it.

“Follow me around,” The New York Times Magazine reported him saying just a few weeks after he declared his candidacy. “I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.”

Whether or not he was being sarcastic, as he later claimed, it was a bad move. “Why would a man who’s running for the presidency of the United States challenge a reporter to follow him to see if he was an adulterer, when he was an adulterer?” Sheehy asks. “He had to get caught.”

And indeed, he did. Shortly after making the remark, Hart “canceled his plans for the weekend and he invited Donna Rice to fly up and stay with him at his house, where obviously he would be seen in Washington,” Sheehy says. Journalists from the Miami Herald were already staked out near his D.C. house thanks to a tip they’d received that he was sleeping with Rice.

After the Miami Herald reported on his affair, a picture surfaced showing Rice sitting on Hart’s lap while he wore a T-shirt reading “Monkey Business Crew,” referring to the name of the yacht they’d partied on. The ensuing scandal prompted Hart to drop out of the race. The next year, Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the general election to George H.W. Bush .

This wasn’t the first sex scandal to feature prominently in an American presidential campaign. When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, opponents dug up his marriage records to paint him as an adulterer in the press, as his wife’s first marriage had not been fully dissolved when they eloped.

In 1884, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph revealed that presidential candidate Grover Cleveland had fathered a son out of wedlock. The woman involved said Cleveland had raped her and tried to bury the story by placing her son in an orphanage and sending her to a mental institution. Despite this, Cleveland became the only U.S. president to hold two non-consecutive terms.

The Hart scandal wasn’t even the first time in modern politics that reporting on a politician’s personal life had thwarted a presidential campaign. A decade and a half before, journalists reported that Thomas Eagleton , George McGovern’s first vice presidential candidate in 1972, had previously been hospitalized for depression and received electroshock therapy. McGovern quickly dumped Eagleton, and his poor handling of the affair may have affected the landslide by which Richard Nixon won reelection.

With few exceptions, however, male reporters in the 20th century generally protected male politicians by not reporting on their affairs, or anything else that seemed “personal.” In this case, however, Hart "was the one who set up himself to get caught,” Sheehy says.

In the press, “[the affair] was only treated as a superficial issue: an extramarital affair with one woman that he had just been on a boat with,” she says. “As if that was the only time and the only way in which Gary Hart showed that he was unfit to be a president.”

Yet far from being irrelevant to the campaign, Hart’s affairs and his general character were something that voters really cared about, says Laura Stoker , a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied voters’ attitudes toward Hart before and after the scandal.

“People who really preferred him over other Democratic candidates just turned against him,” she says.

In the decade after Hart’s scandal, Bill Clinton faced his own questions about extramarital affairs, as well as sexual harassment and assault . However, Sheehy doesn’t think Hart’s scandal made news organizations more willing to report on sex scandals. If anything, Hart’s attacks on the press—including direct attacks on Sheehy herself—made reporters more cautious.

“Many newspapers were weary of being called guilty of ‘gotcha journalism,’” she says.

During the Gary Hart scandal, the importance of evaluating the character of presidential candidates became clear. “We almost elected a compulsive sexual predator as president in 1988,” says Sheehy, “but we didn’t because he got himself caught.”

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Was Gary Hart Set Up?

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.

Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality . In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him— by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad . The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.

In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these . He told Tom Turnipseed, the object of his “jumper cables” attack, that he viewed the episode as “one of the low points” of his career. He apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Willie Horton ad.

And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president.

S trother, 10 years older than Atwater, had been his Democratic competitor and counterpart, minus the gutter-fighting. During the early Reagan years, when Atwater worked in the White House, Strother joined the staff of the Democratic Party’s most promising and glamorous young figure, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. Strother was Hart’s media consultant and frequent traveling companion during his run for the nomination in 1984, when he gave former Vice President Walter Mondale a scare. As the campaign for the 1988 nomination geared up, Strother planned to play a similar role.

In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. After Mondale’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Hart had become the heir apparent and best hope to lead the party back to the White House. The presumed Republican nominee was Bush, Reagan’s vice president, who was seen at the time, like many vice presidents before him, as a lackluster understudy. Since the FDR–Truman era, no party had won three straight presidential elections, which the Republicans would obviously have to do if Bush were to succeed Reagan.

Gary Hart had a nationwide organization and had made himself a recognized expert on military and defense policy. I first met him in those days, and wrote about him in Atlantic articles that led to my 1981 book, National Defense . (I’ve stayed in touch with him since then and have respected his work and his views .) Early polls are notoriously unreliable, but after the 1986 midterms, and then–New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s announcement that he would not run, many national surveys showed Hart with a lead in the Democratic field and also over Bush. Hart’s principal vulnerability was the press’s suggestion that something about him was hidden, excessively private, or “unknowable.” Among other things, this was a way of alluding to suspicions of extramarital affairs—a theme in most accounts of that campaign, including Matt Bai’s 2014 All the Truth Is Out. Still, as Bai wrote in his book, “Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose.”

Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out . But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.

Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”

What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:

In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine , in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed—when he didn’t see her again—that she had spent the night.

Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini , on the cover of the National Enquirer.

Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. For anyone who wasn’t around, there is Bai’s book and an upcoming film based on it : The Front Runner , starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.

But was the plotline of Hart’s self-destruction too perfect? Too convenient? Might the nascent Bush campaign, with Atwater as its manager, have been looking for a way to help a potentially strong opponent leave the field?

“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true! ”

Strother’s conversation with Atwater happened in 1991. He mainly kept the news to himself. As the years went by, he discreetly mentioned the conversation to some journalists and other colleagues, but not to Gary Hart. “I probably should have told him at the time,” he said recently. “It was a judgment call, and I didn’t see the point in involving him in another controversy.”

Crucially, Strother realized, he had no proof, and probably never would. Atwater was dead. Although Hart did not run in later elections, he was busy and productive: He had earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford, had published many books, and had co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission, which memorably warned the incoming president in 2001, George W. Bush, to prepare for a terrorist attack on American soil. Why, Strother asked himself, should he rake up an issue that could never be resolved and might cause Hart more stress than surcease?

But late last year, Strother learned that the prostate cancer he had been treated for a dozen years ago had returned and spread, and that he might not have long to live. The cancer is now in remission, but after the diagnosis Strother began traveling to see people he had known and worked with, to say goodbye. One of his stops was Colorado, where he had a meal with Gary Hart.

Aware that this might be one of their final conversations, Hart asked Strother to think about the high points of the campaign, and its lows. Hart knew that Strother had been friends with Billy Broadhurst, the man who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. According to Strother and others involved with the Hart campaign, Broadhurst was from that familiar political category, the campaign groupie and aspiring insider. Broadhurst kept trying to ingratiate himself with Hart, and kept being rebuffed. He was also a high-living, high-spending fixer and lobbyist with frequent money problems.

Strother talked with Hart this spring; Broadhurst had died about a year earlier. In retrospect, Hart asked, what did Strother make of the whole imbroglio?

“Ray said, ‘Why do you ask?’ ” Hart told me, when I called to talk with him about the episode. “And I said there are a whole list of ‘coincidences’ that had been on my mind for 30 years, and that could lead a reasonable person to think none of it happened by accident.

“Ray replied, ‘It’s because you were set up. I know you were set up.’

“I asked him how he could be so certain,” Hart told me. Strother then recounted his long-ago talk with Atwater, and Atwater’s claim that the whole Monkey Business weekend had occurred at his direction. According to Hart, that plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business . Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.

“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”

What are we to make of Strother’s late-in-life revelation of Atwater’s deathbed confession? Hart’s reputation, deserved or not, certainly gave Atwater something to work with, if that’s what he did. (“It would be just like the perversity of history for someone to undertake an effort that might well have happened by itself,” Matt Bai told me when I spoke with him recently.) What would have induced Broadhurst to participate in an entrapment scheme? (When I asked Strother this question, he said, “Money.”) How exactly was the scheme supposed to work? Hart had been introduced to Donna Rice at least once before (briefly, at an event at the musician Don Henley’s house, in Colorado, that Hart attended with his wife), and he phoned her after the Monkey Business weekend. Both Rice and Hart denied any affair. A few people still living may know what happened that weekend, and why. (Rice, who now leads an internet-safety group called Enough Is Enough and goes by her married name, Donna Rice Hughes, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Most likely the rest of us never will.

L ike other political calamities, the Hart downfall had consequences that will be debated for as long as the man’s name is remembered. History is full of unknowable “What if?” questions. What if whatever happened that weekend in Bimini had not happened? “I was going to be the next president,” Hart told me, clinically. He was, or might have been—and then he wasn’t.

If history had gone in a different direction in 1987, and Hart had become the 41st president rather than Bush, then Bill Clinton would not have had his chance in 1992, or perhaps ever. George W. Bush, who found his footing with a place on his father’s winning campaign, would probably never have emerged as a contender. When and whether Barack Obama and Donald Trump might ever have come onto the stage no one can say. “No first Bush if things had turned out differently,” Gary Hart told me. “Which means no second Bush—at least not when he arrived. Then no Iraq War. No Cheney. Who knows what else?”

How Gary Hart Tried to Change Military History

Taking stock of the long wars: a proposal.

In announcing the suspension of his campaign, Hart angrily said, “I believe I would have been a successful candidate. And I know I could have been a very good president, particularly for these times. But apparently now we’ll never know.”

This article appears in the November 2018 print edition with the headline “Was Gary Hart Set Up?”

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The True Story Behind The Front Runner: How Gary Hart's Scandal Changed Politics

Once the results of the U.S. midterm elections this Tuesday are official , politicos will turn to the 2020 presidential election.

And the new movie The Front Runner — which is getting a limited election-week release before it opens nationwide on Nov. 21 — offers a cautionary tale for future candidates.

And yet two days later, Hart suspended his campaign. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes.”

Just over two weeks later, the National Enquire r published a photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

TIME’s May 18, 1987, cover story on the scandal described the perception of hypocrisy that did Hart in:

Yet the facts, as ambiguous as some of them are, make clear that Hart brought on his own downfall. Ever since he reconciled for the second time with his wife Lee in 1982, Hart has portrayed himself as a dutiful husband whose 28-year marriage was strengthened by the stress of separation. But in his private conduct, Hart challenged the moralistic conventions of political behavior and ultimately paid the price for his apostasy. Until the very end Hart seemed oblivious to the reality that his actions had consequences. He denied there was anything improper about his friendship with Donna Rice, even though it is far from customary for 50-year-old men to spend weekends away from their wives hanging out with comely actresses who have appeared on Miami Vice . Hart jeopardized his reputation for veracity by angrily denying the persistent rumors about his womanizing…

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How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed American Politics

By Matt Bai

Sept. 18, 2014

On a scalding July day five years ago, I found myself hiking in Red Rocks Park, just outside Denver, with Gary Hart. The copper cliffs were brilliantly lit in the midday sun, which burned our uncovered heads as we trudged up a steep incline toward the amphitheater that Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration ingeniously carved into the boulders.

We had come because Hart wanted to show me something, and as we made our way uphill, I was soon breathing heavily in the mile-high air. But I was more aware of Hart, who, at 72, labored audibly despite his legendary ruggedness. (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 one from New Hampshire, in which the flannel-clad Hart had just managed to bury an ax in a tree from a distance, legend had it, of 40 feet.) 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.

“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.

I tried to imagine the lectern 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 insisted on standing against the mountainous backdrop, near the amphitheater he called “a symbol of what a benevolent government can do.”

Back then, Hart was as close to a lock for the nomination — and likely the presidency — as any challenger of the modern era. According to Gallup, Hart had a double-digit lead over the rest of the potential Democratic field among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. 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 13 points, with only 11 percent saying they were undecided. He would have been very hard to stop.

“Must have been a hell of a backdrop,” I said. Hart didn’t respond, and after an awkward moment, I let it drop.

As anyone alive during the 1980s knows, Hart, the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation, was taken down and eternally humiliated by a scandal, a suspected affair with a beautiful blonde whose name, Donna Rice, had entered the cultural lexicon, along with the yacht — Monkey Business — near which she had been photographed on his lap. 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. He warned of the rise of stateless terrorism and spoke of the need to convert the industrial economy into an information-and-technology-based one, at a time when few politicians in either party had given much thought to anything beyond communism and steel. But such recollections were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or an athlete or an 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.

The rest of the world was finished with Gary Hart, but I couldn’t get his story out of my mind, which was why I ended up standing alongside him at Red Rocks on that summer day, like an archaeologist searching for shards of a lost political age. I had come to believe that we couldn’t really understand the dispiriting state of our politics — and of our political journalism — without first understanding what transpired during that surreal and frenetic week in April nearly 30 years ago.

The Hart episode is almost universally remembered as a tale of classic hubris. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? How could such a smart guy have been that stupid ?

Of course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart’s lifetime, all Democratic presidents thought of as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the 20th century, wrote that he was “reasonably sure” that of all the candidates he had covered, only three — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter — hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of “casual partners.” He and his colleagues considered those affairs irrelevant.

By the late 1980s, however, a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding, creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn’t create that vortex. He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.

The nation was still feeling the residual effects of Watergate, which 13 years earlier led to the first resignation of a sitting president. Richard Nixon’s fall was shocking, not least because it was more personal than political, a result of instability and pettiness rather than pure ideology. And for this reason Watergate, along with the deception over what was really happening in Vietnam, had injected into presidential politics a new focus on private morality.

Social mores were changing, too. For most of the 20th century, adultery as a practice — at least for men — was rarely discussed but widely accepted. Kennedy and Johnson governed during the era that “Mad Men” would later portray, when the powerful man’s meaningless tryst with a secretary was no less common than the three-martini lunch. Twenty years later, however, social forces unleashed by the tumult of the 1960s were rising up to contest this view. Feminism and the “women’s lib” movement had transformed expectations for a woman’s role in marriage, just as the civil rights movement had changed prevailing attitudes toward African-Americans.

As America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women into the 1980s, younger liberals — the same permissive generation that ushered in the sexual revolution and free love — were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal, and one that needed to be exposed. “This is the last time a candidate will be able to treat women as bimbos,” is how the feminist Betty Friedan put it after Hart’s withdrawal. (If only she’d known.)

Perhaps most salient, though, the nation’s news media were changing in profound ways. When giants like White came up through the news business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power and the information and insight derived from having it was the currency of the trade. By the 1980s, however, Watergate and television had combined to awaken an entirely new kind of career ambition. If you were an aspiring journalist born in the 1950s, when the baby boom was in full swing, then you entered the business at almost exactly the moment when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post — portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the cinematic version of their first book, “All the President’s Men” — were becoming not just the most celebrated reporters of their day but very likely the wealthiest and most famous journalists in American history (with the possible exception of Walter Cronkite). And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn’t proximity, but scandal. They had actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.

It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League-educated baby boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become more than Woodward or Bernstein, which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.

It was around 8 p.m. on Monday, April 27, 1987, when the phone rang on Tom Fiedler’s desk at The Miami Herald. A woman he did not know was on the line. Ever since Hart’s official announcement at Red Rocks two weeks before, reporters had been speculating among themselves about the state of Hart’s marriage and rumors of affairs, and some of that speculation had begun to leak into the press. Fiedler, a prominent political reporter for The Herald, thought it beneath the media to traffic in such innuendo without any proof, and he published a front-page article that day saying as much. The woman on the phone had apparently just read it.

“You know, you said in the paper that there were rumors that Gary Hart is a womanizer,” she told him. “Those aren’t rumors.” And then a question: “How much do you guys pay for pictures?”

In a subsequent conversation, the anonymous caller told Fiedler that a friend of hers had seen Hart aboard a chartered yacht at Turnberry Isle near Miami, and the two had started an affair on an overnight pleasure cruise to Bimini. Her friend had pictures of her and Hart on the boat that she had shown the caller. The caller never used the name Donna Rice, the 29-year-old commercial actress and pharmaceutical rep who would soon become the first woman dragged through the humiliation of a sex scandal during a presidential campaign.

The caller said there were phone calls between Hart and Rice. Somehow, she knew they had been placed from phones in Georgia, Alabama and Kansas, and precisely when. She claimed that Hart had invited her friend to visit him in Washington, and her friend was going to stay with him that Friday night. “Maybe you could fly to Washington and get the seat next to her,” the anonymous caller suggested.

For decades after that call, just about everyone close to the events of that week, and everyone who wrote about them later, assumed that the caller was Lynn Armandt, the friend Rice brought along on the Monkey Business during the cruise to Bimini. This was a logical deduction, because Armandt would later profit from selling photos she took on that trip. When I asked Fiedler about it last year, though, he told me that although he would continue to protect the identity of his source as he had for 26 years, he was willing to say flatly that it was not Armandt. Fiedler volunteered that he thought Rice knew who the tipster really was.

When I spoke to Rice a few months later, during the first of two long conversations, she told me that she had never figured out with any certainty who set all of this in motion in 1987. But she had come to believe that Armandt was in cahoots with another friend of theirs in Miami — a woman named Dana Weems — who was on the boat for a party but didn’t join them on the cruise to Bimini and thus escaped notice in contemporary accounts of the scandal. Rice had talked to Weems about her dalliance with Hart and showed her the photos from the cruise.

Dana Weems wasn’t especially hard to find, it turned out. A clothing designer who did some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com, based in Hollywood, Fla. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I told her I was writing about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.

“Oh, my God,” she said. There followed a long pause.

“Did you make that call to The Herald?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” Weems said with a sigh. “That was me.”

She then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems’s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle. Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, though she told me Rice wasn’t nearly as successful as she was. Rice was an artificial beauty who was “O.K. for commercials, I guess.”

Weems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on the last weekend of March for the same impromptu party at which Hart and his pal Billy Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, met up with Rice, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on her, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled. . . .

But Donna — she had no standards, Weems told me. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House, and that’s why she agreed to go on the cruise to Bimini. After that weekend, Donna wouldn’t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest. It all made Weems sick to her stomach, especially this idea of Hart’s getting away with it and becoming president. “What an idiot you are!” Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. “You’re gonna want to run the country? You moron!”

And so when Weems read Fiedler’s story in The Herald, she decided to call him, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,” she told me. It was Armandt’s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos, and that’s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn’t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn’t talked to either woman — Rice or Armandt — since shortly after the scandal. She lived alone and used a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised her secret had lasted until now.

“I’m sorry to ruin his life,” she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. “I was young. I didn’t know it would be that way.”

Fiedler never had any doubt that Hart’s marital infidelity, if it could be substantiated, was a story. Nor, it seems, did anyone else at The Herald, where the question of newsworthiness was raised but quickly dispatched. In the reconstruction of how the story unfolded that Fiedler and his colleagues at the paper later published, there is no mention of any debate about whether a candidate’s private life merited investigation.

On Friday, the day when Hart was supposed to meet with Rice at his Capitol Hill townhouse, The Herald dispatched Jim McGee, its top investigative reporter, to Washington. McGee, who at 34 could fairly be called one of the finest investigative reporters in all of American journalism, spent the flight to Washington stalking his fellow passengers, walking up and down the aisle in search of women who looked as if they could plausibly be on their way to sleep with a presidential candidate. “He wondered how he would decide which woman to follow,” The Herald’s reporters later wrote, without a hint of realizing how creepy that sounded.

On the ground in Washington, McGee caught a taxi to Hart’s home and took up a position on a park bench that afforded a clear view of the front door. It was 9:30 p.m. when he saw Hart leave the townhouse with a “stunning” blonde he recognized from the ticket counter in Miami. Hart and the young woman promptly drove off, and McGee rushed to a pay phone across the street. He called his editors and Fiedler to ask for backup; the story was unfolding rapidly, and he needed more bodies to help with surveillance. McGee was still stationed on the street when, about two hours later, Hart and Rice returned from dinner and re-entered the townhouse. He never saw her leave and assumed she spent the night, although Hart’s aides later said that Rice left through the rear door.

Fiedler awoke Saturday morning and hopped the first flight to Washington. He brought with him McGee’s editor, James Savage, and a photographer, Brian Smith. When you added in Doug Clifton, a reporter helping out the Washington bureau who had joined McGee for part of the stakeout Friday night, The Herald’s undercover team now numbered five, along with at least two rental cars, on a block where maybe one or two residents could be spotted on the sidewalk at any given time in the afternoon. The odds of this kind of surveillance going undetected were not especially high.

About 8:40 p.m. Saturday, Hart and Rice left the house and emerged into the adjacent alleyway, heading for the senator’s car. The idea, apparently, had been to meet Broadhurst and Armandt for dinner. It was then that Hart noticed things were amiss. The first reporter he spotted in the side alley was McGee, a 200-pound man who for some reason had decided to make himself inconspicuous by donning sunglasses and a hooded parka. At night. In May.

McGee, sensing he had been made, turned on his heels and ran, bumping into Fiedler, who, being the only reporter on the scene whom Hart actually knew from the campaign plane, had disguised himself in a tracksuit and was pretending to jog around every so often. “He’s right behind me,” McGee whispered urgently. Fiedler immediately changed direction and jogged across the street, like a disoriented sprinter.

Alarmed, Hart abandoned the dinner plan and led Rice back inside. He was certain he was being watched but mystified as to who might be watching. He peered out of his second-floor kitchen window and surveyed Sixth Street, S.E. Hart was by no means an expert in counterintelligence, but he had traveled behind the Iron Curtain, where Americans were routinely tracked by government agents, and he had spent considerable time in the protection of Secret Service agents who were always scanning the periphery for threats. All of this was more than enough training for Hart to recognize the clownish stakeout that had all but taken over his street. He saw the five participants milling around, pretending to be strangers but then talking to one another, ducking into cars or — at least in Hart’s telling, though The Herald team would dispute his account — disappearing behind the bushes. His bushes. He thought perhaps they were reporters, but how could he be sure? Maybe they worked for another campaign or for the Republicans.

Hart decided, at first anyway, to hunker down and wait. He called Broadhurst, at whose nearby townhouse Rice and Armandt were supposed to be staying that weekend, and Broadhurst came over with Armandt and some barbecued chicken. After dinner, Hart instructed Broadhurst to gather up the women and leave via the back door. He would never see Donna Rice again.

Like a character in one of the spy novels he loved to read and write, Hart decided to outwit his surveillants and flush them into the open. It’s not clear how he thought this was going to end, other than badly, but a cornered man does not think clearly. Hart put on a white sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over his thick hair. At first, he got into his car and merged into Capitol Hill traffic. He expected to be followed, and he was — Smith, the photographer, was tailing close behind. Satisfied with this maneuver, Hart pulled over after a few blocks, emerged from the car and started walking back in the general direction of the townhouse. He detoured down a side street and walked twice around the block. Next Hart walked past the rental car in the front where McGee and Savage thought they were safely incognito.

According to the writer Richard Ben Cramer, who chronicled these events in his classic campaign book, “What It Takes,” Hart made a show of writing down the license-plate number in full view of the two reporters; The Herald didn’t mention this detail, but it did report that Hart seemed “agitated” and appeared to yell over his shoulder at someone on the other side of the street as he walked away. Probably both accounts are true. In any event, McGee and Savage deduced from Hart’s behavior that their undercover stakeout had been compromised. They could not write an article without at least trying to get his response. So after quickly conferring, they exited the car, followed Hart’s path back up the alley alongside his row of townhouses and turned a corner. McGee, according to The Herald account, “flinched in surprise.” There was Gary Hart, the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, leaning against a brick wall in his hoodie. He was waiting for them.

There were no press aides or handlers, no security agents or protocols to be followed. There was no precedent for any reporter accosting a presidential candidate outside his home, demanding the details of what he was doing inside it. It was just Hart and his accusers, or at least two of them for the moment, facing off in an oil-stained alley, all of them trying to find their footing on the suddenly shifting ground of American politics.

Eight days later, The Herald published a front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler and Savage, the 7,000-plus-word article — Moby-Dick-like proportions by the standards of daily journalism — is remarkable reading. First, it’s striking how much The Herald’s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” (“McGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.”) Clearly, the reporters and editors at The Herald thought themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues imagined themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.

The other fascinating thing about The Herald’s reconstruction is that it captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever. Even in the dispassionate tone of The Herald’s narrative, you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.

“Good evening, senator,” McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. “I’m a reporter from The Miami Herald. We’d like to talk to you.” As The Herald relayed it: “Hart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.” McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.

“No one is staying in my house,” Hart replied.

Hart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation, but it’s not as if they weren’t ready. They had conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall — which was now literally the situation. McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. “You passed me on the street,” McGee said.

“I may or may not have,” Hart replied.

McGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.

“I’m not involved in any relationship,” Hart said carefully.

So why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?

“The obvious reason is I’m being set up,” Hart said, his voice quivering.

McGee wanted to know if the woman was in Hart’s house at that very moment. “She may or may not be,” is how Hart answered, evading again. Savage then asked to meet her, and Hart said no.

McGee offered to explain the situation, as if Hart had just woken up in a hospital or an asylum and might not have any idea what was happening. He said that the house had been under surveillance and that he had observed Hart with the woman the night before, in Hart’s car. Where were they going?

“I was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying,” Hart said, referring to Broadhurst’s townhouse nearby.

Savage cut in and asked how long Hart had known the woman — “several months” was the response — and what her name was.

“I would suppose you would find that out,” Hart said.

His voice was steadier now, and the reporters noticed that his composure had returned. As would happen several times throughout the ordeal of the next week, and for long afterward, Hart was lurching between conflicting instincts. There were moments when he thought that if he said just enough, if he issued enough of a denial to explain himself, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing. But then he would grow defiant. The hell with them, he would think. They were not entitled to know.

Fiedler made his way into the alley and joined his colleagues, making it three on one (or actually four on one, since Smith, the photographer, was there, too). Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart’s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched.

As Fiedler watched, McGee hit Hart with questions about the phone calls he had made to Rice, which they knew about from the tipster (even though they still hadn’t figured out her identity). Hart, whose suspicions about being set up must have now seemed well founded, didn’t dare deny the calls, but he characterized them as “casual” and “political” and “general conversation.” Then Fiedler jumped in. He asked Hart if he had taken this woman on a yachting trip in Florida.

“I don’t remember,” Hart said, dubiously. You can imagine the vertigo he must have been experiencing as the details of his private life, things he had not disclosed even to his closest aides, just kept coming, one after the other. It probably dawned on him, right about then, that he should never have been in the alley, any more than he should have been on the yacht.

Fiedler reminded Hart that he had been at Red Rocks and had personally heard the speech. He quoted Hart’s own words back to him, where Hart, alluding to the Iran-contra scandal rocking the Reagan administration, talked about running a campaign based on integrity and ethics and a higher standard. If that were so, Fiedler wanted to know, then why was Fiedler having to stand in this alley, at this moment, doing something so beneath him? He pleaded with Hart to be more forthcoming.

“I’ve been very forthcoming,” Hart said.

When McGee pressed him again about the yacht and whether he was denying having met Rice there, Hart grew visibly irritated. “I’m not denying anything,” he said. They were missing the point. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny knowing Rice or having been on a chartered boat. Hart’s stance was that none of it was anybody’s business but his. When the reporters asked Hart to “produce” the woman or this friend who was supposedly hosting her, Hart said other people had a right to privacy, too.

“I don’t have to produce anyone,” he told them.

McGee pulled out his last question, the one you save for the moment when there is nothing to be lost by asking it. He put the question point-blank to Hart: Had the senator had sex with the woman in the townhouse?

“The answer is no,” Hart said, more definitively than he had answered other questions. As Hart walked away, shaken and alone, and started back up the alley, Smith, the photographer, started clicking away. Hart whirled around. This yielded the shots of him rumpled and recoiling, hiding in a hoodie like some perp who was about to have his head forcibly lowered into the back seat of a cruiser.

“We don’t need any of that,” were Hart’s parting words.

The next morning, on May 3, The Herald reporters published a front-page article about Hart’s purported affair . At the end, they referred to a statement in which Hart challenged reporters interested in his personal life to follow him. Hart couldn’t have known it at the time, but his words — “follow me around” — would shadow him for the rest of his days. They would bury everything else he had ever said in public life.

In the history of Washington scandal, only a few quotes — “I am not a crook,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — have become as synonymous with a politician. In truth, though, Hart never issued any challenge to The Miami Herald’s reporters, or to anybody else, really. The words were spoken weeks earlier to E. J. Dionne Jr., who was then the top political reporter for The New York Times and was writing a profile for this magazine . Dionne discussed a broad range of topics with Hart and then reluctantly turned to the rumors of affairs. Hart was exasperated and he finally told Dionne: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

Hart said this in an annoyed and sarcastic sort of way, in an obvious attempt to make a point. He was “serious” about the sentiment, all right, but only to the extent that a man who had been twice separated from his wife and dated other women over the years — with the full knowledge of his friends in the press corps and without having seen a single word written about it at the time — could have been serious about such a thing. Hart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign, for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him. Dionne certainly didn’t take the comment literally, though he suspected others might. “He did not think of it as a challenge,” Dionne would recall many years later. “And at the time, I did not think of it as a challenge.”

As it happened, Dionne’s cover story was set to appear Sunday, May 3, the same day the Herald published its front-page exposé. No one at The Herald had a clue that Hart had issued any “challenge” on the previous Monday when Fiedler heard from his anonymous tipster or when he continued to chase the story during the week. All of this they did on their own, without any prodding from Hart.

In those days before the Internet, however, The Times circulated printed copies of its magazine to other news media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it in their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. When Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne’s story, which had been sent to The Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric shock. There it was, staring up at him from the page — Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before.

The discovery of Hart’s supposed challenge, which the Herald reporters took from the advance copy of The Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster — so that the two articles, referring to the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously — probably eased any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print before they had a chance to identify Rice and try to talk to her. Soon enough, as The Herald would put it in their longer reconstruction a week later, Gary Hart would be seen as “the gifted hero who had taunted the press to ‘follow me around.’ ” Everyone would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. Hart’s quote appeared to justify The Herald’s extraordinary investigation, and that’s all that mattered.

The difference here is far more than a technicality. Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now, they recall it the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn’t believe him, and then The Herald took him up on it. Inexplicably, people believe, Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it. (When I spoke to Dana Weems, she repeatedly insisted to me that she had only called The Herald after reading Hart’s “follow me around” quote, which was obviously impossible.)

And this version of events conveniently enabled The Herald’s reporters and editors to completely sidestep some important and uncomfortable questions. As long as it was Hart, and not The Herald, who set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive, personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us. Hart had, after all, given the media no choice in the matter.

I had a chance to talk to Fiedler about this over lunch one day in the spring of 2013. We ate at a French restaurant near the campus of Boston University, where Fiedler, who went on to run The Herald before his retirement, was now installed as dean of the College of Communication.

Fiedler explained to me that while he knew no political reporter had ever undertaken this kind of surveillance on a presidential candidate or written an article about a possible extramarital affair, he had never doubted that Hart’s liaison with Rice, if it could be proved, was a legitimate story. Fielder’s view — a view shared by a lot of his younger colleagues and informed, no doubt, by the lingering ghosts of Nixon — was that it wasn’t a reporter’s job to decide which aspects of a candidate’s character were germane to the campaign and which weren’t. It was the job of reporters to vet potential presidents by offering up as detailed a dossier about that person as they could assemble, and it was the voters’ job to rule on relevance, one way or the other.

Fiedler readily acknowledged that the order of events pertaining to the “follow me around” quote had since become jumbled in the public mind, and his expression was genuinely regretful. He mostly blamed the way the TV news programs that weekend juxtaposed The Herald’s reporting with the quote from The Times Magazine, as if one had led to the other. That had really been the beginning of the myth, he said, and from that time on, people were confused about which came first — “follow me around” or The Herald investigation. When I asked why he had never tried to correct the record, Fiedler shrugged sadly. “I don’t know what I would need to do,” he said.

Then I mentioned to Fiedler that I had done a web search on his name recently and been sent to his biographical page on the B.U. website. And this is what it said: “In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about marital infidelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart’s campaign-killing affair with a Miami model.” Why did his own web page explicitly repeat something he knew to be untrue?

Fiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. “You know what?” he said. “I didn’t know that. Honestly. I’m serious.” He stared at me for another beat, stunned. “Wow.” I knew he meant it. I was surprised to find that for more than a year afterward — until just last month — Fiedler hadn’t changed a word.

In the days after the Herald story, Hart continued on to New Hampshire, where photographers and political reporters, who until then had always observed some sense of decorum, shoved one another aside and leapt over shrubs in an effort to get near the wounded candidate. It was there, at a carnival-like news conference on Wednesday, May 6, that Paul Taylor, a star reporter for The Washington Post, publicly asked Hart the question that no presidential candidate in America to that point had ever been asked, let alone from one of the country’s most admired newspapers: “Have you ever committed adultery?”

Hart stumbled to answer and ultimately said he shouldn’t have to. What he didn’t know then was that Taylor’s colleagues at The Post — acting at the direction of the paper’s legendary editor and Watergate hero, Ben Bradlee — were already unearthing evidence of a relationship with another woman. By Thursday, Hart was back in Colorado, news helicopters buzzing over his house like something out of Vietnam, and his campaign was through.

The most enduring image of that time, of course, is the infamous photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap, which Armandt snapped on a crowded dock in Bimini during that overnight cruise and later sold to The National Enquirer. In it, Rice is wearing a short white dress; Hart is wearing a “Monkey Business crew” T-shirt, along with a startled, crooked grin. Most people who lived through the event, and some who covered it, will tell you that the photo is what provided irrefutable evidence of the affair and drove Hart from the race. But the photo didn’t surface until nearly three weeks after Hart suspended his candidacy. It was a final indignity, to be sure, but it had nothing to do with his decision to quit.

If Nixon’s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart’s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else. By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: “We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.”

As an industry, we aspired chiefly to show politicians for the impossibly flawed human beings they are: a single-minded pursuit that reduced complex careers to isolated transgressions. As the former senator Bob Kerrey, who has acknowledged participating in an atrocity as a Navy Seal in Vietnam, told me once, “We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are.” That quote, I thought, should have been posted on the wall of every newsroom in the country, just to remind us that it was true.

Predictably, politicians responded to all this with a determination to give us nothing that might aid in the hunt to expose them, even if it meant obscuring the convictions and contradictions that made them actual human beings. Each side retreated to its respective camp, where they strategized about how to outwit and outflank the other, occasionally to their own benefit but rarely to the voters’. Maybe this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against liars and hypocrites. But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. It drove a lot of potential candidates with complex ideas away from the process, and it made it easier for a lot of candidates who knew nothing about policy to breeze into national office, because there was no expectation that a candidate was going to say anything of substance anyway.

Gary Hart, meanwhile, has continued to try to influence the issues of the day. Now a robust 77, he has written 15 books since 1987, including three novels, and now serves on voluntary commissions for the secretaries of state and defense. But he never said much publicly about the scandal or admitted to having an affair, and he never really recovered, politically or emotionally.

A few years ago, during one of our many conversations in the upstairs, book-lined study in Hart’s Colorado home, I asked him whether he ever felt a sense of relief at having not actually become president. This was what people said still — that he allowed himself to be caught because he was ambivalent about the job.

“It was a huge disappointment,” Hart said, shaking his head. “A huge disappointment.”

Lee Hart, to whom he has now been married for more than a half century, had entered the study and was refilling our water glasses, and she overheard him.

“That’s why he accepts every invitation where someone wants him to speak,” she told me. “Every time he can make any kind of a contribution, he does it, because he thinks he’s salving his conscience. Or salving his place after death or something.” She appeared to try to stop herself from continuing, but couldn’t quite do it. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been very difficult.”

“Is that why I give speeches?” Hart said defensively.

“No, no,” Lee answered quickly. “But you do things when you’re tired to the bone that you shouldn’t be doing.”

I asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.

“I don’t feel guilty,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with salving my conscience.”

“No, I don’t mean your conscience,” Lee said.

I asked Lee what she had meant to say.

“Gary feels guilty,” Lee said finally. “Because he feels like he could have been a very good president.”

“I wouldn’t call it guilt,” Hart said.

“No. Well.”

“It’s not guilt, babe,” he protested. “It’s a sense of obligation.”

“Yeah, O.K.,” Lee said, sounding relieved. “That’s better. Perfect.”

“You don’t have to be president to care about what you care about,” Hart said.

“It’s what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very day,” Lee said.

“Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years’ time.

“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating. “You have to live with that, you know?”

An article on Sept. 21 about Gary Hart and the scandal that derailed his run for the presidency in 1987 misidentifed the military branch in which the former senator Bob Kerrey — another public figure touched by scandal — served when, in 1969, he participated in an operation in Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of civilians. He was a member of the Navy SEALs, not a soldier in the Army.

An article on Sept. 21 about Gary Hart misidentified the location of the Capitol Hill townhouse where he lived in 1987. It is on Sixth Street SE, not Fifth Street. The article also misquoted Bill Clinton’s response after he was accused of having an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. He said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” not “I did not have sex with that woman.”

A cover article on Sept. 21 examined the effects of the Gary Hart-Donna Rice scandal on American politics. After the article was published, former journalists for The Miami Herald disputed one aspect of the chronology of the week they pursued the Gary Hart story: when Herald journalists first saw a New York Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’ In interviews before publication, the reporter Tom Fiedler confirmed seeing that article for the first time on Saturday, May 2, as he flew to Washington to join a stakeout of Hart’s townhouse. But after publication, Fiedler recalled that he may actually have seen the Times article on Thursday or Friday. Jim McGee and James Savage, Fiedler’s former colleagues at The Herald, recall that McGee became aware of the article on Friday, before McGee flew to Washington. Fiedler then showed the article to Savage on the plane on Saturday. Therefore, it is very likely that the original version of this article, based in large part on Fiedler’s account, referred incorrectly to the point at which any of the Herald journalists first saw the Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’

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Watch CBS News

Almanac: The Gary Hart scandal

May 8, 2016 / 9:18 AM EDT / CBS News

"I'm not a beaten man. I'm an angry and defiant man. I've said that I bend but I don't break, and believe me, I'm not broken."

And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: May 8th, 1987, 29 years ago today ... the day former Colorado Senator Gary Hart quit the Democratic race for president in the face of a media frenzy.

A media frenzy many people remember today by the photograph that eventually emerged of Hart and a woman named Donna Rice on a dock next to a yacht called "Monkey Business."

When asked if he'd ever committed adultery, Hart responded, "I don't have to answer that question."

Just a few days before he dropped out, an anonymous tip about a possible affair had led Miami Herald reporters to confront Hart outside his Washington, D.C. townhouse.

Their story ran the next day ... the very same day The New York Times printed quotes from an earlier interview with Hart. Asked about earlier rumors of infidelity, Hart had answered: "Follow me around. I don't care, I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored."

Boring, it was not.

With Hart's statement giving them license, the media launched into full scandal mode. And within a week, candidate Hart announced the inevitable:

"Clearly under present circumstances this campaign can't go on. I refuse to submit my family and my friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It's simply an intolerable situation."

Not content with a simple statement of withdrawal, Hart went on to deliver a lecture:

"We're all going to have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters, and presidential candidates to being hunted."

For all Hart's protestations, the release of that "Monkey Business" photo was all most people needed to see.

And with that incident, the precedent of non-stop, 24/7 coverage of the personal failings of politicians -- from both parties -- was firmly established.

Something all candidates, current and future, ignore at their peril.

More from CBS News

Gary Hart (1936- ) served as US Senator from Colorado from 1975-87 and ran for president twice. His political career was derailed by the so-called "Monkey Business" scandal, in which a reporter exposed Hart's extramarital affair.

Gary Hart (1936 –) is a former US Senator from Colorado, serving from 1975 to 1987, and two-time presidential hopeful who became embroiled in one of the first modern political sex scandals. The so-called “Monkey Business” scandal set the tone for future media coverage of politicians’ personal lives and ended Hart’s career in elected office almost overnight. Since October 21, 2014, Hart has served as the United States’ Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. He is also an active political author, and his career serves as a cautionary tale for those who live their lives in the public eye.

Born in Ottawa, Kansas, Gary Hart grew up in Colorado under a strict Nazarene philosophy that prohibited dancing, movies, and alcohol. Planning a career in the ministry, Hart attended Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma. There he met his future wife, Lee. In 1958 they moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Hart entered Yale Divinity School during its “golden age” when the school saw about half of its students pursue nontraditional careers in foreign missions or grassroots civil rights work. At Yale, Hart explored alternative ways to effect social change.

After graduating from Yale Divinity School in 1961 and from Yale Law School in 1964, Hart became an attorney for the United States Department of Justice. He passed the Colorado and District of Columbia bars in 1965. Thereafter, Hart served as a special assistant to the solicitor of the United States Department of the Interior until 1967. He then pursued a private law practice in Denver with the firm Davis Graham & Stubbs.

Hart and McGovern

In 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, US Senator George McGovern of South Dakota co-chaired a commission that sought revisions to the nomination process for candidates at the party level. The new structure would weaken the influence of old-style party “bosses” such as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who were once able to hand-pick national convention delegates and dictate the way they voted. Hart served as McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential campaign. Alongside Rick Stearns, the pair decided to focus on the twenty-eight states holding caucuses instead of primary elections, feeling that the structure of caucuses made them easier and less costly to win. Their strategy proved successful in winning the nomination, but McGovern lost the 1972 presidential race in one of the most lopsided elections in US history.

Early Senate Career

In 1974 Hart ran for the United States Senate by challenging two-term incumbent Republican Peter Dominick. Aided by the state’s move toward Democrats during the early 1970s, as well as Dominick’s continued support of President Richard Nixon and concerns about the aging senator’s health, Hart won in the general election by a wide margin. Hart served on the Armed Services Committee, where he was an early supporter of reforming military contract bidding and advocated for the use of smaller, more mobile weapons and equipment. In addition, he was a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. From 1975 to 1976 Hart was a member of a subcommittee under the “Church Committee” investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and he was the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation.

Hart narrowly won reelection in 1980, beating his opponent, Colorado Secretary of State Mary Estill Buchanan, by a margin of 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent.

Presidential Campaign

In 1983 Hart stood on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol to announce his candidacy for president. Opponents from his own party asserted that Hart lacked money, supporters, and political clout, and that former Vice President Walter Mondale was already the clear Democratic front runner. Political pros scoffed at his viability as a candidate, but his accomplishments attracted voters. Hart presented himself as an ordinary citizen of Middle America who, with perseverance and intelligence, entered the Ivy League.

As a presidential candidate, Hart eschewed traditional forms of funding such as money from Political Action Committees (PACs) or special interest groups. Although born before World War II, Hart seemed to personify the Baby Boomer population that comprised almost half of eligible voters at the time. Still, some commentators judged him as aloof and pointed out that he jealously guarded his personal life. He disliked the networking and ingratiating inherent in the world of politics. In person, some reporters found him distant and unwilling to discuss anything except for hard-core issues, while others attributed his reticence to shyness. On television he proposed new ideas that appealed to the sizable younger generation and differed from Mondale’s more traditional Democratic tenets or President Ronald Reagan’s conservative policies. Hart’s Senate record indicated that he voted for his principles, actively opposing bills not consistent with his beliefs.

To the astonishment of everyone following the campaign, Hart won the New Hampshire primary. After a poor showing in Illinois, Mondale pulled ahead in the polls. In June suggestions surfaced that Hart should become Mondale’s running mate, but neither candidate acquiesced. The margin was narrow, but eventually the Democratic National Convention chose Mondale as its nominee.

Return to the Senate

Returning to Washington, Hart cosponsored the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 with Senator Charles Mathias. The act created a new category of intellectual property rights for computer chips, protecting Silicon Valley from cheaper foreign imitations. The act led to Hart being called the leader of the “Atari Democrats.” Hart also continued voting for bills that protected Colorado’s wilderness areas and water rights. He and Colorado’s Republican Senator, William Armstrong, negotiated with oil shale companies to clean up toxic waste dumps, and agreed on a measure to designate 1.4 million acres of Colorado public land as wilderness. In November, Mondale lost the presidential election to Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan.

Second Bid for President

Encouraged by the favorable response to his first campaign and still motivated to carry out his principles in higher office, Hart decided to run for president on the 1988 ticket. Lingering debts from his first campaign failed to dissuade him. On April 13, 1987, at Red Rocks Amphitheater , Hart again declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. He asserted that “traditional politics must take second place in 1988 because we are going to select not only a leader; we are going to select a future.” The 1988 campaign fed the public’s desire for innovative solutions to pervasive domestic concerns. He addressed the issues of oil import fees, taxes, AIDS, nuclear weapons, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Hart called for education reform, confident that by funneling more money to school systems, requiring testing for present and new teachers, and increasing the teacher-student ratio in public schools, the United States would become more competitive internationally.

“Monkey Business” Scandal

Five days into his campaign, Newsweek and the Washington Post speculated that vague but persistent rumors of Hart’s philandering could mar his bid for the Oval Office. He responded casually to these reports and continued to rally financial support and gather volunteers. On May 3, 1987, the New York Times Magazine printed Hart’s famous challenge that reporters used to justify their intense pursuit of his personal life: “Follow me around. I’m serious. If anyone wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” Miami Herald reporters were already following Hart. Based on an anonymous tip they had staked out Hart’s house the day before the Times story. The Sunday edition of the Herald broke the story: a twenty-nine-year-old woman, identified as model/actress Donna Rice, entered Hart’s townhouse Friday night and did not leave until Saturday evening.

The story hit newsstands nationwide on Monday, May 4. Instantly, other newspapers cross-examined Herald reporters and discovered discrepancies in their surveillance tactics—namely in their total lack of surveillance on the residence’s back door. Nonetheless, the comments about Hart’s private life grew into week-long front page stories. The lingering question about his 1984 campaign debts was forgotten, as were the substantive policy issues of his campaign. He had not been proven guilty of any impropriety, but the question was raised and the voters had to decide how to process it. Hart attempted to renew his campaign in New Hampshire, but every event he held was derailed by questions concerning his alleged infidelity.

On Friday, May 8, game shows and soap operas around the country were interrupted as television networks broadcasted Hart’s live nine-minute speech from Denver . Less than a month after offering balloons and visionary ideas to excited voters at the threshold of the presidential race, and a mere week after the townhouse episode, he withdrew from the race. On May 25, a photo of Donna Rice seated on Hart’s lap aboard a chartered yacht named the Monkey Business was emblazoned across the cover of the National Enquirer beneath a headline reading, “Gary Hart Asked Me to Marry Him.” The photo further humiliated Hart and his supporters. He responded by writing a letter of apology to his backers, a letter significantly more subdued than his angry departure speech.

Media coverage of Hart’s personal life represents a watershed in the history of US presidential campaigns. Though Hart is verifiably not the first public official whose personal life raised public questions, his campaign may have been the first time in the media age that the press deliberately pursued a major candidate for information that would make for scandalous front-page stories. His campaign raised issues about adultery, an elected official’s right to privacy, and the role of the press in scrutinizing a candidate’s personal life. As Hart told his staffers when he initially quit the race, “Even though this is the shortest presidential campaign in history, we made an impact that will not be taken lightly or forgotten by the American people.” Reflecting some years later in George magazine (April 1998) on how his time in the political and media spotlight changed him personally, Hart said, “after I was elected to the Senate in 1984, the whole atmosphere changed. I felt much more in a cage, very closed in … And after that business happened in 1987, I became distrustful of people in general. Not just the press, but other people. Distrustful of their motives, and what their angles might be.”

After “Monkey Business”

Following the scandal, Hart remained relatively active in politics. He serves on the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the biggest political think tanks in the United States, and is also a contributing blogger for The Huffington Post. In 2006 Hart became an endowed professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and has served as a visiting lecturer at several other universities. In 2014 President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Hart as the US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland.

Adapted from Ariana Harner, “The Watershed Campaign of Gary Hart,” Colorado Heritage Magazine 19, no.1 (1999).

Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015).

Laura Stoker, “ Judging Presidential Character: The Demise of Gary Hart ,” Political Behavior 15, no. 2 (1993).

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Film Review: ‘The Front Runner’

Hugh Jackman stars as senator Gary Hart, whose presidential run was undone by a sex scandal, in this shaggy, somewhat unfocused, Robert Altman-style retelling of the 1988 race.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Hugh Jackman stars in Columbia Pictures' THE FRONT RUNNER.

“How did we get here?” asks Jason Reitman in “ The Front Runner ,” dredging the past for answers with this ambitious — and almost intentionally unwieldy — Altmanesque re-enactment of the three weeks in which Gary Hart’s bid to become the 1988 Democratic nominee for president was undone by tabloid-style monkey business. Hugh Jackman proves an inspired candidate to embody Hart, downplaying his brawny movie-star persona, while still conveying the twinkly-eyed sex appeal that would have made the photogenic and well-spoken senator from Colorado a logical choice to follow the country’s first movie-star president, had it not contributed so directly to his undoing.

Hart was the man who would be king, poised to succeed Ronald Reagan, but because he withdrew, America got George H.W. Bush instead. Had Hart won, history would have gone otherwise. As political reporter Matt Bai writes in his book “All the Truth Is Out” (which serves as the backbone of Reitman’s film, which he and Bai co-wrote with former political consultant Jay Carson), had Hart won, “it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years’ time.” America wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Our relationship with Russia would have been different (Hart was friendly with Mikhail Gorbachev and says he would have invited him to the inauguration). And Donald Trump might still be selling neckties and frozen steaks, rather than running the country.

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To tell that story would be science fiction, whereas Reitman finds himself more interested in historical fact, proceeding on the assumption that most Americans — especially those who lived through the Hart scandal — have a foggy idea of how it happened. Until Bai’s excellent autopsy of a book, few had any notion of the significance what has since become a political footnote played in reshaping how the press reoriented its approach to covering candidates’ private lives going forward.

Hart’s implosion, centered on whether he committed adultery with a model named Donna Rice, was virtually unprecedented in U.S. politics — not the adultery, but the notion that it might be newsworthy (apparently, FDR, JFK, and LBJ had all conducted affairs before and during their time in office, and the press dutifully looked the other way). By 1988, times were changing. The Watergate scandal had transformed the role of the media, which had not only managed to expose and unseat a corrupt president (Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, immortalized by Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men” and by Tom Hanks in last year’s “The Post,” appears here, too, this time played by Alfred Molina), but also took it as a personal responsibility not to let another slip past it un-vetted. The technology of news coverage was evolving quickly as well, and Reitman goes out of his way to depict such changes, from fax machines to satellite-equipped TV news vans, without fetishizing, as so many period films do, painting the Miami Herald reporter who got the scoop, Tom Fielder (Steve Zissis), as some kind of slimy, bottom-of-the-food-chain sell-out — the Judas of political journalism.

So, let’s say that Bai is correct that what happened to Hart marked a turning point in campaign news coverage (certainly, there had never been an exposé where reporters went looking for scandal in quite this way, sneaking around a politician’s home like snoops for a Hollywood gossip magazine). But how does one dramatize this shift? As if drawn to such challenges, Reitman’s never-easy approach is to re-create the three-ring circus that is the presidential primaries, opening with an elaborately choreographed three-minute group shot — ersatz Altman, à la “Nashville” — of the press corps gathered outside the 1984 Democratic National Convention, closing on a monitor of Walter Mondale deflating Hart’s chances with a pop-culture zinger: “Where’s the beef?”

Hart may not have nabbed the nomination, but the campaign put him on the nation’s radar, and by the time the film jumps forward four years later, he’s ahead by 12 points in the polls. Reitman and editor Stefan Grube orchestrate high-energy scenes intended to convey the feeding-frenzy dynamic of the campaign, cross-cutting between various press gatherings in which rumors of Hart’s “womanizing” first surface and a strategy roundtable overseen by Hart’s idealistic campaign manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons), who vowed never to step foot in Washington again after what’s about to happen to him here.

Considering co-writers Bai and Carson’s real-world experience working on both sides of such a show — Bai as a journalist, Carson as a campaign consultant — one is inclined to trust their testosterone-fueled, Ivy League-educated behind-the-scenes banter (often spoken by slobs with food in their mouths). And yet, “The Front Runner” too often relies on the tired press-as-mob-of-hungry-jackals cliché, while conspicuously lacking the kind of elegant, eloquent rhythms of a crackling Aaron Sorkin script, relying instead on an obnoxious marching-band score to power through all this scene-setting. Jackman, as Hart, should cut through the noise with his camera-ready persona, speaking truth to power, but instead, he has a hard time being heard much of the time — which is (conveniently) how Reitman plays the scene aboard the Monkey Business yacht where he met Rice (Sara Paxton).

Early on, the only character who gets a scene to herself is Hart’s wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga), seen playing piano at her home in the aptly named town of Troublesome Gulch, Colo. For everyone else, the point seems to be that privacy — not just personal discretion, but alone time — is something they must learn to live without on the campaign trail. And then Washington Post journalist AJ Parker (Mamoudou Athie, playing a composite of pretty much every journalist who wasn’t Fielder) spots Hart making a personal call from a phone booth, and the press start putting two and two together. But it’s not until Fielder receives an anonymous tip from one of Rice’s friends (whom Bai identified as Dana Weems) that he takes the initiative to do what few if any political reporters had done before: Instead of letting candidates set the agenda with issue-related talking points, he changed the subject, proactively refocusing the conversation around Hart’s private life.

Today, the public’s memory has crystallized around the idea that Hart challenged the press to “Follow me around, I don’t care” (a line uttered to the New York Times Magazine’s E.J. Dionne Jr. but attributed to the Post here) and that the Miami Herald took him up on the offer, staking out his home in Washington, D.C. But it didn’t quite happen that way — in fact, as Bai goes to great lengths to point out in his book, Fielder plucked that line from an advance copy of the Times Magazine’s profile and retroactively used it to justify the stakeout, depicted here like a bumbling Keystone Kops routine, building to a “gotcha” scene in Hart’s alley where he confronts these amateur paparazzi.

There are so many ways Reitman could have orchestrated this entire retelling: privileging Hart’s version, focusing on how his wife or Rice took it, studying how it affected his advisers and staff, or turning the journalists involved into heroes or villains. Instead, he goes for the all-of-the-above approach, offering a prismatic sense of what happened from all of these various perspectives, the vast majority of them male (reconciliation scenes with Farmiga are the most powerful, although they’re almost certainly made up). Instead of acknowledging that each of these parties might remember things differently, and playfully weaving contradictions into the sprawling narrative, he averages everything together into a disappointingly toothless account that everyone can agree on, tacking on what sounds suspiciously like a #MeToo moral, spoken by a female reporter in the Washington Post office who labels Hart a chauvinist: “He is a man with power and opportunity. And that takes responsibility.”

Three decades on, practically every political sex scandal since — from Bill Clinton’s intern indiscretions to John Edwards’ illegitimate love child — has kept Hart’s name in circulation. And yet, in the age of Teflon Don (who actually seems to be admired by some for his crotch-grabbing chutzpah), it’s hard to imagine that what happened with Rice could still sink a politician’s career. Is that the message Reitman means to impart? If so, it’s different — and far more shallow — than the one that inspired Bai’s book. It’s too late to redeem Hart’s reputation, although “The Front Runner” should do some good for Reitman’s career, at least. When taken together with “Tully” (which premiered just seven months earlier at the Sundance Film Festival), the “Juno” director’s got his groove back.

Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 2, 2018. (Also in Toronto Film Festival — Galas.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 113 MIN.

Production: A Columbia Pictures release of a Stage 6 Films, Bron, Right of Way Films production. Producers: Jason Reitman, Helen Estabrook, Aaron L. Gilbert. Executive producers: Matt Bai, Jay Carson, Michael Beuff, Jason Blumenfeld, George Wolfe, Steven Thibault, Brenda Gilbert, David Gendron, Ali Jazayeri, Jason Cloth, Chris Conover, Edward Carpezzi.
Crew: Director: Jason Reitman. Screenplay: Matt Bai, Jay Carson, Reitman, based on the book “All the Truth Is Out,” by Matt Bai. Camera (color): Eric Steelberg. Editor: Stefan Grube. Music: Rob Simonsen.
With: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina , Mamoudou Athie, Josh Brener, Bill Burr, Oliver Cooper, Chris Coy, Kaitlyn Dever, Tommy Dewey Molly Ephraim, Spencer Garrett, Ari Graynor, Toby Huss, Mike Judge, Alex Karpovsky, Jennifer Landon, John Bedfor Lloyd, Mark O'Brien, Sara Paxton, Kevin Pollak, Steve Zissis.

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Senate District 15

Map of Senate District 15 (PDF)

2020 Census Population

Name	Count	Percent
Total Population	969,001	100.00%
Hispanic or Latino	276,453	28.53%
Not Hispanic or Latino (NH)	692,548	71.47%
NH Population of one race	655,573	67.65%
NH White alone	271,857	28.06%
NH Black or African American alone	22,788	2.35%
NH Asian alone	351,760	36.30%
NH American Indian and Alaska Native alone	1,767	0.18%
NH Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone	2,726	0.28%
NH Some Other Race alone	4,675	0.48%
NH Population of two or more races	36,975	3.82%

Counties In District

Name	Count	Percent
Santa Clara	969,001	50.05%

Places In District

Name	Count	Percent
SANTA CLARA: Alum Rock(U)	12,042	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Burbank(U)	4,940	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Cambrian Park(U)	3,719	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Campbell(C)	43,959	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Cupertino(C)	60,308	99.88%
SANTA CLARA: East Foothills(U)	6,309	92.74%
SANTA CLARA: Fruitdale(U)	989	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Lexington Hills(U)	2,492	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Los Altos(C)	20	0.06%
SANTA CLARA: Los Gatos(C)	33,529	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: Monte Sereno(C)	3,479	100.00%
SANTA CLARA: San Jose(C)	755,988	74.61%
SANTA CLARA: Santa Clara(C)	0	0.00%
SANTA CLARA: Saratoga(C)	30,973	99.75%
SANTA CLARA: Sunnyvale(C)	87	0.06%
SANTA CLARA: Remainder of Santa Clara(R)	10,167	36.06%

Digital Library

By justice sandra day o'connor, stanford commencement speech, 1982: the individual often does make a difference in society.

June 16, 1982

Try to resolve some disputes outside the courts, O'Connor advises graduates

An informed, reasoned effort by one citizen can have a dramatic impact on how ... a legislator will vote and act. -Sandra Day O'Connor

Following is the 1982 commencement address by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor:

First. I want to say hello to the class of 1982. You are the people who asked mo to be with you today. My presence here reflects that there are some offers that even supreme court justices can't refuse. Yours was one of them. Thank you for asking me to share your day with you. Thank you, Don Kennedy, for your kind words and thoughts and thank you, dear friends of Stanford and of the graduates, for being here today for this wonderful celebration.

As I stand here and look about me, it is like taking a journey in a time tunnel.

I remember. so clearly, the day I first sat in this amphitheater. It was the end of September, 1946. The occasion was the first gathering of my own class, the class of 1950. While your class and mine are separated by a span of 32 years, I can assure you that our two classes share a common belie£. There is no greater, more foresighted office in this land of ours than the Admissions Office of Stanford University. Certainly, all of you would agree that if my decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court are as wise as Fred Hargadon's admissions decisions about you in the spring of 1978, this country is entering into a judicial golden age.

Each spring. when I was here, I would come for the wonderful spring sings. One year, as a group was singing "Singing In the Rain," it started to rain, proving again, that Stanford students can make anything happen if they try hard enough.

I received my undergraduate degree in 1950 on this spot, during the presidency of Wallace Sterling, who is with us here today.

My last appearance was three years ago when I sat in the same first row here as a trustee and watched my oldest son carry the president's flag at his own graduation ceremony.

I have one more future visit here that I know of now: the graduation of my youngest son, a sophomore here, who proudly carries the title of admiral of the Big Way Yacht Club.

I realize that we have gathered here this morning to applaud those of you who will be receiving degrees. But, as one who has sent a few dollars to Stanford for children who have been students here, I suggest that there are several heroes and heroines here today who should be recognized and with whom you graduates would like to share your glory. I refer, of course, to your parents who made two significant contributions to your presence today. First. they had the brains which you were lucky enough to inherit and, secondly, they, and various benefactors of Stanford, provided the money that you needed to sustain yourselves while you were here. I congratulate your parents, and I commend you graduates for your good judgment in selecting your parents.

I have not had time to give many talks this year. My duties on the court don't give me the luxury of much extra time. A commencement speech is a particularly difficult assignment. You are given no topic and are expected to be able to inspire all the graduates with a stirring speech about nothing at all. I suppose that's why so many lawyers are asked to be commencement speakers: we're in the habit of talking extensively even when we have nothing to say.

But as I begin, I want to briefly comment on several changes that have occurred in our country since I was at Stanford.

Although we criticize our country, it is well to periodically mention the strides we have made as a nation in recent decades.

First of all, as my presence here today evidences, the opportunities for women in this country have changed dramatically. As some of you may have read, the only job offer I received in the private sector on my graduation from Stanford Law School, in 1952, was a job as a legal secretary. However, since it was a partner in that same law firm who, as attorney general, recommended my appointment to the president, I have no present intention of initiating legal action. Today, almost 40 percent of all law school classes are comprised of women. Talented women are being actively recruited by private law firms on graduation. Women judges are serving ably at all court levels.

The other great change has been in the increased opportunities in our land for members of minority groups. The very heart of this country is equality of opportunity and respect for all individuals for what they are, and I am thrilled to see some progress in that regard.

We also have somewhat cleaner air and somewhat cleaner water and somewhat smaller cars than when I graduated. While none of the problems reflected are really solved, we can at least see a few changes and some progress.

I can remember, as I was growing up, and when I was a student here, reading about and hearing about the great historic leaders of our country, people who "preserved a nation" or "changed the course of a generation." I would also read about the people then in power. I would wonder what they were really like. They seemed so distant. I wondered how I or anyone else could ever impact on them because "they" seemed too remote, and yet powerful. Since September, I suppose I have been one of "them," the people at that seat of government in this nation. Today, I can share with you something I have learned repeatedly, as I engaged in public service in Arizona and now in Washington.

First, everyone, regardless of rank or reputation, shares the same basic human qualities, and has his or her faults as well as virtues. Secondly, the person who really favorably impacts on this world is, as has always been the case, not an institution, not a committee, and not a person who just happens to have a title: rather, it is the truly qualitative individual. The qualitative individual does matter in this quantitative world of ours, now as ever. When I speak of the qualitative individual and his or her role in life, I am not speaking just about the hero who slays the dragon or the humanistic politician who defeats the demagogue. I am speaking of every person in this land. For each of us has dragons and demagogues we must battle, and how we fight that battle is more meaningful to each of us than a legion of legendary giants.

This dual concept of the qualitative national leader, as well as the qualitative unknown citizen, is expressed in the Talmud very nicely:

"In every age, there comes a time when leadership suddenly comes forth to meet the needs of the hour. And so there is no man who does not find his time, and there is no hour that does not have its leader."

At first blush, this ancient saying suggests merely that there will always be a Moses when a Moses is needed. Yet, on further examination of the words, ''there is no man who does not find his time,'' we realize that the message conveyed is that each of us, in our own individual lives and the crises we face, will have a time to lead. Whether we will lead only a family, or a handful of friends, and where and how we will lead, is up to us, our views and our talents. But the hour will come for each of us, and, because we know this, we surely must also know that the very nature of humanity and society, regardless of its size or complexity, will always turn on the act of the individual and, therefore, on the quality of that individual.

Sometimes I am concerned that people in our country, including young, gifted people like you, at some point develop a sense that government and our society have grown so complex and so large that the individual simply cannot impact on the decisions that affect the country and affect all of us.

Let me disabuse you of that notion. My experience in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government and my position on the Supreme Court all point to this conclusion: an informed, reasoned effort by one citizen can have dramatic impact on how someone, like a legislator, will vote and act. When I was in the legislature, one person, sometimes with a direct interest in the matter, sometimes without one, would on occasion persuade me by the facts, by the clarity of the explanation and by the reasoning, to do something which I never would otherwise have done. I have been at caucuses when a group of legislators was trying to decide what to do, and, time and time again, my fellow legislators would refer to the logic or fairness of what some plain, unknown citizen has said.

I have had an opportunity to view this same basic phenomenon from a different perspective in my role as a Supreme Court justice. A majority of litigants who come before us are people who are essentially unknown, not only to us but even within their own community. We resolve their problems and, in the process, resolve the problems of thousands or millions similarly situated.

I might make a similar point about the lawyers who appear before us. Certainly, some of those who appear before the court are among the most heralded advocates of the land, but most are not. Most are lawyers who have never been before the court before and will never be there again. Many of these lawyers are from small firms and small towns. Some of the best arguments in the 150 or so I have heard have come from legal unknowns, and sometimes the argument of a famed lawyer fails to live up to his or her reputation.

The essential point of all this is simply to make the same point in a different context. The individual can make things happen. It is the individual who can bring a tear to my eye and then cause me to take pen in hand. It is the individual who has acted or tried to act who will not only force a decision but be able to impact it.

Thus far, I have been talking to you for the most part about the role of the individual in participating in governmental decisions. But my principal message to you is broader than that. It is this: that the main goal each of us should have in life is to solve problems and to help other people. We do this because it is important and it is needed. But we do this also because it will bring us pleasure and pride in our own actions.

I cannot overemphasize that there are amazing ways in which the individual can impact on society, even as a volunteer and without reference to any governmental act at all. Let me give you one example, of which there are thousands. I know a man in Phoenix who conceived of the idea of an organization he called second harvest. Essentially what he wanted to do was to feed the poor, but to do it as cost efficiently as he could. So he arranged for fields which had been harvested by the farmers to be harvested again by volunteers for all of the many products which still remained: this was how the organization came to be called "second harvest." He arranged also to get foods from grocery stores that were otherwise going to be thrown out because they were becoming outdated, although still nutritious. He raised cash and bought food in bulk from wholesalers and all of these things were distributed to people who needed it. His concept was so successful that the organization has now spread to many areas in our nation. This is one person. One idea. One qualitative individual impacting meaningfully on what some consider to be an uncaring world.

There are innumerable ways in which all of us can help in all fields. Let me mention only one which is close to my heart. One of the things each of you can do as individuals to improve our nation's court system is to help us resolve more of the disputes which arise in this country someplace other than in the courtroom. I believe there is a widespread and justified view in this country that quantitatively the courts are carrying too large a burden, the size of which cannot adequately be resolved merely by increasing the number of judges, and that qualitatively the courts are being asked to solve problems for which they are not institutionally or traditionally equipped.

The results of this double burden are well known to you. Court delays are so severe in some jurisdictions that an aggrieved party might just as well have no remedy at all. The costs of litigation have often become so high as to deprive many of our citizens of true access to the courts and to cause litigation to become known as the newest form of "the sport of kings."

What can we do about this? There are other alternatives to some of our traditional ways of resolving our problems. In some instances, delay has been avoided and the costs of proceedings have been diminished by legislation requiring mandatory arbitration of certain claims, or simplified, largely unadministered probate proceedings. Some jurisdictions have attacked the problem by simplified procedures in small claims courts. More recently, efforts are being made to resolve many problems, including landlord-tenant disputes, at citizens' dispute resolution centers where laymen, rather than lawyers, help mediate disputes.

Other societies have not had the same need of lawyers or courts that we have here. While Japan affords perhaps the most extreme example, it is interesting to note that in Japan there is one lawyer for every 10,000 citizens whereas in California there is one lawyer for every 233 citizens.

As a citizen, a former legislator and a judge, I am fully aware of the increased number of laws and, therefore, the increased likelihood of disputes arising. However, I firmly believe that individuals and business concerns can dramatically impact on resolving their own problems outside of the courts. First, I suggest to those of you who will be in business that you very carefully consider providing in your contracts that any dispute arising between the parties will be resolved by arbitration. Arbitration often can provide a speedier and a satisfactory solution.

Secondly, I suggest, as you negotiate disputes, you remember the golden rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That might make you a little more generous, save you a lot of time and money and make my job a lot easier.

I wish I could visit and get to know you all. You are a talented, fortunate, attractive group. You are the cream of our nation. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, 32 years ago I sat where you sit today. Thirty-two years from now my wish for you is that you will love this school as much as I have for all these years, that you will be able to be proud of the many improvements we will have made in our society in those intervening years, that you haven't had to pay too many lawyers' fees, that you will have spent a significant portion of your life putting service, public or private, above self, that you will have had fun and excitement along the way and that you will all be lucky enough to be able to have your children attend this paradise on earth that we love and that we call Stanford.

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