Posted on 05/08/2007 9:04:13 AM PDT by Borges
When rumors began circulating about his supposed extramarital affairs, Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President, 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, 20 years ago today and 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 Year’s 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-can’t-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.
It was soooo unfair!!! Had Hart ran for president just four years later, his philandering could have been spun as proof of his ability to connect with the common people and his superior intellect. < / sarcasm >
I’m wondering, didn’t Donna Rice later become a Christian and is involved with some sort of anti-pornography work?
That will get you sleeping rights to the couch in most households...
Hart told the Media to follow him. And they did.
This is making me nostalgic for times when this foolishness wasn’t a resume enhancer or a bad punchline.
Gary Hart was considering pushing a flat tax as a democrat. I would speculate that is why he was exposed.
Imagine how today’s MSM would treat this story. Why Katie Couric would be just gushing with the news.
I miss John Chancellor and David Brinkley. They may not have been perfect by any stretch, but they were world's better than any of today's news readers...
“I’m wondering, didn’t Donna Rice later become a Christian and is involved with some sort of anti-pornography work?”
Yes that’s correct. I remember that much of her anit-pornography efforts were directed to restricting the internet. I always wondered if Donna Rice hadn’t been a CIA plant all along, first on a mission to derail Hart’s presidential plans, and later to whip up popular anti-internet sympathy. Hart had been a vocal senate critic of the CIA and I believe he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Cmmte. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.
Yep.
Hart believed he had received the Kennedy innoculation against bad MSM press for bad behavior. But no...they were saving the vaccine (only available to RAT politicos) for Billy Jeff.
“Gary Hart was considering pushing a flat tax as a democrat. I would speculate that is why he was exposed.”
I always thought it was because he wanted to reign in the CIA.
So they spanked him.
Yep, a leftwingnut philanderer and his skank.
Typical Democrat. We bit the bullet on that one, thank the Lord. - Too bad we couldn’t get a better break before Clinton wriggled his twisted way into the Oval Office.
While that would make a nice conspiracy story, I recall that the truth is a bit more prosaic. Donna Rice’s “friend” and Monkey Business companion, Lynn Armandt, offered to provide to the National Enquirer photos with Gary Hart’s arm around Rice for $25,000. Armandt was also allegedly the person who called the Miami reporter with the gossip about Hart and Rice. So, Armandt “outed” them, supposedly because of a falling out between her and Rice and, perhaps, greed.
...I was just mentioning that Hart blamed the CIA.
If this happened now, the Left would just whine about “swiftboating”.
Ah, the so called press. May they have long sunk into an alcoholic stupor and ended up in a nursing home.
If we’re going to talk about what he did twenty years ago, we should also talk about what he’s done since.
Council for a Livable World Announces Former Sen. Hart as its Chairman
Dec 18, 2006
Washington, D.C. — Council for a Livable World, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious organizations devoted to national security issues, today announced the selection of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart as its chairman.
Hart replaces Jerome Grossman, now chairman emeritus of Council, who has served in that position since 1980.
Hart served as a Senator from Colorado from 1975 to 1987 and was an active member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He was a candidate for his party’s nomination for President of the United States in 1984 and 1988.
Hart has remained active on national security issues. He co-chaired both the U.S. Commission on National Security/ 21st Century, which issued three public reports forecasting the age of terrorism and outlined a new, post-Cold War national security policy, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations task force on homeland security, which recently released its report “America—Still Unprepared, Still in Danger.”
Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh recently wrote a column saying that “Gary Hart has long been one of America’s most interesting political intellectuals, someone not just provocative but prescient.”
Lehigh also noted that the commission chaired by Hart and former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire “predicted both that the United States was becoming increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack and that ‘Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.’”
Hart recently underscored the need for our nation to renew its commitment to improving national security by opining, “We are going to be attacked again, it is just a question of when. These are patient people. . . and they are coming to get us.”
Council for a Livable World, founded in 1962 by nuclear pioneer Leo Szilard, has focused on political action to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons and increase national security. The Council actively works with Members of Congress on national security issues and its connected political action committee raised more than $1.5 million for congressional candidates in the 2006 election.
The Directors and staff of Council for a Livable World look forward to Senator Hart’s leadership for years to come.
University of Colorado Names Senator Gary Hart to Wirth Chair
Since retiring from the United States Senate, Gary Hart has been extensively involved in international law and business, as a strategic advisor to major U.S. corporations, and as a teacher, author and lecturer.
He is currently Wirth Chair Professor at the University of Colorado and Distinguished Fellow at the New America Foundation. For 15 years, Senator Hart was Senior Counsel to Coudert Brothers, a multinational law firm with offices in thirty-two cities located in nineteen countries around the world. He was co chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century. The Commission performed the most comprehensive review of national security since 1947, predicted the terrorist attacks on America, and proposed a sweeping overhaul of U.S. national security structures and policies for the post-Cold War new century and the age of terrorism.
He was president of Global Green, the U.S. affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s environmental foundation, Green Cross International. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund; a former member of the Defense Policy Board; and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was co-chair of the Council task force that produced the report: “America Unprepared-America Still at Risk”, in October, 2002. Senator Hart is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences task force on Science and Security.
Gary Hart has been Visiting Fellow, Chatham Lecturer, and McCallum Memorial Lecturer at Oxford University, Global Fund Lecturer at Yale University, and Regents Lecturer at the University of California. He has earned a doctor of philosophy degree from Oxford University and graduate law and divinity degrees from Yale University. He was visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School and is the author of fourteen books.
Gary Hart represented the State of Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987. In 1984 and 1988, he was a candidate for his party’s nomination for President.
Senator Hart was first elected to the Senate in 1974, having never before sought public office, and was re elected in 1980. During his 12 years in the Senate, he served on the Armed Services Committee, where he specialized in nuclear arms control and was an original founder of the military reform caucus. He also served on the Senate Environment Committee, Budget Committee, and Intelligence Oversight Committee. During his Senate years, he played a leadership role in major environmental and conservation legislation, military reform initiatives, new initiatives to advance the information revolution and new directions in foreign policy. He is widely-recognized as among the first to forecast the end of the Cold War.
Gary Hart travels extensively to the former Soviet Union, Europe, the Far East and Latin America. Beginning in 1988, he was active in negotiating ground breaking joint venture agreements in Russia and has published a book on the former Soviet Union entitled Russia Shakes the World: The Second Russian Revolution (1991).
Senator Hart resides with his family in Kittredge, Colorado.
Publications: Books:
The Shield and The Cloak: The Security of the Commons (Oxford University Press, February 2006);
God and Caesar in America: an essay on religion and politics (Fulcrum Books, 2005);
The Presidency of James Monroe, in the American Presidency series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Time Books/Henry Holt, 2005);
The Fourth Power: a new grand strategy for the United States in the 21st century (Oxford University Press, July 2004);
Restoration of the Republic: the Jeffersonian Ideal in 21st Century America (2002), for which he received a D. Phil. degree from Oxford University;
The Minuteman: Restoring an Army of the People (1998);
The Patriot: An Exhortation to Liberate America from the Barbarians (1996);
The Good Fight: The Education of an American Reformer (a New York Times Notable Book) (1995);
Russia Shakes the World: The Second Russian Revolution (1991);
A New Democracy : new approaches to the challenges of the 1980’s (1986);
America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (1985);
Right from the Start: A Chronicle of the McGovern Campaign (1973);
Four novels:
The Strategies of Zeus (1985)
The Double Man (with former Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, 1984)
Sins of the Fathers (1999)
I, Che Guevara (2000) (under the pseudonym John Blackthorn)
As for the man whose "zeal" brought Hart down, he certainly is not one of those hacks who are soaked in alcohol. Photographs show a vital looking man. He is Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald. Using Google, who directed me to www,latinamericanstudies.org there is something of interest.
Last October an Imus like furore occurred. Mr Fiedler referred to "the 22 people who listen to Cuban Radio". An unfortunate repost followed.
"little chihuahuas nipping at our heels".
He was called a racist and a bigot by certain of the Miami Cuban community. Demands for his resignation or firing followed. A cartoon showed a little dog doing something, on a copy of the Miami Herald. I suppose Mr Fiedler survives. He showed Mr Hart no mercy. This he expected for himself.
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