Human nature is stranger than anything. It was never more so than with Gary Hart, the Kansas boy from the ultra-strict Nazarene background who went Hollywood in 1972 in the presidential campaign of George S. McGovern.
Hart’s own campaign for president, based on his claim to distilled ideas and pure public conduct, collapsed 15 years later when he posed near the pleasure boat Monkey Business with blonde Donna Rice on his lap. As a pure human puzzle he ranks with the greats, and Matt Bai’s new book — All The Truth Is Out — is one of the better ones about him. It is fair, comprehensive, and very well written, but marred by two flaws:
First, Bai accepts Hart’s belief that he is a towering intellect and can see around corners. Second, he says that Hart waged a brave fight for the idea that public and private lives should be separate — an assertion that doesn’t ring true.
How bright was Hart? In contemporaneous texts, Elizabeth Drew and Jack Germond and Jules Witcover say he was bright enough, but not the genius he thought himself. Other doubters were thick on the ground. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called him a “hoax.” Walter Mondale destroyed him with his “where’s the beef?” gambit.
Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward collects a bouquet of Hart’s theories that were novel but not good: He proposed to engage the Soviet Union in a crusade to eliminate childhood hunger, in a joint missile tracking center ‘somewhere in Europe,’ and said that if a communist aircraft strayed over an American military installation, he would order the crew to look in the windows to see if the passengers were in uniform before ordering the plane be shot down. David Remnick wrote that Hart told a journalist the scandal broke because power elites had conspired against him. Hart later wrote that neoconservatives wanted to use Iraq as a garrison to control the whole region. Hart’s best new ideas, Hayward tells us, were his name and his age.
Bai says that Hart fell in a valiant attempt to restore the old standards of politicians’ privacy, by which the exploits of Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Estes Kefauver, Nelson Rockefeller, Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, (who made campaign speeches from his girlfriend’s apartment), were known to the press, but not shared. But instead of saying he deserved to be president in spite of his flaws, he denied that he had them, making a confession of sorts to Ted Koppel only months later, when he had already dropped out of the race. Before that, he lied to the press, to the public, and to friends and associates, many of whom joined his campaign only when he assured them the rumors about him were not or were no longer true.
Germond and Witcover list some of the instances in which Hart had lied: ‘There’s nothing there,’ he told supporters at a late April dinner. On May 1, he told reporter Ken Bode he had ‘nothing to hide.’ Consultant Joe Trippi only joined the campaign when assured the old rumors were done with. An old friend told Remnick of going on TV at Hart’s urging to plead for his innocence, and being “hung out to dry” afterward. When questioned, Hart’s response, one aide remembered, was to say always: “Those…stories….are simply…NOT… true.”
Donna Rice, who had dark days before she found God, married a businessman, and carved out her niche as social conservative, earns our respect as the one point of light in this sad little story. Hart, a broken man since the axe fell upon him, merits our pity perhaps, but no more.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
