L’affaire Gary Hart was a whole lot of things: a circus, a tabloid bonanza, the best TV movie not made for E! or for Lifetime, a pain for the press, and a career-ending event for a possible president — who never regained his political footing and has lived in a void ever since. But it was for us all a lost opportunity; a chance for a debate on private affairs and public elections and on how, when, and if the personal matters should become public. And if so, when, and what lines should be drawn.
It was Hart’s view, author Matt Bai says, that the “when” would be “never,” that his private acts were as relevant to his political life as a physical birthmark, and that “what did or did not happen with Donna Rice or any other woman was nobody’s goddamn business but his and his wife’s.”
Hart had a point and, had he put it that way, things might have been different. But this kind of argument did not come from him. At no point in his six day ordeal in 1987, in the failed half-campaign that followed, or the years that came after that, did he make a coherent attempt to state this case clearly. What he offered instead was pique, paranoia, and delusions of martyrdom, compounded by crucial mistakes.
Hart’s first mistake was to ignore the extent to which Chappaquiddick and Watergate had collapsed the walls between public and private, increasing suspicion of public officials, and making deception a cardinal sin.
His second mistake was to lie, which turned a personal flaw into a public and character issue, into which the press felt entitled to dig. He lied to his friends, lied to his staff, and lied to the press, whom he invited to tail him (as some had mulled doing). When they did, he seemed thunderstruck and, instead of refusing to answer their questions, reeled off answers that sounded bizarre.
What was his relationship with the woman who had come out of his townhouse? “I’m not involved in any relationship.” Was the woman now in the townhouse? “She may or may not be.” Why had Hart and the woman re-entered the town house? “The obvious reason is I’m being set up.”
When asked later on if he had ever committed adultery, he wouldn’t answer the question, though he admitted before that the act was “immoral.” Was Hart saying now that he was immoral? Hart eluded the question, and the only failing he would ever admit to was “putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued.” Hart was not, as Hendrick Hertzberg asserted, “politically stoned to death for adultery;” he was laughed off the stage for erratic behavior, and the whoppers he told to us all.
But suppose that Hart had conceded his flaws, but asserted his right to be president anyhow? Saying he had broken his vows to his wife, but not to his country? Citing the people, from Alexander Hamilton through Franklin Roosevelt to Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, of whom similar things could be said?
That would have been a discussion worth having, but it was one that for whatever reason Hart did not have the courage or the presence of mind to engage. Bai says that Hart thinks of himself as Gary Cooper in the last scene of “High Noon,” throwing his badge on the ground in disgust at the citizens’ cowardice. But Hart’s last act, such as it was, was something much more of a Marx Brothers movie, and the coward in town was himself.
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.”
