All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (28 page)

“I could see that that would be a way to get ahead,” he told me. “To have that sort of snarky, contemptuous, clever way. If you’re good enough and you’ve established a good enough relationship and you get deep into their world, then you can kind of give them a little elbow now and then, and be clever about it, and live to fight another day. You know, I didn’t want to go there. I think much of political coverage
has
gone there, to the detriment of politics and political journalism.”

By the time Bill Clinton was running to unseat George H. W. Bush in 1992, Taylor had gotten as far away from American politics as you could physically get. He chose an assignment as the
Post
’s correspondent in South Africa, where apartheid was unraveling, and where no one could question the seriousness of the work he was doing. If there was any doubt about that, it was pretty much settled in his first week on the job, when he was shot near the collarbone and very nearly killed. (Fortunately, he made a full recovery.) When he returned to the States four years later, Taylor left the
Post
and journalism altogether and founded an organization dedicated
to electoral reform, mainly by changing the laws around campaign spending and TV advertising.

You could have seen that as a kind of atonement for sins past, but Taylor told me he was at peace with the decisions he had made in 1987 and didn’t regret having asked The Question. He had done what he had to do as a reporter covering a story, and he was satisfied that he had acquitted himself as well as anyone could have, and there was nothing more to it than that. “You get to cover the three-alarm fire, you go cover the three-alarm fire,” is how Taylor put it, with obvious ambivalence.

“Every circumstance, every story kind of develops its own logic and its own momentum, and it seemed to me that that’s where we were in that story,” Taylor told me. “It was the right question to ask, and it was the right topic to raise. But if it never gets asked again, no one will be happier about that than me.”

I pointed out that it did get asked—or at least some version of it—all the time. Taylor nodded.

“Many people made this point that we’re sort of debasing the political process if we use this as a lens to judge character,” Taylor said. “And I get that as a problem. So my response to that would be, ‘Agreed.’ Let’s not go there. Let’s
do
respect people’s privacy. And let’s
do
understand that private morality and public morality, they may influence each other, but they are separate entities. I think that’s the right starting point.

“But rules have exceptions,” Taylor said with a shrug. “And shit happens. And there we were.”

I asked Taylor if he had ever talked to Hart after the moment in New Hampshire when they faced one another twenty-six years ago, and he shook his head. He said he had written Hart a letter in the months after, asking to talk, and had received a polite reply from Hart saying he wasn’t interested.

“You know, there’s a time where I thought it would be nice, just on a human level, to bring some quote-unquote closure to it,” Taylor said. “But I don’t know what I would say. I have no burning desire to say anything to him. I expect he doesn’t think too highly of me. That’s the nature of the beast, and I’m okay with that.”

What Taylor seemed not to be okay with, what clearly still gnawed at him after all these years, was the idea that this one question, among the thousands he had asked of politicians in more than a decade of political reporting, was still the thing that defined his career. Not infrequently, if you mentioned the Hart scandal to political insiders who lived through it, one of the first people they mentioned, with a knowing smile, was Paul Taylor. Like Hart himself, Taylor had become stuck in an inglorious moment, and for a guy who considered himself intellectual and idealistic about politics, this was understandably hard to stomach.

“This is my life and career, and I take it pretty seriously,” Taylor told me. “If everybody gets to choose their fifteen minutes, this wouldn’t have been mine.”

In the 1980s, at the height of what Neil Postman called the Age of Show Business, the old adage about life imitating art was almost literally true. Virtually every aspect of the culture was informed by entertainment. Michael Jackson debuted his “Billie Jean” video in 1983, and thanks to MTV and NBC’s
Friday Night Videos
, every American under thirty was soon moonwalking his way to the bathroom. After the movie
Top Gun
, starring Tom Cruise as a renegade fighter pilot, exploded into the American consciousness in 1986 (along with aviator glasses and bomber jackets), the Navy reported a sharp increase in the enlistment of aspiring pilots. So naturally the first televised sex scandal in American politics, the five-day miniseries starring Hart and a sexy model that gripped the nation in 1987, had immediate repercussions in politics and journalism, and not just on the presidential level. In congressional districts and statehouses across the country, reporters were suddenly looking to stage their own versions of this new morality play, and politicians were desperately seeking ways to avoid a starring role.

Within a few weeks of Hart’s withdrawal speech in Denver, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, announced that he was gay. Frank said he took a look around and guessed he wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for long. He was probably
right. “The more the discussion is trivialized and sensationalized, the less you’ll get serious, substantive discussion,” Frank warned. “At the rate we’re going, the
National Enquirer
will be up for the Pulitzer Prize.” (In fact, that wouldn’t happen until 2008, when the
Enquirer
won plaudits and serious Pulitzer consideration for nailing John Edwards.)

A few weeks after Frank’s admission, Richard Celeste, the Democratic governor of Ohio and one of the party’s more promising national talents, had to give up any hope of a presidential run after the
Plain Dealer
wrote about his extramarital affairs. Celeste had been asked at a routine news conference about rumors of his “Gary Hart–type problem,” and he had denied them. The
Plain Dealer
’s editors—who, of course, knew, along with half of Columbus, that Celeste wasn’t being entirely forthcoming—considered this his version of “follow me around,” and promptly set out to prove him a man of faulty character. Celeste was finished in national politics, although he later served as ambassador to India.

By that time, as Taylor would later write, reporters on the campaign trail were already delving into the sex lives of Jesse Jackson and George H. W. Bush, following up on a bevy of rumors. Jackson was now alleged to be sleeping with the actress Debra Winger, although that bit of gossip never actually became a story. (Nineteen years later, Jackson was forced to admit having fathered an illegitimate daughter by another woman.) In Bush’s case, the rumors were persistent enough that his oldest son, George W., felt the need to call Fineman at
Newsweek
to set the record straight—a move that served only to intensify speculation, which lasted right up until Election Day.

Meanwhile, a rumor that Kitty Dukakis had once separated from her husband, Michael, just as Lee and Gary Hart had, forced the soon-to-be-nominee’s wife to publicly disclose her treatment for addiction to diet pills. She figured it was better to admit she had been treated at a Minnesota clinic for a month, thus explaining her prolonged absence from Massachusetts, than to let gossip about marital problems overshadow her husband’s campaign.

The Dukakis story prompted E. J. Dionne to write in the
Times
that Hart’s downfall seemed to have triggered a new era of “confessional politics,” in which “candidates and their spouses are being pushed, by their advisors or their own apprehensions, to disclose aspects of their lives that in another era would have remained private.” Eddie Mahe, a Republican consultant, told Dionne, “The press has collectively made a decision that when any information is presented to them and documented, they will publish it. So the new rule on these things is: you’d better talk about it, and you’d better talk about it first.” The impact of this reached even beyond national borders. By 1989, Paul Taylor noted, heads of state in Greece and Japan were being forced from office at least partly because of sex scandals.

On a rainy day near the end of March 2013, I sat in the back of a shabby Capitol Hill bar with Joe Trippi, discussing this period in the late 1980s. After smuggling Lee Hart out of Troublesome Gulch on the floorboards of his car, Trippi had gone on to become a leading adman and strategist in Democratic campaigns, although usually in the role of a renegade assaulting the party establishment. He masterminded the tech-savvy presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 (at least until a very public breakup late in the campaign, after Dean ran out of money), and then advised Edwards in his 2008 run.

Trippi told me that almost exactly a year after Hart left the race the first time, he got a frantic call from one of his closest friends, Tom Pappas, with whom he had worked as a kid on Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign. Pappas was now chief of staff to Roy Dyson, a Maryland congressman, who was being investigated by the Federal Election Commission for campaign spending violations. Pappas, it turned out, had received a six-figure consulting fee from Dyson’s campaign and failed to disclose it. But what had Pappas so distraught, the reason he had called Trippi for help, had nothing to do with money. He said
The Washington Post
was preparing to run a story that Sunday saying he was gay. Trippi had been dealing with reporters for years and was known to have good, mutually respectful relationships with them. He called one of the reporters working on the story and tried to talk him out of running it.

“Sunday morning, I’m shooting commercials in West Virginia for a gubernatorial candidate, when the front page of
The Washington Post
 …” At this, Trippi’s voice suddenly caught, and to my surprise, he started to weep right there in the bar. “… When the front page of
The Washington Post
says he’s gay.…”

That story, which I later retrieved, was actually more complicated than Trippi remembered. The piece was ostensibly about Pappas’s strange and demanding behavior toward male aides, like one he had allegedly fired just for leaving a party. The reporters never actually came out and said Pappas was gay, but the subtext was clear. They mentioned, for instance, that Pappas was divorced and that his boss was single, and that Pappas often stayed with the congressman at his house.

“Killed himself,” Trippi told me then, choking on those two words after all these years. “Jumped out of a twenty-four-floor building. He jumped. He was in New York.” In fact, I would later learn, Pappas had hurled himself from a window at the Helmsley Palace Hotel near Grand Central Station minutes after hearing about the story. Trippi got the news from one of the
Post
reporters, who tracked him down that Sunday morning. “The question was not, How did I like the story or you know, something like that,” Trippi said. “It was: I need to ask you some questions for a story we’re doing for Monday. Today Tom Pappas threw himself out of a building and killed himself. What do you have to say?” He shook his head in disbelief. “That was the press.”

Trippi swigged from his Miller Lite and rubbed his eyes clear. “It just kills me, every time I even remember that guy,” he said. “I just don’t understand it. Even if it was true, it wasn’t fucking front-page news. We were just going through this whole thing where the personal stuff just wasn’t out of bounds anymore. The Hart thing just unleashed this really crazy period.”

Then and forever after, Hart’s name would be linked with every sex scandal in politics, no matter how tenuous the connection. And yet the Hart Effect, if you can call it that, wasn’t solely, or even chiefly,
about sex. In fact, the very purpose of political journalism—the prime directive, as any
Star Trek
fan might put it—had now been redefined. As Hart himself had predicted, and as Taylor had astutely observed, political journalism was now concerned almost entirely with exposing lies and unearthing character flaws, sexual or not. Coverage had been trending this way, of course, ever since Watergate, and the bookish generation now ascending into the highest ranks of journalism had always taken a less trusting, more adversarial approach than the hard-drinking old guys. But Hart’s downfall was the thing that tipped the scales completely, the catalyst that made it okay—even necessary—for all aspiring political reporters to cast themselves as amateur PI’s and psychotherapists. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would have been: We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.

Often, it must be said, the stories this new culture spawned had genuine value. A senior congressional aide who routinely harassed staffers clearly had something to answer for, and the fact that these stories might have gone unreported in years past didn’t make them any less relevant. The media had good reason to be more skeptical in a society that had already felt the cost of trusting its leaders too much and where carefully choreographed, patriotic TV images could obscure a lot that mattered about a candidate.

The problem, as Hendrik Hertzberg understood, was that along with discretion, the media had discarded any sense of context, too. Once the public heard about your misstep, that was
all
the public would hear about you—or about anything else, if the story were big enough—until you did your duty and disappeared, or until the mob simply exhausted itself and left you lying in the dust. As with Hart, even the intimation of scandal could displace anything else you’d ever done as a measure of character. It was reasonable to argue that Tom Pappas’s profiting illegally from political campaigns—or even his sexuality, if in fact it pertained to repeated mistreatment of the men who worked for him—were newsworthy facts. But looking down from the twenty-fourth floor of the Helmsley Palace that Sunday morning, it must have seemed to Pappas that this was all
anyone would ever know of him again, the totality of his career in public service reduced to a single headline he might never outlive.