All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (32 page)

There were no role models for Donna Rice, you have to remember—no women made famous by political scandal who had somehow found their way back to respectability. The closest thing she found during those months, the only example that inspired her to carry on, was a memoir by Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure who had been born again in prison and ultimately became a minister. And so it seemed like God’s plan at work when Rice, at the invitation of one of her new Christian friends, came to Washington for the National Prayer Breakfast in early 1989 and found herself in the company of some of the people who had rallied around Colson and who had even offered to serve his prison time for him, had the system allowed it. Not just the
kind
of people who had supported him, mind you, but the very same ones. They wanted to support her, too.

And so Rice ended up falling into the comforting embrace of what was known as “the Fellowship” or sometimes simply “the Family,” a group of religious activists who sought to keep national leaders on a righteous path. As she had during those nightmarish days when Hart’s coterie of aides had smuggled her from one place to the next and told her what she had to do, Rice trusted her fate to others, people who knew what to do.

She moved to Northern Virginia, lived with a Christian family,
and did volunteer work. Eventually, Dee Jepsen, the wife of a retired conservative senator, recruited Rice to work for her new group Enough Is Enough, which was crusading against pornography. In 1994, Rice became the communications director and began a long, noble fight against the emerging world of Internet child porn and sexual predators. Eventually, she rose to become the executive director. She married a conservative businessman named Jack Hughes and lived in tony McLean (epicenter of wealthy, conservative Washington), pinned her blond hair back, and dressed in classic business suits. The congressmen and senators who worked closely with her on the first major Internet porn bill in the mid-1990s didn’t even realize that Donna Rice-Hughes was
that
Donna Rice until
The New York Times
profiled her and let everyone know. Donna’s mother had begged her to drop the “Rice” when she got married, because of all the baggage it carried, but by then it didn’t matter. Donna Rice was, as ever, smart and beautiful and beguiling, and in any way that mattered, she, like Chuck Colson, had been reborn.

Rice wasn’t shocked on that fall day in 1998 when the shaky voice on the other end of the phone, ringing with a familiar mountain twang, identified himself as Gary Hart. An intermediary had already contacted Rice to confirm the number and to let her know Hart would be calling. She was curious as to his purpose, but not especially nervous; the truth was she didn’t think about him much anymore. She had really liked him back in 1987—trusted him, as she was inclined to do with older, interesting, self-certain men—and he had jettisoned her completely, thrown her to the media wolves with little more than a glance. But Rice had practiced forgiving. She felt sorry for him. She had completely reimagined her life, while Hart had simply disappeared.

But here he was, an oddly familiar voice, saying what he probably should have said a decade ago. Hart said he was sorry for all the bad things that had happened to her back then. He said he had always felt responsible and that she hadn’t deserved any of it—he knew that. She thanked him. They talked for a while more, said some things that no one else needed to hear, that would stay between the two of them.

Through all the years of their estrangement, Rice thought she could hear the pain and loneliness in his voice. She thought he sounded lost in regret. So she told him about the Fellowship. They had a place in Northern Virginia where the devout and politically connected, along with the occasional pop star or world leader, came together to eat and pray. Maybe he would think about coming to dinner there with her and her family, Rice said. Maybe they could help him.

Hart thanked her for the invitation. “And that was it,” he told me later. He sounded sorrowful, as if he had hoped the conversation might come to some more enlightening end. “I said, ‘We’ll see.’ But that was it.”

Clinton actually did do Hart a significant favor before leaving office, although it didn’t seem like much at the time. Along with his proposals for intervention in Northern Ireland and in the contested Kuril Islands between Japan and Russia, Hart had been pushing Clinton to establish some kind of commission to rethink America’s national security policies for the period after the Cold War. This was in the unstable period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when longsimmering ethnic rivalries were boiling over in parts of the world like the former Yugoslavia, and there was much confusion about what role the United States should play. Clinton evidenced no more interest in this suggestion than he had in the others, but it turned out that, once again, Newt Gingrich had been eyeing the same horizon as Hart. In 1998, with Clinton reeling from scandal and desperate for an agreement on anything substantive, Gingrich talked him into creating the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Among the fourteen commissioners were Gingrich and Hart.

The commission seemed like just another of these shapeless, blue-ribbon panels whose main purpose is to give a few deep thinkers something about which to pontificate. It was to be chaired by two of Hart’s former colleagues in the Senate, both recently retired: the Republican Warren Rudman and the Democrat David Boren.
But then Boren, who was by that time president of the University of Oklahoma, realized he was too busy to chair another of these invisible commissions. As luck would have it (and Hart was certainly entitled to some), Clinton’s second-term secretary of defense was Bill Cohen, Hart’s friend and onetime coauthor. The two had remained close, and so Cohen stepped up where no one else in the administration had. He recommended that Hart be elevated to cochairman, in part because he was better qualified than almost anyone else, but also because he seemed to have a lot more time on his hands than most of the other commissioners. Clinton agreed.

Hart was tentative at first. It had been more than a decade since he had served alongside men and women he respected, and he didn’t know how much of their respect he might still command. More than one member of the commission noticed that Hart had trouble finding the voice that had once seemed so compelling to his contemporaries. But as the old confidence returned, so, too, did the trademark sharpness of mind and intensity. Newly energized, Hart traveled more than any commission member and surprised his staff by rewriting much of one report himself.

The final, highly cogent result—a series of three reports, released between September 1999 and January 2001—was collaborative, but it bore more of Hart’s signature than it did any other member of the commission. And not surprisingly, the findings were penetrating, in many cases echoing themes Hart had been talking about since the early 1980s. Among the commission’s central findings was that the main threat of the twenty-first century would emanate not from any government, but rather from stateless terrorism. “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers,” the first report warned in 1999. The commission recommended that Congress create a new federal agency to grapple with “homeland security”—a phrase that had not yet entered the American lexicon.

All of this barely elicited a yawn from the media at the time the reports were released. But that was before the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, when suddenly everyone wanted to know how this could have happened
and whether there was any blame to be assigned, and within days it came to light that, yes, there was this report that had all but predicted the attacks, and no one in the Bush administration had wanted to listen. (In fact, Hart had personally lobbied senior officials, Donald Rumsfeld among them, to pay attention to the commission’s findings, but Bush had subsequently announced that, instead, Vice President Dick Cheney would be studying the issue of terrorism all over again.) And just like that, in America’s darkest hour, Gary Hart was back. This time, there were no late-night monologues, no cameramen hurling themselves onto windshields, no moralizing from the keepers of the op-ed pages. Serious times had returned—and with them, it seemed, a serious man.

Hart was all over TV and quoted in the papers, without a single mention, for once, of Donna Rice. He was on the speaking circuit again, touring the country with a sixteen-minute speech that seemed perfectly calibrated to scare his audiences into a collective cardiac arrest. The next bomb would probably be biological, Hart said, or maybe chemical. It might be shipped from Singapore to Long Beach, put on a train bound for Newark and detonated, remotely, in Chicago. The attack might strike not at New York or even Los Angeles, but at multiple cities at once—maybe Denver or Cleveland or Dallas. Hart warned his newly rapt audiences that an invasion of Iraq, which Bush was readying to undertake, would prove costly in casualties and would achieve little to make the country safer.

When, in the spring of 2002, the former Democratic congressman Steve Solarz asked Hart to sign a letter to Bush from Democratic statesmen who supported a potential invasion, the idea being that pro-war Democrats in Congress needed some political cover from respected voices inside their own party, Hart fired back a note that, read with the benefit of history, now sounds chillingly accurate. “Though I am flattered to have been on the distribution list for your proposed letter to President Bush,” Hart began, “the last thing in the world I’m going to do, as a Democrat or as an American, is give this administration a blank check to make war on any country.” He concluded:

Hart had, indeed, found his voice on issues of the day. The question was what to do with it. Even as he had cochaired the presidential commission in hopes of reentering public life in some way, Hart had been pursuing another, long-deferred dream of sorts; in 2001, he earned a doctorate in political science at Oxford. (His thesis, later published as a book, centered on the Jeffersonian ideal in twenty-first-century politics.) While he was there, Hart became something of a hero to a group of American students who were there on Rhodes Scholarships, who were blown away by his intellect and who were too young to remember or care much about the events of 1987. And after the tragedy of 2001, when Hart became, if only briefly, a voice of conscience again, the students hatched a plan. They started pushing Hart to run for president once more. And when he didn’t immediately shut down the idea, they managed to get a story written in
The New Republic
, just to float the idea.

That’s when I met Hart in Troublesome Gulch, at the end of 2002. At sixty-six, an age when most of his contemporaries were retiring from politics, Hart was enjoying what he hoped might be a resurgence. “Walter Mondale can just go away,” Hart explained to me then, or tried to explain, as he and Lee and I stood around the island in his kitchen. “John Glenn can go away. Michael Dukakis can go away. I can’t just go away.”

It was Lee who asked him why—not for my benefit, but because she genuinely wanted to understand, and it wasn’t every day she could get him to reflect on it.

“I don’t know,” Hart said candidly, shaking his head. He repeated this phrase a few more times. Then he turned to me.

“If I weren’t doing this,” he asked, meaning publicly entertaining another campaign, “would you be here right now?”

I said probably not.

“Well, there are only two places to be in American life,” Hart said. “On the sidelines or on the playing field. I don’t need to run for president. But I do want to be heard.”

Hart always knew it wasn’t a viable idea, this notion of another presidential campaign fifteen years after the last one imploded. He had no money, no real agenda, no staff or base of support beyond a handful of students. He had never loved the business of campaigning, anyway. After he abandoned the pretext, some Colorado Democrats tried to recruit him to run for his old Senate seat, but Hart demurred on that one, too, and more quickly. All he really wanted—really all he had ever wanted, after it became clear that his presidential hopes were shot forever—was to be a Wise Man of the sort the country used to regularly produce, a George Mitchell–type figure on whom presidents and secretaries of state would call for advice and sensitive missions. In truth, as Hart had proven on the national security commission, he was more than qualified for such a role.

He hoped that John Kerry, who had been a colleague and then a personal friend, would at long last help him fulfill this ambition. Perhaps, had Kerry won the presidency in 2004, which he very nearly did, he would have tapped Hart for some senior appointment. Perhaps Hart had every reason to believe that he might get the same consideration four years later, when he jumped in early in the primary season and endorsed Barack Obama on his way to the presidency. But as the decade wore on, it must have occurred to Hart, even if he was too proud to say as much, that he had misjudged the extent of his reclamation, especially in Washington.

Sure, the commission and all the attention it received had for a while reestablished Hart as a brilliant thinker, especially among an elite set of policymakers. But Hart’s intellectual firepower had never been in question. It was his character that the media had declared beyond remediation, and nothing about the events of 2001 seemed to have altered that. His Wikipedia page, while it contained a healthy section on the national security commission, still led with the scandal and still featured that infernal photo from the dock at Bimini, and no amount of editing ever managed to erase it for long. Hart confided once that he could feel the stigma, still, when he ran into old friends, journalists or former lawmakers, on the streets of Washington. He could see it in the way they looked at him. It was one of the reasons he came back less and less.