What It Takes (89 page)

She broke off to hand around sandwiches. Andrea was still off with the dogs. “It’d be easy,” Lee said. “Just, you know, forget it ...” She smiled at the thought.

“You know what happened when he called me?”

Trippi was chewing, shook his head. Linda was watching from the grass, below the boulder, never speaking, never taking her eyes off Lee.

“I told him, ‘I’m behind you, hundred percent.’

“He said, ‘But, Babe, you know I don’t want to be President.’ ”

She saw Trippi’s face fall. If Hart didn’t want to be President, what the hell was
Joe
there for?

Lee rushed on: “No! You don’t understand! We decided to do it—
anyway
. See?”

Trippi nodded. He understood she was trying to buck him up.

But she was talking for herself, too. Gary was
called
. And that meant Lee had a duty. They hadn’t drifted so far, after all, from Missionary class at Bethany. ... Lee straightened up and looked at the clouds rolling over the ridge, the storm blowing in, with her chin up and a look of clear determination. St. Ludwig’s daughter knew ... if you walked away from your Duty on Earth, well, God help you.

Thunder echoed from behind the ridge. The storm was coming at them on a gale. Sandwich papers whipped away in the grass. There was no time to pack. “Come on,” Lee said. “Up here!”

Lightning lit the sky as they ran up the ridge toward the back cabin. It was just a one-room affair, but with a fireplace—quite cozy—and they could wait out the storm there. They ran with fists full of paper and sandwiches, the basket, blanket, football. The rain started pelting down. The dogs came barking. The thunder was incredible. It made the air smack in their ears. Joe heard his head ringing, a high-pitched keening ...it was Lee, laughing.

She’d got to the cabin, panting and wailing peals of laughter ... she couldn’t stop. She was flushed and wheezing. He thought she was going hysterical. “What is it? Lee?” He didn’t want to sound worried. “
Lee? ... What?
”

“They’re at the gate!” she squeezed out with the last of her breath. She was thinking of the pack, dripping wet, in the lightning; they could have no idea there was shelter anywhere else on the land. “They’re ...
sure
... we’re
coming
...” She was wiping her eyes, but she couldn’t stop laughing. It wasn’t humor—it was coming out of her in a wail, like a steaming kettle. “So they’re
standing ... out ... there ... waiting
!”

Monday,
The Miami Herald
admitted (in the thirty-second paragraph) that no one was watching Hart’s house in the wee hours of Saturday morning. And no one was watching Hart’s back door from midnight on. In the critical hours during which the
Herald
alleged that Donna Rice and Hart were locked away in the townhouse, the five-man investigative team was actually Jim McGee, or McGee and a pal from the Washington bureau.

McGee saw Hart and “the woman” (he didn’t know her name) return to Hart’s townhouse between 11:00 and 11:30
P.M.
And then, he didn’t see them come out!

But if, as Hart said from the first, Donna Rice left his house shortly thereafter,
by the back door
... no one could prove him wrong.

Except, perhaps, Donna Rice.

Monday, Sue Casey shepherded Donna Rice back to Miami, and at a lawyer’s office, Donna gave a press conference on her liaison with Hart.

“I don’t know if he was attracted to me, but there was nothing between us,” she said. “I’m more attracted to younger men.”

She’d met Gary Hart at a party in Aspen, New Year’s Day. She’d run into him, by chance, months later, in a crowd on a boat anchored near Miami. She and her friend, Lynn, went with Hart and Broadhurst on a boat trip to Bimini, to check on Broadhurst’s boat there. And then she didn’t see Hart again until ... well, until this mess.

She told the small group of reporters, she didn’t stay Friday night at Hart’s house. Their association “was all very innocent. ... If there was anything going on, we would have been cautious, but we had nothing to hide. Nobody did. We were all just pals. If there had been something fishy, we would have been sneaking around.

“That’s why I’m so surprised about this whole thing. It’s totally bizarre.”

Of course, they asked if she’d had sexual relations with Hart.

“No.”

Uhhnn, Ms. Rice, just to follow up on that, uh ... no?

“No.”

Well, did he ask?

“No.”

So the only two people who knew what happened in Hart’s Capitol Hill house—i.e., Gary Hart and Donna Rice—said nothing happened. Both said she left, Friday night, through the back door, which the
Herald
conceded it did not watch.

Donna answered all the questions. She was calm, friendly, ladylike, and absolutely clear. But the truest measure of her talent, her poise, was what she didn’t say.

She didn’t say that she hadn’t slept since Saturday night, when Broadhurst told her it was
she
who’d been followed. Or that she hadn’t known what it was about, what she’d done that was so horrible, but she could see in her mind, all night, for two nights, how Gary had
looked at her
... and all she’d wanted was to
tell him
it wasn’t her, she hadn’t meant to bring this trouble to his door—she didn’t know
what had happened ...
but they wouldn’t let her talk to Gary—she
asked them all
, just let her talk to him. (He was the only one she trusted!) ... For two days she hadn’t seen
anyone she knew
. She’d barely talked to anyone, save to her parents, who were the ones to tell her, her picture was all over TV—that’s how she found out her name had been released. Donna had pleaded with the Hart staff not to give out her name, but Dixon just wanted to know, was there anyone to “run interference” for her, and she hadn’t even known what he meant till he said, “Don’t you have a lawyer?” She’d never
had
to have a lawyer, so they put her with
their
lawyer—Tom McAliley—she’d never seen him before. They got to the airport in Miami and all she wanted to do was go home, but they wouldn’t let her go home—there were reporters all over her home—so Casey made her go from the airport straight to McAliley’s office, and they told her, she
couldn’t go home
... till she did a press conference—her name was out there now ... so, she did it.

They still wouldn’t let her talk to Gary.

But she could show him—with this press conference, she was trying to
help him
. ... That’s what she couldn’t tell the press—how much she wanted to help him. Couldn’t
hint
... that’s what the Hart folks had told her.

She was backed into a corner. She had to say something—
now
. She could have told how it really was for her—or she could say what they wanted her to say. So, she said ... well, it was nothing.

And, of course, that day, she couldn’t see ahead. But what could she possibly be after that, but ... nothing?

What could she say, about herself, after that?

The only thing she ever would say in public (and this after more than a year): “I felt like a piece of chum tossed into shark-infested waters.”

Even in private, to friends, she would never tell—not the way it was, for her. She’d get that serious and faraway look in her eyes, and say:

“I gave the press conference they told me to give.”

She did let slip, once, she never heard from Gary Hart again.

Monday, they started coming out of the woodwork: strangers on the phone knew someone who’d slept with Hart ... or they saw Hart and
someone
, not his wife ... or they were sure this guy their friend had been seeing was
really
Hart—with a phony name ... see?

They called newspapers, they called rival campaigns. They called the
Hart
campaign!

The flotsam that washed in at
The Washington Post
came with a picture—two pictures—and a detective’s report. It was that report on Hart from last December ... the one that said he went into this house on a Saturday night ...
and he didn’t come out
... not until Sunday, December 21, when those pictures were taken—there was the
woman
... there was the
number of the house
... this was
the goods
!

Or it looked that way. Tom Edsall was the reporter who got the detective’s report. He bumped it up the ladder—Edsall said he thought this was something
the paper
had to decide. That meant Ben Bradlee, the maximum boss.

So Bradlee took a look at this stuff—Chrissake! He
knew
that gal! ... Well, that was all the decision it required.
Ben
would check it out. The Big Hound was coming out of the kennel.

Monday, Hart traveled from Washington to New York—
made it
to New York, was how he’d say it. He had to drive to Baltimore (the press was staking out Washington National) ... and slip onto a plane to La Guardia—which he left by a back door, to a waiting car, which bore him in blessed anonymity to Gruson’s apartment in Manhattan. Hart canceled a funder in New Jersey that night to work on his speech for the ANPA, the association of newspaper publishers, who’d invited him to speak Tuesday, at the Waldorf.

Hart was scheduled to unveil there his grand economics speech—Strategic Investment—the last brick in his wall. His issue wonks, Dreyer and Steitz, had done their usual Pyramid-of-Cheops job. The speech attempted nothing less than a redirection of U.S. economic effort. It was true tectonic Hart-thought, the fruit of fifteen years’ cutting through earth, and immense labor over the past six months. (Hart was still buffing the speech, by fax, Saturday morning, when the
Herald
SWAT team assumed he was in a sweaty tango with Donna Rice.)

But now, he wrote a new top for the speech—now there was only one issue.

“Last weekend, a newspaper published a misleading and false story that hurt my family ...”

Now that the fight had come to him, it was not entirely unwelcome. He’d have hundreds of newspaper nabobs in one room—he’d stick it in their faces. His message was simple:
they would have to change
.

That same day, he told a reporter for
The Denver Post
: “Somebody’s got to clean up your profession, my friend, or it’s going to drive anyone that’s got an ounce of integrity out.”

That’s why the professionals in Denver (and all the pros on TV—the Priests of the Process in the interview chairs) thought Hart was nuts, or too iron-headed to get it:

Did he mean someone had set him a trap?

Did he mean he didn’t have sex with Donna Rice?

Did he mean the
Herald
shouldn’t have been watching his house?

Or did he mean that even if
someone did
... and
he did
... and
they did
... no one should care?

That was closest to the truth. He meant all those things—they were all one to him. For Hart, this had become one filthy slurry of unfairness, of allegation, of invasion, of wanton and unworthy attack
on his person
. It was
so apparent
to him that
they were repulsive
... and the voters—well, Hart always thought the voters were like him.

He’d made the same case to his friend, his host, the
Times
-man, Sidney Gruson, a dozen times over the years. And Gruson always tried to tell Hart—there was
no way
he could make the press change. ... The last time was at dinner in New York, an Italian joint, just a couple of months before—it was Hart, Gruson, Warren Beatty, and two or three fat-cat contributors. Gruson ran through the changes he’d seen in the ethic of the press since the days of JFK. “It’s not the same this time ... and there’s nothing you can do about that.” Hart raised his eyebrows with that look of his—wonder, naïve puzzlement.

“No matter what I do, they will not change?”

Gruson answered like he was talking to a child. “No, they won’t change. They’ll do the job they think they have to do.” And Gruson would always remember, Warren Beatty turned to him and said, “Tell him. Tell him again and again and again.”

Gruson did tell him, but he knew he wasn’t getting through. Hart would do what Hart would do. Gruson liked him too much to make it a fight between them. In the end, Gruson would fall back upon a bit of Irish counsel he’d known since his own childhood in Dublin.

“Okay,” he’d say. “Fuck ’em, all but six—you need pallbearers.”

Monday night, Lee Hart was in her kitchen, making spaghetti. She was mincing garlic, with a phone to her ear—Warren Beatty, fourth time that day.

“I’ve got a great one,” he was telling her. “You go out there and just tell ’em: ‘You want a monk for President, you’re not gonna have me for First Lady!’ ”

“That’s great, Warren.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, that’s great.”

Everybody had great things for Lee to say. Everybody knew ... she had to say
something
. Not that they meant to push, or dictate, but ... the press was making hay with her silence.

HART’S WIFE WANTS DIVORCE,
the
New York Post
announced. ...
“LIVID” LEE HITS CEILING & SKIPS CAMPAIGN TRAIL
.

The phone rang again and Lee jumped for it ... but it was just headquarters, calling for Trippi. “He can’t come to the phone now. He’s chopping onions.” Lee’s joke would show them, she was
all right
.

Trippi took the phone. “No,” he said to it. “No. I don’t think so, right now. Uh uh.” He was trying to keep his voice light, as he stood in the kitchen. He didn’t want Lee asking: What’s wrong?

“We’ll talk,” Trippi said noncommittally. “Yeah. Tomorrow, fine.”

Of course, what they wanted to know:

Was she ready?

When would she make a statement?

Was she going to meet Gary in New York?

Trippi didn’t know that Lee already had told Gary: she’d meet him in New York, or anywhere. She’d make whatever statement would help.

But Gary had never trotted his family out for effect—he wasn’t going to start now. He told Lee she didn’t have to say
anything
. If they had to act like that ... well, he’d lost.