The Front Runner (All the Truth Is Out Movie Tie-in). Matt Bai

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ through his existential career crisis in 1987—that what happened or didn’t happen with Donna Rice or any other woman was nobody’s goddamn business but his and his wife’s, and about as relevant to his qualifications for higher office as a birthmark or a missing tooth. For more than twenty years, despite the instant opportunity for public redemption it would have afforded him, Hart would not admit to the affair or shed any light on the events that had led to his disgrace—not to interviewers, and not to the friends and former aides who were more reluctant to broach the subject. He believed the entire question, even now, to be an incursion into his zone of privacy, a triviality that it was his duty, as a public figure, not to legitimize.

      Once, over drinks, one of Hart’s close aides from the period told me that Rice, like Hart, had steadfastly denied, even in private, having consummated an affair. I asked him whether he was actually suggesting that Hart, despite his reputation for promiscuity at the time, hadn’t slept with the woman who would forever be linked to his ruined ambitions. The former aide looked around the bar and leaned closer to me, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I fear not,” he said, looking genuinely pained.

      If this was so, then the historical irony was hard to fathom. Because the story of Hart and the blonde didn’t just prove to be Hart’s undoing; it was the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come. Somehow, political and personal lives had collided overnight to create what was, in hindsight, the first modern political scandal, with all the attendant satellite trucks and saturation coverage and hourly turns in the narrative that Kafka himself could not have dreamed up. The unrelenting assault that Hart and family and their closest advisors had encountered during those five days would become an almost predictable rhythm of political life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and it would spawn an entire industry of experts who knew—or claimed to know—how to navigate it. But it was Hart, the standout prodigy of a new generation, who opened the door.

      All these years later, Hart confided, he mostly remembered snippets from that week, painful and disjointed scenes that surfaced only when he allowed them to. Like the moment in New Hampshire when, nearly toppled by the scrum and blinded by flashbulbs, he saw a small boy, maybe four or five, about to be run over by the human crush of cameramen and photographers. Panicked and furious, Hart spotted Ira Wyman, the venerable Newsweek photographer, crouched in front of him. Ira, an amiable, decent man and esteemed photojournalist, had long been with Hart and his wife, through all the days on planes and nights in hotel bars. “Help me,” Hart remembered croaking, in a kind of woozy desperation. He grabbed for Ira’s camera strap. “Ira, help me.”

      Flash, came the response from the ground near his knees, as Ira evaded Hart’s grasp. Flash flash flash.

      “It was a nightmare,” Hart told me flatly one night as we sat in his upstairs study. “We were in some kind of Oz land. For years and years after, people would stop me in airports and say, ‘You should have stayed in the race.’ I mean, they had no idea.” He paused, shook his head. “They had no idea.”

      In his own mind, he had not been driven out of presidential politics, as most everyone else saw it, but rather had walked away disgustedly. He thought of himself as Gary Cooper in that last scene of High Noon, throwing his badge in the dirt, thinking, If this is how it has to be, then find someone else. (Hart preferred not to think about his failed and embarrassing attempt to reenter the race late in 1987, which he would ever after regret.) This had, after all, been the animating theme of the statement he made at the end of that week of scandal, when he came down from the cabin and officially withdrew—a speech that probably should have been remembered, like Eisenhower’s oration on the military-industrial complex, as one of the most prescient warnings in modern American politics, but that, like so much else about the moment, had been almost entirely buried in the public consciousness. Even Hart, perhaps falling back on his usual coping mechanism, claimed barely to remember it.

      “I’m not a beaten man—I’m an angry and defiant man,” Hart had declared then, to raucous cheers that he felt the need to quiet. “I said that I bend but I don’t break, and believe me I’m not broken.” Red-cheeked and gripping the lectern, he went on:

      In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important. … We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted, that has reporters in bushes, false and inaccurate stories printed, photographers peeking in our windows, swarms of helicopters hovering over our roofs, and my very strong wife close to tears because she can’t even get into her own house at night without being harassed. And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for higher office. Now, I want those talented people who supported me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself. Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or a sporting match. We’d all better do something to make this system work, or we’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”

      Indeed, what had it gotten us, this violent compression of politics and celebrity and moral policing? You could argue, I guess, that it brought us closer somehow to our politicians, by making their flaws and failings harder to obscure. You could argue, and many have, that we deserved the information necessary to elect politicians who could be moral, trustworthy stewards of our children’s future, and so on. There was a word that encapsulated all of this, a concept that, more than any issue or ideology, came to dominate our campaigns long after Hart had retreated to Troublesome Gulch. That word was character. It wasn’t just about sex, as it was in Hart’s case, but also about whether you uttered a line you wished you could take back or made an investment you probably shouldn’t have, about whether you’d ever gotten stoned or written something idiotic in a school paper. Nothing mattered more in a politician than his essential character, and no shred of private behavior, no moment of weakness or questionable judgment, was too insignificant to illuminate it.

      It would be facile to dismiss this new focus on character as being entirely trivial or misrepresentative. In a few cases, unfortunately, it was anything but. Consider the example of John Edwards. In June 2007, as the former North Carolina senator and vice presidential nominee was preparing to run a second time for the presidency, I wrote a highly detailed, eight-thousand-word cover story for The New York Times Magazine about his agenda, weighing with great seriousness his signature plan to combat poverty and inequality. I traveled with him to the devastated Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and I consulted a faculty’s worth of antipoverty experts on his proposals. At the time (and for a long while after), I congratulated myself on having taken the most substantive look at Edwards’s depth and rationale as a candidate, even while pundits continued to ignore his policies in favor of commenting on his floppy hair and his fundraising prowess and his wife’s battle with cancer. This was the kind of long-form examination that voters and candidates complained was lacking from political coverage.

      Four months after my cover piece was published, the National Enquirer ran the first in a series of stories alleging that Edwards had fathered a “love child” with a filmmaker who was following him around. Edwards denied the story repeatedly, and the rest of the media mostly ignored it—until the following August, when the Enquirer caught him visiting his lover and his new baby daughter in a Beverly Hills hotel. After that, Edwards went on Nightline—much as Gary Hart had, under different circumstances, twenty-one years earlier—to admit that the child was his. By this time, he was no longer a presidential candidate, having withdrawn after getting drubbed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the early primaries six months earlier. But had things gone a little differently in Iowa or New Hampshire, it was not inconceivable that Edwards could have been the nominee by the СКАЧАТЬ