The Campaigns of Gary Hart, Part 3

David B Morris
10 min readOct 5, 2024

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1987:How Gary Hart’s Character Flaws Ended His Hopes for The White House

He didn’t tell us to follow him, but he really seemed to be begging for it to happen.

It might be stretching a point to call Gary Hart a leftist in the sense that it was understood in either the 1970s or now; what is clear having looked at his political career even prior to everything that occurred leading up to the events of April 1987 was that his behavior and attitude had so many of the benchmarks of what I have come to note of leftists across the political spectrum historically.

Perhaps most significant was framing himself as having ‘beaten the establishment twice’ prior to 1987. Going against the establishment is the trademark of the left (as well as Populists in general) as well as how he defined victory. His first ‘victory’ in 1972 was measured that he helped McGovern win the Democratic nomination from the people who ran in — and then in the fall campaign lost to Nixon in the biggest electoral landslide in history. His second was a campaign against the establishment nominee Walter Mondale that ended with him coming up short. In the first case, his campaign set the Democratic Party back for nearly a generation, and in the second he neither got on the ticket nor did he do anything substantial to the platform. Neither had done anything to help the Democratic Party win the Presidency. All they were was moral victories which is the kind the left specializes in and may actually prefer to actual ones.

More significantly they were victories for Gary Hart. The former had gotten him well known enough that he won a Senate seat in 1974; the latter had raised him to the status of frontrunner for the nomination in 1988. That it had come at the expense of 49 state landslide rejection of the Democratic Party might actually have suited him because it meant that he could frame the party in his own image and receive no questions.

Hart also shares many traits with unsuccessful Democratic Presidential candidates and many Congressional Democrats in my lifetime of voter. He was incredibly intelligent, a great organizer of campaigns and incredibly convinced of his own righteousness to the point that he didn’t believe he had to engage in politics in any terms other than his own. Considering that these flaws had led to the disaster of the 1972 Democratic Convention and the unfolding of the final days of the 1984 primaries you would think that he would have learned from those mistakes or at the very least the mistakes of so many of the candidates who were failing. But going into the weeks before he was scheduled to make his announcements there is no sign that he had learned from them — and crucially considered them insignificant.

By the beginning of 1987 Hart was starting to get the reputation among reporters as something of a flake. And to be fair some of the reasons that they thought so were trivial. One was why he had felt it necessary to change his name from Hartpence to Hart when he entered public life. The other was why he felt compelled to lie about his age: he was born in 1936 but claimed to be born in 1937. There was also a very really unwillingness to talk about anything personal including how he grew up.

None of these things on their own or even collectively were a big deal. What was a big deal was Hart’s decision that since he considered them irrelevant, they were no one else’s business, not the press and not the voters. One can argue about the press’s position on this but when it comes to the voters this is the kind of high-mindedness that can leading to coming off as arrogant and aloof without your political opponents making hay out of it. In the era of Lee Atwater and so many of his ilk, it was definitely going to be a problem down the line. Democrats have lost the Presidency in my lifetime because of their stubborn refusal to not engage when it comes to attacks on their character, saying time and again they’re not worth dignifying by responding too. Taking the high road may be noble but considering the rest of the world probably doesn’t share your scruples, it can be suicide for a person running for high office.

There’s an argument Hart’s best step forward would have been to call a press conference, address all of these trivial issues, answer as many question about it and that very well might have ended it. His refusal to do so shows an arrogance that was going to get him into trouble. But while these issues were trivial, there was that absolutely wasn’t — his marriage.

Gary Hart had always had a reputation as a womanizer even though he was married and had two children. By 1984 he had separated from his wife twice and when the two appeared in public together they seemed distant and distracted. Hart was not close to his children, because he was focused too much on his career. At one point he and Lee had begun divorce proceedings before reconciling. Hart would later admit he was going through a mid-life crisis but during the 1984 campaign and the leadup to the 1988 one he refused to acknowledge it to the media.

One of the major argument about the implosion of Hart’s political career was that the media, after spending the entire twentieth century ignoring the personal lives of political figures, chose to overcorrect after Watergate and turn every story, no matter how minor into the next big scandal. This may very well be true regarding the minor details of Hart’s life and it certainly played out after he left the race: Joe Biden who was running for the Presidency for the first time was accused of plagiarizing lines from a speech from British MP Neil Kinnock and ended up with drawing from the race before the primaries even began.

However when it comes to the personal life of politicians and in particularly the Presidency, there is a much stronger argument that journalists had been derelict in their duty to the point of negligence when they chose not to indulge in President’s extramarital behavior. It might have seemed like a minor detail when FDR was having affairs or Eisenhower was possibly involved in infidelity with his driver Kay Summersby but it’s still something that should have been discussed. When JFK was having affairs with the mistress of a mobster, it absolutely should have been a major story: this is the kind of thing that could compromise (and definitely influenced) much of Kennedy’s administration. And on other personal matters such as health — I’m think of JFK’s struggles with Addison’s and the fact that everyone in DC knew that FDR was not going to survive if he was elected in 1944 — the media completely failed.

Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy about his marriage. Hart should have been prepared.

And if nothing else Hart should have been aware by the time he announced for the Presidency in 1984 that the old rules didn’t apply any more. When Ted Kennedy attempted to challenge Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980 he had infamously been interviewed by Roger Mudd. Mudd had been a friend to the Kennedy’s in previous campaigns — he was the last TV reporter to interview Robert Kennedy before he was assassinated — but when he interviewed his brother he was anything but friendly. Not only did he make Chappaquiddick the center of his piece but he mentioned what the state of Kennedy’s marriage was, a question he was unable to answer coherently. If the rules didn’t apply to the last son of Camelot, then they certainly weren’t going to apply to Gary Hart.

And yet his attitude when he began his candidacy in April of 1987 was to not only argue they were irrelevant they bordered on hypocritical. When he was asked by Lois Romano of the Washington Post to respond to the rumors that were already spreading about his being a womanizer he brazenly told them those candidates “were not going to win that way, because you don’t get to the top by tearing someone down.” This is, for the record, exactly how the Kennedys, LBJ and Nixon had in fact become President — and in the last case Hart should have known that better than anyone. So the best case scenario was that he was being ridiculously naïve and at the worse, purely arrogant.

By May the Miami Herald was aware that Hart was having an affair and they started to follow Donna Rice. They found Hart with Rice and confronted him. Hart told them: “I’m not involved in any relationship,” then added that he was set up.

Not long after the New York Times published an article where Hart responding to his womanizing by saying words that have gone down in history: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anyone wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” Even if he’d been innocent, this was all but a dare to the media to do so. And even if they hadn’t someone on the Republican side almost certainly would have. That Hart honestly thought he could say something like this and not get a response is the dictionary definition of hubris.

The Herald published that article on the same day the Times piece came out. Hart then did what was a positively Nixonian response and in addition to denying the scandal condemned the Herald for intrusive reporting. Hart later said that he wasn’t challenging the press with a taunt but was frustrated. He claimed that it was only intended to invite the media to observe his public behavior and not intend the reporters to skulk in the shadows.

This leaves out two critical facts. The first is that this comment didn’t influence the Herald to pursue the story. The second and more important one was that Hart had no business trying to define what the media could and should cover. Someone who is running for President should be held to a much higher standard than the average American because they are seeking the highest office in the land. It was not the place of Gary Hart to tell the media what they should cover and he had no right to tell them what was news. Furthermore it holds the very people he is asking for his vote in a similar contempt when it says it is not their business to decide what they should know about the candidate or what to care about. The idea that the voters were not interested in the topic as the media was not his determination to make.

It is true that there were polls that were published where a majority of Democrats believed Hart had been truthful and that they thought it was unfair. And if that was true then Hart should have had confidence in the voters that they would hear him out. But a week later, he suspended his campaign and in a defiant press conference said the following:

“If someone’s able to throw up a smokescreen and keep it up there long enough you can’t get your message across. You can’t get raise the money to finance a campaign, there’s too much static…I refuse to submit my family and friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It’s simply an intolerant situation.”

Nixon congratulated Hart on his behavior.

This was compared at the time to Richard Nixon’s conference after losing the 1962 California gubernatorial election where he claimed: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” In fact Hart received a letter from Nixon praising him. That alone should have told Hart how wrongheaded he was. When the man who did everything possible to destroy the candidate who ran against him in the eyes of the world and who two years later was forced to resign from office in disgrace tells you that you are on the right side of the argument, that should have been a cause for self-reflection. And yet Hart never seemed to realize the parallel. He still hasn’t nearly forty years later and that fact should really be one his defenders should take away from this.

And just so we’re clear: Hart’s approach was exactly the same as Nixon’s. That December he returned to the race declaring on the steps of New Hampshire “Let the people decide!” He claimed the other candidates didn’t represent his new ideas he got back into the race. And for awhile it seemed to work. Initially he rose to the top of the polls nationally. In January of 1988 he would polled as high as 28 percent and was well in the lead throughout the month.

But in the New Hampshire primary he fared poorly, barely getting five percent of the vote finishing dead last. It was not so much the issues of Monkey Business that sunk him as stories about the debts of his 1984 campaign that became one. He stayed in the race until Super Tuesday but when he got less than five percent of the vote and didn’t carry a single state, he ended his campaign a second time and with it his life in electoral politics.

Hart stayed active in politics even considering running in 2004 for the Democratic nomination. He began a speaking tour and started his own blog, but eventually chose not to run and endorsed John Kerry. If Kerry had won, he was considered for a top cabinet post in his cabinet. He has emerged as a consultant on National Security and continues to speak on a wide range of issues, including the environment and homeland security. In 2014 he was named U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, the second former Senator to hold that post.

Perhaps his greatest foresight came when he gave a speech on September 4, 2001 before the international law form, warning that within the next 25 years a terrorist attack would lead to mass deaths. Two days later he met with the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to urge: “You must move quickly on homeland security. An attack is going to happen.”

Yet he refuses to talk about what happened involving Donna Rice even 25 years later in a book written about it (later turned into the movie The Front Runner) Matt Bai an author who was favorable to Hart and what he represented, could not get Hart to even talk about the event that triggered the end of his hopes for the Presidency. Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked. Many politicians — particularly those who work on the campaign Hart was a part of — can’t acknowledge their own responsibility when it comes to their actions.

In the conclusion of this series, I will discuss Gary Hart’s real electoral legacy — which is not what he has argued it is for nearly forty years.

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David B Morris

After years of laboring for love in my blog on TV, I have decided to expand my horizons by blogging about my great love to a new and hopefully wider field.