Next week former New York Times political reporter Matt Bai will publish his reconsideration of the dramatic fall of former Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) from his leading position as Democratic contender for president for the 1988 elections. Bai's book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, received an extensive excerpt and cover treatment in this past Sunday's NYT Magazine.
Bai's book lands just a few months after publication of several books revolving around previously unreleased 1971-1972 Nixon tapes, which reveal directives from then Pres. Nixon to gather intelligence and sabotage 1972's Democratic presidential candidates. Nixon's targets included of course, Sen. George McGovern's campaign, managed by then-36-year-old Gary Hart. Hart's office phone was next up to be bugged after Democrat National Committee Chair Larry O'Brien's phone was to be tapped at the DNC's Watergate offices.
Expanding from a detailed minute-by-minute account of the Miami Herald "stakeout" of Hart's DC townhouse, Bai launches a broader expose of political journalism's transformation into tabloid entertainment. Pulitzer prizes and movie screenplays à la Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, with the movie version portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, became the objective and reward for enterprising political reporters.
I know a bit about Gary Hart. We first met, or at least I first heard him speak, at Denver's George Washington High School in 1974 where I was a junior. Hart, just two years after running the McGovern campaign, was making a campaign stop -- yes at a high school -- in this maiden run for office attempting to replace Colorado's sitting Republican U.S. Senator Peter Dominick. Why was Hart at a Denver high school? 18-year-olds had just been granted the right to vote three years before and Hart would need every possible vote to defeat the incumbent Dominick.
Back in 1974 Gary Hart was clearly a new kind of politician. He was young, had worked in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department and challenged the established order by helping to reform the Democratic Party rules in the early 1970s. Hart, then a Denver attorney, helped put together the Colorado hearings of the McGovern Commission which ultimately reformed the Democratic Party nominating process to include greater representation of minorities and women also reducing the influence of big-city party bosses and labor union leaders.
With a last minute insurgent effort under the old rules, Sen. McGovern (D-SD) was the '68 conventions' end-the-war stand-in for the assassinated Bobby Kennedy. Meanwhile establishment and old-order VP Hubert Humphrey hoisted LBJ's "win the Viet Nam war" banner -- which divided the Democratic Party, handing the American presidency to Richard Nixon.
While McGovern was running again for the 1972 nomination, with Hart at the helm, Nixon instructed his White House operatives to bug and disrupt the '72 Miami Democratic National Convention, in order to embarrass McGovern and demonstrate a still-divided Democratic Party. Of course the selection -- and messy removal -- of VP nominee Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) doomed McGovern's general election campaign at the outset.
This was the background with which a 39-year-old Gary Hart entered the U.S. Senate and almost immediately became immersed in national security policy. Not only did Hart take a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was also appointed to the first Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) which began hearings into Nixon/Kissinger's unknown role and misuse of the CIA and National Security Agency -fomenting coups and coordinating assassinations of foreign leaders -- a continuation of the clandestine policy initiated during the Eisenhower/Nixon Administration in the 1950s.
As a 1974 high school junior, I couldn't envision that a day would come 10 years later where I would join Hart's initial 1984 insurgent presidential campaign challenging establishment candidate VP Walter Mondale. Hart was a blip in national political polls in 1983, but through retail campaigning in Iowa, where he placed second, and a surprising 10 point-margin win in the 1984 New Hampshire primary, Hart's success threw the Mondale campaign into a panic. Once again the old order was under siege.