himself at the center of “the most harrowing public ordeal ever endured by a modern presidential candidate.” The old rules going back to FDR and before were suddenly upended. This time, the reporters would go searching for evidence of Hart’s indiscretion, staking out his Washington townhouse like something out of Starsky and Hutch. And the evidence they would uncover, however tawdry and circumstantial, would manage, with staggering speed, to eclipse every other aspect of Hart’s otherwise unblemished career. What no one could fully explain, at the time, was why.
Often, as a society, we assign credit or blame for tectonic shifts in the political culture to whichever politician becomes the first to expose or capitalize on them, rather than recognizing that the reverse is true—that political careers are made and lost by underlying forces that have little to do with individual politicians. We tend to think of the “Great Communicator” Ronald Reagan, for instance, as the man who masterfully reinvented the presidency for the television age, expertly manipulating public opinion with sound bites and imagery, when in fact television had been transforming the presidency for twenty years before Reagan ever got to Washington, which is why a movie actor could get himself elected in the first place. We credit Barack Obama with having broken down the whites-only barrier to the Oval Office, when in fact icons of popular culture had been trampling racial boundaries for years before Obama came along, so that much of the country was entranced by a candidate who might do the same thing in politics. (Obama’s candidacy, based on little by way of experience or substance, might well have been less resonant or realistic had he been white.)
The dominance of broadcast television made Reagan possible, just as changed racial attitudes made the Obama presidency plausible, and not the other way around. As the cliché says, if these men hadn’t already existed as near perfect reflections of what was already churning in the larger culture, we would have had to invent them.
And so it is, in a less heroic way, with Gary Hart. We marvel at his stupidity because we blame him, in a sense, for having brought on all this triviality and personal destruction, for having literally invited the media to poke around in his personal business, and by extension everyone else’s. Before Hart there was almost none of this incessant “character” business in our presidential campaigns, which must mean he was the first leading candidate dumb enough to get caught, and after that there was no escaping the issue. But what you can see now, some twenty-five years on, is that a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding by the late 1980s, and this was creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn’t create that vortex. He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.
The organizing principle of politics itself was changing in 1987. The country was about to witness its first presidential campaign in forty years that didn’t revolve in large part around the global stalemate between East and West. Glasnost and perestroika in Moscow were beginning to thaw the Cold War, and while that would ultimately lead to some disjointed talk of a “peace dividend” and whatever else came next, it was also bound to leave a sizable vacuum in the national political debate. If an election wasn’t going to be about peace-through-strength versus disarmament, about how to deal with the perennial threat of Communist domination, then it was going to have to be about something else.
Inevitably, that something was going to include a new kind of discussion about “character.” The concept had been gaining currency at least since 1972, when the political scientist James David Barber first published his influential textbook, The Presidential Character, in which he tried to place the presidents on a graph depicting two highly subjective axes: “positive-negative” and “active-passive.” (Barber put John Kennedy, incidentally, in the most exalted category of “positive-active,” rumors of his affairs notwithstanding.) By the time the third edition of Barber’s book was published in 1985, the conversation about character in politics had taken on more immediacy.
The nation was still feeling the residual effects of Watergate, which thirteen years earlier had led to the first resignation of a sitting president. Richard Nixon’s fall had been shocking, not least because it was more personal than it was political, the result of instability and pettiness rather than pure ideology. And for this reason Watergate, along with the deception over what was really happening in Vietnam, had injected into presidential politics a new focus on personal morality. Jimmy Carter had come from nowhere to occupy the White House mostly on the strength of his religiosity and rectitude, the promise to always be candid and upright. His failed presidency had given way to Reagan, who relied on an emerging army of religious zealots, “culture warriors” bent on restoring American values of godliness. After Nixon, Americans wanted a president they could not only trust with the nuclear codes, but whom they could trust as a friend or a father figure, too. Judging from history as Teddy White and others had witnessed it, this was no small ambition.
Social mores were changing, too. For most of the twentieth century, adultery as a practice—at least for men—had been rarely discussed but widely accepted. Kennedy and Johnson had governed during the era Mad Men would later portray, when the powerful man’s meaningless tryst with a secretary was no less common than the three-martini lunch. (Kennedy, it would later be said, had no problem with his friends and aides cheating on their wives, provided they never got confused about the order of things and decided to break up their marriages.) Of course Johnny Apple’s editor would tell him there was no story in the president taking strange women into his hotel room; like smoking, adultery in the early 1960s was considered more of a minor vice than a moral crime.
Twenty years later, however, social forces on both the left and right, unleashed by the tumult of the 1960s, were rising up to contest this view. Feminism and the “women’s lib” movement had transformed expectations for a woman’s role in a marriage, just as the civil rights movement had changed prevailing attitudes toward African Americans. As America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women well into the 1980s, younger liberals—the same permissive generation that had ushered in the sexual revolution and free love and all of that—were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal, and one that needed to be exposed. And in this, at least, they had common cause with the new breed of conservative culture warriors, who saw their main brief as reversing America’s moral decline wherever they found it.
In the past, perhaps, a politician’s record on gender equality or moral issues—whether he supported the ERA or prayer in school or whatever—had been the only metric by which activists in either party took his measure. But everywhere you looked in American politics now, the tolerance for this long-standing dissonance between public principles and private behavior was wearing thin. For the sixties generation, as the feminists liked to say, the personal was the political, and it was fast becoming impossible to separate the two. “This is the last time a candidate will be able to treat women as bimbos,” is how the famous feminist Betty Friedan put it after Hart’s withdrawal. (If only she’d known.)
Perhaps most salient, though, the nation’s media was changing in profound ways. When giants like White came up through the newspaper business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power, and the information and insight once derived from having it, was the currency of the trade. And success, in the age of print dominance, meant having a secure job with decent pay and significant prestige in your city; national celebrity was for Hollywood starlets, not reporters.
By the 1980s, however, Watergate and television had combined to awaken an entirely new kind of career ambition. If you were an aspiring journalist born in the 1950s, when the baby boom was in full swing, then you entered the business at almost exactly the moment when The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the cinematic version of the two journalists’ first book, All the President’s Men—were becoming not just the most celebrated reporters of their day, but very likely the wealthiest and most famous journalists in American history (with the possible exception of Walter Cronkite). And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn’t proximity, but scandal. They had actually managed
