no matter what else he did thereafter, even if he cured cancer or found the unified string theory or went completely bonkers and tried to hijack an airplane midflight.
When they talked about him now in Washington, Hart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce. A top Democratic strategist in town had once described Hart to me as “the most important politician of his generation who didn’t become president.” But such descriptions were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or athlete or entertainer, that didn’t evoke inevitable comparisons to Hart among reflective commentators. In popular culture, Gary Hart would forever be that archetypal antihero of presidential politics: the iconic adulterer.
I felt a stab of anxiety now as I stared at the outline of his head, just visible above his car’s cushioned headrest. Hart was exactly the kind of guy who would listen to NPR while traveling back and forth to Denver several times a week; he might not even know that other stations existed. I imagined him now, listening to Professor Harford hold forth with great gravitas on the folly of promiscuous politicians. Perhaps Hart felt tempted to simply yank the wheel to his left and plunge into the steep ravine below, to make sure once and for all that he would never again have to endure the musings of those who professed to know what made a man fit to serve. Or maybe Hart had long ago resigned himself to such discussions and was grateful simply to have escaped, in this instance, the almost automatic allusion to his once promising career.
Soon the expanse of scrub and rock on either side of the canyon road gave way to a village with a five-and-dime, a feed store, an animal hospital, and a nursery, and then Hart turned right onto Troublesome Gulch Road. Old cabins with penned animals sat alongside newish, seven-bedroom monstrosities along the gravel drive, and our tires kicked up plumes of dust as we made our way to the place where the road ended at a wood gate, immediately in front of us. Other than the sign that greeted us—PRIVATE ROAD KEEP OFF—the only hint that anyone of note lived here was the security keypad that Hart now bypassed using some device inside the Escape, so that the gate swung open and he waved for me to follow.
We rumbled past the old, 1,200-square-foot cabin where Hart and his wife, Lee, used to live, the sparse kind you normally think of when you hear about bygone politicians and their log cabins. That’s where the Harts found themselves barricaded for days in 1987, hiding behind covered windows while choppers circled overhead. Further up the road sat the grander cabin the Harts built almost immediately after his forced retirement. The campaign supporter who had promised to secure a loan for the full 167 acres disappeared after the scandal. It was Warren Beatty, Hart’s close friend from his days on the McGovern campaign and one of the few to stick with him, who lent them the money, which Hart quickly repaid.
The cabin was a two-level, two-bedroom affair fashioned from one hundred tons of beetle-killed Rocky Mountain pine. Four rambunctious dogs, including one the size of a love seat and another that was missing an eye, jumped and splayed around Lee as she greeted us in the kitchen. “Mrs. Hart,” as her husband unfailingly referred to her (or sometimes “the widow Hart,” if he was feeling sardonic), explained to me that their son, John, kept collecting the dogs from shelters. “Apache, down!” Hart shouted in annoyance as the largest one tried to knock me backward. “C’mon, Patch!” Then to Lee, with exasperation: “Babe, get the dog.”
Lee was a year older than Hart and still pretty in a timeless, prairie sort of way. The Harts met at Bethany, a small Nazarene college in Oklahoma, where Lee was something of a celebrity, her father having been a church elder and past president of the college (and where Hart very narrowly lost his first political race, for student body president, because he had allegedly been present at a gathering where an open can of beer had been spotted—an allegation he would deny, persuasively, for the rest of his days). Together they had made an unthinkable journey from those days of small-town Bible groups to the halls of Yale, where Hart started at the Divinity School and went on to study law, and ultimately to the Capitol, swept forward by the social upheaval of the age and Hart’s emergence as a political celebrity and then a senator and presidential candidate. They had nearly lost each other in the historical current. But all of that seemed distant now, as Hart and his wife of fifty years wrestled the dogs outside and bustled about the kitchen preparing a lunch of chicken over greens, grandparents given to habitual patter and comforting routine.
We strolled out onto the front deck, the three of us, and listened to the birds chirping and the stillness beneath. Hart pointed across the meadow to where the rushing creek had recently swelled and washed away a layer of soil, leaving roots perilously exposed beneath towering pines. This was how Troublesome Gulch got its name, he explained. A small fox approached and sat back on its hind legs, peering up at us expectantly. Lee rose and went inside to retrieve a piece of raw chicken, then tossed it like a horseshoe out onto the grass, where the grateful fox snapped it up and did a little dance. The couple looked out at the fox admiringly, Hart making a show of mild disapproval at this daily perversion of nature, but clearly pleased by the spectacle nonetheless.
It was right about then that we heard an awful thwunk, and Lee Hart gasped. She ran to the window. What had happened was this: in anticipation of my arrival, Lee had lifted the automatic shades on the towering glass windows that spanned the width of the living room, from floor to ceiling. In case we decided to talk indoors, on the couches next to the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s bookstand in Monticello, she had wanted me to be able to take in the view of the meadow and the creek and the old wooden footbridge beyond. But without its shade to blunt the midday glare, the darkened glass wall now reflected the distant trees as faithfully as a mirror, and a small bird had mistaken that reflected image for the real thing and hurled himself into it kamikaze-style. The thing lay there now on the deck, motionless as a dishrag.
“Oh, no!” Lee said, something cracking inside her. “Oh, no!” she said again. She knelt down, cooing through the onset of tears. The fox turned its head sidelong. The creek burbled on indifferently. I felt powerless and somehow responsible, utterly untrained for such an event. I imagined the Harts might see this as an omen of my return, and maybe it was.
Hart never flinched. He rushed over and lifted the bird in his cupped hands. He walked toward the edge of the deck and gently stroked the feathers, as Lee looked on from one side and I the other. His long torso hovered over the patient and obscured our view as he softly set the bird down on the railing. “He’s breathing,” Hart assured his wife in a soothing, protective tone. Lee finally exhaled, deeply, and retreated a few steps. “He’ll be fine,” Hart said firmly.
And I believed it, too, until Hart shot me a furtive, conspiratorial look and shook his head quickly, as if to say: Not a chance in hell.
How I came to return to Troublesome Gulch on that day in 2009, visiting with some washed-up politician at the moment when just about every other political writer in America was absorbed by the ascension of our first African American president, is a story of failure and the hope for redemption, I guess. Not just Hart’s, but mine, too.
The whole thing began a few weeks before Christmas in 2002, when, as a new writer for The New York Times Magazine, I came across a short newspaper item about how Hart was considering a quixotic comeback bid for the presidency. Like everyone else, I knew Hart only from the memory of scandal—in my case, from reading Newsweek in my college dorm room in 1987—and what motivated such a man to want to rekindle this memory in his advancing years, to want to relive in some way the defining ordeal of his life, struck me as the kind of mystery at the intersection of politics and psychology I found most intriguing. The idea of interviewing Hart after all these years struck my editors and friends as kind of spooky and fun, like attending a séance in the French Quarter.
I met Hart at the Denver headquarters of the global law firm Coudert Brothers, which, as it happened, consisted of a single nondescript office—Hart’s—and a waiting
