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 to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they had come to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.
It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League–educated boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become other than Woodward and Bernstein—which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.
For decades after the break-in at the Watergate complex, virtually every political scandal of note would be instantly packaged using the same evocative suffix that had made heroes of Woodward and Bernstein, even though generations of Americans couldn’t have told you what its actual origin was; the media trumpeted the arrival of “Contragate” and “Troopergate” and “Monicagate.” In a sense, the Hart fiasco, coming thirteen years after Nixon’s resignation, marked the inescapable end point of all the post-Watergate idolatry in the media, and the logical next phase in our political coverage. It marked the start of an era when reporters would vie endlessly to re-create the drama and glory of the industry’s most mythologized moment, no matter how petty or insignificant the excuse.
And even if you couldn’t be Woodward or Bernstein, exactly, you might still have a shot at getting relatively rich and famous, thanks to the evolving ethos of TV news. Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, and within two years the network began airing what would become its signature program: Crossfire. The initial hosts of this televised debate were the liberal journalist Tom Braden and the conservative Pat Buchanan (who would interrupt his tenure, between 1985 and 1987, to serve as Reagan’s communications director). But the evolving cast mattered less than the conceit, which in many ways gave rise to the modern scourge of unending Washington punditry, with glib debate as a cheap replacement for actual news; within a few years, even the staid network Sunday shows that had been around for decades would come to resemble Crossfire in their penchant for partisan clashes and valueless prognostication. (Any thought that CNN, in hindsight, might regret what it had wrought on the political culture was banished in 2013, when the network decided to bring back the show, with Newt Gingrich on the right and Stephanie Cutter, a sharp-tongued Democratic aide, on the left.)
The same year that Crossfire premiered, a local Washington station started syndicating a weekend show called The McLaughlin Group, on which the host, the former Nixon advisor John McLaughlin, fired off abrupt questions at a panel of print journalists who were supposed to opine on all things political, like clairvoyants at a carnival show. The show would become enough of a pop culture sensation that by 1990 Saturday Night Live would be spoofing it regularly, with Dana Carvey doing a dead-on impersonation of the way McLaughlin bullied his guests to weigh in on every imaginable topic. Issue number three: life after death! Some pundits say it doesn’t exist! Theologians disagree! Is there an afterlife?
The boomer brand of newspaperman, cocky and overeducated compared to his predecessors, coveted a cameo on Crossfire or a seat on McLaughlin’s stage, which conferred a new kind of instant celebrity—at least among your colleagues. Shows like these ratcheted up the pressure on reporters to separate themselves from the pack by whatever means they could. And such venues contributed mightily to a shallower conversation about politicians generally, since, increasingly as the years went on, puffed-up panelists were just as likely to speculate on the personalities of candidates—more likely, in fact—as they were on the ideas and issues that were ostensibly under discussion.