for anyone to have overlooked them in the first place. Hart himself would tell me, “I have only one talent. I can see farther ahead than other people. And I can put pieces together in constructive ways, both to avoid disaster and to capitalize on change.”
During that first day in Denver, Hart explained, by way of a brief history of the Middle East, why a war in Iraq, if in fact that’s what George W. Bush was planning, would ultimately be a catastrophe. We might win a quick military victory, he said, but it would become difficult to extricate ourselves, and it would create more terrorists than it would root out. (Decades before, he had insisted that America’s reliance on oil would lead us, inevitably, into a series of desert wars.) He also mused that growing inequality and the recklessness of the markets might well plunge us, sooner or later, into another depression or something very close. By the end of the decade, both of these offhand riffs, which could have been dismissed in the moment as the rants of a gloomy old man, would prove stunningly accurate.
The second thing I quickly realized was that Hart had no real intention of running for president again, even if he wasn’t yet ready to admit that to himself. The idea had come from some students Hart met during a yearlong sojourn at Oxford. That Hart wouldn’t quite slam the door on the notion was a measure of how much he wanted something else that had nothing to do with the presidency: to be reclaimed. Hart longed to be back in the mix for high-profile assignments or maybe even a cabinet post. He wanted to be the elder statesman he had always imagined he would someday become. If openly mulling a return to the campaign trail was the only way to get someone like me to write about his political ideas, rather than a fifteen-year-old marital infidelity, then so be it.
“I made a mistake,” Hart told me, which seemed to me as close to admitting an affair with Donna Rice as he had ever come. “I think there are very few people in the world who don’t know that. I’ve apologized.” It was “a single incident fifteen years ago,” Hart said, and because of it he had been denied the opportunity to serve his country ever since. “I think I’ve paid my dues,” he said.
“I think all I want is some degree of fairness,” Hart said quietly. “I’m not even asking for forgiveness, but fairness.” He shook his head in enduring disbelief. “Perspective,” he said, then repeated the word quietly to himself. “Perspective.”
Hart didn’t say any of this happily, or even willingly. I did what a reporter is supposed to do. I pushed him on it. I waited the better part of my thirty-hour visit until I felt he was sufficiently comfortable talking to me, and then I bored in on the past, poked at the scar tissue, hoping for … what? A catharsis, maybe. An admission that justice had been done all those years ago, that the truth had won out, as I had been taught to believe it always does. That somehow my role models in journalism—men who had covered that campaign and gone on to become, in some cases, my editors and senior colleagues—had through their tenacity spared the nation something worse than what we ultimately got.
Hart might have been excused for throwing me out of his office, but instead he patiently pleaded with me to move on. He had invited me to visit for the same reason that he was hopeful of a reentry into political life—because he thought the past might finally be the past, of interest to no one at last. “This whole business of ’87 is flypaper to me,” he told me, throwing up his hands. “It’s so frustrating. It’s like being in a time warp. I want to get unstuck.”
The three-thousand-word piece I wrote about Hart did nothing to unstick him, although it was about what he should have expected. I revisited the scandal, talked about his tortured journey in the intervening years, cast doubt on his sincerity about the prospect of running again. I repeated the truism (half true at best, as I later came to understand) that Hart had blithely challenged reporters to follow him around back in 1987, and I arrived at the same psychoanalytical conclusion on which a lot of Hart’s contemporaries had settled back then—that Hart had to have harbored some self-destructive impulse to begin with, because otherwise he wouldn’t have risked his lifelong ambitions on some model and then dared his interrogators to prove it.
I mused on why it was that Hart had become a relic from another time—“the political version of a Members Only jacket” is how I put it—and concluded that Hart mostly had himself to blame. If he was stuck in flypaper while others mired in lesser scandals had managed to escape, it was mostly because he refused to do the things you had to do if you wanted to rehabilitate yourself in the modern society—write an apologetic memoir, shed a tear on Oprah, plot out a publicly orchestrated comeback on the cover of People.
Hart detested the piece, of course, and shortly thereafter he publicly dropped any notion of a presidential campaign. I called him a few times afterward and even asked to have a drink on one of his occasional trips to Washington. I liked him, and it seemed to me his perspective on events would be different from the usual Washington wisdom. Hart was cordial but unavailable, and I stopped pestering him.
Once, just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, after he had endorsed his friend John Kerry, Hart and I ended up standing next to each other in a huge barn somewhere near Ames, where Kerry was holding a rally. I thought Hart recognized me when I turned to him, but he said little and seemed to look right through me as we shook hands. He wasn’t invited onstage with some of Kerry’s other endorsers, and no one else there seemed to take note of him. We stood awkwardly and in silence throughout much of the rally, our backs pressed up against the wood beams of the barn wall, until I wandered off to say hello to some reporters I knew, and Hart slipped out into the cold, alone.
That was the second presidential campaign I had covered, and by then I was beginning to surmise that something critical was missing from our coverage of political candidates—mainly, the candidates themselves. Like a lot of my younger colleagues who’d passed on Wall Street jobs or law degrees so they could go off to small, middling newspapers and pursue elusive careers in journalism, my ambition had been forged by reading (and rereading) influential books: The Making of the President 1960, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, and What It Takes. What made political journalism so alluring, and so important, was the idea that you actually got to know the minds of the public servants you were writing about. You were supposed to share beers at the hotel bar and late-night confidences aboard the chartered plane. You were supposed to understand not just the candidates’ policy papers or their strategies for winning, but also what made them good and worthy of trust, or what didn’t.
There was the danger of getting too close, perhaps, in the way that a young Ben Bradlee ignored—willfully or otherwise—the dubious associations of his friend John Kennedy, or in the way that Richard Harwood, a reporter for The Washington Post, decided to remove himself from Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign because he had grown to like the candidate too much. (Kennedy was killed before Harwood had the chance to follow through.) But such was the challenge that came with sitting in history’s orchestra seats, charged with the sacred task of transmitting all that immediacy to the people crammed into the balcony and watching at home.
By the time my contemporaries and I got there, though, presidential politics—indeed, all of politics—was really nothing like that. With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them. They left the drinking and private dinners to the handlers who were expert in such things, whose job it was to help reporters by “reconstructing” the scenes of the day with self-serving narratives (“And then I heard the senator say, ‘Don’t tell me what the polls say! I care about what’s right!’”). Candidates in the age of Oprah “shared” more than ever before, but what they shared of themselves—boxers rather than briefs, allusions to youthful drug use—was trivial and often rehearsed, as authentic as a piece of plastic fruit, and about as illuminating.
Our candidates shared the same planes as their attendant reporters, but unlike their predecessors in the books of our youth, they literally hid behind curtains that divided their cabin from ours. Occasionally, prompted by press aides, they wandered back to have an impromptu, off-the-record conversation, which they conducted with all the fluency and abandon of a North Korean prisoner offering his televised confession. They issued gauzy position papers and used perfunctory interviews to recite their talking