presidents and presidential candidates to keep reporters close when it came to the more weighty business of governing. There was little reason to fear being ambushed on the personal front while trying to make oneself accessible on the political front. In a 2012 letter to The New Yorker, Hal Wingo, who was a Life correspondent in the early 1960s, recalled spending New Year’s Eve 1963 with the newly inaugurated Lyndon Johnson and a group of other reporters. Johnson put his hand on Wingo’s knee and said, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but just remember, that is none of your business.” They remembered, and they complied.
No one should pretend that character wasn’t always a part of politics, of course, and there were times when private lives became genuine political issues. When Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s governor and a Republican presidential hopeful, divorced his wife of thirty-one years in 1962, and then married a former staff member, “Happy,” who was eighteen years his junior and the mother of four small children, the story became inseparable from Rocky’s political prospects. You couldn’t do a credible job of covering the Republican schism in those years without delving at least somewhat into Rockefeller’s private life. When a lit-up Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, killing twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy’s private recklessness became a relevant and enduring political story; no politician, let alone a newspaper editor, would seriously have argued otherwise. When Thomas Eagleton, shortly after joining George McGovern on the Democratic ticket in 1972, was revealed to have undergone shock treatment for depression, his temperament became a legitimate news story, along with the fact that he had neglected to mention it.
But reporters didn’t go looking for a politician’s private transgressions; they covered such things only when they rose to the level of political relevance. And even when personal lives did explode into public scandal in those days, it didn’t necessarily overwhelm everything else there was to know about a man. Whether a politician took bribes, whether he stood on conscience or took direction from powerful backers, whether he lied to voters or had the courage to tell hard truths, whether he stood up to power or whether he bothered showing up for votes—all of this had been, for at least a hundred years, more critical to a politician’s public standing than his marital fidelity or his drinking habits or his doctor’s records. Scandalous behavior mattered, but so did the larger context.
In fact, for most of the twentieth century, while a private scandal might complicate your ambitions for the moment, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that permanently derailed a promising political career. Consider the case of the three scandalized politicians I just mentioned. Rockefeller failed in his presidential bid in 1964—in large part because of the uproar over his marital situation—and again in 1968, when he dithered long enough to allow Richard Nixon’s resurgence. But by 1974, in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, when the country desperately needed the reassurance of trusted leadership, Rocky’s personal controversy had faded to the point where Gerald Ford thought him worthy of the vice presidency. He might well have been a leading candidate for the presidency again had Ford stepped aside in 1976.
Eagleton would always be best known for hiding his electroshock therapy, and any hope he had of holding national office evaporated after his disastrous, eighteen-day stint as McGovern’s running mate in 1972. But that humiliation hardly finished him as a viable and serious politician of the era. He went on to win two more Senate elections before retiring as something of an elder statesman in 1986; his name adorns the federal courthouse in St. Louis.
And then there’s Ted Kennedy, whose career not only survived the haunted waters off Chappaquiddick, but which had only just begun its historic ascent. By 1980, Kennedy felt sufficiently rehabilitated in the public mind not only to run for president, but to challenge the sitting president of his own party. In fact, Kennedy entered the race with a significant advantage in the polls, and while Chappaquiddick surfaced repeatedly, it was an intellectual failure that cast the most doubt on his prospects—mainly that he couldn’t articulate, in an interview with the newsman Roger Mudd, why he actually wanted the job that his brother once held. When he died in 2009, having served in the Senate for four decades after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was celebrated as one of the most consequential political figures of the century, his passion and conviction lauded even by those who disagreed with him. Remarkably, somehow, he had come to embody the idea of character, at least in the public arena.
From the start, though, Hart’s downfall was of an entirely different genre than any of these other scandals, which had afforded their protagonists some room for redemption—not simply a modern variation on a timeless theme, but a new kind of political narrative altogether. What befell Hart in that spring of 1987 was swift, spiraling, and irreversible, as instantly ruinous and blackening as the fiercest hurricane. It washed away any sense of proportion or doubt. It blew away decades of precedent in a matter of hours.
In the strangeness of that moment, as Time’s Walter Shapiro described it, Hart would find 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