The good old days. When a new president could tell a group of reporters: “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.”
The good old days, when politicians (mostly all men) could get drunk with journalists (ditto) without fretting about potential sexual indiscretions being revealed (or committed) because there was an understanding about all that.
The good old days, when a 50-year-old married US senator, running for president, might have invited a 29-year-old model-actor he first met at Don Henley’s house to spend a weekend with him in Washington, and expect discretion on all sides.
Except when Gary Hart did that, in May 1987, the good old days – as soon became explosively clear – were already ending.
The Front Runner, a new film about Hart’s 1988 presidential candidacy and its ignominious collapse, is a pained love letter to the good old days, a morality tale in which the ostensible transgressor turns out to be the victim, and his self-appointed judge and jury – the media – are in fact the culprits.
In the film, the media is guilty for betraying the old gentleman’s agreement that for decades meant that a president such as John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson could shtup whichever personal assistant or job applicant he wanted, and the last thing that would happen would be that somebody would write it up. To do so would be stupid, nay offensive, because no one would care, and it would be prurient, and distract everyone from the very important, dignified matters at hand, matters of government.
It would be like transcribing locker room talk, writing it up as news – pure tabloid stuff.
The movie is based on a book by the former New York Times politics writer Matt Bai and stars Hugh Jackman as Hart, Vera Farmiga as his wife and JK Simmons as his campaign manager. Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno, Thank You for Smoking) directed. The title is an allusion to Hart’s status as the front-runner early on in the 1988 race for the Democratic presidential nomination and to the Hart sex scandal being a forerunner for the burning hellscape of trash that now defines our politico-media reality.
It’s a fun movie, with romantic depictions of a caffeine-fueled political campaign and smoke-filled newsrooms, vivid performances, a bunch of wittily inserted vintage news footage and delightful 1980s props like gigantic portable phones, a Kodak Ektra camera, a Jeep Renegade, Ritz crackers, high hair and high-waisted jeans.
But as widely noted when Bai’s book was published in 2014, the thesis – that the Hart scandal was unprecedented, that the media was wrong to pursue the story of Hart’s alleged womanizing and that doing so set off an irreversible slide into tabloidism and the dumbing-down of politics, in short ruining everything – is superficial and sketchy.
Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, who in 1987 investigated the media’s conduct in the Hart affair for the Los Angeles Times, said in an email that he admired Bai greatly, “but I lived through this one and the book is wrong. So, I fear, will be this film, doing a disservice to the truth even by Hollywood definition.”
“Gary Hart was no martyr,” Rosenstiel wrote in part. “Ask any one of 500 sources in Washington in politics (not even the media) from that time who weren’t in the tiny camp of Hart acolytes. The Senator did himself in. And if it hadn’t been Donna Rice it would have been not only many other women but many other character tics and moments of unthinkable risk-taking or self-delusion.”
Hart was a two-term senator from Colorado who had made a strong run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and who in the early stages of the 1988 race – nine months ahead of the Iowa caucuses – was polling ahead of his rivals.
Hart was a big-picture visionary with the intellectual horsepower to navigate and manipulate the minutiae and the political talent to present his ideas to the public, and he looked good in skinny jeans, which has been relevant in politics since at least the days of the Kennedys, to whom Hart was sometimes compared.
But from certain angles, Hart did not look like a strong candidate. He bridled at photoshoots and other campaign set pieces. He could come across as arrogant and aloof. He had changed his name and there was some confusion about his age. He had been separated a couple times from his wife and was raised in a deeply conservative religious household in Kansas, but became a political sex symbol as manager of George McGovern’s 1972 campaign. When anyone asked him about his personal background he bristled.
(Bristled, yes, but the real Hart was not known to bark with rage at reporters as Jackman, whose hair is nowhere near as good as Hart’s, does repeatedly in the movie. For the once-pious Hart, “anger was … unworthy, like swearing, or the sin of pride,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in his definitive study of Hart in his masterpiece What It Takes.)
Also, Hart was a reputed womanizer. Did all that make Hart unfit for the presidency? Probably not? But did the bristling make the questions go away? Definitely not.
“Hart had gravitated since ’84 toward hedonists such as Warren Beatty, who became his sidekick and used fixers to find him girls,” Gail Sheehy wrote at the time in her Vanity Fair piece The Road to Bimini. “That led him to Turnberry Isle, the Miami resort where Lynn Armandt, proprietor of the on-site bikini store, was more than happy to provide girls like Rice for cruises on a pleasure vessel named Monkey Business.”
The media went about 10ft before they caught Rice, the model turned pharmaceuticals sales rep, flying up from Miami to visit Hart, although both parties denied any untoward conduct.
Hart did not drop out of the race immediately upon the exposure of his friendship with Rice, or upon the publication of the memorable photo of Rice in Hart’s lap with Hart wearing a T-shirt that said Monkey Business Crew.
Hart dropped out after Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor, checked with a friend in Washington about whether a separate affair that Hart was allegedly conducting was the real thing (the Post had photos), and the answer came back in the affirmative. The Post confronted Hart, who said he was withdrawing from the race, and Bradlee never published – the old gentleman’s agreement not entirely effaced.
The thesis of Bai’s book and of the movie is that by poking into Hart’s personal life, the press fell short of its sacred charge and ruined the trust between politicians and the media, ending informal contact between the two sides (those drinks) and thereby destroying the quality of politics coverage, which used to be about the issues but became a mix of generic sound bites and tabloid coverage. Had the media refused to chase the womanizing rumors, the thesis suggests, we would not now be saddled with Fox News, Twitter, “fake news” and that ultimate unholy union of tabloid sludge and political power, our current president.
If the thesis looked questionable in 2014, it is borderline appalling in 2018. Here’s one story that didn’t make it into the movie, recounted in Cramer’s book. It was during the 1984 campaign. Hart was winning big and the entire media wanted him. Hart agreed to a late-night interview in his hotel room with a young, attractive Knight-Ridder reporter, Patricia O’Brien. He answered the door in a short bathrobe, “and she knew he had nothing else on”. She told him he made her uncomfortable and asked him to put on clothes. “And Hart … he got huffy, like it was her dirty mind,” recounts Cramer.
As a flip side to his alleged libertinism, Hart was a moral scold. When his campaign blew up in 1988, he told a Denver Post reporter: “Somebody’s got to clean up your profession, my friend, or it’s going to drive anyone that’s got an ounce of integrity out.” A politician said that!
As #MeToo indelibly revealed, the good old days were not equally good for everyone. The same sexual dalliances, including sexual harassment, that the media was declining to report on in the world of politics was happening in the newsrooms, too, with a parallel culture of male power and impunity. And it was happening in business, the domain of Donald Trump, who knew, as Billy Bush knew, what it was OK for men to say and do.
If there was a problem with the media’s coverage of the Trump candidacy (not a bold conjecture), there is a strong argument that the media made a kind of anti-Hart error, that the coverage was not personal enough – it did not wade far enough into the toxic waste of Trump’s personal life, his businesses, his taxes, his views on race, his marriages.
The media coverage of candidate Trump included endless live footage of Trump’s speeches, but in those pre-#MeToo days, the allegations of sexual assault and harassment brought against Trump by 20 women were largely passed over in favor of investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email hygiene.
There is no debating that the national politics is a mess in which the media writ large is complicit. But it seems kind of wacky to forage for the locus of this mess in the Hart affair – as opposed to, say, Roger Ailes’ biography or the invention of the internet.
“The biggest flaw in Bai’s what-if fantasy, which includes Gary Hart being easily elected and there being no Iraq war, and on and on and on ... is that Gary Hart was almost certainly not going to be elected,” wrote Rosenstiel.
“This incident, this woman, and the various other odd edges about Hart were all clearly in the sights of [the late political strategist] Lee Atwater and the GOP. And Hart was utterly unprepared politically or psychologically to defend himself for the activities, personal and political, that they were going to attack him for.
“There is so much more to this story than blaming the media. It is sad that we have journalists trying to re-litigate what happened and getting it wrong. It might make for a nice myth. But it ain’t good history.”
The Front Runner is released in the US on 6 November and in the UK on 11 January
