Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  (“I heard two women talking in a grocery store,” he’d say. “One asked: ‘Who’s the best lawyer in Charleston?’

  “‘Dale Bumpers when he’s sober,’ the other said.”

  “‘Who’s next best?’

  “‘Dale Bumpers when he’s drunk.’”

  Or he’d get a bit risqué and tell about the man who saw a sign at a gas station that advertised free sex if you were the twentieth customer that day. He was always either nineteenth or twenty-first, but never twentieth. So he came home, complained to his wife that the whole thing was a fraud.

  “‘No, it’s not,’ his wife said, ‘I’ve won three times.’”)

  There was, however, one aspect of political life they both embraced.

  Both wanted very much to be President.

  Bumpers was looking at a horizon in the mid-distance: 1984, or maybe’88. He’d be up for reelection in 1980, and, anyway, Jimmy Carter’s loss in’76 had put the mark of Cain on any Southerner, at least in the short run. So while he felt a tinge of envy when Hart first raised the subject (“What do you think, Dale, is it just plain nuts for me to even consider . . .?”), Bumpers was clear enough about his own intentions—or lack of them—to begin counseling Hart about his audacious gamble.

  “When it comes to ideas,” he said, “nobody can touch you. But politics is an intensely visceral, human enterprise. You know, I have never walked away from a voter without calling him by his first name. It told him I had been paying attention—plus, there’s no sound as beautiful to a person as the sound of his name.”

  And when Hart said he couldn’t do that, couldn’t run for President as if he were trying to sell an insurance policy after a Rotary Club meeting, couldn’t turn himself into an actor, couldn’t compete with Reagan, Bumpers said: “If you do this, you won’t be running for Prime Minister. The President’s the head of state. People don’t want to just know what you’ll do about their taxes. They want to know who you are. You don’t have to pander, not really. But our young governor back home, Clinton? Thank God he’s too young to run or you’d really be in trouble. He likes to say, ‘If voters have to choose between pandering and condescension, they’ll choose pandering every time.’”

  There was no one moment that turned Hart around on his campaign approach, no blinding flash of light. As one of his closest aides said later: “If this had been ’84 or ’88, Gary might not have listened—especially since Bumpers might have been running himself. But the whole idea of running in’80—a first-term senator against the most famous, most powerful name in Democratic politics—was so insane, Gary was persuadable.”

  And the proof of that was what he did about The Name.

  HE HAD BEEN BORN Gary Warren Hartpence. Gary regarded the name as an affliction, especially when his buddies in high school began calling him “Gary Hotpants.” That nickname certainly did not fit the shy high school student, but, given the rumors that had begun during the McGovern campaign, it would not have been helpful had he kept the name. Instead, he, his wife, and his sister all changed their last names to “Hart” back in 1961, when Gary was about to enter Yale Law School.

  No one around Gary had given it much thought; some of them didn’t even know about it. But in September of 1978, when the talk about The Race had gotten serious, the innermost “concentric circle” had gathered in Hart’s office in the Russell Office Building and talked about some of the minefields that might be embedded in the ground under Gary’s feet. It was an awkward conversation—how do you ask a man if the rumors about him and women were true?—but Gary reassured them, no, there’d been problems, like any marriage might have, especially given the demands on a senator’s time, the enforced absences, the travel, but he and Lee had worked it out, there’d be no separation, legal or otherwise.

  And about the name, Gary?

  Well, it had been an inconvenience forever, and actually, it may have been Nancy’s idea, so . . .

  “If I could . . .”

  The man who held up a cautionary finger was one of the most recognizable people in the country, whose indecently good looks had made him a movie star before his first movie was released and whose insatiable appetite for women had him better known for his private life than his public work. But at thirty-five, Warren Beatty had long since proven to Hart that he was a remarkably skilled political player. In 1972, Beatty had organized Hollywood for George McGovern, had invented the idea of the rock concert as a fund-raising device, had persuaded Carole King and Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie, to raise more than a million dollars for McGovern’s shoestring campaign.

  Beatty was also a shrewd advisor on matters of media and public opinion and how to frame an argument. He’d retreated from the celebrity-endorser role, preferring to offer private counsel, and by the time the campaign ended McGovern had said of Beatty: “He was one of the three or four most important people in the campaign.”

  Now, with Hart planning his own Presidential run, Beatty was a voice that Hart listened to, even as he stayed out of the public spotlight; his nickname in the campaign was “The Phantom.” Beatty vigorously underscored Dale Bumpers’s advice that Hart reveal more of his human side. “You’re tap-dancing, Gary. And there’s no reason in the world why you have to. I think you can lance this boil in five minutes.”

  And he explained what he thought Gary ought to do.

  Three days later, Hart held a press conference in the Senate TV gallery.

  “As you all know,” Hart began, “America faces an unparalleled series of crises at home and abroad: a nuclear superpower as a rival, global economic competition, inflation and recession at home, and a looming threat to our well-being in the form of a vulnerable energy supply.

  “So today,” he continued, “I want to talk about—why I changed my name.

  “I was born ‘Gary Hartpence’—one of three or four different versions of a family name about which no two families in our extended clan could agree.” He beckoned to a man standing against the wall to come to the microphone.

  “This is my uncle Ralph,” he said. “Ralph Hartpence. Ralph, will you explain?”

  “Well,” Ralph said, “the family name was originally Eberhartpence. Some changed it to Hart, some went by Pence, some by Eberhart and some by Hartpence. I guess Gary and his family just decided to go for the simplest one.”

  “Thank you, Ralph,” Hart said. “I guess some of you might be asking yourselves, ‘Did he change his name with an eye on politics?’ And the only honest answer is: ‘Maybe.’ I was twenty-four years old, and I know one of my ambitions was to be a writer. And ‘Hartpence’ sounded to me like someone who wrote about British country houses and riding to hounds. But I’m pretty sure I thought that ‘Hartpence’ was just not a name to take into the public arena.

  “One more thing,” Hart said. “I don’t know how many Americans change their name every year. But I have decided that, if I someday seek higher office, I plan to reach out for the support of every American who has done what I’ve done. The numbers say I will win in a landslide. Those of you with more questions might wish to ask Archie Leach—that’s Cary Grant—Marion Morrison—that’s John Wayne—and a list of some four hundred others we have for your examination.”

  The issue of Gary’s name change was never mentioned again.

  FOR GARY HART and his closest advisors, the “women’s issue” had been resolved months earlier. Hart’s good looks and a few offhand remarks had raised more than a few eyebrows when he ran the McGovern campaign in 1972. Any number of women back then were surprised, to put it mildly, to learn that he was married. Indeed, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, who described Hart in romance-novel terms—“very handsome . . . chiseled, movie-star profile, tousled, styled hair, full lips, crinkly eyes . . .” Hart had said cryptically, “Let’s just say I believe in ‘reform marriage.’ ” (He added: “I never reveal myself or who I really am.”) And it was no secret that Gary and Lee had been going through a rough patch. There
was talk of a trial separation; Gary had even talked about sharing a place with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

  The possible prospect of a Hart Presidential run brought Gary and Lee to a different place. Yes, Ronald Reagan and his first wife had divorced, but that was decades ago; he and Nancy had been married for twenty-eight years and he was besotted by her; the idea of a sixty-nine-year-old man stepping out on the woman he called “Mommy” was unfathomable. Hart, by contrast, was young, “studly,” with a reputation. A candidate going through a marital separation was not the way to run as “the women’s candidate”—and among the Hart inner circle, that notion was proving increasingly attractive. (You could see how the argument would be framed: Teddy? The “women’s candidate”? You have got to be kidding. His whole campaign is a boys’ club. Gary’s press secretary, his polling director, his scheduler are all women.) And as a bonus, a Gary Hart who was married with children was a potent contrast with bachelor Governor Jerry Brown, whose monastic living habits drew much press coverage. “Teddy saved us from the ‘other women’ thing,” one aide said, “and Jerry saved us from the ‘weirdo’ thing.” So there was no separation; pictures of Gary, Lee, and his photogenic children graced campaign posters and brochures. It was a strong signal that, if the personal was political, then Hart’s campaign would work to ensure that “the personal” would be, in more ways than one, the soft underbelly of the Kennedy campaign.

  It would not be the only one. And here, the fact that Jerry Ford, and not Jimmy Carter, had won in 1976 would prove to be one of the Hart campaign’s most formidable assets. Because what Ford’s shaky stewardship had demonstrated—for the third time in as many Presidents—was the failure of the insider.

  —No one had a better grasp of the mechanism of the Congress than Lyndon Johnson, who had spent thirty years inside the Capitol.

  —No one had a broader experience with international geopolitics than Richard Nixon.

  —No one was held in more affection among Washington’s legislators than Gerald Ford, who entered the White House with twenty-six years in the House.

  And each of them had presided over one disaster after another. A Carter Presidency might have demonstrated that inexperience was no magic wand either, might have made the idea of an experienced insider like Ted Kennedy appealing. Thanks to a last-minute fumble recovery by Ford in that San Francisco debate, it was another insider who had made a hash of things.

  There was one other arena where Ford’s comeback victory over Carter strengthened Hart’s case immeasurably, a realm in which Hart felt most comfortable, the place, he had believed from his first days in the McGovern campaign, where elections are won or lost: the realm of ideas. However centered Jimmy Carter’s campaign was in his personal qualities, a Carter Presidency could well have been interpreted as a significant departure from the traditional liberalism that Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson had represented. And had Carter failed on the domestic front as thoroughly as Ford had failed, the case for resurgent traditional liberalism embodied by Ted Kennedy might well have been too powerful to combat.

  Since it was Ford who had won, voters saw in 1980 not just the failures of insiders, but the failure of a traditional Democrat (LBJ), followed by two traditionally more or less conservative Republicans (Nixon and Ford). Those failed Presidencies, in turn, strengthened the political appeal of a bold departure from the past. Clearly, there was one credible Republican candidate who would offer a radical departure from business as usual: Ronald Reagan. What was less obvious was that a new breed of Democrats had come to power in the decade of the 1970s, with very different premises from those of Ted Kennedy and the establishment center of the Democratic Party; Democrats like Delaware Senator Joe Biden, elected before his thirtieth birthday, who was electrifying audiences by telling them that an advocate for education need not be an advocate for the agenda of teachers’ unions; or New York Governor Hugh Carey, who stunned his free-spending legislature by asserting, “The days of wine and roses are over”; or Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, who asked, “Why do some in our party think it’s somehow wrong to identify yourself as ‘pro-growth’? Do they think the Department of Labor creates jobs?” Democrats like Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson and New York’s Ed Koch and Portland’s Al Uhlman, who were being forced by simple arithmetic to confront the civil-service unions demanding higher wages and benefits.

  And it wasn’t just politicians. A whole new generation of thinkers, technology whiz kids, entrepreneurs had come of age in the 1970s, grounded in the values of the 1960s, but fed up with the sclerotic pace and calcified thinking of conventional liberals. (“If I could get my hands on the Post Office,” a thirtyish businessman named Fred Smith told Hart in a 1975 meeting, as he prepared to launch an overnight airborne delivery service, “I could triple its productivity in a month. But maybe I should be grateful. Their incompetence is going to make me rich.”)

  Kennedy, by contrast, was most comfortable talking to the base of the party.

  “Kennedy is always invited to speak at the convention, always makes a speech in prime time,” the veteran political writer Jack Germond wrote. “But when it comes to the general-election campaign, if you bring Kennedy to Texas, you send him down to Rio Grande Valley to speak to the Hispanics. If you bring him to Florida, you send him to Miami to talk to the blacks. He is always used exclusively to talk to special interests. And not all of that is related to Chappaquiddick; it’s related to issues.”

  With so many Democrats doubting the party’s orthodoxies, Hart thought, there was a chance that if he could demonstrate some political clout in an early contest, he might be able to tap into this newer breed of Democrats, and into some deep veins of political and financial support; and that would change the whole political equation. He’d seen it with the McGovern campaign, hell, he’d helped make it happen. All those early polls, all that shoestring financing, went right out the window as soon as McGovern had scored an impressive showing or two. He hadn’t even won those early races, just done “better than expected,” finished “surprisingly strong.” All the vaunted “inevitability” of Ed Muskie had collapsed like a tower of Legos the minute Muskie had shown a hint of vulnerability.

  Now, as Hart prepared to enter the 1980 Presidential race, his camp drew comfort from the virtually unanimous conviction of the political insiders that Ted Kennedy’s grip on the Democratic nomination was unshakable.

  It meant the damn fools were making exactly the same mistake they had made in ’72; they had remembered nothing, which meant that once again they would be startled, amazed, shocked. They would treat even a glancing blow as a direct hit on the Kennedy ship. And it would begin, of course, in Iowa. Ted Kennedy was forty, fifty points ahead of Jimmy Carter in poll after poll; Jerry Brown trailed badly, and Hart? “Hart,” as columnist Carl Leubsdorf wrote, “would have to surge to be granted an asterisk.” “The heart of the Democratic Party in Iowa belongs to Ted Kennedy,” said former state chair Tom Whitney. “It’s his for the asking.”

  All of which made Iowa a perfect fit for Gary Hart. Because he didn’t just know the state—he had invented it.

  WHEN GARY HART ANNOUNCED that he would run for President in April of 1979, he did so not from the Senate Caucus Room, where Jack and Bobby had declared, and where Teddy would do so six months later, but from a mountaintop outside his Denver, Colorado, home. Some of his words sought to link him and his campaign to the sacred memory of FDR.

  “As America was in the years of Franklin Roosevelt, facing economic collapse and the passing of an isolationist world,” he said, “we must once more become a bold, adventurous, and pioneering nation. In the 1930s, the task was to break the grip of paralyzing ideas about a do-nothing government and a see-nothing foreign policy.

  “Half a century later, in the 1980s, the task is to break the grip of narrow, negative agendas and special interest government in Washington. Today the center of national interest has been made a center of insensitivity, inaction and special favor.”


  He ended with a more personal note, one that did not come easy, but one that hinted that the importuning of Dale Bumpers and others had in fact resonated:

  “As the son of Dust Bowl farm parents who never finished high school, but who always had the greatest love and the highest hopes for their children, I want to see the American dream live and flourish for my children and the next generation,” he said. “I am a man from the plains, a man of the West. I am new enough to Washington to see what must be changed, and I have seen enough, I believe, to see how it can be changed. And if you wish to know the kind of President I will be, I ask you to watch and listen to the kind of candidate I will be.”

  The fact was, though, almost no one was watching or listening. A snippet of his announcement, taped by local Denver stations, ran for a few seconds on the network newscasts, and only one UPI wire-service reporter flew with him on the United flight from Denver to Chicago to Des Moines. It was that way through most of the summer and early autumn of 1979. Hart would drive with Kathy Bushkin or Kevin Sweeney or a volunteer from McGovern days to a town like Shenandoah, to the Deli Depot on Railroad Street, where a plaque outside marked the rock on which Teddy Roosevelt had spoken during a Presidential visit and where mementoes of the Everly Brothers lined the walls. There’d be five or six folks gathered around the table, eating $1.25 hamburgers, listening to Hart talk about outmoded weapons systems, the need for lighter, cheaper planes and ships. He’d sit in Moose McDuffy’s Tavern, off Interstate 384 in Cedar Rapids, and talk with folks on their way home from a shift at the meatpacking plant about an oil-import fee, and ask why workers should be locked into their jobs for a lifetime in order to protect their health care and their pensions. He’d walk the main street of Trear, population 1,456, and pose on Main Street by the famous cast-iron Winding Stair that led up to what were the offices of the Star-Clipper newspaper. He’d visit the weekly cattle auction in Tama, and during a break in the buying and selling he’d stand in the pit, avoiding the droppings, and he’d talk a bit about his upbringing as the son of a farm-implements salesman in Ottawa, Kansas, 335 miles to the southwest, but he’d talk mostly about new ideas.