Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  And now that Gary Hart had shocked the old media master (and some of his followers as well) with an impressive debate performance, and with the instant post-debate network polls showing a decisive victory for Hart, there was no platform for a recovery, no second round. Backstage at the Music Hall, a furious Nancy Reagan had confronted Sears.

  “I wish we’d have lost in Iowa. Then Ronnie would have fired you in New Hampshire. You don’t trust him, you don’t respect him!”

  “What makes you think he would have done any better in a second debate?” Sears asked.

  It was the last time he would see either Reagan face-to-face.

  With no direct confrontation in the two-week run-up to Election Day, the campaign armies clashed by night—and day—with television commercials. There was one in particular that stood out.

  When the debate had ended, Warren Beatty turned to David Garth in the candidate’s hotel suite, where they had watched the debate, each of them having chosen to avoid the media chaos of the debate venue.

  “It’s not over yet, you know,” Beatty said. “The guys around Gary think they can close the deal if they can paint Reagan as Dr. Strangelove.”

  “Is that what America saw tonight?” Garth said, narrowly missing Beatty’s $50 million face with the cigar he was brandishing. “Gary didn’t make him look dangerous; he made him look shaky. That’s what your commercials need to do.”

  “Got any ideas?” Beatty asked.

  “Give me forty-eight hours,” Garth said.

  On Wednesday, October 22, at 7:26 p.m., just after Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reynolds were signing off on the network newscasts, viewers on all three networks saw a black-and-white photo of Hart and Reagan facing each other in Cleveland. As the announcer began to speak, Hart slowly disappeared, to be replaced by a reverse image of Reagan, so that he appeared to be facing . . . himself.

  “Ronald Reagan only wanted one debate,” the announcer said. “And if you saw it, you know why. So, here’s the next debate Governor Reagan might want to have:

  “In 1967 and 1969, Governor Reagan signed two of the biggest tax increases in the history of California. Now he says he wants to cut taxes, even for multimillionaires.

  “In 1968, Governor Reagan signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation. Now he runs on a platform that would force a teenage girl to bear her rapist’s child—even if it would threaten her life.

  “In 1965, Ronald Reagan said Medicare was ‘socialized medicine’ and toured the country to block it. Now he says he was always for health care for the elderly—just not the one that now protects twenty-five million senior citizens.

  “How can one politician have so many profound disagreements with . . . himself. Doesn’t he remember what he once said? Or is it . . . that he’s hoping you’ll forget.”

  “So . . . if you want a candidate of real change—instead of a candidate who just . . . changes . . . vote for Gary Hart for President.”

  IT WASN’T A LANDSLIDE.

  But it wasn’t that close, either.

  On November 4, ninety-one million Americans went to the polls. Some forty-seven million of them—52 percent—voted for Hart and Bumpers. Forty-six percent chose Reagan and O’Connor, with minor parties picking up the balance. Reagan won the South except for Dale Bumpers’s Arkansas and Florida, where older Democrats in and around Miami and Palm Beach, and newer, younger arrivals along the I-4 corridor from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach, narrowly outvoted the Cuban-Americans of Miami, and the older Republicans along Florida’s West Coast, and the conservatives up in the Panhandle.

  Hart took all of New England except for New Hampshire, and all of the Mid-Atlantic states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland. In the West he took Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, while holding Reagan to a relatively narrow 250,000-vote plurality in California, pressing Reagan hard enough to force him to spend time and money in a state his campaign had earlier thought safe.

  And in the end, for all the arguments over war and peace, nuclear weapons and Soviet aggression, family values and social upheaval, the election came down to the conclusion of several million voters in the industrial heartland that twelve years of Republican Presidents had left them more insecure, more vulnerable, more threatened than they had felt little more than a decade earlier. In effect, enough of the working-class Democrats in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin who had drifted toward Nixon in ’68, flocked to him in ’72, and divided between Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford in ’76, moved back to the Democrats in 1980 to give Hart their electoral votes, and with them the Presidency. Democrats did lose three seats in the Senate, and fourteen seats in the House, most of them in the South, where Reagan’s margins were substantial, but the party remained firmly in control of both houses of Congress.

  —In New York City’s Biltmore Hotel, where the city’s Democrats had gathered, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was explaining the election to a gaggle of reporters. “Voters paint with a very broad brush,” he said. “They knew who was in charge. They didn’t like what was happening. So they threw them out. If we’d been in charge, they would have thrown us out.”“So,” New York magazine’s Michael Kramer asked, “If you had to explain the campaign in one word?”

  Moynihan smiled at Kramer.

  “It was . . . the economy, stupid.”

  —In the Blue Room of the White House, where Gerald and Betty Ford were hosting a small Election Night party of their closest friends, a tentative smattering of applause broke out when Walter Cronkite announced that “CBS News can now declare that Gary Warren Hart has been elected the fortieth President of the United States!” “Allow me to propose a toast,” Betty Ford said, “to the judgment, wisdom, and common sense of the American people.”

  —And in Denver’s historic Brown Palace Hotel, where Gary Hart and a dozen of his intimates were gathered in the Boettcher Board Room, the just-declared President-elect saw Warren Beatty motioning him inside the adjoining bedroom for a private chat. When Hart entered, he saw that Beatty was holding the hand of a tall, brown-haired, bronze-skinned young woman whose commitment to a rigorous fitness regime was clear.“Gary—sorry, Mr. President,” Beatty said, “I want you to meet a very good friend of mine, Serena . . . what is your last name, dear?”

  “Brown,” the young woman said, extending her hand. “Serena Brown. And congratulations, Mr. President.”

  “Serena is going for her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA,” Beatty explained. “She’s one of the most creative thinkers I’ve met in years. I think she would bring incredible energy and creativity to your White House.”

  “I’m sure we can find a place for her,” Hart said.

  AT 6:45 on a brisk morning in late March, the Deputy Chief of Staff turned off Pennsylvania Avenue, walked through a gate that led to a guardhouse, flashed the White House pass, and walked down the walkway into the West Wing of the White House. The promise of spring was in the air, the cherry blossoms had made their Washington debut a week ahead of schedule, and the political portents were bright as well.

  Some of the good fortune was happenstance: In late November, a lightning coup in Baghdad had overthrown the eighteen-month-old presidency of Saddam Hussein and installed a military-civilian regime dominated by Shiites. The Iranian government of Hussein-Ali Montazeri, which had been bracing itself for a war with Saddam’s massive army, recognized the new government within minutes (in fact, there were whispers that a joint effort between Iran’s now-reformed intelligence arm, and the Central Intelligence Agency, may have had something to do with Saddam’s sudden removal, but, then, there were always rumors of that sort circulating in the region). By year’s end, the two nations were negotiating a mutual defense agreement, one that clearly, if unofficially, included Israel. With Iraq no longer a potential aggressor, Israel felt secure enough to signal its interest in a comprehensive peace accord by moving to stop the spread of settlements in the West Bank.

  As for the Soviet Union, its invasion of A
fghanistan was rapidly turning into a nightmare—“our Vietnam,” as Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin admitted at a private dinner party for half a dozen senators. With neighboring Iran opening its borders to thousands of anti-Soviet fighters from the Muslim world, the Soviet military was suffering a terrible loss of men and materiel. Worse, from Moscow’s point of view, the close ties between Iran and the United States were beginning to win America a measure of affection among some of the militant followers of Islam. There was, in fact, a serious doctrinal debate emerging between those who insisted that the United States was indeed the Great Satan, and those who thought that infidels who supported Muslims in their fight against atheistic Communism might not necessarily be worthy of death. Hadn’t the United States distanced itself from the criminally corrupt regime of Saudi Arabia? Hadn’t the Americans forsworn any intent to set foot in the holy lands of Mecca and Medina? This development, Ford administration officials suggested to their successors, might well throw the Soviets onto the defensive in regions across half the globe, making Moscow amenable to the kind of sweeping agreement on nuclear weapons that was at the center of Hart’s foreign policy.

  (It was profoundly reassuring to the Deputy Chief of Staff, indeed, to the mainstream moderate-to-liberal center of America’s political community, that America’s next President was prepared to come to a long-term modus vivendi with the Soviet Union.

  “Imagine,” said outgoing Secretary of State Kissinger at a dinner he hosted for President-elect Hart’s incoming foreign policy team, “if we had elected a President who believed that someday the Soviet Union would simply . . . disappear. That kind of simplistic thinking would have been a disaster.”)

  It wasn’t just a matter of good luck. The President had surrounded himself with men and women that reflected his refusal to be defined by any ideological label. Any Democrat would have put former Deputy Defense Secretary and Vietnam negotiator Cy Vance at the top of his list for Secretary of State. And it was not exactly daring to ask Republican Senator William Cohen to serve as Secretary of Defense. No one, however, could have imagined that Hart would ask seventy-four-year-old former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to leave his law practice and return to government service in the role of National Security Advisor . . . or that Clifford would accept the offer.

  “Clark Clifford has demonstrated the kind of thinking that a President desperately needs and rarely receives,” Hart said, when he announced Clifford’s appointment. “At the height of the Vietnam War, he had the courage to tell the President that he had changed his mind, that the facts did not support the policy he had embraced. And while others were keeping silent for fear of losing their place at the table, Clark Clifford had the courage to tell the President what he did not want to hear. I do not exactly look forward to receiving that kind of candid advice, but without it, a President is all but ensuring that he will fail.”

  There was also clear political calculation at work. For the first time in the Republic’s history, someone other than a white man was chosen to fill one of the “Big Four” Cabinet jobs. With Vance at State, Cohen at Defense, and Senator Lloyd Bentsen at Treasury, Hart named as Attorney General the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Rose Bird.

  (“Don’t throw out our ‘short list’ for that job,” White House counsel Walter Dellinger told an assistant. “She’s only going to be there until one of the Justices leaves, and Gary can name the first woman to the Supreme Court.”)

  And there was a clear recognition of the rough political road ahead when Hart designated Vice President Bumpers as his point man with the Congress. Sure, it was in Democratic hands, but those were hardly guaranteed to be helping hands. Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and House Speaker Tip O’Neill were classically old-school. Ask them to help stem the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare and you were likely to get an indignant refusal to “balance the budget on the backs of the elderly.” Push the auto industry to raise fuel efficiency, and the Democrats from Michigan and Ohio would argue that you were going to throw more UAW members out of work. Unlike many of the younger, Ivy League-educated wine-and-cheese members of the White House team, Bumpers had the kind of engaging, regular-folks personality that could help sway a reluctant politician. If he could just get these troglodytes to understand that if Detroit pushed its fuel efficiency up by two to three miles per gallon, then in five years America wouldn’t need to import one drop of Middle Eastern oil! We could break the back of inflation without the killer interest rates that choked off economic growth.

  That was a lot to put on the back of the Vice President. But the Deputy Chief of Staff had a good deal of faith in Dale Bumpers . . . not to mention that there was a more personal connection. It was Bumpers who’d suggested that Gary Hart look beyond the traditional Beltway candidates to staff his White House, someone like a highly skilled lawyer with demonstrated political skills, who (not so incidentally) would win him points on the diversity front. Hart’s offer came at a propitious moment for the Deputy Chief of Staff: There was trouble on the domestic front, so a move away from home (maybe temporary, maybe not) would provide some breathing room, a chance to think things over.

  And besides, it was a job that came with real clout, the kind of clout every player in Washington understood. The Deputy’s office was in the West Wing, just down the hall from Chief of Staff Billy Shore. And it was one of only six White House staff positions that came with “walk in” privileges: no appointment necessary, just come to the Oval Office, check with his assistant, and knock. In fact, much of the time the President could be found in a small study tucked away in the West Wing, where he retreated for quiet time, a chance to read through the intelligence estimates, or dip into a Russian novel for diversion, or . . .

  IT NEVER WOULD HAVE happened if Secret Service Agent Michael Stoddard hadn’t had that third cup of coffee after wolfing down a burrito for lunch. It had been a late night with a colicky nine-month-old; his shift with the bottle had turned into a four-hour marathon, as his exhausted wife caught up on some desperately needed rest. By noon, Stoddard could barely keep his eyes open, and a stiff dose of caffeine seemed required. But shortly after returning to his post outside the President’s private study, his insides began sending urgent signals that his lunch was pursuing a rapid exit strategy. There was a bathroom just fifty feet down the hall, and it would be a matter of a minute or two. Technically it was a violation of protocol, but Hart had been in that study for forty-five minutes, and there were no scheduled visitors on any list . . .

  It never would have happened if the Chief of Staff hadn’t taken a late lunch out of the White House to dine with his daughter, who was home from college for the first time since the Christmas holidays. Had the Chief been in his office, the call would have gone to him, and he might well have sought guidance before seeking out the President. The Deputy Chief, a relative newcomer to the inner circle, was less familiar with Hart’s work habits; moreover, the President had said just the day before that a threatened strike by the nation’s air traffic controllers was fraught with serious consequences for the economy, the national safety, and his political stature. This will be, he said, the first real test of how this White House will act in a crisis—we have got to get it right.

  So when the Deputy Chief picked up the phone there was no question about it—this was a crisis, pure and simple.

  “Rejected?” the Deputy Chief said incredulously. “I thought the settlement was a done deal.”

  “So did we,” the Labor Department’s chief mediator said. “Fifteen percent raise, immediate upgrade of the workplace, mandatory limit on maximum hours . . . but there’s a real fight for the union leadership, and Evans apparently felt he had to posture. Of course a 75 percent raise is insane. And yes, he knows what the law says about a strike. But he’s fighting for his job . . . and frankly, I think he thinks there’s no way a President can fire all his members, much less Democratic ones.”

  “When are they threatening to walk?”

  “Tw
enty-four hours.”

  “I’ve got to let the President know,” said the Deputy Chief.

  It never would have happened if the President had locked the door to the private study, but the Secret Service had told him his first day in office not to do that: What if he had a heart attack, what if he choked on a peanut, what if he were suddenly tackled by a visitor gone berserk? Besides, it wasn’t as if anything had been planned, exactly. In the Senate and on the campaign trail, he’d made a practice of reaching out to young men and women, checking in on them to find out what they and their friends were thinking, what they were reading and listening to, what ideas were gaining traction. There was nothing untoward about the President engaging one of the young interns in an earnest conversation about national service, then continuing the conversation over lunch in his study, then . . .

  The Deputy Chief of Staff half walked, half ran down the hall that led to the President’s study, knocked once, and then opened the door an instant before Secret Service Agent Stoddard returned from his urgent mission and called out a desperate “wait,” started to say “Mr. President, the air-traffic controllers . . .”

  . . . and looked down toward the floor, into the face of President Hart . . .

  . . . and looked down toward the floor, into the face of White House intern Serena Brown . . .

  . . . and realized why she was able to look into both of their faces at the same time . . .

  . . . and bolted from the room, ran down the hallway into her office, grabbed for the phone, and punched the speed dial.