by Gail Sheehy
When we met in the Condé Nast building, then on Madison Avenue, I was startled by how much Tina Brown resembled Princess Diana, with her youthful beauty and tousled blond hair. The resemblance ended there. Brown fixed me with her steely blue-eyed intensity and talked at the speed of a fast-forwarded tape. Her restless energy was infectious. She told me she liked a high-low approach to the news, with the flash of celebrities, glamour, and crime to balance highbrow culture and serious investigatory journalism. Could I write humanized political profiles? Could I! I told her I’d love to experiment with using my psychological approach to probe the character of political figures.
“Great! Find out who Gary Hart really is, can you?” We were on the same wavelength from the start. She gave me a month to do the story.
It was a presidential election year, 1984, and Hart was the most tantalizing challenge. A Colorado senator whose campaign had been virtually ignored for a year, Hart had just burst onto the national stage in February with his upset victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. He was the Gentleman Caller of American politics—the illusory romantic figure with “new ideas”—who shocked the political establishment and the media by beating the old guard, Vice President Walter Mondale. Hart himself had been quoted as saying, “I’m an obscure man, and I intend to remain that way. I never reveal who I really am.” The mystery became all the more intriguing as I heard the same refrain in preliminary interviews with his political associates: “When you find out who Gary Hart is, let me know.”
The traveling press was tracking his daily public appearances. Expert political analysts were already dissecting the issues. But research had shown that in presidential elections, most people were not voting on issues. They were voting on character. And the importance of character was something I had done a lot of thinking and reading about, starting with Plutarch’s Lives and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (a twelve-volume magnum opus I only grazed to get the gist of his model, tracing the stages of development and decay of all the major world civilizations).
The study of character, as I see it, starts with placing the individual in his or her subculture; for that, I had the tools of social anthropology from my studies with Margaret Mead. Then I would trace his or her development through each stage of life, looking for the pivotal turning points and threads of experience that form a pattern of behavior. My fascination with character, I surmised, might be shared by Americans who had bought one president after another for neatly packaged virtues they turned out not to have. The “new” Nixon. Lyndon “the peacemaker.” The “competent” Carter who pledged to eliminate federal deficits but allowed interest rates to skyrocket, inflation to explode to 12 percent, and unemployment to climb to 7.7 percent, close to the disastrous numbers of Americans thrown out of work by the 2008 global financial crisis.
As always, I started by interviewing all around my subject, usually compiling a list of about forty sources—parents, if living; siblings, a must; the family housekeeper, childhood friends, coaches, the pivotal teacher, the religious guide, the first love, the spouse, the early political staff. It always surprises me how much I can learn from the underlings who worked for the candidate when he or she was a nobody: Could he connect with people? Whom did he listen to? Was he seriously concerned with helping people or full of himself?
My first clue to Hart’s character was revealed in April in the back of the chartered plane. He had been virtually sealed in the plane for two months since his win in New Hampshire. Both he and his wife were suffering from a honking bronchitis. Lee Hart kept trying to cuddle up on the armrest next to her husband. He ignored her. She struggled to lift the armrest and back her hip close to his. He was oblivious, talking issues. No one could get close to Gary Hart. Not his wife, not even his own closest Senate staffers. They told me how, when they all huddled with Hart late at night to mark up a bill, he would suddenly command, “Back off!” What was he hiding?
When Hart walked back to the press section, there wasn’t a wrinkle in his fitted western shirt. The only sign of campaign wear and tear was in the run-down heels of his cowboy boots—a man as controlled physically as he was emotionally.
I dropped a name: Marilyn Youngbird.
“Do you know Marilyn?” Suddenly his voice was buoyant. “She’s been my spiritual adviser for the last few years.”
My jaw must have literally dropped. The mysterious Marilyn was a full-blooded Native American introduced to me by a campaign staffer. Marilyn had assured me that she was Hart’s closest friend, a soul mate. She had described in vivid detail their peak moment at an Indian ceremony that had brought them close both personally and spiritually: a Comanche powwow in a Denver park.
“It was so romantic,” she said. “They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers. It was sensual. He would look at me, smiling from ear to ear. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
I had been certain this was merely the wishful memory of a lonely female supporter who became infatuated with a handsome presidential candidate and wildly exaggerated her importance to him. Now, I wondered.
“Marilyn asked me to tell you that you should take time for a spiritual-healing ceremony,” I reported.
“I know.” Hart sighed. “Marilyn’s been telling me for a long time I need a spiritual purification.”
Suddenly I remembered the note Marilyn had given me to pass on to Hart. When she’d shown me the contents, I thought I would never have the nerve to hand it to a serious man running for the most serious office in the land. But Hart was eager to read it.
Get away from everybody. Go to nature. Hug a tree.
What was more, Marilyn had told me that her parents, both medicine people, had heard the prophecy. The Great Spirit, their god, had chosen Gary Hart to save nature from destruction. I repeated the prophecy for Hart.
“I know,” he said gravely. “She keeps telling me that.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Yes.”
He wasn’t kidding. This was a man with an unusually serious case of grandiosity. When his own words were reported in my first Vanity Fair story that July, “The Hidden Hart,” the candidate’s immediate reaction was to charge: “It’s terribly inaccurate journalism.” This was the first evidence of what we all later learned was Hart’s knee-jerk reaction to being caught at anything. Lie first, then blame others.
Fortunately for both journalists and voters, lying stirs plenty of media attention. Time and Newsweek both called me to ask how could I back up what I had written. It was the first time my veracity had been challenged. Hart’s people would stop at nothing to discredit me. Suddenly, all the work I had put into this story had led to me to a cliff, over which I might lose my career. I invited editors from both magazines to listen to my audiotapes. They were satisfied. Walter Mondale’s campaign backed away from any interest in Hart as a running mate and began dropping references in news stories to “the flake factor.”
Tina was thrilled. “You knocked it out of the park!”
IN 1987, AS CANDIDATES BEGAN lining up to run as the successor to President Ronald Reagan in the 1988 election, Tina was on the phone with an urgent assignment: this time she wanted me to write a whole series of character portraits. I had no hesitation about taking up her offer, but it was a risk. The more successful you are, the harder it becomes to walk the plank. More people notice and more sharks start circling in the water. Still fresh in my mind were the attacks I had received at the ’84 Democratic Convention from some well-respected, classical male profile writers—a few of them personal friends.
“How dare you?” said one, suggesting that I was to blame for dooming Hart’s chances of being on the Democratic ticket.
“Would you trust me as a journalist if I backed away from what I’d learned, to avoid controversy?” I replied. No response.
I had to have confidence that when trying out a new form, in any field, one must expect a backlash from top practitioners of the currently accepted form. I was an
upstart, and a woman journalist to boot.
My defense was simple. “Issues are today. Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.”
I was convinced that in Hart’s second presidential race, it was not a question of if he would destroy himself, but of when. This time, I traveled through the various worlds of Gary Hart and found a tortured and divided man.
Hart was shaped—one might even say malformed—by a highly punitive fundamentalist religious sect. The Church of the Nazarene forbade all sentient pleasures—no dancing, no movies, no listening to the radio, and of course no drinking or unmarried sex. Young Gary had to hang around outside the movie house and ask his friends to tell him what they saw. His mother drilled into the boy her own dark, evangelical beliefs: that man is born with a sinful nature and his appetites must “continue to be controlled” by “putting to death the deeds of the body.” Compulsive about cleanliness, his mother moved the family to sixteen different houses before Gary finished high school. He went on to Bethany Nazarene College.
“You do everything right, you go with a girl, you get married,” he told a friend, Tom Boyd, “then six months later you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?’”
Hart admitted to me, “The one Protestant quality I suppose I’ve got my share of is guilt.” His pastor, whom I met, had made certain that guilt would follow him forever. The Reverend Earl Copsey told me that Gary Hartpence (his real name; he changed it because his classmates called him “hotpants”) was a dead soul as far as the church was concerned. The pastor remembered the exact date on which that death occurred, September 20, 1968—“he left the church to go back out to the world of sin.” Soon, Hart would abandon his wife and family and his new law practice and volunteer to work for a near-hopeless cause called the McGovern campaign. And there he met the man in whose image he remade himself, Warren Beatty, the sybarite who introduced him to guiltless philandering.
The twenty-five-year-old Hart, still imprisoned by his evangelical upbringing, began beating on the cell floor. David Barber, a Duke history professor, told me that Hart, a married senator, had slept with many young volunteers on the McGovern campaign, but when the women wanted a relationship, he acted as if he didn’t know them. Finally, he went over the wall, gravitating toward the furthest extreme and using hedonists and fixers to find him girls. That led him into the kind of suspect scene where party drugs were ubiquitous.
What demon was loose in the mind of the fifty-year-old front-runner of the Democratic Party when he frequented Turnberry Isle, home of the party boat Monkey Business? He lurched across the chartered yacht, drink in hand, to tell a model friend of Donna Rice’s to pass a message to the lanky blonde that this was her big chance to play with the next president of the United States.
When Hart was confronted by reporters from the Miami Herald, who had staked out his town house on Capitol Hill and verified a weekend liaison with Ms. Rice, the senator denied any immoral conduct and stalked off the public stage in furious defiance.
Initially, Tina and I thought it best to leave Hart to indecent obscurity. But the Hart tragedy continued to obsess Americans. Here was a smart and charismatic new-generation politician; why should we lose a potentially great president because of a sexual peccadillo? Network pundits reminded us nightly that we had lived through the adulterous presidencies of FDR and JFK. So was Hart the victim of a prurient press?
“To Gail Sheehy, he was not,” as Tina Brown wrote in her Vanity Fair editor’s letter. “Hart’s sexual adventures were only a symptom of a character malaise . . . she made us realize how the true character of a presidential candidate can remain a secret to the public despite what he feels is excessive scrutiny.”
“The Road to Bimini,” as we headlined the story, seemed to register with a critical mass of Americans. It suggested an answer to the question: Why would any man in his right mind defy a New York Times reporter who asked about his alleged womanizing, challenge him to “put a tail on me,” and then arrange a tryst at his Washington town house with the same Miami party girl?
Because Hart’s double life had finally imploded. He could not be both worthy and sinful. He needed to be caught.
Despite all evidence, Hart continued to lie and attack me. When we appeared together on Nightline, with Ted Koppel questioning us on split screens, Hart flatly denied that he had ever been to Turnberry Isle. Unbeknownst to him, however, hours earlier I had remembered a photograph I’d seen in the resort manager’s office while I was researching the piece for Vanity Fair, showing a rakish-looking Hart and his sidekick Beatty on the boat. I’d made a copy of it, thinking the magazine might want to use it. Two hours before showtime, I scrambled for the image, then recalled I’d given it to the fact-checkers. I called Pamela Maffei McCarthy, VF’s managing editor, who went to the office, retrieved it, and got it delivered to me minutes before the monitor light went on in the remote studio. When Hart asserted he’d never been on the Monkey Business with Donna Rice, I held up the photo. Hart’s lie was exposed.
ONE SATURDAY IN 1986, Tina called me in the country to say, “You need to get into the character of George Bush.”
I couldn’t wait to start. Back in the 1980s, we still wanted our leaders to be macho. Brick walls were made for Jack and Bobby Kennedy to walk through. Lyndon Johnson humiliated people to make certain they were afraid of him. Richard Nixon compiled a secret enemies list and bugged reporters. Ronald Reagan projected cowboy courage as a movie idol. But nobody seemed to be scared of George Herbert Walker Bush. The core question in my mind would become the title of my story: “Is George Bush Too Nice to Be President?”
To explore the character of George Bush, I talked with forty of his friends and family, aides, and close observers before I traveled with him on campaign. What made this lengthy and tenacious process worthwhile was being able to gather enough of the puzzle pieces of my subject’s life to propose a pattern that might surprise even him. Bush’s sister, Nancy, told me she often said, “Damn it, George, why won’t you say what you really think!” According to his brother Jonathan, “You just can’t get him in there fighting.”
He was the kind of guy who would step out in his pin-striped suit in the middle of a downpour to help his chauffeur fix a flat. He was always a teacher’s pet, never a bully. “Too little,” he admitted to me. The secret to his sense of humor was that he knew how to plant the punch line in someone else’s mouth. He was also loyal to a fault. Bush served under three presidents—as UN ambassador, GOP chairman, envoy to China, and director of the CIA—unable to see, much less admit, the most egregious mistakes of the men for whom he worked. During the Watergate scandal, when Bush was GOP chairman, even his mother tried to persuade him that Tricky Dick was lying. But Bush was the last man in the party to believe ill of Richard Nixon.
I asked everyone I interviewed if he or she knew of a gut issue with George Bush, something for which he consistently stood. Most answered like Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce, who said, “I dunno. He probes everybody about what they think before he makes up his own mind.”
“Poppy” was his feckless nickname. His habit of a lifetime was to avoid at virtually any cost tackling anyone head-on. It wasn’t hard to see the antecedent in his childhood. His father, Prescott, was austere, a towering Wall Street banker and former senator with a basso profundo voice who invited no argument and brandished a belt to punish his children. The vice president later affirmed to me, “Dad was really scary.” The parallel between his relationship with his father and with Reagan seemed palpable. George H. W. Bush would do anything to keep from making the father angry.
When I finally got a green light to interview the vice president, it was after he had barnstormed through three states in a twelve-hour day. His hair was mussed and his clothes were an incongruous combination of a banker’s pin-striped pants and a baseball jacket. I was ushered into his private cabin on Air Force Two and stood before him as the plane began rolling down the runway. Bush
stretched out and put his stocking feet up on the couch.
“So is this gonna be a deal on where I’m coming from, a complete psychiatric layout?”
It was so Bush; there was almost nothing he avoided more assiduously than introspection. So I began by asking to talk about his war experiences. “I get in trouble with my mother if I talk about being in combat,” he said. Why? I asked. Talking about it would sound like bragging. Bush had never told the whole story to a reporter up to that point. I cajoled him.
What went through his mind, I asked, when that eighteen-year-old string bean of a pampered suburban boy, the youngest pilot in the U.S. Navy, climbed into his barrel-chested bomber and sat on top of two thousand pounds of TNT? In seconds he’d rev up his single engine, then reach over to signal the tower and push forward on the throttle and—swooock—he’d be catapulted into the Pacific mist. Minutes later, he would be grinding through heavy antiaircraft fire.
“I thought I was a kind of macho pilot,” he finally admitted. “You were trained, you knew what to do. There wasn’t any ‘Wonder if it’s going to work this time’ feeling to it.” On the morning of September 2, 1944, the young American fliers on USS San Jacinto were readied to hit Japanese installations on Chichi-shima. They were warned that their ship wouldn’t be around to pick up anyone who went down—it was turning south. Bush was in the second pair of Avengers to go in. He looked out and saw fluffy little clouds all around, black flack filling the sky; it would only be luck to get through it. “I was aware that the antiaircraft fire would be heavy, but I was not afraid. I wasn’t thinking: This next one’s going to hit me.”
But it did. Suddenly his plane slammed forward. Black oily smoke belched out of the engine and streamed through the cockpit. Bush admitted that, for the first time, the macho pilot was scared. “We were going down. I never saw what hit me, but I felt this thing. I had to finish my bombing run.” He continued his dive and hit his target. When he bailed out, he pulled the rip cord too early. The slipstream caught his body, all 152 pounds of it, and flung it at the tail of the plane. He hit his head. His chute tore. He was falling fast. He managed to slip out of his harness before his boots smacked the water.