Sunday, May 10, 1997 p. 7
By Al Gordon. Newsday Staff Correspondent
DENVER – The jetliner that was to take Gary Hart to Iowa and launch his overt pursuit of the presidency was due to leave Washington National Airport. But Hart wasn’t on it.
It was April, 1982, five years almost to the day before Hart’s lofty vision of a campaign of new ideas would crash under the weight of questions of character. Aboard the plane, reporters following Hart wondered where he was while other passengers, including a former Cabinet member and two other senators, wondered why their departure was being delayed.
Five minutes after the airplane was due to leave, Hart walked on board. The flight crew slammed the door shut behind him and the jet started taxiing while the senator made his way to his seat. If he was bothered by his ungraceful arrival, he did not show it. He offered no apologies.
At the time, the episode seemed inconsequential as did some other events on the trip: Hart’s drastic personality swings from relaxed and funny in some settings to stiff and aloof in others; the 90 minutes he left an aide and reporters cooling their heels at the Waterloo airport waiting for him to show up for a charter flight back to Des Moines.
Only later would close associates, who declined to be quoted by name, disclose how central such behavior seemed to Gary Hart’s character.
The willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and to thumb his nose at the political and news media establishment that was the very heart of his political appeal, they said, also had a reckless and self-destructive side that led some supporters to eventually question his fitness for the White House.
One example cited by political insiders of the double edge to Hart’s style was his comment shortly after being elected to the Senate in 1974 that “we didn’t come here to be a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys running around.” It was at once a bold statement of his belief that the Democratic Party needed to pursue new directions, and also, some thought, a needless personal pot shot at a party stalwart.
Among many in Washington and Colorado who have known Hart well over the years, there is a basic, oneword reaction to the collapse of his presidential campaign in the wake of allegations by The Miami Herald and The Washington Post of extramarital liaisons: “inevitable.”
They paint a picture of a man who chronically waited until well past the last minute to leave for crucial appointments and then drove wildly across town to catch up; who was loathe to admit error and prone to deflect blame to others; who could be cold and abusive even to valued aides and supporters; who could never quite get comfortable with his own past.
And they talk of a man who was not especially discrete in his involvements with women, even as he denied to key political supporters that there was any foundation to his reputation as a “womanizer.”
“We all have friends who have [women] friends who have spent some time with Gary,” said one veteran Colorado political activist. Gossip about politicians’ romantic involvements is commonplace. But in challenging people to prove such gossip was true, “Hart was begging for this,” the activist said of the disclosures that wrecked Hart’s campaign.
In Denver, Hart’s wife, Lee, is highly regarded as a brave, considerate woman. But most people who know the Harts believe that their 28-year marriage has been on the rocks for more than a decade. Even Hart supporters considered the end of their first separation in time for his 1980 Senate re-election campaign, followed by a second separation immediately afterward, to be excessively cynical.
The Harts said in 1981 that they would divorce and Gary Hart defiantly maintained that the breakup of their marriage would not be politically damaging. But in 1982, saying they had worked out their differences, the two reconciled again. He has acknowledged that he dated other women, but only during their separations. Last week he said their marriage was “stronger.”
One person who has never been reluctant to assail Hart is Walt Klein, a Colorado Republican political consultant who worked for the Senate candidates opposing Hart in 1974 and 1980. Hart’s near-defeat in 1980, Klein said, demonstrates that even in Colorado, the more people know about Hart the more doubts they have about him.
“I don’t think there is a place in public life for someone with the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality that Gary Hart has,” Klein said.
Last week, many Hart associates who once might have publicly repudiated Klein’s sentiments were instead privately sharing them.
Asked whether they now believed Hart was fit to be president, several people who had played key roles in his campaigns said they did not.
“The risks he’s taken show a compulsion to flout the rules, to defy the gods, to show that he is different from other mortals,” said a onetime Hart associate.
“No one can understand it,” said one Colorado Democratic figure assessing Hart’s recent behavior. “It’s as if he had a death wish.”
It was not always such. And one prominent Colorado Democrat observed that in the rush to explain Hart’s fall, observers have been too quick to forget the reasons for his rise. The risk-taking that led to his downfall also was a key part of his rise, a political consultant said.
A Democratic political pro who has known Hart since George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign said Hart was really not all that adept at the mechanics of political organizing. “But he was sensational at motivating young people to work in a campaign,” he said.
Young activists liked Hart’s calls for generational change in politics, his hip anti-establishmentism, his portrayal of their efforts as an idealistic crusade.
Others, of all ages, were impressed by his intelligence and drive. He was an early believer in the now-commonplace notion that New Deal-Great Society liberalism had run its course.
Many of Hart’s vaunted new ideas such as encouraging high-tech industrial modernization or reforming the defense department have now been adopted by so many other candidates that they also seem commonplace.
Hart has been willing to sail against the political winds over the years, from his anti-Vietnam War stance with McGovern; to his voting against the Reagan tax cuts and staging a filibuster against the MX missile, which is assembled by a Denver defense contractor; to most recently his opposition to the protectionist trade measures advocated by many rival Democrats and by powerful unions.
But many in the political community distrusted Hart’s motives or disliked the way he treated them. In their view, Hart would tell you more than you wanted to know about what he thought, but precious little about what he felt.
There was a substantial anti-Hart faction in the McGovern campaign, in which Hart was campaign manager, and even some of his allies have in subsequent years worked for his rivals in the presidential race.
In the Senate, Hart worked effectively with his colleagues on some issues. But few of his peers were willing to back his presidential candidacy.
That he was so vulnerable to Walter Mondale’s “Where’s the beef?” charge in 1984 reflected not so much an absence of ideas - Hart had position papers by the bushelful - but the questions people had about the identity of the man outlining those positions, an issue exacerbated by his name change, discrepancies in his birth date and his general refusal to discuss his past or his personality.
Although since his announcement for the presidency in April, he has answered questions about his personality, he reverted to defiant form in his speech Friday withdrawing from the race.
“I am who I am - take it or leave it,” he said.
Copyright 1987, Newsday Inc.