Free All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai
Authors: Matt Bai
twenty-first century. This was dangerous ground for a Democrat in the 1980s, when industrial states and labor unions still threw around immense political power. Whenever anyone would ask Hart about whether his challenge to the status quo made him a liberal or a centrist, he would answer by drawing a simple graph on the back of a napkin or whatever else might be handy, sketching out a horizontal axis for notions of left and right, and then a vertical axis that represented the past and the future. Hart always placed himself in the upper left quadrant—progressive, yes, but tilting strongly toward a new set of policies to match up with new realities.
This is precisely how Hart positioned himself in 1984, when his underfunded and undermanned campaign erupted in New Hampshire and swept the West—as the young, forward-thinking alternative to his party’s aging liberal establishment. “Not since the Beatles had stormed onto the stage of the
Ed Sullivan Show
twenty years before had any new face so quickly captivated the popular culture,”
The Washington Post
’s Paul Taylor later wrote of the 1984 campaign.“Indeed, the velocity of Hart’s rise in the polls was unprecedented in American political history.” Except that Hart’s youthful image belied what was, in retrospect, a critical distinction between the candidate and a lot of those who were assumed to be his contemporaries—the activists, operatives, and reporters who represented the vanguard of the boomers. The baby boom had technically commenced in 1946. Hart, on the other hand, had been born a full decade earlier, in 1936. And those particular ten years happened to make a very big difference, temperamentally and philosophically, in the life of an American.
Those ten years meant that Hart’s essential worldview and personality were shaped more by his upbringing in the post-Depression Dust Bowl than by the beatniks or the social movements that later rocked Southern cities and college campuses. (Hart read about civil rights while doing his graduate studies in New Haven, but he never marched.) They meant that Hart, unlike his younger compatriots,
didn’t
see the personal as the political; to him, the personal was the personal, and nobody else’s business, and it wasn’t polite to ask too many questions. His grandfather sat silently on his front porch all day with a Bible in hand, and nobody badgered him about it. (When a neighbor finally did dare to ask what exactly he was doing out there, the old man answered: “Cramming for the finals.”) Though Hart’s father spent the war in Kansas, running through a succession of small businesses and houses, some of Hart’s uncles had returned from the Battle of the Bulge as hardened, silent men who drank too much and rode the rails for months at a time. They were his boyhood idols, and he knew better than to ask where they’d been or what they’d seen.
Like the role models of his youth, and like the taciturn railroad men he met during his first summers in Denver, where an uncle helped Hart land a job driving spikes in the ninety-degree heat, Hart learned to value reticence and privacy. And like his political heroes, the Kennedys, Hart believed that the political arena was constructed around recognized rules and boundaries, much like the societal rules and boundaries that had governed his upbringing.
This belief had only been reinforced by his experiences in publiclife. As a young senator (too young, really, to have merited such a prized assignment), Hart had served on the legendary Church Committee, which investigated the intelligence agencies’ secret activities on American soil. The committee had uncovered the first tangible evidence of John Kennedy’s sexual escapades and even his connections to Mafia figures, none of which had ever been publicly reported, despite its obvious availability. From his days at the McGovern campaign, Hart knew all the big-time reporters in Washington well enough to drink with them
This is precisely how Hart positioned himself in 1984, when his underfunded and undermanned campaign erupted in New Hampshire and swept the West—as the young, forward-thinking alternative to his party’s aging liberal establishment. “Not since the Beatles had stormed onto the stage of the
Ed Sullivan Show
twenty years before had any new face so quickly captivated the popular culture,”
The Washington Post
’s Paul Taylor later wrote of the 1984 campaign.“Indeed, the velocity of Hart’s rise in the polls was unprecedented in American political history.” Except that Hart’s youthful image belied what was, in retrospect, a critical distinction between the candidate and a lot of those who were assumed to be his contemporaries—the activists, operatives, and reporters who represented the vanguard of the boomers. The baby boom had technically commenced in 1946. Hart, on the other hand, had been born a full decade earlier, in 1936. And those particular ten years happened to make a very big difference, temperamentally and philosophically, in the life of an American.
Those ten years meant that Hart’s essential worldview and personality were shaped more by his upbringing in the post-Depression Dust Bowl than by the beatniks or the social movements that later rocked Southern cities and college campuses. (Hart read about civil rights while doing his graduate studies in New Haven, but he never marched.) They meant that Hart, unlike his younger compatriots,
didn’t
see the personal as the political; to him, the personal was the personal, and nobody else’s business, and it wasn’t polite to ask too many questions. His grandfather sat silently on his front porch all day with a Bible in hand, and nobody badgered him about it. (When a neighbor finally did dare to ask what exactly he was doing out there, the old man answered: “Cramming for the finals.”) Though Hart’s father spent the war in Kansas, running through a succession of small businesses and houses, some of Hart’s uncles had returned from the Battle of the Bulge as hardened, silent men who drank too much and rode the rails for months at a time. They were his boyhood idols, and he knew better than to ask where they’d been or what they’d seen.
Like the role models of his youth, and like the taciturn railroad men he met during his first summers in Denver, where an uncle helped Hart land a job driving spikes in the ninety-degree heat, Hart learned to value reticence and privacy. And like his political heroes, the Kennedys, Hart believed that the political arena was constructed around recognized rules and boundaries, much like the societal rules and boundaries that had governed his upbringing.
This belief had only been reinforced by his experiences in publiclife. As a young senator (too young, really, to have merited such a prized assignment), Hart had served on the legendary Church Committee, which investigated the intelligence agencies’ secret activities on American soil. The committee had uncovered the first tangible evidence of John Kennedy’s sexual escapades and even his connections to Mafia figures, none of which had ever been publicly reported, despite its obvious availability. From his days at the McGovern campaign, Hart knew all the big-time reporters in Washington well enough to drink with them