Tom Fiedler is the former executive editor of the Miami Herald and currently the dean of Boston University’s College of Communication.

First, there was the decorated war hero, Cabinet secretary, all-round economic genius and husband whose presidential aspirations collided with a published report that he was paying off a married woman to keep silent about their torrid affair.

Then there was the rising political star, the governor of the nation’s largest state, a lover of food, wine and young women—or at least one young woman, who bore him a son without benefit of marriage. When he received his party’s nomination for president, an astonished clergyman wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune: “It seems to me,” the letter said, “that a leading question ought to be: do the American people want a common libertine for their president?”


And now we are being asked to reconsider the case of the charismatic western senator who was racing toward a slam-dunk nomination and likely the White House until a newspaper report of his reckless affair with a vivacious party girl ended it all.

Most Americans would be stumped to name the first two of these political figures. But they probably know the third as Gary Hart—the Colorado senator whose candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination derailed in 1987 when the Miami Herald learned of his extramarital affair, confronted him in a dark alley on a Saturday night and published the results of its investigation in the following morning’s edition atop Page One.

The story touched off a firestorm—fueled not only by the mainstream media closely covering his campaign, but also by the tabloids, which clambered to run salacious photos of the “other woman,” Donna Rice, and the aptly named yacht, “Monkey Business,” where one of Hart’s dalliances occurred. Five days after the Herald story broke, Hart withdrew from the race. Left behind were questions touching on subjects ranging from journalistic ethics to the place of adultery in American politics.

Left behind, that is, until now. Hart’s story re-emerged Sept. 18 in the New York Times Magazine in a cover article by political writer Matt Bai headlined “ How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed American Politics.” The scandal is explored in even greater length in Bai’s book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, which was published this week.

The Gary Hart scandal certainly merits discussing, even at this distance. It’s about sex and politics and journalistic ethics. It makes us wonder: What’s fair game for reporters and how much do voters care—or deserve—to know? These questions are important. But they are also timeless—and have been debated long before and long after Hart’s fall from grace. What Bai calls the week that changed politics forever, I guess I’d call just another week, albeit a dramatic one, in Washington.

Bai’s premise is that the Herald article marked a turning point in American politics—the moment at which the ostensibly deferential ways of the news media were discarded and replaced by a sensationalistic, predatory, “gotcha” style of journalism focused on candidates’ character over the substance of their views. The newspaper’s own report of that confrontation between its reporters and the cornered candidate, according to Bai, “captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever.”

It’s an interesting premise, but one that I think doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

First, a disclosure: I cannot be objective in writing here about the magazine article or the book, although I am a great admirer of Bai’s talents as a journalist and a writer. Objectivity demands both distance and perspective, which I forfeited by being one of the Herald reporters who confronted Hart that night and who wrote that front-page story. But even in this subjective position, I think I can lean on what I learned during my 36 years as a journalist to offer a different take on the case of Gary Hart than that put forward by Matt Bai.

I’ll let Bai go first. He opens his argument, as most people do when discussing the scandal, by raising the obvious question: Why did the press so ferociously report the Colorado senator’s fling when recent history is replete with examples of previous presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, to name just three—whose peccadilloes escaped press mention? He quotes journalism’s political godfather, the mid-20th century writer Theodore White, who said that in his era, the affairs of presidents and candidates were irrelevant to him and his colleagues.

“For most of the 20th century,” Bai writes, “adultery as a practice—at least for men—was rarely discussed but widely accepted. Kennedy and Johnson governed during the era that ‘Mad Men’ would later portray, when the powerful man’s meaningless tryst with a secretary was no less common than the three-martini lunch.” He then offers his theory of why that changed with Hart: “Social mores [post-Watergate] were changing. … Perhaps most salient, though, the nation’s news media were changing in profound ways. … There was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.”

I stopped when I read those words: Inconsequential? Lies?

At the risk of sounding like the former president who debated the meaning of “is,” I struggle to understand Bai’s meaning of the word “inconsequential,” at least as it pertains to this particular episode and when it is used an adjective to modify the word “lie.” How big must a lie be to be “consequential”? Of course there can be harmless lies, such as when a politician tells a mom that her infant child is the cutest one he’s ever seen.

But was it inconsequential when Hart repeatedly, and for weeks before the confrontation, publicly denied that he was a “womanizer”? When E.J. Dionne Jr., a New York Times political reporter at the time, asked Hart about the affair rumors, the candidate answered with a non-denial denial: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

For Bai, much hinges on the precise timing of this quote. He claims that the Herald used the “follow me around” challenge to justify its pursuit of Hart. This was dishonest, he suggests, because we couldn’t have known about it before the stakeout—the quote appeared in the Times on May 3, the same day our story ran. What Bai doesn’t acknowledge is that we didn’t need the Dionne quote for justification.

Sen. Gary Hart and his wife, Lee, at a campaign stop in Philadelphia in April, 1984. | AP Photo

A week or so before the Herald and the Times’ articles ran, in an interview with me, Hart had been similarly dismissive of the womanizing allegations, saying, “I’ve been in public life for 15 years and I think that if there was anything about my background that anybody had any information on, they would bring it forward. But they haven’t.” The Hart quote I published wasn’t as dramatic as the one Hart provided to Dionne, but its intent was the same. And it was a lie. That’s not news?

Much of Bai’s article is taken up by his recounting of the Herald’s pursuit of the tip about Hart’s affair with Rice, culminating in her weekend trip to see him in Washington, D.C. My colleagues and I verified the tryst—and thus the lie—during that admittedly awkward confrontation in an alley behind Hart’s Capitol Hill townhouse while Rice waited inside.

Twenty-seven years later, here is the question I would ask of Bai: What should we have done at that moment? Should we have closed our notebooks and caught the next plane back to Miami, concluding that reporting the lie wasn’t newsworthy? That it was inconsequential—and not just to us, but to potentially millions of voters?

I can’t answer for Bai and won’t try. But the response goes to the existential question of the news media’s role in a presidential campaign. Simply put, what exactly does the public expect the news media to do? I think the voting public expects the news media to provide them with the factual information they need to cast an informed ballot.

That factual information can mean different things for different voters. Some voters might want the media to report a candidate’s positions on the economy, abortion, civil rights, immigration, gun safety and so on. They care little about the candidate’s personal beliefs or behavior. But some voters—indeed, the great majority of voters—are more interested in who the candidate is. This is the much-discussed character issue. It goes to the essence of the candidate; it’s about authenticity, empathy, integrity, fairness and more. Issues change, and with them the candidate’s positions. But character doesn’t change, at least not much. For a journalist to withhold information that more fully reveals the character of a candidate would, in my opinion, be a sin of omission.

Many people forget that although Hart dropped out of the campaign just days after the Herald’s story in May, he revived his campaign in late December of that year and began running the gauntlet that begins in Iowa, goes on to New Hampshire and then stretches nationwide to the nominating convention. His reemergence provided the acid test of whether Democratic Party voters would sublimate the character question to the policy issues.

So what happened? In Iowa, of the seven Democrats on the caucus ballots, Hart finished sixth. In the next stop in the nominating process, New Hampshire’s fabled primary, Hart finished last. Dead last. This time he quit the race for good. Hart’s positions on the issues hadn’t changed from the heady days when he was the front-runner, before Donna Rice and Monkey Business entered the public discourse. What had changed were the voters, who now knew that Hart had been living a lie.

Despite all the public scandals that have occurred since Hart’s political undoing, public attitudes around a politician’s personal behavior have changed little. A recent Rasmussen Reports survey found that 81 percent of likely voters take personal behavior into account when casting their ballots. Just 3 percent said it is “not at all important.” Similarly, 92 percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll in 2009 said adultery is “morally wrong.”

That’s not to say that adultery has always been a career-killer. Bill Clinton survived impeachment and has remained a relatively popular figure despite his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Although Newt Gingrich wasn’t successful in his 2012 presidential bid, he’s done just fine as a TV commentator. And former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s bizarre dalliance with an Argentine journalist—and his cover story about hiking the Appalachian trail—didn’t prevent him from winning a congressional seat.

It’s perhaps noteworthy, though, that in those cases the news media’s coverage didn’t draw the kind of fire that the Herald did in 1987—and that Bai appears to rekindle nearly 30 years later.

To me, the question that Bai and others raise shouldn’t be why the news media reported on Hart’s activities, but why it failed to report on FDR, JFK and LBJ. In fact, those men may be the historical aberrations. The candidate I introduced at the beginning whose philandering thwarted his presidential ambitions was Alexander Hamilton, whose face adorns our $10 bill. A journalist’s report about Hamilton’s adulterous love affair with Maria Reynolds squashed his hopes of succeeding George Washington.

Nearly a century later, New York Gov. Grover Cleveland ran into trouble when reports of his out-of-wedlock child became fodder for the newspapers, some of which labeled him a “libertine.” But, paradoxically, Cleveland still won the election. How so? He admitted paternity and provided support for the child. He didn’t lie; there was no contradiction between his private behavior—however indiscreet—and his public position.

I believe the lesson to draw here is that the real campaign-killer isn’t sex; it’s hypocrisy. And the no-hypocrisy rule—if I can call it that—is as true today as it was in 1987, 1884 or 1796.

Were I asked to rewrite the Times’ headline to suit my version of the events back then, it would be this: How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed … Gary Hart.

It wouldn’t make for much of a book.