monkey business yacht photo

30 Years Ago: Gary Hart's Monkey Business, and How a Candidate Got Caught

Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President.

In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that they should follow me around. . . . They’ll be very bored. As the NBC anchor John Chancellor explained a few days later, "We did. We weren’t."

Seldom if ever has a major presidential candidacy crashed and burned so quickly. On May 8, 1987, a mere five days after issuing his challenge, the Colorado senator withdrew as a candidate. He would reenter the race the following December, but he would then withdraw a second time after winning just 4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary in February 1988. His political career was over.

Hart, the son of a farm-equipment salesman, was born in Ottawa, Kansas, in 1936, with the surname Hartpence (he legally changed it in 1965). He attended a local college and then went to both Yale Divinity School and Yale Law School. He practiced law for several years in Denver and then took on the task of running the very long-shot campaign of Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

It made his political reputation, for it turned out that the McGovern campaign had a secret weapon. After the 1968 Democratic Convention was marred by riots in the streets of Chicago outside and near chaos inside, the Democratic Party established a commission to reform the nominating process.

Its recommendations, adopted by the party, sharply curtailed the power of elected officials and party insiders to choose delegates, increased the importance of caucuses and primary elections, and mandated quotas for blacks, women, and youth. The chairman of the commission, Sen. George McGovern, understood far better than the other candidates how much the rules had changed the political landscape. Hart exploited that understanding to the hilt.

While McGovern took only one state and the District of Columbia against Richard Nixon, no one blamed this on Hart. Two years later, Hart captured a Colorado Senate seat in the Democratic landslide of 1974, and he was reelected easily in 1980. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, and though he lost out to the more senior Walter Mondale, who had served as Jimmy Carter's Vice President, he established himself as a serious candidate who was young, attractive, articulate, and seemed to offer new ideas.

He declined to run for reelection to the Senate in 1986 in order to devote his full attention to winning the 1988 Democratic nomination for President. Against a lackluster field, polls soon showed him far ahead of his nearest rival, more than 20 points in some polls. But he had a major problem, a persistent buzz of rumor regarding his private life and being a womanizer. He and his wife, Lee, had been married for more than 25 years and had two children, but the marriage was apparently a troubled one. They had separated twice and reconciled twice.

A story in Newsweek around the time he formally announced his candidacy, on April 13, 1987, highlighted these rumors, and while it made no specific allegations, it quoted a former adviser as saying that Hart was going to be in trouble if he can't keep his pants on. This produced a barrage of stories in other newspapers and magazines but, again, nothing concrete.

Then, two weeks after Hart’s announcement, the executive editor of the Miami Herald , Tom Fiedler, got an anonymous phone call. The caller said she had proof that Hart was having an affair.

Fiedler was not, at first, impressed. Told that the caller had photographs of Hart and a friend of hers, an attractive blonde in the Miami area, Fiedler said that politicians had their photographs taken with strangers all the time; it proved nothing. But then the caller told him about phone calls her friend had received from Hart from various places over the past few months, and the dates when those phone calls had been received.

Fiedler was easily able to check them against Hart’s schedule, and they coincided. If it was a crank call, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the tip appear genuine. But he was wary of a professional dirty trick. She then told him that her friend was flying up to Washington that Friday, May 1, to spend the weekend with Hart at his Washington, D.C., townhouse. Fiedler knew that Hart was scheduled to be in Iowa Friday and then in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday, which was Derby day. He also thought that Hart lived in Bethesda, Maryland, not in the District. But checking the next day, he learned that Hart had sold the house in Bethesda and had indeed moved to Washington, to a townhouse on Capitol Hill. He also learned that the Kentucky stop had been cancelled; Hart was spending the weekend in the District of Columbia. Fiedler’s journalistic instincts told him he was on to something big.

He and a senior editor decided that Jim McGee, an investigative reporter, should catch a Friday afternoon plane to Washington—the flight most likely to have the mystery woman—and stake out Hart’s house. McGee barely made the 5:30 flight. On it he noticed one particularly striking blonde. Could this be her?

Staking out Hart’s house that evening, McGee saw Hart’s front door open at about 9:30 and a man and woman emerge. It was Hart and the blonde on the plane.

The next morning Fiedler and a photographer arrived on the scene. They thought it crucial to have the sighting confirmed, and that evening they saw Senator Hart and the woman emerge from the back entrance of the townhouse. The couple went to Hart’s car, which was parked a short distance away, but then returned to the house through the front entrance. Hart seemed agitated, as if he sensed he was being followed. When he came back out the back entrance, the reporters decided to confront him.

He denied that the woman had spent the night at his house and gave several lawyer-like denials of any impropriety. The reporters, facing a rapidly approaching deadline, decided to go with the story, which appeared in the Sunday, May 3, edition of the paper, with the headline Miami Woman Is Linked to Hart. It caused a sensation.

It soon emerged that the woman’s name was Donna Rice, and she had met Hart at a New Years Eve party in Colorado. She had later accompanied him on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini on an 83-foot luxury yacht with the you-cant-make-this-stuff-up name of Monkey Business . A picture soon appeared in the National Enquirer , and then in hundreds of newspapers, showing Donna Rice sitting in Hart’s lap, with Hart in a Monkey Business T-shirt.

At a press conference on May 6, the senator furiously denied doing anything wrong. If I had intended a relationship with this woman, he said, believe me . . . I wouldn’t have done it this way.

But contributions to his campaign were rapidly drying up, and his lead in an overnight poll in New Hampshire fell by half. The Washington Post informed the campaign that it had good information on another liaison of his. On Thursday he flew home to Colorado, and on Friday, May 8, he announced his withdrawal from the race.

Gary Hart’s political career began with the crucial insight that the rules of the game with regard to getting delegates to the Democratic convention had fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of the 1968 Chicago convention. His political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.

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Was Gary Hart Set Up?

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.

Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality . In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him— by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad . The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.

In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these . He told Tom Turnipseed, the object of his “jumper cables” attack, that he viewed the episode as “one of the low points” of his career. He apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Willie Horton ad.

And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president.

S trother, 10 years older than Atwater, had been his Democratic competitor and counterpart, minus the gutter-fighting. During the early Reagan years, when Atwater worked in the White House, Strother joined the staff of the Democratic Party’s most promising and glamorous young figure, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. Strother was Hart’s media consultant and frequent traveling companion during his run for the nomination in 1984, when he gave former Vice President Walter Mondale a scare. As the campaign for the 1988 nomination geared up, Strother planned to play a similar role.

In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. After Mondale’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Hart had become the heir apparent and best hope to lead the party back to the White House. The presumed Republican nominee was Bush, Reagan’s vice president, who was seen at the time, like many vice presidents before him, as a lackluster understudy. Since the FDR–Truman era, no party had won three straight presidential elections, which the Republicans would obviously have to do if Bush were to succeed Reagan.

Gary Hart had a nationwide organization and had made himself a recognized expert on military and defense policy. I first met him in those days, and wrote about him in Atlantic articles that led to my 1981 book, National Defense . (I’ve stayed in touch with him since then and have respected his work and his views .) Early polls are notoriously unreliable, but after the 1986 midterms, and then–New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s announcement that he would not run, many national surveys showed Hart with a lead in the Democratic field and also over Bush. Hart’s principal vulnerability was the press’s suggestion that something about him was hidden, excessively private, or “unknowable.” Among other things, this was a way of alluding to suspicions of extramarital affairs—a theme in most accounts of that campaign, including Matt Bai’s 2014 All the Truth Is Out. Still, as Bai wrote in his book, “Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose.”

Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out . But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.

Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”

What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:

In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine , in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed—when he didn’t see her again—that she had spent the night.

Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini , on the cover of the National Enquirer.

Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. For anyone who wasn’t around, there is Bai’s book and an upcoming film based on it : The Front Runner , starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.

But was the plotline of Hart’s self-destruction too perfect? Too convenient? Might the nascent Bush campaign, with Atwater as its manager, have been looking for a way to help a potentially strong opponent leave the field?

“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true! ”

Strother’s conversation with Atwater happened in 1991. He mainly kept the news to himself. As the years went by, he discreetly mentioned the conversation to some journalists and other colleagues, but not to Gary Hart. “I probably should have told him at the time,” he said recently. “It was a judgment call, and I didn’t see the point in involving him in another controversy.”

Crucially, Strother realized, he had no proof, and probably never would. Atwater was dead. Although Hart did not run in later elections, he was busy and productive: He had earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford, had published many books, and had co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission, which memorably warned the incoming president in 2001, George W. Bush, to prepare for a terrorist attack on American soil. Why, Strother asked himself, should he rake up an issue that could never be resolved and might cause Hart more stress than surcease?

But late last year, Strother learned that the prostate cancer he had been treated for a dozen years ago had returned and spread, and that he might not have long to live. The cancer is now in remission, but after the diagnosis Strother began traveling to see people he had known and worked with, to say goodbye. One of his stops was Colorado, where he had a meal with Gary Hart.

Aware that this might be one of their final conversations, Hart asked Strother to think about the high points of the campaign, and its lows. Hart knew that Strother had been friends with Billy Broadhurst, the man who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. According to Strother and others involved with the Hart campaign, Broadhurst was from that familiar political category, the campaign groupie and aspiring insider. Broadhurst kept trying to ingratiate himself with Hart, and kept being rebuffed. He was also a high-living, high-spending fixer and lobbyist with frequent money problems.

Strother talked with Hart this spring; Broadhurst had died about a year earlier. In retrospect, Hart asked, what did Strother make of the whole imbroglio?

“Ray said, ‘Why do you ask?’ ” Hart told me, when I called to talk with him about the episode. “And I said there are a whole list of ‘coincidences’ that had been on my mind for 30 years, and that could lead a reasonable person to think none of it happened by accident.

“Ray replied, ‘It’s because you were set up. I know you were set up.’

“I asked him how he could be so certain,” Hart told me. Strother then recounted his long-ago talk with Atwater, and Atwater’s claim that the whole Monkey Business weekend had occurred at his direction. According to Hart, that plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business . Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.

“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”

What are we to make of Strother’s late-in-life revelation of Atwater’s deathbed confession? Hart’s reputation, deserved or not, certainly gave Atwater something to work with, if that’s what he did. (“It would be just like the perversity of history for someone to undertake an effort that might well have happened by itself,” Matt Bai told me when I spoke with him recently.) What would have induced Broadhurst to participate in an entrapment scheme? (When I asked Strother this question, he said, “Money.”) How exactly was the scheme supposed to work? Hart had been introduced to Donna Rice at least once before (briefly, at an event at the musician Don Henley’s house, in Colorado, that Hart attended with his wife), and he phoned her after the Monkey Business weekend. Both Rice and Hart denied any affair. A few people still living may know what happened that weekend, and why. (Rice, who now leads an internet-safety group called Enough Is Enough and goes by her married name, Donna Rice Hughes, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Most likely the rest of us never will.

L ike other political calamities, the Hart downfall had consequences that will be debated for as long as the man’s name is remembered. History is full of unknowable “What if?” questions. What if whatever happened that weekend in Bimini had not happened? “I was going to be the next president,” Hart told me, clinically. He was, or might have been—and then he wasn’t.

If history had gone in a different direction in 1987, and Hart had become the 41st president rather than Bush, then Bill Clinton would not have had his chance in 1992, or perhaps ever. George W. Bush, who found his footing with a place on his father’s winning campaign, would probably never have emerged as a contender. When and whether Barack Obama and Donald Trump might ever have come onto the stage no one can say. “No first Bush if things had turned out differently,” Gary Hart told me. “Which means no second Bush—at least not when he arrived. Then no Iraq War. No Cheney. Who knows what else?”

Recommended Reading

Fighting the next war.

How Gary Hart Tried to Change Military History

Taking stock of the long wars: a proposal.

In announcing the suspension of his campaign, Hart angrily said, “I believe I would have been a successful candidate. And I know I could have been a very good president, particularly for these times. But apparently now we’ll never know.”

This article appears in the November 2018 print edition with the headline “Was Gary Hart Set Up?”

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​Almanac: The Gary Hart scandal

May 8, 2016 / 9:18 AM EDT / CBS News

"I'm not a beaten man. I'm an angry and defiant man. I've said that I bend but I don't break, and believe me, I'm not broken."

And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: May 8th, 1987, 29 years ago today ... the day former Colorado Senator Gary Hart quit the Democratic race for president in the face of a media frenzy.

A media frenzy many people remember today by the photograph that eventually emerged of Hart and a woman named Donna Rice on a dock next to a yacht called "Monkey Business."

When asked if he'd ever committed adultery, Hart responded, "I don't have to answer that question."

Just a few days before he dropped out, an anonymous tip about a possible affair had led Miami Herald reporters to confront Hart outside his Washington, D.C. townhouse.

Their story ran the next day ... the very same day The New York Times printed quotes from an earlier interview with Hart. Asked about earlier rumors of infidelity, Hart had answered: "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."

Boring, it was not.

With Hart's statement giving them license, the media launched into full scandal mode. And within a week, candidate Hart announced the inevitable:

"Clearly under present circumstances this campaign can't go on. I refuse to submit my family and my friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It's simply an intolerable situation."

Not content with a simple statement of withdrawal, Hart went on to deliver a lecture:

"We're all going to have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters, and presidential candidates to being hunted."

For all Hart's protestations, the release of that "Monkey Business" photo was all most people needed to see.

And with that incident, the precedent of non-stop, 24/7 coverage of the personal failings of politicians -- from both parties -- was firmly established.

Something all candidates, current and future, ignore at their peril.

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How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart’s Presidential Bid

By: Becky Little

Published: November 7, 2018

Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Yet according to Gail Sheehy , a journalist who covered Hart for Vanity Fair in the 1980s , the real story was bigger than just one affair—it was about Hart’s fundamental character, and whether a man like him should be president.

Stories of Hart’s affairs had circulated long before his scandal broke in the spring of 1987 (those weeks are depicted in the new film The Front Runner , starring Hugh Jackman as Hart). The rumors had trailed him the first time he campaigned to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, and even stretched back to his time as the national campaign director for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid.

“The wife of a very prominent Duke political scientist told me that he would just take every one of the college girls who volunteered [at the McGovern campaign] to bed,” Sheehy says. “And the next day, she would be hanging on her chance to talk to him, and he would walk right past her as if he’d never seen her before. He did that over and over and over again.”

Hart also sexually harassed at least one female reporter. When journalist Patricia O’Brien went to his hotel room to interview him during his 1984 campaign, he greeted her in a short bathrobe, then got “huffy” when she asked him to put some clothes on, Richard Ben Cramer reported in his book, What It Takes: The Way to the White House .

Hart wasn’t discreet about his affairs, either, according to Sheehy. At one point during his 1984 campaign when the media was focused on him as a major contender, a “veteran political mistress he’d been seeing since 1982 was startled to have him turn up on her Washington doorstep,” Sheehy wrote for Vanity Fair in September 1988. “She could see the Secret Service van parked right down the street. Hart stayed the night and blithely walked out her front door the next morning.”

Covering both of his presidential campaigns in the ‘80s, Sheehy caught him in several lies; not just about his affairs, but also seemingly unimportant details like whether he played varsity sports in high school. When reporters asked the Democratic candidate for president whether he had ever committed adultery in the spring of 1987, he not only denied it, but challenged them to prove it.

“Follow me around,” The New York Times Magazine reported him saying just a few weeks after he declared his candidacy. “I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.”

Whether or not he was being sarcastic, as he later claimed, it was a bad move. “Why would a man who’s running for the presidency of the United States challenge a reporter to follow him to see if he was an adulterer, when he was an adulterer?” Sheehy asks. “He had to get caught.”

And indeed, he did. Shortly after making the remark, Hart “canceled his plans for the weekend and he invited Donna Rice to fly up and stay with him at his house, where obviously he would be seen in Washington,” Sheehy says. Journalists from the Miami Herald were already staked out near his D.C. house thanks to a tip they’d received that he was sleeping with Rice.

After the Miami Herald reported on his affair, a picture surfaced showing Rice sitting on Hart’s lap while he wore a T-shirt reading “Monkey Business Crew,” referring to the name of the yacht they’d partied on. The ensuing scandal prompted Hart to drop out of the race. The next year, Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the general election to George H.W. Bush .

This wasn’t the first sex scandal to feature prominently in an American presidential campaign. When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, opponents dug up his marriage records to paint him as an adulterer in the press, as his wife’s first marriage had not been fully dissolved when they eloped.

In 1884, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph revealed that presidential candidate Grover Cleveland had fathered a son out of wedlock. The woman involved said Cleveland had raped her and tried to bury the story by placing her son in an orphanage and sending her to a mental institution. Despite this, Cleveland became the only U.S. president to hold two non-consecutive terms.

The Hart scandal wasn’t even the first time in modern politics that reporting on a politician’s personal life had thwarted a presidential campaign. A decade and a half before, journalists reported that Thomas Eagleton , George McGovern’s first vice presidential candidate in 1972, had previously been hospitalized for depression and received electroshock therapy. McGovern quickly dumped Eagleton, and his poor handling of the affair may have affected the landslide by which Richard Nixon won reelection.

With few exceptions, however, male reporters in the 20th century generally protected male politicians by not reporting on their affairs, or anything else that seemed “personal.” In this case, however, Hart "was the one who set up himself to get caught,” Sheehy says.

In the press, “[the affair] was only treated as a superficial issue: an extramarital affair with one woman that he had just been on a boat with,” she says. “As if that was the only time and the only way in which Gary Hart showed that he was unfit to be a president.”

Yet far from being irrelevant to the campaign, Hart’s affairs and his general character were something that voters really cared about, says Laura Stoker , a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied voters’ attitudes toward Hart before and after the scandal. 

“People who really preferred him over other Democratic candidates just turned against him,” she says.

In the decade after Hart’s scandal, Bill Clinton faced his own questions about extramarital affairs, as well as sexual harassment and assault . However, Sheehy doesn’t think Hart’s scandal made news organizations more willing to report on sex scandals. If anything, Hart’s attacks on the press—including direct attacks on Sheehy herself—made reporters more cautious.

“Many newspapers were weary of being called guilty of ‘gotcha journalism,’” she says.

During the Gary Hart scandal, the importance of evaluating the character of presidential candidates became clear. “We almost elected a compulsive sexual predator as president in 1988,” says Sheehy, “but we didn’t because he got himself caught.”

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The Real Owner Of The Monkey Business Boat

• Last updated Sep 19, 2024
• Difficulty Beginner

• Category Boating, Pedalos and Punts

The luxury yacht Monkey Business was custom-built for the Turnberry Isle Resort Marina in southern Florida by its developers, Donald Soffer and Eddie Lewis. The 83-foot (25-metre) vessel played a pivotal role in the 1987 scandal that scuppered Gary Hart's campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President of the United States. The yacht was rented by William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, who, along with Hart and two women, one of whom was Donna Rice, sailed to Bimini for an overnight trip. Rumours of an affair between Hart and Rice, along with a photo of the pair on the yacht, led to Hart's withdrawal from the race.

What You'll Learn

The yacht was custom-built for the turnberry isle resort marina in florida, it was owned by developers donald soffer and eddie lewis, the gary hart-donna rice scandal, the yacht was seized in 1988 after marijuana was found on board, the yacht was put up for sale in 1990.

The 83-foot (25-metre) yacht Monkey Business was custom-built for the Turnberry Isle Resort Marina in southern Florida. The resort, which is located in Miami, is known for its luxury and exclusivity, and the marina is a central part of the Turnberry lifestyle. The facility has recently undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation, boasting Ipe wood decking and an aluminium floating dock system that can accommodate large vessels.

Turnberry Isle Resort Marina is where the infamous Monkey Business was based. The yacht was launched in 1978 for Donald Soffer, who owned the resort. Soffer and his business partner, Eddie Lewis, rented out the yacht in March 1987 to William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist. Broadhurst, along with former US senator Gary Hart, took an overnight trip with two women, one of whom was Donna Rice. This trip sparked a media frenzy and ended Hart's campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

The yacht itself is a Broward Marine motor yacht with an aluminium hull and rosewood-panelled cabins. It includes a hot tub and a full bar. Before the 1987 scandal, it was known for hosting celebrity guests such as Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and Julio Iglesias. The yacht has also made appearances in films, including Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 in 1983 and The Front Runner in 2018, a film about the Gary Hart scandal.

Following the scandal, Soffer put Monkey Business up for sale, but it failed to sell, even though the yacht's captain reported that the notoriety had hurt business.

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The luxury yacht Monkey Business was jointly owned by developers Donald Soffer and Eddie Lewis. It was custom-built for the Turnberry Isle Resort Marina in southern Florida, where it was frequently docked. The 83-foot (25-metre) yacht was constructed by Broward Marine and launched in 1978. Monkey Business's hull was made from aluminium, and its cabins were fitted with rosewood panelling, a hot tub, and a full bar. The yacht played host to a number of celebrity guests, including Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and Julio Iglesias.

In March 1987, the yacht was chartered by William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, and former US senator Gary Hart. Broadhurst and Hart sailed on Monkey Business to Bimini with two women, one of whom was Donna Rice. The trip sparked a media frenzy and ultimately led to the end of Hart's campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 US presidential election. Rumours of an affair between Hart and Rice began circulating, and a photo emerged of Rice sitting on Hart's lap, with Hart wearing a Monkey Business t-shirt.

In the aftermath of the scandal, Soffer attempted to sell Monkey Business in 1988, with his captain telling reporters that the yacht's notoriety had hurt business. However, the yacht failed to sell. In 1990, it was put up for sale again, this time for $1.5 million, with the owner once more citing the negative impact of the Hart scandal on the vessel's profitability.

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Rumours of Hart's "womanizing" had been circulating for some time, and he had previously invited the media to observe his public behaviour, claiming that anyone who did so would "be very bored". However, in May 1987, the Miami Herald published a story revealing that Hart had spent the night with Rice, who was not his wife. The story included photographic evidence of the two together. When asked directly about the affair, Hart denied any wrongdoing and claimed that he and Rice were just pals.

Despite his denials, the scandal had a significant impact on Hart's campaign. On May 8, 1987, just a week after the story broke, Hart suspended his campaign. He cited his own mistakes as the reason for his withdrawal, saying, "I've made some mistakes. Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes."

The scandal was also notable because it marked a turning point in how the media covered the private lives of public figures. It sparked a debate about the role of journalism in politics and the changing societal norms around infidelity and the portrayal of politicians in the media.

The yacht Monkey Business played a role in the scandal. In March 1987, Hart, along with William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, sailed the yacht to Bimini with two women, one of whom was Donna Rice. A photograph emerged of Rice sitting on Hart's lap, with Hart wearing a "Monkey Business" T-shirt. This image further fuelled the scandal and damaged Hart's campaign.

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The Monkey Business yacht is known for its role in derailing Gary Hart's campaign for President of the United States in 1988. However, the vessel made headlines again in the same year when it was seized by authorities due to the discovery of marijuana on board.

In May 1988, about a year after the Gary Hart scandal, the yacht was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard after a small amount of marijuana was found during a routine safety inspection. The exact amount of marijuana found has been reported as 9 grams or 1 gram, which was enough to test positive and seize the vessel under "zero tolerance" policies. The yacht was escorted to the Coast Guard's base, and while the four unnamed individuals on board were not arrested, the discovery certainly attracted attention and dealt another blow to the yacht's reputation.

At the time of the seizure, the Monkey Business was owned by millionaire developer Donald Soffer and was associated with the Turnberry Isle Resort Marina in southern Florida. The yacht had been custom-built for the resort and featured an aluminium hull, rosewood-panelled cabins, a hot tub, and a full bar. It had hosted several celebrities, including Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jack Nicholson.

The seizure of the yacht due to marijuana possession added to the infamy surrounding the vessel, which was already significant due to its role in the Gary Hart scandal. This incident further contributed to the yacht becoming synonymous with controversy and scandal.

The notoriety of the yacht affected its business prospects, and in 1990, Soffer attempted to sell the Monkey Business for $1.5 million. However, the sale did not go through, and the yacht continued to struggle to shake off its scandalous reputation.

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The luxury yacht Monkey Business was built in 1978 for Donald Soffer, the owner of the Turnberry Isle Resort near Miami, Florida. The 83-foot (25-metre) Broward Marine motor yacht was custom-built for the resort and featured an aluminium hull, cabins with rosewood panelling, a hot tub, and a full bar. It played host to many celebrity guests, including Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and Julio Iglesias.

In March 1987, the yacht was rented by William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, who, together with former US senator and leading Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, sailed it to Bimini for an overnight trip with two women, one of whom was Donna Rice. This trip sparked a media frenzy and ended Hart's campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 election for President of the United States, as rumours of an extramarital affair with Rice surfaced.

Following the political scandal, Soffer put the Monkey Business yacht up for sale in 1988, citing that the negative notoriety had hurt his business. However, despite its infamous reputation, the yacht failed to sell.

The yacht's role in the scandal was later depicted in the 2018 film "The Front Runner", which chronicled Hart's rise and fall in politics. The real Monkey Business yacht did not appear in the film, and it is unknown which yacht was used to portray it.

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• The True Story Behind <i>The Front Runner</i>: How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

The True Story Behind The Front Runner : How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

O nce the results of the U.S. midterm elections this Tuesday are official , politicos will turn to the 2020 presidential election.

And the new movie The Front Runner — which is getting a limited election-week release before it opens nationwide on Nov. 21 — offers a cautionary tale for future candidates.

It’s based on the true story of the fall from grace of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Played by Hugh Jackman, he was “the clear front runner for the Democratic nomination” in the 1988 presidential election, according to TIME, until he was forced to drop out of the race. The scandal hit just over 30 years ago, after the Miami Herald revealed that the married man had been spending nights with another woman — Donna Rice, a 29-year-old model.

Hart’s political career ended rather quickly. On Monday, April 27, 1987, Miami Herald politics editor Tom Fielder received an anonymous tip that in late March, Hart had attended an overnight trip on a yacht rented by lawyer-lobbyist William Broadhurst named Monkey Business . According to the tip, as they sailed from Miami to Bimini, he hit it off with a woman who was not his wife. The tipster — later revealed to be clothing designer Dana Weems — offered photos to prove it and said Rice was going to fly up to Washington, D.C., to see him.

By May 1, Herald investigative reporter Jim McGee was on a plane, and had staked out Hart’s D.C. townhouse. Hart was seen leaving the building with a woman who was not his wife shortly after 9 p.m., returning with her shortly after 11 p.m., and then leaving with her the next evening.

When the Herald confronted him, Hart denied that he was having an affair with the woman and said only that he was taking her back to where she was staying. On May 3, 1987, their story appeared in the Herald with photographic evidence of the two together from the stakeout. At a televised press conference in New Hampshire, a Washington Post reporter asked Hart point-blank whether he had ever committed adultery. “I don’t have to answer that,” Hart responded . Donna Rice, in another press conference with reporters, said she and Hart were “just pals” and added that she preferred “younger men.”

And yet two days later, Hart suspended his campaign. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes.”

Just over two weeks later, the National Enquire r published a photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap.

In the case of Gary Hart, the problem wasn’t what he did, but how he did it. Americans didn’t like hypocrites. They couldn’t rally around a candidate whom they felt wasn’t being straight with them, pundits observed. A TIME poll conducted shortly after the news broke found that when Americans were asked what bothered them more, extramarital sex or “not telling the truth,” 69% said the latter and 7% said the former.

TIME’s May 18, 1987, cover story on the scandal described the perception of hypocrisy that did Hart in:

Yet the facts, as ambiguous as some of them are, make clear that Hart brought on his own downfall. Ever since he reconciled for the second time with his wife Lee in 1982, Hart has portrayed himself as a dutiful husband whose 28-year marriage was strengthened by the stress of separation. But in his private conduct, Hart challenged the moralistic conventions of political behavior and ultimately paid the price for his apostasy. Until the very end Hart seemed oblivious to the reality that his actions had consequences. He denied there was anything improper about his friendship with Donna Rice, even though it is far from customary for 50-year-old men to spend weekends away from their wives hanging out with comely actresses who have appeared on Miami Vice . Hart jeopardized his reputation for veracity by angrily denying the persistent rumors about his womanizing… Rather than wrestling with the complexities of arms control and a troubled economy, the public tends to look for personalities they can trust, whose judgment and integrity make them feel comfortable.

The scandal marked a turning point in how the media covered the private lives of public figures. “Political journalism may never be the same,” TIME said. Some media experts thought the Herald ‘s stakeout was too forward for a mainstream news outlet; TIME and other news outlets said Hart was asking for the comeuppance because of his earlier challenge to the New York Times magazine that reporters could feel free to “put a tail on me,” and his warning that they’d be “bored.”

TIME argued that journalism had simply evolved and adapted to societal changes, on top of a plummeting trust in government because of the Vietnam War. Historically, when journalists found out that public-office-holders like President John F. Kennedy were having affairs , they didn’t report on them because such trysts weren’t considered newsworthy. However, TIME observed, “with the breakdown of sexual taboos in the 1960s, public discussion of such topics became more acceptable. At the same time, with the changing status of women, society has grown less tolerant of the macho dalliances of married men.” The more candidates and politicians appeared on TV, the more that the line between movie stars and political figures became “blurred,” and the more there was a need for media consultants who could create this image of the politico for the general public. Now the job of journalists was to find out who these people really were.

As for what happened to the main characters, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the 1988 presidential election to George H.W. Bush. Gary Hart went back to practicing law, serving on a variety of advisory councils, and was the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland in the Obama administration; he is still married to his wife Lee. Donna Rice Hughes married in 1994 and is an activist who works to rid the Internet of child pornography — and who has made it clear that she will have more to say in the future. In a recent statement about the 2018 film, she wrote that she is working on a memoir, that “all the truth is not out, as I have never told my own story.”

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28m  /  91'10 | amer | 2009.

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How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed American Politics

By Matt Bai

• Sept. 18, 2014

On a scalding July day five years ago, I found myself hiking in Red Rocks Park, just outside Denver, with Gary Hart. The copper cliffs were brilliantly lit in the midday sun, which burned our uncovered heads as we trudged up a steep incline toward the amphitheater that Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration ingeniously carved into the boulders.

We had come because Hart wanted to show me something, and as we made our way uphill, I was soon breathing heavily in the mile-high air. But I was more aware of Hart, who, at 72, labored audibly despite his legendary ruggedness. (The most famous picture from Hart’s first presidential campaign, where he came from nowhere in 1984 to stalemate Walter Mondale and overturn the aging Democratic establishment in the process, was one from New Hampshire, in which the flannel-clad Hart had just managed to bury an ax in a tree from a distance, legend had it, of 40 feet.) He had developed a paunch and was slightly stooped, his arms swinging crookedly at his sides. He wore black pants and a black Nike polo shirt, from which tufts of chest hair sprouted near the unbuttoned collar. His famous mane, still intact but now white and unruly, framed a sunburned, square-jawed face.

“When I announced for president in 1987, we did it right up there,” Hart said, pointing toward a rock formation at the top of the hill.

I tried to imagine the lectern set against the red rocks and blue sky, the crush of cameras and the palpable sense of history. Hart’s aides had wanted him to do something more conventional, with a ballroom and streamers and all of that, but he insisted on standing against the mountainous backdrop, near the amphitheater he called “a symbol of what a benevolent government can do.”

Back then, Hart was as close to a lock for the nomination — and likely the presidency — as any challenger of the modern era. According to Gallup, Hart had a double-digit lead over the rest of the potential Democratic field among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. In a preview of the general election against the presumed Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Hart was polling over 50 percent among registered voters and beating Bush by 13 points, with only 11 percent saying they were undecided. He would have been very hard to stop.

“Must have been a hell of a backdrop,” I said. Hart didn’t respond, and after an awkward moment, I let it drop.

As anyone alive during the 1980s knows, Hart, the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation, was taken down and eternally humiliated by a scandal, a suspected affair with a beautiful blonde whose name, Donna Rice, had entered the cultural lexicon, along with the yacht — Monkey Business — near which she had been photographed on his lap. When they talked about him now in Washington, Hart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce. He warned of the rise of stateless terrorism and spoke of the need to convert the industrial economy into an information-and-technology-based one, at a time when few politicians in either party had given much thought to anything beyond communism and steel. But such recollections were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or an athlete or an entertainer, that didn’t evoke inevitable comparisons to Hart among reflective commentators. In popular culture, Gary Hart would forever be that archetypal antihero of presidential politics: the iconic adulterer.

The rest of the world was finished with Gary Hart, but I couldn’t get his story out of my mind, which was why I ended up standing alongside him at Red Rocks on that summer day, like an archaeologist searching for shards of a lost political age. I had come to believe that we couldn’t really understand the dispiriting state of our politics — and of our political journalism — without first understanding what transpired during that surreal and frenetic week in April nearly 30 years ago.

The Hart episode is almost universally remembered as a tale of classic hubris. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? How could such a smart guy have been that stupid ?

Of course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart’s lifetime, all Democratic presidents thought of as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the 20th century, wrote that he was “reasonably sure” that of all the candidates he had covered, only three — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter — hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of “casual partners.” He and his colleagues considered those affairs irrelevant.

By the late 1980s, however, a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding, creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn’t create that vortex. He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.

The nation was still feeling the residual effects of Watergate, which 13 years earlier led to the first resignation of a sitting president. Richard Nixon’s fall was shocking, not least because it was more personal than political, a result of instability and pettiness rather than pure ideology. And for this reason Watergate, along with the deception over what was really happening in Vietnam, had injected into presidential politics a new focus on private morality.

Social mores were changing, too. For most of the 20th century, 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. Twenty years later, however, social forces unleashed by the tumult of the 1960s were rising up to contest this view. Feminism and the “women’s lib” movement had transformed expectations for a woman’s role in marriage, just as the civil rights movement had changed prevailing attitudes toward African-Americans.

As America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women into the 1980s, younger liberals — the same permissive generation that ushered in the sexual revolution and free love — were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal, and one that needed to be exposed. “This is the last time a candidate will be able to treat women as bimbos,” is how the feminist Betty Friedan put it after Hart’s withdrawal. (If only she’d known.)

Perhaps most salient, though, the nation’s news media were changing in profound ways. When giants like White came up through the news business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power and the information and insight derived from having it was the currency of the trade. By the 1980s, however, Watergate and television had combined to awaken an entirely new kind of career ambition. If you were an aspiring journalist born in the 1950s, when the baby boom was in full swing, then you entered the business at almost exactly the moment when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post — portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the cinematic version of their first book, “All the President’s Men” — were becoming not just the most celebrated reporters of their day but very likely the wealthiest and most famous journalists in American history (with the possible exception of Walter Cronkite). And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn’t proximity, but scandal. They had actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.

It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League-educated baby boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become more than Woodward or Bernstein, which is to say, 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.

It was around 8 p.m. on Monday, April 27, 1987, when the phone rang on Tom Fiedler’s desk at The Miami Herald. A woman he did not know was on the line. Ever since Hart’s official announcement at Red Rocks two weeks before, reporters had been speculating among themselves about the state of Hart’s marriage and rumors of affairs, and some of that speculation had begun to leak into the press. Fiedler, a prominent political reporter for The Herald, thought it beneath the media to traffic in such innuendo without any proof, and he published a front-page article that day saying as much. The woman on the phone had apparently just read it.

“You know, you said in the paper that there were rumors that Gary Hart is a womanizer,” she told him. “Those aren’t rumors.” And then a question: “How much do you guys pay for pictures?”

In a subsequent conversation, the anonymous caller told Fiedler that a friend of hers had seen Hart aboard a chartered yacht at Turnberry Isle near Miami, and the two had started an affair on an overnight pleasure cruise to Bimini. Her friend had pictures of her and Hart on the boat that she had shown the caller. The caller never used the name Donna Rice, the 29-year-old commercial actress and pharmaceutical rep who would soon become the first woman dragged through the humiliation of a sex scandal during a presidential campaign.

The caller said there were phone calls between Hart and Rice. Somehow, she knew they had been placed from phones in Georgia, Alabama and Kansas, and precisely when. She claimed that Hart had invited her friend to visit him in Washington, and her friend was going to stay with him that Friday night. “Maybe you could fly to Washington and get the seat next to her,” the anonymous caller suggested.

For decades after that call, just about everyone close to the events of that week, and everyone who wrote about them later, assumed that the caller was Lynn Armandt, the friend Rice brought along on the Monkey Business during the cruise to Bimini. This was a logical deduction, because Armandt would later profit from selling photos she took on that trip. When I asked Fiedler about it last year, though, he told me that although he would continue to protect the identity of his source as he had for 26 years, he was willing to say flatly that it was not Armandt. Fiedler volunteered that he thought Rice knew who the tipster really was.

When I spoke to Rice a few months later, during the first of two long conversations, she told me that she had never figured out with any certainty who set all of this in motion in 1987. But she had come to believe that Armandt was in cahoots with another friend of theirs in Miami — a woman named Dana Weems — who was on the boat for a party but didn’t join them on the cruise to Bimini and thus escaped notice in contemporary accounts of the scandal. Rice had talked to Weems about her dalliance with Hart and showed her the photos from the cruise.

Dana Weems wasn’t especially hard to find, it turned out. A clothing designer who did some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com, based in Hollywood, Fla. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I told her I was writing about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.

“Oh, my God,” she said. There followed a long pause.

“Did you make that call to The Herald?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” Weems said with a sigh. “That was me.”

She then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems’s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle. Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, though she told me Rice wasn’t nearly as successful as she was. Rice was an artificial beauty who was “O.K. for commercials, I guess.”

Weems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on the last weekend of March for the same impromptu party at which Hart and his pal Billy Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, met up with Rice, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on her, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled. . . .

But Donna — she had no standards, Weems told me. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House, and that’s why she agreed to go on the cruise to Bimini. After that weekend, Donna wouldn’t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest. It all made Weems sick to her stomach, especially this idea of Hart’s getting away with it and becoming president. “What an idiot you are!” Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. “You’re gonna want to run the country? You moron!”

And so when Weems read Fiedler’s story in The Herald, she decided to call him, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,” she told me. It was Armandt’s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos, and that’s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn’t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn’t talked to either woman — Rice or Armandt — since shortly after the scandal. She lived alone and used a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised her secret had lasted until now.

“I’m sorry to ruin his life,” she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. “I was young. I didn’t know it would be that way.”

Fiedler never had any doubt that Hart’s marital infidelity, if it could be substantiated, was a story. Nor, it seems, did anyone else at The Herald, where the question of newsworthiness was raised but quickly dispatched. In the reconstruction of how the story unfolded that Fiedler and his colleagues at the paper later published, there is no mention of any debate about whether a candidate’s private life merited investigation.

On Friday, the day when Hart was supposed to meet with Rice at his Capitol Hill townhouse, The Herald dispatched Jim McGee, its top investigative reporter, to Washington. McGee, who at 34 could fairly be called one of the finest investigative reporters in all of American journalism, spent the flight to Washington stalking his fellow passengers, walking up and down the aisle in search of women who looked as if they could plausibly be on their way to sleep with a presidential candidate. “He wondered how he would decide which woman to follow,” The Herald’s reporters later wrote, without a hint of realizing how creepy that sounded.

On the ground in Washington, McGee caught a taxi to Hart’s home and took up a position on a park bench that afforded a clear view of the front door. It was 9:30 p.m. when he saw Hart leave the townhouse with a “stunning” blonde he recognized from the ticket counter in Miami. Hart and the young woman promptly drove off, and McGee rushed to a pay phone across the street. He called his editors and Fiedler to ask for backup; the story was unfolding rapidly, and he needed more bodies to help with surveillance. McGee was still stationed on the street when, about two hours later, Hart and Rice returned from dinner and re-entered the townhouse. He never saw her leave and assumed she spent the night, although Hart’s aides later said that Rice left through the rear door.

Fiedler awoke Saturday morning and hopped the first flight to Washington. He brought with him McGee’s editor, James Savage, and a photographer, Brian Smith. When you added in Doug Clifton, a reporter helping out the Washington bureau who had joined McGee for part of the stakeout Friday night, The Herald’s undercover team now numbered five, along with at least two rental cars, on a block where maybe one or two residents could be spotted on the sidewalk at any given time in the afternoon. The odds of this kind of surveillance going undetected were not especially high.

About 8:40 p.m. Saturday, Hart and Rice left the house and emerged into the adjacent alleyway, heading for the senator’s car. The idea, apparently, had been to meet Broadhurst and Armandt for dinner. It was then that Hart noticed things were amiss. The first reporter he spotted in the side alley was McGee, a 200-pound man who for some reason had decided to make himself inconspicuous by donning sunglasses and a hooded parka. At night. In May.

McGee, sensing he had been made, turned on his heels and ran, bumping into Fiedler, who, being the only reporter on the scene whom Hart actually knew from the campaign plane, had disguised himself in a tracksuit and was pretending to jog around every so often. “He’s right behind me,” McGee whispered urgently. Fiedler immediately changed direction and jogged across the street, like a disoriented sprinter.

Alarmed, Hart abandoned the dinner plan and led Rice back inside. He was certain he was being watched but mystified as to who might be watching. He peered out of his second-floor kitchen window and surveyed Sixth Street, S.E. Hart was by no means an expert in counterintelligence, but he had traveled behind the Iron Curtain, where Americans were routinely tracked by government agents, and he had spent considerable time in the protection of Secret Service agents who were always scanning the periphery for threats. All of this was more than enough training for Hart to recognize the clownish stakeout that had all but taken over his street. He saw the five participants milling around, pretending to be strangers but then talking to one another, ducking into cars or — at least in Hart’s telling, though The Herald team would dispute his account — disappearing behind the bushes. His bushes. He thought perhaps they were reporters, but how could he be sure? Maybe they worked for another campaign or for the Republicans.

Hart decided, at first anyway, to hunker down and wait. He called Broadhurst, at whose nearby townhouse Rice and Armandt were supposed to be staying that weekend, and Broadhurst came over with Armandt and some barbecued chicken. After dinner, Hart instructed Broadhurst to gather up the women and leave via the back door. He would never see Donna Rice again.

Like a character in one of the spy novels he loved to read and write, Hart decided to outwit his surveillants and flush them into the open. It’s not clear how he thought this was going to end, other than badly, but a cornered man does not think clearly. Hart put on a white sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over his thick hair. At first, he got into his car and merged into Capitol Hill traffic. He expected to be followed, and he was — Smith, the photographer, was tailing close behind. Satisfied with this maneuver, Hart pulled over after a few blocks, emerged from the car and started walking back in the general direction of the townhouse. He detoured down a side street and walked twice around the block. Next Hart walked past the rental car in the front where McGee and Savage thought they were safely incognito.

According to the writer Richard Ben Cramer, who chronicled these events in his classic campaign book, “What It Takes,” Hart made a show of writing down the license-plate number in full view of the two reporters; The Herald didn’t mention this detail, but it did report that Hart seemed “agitated” and appeared to yell over his shoulder at someone on the other side of the street as he walked away. Probably both accounts are true. In any event, McGee and Savage deduced from Hart’s behavior that their undercover stakeout had been compromised. They could not write an article without at least trying to get his response. So after quickly conferring, they exited the car, followed Hart’s path back up the alley alongside his row of townhouses and turned a corner. McGee, according to The Herald account, “flinched in surprise.” There was Gary Hart, the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, leaning against a brick wall in his hoodie. He was waiting for them.

There were no press aides or handlers, no security agents or protocols to be followed. There was no precedent for any reporter accosting a presidential candidate outside his home, demanding the details of what he was doing inside it. It was just Hart and his accusers, or at least two of them for the moment, facing off in an oil-stained alley, all of them trying to find their footing on the suddenly shifting ground of American politics.

Eight days later, The Herald published a front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler and Savage, the 7,000-plus-word article — Moby-Dick-like proportions by the standards of daily journalism — is remarkable reading. First, it’s striking how much The Herald’s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” (“McGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.”) Clearly, the reporters and editors at The Herald thought themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues imagined themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.

The other fascinating thing about The Herald’s reconstruction is that it 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. Even in the dispassionate tone of The Herald’s narrative, you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.

“Good evening, senator,” McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. “I’m a reporter from The Miami Herald. We’d like to talk to you.” As The Herald relayed it: “Hart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.” McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.

“No one is staying in my house,” Hart replied.

Hart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation, but it’s not as if they weren’t ready. They had conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall — which was now literally the situation. McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. “You passed me on the street,” McGee said.

“I may or may not have,” Hart replied.

McGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.

“I’m not involved in any relationship,” Hart said carefully.

So why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?

“The obvious reason is I’m being set up,” Hart said, his voice quivering.

McGee wanted to know if the woman was in Hart’s house at that very moment. “She may or may not be,” is how Hart answered, evading again. Savage then asked to meet her, and Hart said no.

McGee offered to explain the situation, as if Hart had just woken up in a hospital or an asylum and might not have any idea what was happening. He said that the house had been under surveillance and that he had observed Hart with the woman the night before, in Hart’s car. Where were they going?

“I was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying,” Hart said, referring to Broadhurst’s townhouse nearby.

Savage cut in and asked how long Hart had known the woman — “several months” was the response — and what her name was.

“I would suppose you would find that out,” Hart said.

His voice was steadier now, and the reporters noticed that his composure had returned. As would happen several times throughout the ordeal of the next week, and for long afterward, Hart was lurching between conflicting instincts. There were moments when he thought that if he said just enough, if he issued enough of a denial to explain himself, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing. But then he would grow defiant. The hell with them, he would think. They were not entitled to know.

Fiedler made his way into the alley and joined his colleagues, making it three on one (or actually four on one, since Smith, the photographer, was there, too). Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart’s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched.

As Fiedler watched, McGee hit Hart with questions about the phone calls he had made to Rice, which they knew about from the tipster (even though they still hadn’t figured out her identity). Hart, whose suspicions about being set up must have now seemed well founded, didn’t dare deny the calls, but he characterized them as “casual” and “political” and “general conversation.” Then Fiedler jumped in. He asked Hart if he had taken this woman on a yachting trip in Florida.

“I don’t remember,” Hart said, dubiously. You can imagine the vertigo he must have been experiencing as the details of his private life, things he had not disclosed even to his closest aides, just kept coming, one after the other. It probably dawned on him, right about then, that he should never have been in the alley, any more than he should have been on the yacht.

Fiedler reminded Hart that he had been at Red Rocks and had personally heard the speech. He quoted Hart’s own words back to him, where Hart, alluding to the Iran-contra scandal rocking the Reagan administration, talked about running a campaign based on integrity and ethics and a higher standard. If that were so, Fiedler wanted to know, then why was Fiedler having to stand in this alley, at this moment, doing something so beneath him? He pleaded with Hart to be more forthcoming.

“I’ve been very forthcoming,” Hart said.

When McGee pressed him again about the yacht and whether he was denying having met Rice there, Hart grew visibly irritated. “I’m not denying anything,” he said. They were missing the point. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny knowing Rice or having been on a chartered boat. Hart’s stance was that none of it was anybody’s business but his. When the reporters asked Hart to “produce” the woman or this friend who was supposedly hosting her, Hart said other people had a right to privacy, too.

“I don’t have to produce anyone,” he told them.

McGee pulled out his last question, the one you save for the moment when there is nothing to be lost by asking it. He put the question point-blank to Hart: Had the senator had sex with the woman in the townhouse?

“The answer is no,” Hart said, more definitively than he had answered other questions. As Hart walked away, shaken and alone, and started back up the alley, Smith, the photographer, started clicking away. Hart whirled around. This yielded the shots of him rumpled and recoiling, hiding in a hoodie like some perp who was about to have his head forcibly lowered into the back seat of a cruiser.

“We don’t need any of that,” were Hart’s parting words.

The next morning, on May 3, The Herald reporters published a front-page article about Hart’s purported affair . At the end, they referred to a statement in which Hart challenged reporters interested in his personal life to follow him. Hart couldn’t have known it at the time, but his words — “follow me around” — would shadow him for the rest of his days. They would bury everything else he had ever said in public life.

In the history of Washington scandal, only a few quotes — “I am not a crook,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — have become as synonymous with a politician. In truth, though, Hart never issued any challenge to The Miami Herald’s reporters, or to anybody else, really. The words were spoken weeks earlier to E. J. Dionne Jr., who was then the top political reporter for The New York Times and was writing a profile for this magazine . Dionne discussed a broad range of topics with Hart and then reluctantly turned to the rumors of affairs. Hart was exasperated and he finally told Dionne: “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.”

Hart said this in an annoyed and sarcastic sort of way, in an obvious attempt to make a point. He was “serious” about the sentiment, all right, but only to the extent that a man who had been twice separated from his wife and dated other women over the years — with the full knowledge of his friends in the press corps and without having seen a single word written about it at the time — could have been serious about such a thing. Hart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign, for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him. Dionne certainly didn’t take the comment literally, though he suspected others might. “He did not think of it as a challenge,” Dionne would recall many years later. “And at the time, I did not think of it as a challenge.”

As it happened, Dionne’s cover story was set to appear Sunday, May 3, the same day the Herald published its front-page exposé. No one at The Herald had a clue that Hart had issued any “challenge” on the previous Monday when Fiedler heard from his anonymous tipster or when he continued to chase the story during the week. All of this they did on their own, without any prodding from Hart.

In those days before the Internet, however, The Times circulated printed copies of its magazine to other news media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it in their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. When Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne’s story, which had been sent to The Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric shock. There it was, staring up at him from the page — Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before.

The discovery of Hart’s supposed challenge, which the Herald reporters took from the advance copy of The Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster — so that the two articles, referring to the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously — probably eased any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print before they had a chance to identify Rice and try to talk to her. Soon enough, as The Herald would put it in their longer reconstruction a week later, Gary Hart would be seen as “the gifted hero who had taunted the press to ‘follow me around.’ ” Everyone would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. Hart’s quote appeared to justify The Herald’s extraordinary investigation, and that’s all that mattered.

The difference here is far more than a technicality. Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now, they recall it the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn’t believe him, and then The Herald took him up on it. Inexplicably, people believe, Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it. (When I spoke to Dana Weems, she repeatedly insisted to me that she had only called The Herald after reading Hart’s “follow me around” quote, which was obviously impossible.)

And this version of events conveniently enabled The Herald’s reporters and editors to completely sidestep some important and uncomfortable questions. As long as it was Hart, and not The Herald, who set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive, personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us. Hart had, after all, given the media no choice in the matter.

I had a chance to talk to Fiedler about this over lunch one day in the spring of 2013. We ate at a French restaurant near the campus of Boston University, where Fiedler, who went on to run The Herald before his retirement, was now installed as dean of the College of Communication.

Fiedler explained to me that while he knew no political reporter had ever undertaken this kind of surveillance on a presidential candidate or written an article about a possible extramarital affair, he had never doubted that Hart’s liaison with Rice, if it could be proved, was a legitimate story. Fielder’s view — a view shared by a lot of his younger colleagues and informed, no doubt, by the lingering ghosts of Nixon — was that it wasn’t a reporter’s job to decide which aspects of a candidate’s character were germane to the campaign and which weren’t. It was the job of reporters to vet potential presidents by offering up as detailed a dossier about that person as they could assemble, and it was the voters’ job to rule on relevance, one way or the other.

Fiedler readily acknowledged that the order of events pertaining to the “follow me around” quote had since become jumbled in the public mind, and his expression was genuinely regretful. He mostly blamed the way the TV news programs that weekend juxtaposed The Herald’s reporting with the quote from The Times Magazine, as if one had led to the other. That had really been the beginning of the myth, he said, and from that time on, people were confused about which came first — “follow me around” or The Herald investigation. When I asked why he had never tried to correct the record, Fiedler shrugged sadly. “I don’t know what I would need to do,” he said.

Then I mentioned to Fiedler that I had done a web search on his name recently and been sent to his biographical page on the B.U. website. And this is what it said: “In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about marital infidelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart’s campaign-killing affair with a Miami model.” Why did his own web page explicitly repeat something he knew to be untrue?

Fiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. “You know what?” he said. “I didn’t know that. Honestly. I’m serious.” He stared at me for another beat, stunned. “Wow.” I knew he meant it. I was surprised to find that for more than a year afterward — until just last month — Fiedler hadn’t changed a word.

In the days after the Herald story, Hart continued on to New Hampshire, where photographers and political reporters, who until then had always observed some sense of decorum, shoved one another aside and leapt over shrubs in an effort to get near the wounded candidate. It was there, at a carnival-like news conference on Wednesday, May 6, that Paul Taylor, a star reporter for The Washington Post, publicly asked Hart the question that no presidential candidate in America to that point had ever been asked, let alone from one of the country’s most admired newspapers: “Have you ever committed adultery?”

Hart stumbled to answer and ultimately said he shouldn’t have to. What he didn’t know then was that Taylor’s colleagues at The Post — acting at the direction of the paper’s legendary editor and Watergate hero, Ben Bradlee — were already unearthing evidence of a relationship with another woman. By Thursday, Hart was back in Colorado, news helicopters buzzing over his house like something out of Vietnam, and his campaign was through.

The most enduring image of that time, of course, is the infamous photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap, which Armandt snapped on a crowded dock in Bimini during that overnight cruise and later sold to The National Enquirer. In it, Rice is wearing a short white dress; Hart is wearing a “Monkey Business crew” T-shirt, along with a startled, crooked grin. Most people who lived through the event, and some who covered it, will tell you that the photo is what provided irrefutable evidence of the affair and drove Hart from the race. But the photo didn’t surface until nearly three weeks after Hart suspended his candidacy. It was a final indignity, to be sure, but it had nothing to do with his decision to quit.

If Nixon’s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart’s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else. By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: “We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.”

As an industry, we aspired chiefly to show politicians for the impossibly flawed human beings they are: a single-minded pursuit that reduced complex careers to isolated transgressions. As the former senator Bob Kerrey, who has acknowledged participating in an atrocity as a Navy Seal in Vietnam, told me once, “We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are.” That quote, I thought, should have been posted on the wall of every newsroom in the country, just to remind us that it was true.

Predictably, politicians responded to all this with a determination to give us nothing that might aid in the hunt to expose them, even if it meant obscuring the convictions and contradictions that made them actual human beings. Each side retreated to its respective camp, where they strategized about how to outwit and outflank the other, occasionally to their own benefit but rarely to the voters’. Maybe this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against liars and hypocrites. But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. It drove a lot of potential candidates with complex ideas away from the process, and it made it easier for a lot of candidates who knew nothing about policy to breeze into national office, because there was no expectation that a candidate was going to say anything of substance anyway.

Gary Hart, meanwhile, has continued to try to influence the issues of the day. Now a robust 77, he has written 15 books since 1987, including three novels, and now serves on voluntary commissions for the secretaries of state and defense. But he never said much publicly about the scandal or admitted to having an affair, and he never really recovered, politically or emotionally.

A few years ago, during one of our many conversations in the upstairs, book-lined study in Hart’s Colorado home, I asked him whether he ever felt a sense of relief at having not actually become president. This was what people said still — that he allowed himself to be caught because he was ambivalent about the job.

“It was a huge disappointment,” Hart said, shaking his head. “A huge disappointment.”

Lee Hart, to whom he has now been married for more than a half century, had entered the study and was refilling our water glasses, and she overheard him.

“That’s why he accepts every invitation where someone wants him to speak,” she told me. “Every time he can make any kind of a contribution, he does it, because he thinks he’s salving his conscience. Or salving his place after death or something.” She appeared to try to stop herself from continuing, but couldn’t quite do it. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been very difficult.”

“Is that why I give speeches?” Hart said defensively.

“No, no,” Lee answered quickly. “But you do things when you’re tired to the bone that you shouldn’t be doing.”

I asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.

“I don’t feel guilty,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with salving my conscience.”

“No, I don’t mean your conscience,” Lee said.

I asked Lee what she had meant to say.

“Gary feels guilty,” Lee said finally. “Because he feels like he could have been a very good president.”

“I wouldn’t call it guilt,” Hart said.

“No. Well.”

“It’s not guilt, babe,” he protested. “It’s a sense of obligation.”

“Yeah, O.K.,” Lee said, sounding relieved. “That’s better. Perfect.”

“You don’t have to be president to care about what you care about,” Hart said.

“It’s what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very day,” Lee said.

“Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years’ time.

“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating. “You have to live with that, you know?”

An article on Sept. 21 about Gary Hart and the scandal that derailed his run for the presidency in 1987 misidentifed the military branch in which the former senator Bob Kerrey — another public figure touched by scandal — served when, in 1969, he participated in an operation in Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of civilians. He was a member of the Navy SEALs, not a soldier in the Army.

An article on Sept. 21 about Gary Hart misidentified the location of the Capitol Hill townhouse where he lived in 1987. It is on Sixth Street SE, not Fifth Street. The article also misquoted Bill Clinton’s response after he was accused of having an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. He said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” not “I did not have sex with that woman.”

A cover article on Sept. 21 examined the effects of the Gary Hart-Donna Rice scandal on American politics. After the article was published, former journalists for The Miami Herald disputed one aspect of the chronology of the week they pursued the Gary Hart story: when Herald journalists first saw a New York Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’ In interviews before publication, the reporter Tom Fiedler confirmed seeing that article for the first time on Saturday, May 2, as he flew to Washington to join a stakeout of Hart’s townhouse. But after publication, Fiedler recalled that he may actually have seen the Times article on Thursday or Friday. Jim McGee and James Savage, Fiedler’s former colleagues at The Herald, recall that McGee became aware of the article on Friday, before McGee flew to Washington. Fiedler then showed the article to Savage on the plane on Saturday. Therefore, it is very likely that the original version of this article, based in large part on Fiedler’s account, referred incorrectly to the point at which any of the Herald journalists first saw the Times article quoting Hart as saying, ‘'Follow me around.'’

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Infamous Mega Yacht Monkey Business to Appear in The Front Runner

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The film made its debut in September at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the state where Hart was a senator. It opens nationwide on November 9.

Hart was the leading Democratic presidential candidate in 1977 until rumors of an affair with a woman named Donna Rice surfaced. That, along with rumors of his womanizing and a photo of the two alongside the yacht, sank his campaign. The photo showed Rice sitting on Hart’s lap while he wore a “Monkey Business Crew” t-shirt.

Media coverage of the alleged affair was widespread. William C. Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer, chartered Monkey Business in 1987. Broadhurst, Hart and two women, one of which was Rice, cruised from Miami to Bimini for a day trip. According to Rice, they stayed overnight because customs was closed. She and the other woman allegedly stayed on the yacht. Broadhurst and Hart reportedly stayed on Broadhurst’s boat, which was moored nearby.

Filming for The Front Runner, which stars Hugh Jackman, occurred in Savannah, GA, last autumn. It’s unclear which yacht plays the role of Monkey Business, which was originally launched by Broward Marine in 1978 and custom built for Donald Soffer, owner of the Turnberry Isle Resort near Miami.

The 25-meter mega yacht was made of aluminum and features cabins with rosewood paneling. Amenities included a hot tub and a full bar. Some of the other famous guests that sailed aboard Monkey Business included Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson and Julio Iglesias.

In 1988, Cape Shoalwater, a U.S. Coastguard boat, seized the yacht after a safety inspect off Bimini found nine grams of marijuana aboard. In 1990, Soffer put Monkey Business up for sale, saying that the scandal had failed to make the mega yacht profitable. The vessel was priced at $1.5 million, but it failed to sell. In 2004, Monkey Business was still docked at the Turnberry Yacht Club.

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Politicians, Boats, Bad Behavior: Sailing Into Trouble With America's Scandal Navy

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Updated Tuesday, April 23

ep. Devin Nunes, who decided earlier this month to sue the parent company of the Fresno Bee over a story that did not allege he took part in a 2015 orgy aboard a yacht on San Francisco Bay, just helped us pinpoint the latest boat in America's Scandal Navy.

The nation's real Navy — the one with submarines and aircraft carriers and missiles and Tom Cruise pretending to be a pilot — has a heroic past conveyed by the names Bonhomme Richard, Constitution, Monitor and Missouri, and great engagements like the battles of Lake Erie, Mobile Bay and Midway.

The nation's Scandal Navy is short on armament but long on sordid episodes involving politicians whose careers have often intersected with yachts and various brands of impropriety. The roster of scandalcraft includes names like the Monkey Business, the Duke-Stir, the Sequoia and the Potomac. The engagements they were part of were more fit for the National Enquirer than the national Naval War College.

The latest addition to the flotilla — again, thanks to Congressman Nunes — is the Alpha Omega. That's a 59-foot yacht owned by the proprietor of St. Helena's Alpha Omega Winery, a close friend of Nunes who occasionally donates the craft for charity events.

Nunes announced earlier this month he had filed a $150 million defamation lawsuit against the McClatchy Co. over a story the Fresno Bee published last year. That piece recounted a suit filed by a former Alpha Omega Winery employee who said she witnessed an orgy during a charity cruise aboard the yacht in 2015.

Nunes' connection to the episode, which allegedly involved a group of male guests using cocaine and consorting with possibly under-age prostitutes aboard the Alpha Omega, is that he has a small investment in the winery. Beyond Nunes' investment, there's no suggestion in the original lawsuit, or in the Bee's story, that he participated in the bay bacchanal.

That's a little disappointing, because the most illustrious craft in America's Scandal Navy have hosted our elected representatives doing things on board they'd never want their constituents or their wives to know about. But who knows? The Alpha Omega is for sale , and maybe some other member of Congress or the Legislature will get a chance to breach ethics, morals and/or federal, state and local laws during a voyage.

While we wait for that to happen, here are some other illustrious members of the Scandal Navy:

The Monkey Business, 1987

The Scandal Navy's honorary flagship. If you've been following seaborne political misbehavior for a while, you'll remember Monkey Business as the yacht on which, in 1987, a promising Democratic presidential candidate, Gary Hart, saw his career sink out of sight (ironically, the boat stayed afloat).

The details have been rehashed for decades, but briefly: Hart, a senator from Colorado, was seen as the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination for the presidency in 1988. Before a single vote had been cast in the primaries, however, Hart became the subject of an investigation by the Miami Herald, which had gotten a tip that the senator was having an extramarital affair. Among the evidence of impropriety provided to the paper were snapshots of Hart and his paramour, a woman named Donna Rice, on a pleasure cruise from Florida to the island of Bimini aboard the Monkey Business.

A team of Herald reporters, accompanied by a photographer, witnessed Hart and Rice entering and leaving the senator's Washington, D.C., residence. Hart denied a dalliance, but the resulting explosion of attention led him to quit the presidential race. Reports continue to circulate that the episode was a dirty trick orchestrated by operatives working for the campaign of Republican candidate George H.W. Bush.

Recommended reading: " How Gary Hart's Downfall Forever Changed American Politics ," by Matt Bai in The New York Times Magazine (2014).

" Was Gary Hart Set Up? ," by James Fallows in The Atlantic (2018).

The Duke-Stir, 2005

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a San Diego County Republican, was a star in the real U.S. Navy: an oft-decorated fighter-bomber pilot and instructor at the service's Top Gun flight combat school. He's also honorary commodore of America's Scandal Navy.

Cunningham was elected to Congress in 1990 and won re-election seven times. In 2005, the San Diego Union-Tribune began reporting Cunningham's ties to a defense contractor who secured a series of Pentagon deals with the congressman's help. The ties included shady-looking real estate transactions and a variety of gifts and favors — including the contractor buying a $140,000, 45-foot yacht upon which Cunningham lived rent-free. The former combat ace's floating residence, which had been named the Buoy Toy, was rechristened the Duke-Stir.

The Union-Tribune's reporting led to a Pulitzer Prize — and also to an FBI investigation, criminal charges and the congressman's eventual guilty plea to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud. Cunningham resigned from Congress and spent nearly seven years in federal custody.

'USS Traficant,' 2001

In the early 1980s, James Traficant was a sheriff in northeastern Ohio who found himself facing federal charges he had taken bribes from mobsters. Traficant — not a lawyer — defended himself in court and beat the rap. Shortly afterward, he won election to Congress — but it wasn't the last time he faced corruption charges.

Sometime during his nine terms in the House of Representatives, the Democrat Traficant bought a boat from Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho who is best remembered outside the Gem State for allegedly trying to solicit sex in an airport bathroom. The boat may have been the least eye-catching thing about Traficant, who was known for his throwback '70s attire and a wild mane of hair — it was actually a toupee — that he once claimed he cut himself with a weed whacker.

Traficant's House tenure ended when he was convicted on 10 counts of racketeering, bribery and fraud. Among other things, he was accused of demanding salary kickbacks from his congressional staff and requiring them to do repair work on his boat, docked at a Washington, D.C. marina. I've tried without success to dig up the name of the craft, which Traficant described during his House expulsion hearing as "a 1970 wooden Egg Harbor motor yacht. It is old, but it was lovely inside." Not even the grand jury indictment mentions the boat's name. We'll just call it the USS Traficant in honor of the late congressman, who served seven years in prison for his crimes. He died in 2014 after a tractor toppled over on him at his Ohio horse farm.

Recommended reading: " Oh, Behave ," by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker (2002).

USS Sequoia, 1963

The Sequoia served as the yacht for most U.S. presidents between the mid-1920s and the late '70s, including John F. Kennedy. In May 1963, less than six months before Kennedy was assassinated, the boat was the scene of his 46th and final birthday party .

It was not a sedate affair. There was plenty of champagne to go around, and accounts of the party say that one of the president's brothers, Sen. Edward Kennedy, somehow had one leg of his trousers ripped off during the proceedings. But what elevates the Sequoia to inclusion in the Scandal Navy was the president's behavior.

Among the guests at the party were future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, who by this point had been friends with John and Jackie Kennedy for years. At one point in the party, Tony Bradlee said in a published account, JFK began chasing her.

"I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass,” Bradlee said. “It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said, ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad."

Recommended reading: " JFK's last birthday: Gifts, champagne and wandering hands on the presidential yacht,"  by Ian Shapira in the Washington Post (2017).

USS Potomac, 1980

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't care for the Sequoia, and had a 165-foot Coast Guard cutter, the Electra, refitted and rechristened as the Potomac , which became a presidential superyacht. We don't have any tales to relate of presidential misbehavior aboard the boat, though FDR was known to have carried on at least one long-term affair during his three-plus terms in office.

No, the Potomac's scandal moment came after it was retired from government service — a period during which one of its owners, briefly, was Elvis Presley .

Eventually, the Potomac wound up in the hands of a Southern California bail bondsman named Aubrey Phillips. In September 1980, the Potomac was docked at San Francisco's Pier 26 next to another boat Phillips owned, the Valkyrie. Both craft displayed banners bearing the legend "Crippled Children's Society of America," a nonexistent organization that turned out to be a front for a marijuana smuggling operation. The boats were seized, along with 20 tons of pot, in a bust carried out by dozens of state and federal agents backed up by the Coast Guard.

The Potomac was towed to Treasure Island, where it sank six months later. Refloated, the former "Floating White House" was sold at auction to the executive director of the Port of Oakland, who spent $15,000 to acquire it. After a long process of fundraising and a $5 million restoration, the Potomac was opened as a museum at Oakland's Jack London Square and offers cruises throughout the year.

Updates April 22: This story has been updated to include a reference to one recent account that suggests that Gary Hart may have been set up in the Donna Rice incident by a Republican political operative. April 22: This story has been updated to clarify that the Alpha Omega Winery's yacht is occasionally donated for charity events, not hired out as the original copy reported.

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• What Is Cinema?

The Road To Bimini

Six weeks before Gary Hart killed off his presidential candidacy, I had a story in the works describing the war that raged within this double man. It was a war to the death. After studying Hart on and off for three years, I had become convinced that this time around it was not a question of if Gary Hart would destroy himself but a question of when.

He accomplished the stunning feat of political self-destruction in only twenty-six days. Why would any man in his right mind defy a New York Times reporter who asked about his alleged womanizing to “put a tail on me,” then cancel his weekend campaign appearances and arrange a tryst at his Washington town house with a Miami party girl? What demon was loose in the fifty-year-old front-runner of the Democratic Party, who lurched across the chartered yacht Monkey Business, drink in hand, and boasted to a model friend of Donna Rice’s that this was her big chance to party with the next president of the United States?

When he was caught and cut and ran, I thought that put an end to my story. Then debate broke out. Adamant that he had in no way transgressed, Hart lashed out at the wrongheadedness and prurience of the press and stalked off the public stage in anger and defiance. Hart’s own divided mind found its analogue in defenders within the press who still believe a Chinese wall can exist between public and private selves. Husbands and wives bickered over what adultery has to do with whether or not a person would make a good president.

Hart’s political demise remains an object of intense conversation because the central question remains unanswered: How could a man so dangerously flawed come so close to persuading us that he was fit to lead a superpower through the perils of the nuclear age? I have been dismayed that many people fail to grasp what is really at issue here. The key to the downfall of Gary Hart is not adultery. It is character. And that is an issue that will not go away.

A pathological deficit in Hart’s character riddled the public man as thoroughly as it ruled the private one. Through both his races for the presidency, to appease the inner dictator of his sore guilty soul, Hart sought out pretty spiritual playmates like Marilyn Youngbird, a Native American divorcée, who would worship his driven-to-do-good side and play back the message that he was worthy, even exalted, in his quest for power. Such worshipers were not, finally, a fair match against wilder demons that drew him to the satyrs, procurers, hustlers, and bimbos always first to spot a weakness in a powerful man and eager to exploit it.

The people close to Hart knew of his bizarre behavior patterns. Almost every one of the key players from his 1984 campaign had turned his back on Hart and walked away in puzzlement or silent disgust. The new players in his 1988 campaign rationalized to themselves and lied to us. His wife, Lee, a woman with a twenty-eight-year investment to protect, continued to be his accomplice in the sham that here was a healthy, happy man with a rehabilitated marriage who was our next great hope for leader of the free world.

Yet clues to Hart’s fatal character flaw were strewn all across his public life. If one missed the clues there, he had been flaunting the same weakness in his private escapades for at least fifteen years. If character is destiny, the character issue predicts not only the destiny of one candidate but the potential destiny of the United States he seeks to lead. That is why it is a serious exercise to try to solve the psychological mystery of Gary Hart’s demons. At a deeper level, the revelations raise the question of how much we really know about the character of any of the candidates running for president. How hard are we willing to work to save ourselves from waking up, once more, with the terrible aftertaste of a night on the town with yet another unrevealed and perfidious president?

Retracing his steps, I traveled through the various worlds of Gary Hart. The population of each world was alien to and unaware of the others. With the help of his sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins, the pastor and old Sunday-school chums from his Church of the Nazarene, and his closest classmates in Ottawa, Kansas, I re-examined the mental and moral distinguishing marks left on his character by an upbringing far from normal. Then I went on to the good soldiers who believed in his worthy side as he cut a bold and even sacrificial swath across American politics. Feeling betrayed, most wanted to share what had always puzzled them about Hart.

To both of these groups the world of Donna Rice was about as familiar as a black hole. It is a demimonde that thrives on the illusion that beautiful young women and drugs are effortlessly available, as party favors. Since Donna is determined to come out of the scandal squeaky clean, a celebrity who is “buddy-buddy” with Barbara Walters, she and the agent she hired as a “crisis manager” were not forthcoming, and clearly had a manufactured story to tell. So I sought out her father, who admitted his own doubts about his daughter’s dubious life-style. And with the help of Miami and Fort Lauderdale prosecutors and drug-enforcement agents I examined Donna’s live-in love affair with a big-time cocaine dealer, who is currently serving ten years in a federal penitentiary. Four of Donna’s friends illuminated the rest of the smoke and mirrors in this high-rolling netherworld. It might be seen as the forbidden picture show to which Hart’s hidden, sybaritic side had always longed for admission. Indeed, it might be one in a dizzying series of mirrors on which, according to a senior political consultant who has known and watched him for over a decade, “Gary Hart has been writing in lipstick for years, ‘Stop me before I fuck again.’ ”

Out of the lull of a thousand miles of plains the visitor is jolted into Ottawa by bumping over a railroad crossing. They crisscross the town, these old tracks that hum with the importance of far-away places—Chicago, St. Louis, New York, even California—but the trains do not stop here. Ottawa, Kansas, is one of those respectable blurs glimpsed by the people who pass through, no hope of greatness in it. The tracks serve only to fence in this dozy farm town, as if to keep it safe from worldly contamination, safe even from the future.

Scarcely a thing has changed in Ottawa in the twenty-five years since Gary Hart broke out. The houses are still bungalow-like clapboard boxes with gliders on their sagging porches, proud, tired, and perpetually in need of a fresh coat of paint. Apart from a few tire swings and mechanical rotating daisies, precious little is squandered on pleasure here. People still eat the same syrup-soaked foods and drive ’47 Chevys (now rebuilt) and set fans on their floors against the creep of heat. The girls still have doughy legs and the boys Fuller-brush cuts, and the fifty-year-old men who were boys with Gary Hartpence get together down at the Main Street bakery every morning and have the same conversation they’ve been having for the past quarter of a century. The fourth of May was different. The guys were all waiting on Walt Dengel with a wallbanger of news.

“I see your buddy Gary did it to himself,” one taunted.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the respected town mortician. Dengel, who has known Gary since fourth grade, had been about to open a local Hart headquarters.

“No, man, he got caught with his pants down.”

“Dumb,” Dengel muttered.

Two weeks after the scandal broke, these men who are contemporaries of Hart’s, stumped by his mystifying behavior, were scouring their memories all over again to offer me clues. The first words that came to mind when his schoolmates described Gary Hartpence were invariably “always neat and clean.” Skinny and fine-boned, the boy always wore a long-sleeved dress shirt and perfectly pressed slacks, with his hair cropped short above jug ears—a creature resembling in no way the rangy, cowboy-booted desperado of his later years.

They discovered that not one of them was close to him. Not one had gone home with him. The more Gary’s schoolmates scratched their heads, the more they questioned if the boy they thought they had known, the boy they had given back to the press in tidy anecdotes, ever really existed.

His athletic record, for instance, is pure fiction. Hartpence played a fair game of touch football in eighth grade, but didn’t even come out in the ninth. The only league in which he played basketball was the church league, which admitted boys for superlative attendance at Sunday school. No, his schoolmates corrected the record, Gary wasn’t good enough to make any varsity team, except tennis, which was a sport for leftovers. Classmate Kent Granger reminisced over their last tennis game, in which he beat Hartpence 6—love. Granger remembers because he had polio at the time.

Granger believes he knew Gary as well as any of his classmates did. But they weren’t in the same “carload,” and the social-classification system in Ottawa came down to who was in which car draggin’ Main Street. Granger belonged to the jock crowd. “We smoked and had successful relationships with ladies.” Being that Ottawa had no bars, there were only a few outlets for boys to show their virility. One was to let a little air out of the car tires and hump them over the railroad tracks next to Skunk Run, then gun it eight miles to the next town, hoping a train didn’t catch you first. In a recent autobiographical sketch, Hart passed himself off as a participant in this daredevil pursuit. “Not Gary,” swears Walt Dengel, “he wasn’t nocturnal then.” He chuckles. “Not like he is now. He didn’t drag Main Street either. He’d only come out for special occasions.”

The Youth Center was the social cornice of Ottawa, equivalent to the dance assembly, the country club, meeting under the clock at the Biltmore, the essence of being “in.” Elbowed back by the tracks of the Santa Fe line, the Youth Center still functions today, with Ping-Pong tables and a record player and chaperons. When Gary’s classmates gathered there, everybody danced. Everybody? I ask.

“Maybe Gary didn’t,” amends Dengel. Gary and his sister, Nancy Lee, were never welcomed by the clique at the Youth Center: “They thought they were fancier people,” she recalls with a wilted bitterness.

Gary never talked about his feelings. Nice kid, but he never gave much. Granger pegs him as the slowest in maturing of anyone in their class, in every respect except intellectually. One thing they all agree upon for certain: the “mischievous” boy that Hart himself tried to manufacture for the press on his staged homecoming last spring was an outright lie.

“When the mischief started,” recalls Kent Granger, “Gary always faded away.”

Granted, he belonged to the strictest church in town, but the whole town was conservative, a dry town in a dry state, with standardized Christian manners that equated dullness with godliness. The other kids assumed Gary Hartpence’s church was pretty much like theirs, the First United Methodist or the First Baptist. But by their very stature and social prestige, the two redoubtable spinster churches that still dominate the town bear no resemblance to the grocery-box plainness of the Church of the Nazarene.

In fact, the Nazarene church at that time in Ottawa had no more than fifty members. Of the four young people, two were Gary and his sister. The whole sect had a national membership of around 233,000. Its rules of Christian conduct, meant to protect initiates from going to hell, forbade dancing, listening to the radio, seeing movies—one never knew when something satanic might come on—and, of course, drinking. Some of the Nazarenes in Ottawa today told me they had never seen a picture show. Well, maybe one Roy Rogers movie, but only because the children insisted on seeing Trigger. Nobody could remember Gary so much as taking a beer all during high school. He implored select schoolmates to give him blow-by-blow descriptions of the movies they saw. He never told anyone why. He made up excuses. Even then, he lived a lie.

I called on a spry lady who at one point lived two doors down from the Hartpences and had been close to Gary’s mother. Using the terminology of their church, I asked if she thought Gary had backslid seriously.

“Honey, well, yes, I do. Gary was a good boy. I hope there’s some good in him left. As long as he was a Christian, we’d have known he wouldn’t do this. But as you get into these worldly jobs, you backslide. Power gets to a man.” She stitched up her lips. “I could just pull his ears.”

I had asked Hart in an interview in 1984 about his own boyhood conception of God.

“Was He punitive?”

“Yeah, if you did bad.” He laughed.

“He was a God of mercy, but of wrath as well.”

I had also asked if his mother was at all demonstrative.

“Not really.”

And of Ottawa, Kansas, what was his first memory?

“Very cold,” he blurted.

His mother had drilled into the young Gary her own dark evangelical beliefs: that man is born with a sinful nature, that natural functions and appetites must “continue to be controlled” by “putting to death the deeds of the body.” The only refuge the boy found from the cold, from the frozen dogma of a bleak church, from the instability of frequent moving and the constant state of alert created by his ailing mother, was in books.

Friends cannot remember a girl ever making a play for the straitlaced Gary. “Lots of laughs but not a looker” is how the kinder kids described the girl he dated senior year, Kay Shaughnessy. Kay became a career navy officer and never did marry.

The name of Ann Warren is mentioned. She spent time around Hart when he came back to Ottawa for his class reunion in 1984, and noticed that he didn’t say much, just sat back, being detached and looking uncomfortable, as he always had been.

“I did date Gary in high school,” she acknowledges. “But he wasn’t romantic, no, definitely he wasn’t.” Still, when the extroverted Ann went on to date another boy, Hart had a fit.

“I wonder about all these affairs, if he really enjoyed them,” muses the widow Warren. “Maybe it was just revenge for all the things he never had. I think he’s still thumbing his nose at the world.”

Nina (pronounced Nye-nah) Hartpence, Gary’s mother, was someone Walt Dengel knew rather well. She made frequent use of the ambulance owned by his father’s funeral home. “It was more of a delivery-service type thing,” Dengel says, by way of explaining Nina Hartpence’s frequent calls demanding to be taken into Kansas City to the hospital. “She was frail, kinda chronic—I couldn’t even tell you what we took her to the hospital for.” This is not surprising, since Mrs. Hartpence, who had always complained of vague ailments, kept her family on call for such trips throughout the last fifteen years of her life.

The local newspaper found out the famous politician’s mother had moved the family at least sixteen times before Gary got out of high school. Nina Hartpence would take a place, clean it up, then move—once in the course of a single day—and start cleaning again. Nina had an extraordinary hold over her family. When she wasn’t turning the whole household upside down to meet her standards of perfection, she would take to her bed and control everyone around her by complaints of headaches, or asthma, or heart palpitations, and ultimately of thyroid problems. Relatives talk about how Carl Hartpence, Gary’s father, waited on her hand and foot. He couldn’t even get out of the house to go fishing for fear of leaving her alone.

“She was strictly religious,” her brother-in-law Ralph Hartpence told me. “She’d always quote out of the Bible. She’d hold services in the church and get Gary to preach with her.”

Did other members of the family think Nina’s strictness strange? I ask Uncle Ralph, who comes from the more passive father’s side of the family.

“It sure showed on Gary,” says his uncle. “He stayed with us at our trailer house in Colorado in ’48, when he was ten or ’leven. Never saw such a well-behaved boy in my life.” Gary dared not take more than one toy out of the box at a time.

“Why don’t you take the whole box outdoors,” his Uncle Ralph kept coaxing, “take out all the toys like my kids do and have a ball.”

“I’m afraid of getting dirty,” he remembers Gary saying.

“That boy needed to be turned loose.”

Not according to Aunt Erma Louise Pritchard, who of all the relatives remains closest in spirit to Nina Pritchard Hartpence. “Gary’s mother was compulsively clean,” she says approvingly, and Gary was always a good boy, she emphasizes. I ask what she thinks of his recent behavior.

“Somebody set him up.” (This is not a phrase that comes naturally from a lady with hair the yellowed white of never-used linen.) “I’ll never see and never believe, just like Nina wouldn’t have believed it.” Her demeanor perfectly expresses the contentment of the walking dead, a condition distinct from that of her sister-in-law, Gary’s deceased mother, only by the outstanding balance to be settled on her account with her Maker.

Outside the gaunt parsonage that was once a home of the Hartpences, I meet the current pastor. Gary Hartpence is a dead soul as far as the church is concerned. He died the day—the Reverend Earl Copsey remembers the date exactly, September 20, 1968—“he left the church to go back out to the world of sin.”

The truly singular feature of this sect is that its members believe one can, and should, achieve perfection in this life. No wonder Hart admitted to me in 1984, “The one Protestant quality I suppose I’ve got my share of is guilt.”

People raised in such strict Fundamentalist families never experience the turbulence common to normal adolescence. And since the stage of rebellion and identity formation is not allowed, breakaways like Hart often behave for years like belated teenagers. Rebellious, angry, and irresponsible as adults, they commonly harbor an extreme fear of commitment, and buck any sort of structure. Yet even as they are compelled to break rules and backslide toward Satan, the voice of a wrathful God is almost impossible to silence. The hold that this kind of authoritarian upbringing has on a person can last thirty or forty years after the formal church tie has been severed.

Charleen Peterson Roberts, a Nazarene teenager a little older than Gary, left the church even before he did. But the church never really leaves a person. The world is black and white, and there are only two ways to go. Charleen’s voice lowers superciliously. “Gary’s going to hell, that’s all, it’s pretty plain. If he doesn’t get right with God.”

Donna Rice, or “the woman in question,” as Hart dehumanized her by his only references, was cast as the villain of the piece. “Irate” is how Gary’s sister described herself when I phoned the day the infamous picture appeared in the National Enquirer. “Girls like her are a dime a dozen. I can tell you, when Gary and I sat and talked on April 12, he said what an asset Lee was.” She added that the children—Andrea, who still lives at home while attending the University of Colorado, and John, who stays away at the University of Massachusetts—were both “absolutely devastated.”

Then why, I asked, would Hart have taken such a cruel and reckless chance? Nancy Lee said she meant to ask him. A week later she was calm and implacable.

“Are you reading that crap in the newspapers?” Hart had demanded of her. “Well, don’t, just don’t,” he directed. He and Lee had gotten on the phone and given her the family line: Their marriage is stronger than ever; the real truth will eventually come out; the “setup” was planned by Hart’s enemies even before he announced.

“Why would Gary give up something like Lee for that lowlife,” Nancy Lee asked rhetorically, “a twenty-nine-year-old tramp?”

But the evidence is that when Gary Hart did break out into the worldly world, he gravitated toward its farthest extreme, using hedonists and fixers to find him girls. They led him into the kind of suspect scene where party drugs were ubiquitous. With a lust for danger, he plunged into the world of Donna Rice, a world even her father feared to look at too closely. Donna’s protestations that her privacy has been “beaten down by the press” ring rather hollow. It was Donna, not the press or her pals, who dropped the bombshell about her weekend cruise with Hart on the Monkey Business. That assured her of the national celebrity she had so long but lucklessly chased. Her distress was not over the publicity, but over the fact that, to her continuing astonishment, it was negative.

Spindle-legged and buck-toothed as a young girl in Irmo, South Carolina, Donna Rice made mostly A’s and did missionary work for the Southern Baptists one summer. She blossomed by the age of twenty-one into a willowy if flatchested blonde, not beautiful but pretty, not unintelligent but undirected. What use was a Phi Beta Kappa key (offered to about 140 students—or 6 percent of her senior class) if it couldn’t buy her fame? She figured the easiest way to come by celebrity, according to friends, was to use her looks to make the right connections to meet “people of significance.”

In a lengthy interview with her father, Bill Rice, a highway engineer for the federal government in South Carolina, the nebulous outlines of her reported life-style began to take on definition. “She won that beauty contest and they put her up in New York and that’s when her life started to change.”

A mature New York businessman, according to one newspaper report, met Donna at a party, and took pity on the struggling newcomer. He invited her to stay at his East Side apartment for a few days. She moved in and stayed for two years. The anonymous businessman has described Donna as “always up.” She would go to discos all night, sleep late, and use his telephone constantly. Her room was always a mess, and although she turned up at “go-sees,” he said she didn’t need to take more than one modeling job every three months.

“I’ve been a little disturbed by her life-style,” her father admits. In June 1981, Donna called him from New York and warbled, “Guess who I went out with last night? Prince Albert.”

“Who in hell is Prince Albert?” her father drawled. But that was typical of the calls Donna made to her friends and family, itemizing each “date” with a famous person: TV host Bill Boggs, Tony Curtis, rock musician Don Henley. “She was always out having a good time,” her father recalls. “Driven to dating celebrities,” says the businessman. “They went from club to club every night,” remembers Shirley Semones, mother of Donna’s friend Julie.

“She drifted into acting because it’s what everybody else was doing,” adds Julie Semones. “She hasn’t really been serious about it.” Donna didn’t trouble to take classes or do plays like her friends, but she was nothing if not persistent about using people to get to the right parties. Julie began to resent it. “She’d meet people through me and she’d say, ‘Why don’t you stay in touch with these people? They’re good connections.’ ”

Finally, through her Arab connections, Julie introduced Donna to Nabila Khashoggi, daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Bang, Donna was invited to Adnan Khashoggi’s forty-sixth-birthday party, aboard his opulent new yacht, her ticket and expenses to Cannes paid for.

“Khashoggi could buy the finest caviar and champagne . . . why not the best females?” writes Ronald Kessler in his biography of Khashoggi. The strutting Saudi middleman was tiring of the tawdry and obvious tarts being supplied to him for show on his yacht. He soon let it be known to his several procurers that he wanted a better brand of glamorous young woman to languish on the silk-covered couches and slither along the chamois walls of his custom-made $70 million yacht, the Nabila. According to one procurer, recruitment standards for party girls were strict. They had to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, classy and elegant, capable of making conversation, and very, very clean, with just the right combination of innocence and sexiness.

Donna would have fit the bill. Fine-boned, well spoken, and fair, she was quite good at passing herself off as a southern belle. Michael Griffith, an attorney who met Miss Rice at a Bridgehampton party in 1980, told a New York paper that he believed she came from a wealthy South Carolina family and therefore didn’t have to work while she waited for her break.

The party aboard the Nabila was a peak experience for Donna. Khashoggi’s birthdays were always celebrated with great extravagance. Guests were swooped up by his helicopter and deposited on the yacht’s own helipad. They moved about the decks sipping Dom Pérignon and dining on duck and venison and dancing in the disco bathed in clouds of artificially generated mist. The revelry lasted until dawn.

“Her trips to Europe and Vegas were at the request of Khashoggi’s daughter,” Donna’s father confirmed, “and Donna’s part of it was paid.”

When Khashoggi went to Las Vegas, Kessler reports, he gambled with thousand-dollar chips, which bored his companions, but the girls he took along were showered with bracelets and dresses and could always have a sniff of cocaine if they so desired.

I asked Mr. Rice if Donna had a trust fund.

“What’s that?” her father asked. “You were under the mistaken impression we were rich?”

How, then, did Donna support herself for two years in Manhattan? I inquired.

“I don’t want to get into that,” her father said.

Had he talked to his daughter about it?

“I didn’t ask her those questions. It was never discussed.” All at once, Donna’s father revealed his own worst fears. “What was she doing in New York to make a living? Have you got some information indicating she was a hooker?”

I said I didn’t know. I discussed with him what I’d learned about Donna’s move to Florida: that she soon began living with a drug dealer, remained with him for two years, and neither of them had any legitimate source of steady income. Mr. Rice had met the young man and already knew the story.

“She just doesn’t think!” her father exploded in frustration. “Her mother and I tell her about appearances, but she’s so naïve it makes you want to throw up.” His voice went limp with resignation. “Looking back, of course, I can see where I went wrong. I could have advised her. But, hell, she’s twenty-nine years old.”

In 1983, Donna moved to Plantation, Florida, outside Fort Lauderdale, and stayed briefly with a friend, Debi Dalton. Debi introduced her to her handsome, laid-back neighbor, James Bradley Parks. He had a two-bedroom condo on University Drive and a big flashy motorcycle. Donna moved right in. She had supposedly gone to Florida in hopes of getting a SAG card. But her modeling work was “real sporadic,” according to Debi. She got Brad a chance for a beer commercial, begged him to go, but Brad preferred other, more adventurous and lucrative activities.

Caught red-handed in 1979 picking up a thousand-pound load of marijuana smuggled in on a low-flying plane from Colombia, Parks impressed authorities as “a real cocky guy.”

When I reached Parks’s attorney, Bruce Wagner, he was at first baffled as to why I’d be calling him for a story on Gary Hart. Then a whistle came through the phone. “Oh, that Donna. I know she went out with Brad all during the time his appeal was being prepared. Sure, she was at the sentencing.”

The sentencing hearing, on March 30, 1984, did not go down well for Brad and Donna. Brad protested he was a scapegoat, but said he’d straightened out and was getting modeling jobs. Then the government prosecutor brought on her witness: Burton P. Dupuy III. It seems that, the year before, Dupuy had spent two days at Brad’s condo, where he was given samples of cocaine, heard casual conversation about past escapades of flying south to pick up pot, and was finally asked if he would like to front cocaine. A few weeks later he was busted selling Brad’s stuff to an undercover agent. All the evidence suggested that Brad’s drug-dealing activities had only increased since his 1979 arrest.

Judge Jose Gonzalez Jr. was not well pleased by this tale. He gave James Bradley Parks ten years in Eglin Federal Prison.

“Brad Parks was what we in the Drug Enforcement Administration consider a significant drug trafficker,” says Special Agent Billy Yout. “Which means, in Florida,” he is careful to qualify, “hundreds of kilos of coke a year and millions of dollars.”

After Brad, times were tough for Donna. She had to get her own digs for the first time. And, according to her talent agent, Peggi McKinley, “her career was pretty much flat. It didn’t develop.” Aggressive, a loner, she was still sent on casting calls to try for parts as the all-American girl or young mom, but she was number fifteen on McKinley’s list, “because Donna was never on a winning streak.” A serious professional model in Miami can make over $100,000 a year. In 1986 Donna Rice earned no more than a few thousand dollars with McKinley. During the first five months of 1987, she brought in only $800, says the agent. And in the commercials business, as on the party-girl scene, a girl over twenty-five is no longer young.

So, two years ago, Donna had to take her first steady job, as a sales rep for Wyeth Laboratories. Boring, but it gave her rent money, a company car, and a reimbursable phone bill. Also, she could work on her own schedule. “She was always flying off somewhere,” the maintenance man at her unprepossessing apartment in North Miami told a reporter. There was no man in her life after Brad. “She didn’t like to have relationships with men,” offers Debi Dalton.

At her twenty-ninth-birthday party, Donna was without a date. The Miami man she spent more time with than any other, Steve Klengson, did show up. He is a self-described naïve country boy with whom she’d had a platonic friendship since their South Carolina days. At that point in her life, Klengson says, Donna was focused not on finding a relationship but on advancing her career. But she told him she’d had news that Brad might get out by next fall.

Klengson was the easygoing, movie-date pal Donna had leaned on, the year before, when she decided to have breast implants. “She was self-conscious about it,” he says, “but she thought a smaller-chested woman just didn’t make it.” When he married one of Donna’s casual acquaintances, two weeks after the party, “that put a strain on our friendship,” Klengson acknowledges. He feels he is partially to blame for not warning Donna off the path to Gary Hart.

Last Super Bowl weekend, Donna and her model friends Dana Weems and Lynn Armandt flew out to Los Angeles looking for action. Julie Semones took them to the private club Helena’s, where Donna met a Hollywood screenwriter, Eric Hughes. “She is sweet, but vacant,” he observed. Donna told him it was time for her to move to L.A., to really get her career off the pad. “She’s probably still too naïve to understand she should be desperate,” said the Hollywood veteran. The four women ended up watching the Super Bowl on TV.

In Miami, Donna hung out at the Turn-berry Isle resort complex, a world of make-believe concocted on 234 acres of landfill on the intercoastal waterway beside Miami Beach, where rich men migrate for winter weekends. From the four gigantic condo towers rising out of the flatness to the celebrities’ lounge, with its promise of “animated conversation” with guests like tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis or actor James Caan (who parties with Turnberry developer and resident Donald Soffer aboard the Monkey Business ) or dethroned Miss America Vanessa Williams, to the spa, billed as “one of the most lavish dens of self-indulgence in the world,” to the ocean club, where, the brochure promises (in not very ambiguous phrases), one can “create, with the help of our staff, a very private affair,” to the highly publicized “model nights,” when pretty girls drift out of the disco to the boats, their backs soft as butter, the whole concept is to induce the most expensive fantasies, fulfill them, and then collect.

“It sure ain’t jet-setty there,” Congressman Bill Lehman told the Miami Herald. Although he has a complimentary membership, Lehman makes it a point to stay away from the yacht club, the spa, the Monkey Business, and the mirrored disco: “That’s too fast a track for me.” Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, told me, “To people who know Miami, the fact that Hart was hanging out at a sleazy place like Turnberry said more about his character than Donna Rice.” In fact, Hart had visited the resort as early as the 1984 campaign, on a rest stop with Warren Beatty.

Turnberry Isle’s guest list is not limited to shady celebrities and models, according to D.E.A. agent Billy Yout. “A lot of drug traffickers frequent and stay at Turnberry, and with dealers come drugs. The atmosphere caters to their fast-lane life. These are people who can buy virtually anything, including the companionship of supposedly legitimate women.”

A number of Miami models, who are given complimentary membership, play an important role in creating the glitzy atmosphere. As a respected Miami architect describes their function, “it is to decorate the place and to help busy men relax.” He added that Donna Rice was one of these decorative fixtures. The Miami Herald has reported that the women are known as “Donnie’s girls,” but Turn-berry developer Donald Soffer laughed off the term as “an expression used by jealous guys.”

To save them the time and anxiety of “dating,” busy men can charter an entire party along with the yacht Monkey Business , which is owned by Soffer. The models who hang out at the Turnberry show up and the party begins. Lynn Armandt, whom the press has described as a model, is the party-girl connection. Her Too Hot Bikini Shop is nothing more than a tent with a few racks of bikinis on which she pays Soffer a nominal commission, while he provides her with a base on some of the most expensive square-footage in Florida.

The fateful night in March when Donna went aboard the Monkey Business, she didn’t even know who had chartered it. The woman who later tipped off Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald was aghast that Gary Hart could be at a party like that—“They weren’t the kind of people you’d think a presidential candidate would want to be around.” Many of the people onboard were drunk or using drugs, according to Fiedler’s source. She drew back in disgust from the arrogance of Hart’s come-on. But Donna, upon hearing his boast about being a presidential candidate, made a beeline for him.

“Hi, we met in Aspen,” she said for openers. The rest is history.

The next day, Hart invited her on the Bimini trip. Donna told anyone who would listen of her great coup. Now she had really hit it lucky. She even called her father when she got back: “Guess who I had a date with?” Upon hearing, Mr. Rice said, “Donna, you look out for those damned politicians. I’d better look up this boy’s history.” She told Debi Dalton that one of her friends was so excited she’d said, “Just think, you could be First Lady.” Debi dumped on Donna’s naïveté. “You won’t ever be anything but a sidekick.”

But let us not forget that the man who chartered the party boat for Hart was William Broadhurst, a friend and political intimate. Billed as “Mr. Fix It” for Edwin Edwards, the notorious Louisiana governor who beat a corruption charge, Broadhurst seems to specialize in getting close to politicians who are out of control. “Billy B.” arranged planes for the governor’s gambling trips and enjoyed his jokes about Edwards’s well-publicized womanizing. In the midst of the Hart— Monkey Business flap, a state senator asked the governor what he thought of his boy Broadhurst. A vintage Edwards comment came back: “Oh, Billy B., he was more careful when he was pimping for me.”

Broadhurst had also been throwing around a lot of money on Hart in the last year. His law firm challenged his use of its money for such political entertainment, and after the scandal his partners reorganized and dropped him from the partnership.

Given the company Gary Hart had chosen, he was heading for a crash. “The woman in question” does not even qualify as a villain, since she is a character with no center, no concrete goal, the kind known to “knockabout guys” as an “action girl,” just drifting from party to party in a perpetual state of expectation that the next introduction will lead to the next connection, which she can then parlay into a meeting with the next rich or famous man. On that game board, Donna started out at the top—with royalty, followed by one of the richest men in the world—and it was downhill from there. Nearly six years after her debut aboard the Nabila, she was a woman still waiting to hit a lucky streak. The Monkey Business , a mere $2,000-a-day charter, was a dinghy compared with Khashoggi’s $70 million yacht.

Donna Rice did not know how to protect herself, and, worse, she had nothing to protect. She collided with the world of a man who had everything to lose, and was ready to lose it.

Hart does not look like a happy man in that picture of the foursome on the bandstand in Bimini. His fevered red face resembles that of a terminally ill man suspended in those golden drugged seconds when, because his painkillers are working, he can pretend to revel in living.

The tempting, tortured journey by which Gary Hartpence crossed the tracks of Ottawa to the world of Donna Rice took him twenty-five years. He began on August 9, 1961, with an appearance at the courthouse in Ottawa to petition for a change of his name. Nina Hartpence, it was so noted, had an illness and was not present.

Years later, when the press discovered the name change, Hart was still covering up his very first act of independence, dared finally at the age of twenty-four.

His first attempt to leave had taken him to Yale Divinity School, but he went with the blessing of his mother by promising to live out her dream for him—to be a preacher. It was a common path for young men like Hart, wishing to go beyond the mind-set of their upbringing, but terrified to make a complete break. Now he headed back East to Yale Law School “with the idea of starting a new life,” says Nancy Lee.

What Gary had not shared with his mother were the Dostoyevskian visions already planted in his head by one J. Prescott Johnson, the philosophy professor who claims he “broke him” back at Bethany Nazarene College. Bethany was a bulwark of religious rectitude intended to protect its flock from the wickedness of universities; its dress code forbade girls to wear sleeveless blouses or blue jeans. Not only did Johnson introduce Hart to the seductive existentialists, he left the boy alone for the first time with a woman—Oletha (Lee) Ludwig. Lee came from a classy Kansas City family, and her father was general secretary of the whole sect. She wouldn’t give that “hick” the time of day.

“Gary saw Lee as a challenge,” says Nancy Lee. He took up that challenge, and they were married two months after their college graduation. Lee and Gary packed up and drove their jalopy east, to New Haven, where Lee began a six-year stint of supporting them while Gary attended the two graduate schools. Almost immediately Hart expressed frustration at being tied down. He told a friend, Tom Boyd, “You do everything right, you go with a girl, you get married. Then, six months later, you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?’ ”

Hart’s overwhelming need at that stage was to find an identity to replace his necrotic Nazarene past. As a volunteer in Jack Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, he found his first model. With the utter surrender of a sword-swallower at the circus, Hart internalized J.F.K.’s values and attitudes, then tried to conjure up the same charisma by copying his gestures and even the Bostonian twang. Marking well that here was a presidential candidate who could play around with impunity, Hart took Jack and Jackie’s marriage as a model.

After two years in Washington at the Justice Department, where the fledgling attorney worked on cases left over from the McCarthy era, Hart struck out for Colorado. It was 1967. Colorado in the swinging sixties was the frontier for a covey of young, idealistic lawyers looking for a place to resettle, do good, and “be free.” Patricia Schroeder, now a congresswoman, and Richard Lamm, later governor, were a part of that movement. But, for all the group’s nonconformist élan, its members saw Gary Hart as the biggest risk taker.

No sooner had Hart served a year within the confines of a traditional law firm than he moved into a basement to start his own practice. Hart himself told me that was the greatest turning point in his life. He was thirty-one, and the father of two. But that bold move was only the beginning of an accelerated flight from his past. In the same year, 1968, he formally left his church.

His mother, already disappointed at his straying into the secular woods, set a cold sentence upon him. She told Aunt Erma Louise, “He’s changed.” From Nina, that was a condemnation.

In 1970, abandoning his new practice, he left his wife and family and moved out on the trail to work for an apparently hopeless cause called the McGovern campaign. “We thought he was nuts,” says Pat Schroeder. Not remotely interested in ideas in those days, Hart prided himself on being a cool technocrat. The intoxication of disencumbering himself of all obligations—human, financial, and spiritual—swept Hart into that high, sweet air the Scriptures call “lighter than vanity.” And in this weightless state, he met his mirror image.

Warren Beatty, star and sybarite, was a daredevil from Hollywood taking a year out of his life to work for McGovern and indulge his earliest childhood wish, to be president. He could introduce Hart to the glamour of Hollywood, and Hart could offer him political credibility—a magnificent symbiosis. It was the beginning of a long association. In age and temperament Beatty and Hart were a perfect match; Beatty, too, had always made use of secrecy in his life, and, when criticized for being inhuman, once remarked, “But I have no need to seem more human.” Gary copied Warren’s seductive body language and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of character Beatty played in Shampoo: a philanderer hiding from his own promiscuity.

“Hart had a real Don Juan complex,” observes Amanda Smith, now a feminist lecturer and wife of political scientist James David Barber, but back in 1971 the women’s issues person in McGovern’s Washington headquarters. “It’s something he couldn’t stop, but the women weren’t people to him at all.” Hart would speak for McGovern at a college political-science club, then spend the weekend with the club president. Monday morning, time and again, these breathless, brainy little buds would turn up in Washington to commit their lives to working for Gary Hart. Time and again, they would find themselves stuffing envelopes and weeping as they watched Gary pass their desk to the rest room—without so much as a hello.

“Over and over the women who stayed with the campaign found themselves consoling the women who had been bewitched by Gary,” says Smith. “Some were local campaign workers, some married, some pretty fancy. They were anybody.”

The ugly duckling, Gary Hartpence, had developed, as if overnight, into a dazzlingly handsome young man whose picture appeared even in Playboy. Gary had been a sensitive and intelligent boy; his need to break out was inevitable, yet he could not use the new freedom to experience sex and pleasure within the context of a full human relationship. His was a compulsion rooted not in seeking illicit sex but in proving he was so utterly worthy that he could break all the rules. For all his superficial arrogance, however, the evidence suggests that he could never believe he was worthy enough.

It was sudden and inexplicable, the way Nina Hartpence withdrew from her mortal coil. On the eve of the ’72 primaries, just as Gary was moving into high gear, he had to slam into reverse and rush home to Ottawa, toward a reckoning that never took place. Dashing up the steps of the local hospital, he was met by his mother’s nurse’s aide. Nina had already expired.

Gary hurried away without giving a eulogy at her funeral (although he later did so at his father’s). But his father seemed to make an effortless transformation. Carl went fishing, he went dancing, he romanced the nurse’s aide, and she made him laugh again. With his wife in the ground only six months, he and Faye Brown, aged seventy-two, had themselves a church wedding. Nancy Lee thought the ceremony “extravagant,” but Gary gave his unqualified approval. “She was pretty, fun-loving,” sniffs Aunt Erma Louise, “nothing like Nina.” The newlywed couple enjoyed exactly one day of bliss before the hitherto perfectly healthy Carl Hartpence suffered a heart attack. Five days later he was dead.

Clearly there would be no simple escape from the awesome power Nina Hartpence wielded over her son and husband. Both men had to go to dangerous extremes to free themselves. Indeed, Carl Hartpence may have died from it. And if Gary had hoped that his mother’s death would release him at last from the cold steel band of guilt around his heart, the fate of his father must have been a dart omen.

A strict Fundamentalist is taught that any window left open in one’s own faith can let in the evil that strikes down loved ones. Years after a person “comes out” from a Fundamentalist background, a traumatic event—or even a familiar verse from the Bible or evangelical exhortation—can trigger a panic over the remembered feeling of suffocation. Such a panic may have been what brought Gary back to Lee and the children after his parents’ unexpected deaths. But it didn’t keep him from showing up with a stewardess at a serious staff dinner after the ’72 convention. At least one close colleague remembers being stunned to learn that Hart was married. From then on, without regard to the status of his marriage, there were always other women.

Another pattern began to emerge, as fascinating as it would ultimately be fatal. When the McGovern campaign crashed, Hart handled the failure in a memorable way. “Everything was over for him,” recalls Harold Himmelman, a Washington lawyer. “Gary had nothing—no career, no money, no future. He was then the architect of the world’s worst political campaign.” Yet Hart seemed, somehow, stronger, lighter, even happier—like a man broken loose from all rules and obligations, and free to reinvent himself again. Even then, Hart was dropping tantalizing clues to his danger-seeking side. He told a Washington Post reporter, “Just as challenge and insecurity frighten most people, security and safety frighten me.”

During the cathartic winding-down period that followed, Hart called a law-school classmate, Oliver “Pudge” Henkel, and his wife, Sally, to invite them to join the Harts on vacation in Jamaica. The Henkels were surprised—they hadn’t seen the Harts since Yale and didn’t consider them good friends—but they accepted. During the trip, Hart withdrew from the group, spent time alone silently pondering his future, and came back to announce that he was thinking of a political career for himself. To the amazement of those around him, with a negative net worth and no political base, Hart set out to capture a seat in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected in 1974, Hart’s worthy side cast his victory as a purification: “Receiving the oath of office was, for me, the secular equivalent of acceptance into church membership.”

The purifying effects of election to what Hart considered the most select club in America did not inhibit the new senator’s adventures. He began to go farther afield, exploring American Indian religion, and getting glossy English hostess Diana Phipps to introduce him to European society. The more broadly he roamed, the more exaggerated was his denial that he had any problem. When he decided to gird up for the first presidential run, his friend Mike Medavoy, executive vice president of Orion Pictures, warned him to keep some distance from Beatty because of the actor’s atrocious reputation. Hart took offense, as he always would, and said, “I don’t have to worry about appearances if I’m not doing anything wrong.”

On the subject of guilt, “Gary seemed so young and immature,” says an old friend and former staff member. At one point, when he had been separated from Lee for six months, he closed the door of his Senate office and told this good soldier, “You’ve heard Lee and I are separating. You’ll no doubt want to make other arrangements.” The buried Fundamentalist within him must have assumed the staffer would want to move away from such a sinful person. Simultaneously, he was asking his secretary to find an excuse for him to fly to L.A. for the weekend. There he’d frequently hang out at Warren Beatty’s house, sitting by the pool, which was often populated with topless starlets. Hart and Beatty were overheard discussing other men’s scores, with Hart admiringly reporting on another senator, who would go to New York, line up five or six girls, “and just have himself a weekend.”

By the time Gary first decided to run for president, Lee had made a significant, twenty-four-year investment in his future. She had quit teaching in 1964 to have her first child and didn’t go back to work until 1979, when she and her husband separated officially.

They had reconciled in time for her to campaign for Hart’s re-election to the Senate, where he proudly wore the label of poorest member. Lee was shuffled off once more, less than a year later, when Hart’s office announced a divorce. She turned to real estate. But if there is anything tougher than campaigning ten hours a day with one’s husband, Lee Hart told me, it is competing eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, with the real-estate sharks along the Potomac. The Harts patched it up again shortly before Gary began his first presidential campaign.

My question to Lee Hart in 1984 about her husband’s much-vaunted indifference to material things struck a raw nerve. “Sure, I’d like to have the freedom that money can bring,” she said with some bitterness. “I can’t go to Colorado and ski like I’d like to, because I can’t afford to. I can’t go to New York and take in a play, as I would love to, because I can’t afford to. ”

Lee appeared to want the White House as much as Gary did. That would explain why she was willing to be humiliated in private and ignored in public. On the campaign plane, she would try to edge onto the armrest next to her husband; he was cold and distant. During joint campaign appearances, Lee would come forward, on cue, and be acknowledged by Gary only as “already deserving the job of First Lady” for her hard work. She would hold up her hands like the trapeze lady from the Flying Wallenda family, then drop back into the shadows. Not infrequently, her husband would forget to introduce her altogether.

“Lee Hart was always able to separate what she felt for Gary as a husband and what she felt for him as a politician,” according to Raymond Strother, a friend and campaign consultant. The relationship of Lee and Gary Hart seemed to have become mutually exploitive. Since neither one expected honesty or intimacy from the other, Lee Hart never saw herself as a victim. She had tried independence and found it a tough row to hoe. It would be easier to achieve her own ends by advancing her husband.

Almost two decades after Gary Hart severed formal ties with his Fundamentalism, he was still ambivalent about worldly success. The part of him that could not believe he deserved to be successful, because he was a sinner and a backslider, would now begin to sabotage his grander political ambitions. Even during the fastest-rising arc of his career—those few magical weeks in 1984 after his upset victory in the New Hampshire primary—while Gary Hart was the hottest political star in the country and a full-strength media spotlight was upon him, he was compelled to flout the rules of normal public behavior.

A veteran political mistress he’d been seeing since 1982 was startled to have him turn up on her Washington doorstep at such a vulnerable moment. She could see the Secret Service van parked right down the street. Hart stayed the night and blithely walked out her front door the next morning.

The same woman later spilled her hurt to one of Hart’s former advisers. She described her association with Hart as “sporadically affectionate.” But the more intimate their occasions together, the more brutally he would withdraw. As they parted he would say, “Call me and we’ll get together very soon.” She would demur, saying she knew how busy he was. No, he’d insist, just call and he’d find a way they could be together. So she would call. And then he’d duck her.

The pattern was always the same: the indiscriminate hunt, the rush to intimacy, the forced reassurances, then a sudden withdrawal, denial, and rapid retreat. A political friend of Hart’s for the last ten years says, “Gary was compulsive about seeking out women, sometimes for a sexual relationship, sometimes not. It was a compulsion, but it was not about sex, even if the relationship was sexual. The compulsion was to defy the rules and still have it all, on his terms.”

The capriciousness of it was what stung Hart’s women, many of them smart, substantial people. But they probably didn’t know his history. With the model of a mother as continuously demanding as she was undemonstrative, Hart could not be expected to have any notion of a warm, close, friendly relationship with a woman. Sex and power could be sought only outside such a relationship. Under the sway of his sensual passion, and when conquest and possession were the issue, he could be very intense, according to confidants of several of his partners. But once the passion was consumed, the fantasy fulfilled, and the specter of the start of a relationship reared its head, Hart would shrink back and, clang!, that inner steel door between his two selves would slam shut.

As Hart pursued national office, he naturally faced increasing constraints and the microscopic press scrutiny that goes with the territory. Alarm bells must have gone off. The constraints were not unlike the suffocating restrictiveness of his upbringing, and the scrutiny must have been felt as the very “prying” he’d been hiding from all his life. He grew sick of feeling guilty. His denials grew more extreme. Hart’s pathology was much like that of an alcoholic who, after his seventh drink, insists with thickened tongue, “Whaddya mean I can’t drive, shhur I can”—that level of denial.

In 1980, he told Hal Haddon, a longtime friend from Colorado, that he had stopped womanizing. Convinced that the only way Hart could become president was to clean up his act, Haddon suspended disbelief. But by 1982, Haddon, like Hart’s brain-truster, Larry Smith, had lost faith and walked away. Hart’s campaign became a vacuum, and into it were sucked naïfs like Pudge Henkel—who signed on as campaign director when Hart told him, “I have nothing to hide”—and an assortment of what Smith saw as “scumbags, jackals, and freebooters.” Henkel himself was amazed when Hart asked him to manage the campaign. He later saw that Gary had chosen him because he already knew his personality: “He wanted someone who was not going to ask him to tailor his personal life to what a political consultant would want.”

Patrick Caddell was brought on in desperation in January of 1984. The veteran pollster told me that he’d gradually recognized what Hart really wanted: “maximum chaos.” A campaign always takes on the character of a candidate, and in this case the campaign was designed to keep Hart free of structure, ensure that his advisers were kept off-balance by bickering, and guarantee that no one got close enough to see the demons Hart was hiding. The pattern was frightening in a campaign; in a presidency, such chaos could be annihilating for a whole country.

In March of ’84 I started out to cover Hart, as dazzled as much of the nation by this fresh face and attracted to his concepts. But since the national press had discovered him in New Hampshire and was now daily documenting his “new ideas,” I decided to examine his character.

One of Hart’s consultants put me onto Marilyn Youngbird, said to be among the rare people with whom he could “let down his hair.” Marilyn turned out to be an attractive divorcée and full-blooded Native American. She told me that she had awakened in Hart a reverence for the sun, the trees, all forms of life. They had met the day after he first entered the Senate (in his redemptive phase, I noted), and she was certain she had been Hart’s closest friend from ’78 to ’80, a soul mate. Marilyn went on to describe in breathless detail the peak moment, at a Comanche ceremony, which brought them close both spiritually and personally.

“They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers. It was sensual, oh yes. He would look at me, smiling from ear to ear. Then all the smoke from the sage and cedar would engulf him. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, it was so beautiful.”

The woman must be wildly exaggerating was my first reaction. She’s probably fallen for Hart and romanticized some innocent occasion. So I brought up her name casually during an informal gathering in the back of Hart’s campaign plane.

“Oh, by the way, I have a message to pass on to you from Marilyn Youngbird. She says you should take time for a spiritual-healing ceremony.”

“Do you know Marilyn?” His voice was suddenly buoyant, spontaneous. “She’s been my spiritual adviser for the last few years.”

I tried to contain my astonishment as Hart gushed on, in a most uncharacteristic fashion, about her ineffable qualities. He even showed me a note from her he was carrying around. The memorable line was: “Hug a tree.” Several days later, in a one-on-one interview, I asked him about Marilyn again.

“She says she’s your conscience. And her people have all heard the prophecy. The Great Spirit has chosen Gary Hart to save nature from destruction. It’s your time.”

“I know,” he said. “She keeps telling me that. ”

“Do you believe it?”

Marilyn’s effect on him suggested a longing for some supernal being who would render him morally lovable as well as unimpeachable. What is more, her adoration seemed to feed Hart’s exaggerated view of himself as a man with a divine destiny.

When my article appeared in the July 1984 Vanity Fair, Hart played it exactly as he would three years later with the Miami Herald story. He lied and denied. “Terribly inaccurate,” complained Hart in print and on TV, while disclosing that he had not read the article and did not intend to. His protestations only dug him in deeper, prompting articles in Time and Newsweek, one of which noted that “Mondale’s advisors were amused by any hint of Hart as an oddball subscriber to Teepee Guide.” The Mondale camp used the article to dump a man they wanted to keep off the ticket at all costs.

Having looked closely at his life history, we can now propose some possible explanations for Hart’s behavior. Here is a man who grew up in a severely restricted manner, by virtue of his religion, his social milieu, and a mother whose treatment of her son was tantamount to child abuse. Emotionally deformed by that long boyhood, simply not equipped with any understanding of or feeling for the value built into human relationships, he was never able to learn in adult life how to connect with others. He can connect only with abstract ideas.

The Gary Hart who emerged from this tortured journey is a divided man. It was buried in his earliest consciousness that one was either worthy or sinful. One could not be both. Because he had to believe he was worthy of asking to be made president, he was compelled to separate the part of himself that he considered sinful from the part that was worthy.

One side of Hart, the rigid and controlling spirit of his Fundamentalist past, seeks perfection and inflicts harsh self-punishment for any natural pleasure. This is the boy who could not be coaxed to take more than one toy at a time out of the box, the boy who was always outside the picture show peering in. The other side of him, the passionate and profane side, never saw the light of day as an adolescent boy—indeed, was imprisoned for his first twenty-five years. That delinquent side began beating on the cell floor and going over the wall as far back as 1972, during the McGovern campaign. Finally, it went haywire.

The compartmentalization of Hart’s private life was echoed in his public life. When he stated in a keynote speech, “This is a campaign of new ideas—after all, that is what government is about, isn’t it?” his old chief of staff, Larry Smith, thought, No, government is about presenting and persuading the people of a vision of what is good for the country. Hart’s concept of politics focused only on the right instruments, i.e., how things should work. Indeed, he contended vehemently that one was not properly connected to the other. In the same way, Hart was unable to connect the emotional or moral expectations of those around him with their instrumental value to him. He had to be told to touch his wife, balked at having to phone potential supporters, and rarely thanked people who had given up months or years of their own careers to work for him.

Yet one part of him seemed to deeply believe he would make a magnificent leader. He was intellectually facile and worked hard at attracting experts to design sophisticated ideational grids. Above all, he subscribed to the Gatsby theory of self-reinvention. On his image-making trip to Ottawa last April, he became a hero to the graduating seniors by preaching to them what all small-town Americans want to believe:

“Do not accept the idea that you have to be born to wealth or grow up in a powerful family or a big city to achieve in life” was his message. “You can be anything you want to be.”

We’ve all seen and read a surfeit about the six days in which the world Hart built exploded. Tom Fiedler, a Miami Herald reporter who had covered the candidate for two years, at first didn’t recognize Hart when they came face-to-face on that fateful night outside his town house. Hart was disheveled; when confronted, he clutched himself with both arms, and his speech was halting and disjointed.

But by the time he phoned his wife that Saturday night he was able to tell her, coolly, to ignore the imminent scandal. This moment cannot have come as any great shock to Lee Hart. Five years before, when Hart first decided to run, according to friends, his wife had warned the candidate, “Your downfall will be sex.”

Another call Hart made that night was to his campaign director, Bill Dixon, assuring him there was nothing to the story. Dixon prepared the counterattack on the press, then resigned two days later. According to a former top aide, “We never really considered telling the whole truth.”

When Hart appeared before 1,600 publishers at the Waldorf two days later, he seemed, remarkably, more relaxed than he’d been in years. “Hi, babe” was the breezy greeting he gave his wife when she emerged from three days of seclusion to join him in New Hampshire the following day. Lee’s face, set like aspic, looked as if its last buoyancy was about to collapse.

Hart then faced reporters, who asked the candidate if he had ever committed adultery. At dinner that night on the Vermont border, he was full of brittle laughter and joked about his imbroglio with Donna Rice. In his utter disgrace, he was oddly devil-may-care. Then Lee told him, according to a participant, that his children were devastated. Hart was startled. It was the first indication he was registering even faintly the human impact of his actions.

Shortly after eleven that night Hart’s press secretary went to him in his motel and laid out a new set of facts. A private detective had made a detailed report of Hart’s activities over a twenty-four-hour period last December. The photographs of him entering and leaving the house of a Washington woman were now in the possession of the Washington Post.

“This thing is never going to end, is it?” Hart said to his press secretary. And then, with a remark so stunningly cavalier one can almost hear the thumbing of his nose, Gary Hart said, “Look, let’s just go home.”

Take me as I am or not at all, was the message he conveyed in his angry withdrawal speech. Holed up in the Rockies for the next month, Hart established a one-way communication with the world: he took a secret telephone number, turned away requests for interviews, called out to dozens of his financial contributors, and sent out to several thousand of his supporters a letter of apology as impersonal as “Dear Occupant,” signing off by quoting the Scriptures.

His status at his Denver law firm, where managing partner Donald O’Connor says Hart has brought in some oil business since the scandal, is still in flux. “We get needled, but we haven’t paid any economic penalty,” adds O’Connor. “That could change in the future.” Through his agent, Hart put out a book outline, which was promptly turned down by his publisher, William Morrow, and dismissed at Simon and Schuster the same day Donna Rice tried to peddle a book on herself as victim (to be written with the help of Liberace’s ex-chauffeur).

When the first visual evidence of his romantic relationship with Rice appeared in the Enquirer, Gary Hart simply withdrew into his ever smaller, isolated world and, miraculously, according to friends, managed to shield his family from the pictures. Lee Hart is very angry, but her anger is externalized, according to a former Senate staffer who stayed with Hart until the bitter end. Lee is convinced that the debacle was all the fault of the press—and of Washington, to which she vows never to return.

When reporters called his press secretary, Kevin Sweeney, and insisted that sooner or later Gary Hart is going to have to answer the questions about his personal life and whether or not he told the truth about not spending the night with Donna Rice, a most revelatory rallying cry came back: “He can say the hell with you guys, and just go out and start giving speeches.”

Now that he is not under any obligations as a presidential candidate, Sweeney said, Hart plans to emerge from seclusion and seek engagements with university audiences. No, he does not intend to address why he withdrew from his campaign. But is anyone going to sit still for Gary Hart’s lecture on why aircraft carriers should be smaller?

It is hard not to feel some compassion for a man so alienated from his past he has nowhere to go. If Gary were still a member of the Nazarene church in Ottawa, the Reverend Mr. Copsey would personally confront him. “I would ask, ‘Are you guilty of goin’ to bed with this woman? Havin’ these affairs?’ I would read Scripture to him and ask him to ask the Lord’s forgiveness.” Copsey frowns. “Course that would lead to a bigger problem, because he’d have to confess to his wife, and his wife and him would have to reconciliate.”

Just suppose for the sake of argument, I proposed to Hart’s Aunt Erma Louise, that all these things about Gary are true. What would he have to do to redeem himself? Aunt Erma Louise, in whom negation has been canonized as the one positive virtue, pronounced the judgment that Hart must be fleeing to this day.

“He’d have to go back to the way he lived before. When he was a boy.”

It would seem unthinkable for a man of Hart’s hard-won independence to go home again, to “put to death the deeds of the body.” Hart himself apparently believes that he can drop in and out of society as he pleases and be taken seriously as a political gadfly, that he can walk away from those hundreds who used up the credit on their charge cards to stake him to the caprice of a presidential campaign, dismiss a million-and-a-half-dollar campaign debt, and slam the door on those thousands of volunteers who squandered on him the idealism of their twenties. But Richard Nixon dropped out of sight at San Clemente for three years after his disgrace before daring the first test speech, at a political dinner in Corona del Mar.

Whether or not Gary Hart can carve out a place for himself as a Socratic contributor to the nation’s political dialogue, his most important task, in my opinion, is not the instrumental one. He needs to find a way to feel his common humanity, and to search out a middle path between Nazarene perfection and Beatty-esque amorality. But that journey requires humility. Only time will tell, and only one person will know in the end, if Gary Hart can beat the Devil in Gary Hartpence.

Gail Sheehy