Why Don't Sex Scandals Matter Anymore?

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Speaker 1 Hey, I'm Latz of Nasser. This is Radiolab.
And here in the USA, it is election season.

Speaker 1 And while we are not a cover the news kind of show, typically, we have done a number of stories about elections and politics over the years.

Speaker 1 And so this week I wanted to resurface one of those shows, but I also wanted to give it a little update.

Speaker 3 Here we are. How are you doing, Brooke? Good, really good.
Great to talk to you. Really?

Speaker 1 So this is Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of the show on the media. I called her up in her home because we had done this story back in 2016, just nine months before Trump was elected president.

Speaker 1 It was about how the media covers presidential campaigns, how we the public think about our candidates.

Speaker 1 And when I re-listened to the episode, I felt like it was perfectly speaking to the political moment that we're in right now, but then also simultaneously

Speaker 1 totally outdated.

Speaker 3 Do you agree with that?

Speaker 7 Do you think that's true in some way?

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Okay.
And I have thoughts, though, maybe not the ones pertaining to what is the profound nature of our humanity that you may want to get to.

Speaker 1 Well, that was the number one question.

Speaker 1 But Brooke did show show me how the last eight years have evolved out of, but also completely rewritten that story. So I'm going to play you the original show.
Like I said, we did it back in 2016.

Speaker 1 So you will hear Jad and Robert, original hosts. And then I'll come back on the flip side to talk to Brooke.

Speaker 3 So here we go.

Speaker 8 So we're going to take you back. to an evening in 1987.
Tom Fiedler, ace political reporter for the Miami Herald, it's late at night and he's in his office.

Speaker 9 I'm sat at my desk and just in fact packing up to go home. My phone rang and I'm thinking, oh, it's probably my wife and she's wondering why I haven't left yet.
I said, all right, I'll pick it up.

Speaker 8 But when he picked up the phone,

Speaker 8 it turned out it was not a voice he recognized. It was a woman's voice, maybe in her late 20s.
And she said to him, I have something you need to know.

Speaker 8 It was a tip about one of the most powerful and charismatic men in American politics, former Senator Gary Hart, who at the time was not only the most likely candidate to become the Democratic nominee, he was very possibly going to be the next president of the United States.

Speaker 9 And her words to me were,

Speaker 9 Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends.

Speaker 8 And she told him, basically,

Speaker 8 I can prove it.

Speaker 9 And, you know, I was rather, I guess,

Speaker 9 dumbstruck by that.

Speaker 9 And he thought, well, now what do we do?

Speaker 10 Now, if you're of a certain age, you probably remember this story. You probably know what happens next.
But even if you've never heard of Gary Hart, you still probably know the outline of this story.

Speaker 10 The accusations.

Speaker 3 Anthony Wheaton,

Speaker 3 John Edward.

Speaker 10 Then the denial.

Speaker 2 I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Speaker 10 And then after that, the whole wall-to-wall media thing.

Speaker 10 Which just goes on and on and on until you want to take your head off your shoulders, put it on the sidewalk, and beat it with a baseball bat.

Speaker 10 But the thing that's easy to forget

Speaker 10 is that it wasn't always like this.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 2 Hart was the first to walk into this vortex of social forces.

Speaker 2 And after that, the rules of political journalism and politics change almost immediately.

Speaker 8 That, by the way, is Matt Bayh.

Speaker 2 National political columnist for Yahoo News.

Speaker 8 He wrote a book about this incident, which he called All the Truth is Out.

Speaker 10 And in that book, he makes the argument that this is the moment, Gary Hart, 1987, when political journalism slid off the rails. Or, you might argue, when it finally got serious.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, just flash back a minute, because I think the context is important.

Speaker 8 1984.

Speaker 2 Hart kind of comes from nowhere.

Speaker 12 It's a whole new ballgame in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Speaker 2 Runs for president, storms, New Hampshire.

Speaker 13 Senator Gary Hart is on his way to a clear-cut victory over Walter Mondale.

Speaker 2 Beats Mondale there and becomes a political celebrity.

Speaker 14 This country cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics for the rich.

Speaker 3 Gary Hart.

Speaker 2 Gary Hart, the senator from Colorado.

Speaker 16 Gary Hart.

Speaker 15 I'm a Democrat and proud of it.

Speaker 10 Hart was this tall, good-looking Democrat.

Speaker 2 He's got great wavy hair.

Speaker 17 I mean, dashing, handsome, charismatic, and young.

Speaker 8 This is Leslie Stahl.

Speaker 3 CBS.

Speaker 8 She's covered politics for 40 years, now works for 60 minutes.

Speaker 17 He was cool and smart. Women liked him, too.

Speaker 2 He's an anti-Orthodox Democrat, very liberal, anti-nukes. He is sort of the Bill Clinton before Bill Clinton.

Speaker 8 He doesn't get the Democratic nomination in 1984.

Speaker 2 Walter Mondale does by a nose, but when Mondale gets crushed by Ronald Reagan, Hart is immediately presumed to be the next nominee of the party at a time when these things were more obvious.

Speaker 10 So fast forward to 1987.

Speaker 18 Like it or not, campaign 88 is underway.

Speaker 19 And the leading contender, frontrunner Gary Hart in New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 He's winning.

Speaker 2 He's running double digits higher than any Democrat.

Speaker 8 And he's projected to beat George Bush, the Republican frontrunner.

Speaker 20 The next president of the United States,

Speaker 13 Gary Hart.

Speaker 21 It felt like, look, this is a guy who is changing politics, who is unafraid to speak the truth, who is willing to be really clear about what he wants to do.

Speaker 10 That's Kevin Sweeney. He was Hart's press secretary in 1987.
He joined the campaign just a few years out of college.

Speaker 21 23, I'm idealistic. The first time we really met, I was wearing a necktie with pictures of Lincoln and Washington on it, and Hart said, that's the ugliest necktie I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 21 Except my mother made it, and he said, I apologize.

Speaker 21 Well, that's a good beginning. Yeah, I knew pretty early I wanted to work for Hart.

Speaker 3 Do you remember why?

Speaker 21 He was really liberal on social issues at the time, unafraid to be specific or take a stand.

Speaker 10 He said Hart placed an extraordinary amount of emphasis on not just winning the campaign, but what would they do when they got in office?

Speaker 21 He commanded that attitude.

Speaker 10 So they wrote out all these position papers on foreign policy, energy, international trade, the budget, even what would his relationship with Gorbachev be?

Speaker 21 There was something about heart and something about what happened on the campaign where it did feel like the kind of campaign that I haven't seen since.

Speaker 8 And when does the subject of what goes on below the belt come up, if at all?

Speaker 21 Well, there were rumors, definitely rumors.

Speaker 2 By this time, there are a lot of whispers about his personal life and a lot of speculation. He's been married to his college sweetheart, Lee, for a very long time.

Speaker 2 They've been separated twice, the long separations, and during those separations, he's dated openly in Washington. So it's a well-known

Speaker 2 fact of life in Washington where he is a central figure and has a lot of friends in the press corps that he's dated, that he's dated people for extended periods of time, that he and his wife have a troubled marriage together and not together.

Speaker 2 He stayed on Bob Woodward's couch for a little while when she kicked him out at one point. Nobody wrote about that.

Speaker 10 And the reason they didn't write about it was because of a very old, very well-established convention.

Speaker 2 I mean, look, go back to the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, you know, heroes, towering figures.
Their personal lives simply were not in play.

Speaker 10 Take, for example, JFK.

Speaker 17 Leslie Stahl says that when the press was covering him, vast numbers of reporters knew that John Kennedy was cheating on his wife. That was no secret.

Speaker 17 But we we wouldn't have dreamed of printing that, even if the whispers were loud enough to spread around the country. It just wasn't done.

Speaker 8 Is the thought, hey, nobody does that, so

Speaker 8 forget about it. Or, hey, that has nothing to do with statecraft.

Speaker 2 I think the feeling was that, so what? You know, we all get to have a zone of privacy.

Speaker 10 And the assumption was that what happened in your private zone, behind closed doors...

Speaker 17 had nothing to do with whether you were going to be a good president or not.

Speaker 3 I mean, there are certain ethics and certain standards, I guess.

Speaker 2 This is the world that Hart still thinks he's living in, that as long as it doesn't burst into public view, it won't be a story.

Speaker 10 But Matt Bai says that world was actually changing because of a political earthquake that had happened just over a decade before.

Speaker 3 Talking about the Watergate break-in.

Speaker 13 Burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington.

Speaker 2 That is the big first knocked-out brick in that wall.

Speaker 23 Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Speaker 10 You know, arguably the biggest scandal in White House history. You had Nixon tapping phone lines, compiling enemy lists.

Speaker 2 And for the reporters covering Nixon,

Speaker 2 it really is an embarrassment.

Speaker 2 You had an entire White House press corps, political press corps, campaign press corps, who had followed this man, Richard Nixon, for decades.

Speaker 2 and somehow either missed the fact or failed to report the fact that he had some significant psychological issues and was paranoid and could be corrupted.

Speaker 17 I think there was a sense that we let the public down.

Speaker 8 Leslie Stahl remembers it this way.

Speaker 17 The regular White House press reporters, they should have been digging.

Speaker 17 Chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. They should have been looking behind the curtain.
And so, right after Watergate, reporters became tougher,

Speaker 17 saying, okay, we have to be skeptical about everything.

Speaker 2 And in particular, the character issue.

Speaker 2 Meaning, suddenly, your makeup, your personal behavior, who you are in your private moments matters a whole hell of a lot for the kind of president you can be and whether or not we can trust you as a public leader.

Speaker 24 Hart's character is the subject tonight of our weekend journal.

Speaker 25 When Americans choose presidents, personal character traits are important. In this day and age, candidates' personal lives are getting a great deal of scrutiny.

Speaker 21 I remember there was a bit of a shift in the kinds of reporters who were covering national politics. They had a different orientation, and they were really interested in the character question.

Speaker 8 That's Kevin Sweeney again. He says he was initially frustrated by a reporter's strange obsession with things that were not really issues, important issues in the campaign.

Speaker 21 Like age, there was some confusion about Hart's age, the fact that he changed the family name, his signature changed at a certain point in his life.

Speaker 8 He says when those stories initially popped up,

Speaker 21 I thought it was a false set of issues. I didn't really take it seriously.

Speaker 10 But then when it came to the rumors of, quote, womanizing or marital infidelity, he felt like he needed to talk to Gary Hart.

Speaker 21 I did say, if anything is happening, it needs to stop. I mean, this can't, whatever it is.
I mean, and he said, you know, nothing is happening.

Speaker 21 And he shot back and said, they have no right to cover that. That's ridiculous.
It's not an issue. That, you know, why is that an issue? That's not their job.

Speaker 21 And I kept pushing back, saying, I don't actually care what their job is. I don't care what you think their job is.
This is the new context that exists now.

Speaker 21 I don't know why or how, but the rules have changed. The rules have changed.

Speaker 8 So,

Speaker 9 you know, it was...

Speaker 8 This brings us back to Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald. He was covering Gary Hart, going with him to all the stops in Iowa, New Hampshire.

Speaker 9 And so forth. And it seemed like at every stop along the way, someone, some reporter would raise her his hand and would say, what about the rumors of his womanizing?

Speaker 10 Dumb says that he would see reporters asking all these questions, and he was a little bit troubled.

Speaker 9 So on April 27th, 1987, he wrote a column asking the question, is it ethical for journalists to be even raising this kind of a question?

Speaker 9 And I really came down to the conclusion that that unless the media, unless the reporters involved had actual proof that this was a problem, that he was a womanizer, we just shouldn't be printing that.

Speaker 8 Column runs on a Monday morning. That night, he gets the call.

Speaker 9 A voice on the other side says, Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends.

Speaker 10 He was dumbstruck, as we know.

Speaker 9 I told her that my position had to be that I couldn't believe what she had to say unless there was proof.

Speaker 9 And finally, she said, my friend is going to fly up to Washington next weekend, and she's going to spend the weekend with Senator Hart. She said, so all you have to do is buy a ticket on that plane.

Speaker 3 And I thought, well, would that be ethically okay?

Speaker 9 What is inbounds and what is out of bounds?

Speaker 10 I mean, character was this new obsession of political journalism, but according to Matt Bayh, no one had taken that character question into a candidate's bedroom. That was new.

Speaker 3 But Fiedler thought, well, no, no, no, no, this is inbounds.

Speaker 9 Because Gary Hart was publicly denying that he had been carrying on affairs with anyone in particular.

Speaker 10 Now, to be clear, oftentimes when Gary Hart was asked about these rumors of an affair, he was never asked directly, just about the rumors, he'd say something like this.

Speaker 15 It's no one else's business.

Speaker 21 Now, why is it not anyone else's business?

Speaker 23 Because it isn't. No, but it hasn't been the business of the American public for 200 years, and it isn't today.

Speaker 10 He'd say something like that. But Fiedler says a couple times when he's asked, he did say something that amounted to a no.

Speaker 9 Such as if there was any truth to these allegations, it would have come out long before. The kinds of answers that were non-denials, denials, another phrase that came out of Watergate.

Speaker 9 So my view at that

Speaker 9 point was

Speaker 9 if in fact there was proof that he was carrying on an affair privately while publicly insisting that there really was no basis to this, then that was a relevant issue.

Speaker 8 Relevant to his performance as future president?

Speaker 9 Yes, it was a question of integrity.

Speaker 9 So we thought the only way that we are going to find out if what the caller told us is true is we've got to catch him.

Speaker 10 That's coming up next.

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Speaker 26 The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robin Ince, and I've sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels.

Speaker 1 And what else?

Speaker 11 It was fascinating though, the eels.

Speaker 26 But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit.

Speaker 11 Brain-computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, signs of the North Pole and eels. Did I mention the eels?

Speaker 26 Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sagasso C?

Speaker 11 Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 Hey, I'm Jad Ibumran.

Speaker 8 I'm Robert Krolwich.

Speaker 10 This is Radio Lab. Getting back to the story, reporter Tom Fiedler gets a tip saying that candidate Gary Hart is having an affair, and he thinks to himself, this is inbounds if it's true.

Speaker 9 Therefore, we've got to catch him.

Speaker 8 So, his editor tells a colleague of his, Jim McGee, to go to the airport, telling him, This is what you're going to do.

Speaker 9 You're going to look for a woman who looks like a model.

Speaker 10 That's how the woman on the phone described her friend.

Speaker 9 She's described as a model, blonde in her mid-20s, and call me back if you see it.

Speaker 9 So, this guy, Jim, races to the airport, spots this attractive young woman, fits the description, who, of course we later knew was Donna Rice.

Speaker 8 So he boards the plane, they land in DC, he follows her out of the airport into a cab.

Speaker 9 He runs to another cab, jumps in it, and he says, follow that cab.

Speaker 10 Just like the movies.

Speaker 8 Which they do. He loses her for a while, but then eventually he gets to the house where he thinks Hart and this lady should be.

Speaker 9 And he's not there more than a few minutes when the front door opens and out comes the young woman on the arm of a very handsome man.

Speaker 3 One small problem.

Speaker 9 Jim had never met Gary Hart.

Speaker 10 He had no idea what Gary Hart looked like.

Speaker 9 He said later, he said, I really couldn't pick Gary Hart out of a lineup. That's when I really thought we have got to go to Washington.

Speaker 2 And that's what they do. The Herald, Matt Buy again, they send a team of reporters, investigative reporters and fieldler and a photographer to Washington.

Speaker 9 We arrive Saturday morning.

Speaker 2 They stake out his townhouse.

Speaker 9 You know, I'm thinking, my gosh, somebody will surely notice that there are four or five five of us.

Speaker 3 Lurking is probably the right word.

Speaker 2 It's May, and one guy's in a parka to disguise himself, and Feeler, who the candidate knows, is in a jogging suit and he's pretending to jog around the street all day long.

Speaker 9 I would change clothes a little bit. Occasionally, I would run without the jacket.
Other times, I would just be wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

Speaker 8 He'd run around and around and around.

Speaker 2 It's not how the CIA would do it, but it's about what you'd expect from a newspaper.

Speaker 9 Our quote-unquote stakeout went on all day into Saturday night, and it got dark. And then

Speaker 3 front door opens.

Speaker 9 Out comes this man and out comes the blonde woman.

Speaker 2 Hart walks out with Donna Rice, sort of arm in arm.

Speaker 9 He quickly realizes something is wrong.

Speaker 2 He kind of makes the surveillance. They see him, he sees them.
He turns her back around. They go inside.

Speaker 9 Go back inside the townhouse.

Speaker 2 He sends her away through the back door.

Speaker 9 And then he comes back out of the townhouse, hops in his car, and starts to drive off.

Speaker 9 So our photographer starts to chase Senator Hart's car. He drives a couple blocks up streets, down streets, back and forth.

Speaker 8 He gets out of the car, walks through a park. Chase continues on foot.

Speaker 2 He knows they're following him and they know he knows they're following him.

Speaker 8 Hart ducks around the corner. They lose him for a second.
Then they're running to catch up.

Speaker 2 And then they turn a corner in an alley and there's Hart.

Speaker 2 There is the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, the most important Democratic politician in the country. And they're confronting each other.

Speaker 10 And for a moment, standing in the alleyway behind Hart's townhouse, they just stare at each other.

Speaker 10 Because there is no script for this moment.

Speaker 9 Ultimately,

Speaker 9 he asked, well, who are you?

Speaker 9 Well, we're from the Miami Herald. And

Speaker 9 he didn't really say anything.

Speaker 9 So I told him that we wanted to know why he was meeting with this woman in his townhouse, a woman who at that point we knew had spent the night with him.

Speaker 2 He says in myriad ways, myriad times, I'm not going to tell you who that woman was.

Speaker 9 This is private, this isn't public.

Speaker 2 But he says there's no affair, which he would maintain forever after.

Speaker 2 And ultimately...

Speaker 9 He said, I've said enough. And he turned and walked inside and slammed the door.

Speaker 9 We did tell him, though, he said, we're going to write this story unless you give us a reason

Speaker 9 that explains as to why what we are seeing and what we're concluding is wrong. And he never did that.

Speaker 9 So we kind of look at ourselves and say, well, now what do we do?

Speaker 9 Ultimately, the call was, we have the proof we feel we needed. We know that publicly he was saying these things, and we now know that privately he was engaged in this.

Speaker 8 So they ran back to the hotel room. Fiedler frantically typed out the story.

Speaker 9 Gary Hart,

Speaker 9 whose presidential campaign has been dogged by rumors of womanizing, comma,

Speaker 9 spent Friday night and much of Saturday with a woman who came from Miami to meet him.

Speaker 9 I finally went back and I probably slept for three or four hours.

Speaker 8 Okay, so you're going to do the story. The only thing that gives me pause is if

Speaker 8 under this standard you'd lose Jack Kennedy, certainly.

Speaker 8 You'd lose Woodrow Wilson, I think.

Speaker 3 So you'd lose a lot of people

Speaker 8 you might not want to lose.

Speaker 9 But you know, you've leaped to the conclusion that the public would banish a person for that. And

Speaker 9 I don't go there.

Speaker 27 So are you worried about how it's going to land?

Speaker 8 That's how producer Jamie York? Terrified.

Speaker 9 I was terrified.

Speaker 8 And the next morning...

Speaker 2 An ABC News Ring. The political world explodes.

Speaker 16 Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart.

Speaker 3 Gary Hart.

Speaker 9 Gary Hart

Speaker 9 truly became a fire star.

Speaker 24 The Miami Herald reports today that Hart, quote, spent Friday night and most of Saturday.

Speaker 16 The Miami Herald reports that Hart and a Miami woman spent Friday night alone together in his Washington townhouse with a young woman.

Speaker 2 That story begins ricocheting around the country on the end.

Speaker 16 So by Sunday, confronted by Herald reporters last night, Hart denied any impropriety.

Speaker 21 Hart denied any impropriety.

Speaker 2 It's very apparent that not only is Hart in trouble, but the entire culture of media around politics has changed in some very dramatic way.

Speaker 8 And when you think about the mindset of the television people, the radio people, the newspaper people, is there any self-doubt there?

Speaker 8 Is there people saying, oh, should we, is this really a question of his ability to conduct matters of state? Is that question being asked?

Speaker 2 There's a tremendous amount of self-doubt.

Speaker 28 Not everyone agrees that such intense public scrutiny is necessary.

Speaker 2 There was widespread feeling

Speaker 2 that what Fiedler and his colleagues had done was wrong.

Speaker 17 You know, that's out of bounds.

Speaker 7 What business is it of the press?

Speaker 2 You staked out a guy in his home?

Speaker 17 What are they up to, sneaking around in the bushes and all that?

Speaker 7 A lot of reporters don't think it's relevant. And one reason is this.
Nobody knows where this is going to lead. Has this set a precedent?

Speaker 7 Should reporters be staking out George Bush's house, Bruce Babbitt's house, Joe Biden's house?

Speaker 2 But then in the same breath, there's generally this sense of, but you know.

Speaker 7 All he had to do basically was stay clean.

Speaker 2 What was he thinking?

Speaker 3 Gary Hart is to blame.

Speaker 7 It's Gary Hart's fault.

Speaker 2 And didn't he understand that things had changed? And doesn't the public maybe have a right to know?

Speaker 28 And so the newspaper that began the controversy is not backing down. This was not character assassination.
This was character suicide.

Speaker 8 He did it. We didn't.

Speaker 28 Even as the debate heats up over the ethics of its coverage of Gary Hart.

Speaker 2 So there was a real conflict. All the various echelon of media respond to this differently.
The New York Times refuses to touch it originally. The Washington Post is deeply conflicted.

Speaker 8 And as for the public...

Speaker 28 In an unscientific Herald telephone poll, 63% of the callers said they thought the paper was making too much of a fuss over Gary Hart.

Speaker 2 I mean, the polling shows that people think the media overstepped. He's still polling very strongly.
He's winning in the public mind.

Speaker 8 According to Leslie Stahl, most people seem to be willing to compartmentalize.

Speaker 17 Most people can split off. How's he going to be as president? And, you know, is he cheating on his wife?

Speaker 2 It was not clear that the tide was going to take Hart out at all.

Speaker 8 So Hart and his team try to get ahead of the story. They schedule a press conference in New Hampshire.
And on the flight over, Kevin Sweeney, his press secretary, preps him.

Speaker 21 I remember asking Hart a question something like, have you ever been unfaithful to your wife? And he shot back at me with anger. He said, I don't have to answer that question.

Speaker 21 That's a question that I can answer to God, to my wife, but it's not a question that I need to answer in politics. That's a dangerous question to be asking.
We don't want to go there.

Speaker 21 And I just just said that's a great answer. Just hold that anger.
That's an appropriate response.

Speaker 21 We get to the press conference.

Speaker 10 Hart and Sweeney walk into this colonial-style room at Dartmouth College.

Speaker 21 There are lights everywhere.

Speaker 27 The room is filled.

Speaker 2 It's sweaty. It's hot.
There's more media than anyone's ever seen packed in.

Speaker 21 It's a really intense environment.

Speaker 20 Senator Hart, please. Senator Hart.

Speaker 2 Hart has very little buffer, and he's handling the questions.

Speaker 18 How are you going to convince them that you're not going to make this kind of mistake and judgment about personal behavior again?

Speaker 27 Really, pretty brilliantly.

Speaker 15 I won't tell them. I'll demonstrate it.

Speaker 15 As time goes on, people are going to want to know about your judgment and your character on the issues that affect their lives and their families and their nation.

Speaker 20 That's what this campaign is going to be about.

Speaker 2 He's kind of firing on all cylinders.

Speaker 21 And Hart goes through, you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes of questions.

Speaker 29 And then you raised, in your remarks yesterday, you raised the issue of morality and you raised the issue of truthfulness.

Speaker 2 At some point he calls on a young reporter named Paul Taylor.

Speaker 18 Very specific, and I have a series of questions about it.

Speaker 2 And Paul Taylor walks him through a series of questions.

Speaker 22 You said you did nothing immoral. Did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or any other time you were with?

Speaker 3 That is correct. That's the question.

Speaker 2 Do you believe that adultery is immoral?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 22 Have you ever committed adultery?

Speaker 2 He says, Senator, have you ever committed adultery?

Speaker 10 Senator Hart looked out at the sea of of reporters.

Speaker 2 No politician had ever publicly been asked that broad, direct a question about his personal behavior. It really just, it shocked the room.

Speaker 10 We don't know what Gary Hart was thinking in that moment. He did not want to be interviewed on tape.

Speaker 10 But it's clear that if he said yes or no to that broad of a question, then his entire married life, because have you ever committed adultery, that word ever, his entire married life would suddenly be in play.

Speaker 10 And as far as we know, no other person in his situation in history had ever been asked to drag that much of themselves into the limelight.

Speaker 2 And on his face, you can see that he knows that this is never going to end. I mean, he knew how many women he'd seen over the years.
He could envision them all being paraded through the papers.

Speaker 2 He could tell already that there was all this new sort of tabloid press and that the political press was following along, that he was never going to be able to talk about his agenda. And

Speaker 2 Hart stumbled around for a minute, and ultimately, he says, I do not have to answer this question.

Speaker 21 I don't have to answer that question.

Speaker 22 That's right, Discussion. That's right.

Speaker 21 And I think when I heard that response,

Speaker 21 I felt it.

Speaker 21 I felt it. The tone was such that it felt like defeat.

Speaker 21 It felt like he is exhausted and he can't take this. And

Speaker 21 I was offended.

Speaker 21 I really in that moment thought this is just wrong.

Speaker 21 This has nothing to do with

Speaker 21 what is necessary to run this country. And I just thought this is not,

Speaker 21 this is not,

Speaker 21 we're not going to survive.

Speaker 2 And that moment effectively does him in.

Speaker 23 Senator Ben. I've told you the facts.

Speaker 20 You don't believe me.

Speaker 15 There's nothing I can do about it.

Speaker 3 Senator, all right. One second.
What are you? Senator, one second.

Speaker 19 Gary Hart is finished as a presidential candidate. Gary Hart's formal campaign is only three weeks old.
There was simply no putting the genie back in the bottom.

Speaker 30 His appearances yesterday were mob zoned. The Hart campaign has been hammered to its knees, asking the same questions again and again.

Speaker 30 Today, after what may be remembered as the most disastrous week any presidential candidates endured in years, Hart told an aide, let's go home.

Speaker 10 A couple weeks later, that famous image of Gary Hart and Donna Rice comes out in the National Enquirer, and that was that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's that for people my age, like that image of Donna Rice sitting in his lap and he's got this shirt on that says monkey business, that's that's the thing you remember.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Now, according to Matt Bay, you can look at this whole story, and particularly Tom Fiedler taking that call, and Paul Taylor asking that question,

Speaker 10 as this moment when all of these forces way outside of Gary Hart's control come together not just to sink his campaign, but to change political journalism profoundly.

Speaker 10 But as with all cultural shifts, there's more than one way to look at this. So just for a gut check,

Speaker 10 we put the whole story.

Speaker 31 We're talking about Tom Fiedler?

Speaker 3 Yeah, Tom.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 27 In front of this lady. Can we have you introduce yourself?

Speaker 31 I'm Cokie Roberts.

Speaker 8 With no, like who you are, like part two.

Speaker 6 I have six grandchildren.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 8 Something in PRE.

Speaker 31 I'm a political commentator and author. Okay.

Speaker 8 Cokie Roberts believes that, yeah, reporters were interested in character more after Watergate. But it wasn't just that.

Speaker 31 The thing that's important to keep in mind here is that there were many more women covering candidates at that point than there had been before. There were women on the bus.

Speaker 31 And in the case of Gary Hart, several of those women had had personal encounters with him. There were times when you'd be in a room where he had hit on every woman in the room.

Speaker 31 So this was not somebody that women who were covering campaigns were ignorant of.

Speaker 31 And the other thing to keep in mind, Robert, is that the whole women's movement did talk quite a bit about the personal is political.

Speaker 31 And because the way women were treated was something that we thought, and I continue to think,

Speaker 31 is a good gauge of character. And there was something of a sense that he treated women like Kleenex.

Speaker 31 So

Speaker 31 we were expanding the universe of what was a major character flaw.

Speaker 27 So then

Speaker 27 are you kind of rooting Fiedler on?

Speaker 2 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 31 Finally, somebody's written about it, and thank God it's a guy.

Speaker 27 But as much as you were cheering them on, was there any concern that that was changing the rules of journalism?

Speaker 31 No.

Speaker 21 Why?

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 31 the rules of journalism were constantly changing, as they should.

Speaker 10 And according to Coki Roberts, this was less less about journalism changing than about journalism catching up with the ethics of the time.

Speaker 31 Look, we elect our presidents based on who they are, not on what policies they stand for. It's different from any other office.

Speaker 31 The voters need to know as much as they can humanly know about that person.

Speaker 27 So, is there a line for you? Is there a place you won't go in taking the full measure of a candidate?

Speaker 31 Not for president that I can think of.

Speaker 27 There's nothing you wouldn't touch.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 31 I mean, I'd have to know that it was true.

Speaker 27 Sure.

Speaker 31 But no, no.

Speaker 3 I love that.

Speaker 10 Leslie Sahl had a slightly different take.

Speaker 17 She's fabulous, Cokie Roberts.

Speaker 17 I didn't go there. That's interesting.

Speaker 17 I just didn't want to ask about it. I didn't want to go there.

Speaker 17 I'm telling you this, even though I covered Watergate and would have asked any number of questions about character, you know, it's open season, fellas. The public needs to know this.

Speaker 17 But you know, sex is really a hard place for me to

Speaker 3 pry.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 I agree with it, but I also have my own opinion that

Speaker 17 there's propriety. And I'm old-fashioned, I guess.
Am I? I don't know.

Speaker 20 I'd intended, quite frankly, to come down here this morning and

Speaker 20 read a short, carefully worded political statement.

Speaker 8 This is Gary Hart's statement a few days after that press conference, saying that

Speaker 20 I was withdrawing from the race and then quietly disappear from the stage.

Speaker 20 And then, after frankly tossing and turning all night, I said to myself, hell no.

Speaker 20 I'm not going to do that because it's not my style and because I'm a proud man and I'm proud of what I've accomplished.

Speaker 20 In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition competition or sporting match.

Speaker 20 We all better do something to make this system work, or we're all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.

Speaker 8 Now we did reach out to Mr. Hart for a comment explaining to him the story we were doing, and he wrote back this response.

Speaker 8 Thank you for your letter and the invitation to participate in your current story. Though I did not become president, my life continues to be extraordinarily rich.

Speaker 8 Perhaps someday someone will tell that story, but for now, I have no interest in revisiting what many consider a turning point for the nation, and a few an injustice.

Speaker 8 I do believe that the full and accurate story of that event remains to be told.

Speaker 8 Signed, Gary Hart.

Speaker 1 It does feel, like I said at the top, like it sort of feels like the episode is about this moment, but it also doesn't at all. Like it.

Speaker 3 Right. I think you're absolutely right.
It does, you know, there are certain similarities, but there's also a tremendous difference.

Speaker 1 Once again, Brooke Gladstone, host of the WNYC show on the media.

Speaker 3 So you have Trump being accused dozens of times of sexual assault or sexual harassment, even convicted, at least in a civil trial, but it doesn't seem to matter. That is staggering.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why does that not matter way more?

Speaker 3 Well, you see, this is what makes this time different. This is a time where a simple lie will be embraced if it serves a voter's purposes.

Speaker 1 Brooks says, of course, part of what's going on here is that the electorate has become much more rigidly partisan, even tribal.

Speaker 1 But it also has to do with our relationship with the media, where we get our news, who we trust, who we don't trust.

Speaker 3 This is a profoundly cynical time. I don't think I have ever lived through a political era that has been as cynical as this.

Speaker 1 And Brooks says she thinks this this has to do, at least in part, with an evolution since the time of Gary Hart in the way reporters and media outlets think about what's worth covering or not.

Speaker 3 Yes, precisely, precisely. And I have an anecdote you might find interesting.
Okay, let's hear it. It was in the late 80s.
I was

Speaker 3 the editor of All Things Considered

Speaker 3 at the time. And

Speaker 3 George H.W. Bush was in some sort of a car thing.
There was a threat, a loud bang. There was a woman with him in the car who got hustled away.
Her name was Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Speaker 3 And she had had, it was a 17-year affair with George H.W. Bush.
No, I never even heard of that. This was an open secret.
Really? It's believed they began their relationship in 74.

Speaker 3 She was his secretary when he was chief of the U.S. Liaison office to China.

Speaker 3 She was his executive assistant when he was the CIA. Wow, I never heard of her.
Wow, yeah. Vice president, president.
But she denied the affair.

Speaker 3 We talked about whether this was the time to sort of bring this story out into the open.

Speaker 1 At the time, he was, what was his, he was

Speaker 3 president. He was president.
He was president. Yeah.
But, you know, we ended up not doing it. We ended up not doing George H.W.
Bush's affair. And it never was done.
And

Speaker 1 why did you decide not to?

Speaker 3 Well, in the late 80s, in that editorial office, we decided that it really wouldn't inform the public of anything related to George H.W. Bush's governance of the country.

Speaker 1 And Brooke says this is the important thing to pay attention to. Not so much whether you're intruding on someone's privacy or not, but rather.

Speaker 3 What better informs the people and what is a distraction?

Speaker 1 Because in the years that followed, from Bill Clinton's sex scandals to George W.

Speaker 1 Bush, whether he used cocaine in the past, to Barack Obama's tan suit, the press constantly aired on the side of coverage. More information, but also with it, maybe more distraction.

Speaker 1 The aperture on what was worth talking about kept opening wider and wider until Trump came on the scene and the press pretty much started covering everything and anything about him.

Speaker 3 I mean, during Trump's first campaign against Hillary Clinton, CNN would focus on an empty podium, because Trump would arrive late all the time, rather than simply shift to the speech that at that very moment Hillary Clinton was given elsewhere.

Speaker 1 And of course, after he was elected president, he continued to offer the press a deluge of outrageous statements, exaggerations, and lies.

Speaker 3 Right before the first inauguration, he said, oh my God,

Speaker 3 all the fancy dresses in Washington, D.C. have all been sold out because of the upcoming inauguration.
It's going to be such a big thing.

Speaker 3 And the Washington Post sent people out to go to the stores to find out, so did they sell out? And of course, no, they did not.

Speaker 3 But was it worth it?

Speaker 1 There was just so much coverage of all these little things that even when something big and important was happening, it just sort of got lost in the noise.

Speaker 3 And, you know, obviously, Donald J. Trump is a master of distraction, and he doesn't really care how people think about it.

Speaker 1 And the media just keeps falling for these distractions.

Speaker 1 This is actually something that Brooke on her show On the Media has reported about, you know, repeatedly, including just this past spring in an episode called How Not to Cover the Trump Trials.

Speaker 2 You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade.

Speaker 3 It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and coverage around Trump's indictment found the media stumbling back into some of its own worst habits.

Speaker 3 Heading down the FDR to the Manhattan Courthouse on Chamber Street.

Speaker 3 The media that vowed to never again waste precious airtime on Trump-related minutia

Speaker 3 forgot. Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 2 They're now making their way across town.

Speaker 3 As we've heard now since 2016 at least,

Speaker 3 the ability to flood the zone with outrages

Speaker 3 causes a kind of emotional, intellectual, and maybe even ethical paralysis.

Speaker 1 Do you feel like,

Speaker 1 is it just going to get more and more like this, more sensational, more distraction? Can it go back, or is it just sort of a one-way

Speaker 1 ratchet?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I'm not the best prognosticator, but I would say there's a symbiotic relationship between Americans and their leaders and Americans and their media.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 in a sense, we're seen as consumers, not as citizens.

Speaker 3 We are served what we will buy and what we find tasty.

Speaker 1 Tabloid coverage will give you tabloid presidents, I guess, is

Speaker 1 the vision there.

Speaker 3 But if our media and our leadership

Speaker 3 offer us something else,

Speaker 3 we can be better.

Speaker 3 So, the reporters may take the cue and decide that this isn't worth it, or they'll decide that this is going to be very clicky, and people on the side that you're on are going to love it.

Speaker 3 It's going to make them feel good, and it will just be in the process of tossing out red meat.

Speaker 3 Hard to say.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much to Brooke Gladstone. And honestly, when I'm trying to avoid getting stuck in the swirl of media distractions, the circus of it all, on the media is the place I go.

Speaker 1 They put things in perspective. They curate the news in a way that is

Speaker 1 clarifying and not muddying. Yeah, go check them out wherever you get your podcast on the media.
The original story we did on Gary Hart drew so much from Matt Bayh's book.

Speaker 1 It's called All the Truth Is Out. You can, of course, find the link to the book on our website, radiolab.org.

Speaker 1 That story, the original story, was produced by Simon Adler with help from Jamie York, and the update you just heard with Brooke was produced by Rebecca Lacks. I'm Latif Nasser.

Speaker 1 This has been Radiolab, and we will catch you next week.

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm David, and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 3 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 3 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Lacks, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 3 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 32 Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio.

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