Gary Hart: The Front Runner

The movie is a real walk down memory lane. There were telephone booths, a lot of people smoked cigarettes, and the national news media had the power to take down the leading candidate for president of the United States. I can imagine folks working for what Rush Limbaugh likes to call the “drive-by media” watching the movie with great frustration. “We tried all of that stuff on Trump and more,” they would be telling themselves, “And none of it worked.” Those were the days.

At the same time, the spectacle that the movie depicts hardly confirms the Limbaugh view of reality, either then or now. As Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others of their stripe would have us believe, the national press, with the exception of Fox News and right-wing radio, is nothing but an extension of the Democratic Party. But what we see played out right there on the silver screen is the national press going to great lengths to destroy the candidacy of a liberal Democrat who was practically a shoo in to succeed Ronald Reagan as president in 1988, opening the door for Reagan’s lackluster vice president, George H.W. Bush, to succeed him.

“Great lengths,” you say, but didn’t the guy practically ask for it, challenging the news media to follow him around to see how upright and circumspect his behavior was? That is, indeed, what is popularly believed, as we see repeated here in GQ’s list of “The Twenty-Five Greatest Philanderers in American Political History:

Laughably Self-Destructive Candidate

The person Washingtonians picture when they think of hubris. Basically dared reporters to prove he was having an affair in 1984, and then, hey, they did! And from then on, no one in Washington asked for proof of anything—except if Hart had actually been a passenger on a yacht called Monkey Business when a photographer snapped the incriminating picture that ruined his career. Because, man, twenty-plus years later and that's still hard to believe.

If you pay really careful attention, you will see that the movie fairly accurately undercuts that myth. Reporters for the Miami Herald are the ones who staked out Gary Hart’s townhouse in Washington, DC, and reported seeing the blonde young woman who turned out to be Donna Rice go in the front door and not come out all night (neglecting the fact that there was a back door that they did not observe). In a follow-up report, they borrowed and carefully modified a line from an interview of Hart by the very sympathetic liberal Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne, published simultaneously with the Herald’s report in the New York Times Magazine. The movie shows Dionne, a man of French Canadian extraction curiously turned into a reporter named A.J. Parker, played by Mamoudou Athie, who is quite unmistakably black, expressing considerable annoyance over the Herald’s misuse of his interview.

Here is how things actually came down, as reported in a 2008 interview of Hart by the Westword web site:

Gary Hart: Anytime the subject comes up, I’m obliged to correct the media myth that I dared or challenged reporters to follow me. I did not. I did not, even though for twenty years I’ve had to live with that allegation. It’s just not true.

Westword: There was a New York Times article [written by E.J. Dionne and published on May 3, 1987] that’s generally mentioned as the source of those claims….

GH: It came out the same day as the infamous Miami Herald report [which claimed that a young woman had been seen coming out of Hart’s Washington, D.C., residence the previous night]. They didn’t place me under surveillance as a result of that sentence….

WW: You were already under surveillance.

GH: I was already under surveillance based on rumors, inaccurate rumors. And the sentence in E.J. Dionne’s profile was very much directed to him, and he knows that. I just said, "E.J., you’re welcome to accompany me in my daily rounds if you think I’ve got time to chase girls." [The quote as published read, “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.”] He understood it was an invitation. It was to be openly pursued, but I was not stupid enough to dare or challenge the entire press corps. That’s crazy, and everybody in journalism who’s known me for thirty years knows it’s not true. But it was the justification, the after-the-fact justification for supporting the Miami Herald in the media: "Hart dared us to follow him." I didn’t. I simply didn’t.

The Miami Herald guys were put onto Rice and Hart’s trail by a phone call from a woman, we see in the movie. What is not at all clear is that this caller is Rice’s close friend, Lynn Armandt. Even more opaque is what possible motive Armandt might have for betraying her friend and why this newspaper, liberal like all the rest of them, after originally demonstrating skepticism, would so eagerly go for the bait and risk making itself look bad by putting Hart under surveillance and reporting on their findings. After all, such prying into and reporting on the private lives of major politicians is really quite outside the usually accepted boundaries. Consider what we now know about John F. Kennedy’s carousing, Lyndon Johnson’s perhaps even more energetic tomcatting (Search “LBJ womanizer.”), and most spectacularly Bill Clinton. That GQ list—which doesn’t even include Lyndon Johnson—has some choice things to say about Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, once my strict Southern Baptist father’s favorite presidential candidate.

Regular followers of the news would have never imagined such things at the time. You can believe that the press knew all about all those extramarital frolics, though, but it was all off limits, just as they knew all about George H. W. Bush’s long-term mistress, Jennifer Fitzgerald, and stayed generally mum about her, too. (Was she at the funeral?)

The Fallback Story?

So there’s still a good reason to smell a rat in the political felling of Gary Hart. It turns out that the estimable journalist James Fallows, just in time for the release of The Front Runner, actually claims to have identified the rat in a November 2018 article in The Atlantic, “Was Gary Hart Set Up?” According to Fallows, it was all the work of that scamp, the late Lee Atwater of “Willie Horton ad” fame. Atwater, the Republican dirty trickster from South Carolina, Fallows tells us, actually gave a deathbed confession back in March of 1991 to Hart’s campaign manager Raymond Strother, a fellow Southerner and also a social friend of Atwater in spite of their political differences.

Regular watchers of MSNBC would have known about the Fallows report as soon as The Atlantic hit the news stands, because Rachel Maddow gave it a big pitch on one of her nightly programs. “Was the Gary Hart scandal just a set-up by the Bush campaign?” is the MSNBC title for the segment on its web site.

There are more reasons to be skeptical of this explanation of events than that the oleaginous Maddow is pushing it. Why would Strother have kept the story secret for more than a quarter of a century? If he was a really serious advocate for Hart, why didn’t he bring the story out while Hart was still in his prime and could have used it to make a political come-back?

The details of the story are all about how Atwater finagled with Billy Broadhurst to get Hart on that yacht named Monkey Business in March 1987 and to pose with Donna Rice on his lap. Fallows asks this rhetorical question: “What would have induced Broadhurst to participate in an entrapment scheme?” Then he answers it: “When I asked Strother this question, he said, ‘Money’. “

As we see in the movie, though, and, as Fallows makes clear in his own article, it was the work of the Miami Herald with its stakeout and then the mad dog MSM pack that piled on that did Hart in. He had already suspended—and essentially ended—his campaign because of that, a couple of weeks before the Monkey Business caper with the National Enquirer cover photo of Donna Rice on his lap hit the news. Neither Strother nor Fallows alleges that Atwater worked his magic on the Miami Herald or the rest of the putatively liberal mainstream press. It looks very much like Strother, Fallows, and Maddow are throwing sand in our eyes.

To further drive the point home, let’s take a little closer look at this trio. Here we can watch a long 2003 interview of Strother, who worked for Bill Clinton in Arkansas among a lot of other Democratic politicians, by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that I would be any more willing to buy a used car from this guy than I would from James Carville. In trusting his political future with the likes of Strother, Hart, to my mind, showed some of the same poor judgment and lack of street smarts that ultimately did him in. But in our system as it has evolved, where else might he have turned?

As likely Deep State operatives, Fallows and Maddow have a far different pedigree than the blue collar Strother. Next to membership in Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society, there is no better baptism for future Deep State work than being a Rhodes scholar. Fallows and Maddow, like Bill Clinton and George Stephanopoulos, were both Rhodes scholars, and so was E.J. Dionne, for that matter. Why does the national press go to the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato so frequently for pearls of wisdom about presidential politics? He was a Rhodes scholar, of course.

Donna Rice

The Front Runner’s biggest contribution toward putting us off the scent of the Gary Hart takedown is in its casting and portrayal of Donna Rice. Mamoudou Athie, black though he may be, is a lot more realistic E.J. Dionne than Sara Paxton is Donna Rice. Paxton in face and particularly in demeanor is vulnerable, and in the movie she’s this poor idealistic girl attracted to Hart by his charisma and his political positions. Rice, on the other hand, is a very self-possessed woman who comes across as nobody’s vulnerable victim. She was the same person then that we see on YouTube in her current incarnation as anti-porn crusader, Donna Rice Hughes, campaigning against Teen Vogue magazine and its “safe anal sex” guide. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see her campaigning for and winning a seat in Congress one of these days.

The opening paragraphs of Chapter 20 of Blue Thunder:How the Mafia Owned and Finally Murdered Cigarette Boat King Donald Aronow by Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell give us a much more accurate picture of who Donna Rice was and is, and, in doing so, shed a lot more light upon what really happened to Gary Hart:

A titillating piece of information had come my way while looking into the Aronow story.  Although apparently unrelated to the murder, it reinforced the omnipresence of the mob and its infiltration into all aspects of society.  When the feds busted Ben Kramer, they discovered originals of Gary Hart’s stump speeches in Ben’s Ft. Apache safe.  Somehow a Lansky, Inc. drug kingpin had gotten possession of a presidential contender’s papers. 

At the time that Hart was blown out of the presidential waters, he had been the Democratic front-runner.  The rest of the Democratic contenders seemed to have little chance of knocking Hart off the winning path.  On the Republican side was George Bush, the heir apparent to the Reagan era. Bush was considered a weak candidate; even Reagan had expressed doubts about his loyal veep’s presidential fortitude.  It looked as if the Democrats might capture the White House for the first time in eight years.

Suddenly, “Snow White,” as Hart was dubbed by the press, was devastatingly and humiliatingly knocked out of contention.  With Democrats’ strong front-runner gone, the party was divided among the “Seven Dwarfs,” the remaining Democratic candidates.  The precarious unity was gone, and a fractious campaign ensued with no one able to amass the strength that Hart once commanded.

Despite Gail Sheehy’s famous “psycho-political” article in Vanity Fair about Hart, there may be more behind the story than simply the tale of a man whose rigid religious upbringing forced him to punish himself by self-destructing.  A closer look at the Hart debacle reveals an interesting panorama played out behind the highly publicized story.

Lynn Armandt, the woman who brought Gary Hart down, had worked for a long time at Turnberry Isle before the infamous Monkey Business trip in May 1987.  Don Soffer, the developer and manager of the resort, had made her the head of “Donny’s party girls”–which some cynics likened to high-priced call girls.  He also provided her with free floor space to sell bikinis.  (Turnberry’s shops are considered some of the most expensive retail space in Miami.)  In all, an extremely lucrative position for a woman of her background.

She and Donna Rice, another of Donny’s girls, were very good friends.  The two women lived in upscale, neighboring condominiums not far from Turnberry and Thunderboat Alley.  As Donny’s girls, Armandt and Rice made money, “dated” wealthy and famous men, and had entrée to Miami’s high-flying lifestyle.

After the incident, Rice supposedly ended her association with Armandt, angered over the “betrayal.”  Or so she told Barbara Walters in a 20/20 piece.  But people at Turnberry and Rice’s Miami condominium saw the two women together often after the Hart affair.  A maintenance man at Rice’s condo saw them sunbathing at the pool frequently both before and after the 20/20 piece.  “They were laughing and joking and were the best of girlfriends,” he had said.  “Nothing changed.”

As the scrutiny of the scandal continued unabated, Armandt moved to New York and then went underground.  She was castigated as a money-hungry woman who sold out her friend and brought down a presidential contender for a handful of dollars.  But if she had been so inclined, why not blow the cover on some of the other celebrities who cavorted at the resort over the years?  The resort’s client roster included a long list of powerful and celebrated men.  Some whose often compromising activities there would have been ideal fodder for the gossip rags.

A street-smart woman such as Armandt knew she would become a pariah among Turnberry’s clientele and her relationship with her boss and benefactor would be severed if she publicized the secret life of any patron.  Armandt also knew that some of the Turnberry boys could play a rough game.  If it ever slipped her mind, she only had to remember what happened to her drug-smuggling husband.  The last trace of him was a bloody bullet-riddled car and a piece of paper containing the telephone number of Turnberry patron Ben Kramer.

Gary Hart had already been to Turnberry before the Monkey Business incident, despite his denials.  When he returned in May 1987, a “setup” may have been arranged with Armandt being directed at every step of the way.

One fed who has investigated Turnberry (he alleges that the twenty-nine-story condominium is “mobbed-up from the twenty-ninth floor down”) agrees with the notion that the Hart affair was masterminded by OC (organized crime, ed.) interests.  He points out that Armandt went to the Miami Herald with her story, where she had no prospect of making any money but the greatest chance of destroying Hart quickly.  The key question is, who stands to benefit from destroying Gary Hart?  “One thing to always remember is [the mob] they’re big business,” he reminds me, “As goes the economy, so goes big business.  Meyer Lansky was a staunchly conservative Republican, you know.”

There could be a deeper motive behind the Hart fiasco than simple partisan preferences.  Contemporary organized crime depends on a protective shield of middle-level governmental and law enforcement officials.  These are the people who possess valuable information and make decisions that directly affect the mob—selecting which cases to investigate and which to ignore, which drug smugglers to go after, which wiseguy convicts to parole.  It’s the mob’s real muscle and it comes from owning not the president but the appointed politicians and law enforcement management.

After eight years of productive, well-oiled relationships at all levels of the federal government, it’s unlikely the mob would look favorably on a completely new administration.  With a Democratic win, these relationships would be lost as officials and appointees made way for a new administration.  The protective shield would falter—temporarily—as OC bagmen had to start anew finding people willing to take envelopes stuffed with cash in return for favors.

Keeping the same party in power and simply changing the head ensures that the machinery continues to run smoothly.  From organized crime’s perspective, the “right” people retain their jobs:  those not-so-really-new faces who would be expected from the not-so-really-new President Bush.

It is widely acknowledged that the Republicans didn’t win the 1988 election so much as the Democrats lost it.  Perhaps there was an unseen hand making some adjustments in the direction of the election by strengthening the Republican chances of winning.

The mob had influenced presidential campaigns in the past.  It’s common knowledge that Lansky, along with the mob boss Sam Giancana, had tipped the scales in Jack Kennedy’s favor when he delivered the state of Illinois.  And if the mob could influence an election, manipulation of a local murder would be a small endeavor.  It was all just a matter of “taking care of business” for the world’s largest and most powerful “corporation.” 

It’s pretty clear that the “unseen hand” here is highly unlikely to have been that of the lone Lee Atwater. Burdick and Mitchell are a bit weak, though, we think, in explaining the motive behind that hand. For that, we turn to pp. 432-434 of Roger Morris’s Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America:

Clinton admitted, however, he would enter the race far from the obvious choice. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination was clearly Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a former McGovern campaign manager and a nationally known, well-financed veteran of the 1984 race. He was receiving increasingly favorable publicity, had run well ahead of George Bush, the likely GOP nominee, in the polls, and already seemed to many an odds-on favorite to be the next president.

On March 27 [1987] Clinton went to Los Angeles for an exclusive dinner with television producer Norman Lear and other figures from the entertainment industry-"Hollyticking," as the process of currying and money seeking came to be known. By striking coincidence, however, among those dining with Clinton that evening was Don Henley, a former member of the Eagles rock band. The same night, across the continent in Miami, one of Henley's close friends, a young woman named Donna Rice, was boarding a yacht called the Monkey Business for a voyage that would change the course of American politics.

Within the next few weeks, the public would witness the swift destruction of Gary Hart's candidacy and potential presidency. Only days after his April 13 formal announcement for the White House, the senator was the object of media speculation about his alleged womanizing. Acting on what it claimed was an anonymous tip, the Miami Herald followed a woman to Washington, staked out a townhouse where she was visiting Hart, and on May 4, in the story that swept through the media nationwide, accused the front-runner of an illicit "relationship" with twenty-nine-year-old party girl Donna Rice of Miami. The next day it was confirmed that Hart has spent the weekend of March 27-29 aboard the Monkey Business, which his aide Billy Broadhurst had chartered for the candidate's relaxation after Hart attended a scheduled fund-raiser in South Miami. On Saturday the two men had taken an overnight trip to Bimini with Rice and her girl friend.

In the wake of the later Herald story, compromising photos of the Bimini trip, including one showing Rice on the senator's lap, were sold to the tabloid press for six figures. And though Hart adamantly denied charges of adultery and seemed to be riding out the Herald story, which some reporters had begun to question, there was more. The Washington Post put the Hart campaign on notice that it had been given a private detective's report purporting to show the candidate's involvement with yet another woman in Washington. It was what many later saw as the paper's power play to force the candidate out of the race. Meanwhile, amid the blaring headlines and rumors, crucial sources of Hart campaign money and support were deserting him. On May 8, less than a month after the Monkey Business expose', Hart withdrew.

As elements of the Hart drama began to emerge afterward, it was clear that his personality and habits had driven his fate to some extent. Yet there had been more to the politician's destruction than vulnerable psychology. Whatever his other strengths or weaknesses, Hart was no ordinary candidate to those in the inner recesses of power.

As a freshman senator he had been a key member of the celebrated Church committee investigation of CIA abuses and specifically the agency's incessant links to organized crime. He had gone on to serve on the new Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, where he continued to be known for advocating further investigation and exposure of the alliance between the mob and the US intelligence community. Hart would be a vocal critic of CIA covert operations in general. A leading opponent of the Nicaraguan Contra war, the senator had barely escaped what he and others believed to be an assassination plot in 1983 when he flew into Managua at the time of an extraordinary CIA-sponsored Contra air strike against the capital.

From 1984 to 1987 Hart was repeatedly on record voicing his skepticism about the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and promising that if elected president in 1988 he would order the opening of all CIA and other government files in question, looking in particular at the possible role of organized crime figures Santo Trafficante, John Roselli, and Sam Gianciana in the Kennedy murder--the last two of whom had been killed during the Church committee inquiry. By the mid-1980s Hart was increasingly bold in exposing the "sleaze factor" in the Reagan administration, including the wider influence of the mob in Washington. According to someone familiar with the written record of the remark, Trafficante had said of Gary Hart, "We need to get rid of the son of a bitch."

Though it came too late to affect his fate, there would be still more evidence that Hart's fall was not what it seemed at the time. According to US Customs sources, one part of the setting of the episode had long been suspected of a role in drug running. Some of those involved in Hart's Miami-Bimini weekend turned out to have links to organized crime and cocaine trafficking and, in spiraling circles beyond, to crime bosses of the Jewish and Italian syndicates, who in turn possessed ties to the US intelligence community dating back to the Bay of Pigs and earlier.

Discrepancies were plain in the Miami Herald's role in the affair as well. In the supposedly spontaneous call of the paper's public-spirited tipster there had been highly implausible detail about Hart's movements and phone records over the preceding period, intimate knowledge that should have prompted journalistic suspicion but that the paper apparently never questioned. In fact, as a subsequent independent investigation would show, Hart had been under surveillance by unknown parties for days and perhaps weeks before the weekend of March 27-29.

There were also reports of sensational videotapes of the Money Business, part of a professional surveillance of the vessel. Despite unexplained money, incriminating phone calls, and even evidence of a contract murder, most of the media had simply repeated the first trumpeted charges and reprinted the supplied photos, joined the clamor that forced the candidate from the race, and then moved on to the next story. There was no doubt that Hart inhabited the edge, but there was compelling evidence, too, that he had been pushed over it. And both self-inflicted and arranged, the ruin of Gary Hart would have historic impact on the Clintons. 

Most immediately, it was of great benefit to the weak Republican candidate, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and then, as Maddow points out in her presentation, it affected the succession of presidents for the next couple of decades. Notice that in this account, the putatively liberal Washington Post, as with Watergate, played a major active role in bringing Hart down. In The Front Runner, they are the good guys, trying to uphold the highest journalistic ethics, but dragged along into the sordid mess by the aggressive heavies at the Miami Herald.

We have seen this cast of characters working in concert before. I tried to capture that reality with a poem that I posted on my web site on November 22, 2003:

Barren Summit

Forty years and counting

Since Kennedy was killed,

And our vacuum of leadership

Still has not been filled.

Why should those shoes present

Such difficulty in filling?

The candidates are weeded out

By those who did the killing.

What is really depicted in The Front Runner is just the accepted version of that weeding out process as it occurred over three weeks in the spring of 1987. (The sharp professionals at Sony Pictures Entertainment who did the official trailer seem to think that all those things took place a year later.)

David Martin

December 6, 2018

Addendum

Don’t expect a correction of the dating error in the movie’s trailer anytime soon. The error is embedded in the movie, itself. After posting the article, I discovered this observation, listed as a “Goof” at IMDB.com: “The film begins in 1984 then the screen displays ‘4 years later’ but it actually picks up in early 1987.”

Everything that transpires thereafter, the movie tells us, took place over a three-week period. Now I am beginning to wonder if this implicit 1988 dating is not intentional brazen rewriting of history, done to make Hart’s behavior appear even more reckless than it was, right in the heat of the primary campaigns instead of a full year before.

Now here’s a clear and obvious goof for you. Right before its Goof section is IMDB’s Trivia section. There we find: “Sarah Paxton who plays Donna Rice was born in 1988, the year the events depicted occurred.” The right hand and the left hand at IMDB should get in touch with one another.

David Martin

December 8, 2018

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