I want you to picture a specific image. It's
arguably one of the most famous or maybe infamous
images in American political history. A man in
a T -shirt, wearing sunglasses, sitting on a
dock. Maybe there's a boat involved. And the
name of that boat is monkey business. It's the
punchline that defined a whole decade. I mean,
if you stop someone on the street and say, Gary
Hart, that is the immediate association. That's
it. The blonde woman, the boat, the scandal,
the, you know, the total fall from grace. Right.
It's the moment political journalism just turned
into something, I don't know, something different.
But here is the paradox. And it is a really jarring
one. If you leave that dock and fast forward
to the first week of September. 2001, specifically
September 6th, you find that same man, the punchline,
sitting in a meeting with a national security
advisor of the United States. And he isn't talking
about scandals. He's predicting with like a terrifying
specificity that a massive terrorist attack is
about to happen on U .S. soil. It is one of those
historical what -ifs that just keeps you up at
night. You have a man who was, well, arguably
the most forward -thinking political strategist
of his generation, completely sidelined by a
sex scandal. Completely. And there he is trying
to warn the government about 9 -11 literally
five days before it happened. So today we're
doing a deep dive into the life and career of
Gary Hart. And the mission here is. Quite specific.
We aren't here to just rehash the gossip for
the sake of gossip. We have a massive stack of
sources here. Senate records, biographical files,
declassified commission reports. We're going
to unpack how a farm boy from Kansas became the
Atari Democrat, analyze the exact timeline of
the scandal that destroyed him because the popular
story is actually wrong, and look at those warnings
he gave in 2001. And I think the key here is
to view Hart not just as a failed politician,
but as a case study in how American politics
has evolved. He really bridges the gap. I mean,
he started in the era of smoke filled rooms and
he ended up as the first casualty of the 24 hour
news cycle. He's patient zero. He is patient
zero for modern political media. Absolutely.
He didn't just see the rules change. In a lot
of ways, he. broke the old rules and kind of
forced the new ones into existence. Yeah. But
to understand the fall, we have to understand
the ascent. And looking at his early life, the
first thing that struck me in the biographical
data is that Gary Hart didn't actually exist
for the first 25 years of his life. No, he didn't.
He was born Gary Warren Hartpence. Hartpence.
That's a mouthful. It is. In Ottawa, Kansas,
his father was a farm equipment salesman. It
was a pretty modest, you know, very religious
upbringing in the heartland. That name change
is really the first clue to his character. It
wasn't some Hollywood stage name. In 1961, Gary
and his father actually went to the courthouse
together to change the family name. Together.
That's interesting. Yeah. And the reasoning they
gave was just incredibly pragmatic. Hart is just
easier to remember and spell than Hartpence.
Which is true from a branding perspective. I
mean, Senator Hartpence sounds a bit. A little
stuffy, yeah. But it does suggest a certain level
of calculation, doesn't it? Even at a young age,
this idea of streamlining your own identity.
Absolutely. It speaks to a desire for efficiency.
And you see that pivot in his education as well.
He went to Southern Nazarene University, a very
strict religious school. And then he goes on
to Yale Divinity School. So he was on a track
to become a minister or a philosopher. Right.
He wanted to save souls. But then... Almost abruptly,
he graduates in 1961 and literally walks across
the campus to enroll in Yale Law School. The
shift from the laws of God. To the laws of men.
Exactly. And while the sources don't give us,
you know, a diary entry explaining the exact
moment of the decision, the trajectory shifts
from spiritual leadership to practical systemic
leadership. He goes to work for the Department
of Justice, then the Department of the Interior.
Pretty standard stuff. But the moment where he
stops being a bureaucrat and starts being a political
architect is 1972. The George McGovern campaign.
Now, historically, McGovern is, of course, remembered
for losing to Nixon in one of the biggest landslides
ever. A total wipeout. But the primary campaign,
that was something else entirely. And Hart was
the campaign director. This is where we have
to get into the weeds a little bit of how American
politics actually works, because Hart effectively
hacked the system. He really did. Before 1972,
the Democratic nominee was largely chosen by
party bosses. You know, the mayor dailies of
the world. The guys in the smoke -filled rooms.
Exactly. But after the... Just the chaos of the
1968 convention in Chicago, the party opened
up the process. They created this new, really
complex system of primaries and caucuses. And
most of the old guard, the establishment, they
didn't really understand the new rulebook. Correct.
But Gary Hart and his colleague Rick Stearns
did. They looked at the new rules and treated
them like a logic puzzle. They realized that
while all the big names, Muskie, Humphrey, were
fighting over the expensive primary states with
TV ads and big rallies. Spending all the money.
There were 28 states that held caucuses. OK,
so for you, the listener who might not know,
what is the functional difference there that
Hart was able to exploit? It's a great question.
A primary is simple voting. You walk in, you
pull a lever or fill out a bubble, you leave.
A caucus is a meeting. It's a commitment. It's
a huge commitment. It requires neighbors talking
to neighbors in a school gym for hours. It requires
time. And most importantly, organization. Hart
realized that caucuses were cheap in terms of
dollars, but really expensive in terms of effort.
So he built a grassroots army. A huge one. They
focused on these completely ignored states, organizing
thousands of volunteers to show up at these meetings
on a Tuesday night in, you know, Iowa or Nebraska.
It was a moneyball approach to politics way before
that term existed. They were looking for undervalued
assets on the political map. Precisely. And it
worked. McGovern just swept the nomination, shocking
the entire establishment. Now, the general election
was a disaster. We know that. But inside the
party, Gary Hart walked away with this reputation
as a whiz kid. He was the guy who saw the Matrix.
And he didn't waste any time cashing in on that
reputation. Yeah. Just two years later, 1974,
he moves to Colorado and runs for the U .S. Senate.
And his timing was impeccable. I mean, 1974 is
the year of Watergate. Of course. The Republican
brand was just radioactive. Hart ran against
an incumbent, Peter Dominick, who had not only
supported Nixon, but was also suffering from
some health issues. So Hart runs as the fresh
face, the outsider, the reformer. And he wins
in a landslide 57 .2 percent of the vote. Huge
margin. So now he is Senator Hart. And looking
at his Senate record in the provided files, he
wasn't a backbencher. He seemed to gravitate
toward the heavy, complex committees almost immediately.
Oh, he was incredibly active. He landed a seat
on the Church Committee. For those not familiar
with 70s history, the Church Committee was a
massive, massive investigation into the intelligence
abuses of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI. This was
really dark stuff. Oh, yeah. They were looking
into assassination plots, illegal domestic surveillance
on anti -war protesters. This is where Hart gets
his first deep exposure to the national security
apparatus, and it clearly shapes him. And then
there's the Three Mile Island incident in 1979.
There's a detail in the source material that
I found pretty wild. He wasn't just reading reports
about the nuclear meltdown. Yeah. He was physically
there. He was the chairman of the Subcommittee
on Nuclear Regulation. So when the reactor accident
happened, he didn't manage it from a desk in
D .C. No. He flew to Pennsylvania and went up
in an Army helicopter directly over the reactor
to assess the situation while the crisis was
still unfolding. That's incredible. It showed
a kind of physical courage and a hands -on style
that really separated him from the typical lawyer
-politician archetype. But the label that really
came to define him, and the one that I think
is most interesting for us, to unpack is Atari
Democrat. Right. Sounds so retro now, like calling
someone a Betamax Republican. Right. But in the
context of the early 80s, what was he trying
to signal with that term? It was a declaration
of a new kind of liberalism. You have to remember,
the Democratic Party of the 1970s and 80s was
still built on the New Deal coalition. Heavy
industry, big labor unions, protectionism. The
Rust Belt. The Rust Belt, exactly. Hart looked
at the world and saw the information age coming.
Atari Democrat meant a moderate who believed
the government should partner with the tech sector,
encourage entrepreneurship and move away from
that old industrial reliance. It was about shifting
the focus from steel mills to silicon ships.
That's the perfect way to put it. And he backed
it up with legislation. He co -sponsored the
Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984. What
did that do? Why was that a big deal? Well, it
was a landmark bill. Before this, you could basically
take a computer chip, photograph the layout of
the transistors, what they call the mask work,
and just clone it. There was no intellectual
property protection for the physical design of
a chip. So it was the Wild West for tech. Totally.
And Hart helped create a new category of IP law.
specifically to protect Silicon Valley from foreign
copycats. He was thinking about this stuff years
before most people in Washington even knew what
a microchip was. So he's identifying the economic
future of the country. He's a military reformer
pushing for smaller, more mobile units rather
than massive battleships. He's checking all these
visionary boxes. But politically, he almost flamed
out in 1980. Oh, it was a very close call. 1980
was the Reagan revolution. Republicans swept
the country. Hart barely, and I mean barely,
held onto a seat in Colorado. How close was it?
He won by roughly 1%, just over 19 ,000 votes.
His opponent, Mary Estill Buchanan, attacked
him as a McGovernate carpetbagger, trying to
tie him to the old left, saying he was too liberal
for Colorado. And what was the specific attack
line? A lot of it centered on his support for
the Panama Canal treaties, which was seen as
giving away the canal. It was a very effective
conservative talking point at the time. So that
close call spooked him. It had to. He realized
that if he wanted to be president, he couldn't
just be the smart guy or the ideas guy. He needed
to be the tough guy, too. Which brings us to
a very strange chapter in his biography, The
Naval Reserve. This feels like a subplot that
a scriptwriter would add to make a character
more complex. But in real life, it just seems...
Odd. It is very peculiar. Why does a sitting
United States senator in his 40s decide to join
the Navy? It's a great question. The stated reason,
which Hart has always maintained, is that he
didn't feel comfortable voting on military matters,
specifically the potential for conflict in the
Persian Gulf, without understanding the military
from the inside. So he was saying, I don't want
to send young men to war if I haven't served.
That was the line. He said he didn't want to
send young men to die in a service he didn't
understand. which sounds noble on paper. But
the critics at the time didn't buy it. Not for
a second. Columnists like Evans and Novak just
savaged him for it. They called it clearing the
biographical decks. What does that mean? Well,
you have to look at the landscape of the time.
JFK, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H .W.
Bush, they all had military service records.
It was practically a prerequisite for the presidency.
Hart was the odd man out. So the cynical view
is that he was just checking a box on his resume
for a future presidential run. And the application
process itself was riddled with irregularities.
Oh, it was messy. He was over the age limit for
a commission. He was, I think, 43 at the time.
He had no prior experience. And in what becomes
a recurring theme for Hart, there were discrepancies
on his forms regarding his birth date. He got
his own birthday wrong. Again, it happened more
than once in public documents. It added to this
low -level hum of suspicion that he was constantly
reinventing himself, you know, shaving a year
off here or there. So how did he get in? He got
a waiver from the Secretary of the Navy, Edward
Hidalgo. But here is a fascinating connection.
The Senate liaison for the Navy who helped smooth
this whole process over was none other than John
McCain. No way. That is a wild connection. They
actually became friends through the process.
Hart was commissioned as a lieutenant junior
grade. He apparently wanted a higher rank, but
the Navy held firm that he had no experience.
He did his active duty tours, but politically
it was a wash. It just looked too calculated
to a lot of people. But despite the cynicism,
he gears up for the big show, 1984. He decides
to run for president. And this is really the
rehearsal for the tragedy that comes later. It
really is. 1984 is where he proves he's a heavyweight.
He announces early. in February of 1983, and
he is polling at an asterisk, like 1%. A total
nobody on the national state. Completely. He
is running against Walter Mondale, the former
vice president and the embodiment of the Democratic
establishment, and John Glenn, an American hero
and astronaut. Hart is a nobody outside of Colorado
and D .C. So he goes back to the 1972 McGovern
playbook. He does. He realizes he can't outspend
Mondale, so he decides to outwork him in the
early states. He goes to New Hampshire way, way
before anyone else. He campaigns on this theme
of new ideas. That was the slogan. It was a brilliant
frame. Mondale was the past. Hart was the future.
And it worked. He won New Hampshire by 10 points.
I mean, that is a political earthquake. It was
a massive upset. Suddenly, Gary Hart is on the
cover of Time and Newsweek. He's being called
the new JFK. He has the hair, the look, the Atari
platform. Mondale is reeling. The entire establishment
is terrified. But then we have one of the most
famous moments in debate history, the where's
the beef moment. I think people know the punchline,
but let's analyze why it was so incredibly effective.
It's a perfect case study in political jujitsu.
Mondale was being attacked as old and boring.
Hart was new ideas. But during a debate, Mondale
turns to Hart and uses a slogan from a hugely
popular Wendy's hamburger commercial. Everyone
knew this ad. Oh, yeah. It was iconic. And he
said, when I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded
of that ad. Where's the beef? The audience just
erupted. They did. But the reason it worked wasn't
just because it was a funny, timely reference.
It struck at Hart's biggest vulnerability. People
thought he was cool. He was aloof. He was intellectual.
But they weren't sure there was any real substance
behind the new ideas slogan. So Mondale was saying,
this guy is all packaging. He's all sizzle and
no steak. Exactly. It halted Hart's momentum
cold. It gave the media and the voters a simple,
powerful narrative to latch on to. Hart fought
all the way to the convention in San Francisco,
but Mondale had the delegates by then. He did,
but it was the last time a nomination was truly
contested that late into the game, and Hart went
out swinging. He told the convention, This is
one heart you will not leave in San Francisco.
That's a great line. It was a promise. He was
telling the world, I'll be back in 1988 and I'm
going to win this time. And for three years,
that seemed inevitable. Going into the 1988 cycle,
he wasn't just a frontrunner. He was the guy.
Oh, he was the prohibitive favorite. He was pulling
double digits ahead of everyone. The path was
completely clear for him to be the next president
of the United States. But there was noise in
the background. Rumors. The womanizing rumors.
It was something of an open secret in D .C. that
Hart had a complex marriage. He and his wife
Lee had separated twice in 79 and 81, though
they always reconciled. He called it a midlife
crisis, right? He did. But there were constant
whispers about affairs, about him not being,
you know, a faithful husband. And this brings
us to the scandal. And this is where we need
to be very precise, because the popular memory
of this event is actually wrong. The story everyone
knows is Hart arrogantly taunted the press, geared
them to follow him. So they did. And they caught
him. That is the myth. It's a very convenient
narrative because it makes the whole scandal
Hart's fault for being arrogant. But the timeline
and the sources, it tells a very different story.
OK, let's break down that timeline. The felon's
quote is finding. Follow me around. I don't care
if anybody wants to put a tail on me. Go ahead.
They'll be very bored. Right. He gave that quote
to E .J. Dionne of the New York Times for a magazine
piece. But, and this is absolutely crucial, that
interview had not been published yet when the
Miami Herald began their investigation. So the
Herald wasn't accepting some kind of challenge?
No. The Herald received an anonymous tip. A phone
call from a woman who claimed her friend was
having an affair with Hart and that she even
had photos. So the Herald flew a team to D .C.
and staked out his townhouse based entirely on
that tip. Not on a dare. And the quote from The
Times. Here's the crazy part. The quote appeared
in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May
3rd. That was the exact same day that the Miami
Herald published its story about the stakeout.
Oh, wow. What a collision. It was a cosmic collision
of bad timing. It made Hart look incredibly hubristic,
as if he was daring them while he was actively
with Donna Rice. But the surveillance was already
happening. The die was already cast. So let's
talk about that weekend, May 1st and 2nd, 1987.
The stakeout itself. It's just grim. You have
these reporters sitting in rental cars watching
the back door of a presidential candidate's home.
They see a young woman, Donna Rice, coming and
going with Hart's friend. Then they see her and
Hart together. And on Saturday evening, they
decide to confront him. In an alleyway. In an
alley. Sounds like a movie. It really does. Hart
is walking near his townhouse. The reporters
literally surround him. It's chaotic. They start
firing questions at him. Who is the woman in
your house? Is she staying with you? Hart denied
everything. He was agitated. He claimed he was
being set up. But the optics were just fatal.
The frontrunner for the presidency cornered in
an alley trying to explain why a blonde model
was in his house. It was over at that moment,
really. The story breaks the next day. And the
media environment. The sources describe it as
a frenzy that had never been seen before. This
was the Rubicon Crossing. Before this, there
was sort of a gentleman's agreement in the press.
There was. I mean, the press corps knew about
FDR. They knew about JFK. They knew about LBJ.
But they viewed it as private conduct that didn't
impact their ability to govern. With Hart, the
character issue became the dominant and really
the only story. The wall between public and private
was demolished. It was bulldozed. Overnight,
the campaign turned from a debate about policy
into a character inquisition. The Washington
Post was preparing a story about another woman
Hart had dated while he was legally separated
from his wife. The pressure was just unbearable.
And on May 8th, just a week after the story broke,
he suspended his campaign. Just like that, it
was over. And his withdrawal speech... Reading
the transcript of it now, it's not apologetic,
it's angry. It is. It's defiant. He felt he was
the victim of a media that had completely lost
its way. He said, and this is a quote, I watched
journalists become animals, literally. But the
most haunting part is when he paraphrased Thomas
Jefferson. What did he say? He said, I tremble
for my country when I think we may, in fact,
get the kind of leaders we deserve. That is a
heavy statement. He was warning us. He was saying,
if you make politics about peeping through keyholes
and staking out people's homes, serious people
with complex lives will stop running for office.
And you'll be left with what? You're going to
be left with people who are simply better at
hiding things or people who have no shame at
all. He also talked about this idea of static.
Yes. He said that scandal creates static that
drowns out the signal of real issues. And that
concept becomes devastatingly, tragically relevant
when we look at his post -political career. He
did try to jump back in briefly in December of
87, right? The Let the People Decide tour. He
did. It was a bizarre, almost quixotic attempt
to restart his campaign. He thought maybe the
voters didn't care as much as the press did.
He was wrong. He was wrong. He was a punchline
by then. He polled terribly and dropped out again
for good after Super Tuesday. His electoral career
was dead. And usually in a biography, this is
where the screen fades to black. The politician
retires, maybe writes a memoir, plays golf. But
for Gary Hart, this was arguably just the end
of the first act. This is where the story gets
really substantive. Hart didn't disappear into
obscurity. He went to Oxford. He earned a doctorate
in politics. He completely reinvented himself
again, this time as a serious scholar of national
security. And this brings us to the late 90s.
President Clinton commissions Hart, along with
former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, to lead
a major study on national security. But Hart
Rudman... commission. And this wasn't some fluff
assignment to keep a former politician busy.
They spent nearly three years analyzing the changing
global landscape after the Cold War. And their
conclusion was stark. What did they find? They
said that the era of American invulnerability
was over. They concluded that the U .S. homeland
was now a primary target. And they were specific
about the nature of the threat. Extremely specific.
They warned that a terrorist attack involving
mass casualties would occur on U .S. soil. They
explicitly stated it wasn't a matter of if, but
when. They published their final report in early
2001. So now we are in 2001. George W. Bush is
president. The report is out there collecting
dust on a shelf somewhere, I assume. But Hart
didn't just file the report and walk away. He
was actively sounding the alarm. He was. And
this is where the timeline becomes just chilling.
Let's look at the week before 9 -11. OK. September
4th, 2001. Hart is in Montreal giving a speech.
He publicly warns that within the next 25 years,
a massive terrorist event will kill Americans
on American soil. He is trying to get people
to pay attention. And then September 6th. Five
days before the attacks. This is the meeting
that I think must haunt him. Hart goes to the
White House to meet with Condoleezza Rice, the
National Security Advisor. He is there specifically
to urge the Bush administration to move faster
on the Hart -Rudman Commission's recommendations.
What did he tell her? Do we know? We do. He was
blunt. He told her, you must move more quickly
on homeland security. An attack is going to happen.
He was trying to cut through the bureaucracy
to light a fire under them. And the response.
According to Hart and later reports, the administration
was polite, but essentially dismissed the urgency.
Their focus was elsewhere. They were looking
at missile defense. They were looking at state
actors like Iraq and China. The idea of a non
-state actor using commercial planes as missiles.
It just wasn't the frequency they were tuned
into. It really brings us back to his warning
about static, doesn't it? The scandal in 87 destroyed
his political viability. If he had been President
Hart or even just Senator Hart with his reputation
intact, would that warning have been heeded?
That is the ultimate unanswerable question. The
scandal didn't just remove a candidate from the
field. It sidelined a mind that had correctly
diagnosed the defining threat of the 21st century.
Because he was viewed as damaged goods, his warnings
were easier to ignore. The static of his personal
life drowned out the signal of his intelligence.
That's it. That's the tragedy. It's unbelievable.
But he did eventually find a way to serve again
in a different capacity. He did. Under the Obama
administration from 2014 to 2017, he served as
the U .S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.
It's a very difficult, very delicate diplomatic
role helping to manage the peace process. And
the fact that he was chosen for that, what does
that signal? It shows that, at least within the
serious circles of foreign policy, he had earned
his redemption. He had proven he was the statesman
he always claimed to be, despite the caricature.
I want to touch on one final aspect before we
wrap up. The personal side. The scandal was ostensibly
about protecting the sanctity of marriage. The
press destroyed him to save the country from
an adulterer. Yeah. But looking at the sources,
the marriage survived. It did. Gary and Lee Hart
remained married until her death in 2021. And
it wasn't a fairy tale. In public statements
over the years, they were very honest about the
fact that it was difficult. They admitted to
the separations. They admitted to the pain. Hart
said that the time they spent apart actually
strengthened their marriage in the long run.
but they changed to stay together. It just defies
the simple narrative, doesn't it? The media treated
it as a black and white morality play, but the
reality was a complex, gray, very human relationship
that endured for over 60 years. And in a way,
that's the story of Gary Hart himself. He was
never the caricature the media painted him as.
He wasn't just the monkey business guy. He was
a brilliant strategist, a flawed husband, a visionary
policymaker, and a casualty of a changing culture.
He's even found this weird second life in pop
culture. He has. He's played by Hugh Jackman
in the movie The Front Runner. He shows up in
references on Cheers and The Golden Girls. But
the weirdest one has to be Stephen King. Oh,
right. He's the president in Stephen King's Dark
Tower universe. In that alternate timeline, he
won in 1988. A strange kind of immortality. To
be the good president in a fantasy novel. It
shows that he remains this symbol of what could
have been. It's a powerful idea. So let's synthesize
all this. We started with a farm boy who renamed
himself for practical reasons. We saw the strategist
who invented the modern caucus system, the Atari
Democrat who foresaw the tech economy. Then the
scandal that changed journalism forever. And
the prophet who warned us about 9 -11 when almost
no one was listening. It is a dense, complicated
legacy. The question I'm left with is the one
we touched on earlier. Did the destruction of
the wall between public and private life actually
make us better off? We knew everything there
was to know about Donna Rice. We knew nothing
about the 19 terrorists training to fly planes
in Florida. That is the verdict of history, isn't
it? In our obsession with the personal failings
of our leaders, we distracted ourselves from
the existential threat. facing our nation, Hart
warned us about the static. And looking back
at that week in September 2001, it's just so
hard to argue that we were listening to the right
signal. Which leaves us with a provocative thought.
Sometimes the headline everyone is screaming
about is just noise, and the real story, the
one that actually matters, is in the quiet report
that nobody is bothering to read. Absolutely.
The signal gets lost in the static. That's it
for this deep dive into the paradox of Gary Hart.
Thanks for listening. Thank you. We'll see you
in the next one. Stay curious.