Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. With Donald Trump moving back into the White House, we thought it made sense to take stock of how political and journalistic norms have morphed over the years. We're sharing an episode from Radiolab that aired in October on just that topic. Latif Nasser, Radiolab's cohost, invited me to talk about it.

Latif Nasser: How you doing, Brooke?

Brooke Gladstone: Good. Really good. Great to talk to you, really.

Latif Nasser: Really I-- 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. It was about how the media covers presidential campaigns, how we the public think about our candidates. When I relistened to the episode, I felt like it was perfectly speaking to the political moment that we're in right now, but then also somehow simultaneously totally outdated.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

Latif Nasser: Do you agree with that? Do you think that's true in some way?

Brooke Gladstone: Absolutely.

Latif Nasser: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Latif Nasser: Well, that was the number one question. Brooke did show me how the last eight years have evolved out of, but also completely rewritten that story. I'm going to play you the original show. Like I said, we did it back in 2016, so you will hear Jad and Robert, our original hosts. Then I'll come back on the flipside to talk to Brooke. here we go.

Robert: 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.

Tom Fiedler: I was at my desk. I'm just, in fact, packing up to go home. My phone rang, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's probably my wife, and she's wondering why I haven't left yet." Said, "All right, I'll pick it up."

Robert: When he picked up the phone--

Tom Fiedler: Turned out this--

Robert: It turned out it was not a voice he recognized. It was a woman's voice, maybe in her late 20s. She said to him, "I have something you need to know." 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.

Tom Fiedler: Her words to me were, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

Robert: She told him, basically, "I can prove it."

Tom Fiedler: I was rather, I guess, dumbstruck by that.

Robert: He thought--

Tom Fiedler: Well, now what do we do?

Jad: 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, the accusations, then the denial.

Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Jad: Then after that, the whole wall-to-wall media thing, 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. The thing that's easy to forget is that it wasn't always like this.

Matt Bai: No. Hart was the first to walk into this vortex of social forces. After that, the rules of political journalism and politics change almost immediately.

Robert: That, by the way, is Matt Bai.

Matt Bai: National political columnist for Yahoo News.

Robert: He wrote a book about this incident which he called All the Truth Is Out.

Jad: 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.

Matt Bai: Well, just flash back a minute because I think the context is important.

Robert: 1984.

Matt Bai: Hart kind of comes from nowhere.

News Presenter 1: It's a whole new ballgame in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Matt Bai: Runs for president. Storms New Hampshire.

News Presenter 2: Senator Gary Hart is on his way to a clear-cut victory over Walter Mondale.

Matt Bai: Beats Mondale there and becomes a political celebrity.

Gary Hart: This country cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics for the rich. [cheers]

News Presenter 3: Gary Hart.

News Presenter 4: Gary Hart, the senator from Colorado.

News Presenter 5: Gary Hart.

Gary Hart: I'm a Democrat and proud of it.

Jad: Hart was this tall, good-looking Democrat.

Matt Bai: He's got great, wavy hair.

Lesley Stahl: I mean, dashing, handsome, charismatic and young.

Robert: This is Lesley Stahl.

Lesley Stahl: CBS.

Robert: She's covered politics for 40 years. Now works for 60 Minutes.

Lesley Stahl: He was cool and smart. Women liked him, too.

Matt Bai: He's an anti-orthodox Democrat, very liberal, anti-nukes. He is sort of the Bill Clinton before Bill Clinton.

Robert: He doesn't get the Democratic nomination in 1984. Walter Mondale does by a nose. When Mondale gets crushed by Ronald Reagan--

Matt Bai: Hart is immediately presumed to be the next nominee of the party at a time when these things were more obvious.

Jad: Fast forward to 1987.

News Presenter 6: Like it or not, Campaign '88 is underway.

Matt Bai: And-

News Presenter 7: The leading contender, frontrunner Gary Hart, in New Hampshire.

Matt Bai: -he's winning.

Gary Hart: On to the White House.

Matt Bai: He's running double digits higher than any Democrat.

Robert: He's projected to beat George Bush, the Republican front runner.

News Presenter 8: The next President of the United States, Gary Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: 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.

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

Kevin Sweeney: 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." [laughter] I said, "My mother made it," and he said, "I apologize."

Robert: [laughs] Well, that's a good beginning.

Kevin Sweeney: Yes. I knew pretty early I wanted to work for Hart.

Robert: Do you remember why?

Kevin Sweeney: He was really liberal on social issues at the time. Unafraid to be specific or take a stand.

Jad: 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.

Kevin Sweeney: He commanded that attitude.

Jad: They wrote out all these position papers on foreign policy, energy, international trade, the budget. Even what would his relationship with Gorbachev be?

Kevin Sweeney: There was something about Hart, and something about what happened on the campaign where it did feel like the kind of campaign that I haven't seen since.

Robert: When does the subject of what goes on below the belt come up, if at all?

Kevin Sweeney: Well, there were rumors, definitely rumors.

Matt Bai: 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. They've been separated twice, long separations. During those separations, he's dated openly in Washington. It's a well-known 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 he stayed on Bob Woodward's couch for a little while when she kicked him out at one point. Nobody wrote about that.

Jad: The reason they didn't write about it was because of a very old, very well-established convention.

Matt Bai: I mean look, go back through the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower heroes, towering figures. Their personal lives simply were not in play.

Jad: Take, for example, JFK. Lesley Stahl says that when the press was covering him--

Lesley Stahl: Vast numbers of reporters knew that John Kennedy was cheating on his wife. That was no secret, but 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.

Robert: Is the thought, "Hey, nobody does that, so I-- you know, forget about it?" Or, "Hey, that has nothing to do with statecraft?"

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

Jad: The assumption was that what happened in your private zone behind closed doors--

Lesley Stahl: Had nothing to do with whether you were going to be a good president or not. There are certain ethics and certain standards, I guess.

Matt Bai: 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.

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

News Presenter 9: Talking about the Watergate break in.

News Presenter 10: Burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington.

Matt Bai: That is the big first knocked-out brick in that wall.

News Presenter 11: Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Jad: Arguably the biggest scandal in White House history. You had Nixon tapping phone lines, compiling enemy lists. For the reporters covering Nixon--

Matt Bai: It really is an embarrassment. You had an entire White House press corps, political press corps, campaign press corps who had followed this man, Richard Nixon, for decades. 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.

Lesley Stahl: I think there was a sense that we let the public down.

Robert: Lesley Stahl remembers it this way.

Lesley Stahl: The regular White House press reporters, they should have been digging, chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. They should have been looking behind the curtain. Right after Watergate, reporters became tougher, saying, "Okay, we have to be skeptical about everything."

Robert: In particular--

Lesley Stahl: The character issue.

Matt Bai: 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.

News Presenter 12: Hart's character is the subject tonight of our Weekend Journal. When Americans choose presidents, personal character traits are important. In this day and age, candidates' personal lives are getting a great deal of scrutiny.

Kevin Sweeney: 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.

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

Kevin Sweeney: 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.

Robert: He says when those stories initially popped up--

Kevin Sweeney: I thought it was a false set of issues. I didn't really take it seriously.

Jad: Then when it came to the rumors of "womanizing" or marital infidelity, he felt like he needed to talk to Gary Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: Yes. I did say, "If anything is happening, it needs to stop. This can't-- whatever it is. I mean-- " and he said, "You know, nothing is happening." He shot back and said, "They have no right to cover that. That's ridiculous. It's not an issue that-- why is that an issue? That's not their job." 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. I don't know why or how, but the rules have changed. The rules have changed."

Tom Fiedler: It was--

Robert: 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--

Tom Fiedler: --and so forth. It seemed like at every stop along the way, someone, some reporter would raise her or his hand and would say what about the rumors of his womanizing?

Jad: Tom says that he would see reporters asking all these questions, and he was a little bit troubled.

Robert: On April 27th, 1987, he wrote a column asking the question--

Tom Fiedler: Is it ethical for journalists to be even raising this kind of a question? I really came down to the conclusion 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.

Robert: Column runs on a Monday morning.

Jad: That night--

Matt Bai: He gets the call.

Tom Fiedler: The voice on the other side says, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

Jad: He was dumbstruck, as we know.

Tom Fiedler: I told her that my position had to be that I couldn't believe what she had to say unless there was proof. 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." I thought, "Well--

Robert: Would that be ethically okay?

Tom Fiedler: --what is inbounds and what is out of bounds?"

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

Robert: Fiedler thought, "Well, no, no, no, this is inbounds.

Matt Bai: Because Gary Hart was publicly denying that he had been carrying on affairs with anyone.

Jad: 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--

Gary Hart: It's no one else's business.

Interviewer: Now why is it not anyone else's business?

Gary Hart: Because it isn't.

Interviewer: No, but--

Gary Hart: It hasn't been the business of the American public for 200 years, and it isn't today.

Jad: He'd say something like that. Fiedler says a couple times when he was asked, he did say something that amounted to a 'No.'

Tom Fiedler: 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. My view at that point was 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.

Robert: Relevant to his performance as a future president?

Tom Fiedler: Yes. It was a question of integrity. 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.

Jad: That's coming up next.

[music]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert: I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad: This is Radiolab. 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. Therefore--

Tom Fiedler: We've got to catch him.

Robert: His editor tells a colleague of his, Jim McGee, to go to the airport, telling him--

Tom Fiedler: "This is what you're going to do. You're going to look for a woman who looks like a model."

Jad: That's how the woman on the phone described her friend.

Tom Fiedler: She's described as a model, blonde, in her mid-20s. "And call me back if you see it."

Jad: This guy Jim races to the airport--

Matt Bai: Spots this attractive young woman, fits the description.

Tom Fiedler: Of course, we later knew was Donna Rice.

Robert: He boards the plane, they land in DC. He follows her out of the airport to a cab.

Tom Fiedler: He runs to another cab, jumps in it, and he says, "Follow that cab."

Jad: Just like in the movies.

Tom Fiedler: Which they do.

Robert: He loses her for a while, but then eventually he gets to the house where he thinks Hart and this lady should be.

Tom Fiedler: 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. One small problem. Jim had never met Gary Hart.

Jad: He had no idea what Gary Hart looked like.

Robert: No. [laughs]

Tom Fiedler: 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.

Matt Bai: That's what they do. The Herald-

Robert: Matt Bai again.

Matt Bai: -they send a team of reporters, investigative reporters, and Fiedler, and a photographer to Washington.

Tom Fiedler: We arrive Saturday morning.

Matt Bai: They stake out his townhouse.

Tom Fiedler: You know, I'm thinking, "My gosh, somebody will surely notice that there are four or five of us-- lurking is probably the right word.

Matt Bai: It's May, and one guy's in a parka to disguise himself. Fiedler, who the candidate knows, is in a jogging suit, and he's pretending to jog around the street all day long. [laughter]

Tom Fiedler: 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.

Robert: He'd run around and around and around.

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

Tom Fiedler: Our "stakeout" went on all day into Saturday night, and it got dark. Then front door opens. Out comes this man and out comes the blonde woman.

Matt Bai: Hart walks out with Donna Rice, sort of arm in arm.

Tom Fiedler: He quickly realizes something is wrong.

Matt Bai: He kind of makes the surveillance. They see him. He sees them. He turns her back around. They go inside.

Tom Fiedler: Go back inside the townhouse.

Matt Bai: He sends her away through the back door.

Tom Fiedler: Then he comes back out of the townhouse-

Robert: Hops in his car--

Tom Fiedler: -and starts to drive off. Our photographer starts to chase Senator Hart's car.

Matt Bai: He drives a couple blocks--

Tom Fiedler: Up streets, down streets, back and forth.

Robert: He gets out of the car.

Tom Fiedler: Walks through a park.

Robert: Chase continues on foot.

Matt Bai: He knows they're following him, and they know he knows they're following him.

Robert: Hart ducks around the corner. They lose him for a second, then they're running to catch up.

Matt Bai: Then--

Tom Fiedler: They turn a corner in an alley. There's Hart. There is the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, the most important Democratic politician in the country. They're confronting each other.

Jad: For a moment, standing in the alleyway behind Hart's townhouse, they just stare at each other because there is no script for this moment.

Tom Fiedler: Ultimately, he asked, "Well, who are you?" "Well, we're from the Miami Herald." He didn't really say anything. 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.

Matt Bai: He says, in myriad ways, myriad times--

Tom Fiedler: "I'm not going to tell you who that woman was. This is private. This isn't public."

Matt Bai: He says there's no affair, which he would maintain forever after. Ultimately--

Tom Fiedler: He said, "I've said enough." He turned and walked inside and slammed the door. We did tell him, though. We said, "We're going to write this story unless you give us a reason that explains as to why what we are seeing and what we're concluding is wrong." He never did that. We kind of look at ourselves and say, "Well, now what do we do?" 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.

Robert: They ran back to the hotel room. Fiedler frantically typed out the story.

Tom Fiedler: "Gary Hart, whose presidential campaign has been dogged by rumors of womanizing, spent Friday night and much of Saturday with a woman who came from Miami to meet him." I finally went back and I probably slept for three or four hours.

Robert: Okay, so you're going to do the story. The only thing that gives me pause is under this standard, you'd lose Jack Kennedy, certainly.

Tom Fiedler: Yes.

Robert: You'd lose Woodrow Wilson, I think. you'd lose a lot of people you might not want to lose.

Tom Fiedler: But you've leaped to the conclusion that the public would banish a person for that. I don't go there.

Robert: Yes.

Jamie York: Are you worried about how it's going to land?

Jad: That's our producer, Jamie York.

Tom Fiedler: Terrified. I was terrified.

Robert: The next morning--

News Presenter 12: An ABC News brief.

Tom Fiedler: The political world explodes.

News Presenter 13: Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart.

News Presenter 14: Gary Hart.

News Presenter 15: Gary Hart.

Tom Fiedler: It truly became a firestorm.

News Presenter 16: The Miami Herald reports today that Hart, "Spent Friday night and most of Saturday-

News Presenter 17: The Miami Herald reports that Hart and a Miami woman spent Friday night alone together.

News Presenter 16: -in his Washington townhouse with a young woman."

Matt Bai: That story begins ricocheting around the country.

News Presenter 18: On CNN.

Matt Bai: By Sunday--

News Presenter 19: Confronted by Herald reporters last night-

News Presenter 20: Hart denied any impropriety.

News Presenter 19: -Hart denied any impropriety.

Matt Bai: 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.

Robert: When you think about the mindset of the television people, the radio people, the newspaper people, is there any self-doubt there? Is there people saying, "Is this really a question of his ability to conduct matters of state?" Is that question being asked?

Matt Bai: There's a tremendous amount of self-doubt.

News Presenter 21: Not everyone agrees that such intense public scrutiny is necessary.

Matt Bai: There was widespread feeling-

News Presenter 22: The Miami Herald was put on the defensive.

Matt Bai: -that what Fiedler and his colleagues had done was wrong.

Lesley Stahl: You know, that's out of bounds.

News Presenter 23: What business is it of the press?

Matt Bai: You staked out a guy in his home?

Lesley Stahl: What are they up to, sneaking around in the bushes and all that?

News Presenter 24: A lot of reporters don't think it's relevant. One reason is this, nobody knows where this is going to lead.

News Presenter 25: Does this set a precedent?

News Presenter 26: Should reporters be staking out George Bush's house? Bruce Babbitt's house? Joe Biden's house?

Matt Bai: Then in the same breath, there's generally this sense of, but you know-

News Presenter 27: All he had to do, basically, was stay clean.

Matt Bai: -what was he thinking?

News Presenter 28: Hart is to blame.

News Presenter 29: It's Gary Hart's fault.

Matt Bai: Didn't he understand that things had changed? Doesn't the public maybe have a right to know?

News Presenter 30: The newspaper that began the controversy is not backing down.

Male 1: This was not character assassination. This was character suicide. He did it, we didn't.

News Presenter 31: Even as the debate heats up over the ethics of its coverage of Gary Hart.

Matt Bai: There was a real conflict. All the various echelon of media respond to this differently.

Tom Fiedler: The New York Times refuses to touch it. Originally, the Washington Post is deeply conflicted.

Robert: As for the public--

News Presenter 32: In an unscientific Herald telephone poll, 63 percent of the callers said they thought the paper was making too much of a fuss over Gary Hart.

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

Robert: According to Lesley Stahl, most people seemed to be willing to compartmentalize.

Lesley Stahl: Most people can split off how's he going to be as President and is he cheating on his wife?

Matt Bai: It was not clear that the tide was going to take Hart out at all.

Robert: Hart and his team try to get ahead of this story. They schedule a press conference in New Hampshire. On the flight over, Kevin Sweeney, his press secretary, preps him.

Kevin Sweeney: I remember asking Hart a question, something like, "Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?" He shot back at me with anger. He said, "I don't have to answer that question. 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." I just said, "That's a great answer. Just hold that anger. That's an appropriate response.

News Presenter 33: Senator Hart. Senator Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: We get to the press conference.

Jad: Hart and Sweeney walk into this colonial-style room at Dartmouth College.

News Presenter 33: Senator Hart, Senator Hart, there is a new poll.

Kevin Sweeney: There are lights everywhere. The room is filled.

Matt Bai: Sweaty. It's hot. There's more media than anyone's ever seen packed in.

Kevin Sweeney: It's a really intense environment.

Matt Bai: Hart has very little buffer, and he's handling the questions-

News Presenter 34: How are you going to convince them that you're not going to make this kind of mistake in judgment about personal behavior again?]

Matt Bai: -really pretty brilliantly.

Gary Hart: I won't tell them. I'll demonstrate it. As time goes on, people are going to want to know about your judgment, your character on the issues that affect their lives and their families and their nation. That's what this campaign is going to be about.

Matt Bai: He's kind of firing on all cylinders.

Kevin Sweeney: Hart goes through 30 minutes, 40 minutes of questions. Then--

News Presenter 35: In your remarks yesterday, you raised the issue of morality and you raised the issue of truthfulness.

Matt Bai: At some point, he calls on a young reporter named Paul Taylor.

Paul Taylor: Be very specific. I have a series of questions about it.

Matt Bai: Paul Taylor walks him through a series of questions.

Paul Taylor: 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 her?

Gary Hart: That is correct. That is correct.

Paul Taylor: Do you believe that adultery is immoral?

Gary Hart: Yes.

Paul Taylor: Have you ever committed adultery?]

Matt Bai: He says, "Senator, have you ever committed adultery?"

Gary Hart: Um--

Jad: Senator Hart looked out at the sea of reporters.

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

Jad: We don't know what Gary Hart was thinking in that moment. He did not want to be interviewed on tape. 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. As far as we know, no other person in his situation in history had ever been asked to drag that much of himself into the limelight. On his face you can see--

Matt Bai: 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. 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.

Gary Hart: Um--

Matt Bai: Hart stumbled around for a minute. Ultimately he says--

Gary Hart: I do not have to answer this question.

Kevin Sweeney: "I don't have to answer that question."

Paul Taylor: It was introduced by you, Mr. Hart.

Gary Hart: That's right.

Paul Taylor: I think--

Kevin Sweeney: When I heard that response, I felt it. I felt it. The tone was such that it felt like defeat. It felt like he is exhausted, and he can't take this. I was offended. I really in that moment thought this is just wrong. This has nothing to do with what is necessary to run this country. I just thought, this is not-- we're not going to survive.

Matt Bai: That moment effectively does him in.

Gary Hart: I have told you the facts. If you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do about it.

News Presenters: Senator Hart--]

News Presenter 36: Gary Hart is finished as a presidential candidate.

News Presenter 37: Gary Hart's formal campaign is only three weeks old.

News Presenter 36: There was simply no putting the genie back in the bottle.

News Presenter 38: His appearances yesterday were mobs in.

News Presenter 39: The Hart campaign has been hammered to its knees.

News Presenter 40: Asking the same questions again and again.

News Presenter 41: Today, after what may be remembered as the most disastrous week any presidential candidate's endured in years. Hart told an aide, "Let's go home."

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

Robert: For people my age, that image of Donna Rice sitting in his lap and he's got this shirt on that says "Monkey Business," that's the thing you remember.

Jad: Yes. Now according to Matt Bai, you can look at this whole story, and particularly Tom Fiedler taking that call and Paul Taylor asking that question. 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. As with all cultural shifts, there's more than one way to look at this. Just for a gut check, we put the whole story-

Cokie Roberts: We're talking about Tom Fiedler?

Robert: Yes, Tom.

Cokie Roberts: Yes.

Jad: -in front of this lady.

Jamie: Can we have you introduce yourself?

Cokie Roberts: I'm Cokie Roberts.

Robert: No, who you are, like, part two. [laughter]

Cokie Roberts: I have six grandchildren.

Robert: No, no, no, no, no. Something NPR-y.

Cokie Roberts: I'm a political commentator and author.

Robert: Okay. Cokie Roberts believes that yes, reporters were interested in character more after Watergate, but it wasn't just that.

Cokie Roberts: 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. 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. This was not somebody that women who were covering campaigns were ignorant of.

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. Because the way women were treated was something that we thought-- and I continue to think-- is a good gauge of character. There was something of a sense that he treated women like Kleenex. We were expanding the universe of what was a major character flaw.

Jamie: Then are you kind of rooting Fiedler on?

Cokie Roberts: Oh, absolutely. Finally, somebody's written about it, and thank God it's a guy.

Jamie: As much as you were cheering them on, was there any concern that that was changing the rules of journalism?

Cokie Roberts: No.

Jamie: Why?

Cokie Roberts: Because the rules of journalism were constantly changing, as they should.

Jad: According to Cokie Roberts, this was less about journalism changing than about journalism catching up with the ethics of the time.

Cokie Roberts: Look, we elect our presidents based on who they are, not on what policies they stand for. It's different from any other office. The voters need to know as much as they can humanly know about that person.

Jamie: Is there a line for you? Is there a place you won't go in taking the full measure of a candidate?

Cokie Roberts: Not for president that I can think of.

Jamie: There's nothing you wouldn't touch?

Cokie Roberts: No. I mean, I'd have to know that it was true.

Jamie: Sure.

Cokie Roberts: No. No.

Lesley Stahl: [laughs] I love that. Oh.

Jad: Lesley Stahl had a slightly different take.

Lesley Stahl: She's fabulous, Cokie Roberts. I didn't go there. That's interesting. I just didn't want to ask about it. I didn't want to go there. I'm telling you this even though I covered Watergate, and would've asked any number of questions about character. You know, it's open season, fellas. The public needs to know this. Sex is really a hard place for me to pry, so I agree with it but I also have my own opinion that's there's propriety. I'm old-fashioned, I guess. Am I? I don't know.

Gary Hart: I had intended, quite frankly, to come down here this morning and read a short, carefully worded political statement.

Robert: This is Gary Hart's statement a few days after that press conference.

Gary Hart: Saying that I was withdrawing from the race, and then quietly disappear from the stage. Then after frankly tossing and turning all night, I said to myself, "Hell, no. [cheers] 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. In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important.

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

Robert: Now we did reach out to Mr. Hart for comment, explaining to him the story we were doing. He wrote back this response. "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. Perhaps someday someone will tell that story. For now, I have no interest in revisiting what many consider a turning point for the nation and a few an injustice. I do believe that the full and accurate story of that event remains to be told. Signed, Gary Hart."

Brooke Gladstone: Mm.

Latif Nasser: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. I think you're absolutely right. It does-- there are certain similarities, but there's also a tremendous difference.

Latif Nasser: Once again, Brooke Gladstone, host of the WNYC show On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Latif Nasser: That is staggering.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

Latif Nasser: Why did that not matter way more?

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Latif Nasser: Brooke says, of course, part of what's going on here is that the electorate has become much more rigidly partisan-- even tribal. It also has to do with our relationship with the media, where we get our news, who we trust, who we don't trust.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Latif Nasser: Brooke says she thinks 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, precisely. Precisely. I have an anecdote you might find interesting.

Latif Nasser: Okay, let's hear it.

Brooke Gladstone: It was in the late '80's. I was the editor of All Things Considered at the time. 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, and she had had-- it was a 17-year affair with George H.W. Bush.

Latif Nasser: No. I never even heard of that.

Brooke Gladstone: This was an open secret.

Latif Nasser: Really?

Brooke Gladstone: It's believed they began their relationship in '74. She was his secretary when he was chief of the US liaison office to China. She was his executive assistant when he was the CIA director.

Latif Nasser: Wow, how have I never heard of her? Wow. Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Vice president. President. She denied the affair.

Latif Nasser: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: We talked about whether this was the time to sort of bring this story out into the open.

Latif Nasser: At the time, he was-- what was his--

Brooke Gladstone: He was president.

Latif Nasser: He was president.

Brooke Gladstone: He was president.

Latif Nasser: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: We ended up not doing it. We ended up not doing George H.W. Bush's affair. It never was done.

Latif Nasser: Why did you decide not to?

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Latif Nasser: 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--

Brooke Gladstone: What better informs the people, and what is a distraction?

Latif Nasser: Because in the years that followed, from Bill Clinton's sex scandals to George W. Bush, whether he used cocaine in the past, to Barack Obama's tan suit, the press constantly erred on the side of coverage. More information, but also with it maybe more distraction. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 giving elsewhere.

Latif Nasser: Of course, after he was elected President, he continued to offer the press a deluge of outrageous statements, exaggeration, and lies.

Brooke Gladstone: Right before the first inauguration he said, "Oh my God, all the fancy dresses in Washington, DC, have all been sold out because of the upcoming inauguration. It's going to be such a big thing." The Washington Post sent people out to go to the stores to find out so did they sell out? Of course, no, they did not. Was it worth it?

Latif Nasser: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, Donald J. Trump is a master of distraction, and he doesn't really care how people think about it.

Latif Nasser: The media just keeps falling for these distractions. This is actually something that Brooke, on her show On the Media, has reported about repeatedly, including just this past spring in an episode called, "How Not to Cover the Trump Trials."

News Presenter 42: You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade. It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and--

Brooke Gladstone: The coverage around Trump's indictment found the media stumbling back into some of its own worst habits.

News Presenter 43: Heading down the FDR.

News Presenter 44: To the Manhattan courthouse on Chambers Street.

News Presenter 45: Arriving at this intersection of American history--

Brooke Gladstone: What the media that vowed to never again waste precious airtime on Trump-related minutiae forgot.

News Presenter 46: Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

News Presenter 47: They're now making their way across town.

Brooke Gladstone: As we've heard now since 2016 at least, the ability to flood the zone with outrages causes a kind of emotional, intellectual, and maybe even ethical paralysis.

Latif Nasser: Do you feel like-- 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 ratchet?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I'm not the best prognosticator.

Latif Nasser: [laughs] That's fair.

Brooke Gladstone: I would say there's a symbiotic relationship between Americans and their leaders and Americans and their media. In a sense, we're seen as consumers, not as citizens. We are served what we will buy and what we find tasty.

Latif Nasser: Tabloid coverage will give you tabloid presidents, I guess. is the vision there.

Brooke Gladstone: If our media and our leadership offer us something else, we can be better. 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 clique-y and people on the side that you're on are going to love it. It's going to make them feel good, and it will just be in the process of tossing out red meat.

Latif Nasser: Mm.

Brooke Gladstone: Hard to say.

Latif Nasser: Thank you so much to Brooke Gladstone. Honestly, when I am trying to avoid getting stuck in this swirl of media distraction, the circus of it all, On the Media is the place I go. They put things in perspective, they curate the news in a way that is clarifying and not muddying. Yes, go check them out wherever you get your podcasts, On the Media. The original story we did on Gary Hart drew so much from Matt Bai's book.

It's called All the Truth is Out. You can, of course, find a link to the book on our website, radiolab.org. That story, the original story, was produced by Simon Adler with help from Jamie York. The update you just heard with Brooke was produced by Rebecca Laks. I'm Latif Nasser. This has been Radiolab. We will catch you next week.

[music]

David: Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Laks, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Ellie: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. Tune into the big show. It usually posts on Friday around dinner time to hear about the escalating threats to public radio and what that means.

[END OF AUDIO]

 

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