Sarah: The year of the bimbo, the year of my conception. I've started to take that as my, “I was born in the year of the dragon, but I was conceived in the year of the bimbo”, and I've become very proud of that.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About the show where we recapture, oh, fuck. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Sarah: The problem is that you start doubting yourself midway through saying a slogan. It's like Hot Pockets. Hot. Oh no, that's no good. Oh, start it over. Shut it down. New jingle.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we retell stories of the past in ways you've never heard before.
Sarah: That is true.
Mike: That's worse. I'm sorry.
Sarah: Well, but this one is honestly one of the ones where I got in. There was just one thread that I was pulling on and then I just kept pulling. I was like, I thought this was one of our boring elections. No, we don't have those.
Mike: Okay. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute.
Mike: And today we're talking about Gary Hart and Donna Rice.
Sarah: Yes. And by extension, Willie Horton and Michael Dukakis. We're going on a journey that's taking us through election ’88. And we're going to start with a sex scandal and we're going to end with Law and Order.
Mike: Ooh, that sounds like my college years.
Sarah: Yes. So tell me what you know. What do you know about Gary Hart and Donna Rice?
Mike: Okay. So here's my broad outline of Gary Hart, or what little I know about him. He was the presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1988. He was really popular and really charismatic, and somebody that was sort of this rising star. And then he flamed out when a photo emerged of him smiling in the sun with this woman named Donna Rice on his lap. That was the end. And my understanding is that it was sort of the beginning of a lot of threads that culminated with Bill Clinton. Candidate’s personal lives become part of the story, and the press becomes much more zealous in finding these sorts of personal peccadilloes rather than the political nature of political figures. And so I think it was just the beginning of a new form of politics for the country, or at least that's always the narrative that I've heard, that he was kind of a breaking point.
Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like the story, as I've absorbed it in the past, has been that as a presidential candidate your sex life was your business, your personal life is your business. The press could be counted on to look the other way, and that Gary Hart, kind of through no fault of his own, had been caught in the moment that American politics shifted from you can do whatever you want, it doesn't matter to show up and have good hair, and then you can go off and have sex with whoever you want, to no, actually we are going to inspect your personal life and that will be the litmus test for your ability to serve the American people.
That's certainly true. But election ‘88 was fascinating. And I think that the way that Gary Hart's campaign was destroyed and how - spoiler alert - George HW Bush ended up winning it, these things are all related to what politics has become in the last 30 years.
Mike: So tally ho, where does the story begin?
Sarah: Okay, so let's start in the spring of 1987. And 1987 is, as we talked about in our Jessica Hahn and Tammy Faye Bakker episode, “the year of the bimbo”. So Donna Rice in 1987, she's a model/actress/pharmaceutical rep at the time. I think she's in pretty person industries. She was on an episode of Miami Vice. That to me means yes, she's a star. She's living in Miami and in with a sort of wealthy, glitterati crowd. She's in with the movers and shakers.
And so she goes to a New Year's party in Aspen hosted by Don Henley. Don Henley is one of the guys in the Eagles. I don't know what he did in the Eagles. Didn't they all kind of do the same thing? There were like six guys, and they all played guitar.
Mike: They're basically a mariachi band. Yes. It's all guitars. Yes.
Sarah: Anyway, he's very famous. Don Henley is a very big, exciting deal in 1987, is the point. And Donna Rice is this sexy, young, unattached lady in her prime. And who should she meet at Don Henley's party on the swinging slopes of Aspen, but Gary Hart. Who she thinks of when she meets him as just a super attractive, charismatic guy with a lovely head of hair. And she doesn't really know that much about what he does for a living or what he's up to. And later will claim that she didn't even know that he was running for president.
Mike: So she's a low information voter, like so many of us.
Sarah: Yeah. She's a low information voter. And an interview with one of her friends at the time, that person says yeah, like Donna kind of knew that he was running for president but didn't really pay attention to it. Which I think actually is the attitude both of them had, which is just very hard to imagine now that Gary Hart also was like, “Yeah, I’m running for president. No big deal. Anyway, you seem nice.”
So they met at this party, and I'm sure that there was some energy of, wow, we are two very attractive, charismatic people in our sexual primes. How interesting, how provocative, right? Because Gary Hart's 50, he's running for president for the second time, he ran in 1984 and he was considered as a running mate for Walter Mondale. And ultimately wasn't chosen for that because there were some whispers at the time of if you bring Gary Hart on the ticket, he's kind of a swinger, he's palling around extra maritally, that might be a problem for you. Who can say?
Mike: So this was known.
Sarah: Yeah. This is a known thing about him. And another problem that Gary Hart has is that he has always been kind of prickly when people want to know the real Gary Hart. Who is he really? What is he like, what was his childhood like? And he was like, no, can I just be your president? Why must we talk about my childhood? Don't you want to hear my thoughts on policy?
Mike: Which seems so naive now, but it's actually kind of nice.
Sarah: So yeah, Gary, rather than packaging himself or getting into the sort of how do I commodify my early life, my childhood, my personal details, whatever, is just like, no, it's none of your business. I really prefer not to talk about it. He's seen as aloof and kind of difficult to get to know. And that's seen as his major flaw. That and the rumors of womanizing. And aside from that, he's a moderate reformer. He's comfortably progressive, he's charismatic, he's attractive. He's a very good candidate. He's also not in the race for very long. He pulled out of the race after three weeks. He was barely in the game.
Mike: What was he at this point? Is he a governor or Senator?
Sarah: He's a Senator serving the state of Colorado. He's an affable, aloof westerner.
Mike: Skier. An affable skier.
Sarah: Okay. This is one of my favorite features on the show. Look at a picture of Gary Hart and tell me your thoughts.
Mike: Gary Hart. Oh, he’s handsome. He's smiling. Good teeth.
Sarah: Is he wearing a tie with a nautical theme?
Mike: Yes. He looks clean and affluent and easy to get along with. Like a tennis coach or something.
Sarah: Yeah. I think Gary Hart has a quality where he seems like Hollywood's idea of a politician. He looks like the president in a movie. Warren Beatty and Gary Hart were friends with each other, and if you're trying to avoid rumors of womanizing, being friends with Warren Beatty shows that you don't really care.
Mike: Yeah. If you want to avoid accusations of alcoholism, you probably shouldn't be friends with Motley Crue.
Sarah: Right? So Gary Hart is running. He hasn't been in the race for very long. The other candidates who have entered the race among them are Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. Michael Dukakis has that Jimmy Carter energy of, ‘I will be your president if you will have me. I don't want to lie to you. I don't want to bamboozle you. I don't want to manipulate you.’ And I think Gary Hart has that energy of, ‘I'm going to manipulate you a little because we both know that's what you want. I'm going to lie to you a little. I'm your daddy. I'm not going to tell you what's really going on when I leave the house during the day because you don't really want to know. You just want me to come home and tell you that everything's fine.’ And that's kind of the model of politician, the mold that he's poured into.
So he and Donna Rice have met at Don Henley's party in Aspen.
Mike: So they meet, they chat, but nothing interesting happens.
Sarah: As far as we know, they have a meet cute. Okay. Donna Rice also has a friend named Lynn Armand who later sells her story to People magazine. She's one of the first key leakers. She also tells people that actually Donna wasn't super interested in Gary Hart when they first met. She was vibing more with Don Henley.
Mike: The rockstar versus the obscure Senator.
Sarah: So she's more interested in Don Henley, but she apparently stays in touch with Gary Hart. And so then a few weeks later in Miami, William Broadhurst, who's a lawyer in Washington, DC, and a good friend of Gary Hart's and also a fundraiser for his campaign, invites Donna Rice out on the boat with him and Gary. And Donna Rice invites her friend Lynn and Lynn comes on board and takes a photo of Donna while she is sitting on Gary Hart's lap on a boat called the Monkey Business.
Mike: The infamous photo on the extremely unfortunately named boat.
Sarah: Yeah. And Gary Hart later will say that that was a posed photo. Donna Rice had jumped into his lap for five seconds while Lynn took the photo and then she jumped back out and it was all a set up. This is what he later claims. Lynn who sells her story and also her photographs, says they go out, they spend the night in The Bahamas. She and Broadhurst, the lawyer, slept in separate bedrooms that night. But as far as she knows Donna and Gary didn't. And then let me also tell you a theme is emerging here because in the story that she sells to People, Lynn talks about observing Gary and Donna, because her story is that she was Donna's friend and she ended up getting roped into going along and being kind of part of this weird vacation.
Mike: A weird wing man, wing lady.
Sarah: Yeah. When she goes to People she isn’t talking about being part of arranging any setup. And Don describes her as a lovely but slightly flighty person, who’s very into Gary and not really super thinking about the implications of what they're doing together, which to be fair, neither is Gary Hart. Lynn says of Gary, “I thought he almost wanted to be caught. He's a very smart man, but he was doing stupid things, like being blatant with Donna.”
Mike: So do we find out about this photo immediately? Does this hit the papers?
Sarah: No. Donna Rice and Gary Hart go on the Monkey Business and take the famous lap setting photo in March of 1987. And so in early May of that year, Broadhurst, the lawyer, and Gary Hart campaign fundraiser invited Donna Rice and her friend Lynn up to Washington.
Meanwhile, the Miami Herald has a tip about a young lady who is not his wife who is going to be visiting Gary Hart at his house in Washington. Gary Hart has even in the past invited the press to follow him around because he's been frustrated at their focus on his personal life. And so the Miami reporters do, and they do a stake out outside of his house. And what do they see? But Donna Rice going in the front door and then not coming back out and apparently staying overnight.
Mike: Not a great look, not a great look.
Sarah: They break the story and Gary Hart and what Donna Rice immediately claims is that actually there is a back door. She walked out of that one. They did not spend the night together. They had not slept together in the past. They had not had an affair. And as far as I know, they both consistently maintain that to this very day. Yeah. Not only was this blown out of proportion, but that there wasn't even an affair between them.
Mike: So it looks bad. But in actual fact it's a perfectly explainable scenario.
Sarah: Yeah. And it is, it's not an unreasonable explanation that someone could go in the front door and come out the back and not be noticed by the vehicles taking out the front entrance. It's also super possible that two attractive people can go on a boat to The Bahamas together. It's obviously possible for attractive people to not have sex with each other because you walk outside, and the world is not an orgy. We, as human beings, are capable of restraints.
Mike: Yes. Although what is their explanation for why he's having a woman over at his house at all?
Sarah: Well, at the time, I don't think he's ever able to say anything convincing. And the way that the news plays this is that story breaks in the Herald. And then People magazine is like, oh my God, we need to get a picture of this Donna Rice person, nobody knows what she looks like. There are no pictures of her. We can be the first people to get a Donna Rice picture. And then they go out, they scour all their contacts, they find out that Donna Rice was a catalog model at one time.
And so they find a contact of theirs who happens to have taken a photo of her seven years earlier while she was on a beach in France. And because he had come across her and her girlfriend when she was 21 years old and were sunbathing and took a bunch of photos of them. And he was smoking and gave her a cigarette to hold and was like, hold this cigarette and give me a come hither look, and took a photo of her like that. And then actually had her sign a release and everything and was like, maybe someday these will be in print. And she was like, yeah, right. And that photo became the cover of People magazine.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: The headline is “Hart Stopper”.
Mike: Oh God. That's actually pretty good.
Sarah: That's actually pretty good. And it's unfortunately a great picture of Donna Rice. She looks like Bo Derek, she looks amazing. And this is the worst time for a woman to look amazing. Right.
Mike: Yeah. You're the bimbo.
Sarah: She's the bimbo. She's the third bimbo. After the story is in the Herald, Donna calls Lynn Armand, and says, remember those pictures that you took on the Monkey Business of me and Gary? Please destroy them. This is what Donna says later. And Len says, oh yes. Okay. And Donna assumes that she has destroyed them, but what she instead does is sell them to People. And so Lynn sells the Monkey Business photo to People magazine and that's how that breaks.
Mike: It feels like all of these ”bimbo stories” have just shitty friends at the center.
Sarah: This also is a trend that we're going to see amplified and repeated in the nineties where suddenly anyone who has ever met you is valuable to hard copy. It's really bad. And so this comes out and the press go into a feeding frenzy and Gary Hart pulls out of the race.
Mike; That's it? That's the Gary Hart story.
Sarah: Yeah, he was the front runner. He was going to be president. He was this great charismatic candidate who could have taken on the Reagan dynasty and beaten Bush. And instead he got too friendly with Donna Rice and had sex and because of that, we ended up in the Iraq war. However, recently there was a new complication to this story. This gets back to a gentleman by the name of Lee Atwater. Do you know about Lee Atwater?
Mike: No.
Sarah: I have become fascinated by Lee Atwater while researching this. So Lee Atwater helped get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980, he worked on the Reagan campaign. He was an early proponent of pretty much everything we can see today in terms of what we take for granted as how elections work. A lot of that was new at the time and specifically innovated by Lee Atwater. So for example, he was an early adopter of push polling. Do you know what that is?
Mike: Oh, that's the fake thing where they call you and they're like, now that you know that 80% of America is Muslims, how do you feel about that? Good or bad? So they're giving you this false information and pretending that it's just some neutral poll.
Sarah: Yeah. So that's a Lee Atwater classic. And he didn't invent it, but he helped popularize it. And he also is an early and enthusiastic adopter of what we now think of as going negative. Which is basically, it doesn't matter who your candidate is and what he has to offer, the only question is how do you dig up personal information or specific damning information about the opponent and make an impossible for the people to vote for the opponent so that they have to vote for your candidate, which is very useful if you're the campaign manager for George HW Bush, which is what Lee Atwater became in 1987.
Mike: So he's like the Carl Rove for Reagan and HW Bush.
Sarah: Yeah. And actually, Carl Rove was his protege. And I think in the same way that we can trace the moments that lost an election to Don Henley throws a New Year's party in Aspen. One of the other moments that I think brought us to where we are today is that in 1956 in South Carolina, Lee Atwater is five years old, and he has a little brother named Joe. And Joe and Toddy Atwater, their mother, are making donuts in a deep fat fryer, and there is an accident, and it falls, and Joe is covered in horrible burns and dies pretty soon after. He lives for a little while after with those burns, and Lee is in the next room.
Mike: Oh, that's awful.
Sarah: And this kind of becomes this weird, little, light motif and profiles and interviews with him as he becomes a Washington power Broker in the eighties.
Mike: It's always so hard finding out these terrible people had sad humanizing incidents in their pasts because then you have to deal with them as people and not as these cartoon master shredder type characters that I want them to remain in my head, but it's oh, he's bad person who had a really negative effect on us politics, but he's also a human being with a history and hurts and a family and all of this very inconvenient complexity.
Sarah: Yes. And yet personally this is my favorite way of gaining counter-intelligence.
Mike: This is your whole career.
Sarah: That's my whole career. Yeah. It's tactical. I feel like I encounter this sort of question a lot of you know, what's the point of empathizing with terrible people and it's like, well, okay, first of all, makes you feel more connected to the great human assemblage that we're all communally a part of, et cetera. But also if you find out that someone can go out and destroy American politics because they had a trauma in their childhood, then that allows you to be like, okay, so let's help people to deal with their emotions and then they won't see the world as an endless game of rape pillage and push pole. If it comes down to this grain of sand that God built around and around, but ultimately in the end, there's just this scary, sad thing that happened then we don't need to have all of these dangerous and unstable people running our country if they didn't have to be this way.
And so what Lee Atwater says is that he heard his brother's screams the rest of his life, he was haunted by it. And he also formed this idea that there is no mercy in this world. This is a kill or be killed kind of a place, essentially. It was traumatizing for him. It certainly shaped everything that he brought to Washington. And so he wasn't particularly interested in politics when he was growing up, he was actually much more interested in playing in a blues band, which he was pretty good at. One of the weird parts of his life is that he was friends with BB king, who was very sad when he died.
Mike: So many celebrity cameos in the story.
Sarah: Yeah. And so I think when he's 20 years old, he does an internship for Strom Thurmond and that's the moment when he falls in love with politics.
Mike: Oh my God. Just to put out another execrable human being into the story.
Sarah: Yeah. For those of us not lucky enough to be acquainted with the Strom Thurmond legacy, tell us about Strom Thurmond, Michael, you know things.
Mike: He was as old as the tree people in the Lord of the Rings movies, he was just the oldest man on planet earth. And of course it's age has nothing to do with how terrible he is, but it was more that he was an old school racist.
Sarah: Ae was a reconstruction era racist. I think that's the thing about them being so old. You had this feeling that he had been in the house with Melanie and Scarlet and grown up and now he had been elected to office and he was finally getting his revenge. A Strom Thurmond quote, “He says the blood will run before we integrate”. Right. That's a classic Strom Thurmond ism.
Mike: So this is Lee Atwater's political education.
Sarah: Yes. Every Vader has a Palpatine.
Mike: Good God.
Sarah: Yeah. And so Lee Atwater is a practitioner of the Southern strategy, which is racism 2.0 or 3.0, I guess. Let's get to read this in Lee Atwater's own words. In 1981, Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political scientist, and it starts off by saying “Y'all, don't quote me on this”. Lee Atwater at the time says “You start out in 1954 by saying N-word, N-word, N-word” - he is of course not saying ‘N-word’ – “By 1968, you can't say N-word, that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff and you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. We want to cut this as much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than N-word, N-word.”
Mike: This is where welfare Queens come from.
Sarah: Exactly. Yeah. And he was saying, you can actually import all of the kind of old fashioned racism and you don't have to name it. You don't have to tell people that you're appealing to their racism in order to appeal to their racism. You appeal to the worst instincts of the voters that you're trying to court, but you do it in a way that both of you can maintain some kind of plausible deniability about why you're doing what you're doing. So he brings the same principle to the fact that if you go negative about a candidate, you can do it in a way that doesn't make you look bad.
Mike: Right. You need to put that into the bloodstream, but you don't necessarily want to be the one who gets fingered for doing it. Right. You want this information to be out there, but you don't want to be the one who raises your hand and says I'm the one making this accusation.
Sarah: Exactly. So Lee Atwater in 1990 has successfully gotten one of our least charismatic presidents ever elected by running the Bush campaign in 1980. And then one day he's jogging with a friend of his and suddenly stops running and his symptoms get worse, and it turns out that he has a brain tumor. And the doctor has given me a year to live, which is pretty much as long as he survives.
And this is another thing that makes him just so fascinating to me, he comes to terms to some degree with what he has done. What he always said in the eighties and what people always said about him was that he loved to win, and he made no bones about that. He didn't care who he was trying to secure victory for, he liked winning. And as he's on his death, he apparently has thoughts along the lines of like maybe that wasn't the only thing to orient my life around.
Mike: Am I bad?
Sarah: He does an interview with Life Magazine very shortly before he dies. It's widely quoted and distributed, and it becomes this weirdly bipartisan thing in Washington at the time of like, yes, we should all follow the dying words of Lee Atwater.
This is what he has to say as a kinder, gentler Lee Atwater. “Long before I was struck with cancer I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives, something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican party to take advantage of it, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see what was missing in society is what was missing in me, a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.”
Mike: For fuck sake.
Sarah: We would be a good, good cop/bad cop team because I would just naturally be like, can I get you anything from the vending machine, that must've been hard, and I need you as backup for these things.
Mike: It’s just so easy to say that once you're out of power. It's so easy to say that once you're on your deathbed and you're thinking about this stuff. What really matters in my life? It's family, it's health, blah, blah, blah. Other people have been shouting that at you for decades and you have been ignoring them and writing them off as kooks. You were the barrier to a country that puts those things at the center of political life, and now that you're incapable of putting them at the center of political life to be like, oh, I was wrong all the time. Fine, whatever. I don't want to take anything away from anybody, but it's so frustrating that so many people have these revelations when they are too late. We need these Epiphanes before people get brain cancer.
Sarah: Yeah. And did Lee Atwater have the potential to even notice that before he had brain cancer? So something else that Lee Atwater perhaps apologizes for is setting up Gary Hart. And years later, a guy named Raymond Strother - who had worked for Gary Hart's campaign and known Lee Atwater at the time - as everyone in politics did, comes forward and says that on his deathbed as he's very weak and dying of brain cancer, Lee Atwater had called Ray Strother and apologized for setting up Gary Hart.
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: And getting Donna Rice in his lap for the monkey business photo.
Mike: Setting up how though, how did it work?
Sarah: Good question. Because the story is that Lee Atwater basically had gotten Broadhurst, who is Hart’s fundraiser lawyer friend, it's his boat. It's his kind of trip to the Bahamas that he brings Donna Rice and Gary Hart on the boat for. And he's the one who also is bringing Donna and Lynn up to Washington, DC, which is when the stakeout happens that catches Donna Rice going into Gary Hart's house.
According to this version of events, Lee Atwater gets to Broadhurst and gets him to arrange a sting. And Gary Hart, who's also interviewed for this article said, yes, that is what happened, and I was going to be president. And then I was the victim of a classic Lee Atwater dirty trick.
Mike: Is the idea that he encouraged Donna Rice to sit on his lap and sort of aggressively create photo evidence of this, or he encouraged Donna Rice to go over to it.
Sarah: It's a little bit vague. What Lee Atwater apparently tells Strothers according to Strother is I did it. I fixed Hart and Broadhurst is dead, so he can't be reached by the media for comment about this. So we don't know what his story is. And of course, Donna Rice wouldn't have been in on the setup.
Mike: So it's basically putting them together in a room. It's not necessarily, we're going to pay Donna Rice to create the illusion of an affair with this guy, it's that she's pretty, we know Gary Hart has a weakness for pretty ladies. Let's create the circumstances under which he would have an affair.
Sarah: Or we create smoke and people assume there's fire because if he is known for his extramarital dalliances, or at least rumors thereof, no one has to have an affair for him to seem guilty of having had one. It does feel like classical Lee Atwater because it's about keeping your hands clean and allowing someone to kind of do a lot of the work for you. Because then Gary Hart pulls out of the race. And so what Gary Hart says about the monkey business photo in this Atlantic article, he says, “Miss Armand made a gesture to Ms. Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armand took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”
Mike: I don't know if I buy this explanation.
Sarah: Say more about that.
Mike: This kind of sounds like Gary Hart justifying this after the fact because the real scandal wasn't the photo, it sounds like the real scandal was her maybe spending the night at his house.
Sarah: All right. Well, I'll tell you my thoughts on this, which are that I think that Gary Hart has come to believe what America has come to believe about Gary Hart, which is that he was going to be president, it was going to happen, and the Donna Rice thing derailed him, which is a nice idea, but he was in that race for three weeks and what I have come to believe now, having looked at how the rest of that race unfolded is that a) if Lee Atwater got him through Donna Rice, then avoiding, that would have just meant that Lee Atwater would've got him some other way, because that's how negative campaigning works. And you don't have to have an affair or seem like you were having an affair because Michael Dukakis has been happily married to Kitty Dukakis for 500 years. And Lee Atwater still ruined his campaign, too.
Also Gary Hart, a lot of the writing about him as he's beginning to campaign and even his own descriptions of his own state of mind are that he kind of wants to be president. He feels like it's his job to be president. Everyone agrees that he's just the one, it's hard to see who else it would be. There's this kind of chosen quality to him. But there's quotes where he's talking about running for president and his chances. And he says, part 50% of me wants to be president and 50% of me wants to go live in Ireland and write a novel.
Mike: Do you believe him that they didn't have an affair?
Sarah: I don't know. I don't care. Right. I just don't care. Did he have sex with Donna Rice or like some kind of physical thing with her once or twice or a few times? It doesn't matter. If he did, then that's only the instance of that that they were able to get some physical proof of, and then use to torpedo his campaign. But they were manufacturing evidence of something that was kind of a bigger story that was out there about him. The opposition clearly didn't need an actual affair to have happened in order to do what they needed to do. So it's irrelative to the campaign itself in a way.
Also looking at Gary Hart, there are times in my life, obviously not on the scale, but where someone has asked me to apply for a job or something and I will be like, it's interesting that I haven't sent my resume yet. I want to send in my resume. I want to want to send in my resume and yet, I'm dragging my seat about attempting to take advantage of this opportunity that I should be interested in and yet clearly don't actually care about. I feel like Gary Hart, regardless of what he did or didn't actually do, I feel like he was kind of engaging in self sabotaging behavior and that he really didn’t want to be president. In 1987, all Gary Hart knew was that everyone wanted him to run for president and he was the democratic party's best hope.
And so apparently this is what he had to do, but maybe he didn't super want to do it and helped torpedo his own career, whether without the help of Lee Atwater and torpedoing your career is a personal choice that becomes much easier to regret once he sat back and watched 30 years of an American nightmare that you feel plausibly and that other people are arguing, you personally could have prevented.
Mike: Hmm. So is the real you're wrong about here that Gary Hart would have lost anyway? This whole narrative, that he was the golden child of democratic party politics isn't really true? And he probably would have lost, and we would have ended up in exactly the same situation.
Sarah: Well, we can't know. But yes, I do think that that's very possible, but yeah. I think that it's very possible that Gary Hart would have lost. And I think that the narrative that we've taken from this is that Gary Hart didn't become president because of this little dalliance that he had, which also allows us to blame everything on Donna Rice, which of course we love to do. And that it is Donna Rice's fault that George Bush became president. And then everything that came after that.
Mike: But you're saying that the Gary Hart story is actually much more the Lee Atwater story.
Sarah: Yes. And then it's all the Lee Atwater story. Do you have a favorite fact about Michael Dukakis? Because I have a lot of them.
Mike: I have heard very little, this is the first election that I actually remember. I was six and so I remember my parents talking about it. I remember being aware, vaguely, that we were Dukakis family.
Sarah: Everything I know about you and your family tells me that you are like an archetypal Dukakis family.
Mike: Totally. I wasn’t really aware of this at the time, but all I really know about that campaign now is the infamous tank photo where Mike Dukakis’ little head was popping out of the little tank with a little hat on him that made him look like a turtle. And it was seen as this dumb thing and like all political moments that we fixate on, I'm sure that it was a much larger story, but that's essentially the only lingering image or lingering conclusion of that election, that one photo that went wrong.
Sarah: You know who did that ad?
Mike: Oh, fuck. Is it going to be Lee Atwater?
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: Really?
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. He saw that footage of Dukakis in the tank for a photo op you know, to make him look military-like, the Dukakis campaign had gotten him riding in a tank with a helmet on. And that became the image that the Bush campaign seized on aptly so when you think about the fact that they were trying to get George HW Bush elected, who, despite having been a pilot in World War II, just does not come across as a guy's guy. They were always talking about trying to get past the weenie factor.
Mike: So is the Dukakis campaign a glimpse of what the Gary Hart campaign would have been?
Sarah: Yes, I think so. And then the other Lee Atwater joint that he apologizes for on his deathbed and which he says rather tellingly that he wishes he hadn't done it because it makes him seem racist, which he is not, is the Willie Horton ad. Do you know this story?
Mike: Wasn't it that Dukakis had passed a law that allowed convicts to go out of prison on furlough. And there was a convict named Willie Horton who went out on furlough, and I think raped and murdered somebody. And they laid that at the feet of Mike Dukakis.
Sarah: Yeah, and that’s definitely what we’ve taken from it and remember is yes, Michael Dukakis was letting murderers out of prison on their own Rick cognizance and they were going out and raping and killing and so obviously we can't elect him. We need a lot and order president, the end. Yes. So the Willie Horton thing, first of all, his name is not Willie Horton. No one in his adult life has ever called him Willie Horton. He is a grown man. His name is William Horton.
Mike: Oh. So they changed it to make it sound more typically African-American.
Sarah: Yes. So what happens by the way, William Horton takes part in a robbery. He claims that he sat and waited in the car while one of the other guys went in, committed the robbery, and stabbed the clerk to death. The clerk was a 17 year old boy. He's in prison for I think a decade, and has good enough behavior that he's able to get it on a furlough. And the way he tells it later, he's out on furlough, he's driving a car without a license. The cops pull him over and he panics and runs away. And then he's on the lam for about a year. And then in April of 1987, he broke into a house in a Maryland suburb, which is the home of a couple named Clifford Barnes and Angela Miller. And he takes Clifford barns to the basement and stabs him or cuts him with a knife and Barnes survives. And then when Angela Miller, who's his fiancé, arrives home. William Horton rapes her at gunpoint multiple times and it's a terrible crime and this becomes the ad. So William Horton is let out of prison because of a furlough program. Furlough programs used to be the norm in American prisons. A couple of years before Michael Dukakis was running for president, every state in America had it for a low program.
Mike: Oh really? They were that common. I had no idea.
Sarah: Yes. I know. Neither did I, because we grew up in the Law and Order years. The Dick Wolf Law and Order years, which were almost as bad as the Nixon ones. When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, California had a pretty liberal furlough and work release program, one Ronald Reagan vocally defended. And in the 1970s two people who were serving prison terms in California for non-violent offenses committed murders while they were on work release. And Ronald Reagan, before the press, what he says, which is true, is that no system is perfect. Yes, there were two murders, but you have to look at it in the scheme of hundreds, of thousands of people. Ultimately this is worth doing. And so with the furlough program in Massachusetts, this was a program that was preexisting when Michael Dukakis became governor of Massachusetts. All that he did was refuse to veto it.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: All he did was keep it going.
Mike: So it wasn't even like a Mike Dukakis joint.
Sarah: No, it absolutely wasn't.
Mike: It just happened while he was there.
Sarah: Yeah. Jesse Jackson, after the infamous, well I don't want to call it the Willie Horton ad, but that's what it is. The “Willie Horton ad” comes out. I know that no one has said this, but this is racist. And the Bush campaign is like, no, it isn't. And it's not even our ad. Actually they're able to, after the ad has been airing for almost an entire month, it has 28 days to be on the air. And on day 25, the Bush campaign says, actually, please stop airing it. It's racist. We’re disemboweling it.
Mike: Oh, really? I didn't know that. Okay.
Sarah: Lee Atwater is the master of having your smear cake and eating it too. Right. So they don't have to take any responsibility for spreading racist rhetoric, but they're still the beneficiaries of it. And so one of the myths about this ad is that Dukakis has a big lead, he's doing well in the race, and then the ad comes out and torpedoes his campaign. I think what's true now is that the ad is our fossil of that tactic of the Bush campaigns, but actually Dukakis had started suffering well before the ad came out. And it's because they had been hammering the Willie Horton point for weeks and weeks.
This was something that Bush was consistently mentioning. It was just a tenet of the campaign to talk about how Dukakis wants to scale back defense budgets. He wants to render America vulnerable to foreign attack. He looks silly in a helmet. He also makes the big mistake, which I just identify with so much when he's in a debate against Bush. And mid-October, so his numbers are already dropping at this point. And the question they ask him is ‘Michael Dukakis, if a criminal where to rape and murder your wife, Kitty, wouldn't you want him to be executed?’ And Michael Dukakis, God bless him, is like, well, I don't believe in the death penalty. I don't support it. We know that it doesn't act as a deterrent. There are better, more cognitive, blah, blah blah-blah-blah.
Mike: He answers as a politician, not as a husband.
Sarah: Yeah. I read about the response people had to this and how it was just this terrible, how could he possibly have history responded so coldly and not emotionally. And it's a policy question. Politicians aren't supposed to be making their decisions based on their worst fears about what could happen to their wives. But this is also a period in America where the middle is moving toward that being the norm. Everyone knows that they're at a risk of getting Willy Horton-ed Everyone knows that they're at a risk of the Willie Horton effect, where you're trying to run for office and accrue some power and have some values. And if someone, because of a policy that you did not actively emphatically oppose, murders someone, then it is on your hands, and you have to do everything that you can to prevent that possibility or else you will render yourself unelectable. I think this is the moment when soft on crime became one of the things that even liberals were most afraid of seeming, because they all saw what happened to Dukakis. And Dukakis himself during this race, he doesn't counter the accusations.
Mike: Oh really?
Sarah: Yes. Initially. Later on he does, but for the first, I think for a couple of months, he's whatever, obviously what they're saying doesn't make any sense. My policies are logical. And this is the same thing that Gary Hart says when the accusations about Donna Rice surface. Initially, he's like, that's none of your business. I don't need to talk about that. And Dukakis is like, what? No, I am supporting reasonable policies. I don't need to engage in this conversation with you. And what that means is that people take what the Bush campaign is saying to be true.
Mike: It sounds like both politicians didn't realize the nature of the political fight they were in. They thought they were at this higher level of we're in a debate about policies and we're in a debate about how my ideas will affect American lives. And then what Lee Atwater got was that you're in a mud fight, you're in a wrestling match and you just have to use everything you can.
Sarah: Yes. And I think also, there's this idea that people are taken down by discrete scandals, right? That if only Gary Hart hadn't gone on the monkey business with Donna Rice, he would have been president. If only Dukakis could have avoided the Willie Horton ad. Or the crime that precipitated it, it would have been fine. And really, I look at that and I'm like, this is not like the PAC did one ad and Gary Hart made one mistake. It's that they were taken out because the Republican party had gotten so good at campaigning based on the perceived flaws and all of the fears and all of the anxieties that it could whip up about the opposition that this became their sole strategy at the time and it worked because there really wasn't much you could say about Bush, about who he was as a candidate that made him attractive. You really were forced to go after the perceived flaws and weaknesses of his opponents. And so what I really think is that it's not about Donna Rice. It's not about Willy Horton, it's about Lee Atwater. And to a larger degree, it's about what campaigning for president turned into in America by the late eighties.
Mike: It's a way of campaigning. It's a methodological shift.
Sarah: Yeah. And then that became our reality. And you can see how by trying to counter that, candidates that we had in the future, got in the mud. Especially the tough on crime mud. So I will close by telling you my favorite Michael Dukakis fact, which is that he's, I think 85 years old and works at Northeastern, which is two miles away from his home. He walks to work. And when he walks two miles to work, he takes a reused plastic bag with him, and he fills it with all of the trash that he finds. He's kind of like this Massachusetts Bill Murray, because people will also run into him while he's picking up garbage and then be like, oh, I just met Michael Dukakis. But there are all these interviews where people are just out walking with him, talking about policy and Boston and the future and the past, while Michael Dukakis is walking around picking up garbage with his bare hands.
Oh, and he also wears Kitty’s hand-me-down Prada sunglasses, because he’s thrifty and he likes them. And he also is known apparently among his friends for making soup out of turkey carcasses after Thanksgiving, which he then gives to homeless shelters. So a few years ago, everyone gave him their turkey carcasses, so he ended up with 27 turkey carcasses one year.
I know, my takeaway for this also is that there was this narrative that of, Gary Hart could have been president, but then he had sex and so we were stranded with Michael Dukakis who was like a terrible wimp. And I’m like, no, Michael Dukakis was great. He has thoughts and feelings, and he believes in responsible criminal justice policy, and he picks up garbage. What was wrong with us? Maybe Michael Dukakis is the soulmate who was there all along.
And so I think that inside us, there's the eternal Janice face of Atwater and Dukakis. There is a side of us that just wants to win to win, or you can accept that everyone thinks you're a cock and the jokes on them, that you know that the best way to live and serve your community is to quietly do unsexy infrastructural stuff, like make the T better and to give to your community, not through bombast and hateful rhetoric, but by picking up garbage.
Mike: God it's just the perfect contrast of the road we didn't take and the road we did, right. It's this quiet, decent man, who seems to actually care about the community around him and is smart and just nice. And everyone’s like, fuck that dude.
Sarah: And is thanked for it by being relentlessly mocked. Yeah. Our electorate has become Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. Michael Dukakis came along with his nice little bag of trash and his sweater and was like, I'd like to help you have public transportation and to reduce recidivism. And we're like, don't fuck with me, Sean. I think that on the whole, both the Gary Hart story and the Dukakis story, both of those campaign stories, we have absorbed them as stories of, you make one mistake and then you torpedo your chances and then the other guy wins. And it's like, no, the other guy was running his campaign using a computer. And you guys were using slide rules.
I think the future came and it was called Lee Atwater. And it wasn't that Gary Hart was slutty and it wasn't that Michael Dukakis made a mistake with policy, it was just that they were unable or unwilling to comprehend what they were up against. And I think that the problem was not them. It wasn't Donna Rice’s fault. It wasn't Michael Dukakis’ fault. It wasn't even really Lee Atwater's fault, because he was an individual person and he, in the same way that like Linden Ronstadt has written a bunch of songs that have become hits, and everyone knows them and sings them, and you cry in the car, and they touch a part of your soul. That's because Linda Ronstadt is a gifted musician, but it's also because she happened to know what American needed to hear at the moment, they needed to hear it. I’ve just been driving a lot in the Southwest. I always sing a lot of Linda Ronstadt when I'm doing that.
Mike: I can always tell when you've been on road trips.
Sarah: Yeah. So Lee Atwater understood what America wanted and gave it to us. You can blame Lee Atwater and the GOP for preying on those fears, but they also assessed vulnerabilities that were really there, and they pandered to racism that existed. American didn't deserve Michael Dukakis, I guess.
Mike: I just think that if you're an elected official running for president and you need to meet with an attractive female model, for any reason, do it at Panera bread. That's a much better idea than having her at your house.
Sarah: And then after having the meeting, you go out to the parking lot and see if there are any loose napkins you can pick up together.