Problem with delving into politicians’ personal lives

By Michael Smerconish

Sunday, Oct. 19, 2014 | 2:03 a.m.

Gary Hart’s downfall in the run-up to the 1988 presidential election marked an important milestone on a journalistic arc that began with Watergate. Where, previously, the media fast track was greased by befriending politicians, now it was enhanced by bringing them down. Ever since, nothing has been out of bounds for media outlets large and small. Consider Kansas.

Paul Davis, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has been locked in a tight race against Republican incumbent Sam Brownback. A few weeks ago, a twice-weekly local newspaper with no website called the Coffeyville Journal revealed that, in 1998, Davis, then 26 and unmarried, was in a strip club getting a lap dance when the place was raided as part of a drug sting. Davis wasn’t charged with a crime, but that won’t stop the story’s circulation through Election Day.

Matt Bai’s new book, “All The Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” asks whether the all-is-fair-game standard has been in the nation’s best interest. The focus is the Hart saga, about which Bai corrects what he regards as numerous myths.

“Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now,” Bai writes, “they recall it the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn’t believe him, and then the (Miami) Herald took him up on it. Inexplicably, people believe Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it.”

Bai says that’s not how it happened. The Herald was already staking out Hart by the time his so-called challenge was published by journalist E.J. Dionne. And, Bai says, that’s not just a timeline clarification. The idea that Hart set the episode in motion made it seem as if he, not the press, had changed the boundaries.

Plus, you remember the photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Hart’s lap? Chances are you think the photo was the smoking gun that killed his political career. Actually, the picture didn’t come to light until nearly three weeks after he suspended his candidacy.

Four years ago, I interviewed Hart about a book he was releasing. I asked him where reporters and observers should draw the line today on covering politicians’ personal lives. He said:

“The standard that got changed I think 20 or 25 years ago was that a public person’s private life was of importance only if it affected their ability to do their job. I think that was a pretty good standard, and it permitted some people who are flawed human beings, as we all are, to continue to serve their country.”

Maybe he’s right. After all, as Hart noted, if today’s standard had been applied in decades past, the country would have been denied the service of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, among others. (Bill Clinton was missing from his list, but deserves mention, too.) Some might argue that by Hart’s own standard, he was rendered unqualified to serve, that a president carrying on an extramarital affair could be compromised by enemies foreign and domestic. But that’s only because we ostracize behavior, which is, arguably, none of our business.

Tom Fiedler disagrees. Today, he is the dean of the College of Communication at Boston University. But 30 years ago, he was a political reporter for the Miami Herald whose phone rang with the tip that would eventually sink Hart. Recently on CNN, he told me that Hart’s challenge had been issued before Dionne wrote about it and that “Sen. Hart himself raised that issue as really a measure of who he was, of his own authenticity.”

I asked Fiedler about the propriety of three Herald reporters and a photographer literally cornering Hart in an alley adjacent to his home. He said they were there to confirm a tip that Hart was spending the weekend with Rice.

“You somehow make it sound like what we were doing was somehow out of the bounds of journalism,” Fiedler said. “It was very much in bounds of what journalists do.”

When I noted that the tip was about infidelity, he disagreed.

“The tip was about lying,” he responded. “He had lied to everyone, the public included, that he claimed he was not engaged in this kind of behavior. That was the tip — that he was, indeed, engaged in this behavior, and we checked out the tip. We felt that it’s important that voters be able to consider — when they’re looking at a person’s fitness for office — they should be able to take into account what his character included. And it included lying about, as it happened, infidelity.”

When I shared that recollection with Bai, he was quick to respond: “When they were in that alley, on May 2, 1987, and four reporters and a photographer had the presumed Democratic nominee, the guy who was beating George H.W. Bush in the polls by double digits, and they have him backed up against a brick wall in a white hoodie, and they are peppering him with questions about the woman who they saw entering and leaving the home. The question was not, ‘You said you were not cheating on your wife, so how do you explain the lie?’ What Tom Fielder said to him is, ‘You held yourself out when you announced ... as a politician who would hold himself to a high moral standard. Who is that woman in your house?’ ”

Bai sees significance in the fact that Hart’s announcement comments about the need for morality were in the context of addressing official misbehavior — Iran contra and a series of Reagan administration scandals. “He was not talking about his marital vows,” Bai told me, noting the Herald reporters made no such distinction.

Perhaps it was never for us to condemn Hart. That was a job for Lee, his wife. And how ironic that, after more than 50 years, they’re still together.

Michael Smerconish writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer and is host of “Smerconish” on CNN.