Ambivalence and Ambition : Hart Seems Devoted to Life of Contradictions

Gary Hart has long seemed many different men, at least two of them at war; one seeking the highest prize on the political landscape, the other curiously determined to throw it all away.

Had the first made it to the White House, it would have been a classic American story: the success of a poor boy from the heartland on fire with religion and ideas and ambition. At 21, he left rural Kansas for Yale. At 34, he managed a presidential campaign. At 37, he was elected to the Senate. At 50, he was the Democratic front-runner for the presidency itself.

But the second Gary Hart’s peculiar, self-destructive flaws outpaced his spectacular promise. Faced with charges of womanizing, his campaign in tatters, on Friday he called it quits.

“Clearly, under present circumstances, this campaign cannot go on,” he said, leaving the nation to puzzle: How could an experienced politician with so much to lose behave in a manner that raised so many questions? How could he risk it all so carelessly?

There may be no clear lens into the answers, but there are plenty of clues. They are scattered across the terrain of a lifetime, in Kansas and Colorado and Washington, in the observations of rivals and friends, in the defiant words of Hart himself.

“I am who I am. Take it or leave it,” he said. “. . . I guess I’ve become some kind of a rare bird, some extraordinary creature that has to be dissected by those who analyze politics to find out what makes him tick.”

Unusual Indeed

That scrutiny is inevitable, for Hart has been unusual indeed.

He has been not only a man of contradictions, but also one seemingly dedicated to them, as if every paradox was a signpost of intelligence. A meticulous custodian of facts, he has also been a font of pointless deceptions.

For Hart, ambivalence was ambition’s constant companion. He desperately wanted to be President but detested the grunt work of politics. As a campaigner, even as a senator, he often disengaged himself at critical times, becoming aloof and disdainful.

He made many poor judgments, some the inevitable mistakes of a demanding life but others an eerie, self-destructive unraveling. He was a candidate whose rhetoric sought the high ground of new ideas and whose actions made character the central issue of the campaign.

From the first, Hart felt ambivalent about his calling.

A Democrat, he was born in Ottawa, Kan., a town so Republican that his uncles had to re-register to vote for him. Ottawa counts 11,561 residents. Early on, Hart had visions larger than that.

“What’s going to happen to us if we live and die here?” he once asked Duane Hoobing when they were youngsters. Hart likes to compare growing up in Ottawa to the TV program “Happy Days.” And he did, indeed, spend time riding up and down Main Street and sipping malts at the Dutch Maid. But when Hart was still a fifth-grader, he set a goal: That year, he would read 100 books.

And he did.

Early on, his serious side warred with the Main Street cruiser.

He ran for senior class president and lost--to Hoobing. It was the serious side, Hoobing recalls, that cost Hart the election. “He was not outgoing enough,” Hoobing says. “It taught Gary to smile more.”

Had Religion

Still, he couldn’t loosen up much. He had religion.

It was an austere faith, the creed of his mother, Nina. She was a fastidious, devout member of the Church of the Nazarene. Hart describes her as warm and humorous, a woman who loved life--the “salt of the earth,” he calls her. But his mother also forswore makeup. And she wore no jewelry. Her standards were high. By the dictates of her faith, she outlawed smoking. She banned drinking. She told her son he could neither dance nor see movies.

“She was a pretty tough lady,” says Joe Lee, a boyhood friend. She made Gary wear long-sleeve shirts. She made him wear button-down collars. She made him come home earlier than his friends.

And, although Hart says his mother “was never pushy,” she let him know that she wanted him to be a minister.

He began carrying a Bible with his schoolbooks. His adopted sister recalls that, by the time Gary had turned 16, he was preaching at the Nazarene church.

Jitterbugged With Friends

But he was ambivalent about piety. Some nights, he sneaked out to a local airstrip with friends, opened the car doors, turned up the radio and jitterbugged.

During the summer after his senior year, he bleached his hair yellow. He fled Ottawa and raced off to Colorado, reportedly at 105 m.p.h. in a green Dodge.

Ambivalent, he came home in a week.

In 1953, he finally left Ottawa for Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma. Affiliated with the Nazarene Church, it had 1,400 students, a cluster of three-story buildings and a chapel where students worshiped twice a week.

There Hart came under the influence of philosophy professor J. Prescott Johnson, who introduced young Hart and several other bright students to the classical Greek philosophers and ultimately to the works of Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-Century Danish religious thinker.

A lonely, melancholy, often anguished figure, Kierkegaard early in life was struck by his acute intellect’s propensity to transmute every experience into a detached, abstract reflection. The only antidote to this poisonous tendency, he argued, was a radical, all-consuming commitment. He called it the “either/or” choice.

To Hart, Kierkegaard was “explosive,” Johnson has said.

Mirror of Ambivalence

Hart had found not only a galvanizing idealism to supplant the youthful piety he had decided to discard, but also a mirror of the fundamental ambivalence that was to characterize so many crucial moments in his life.

Indeed, decades later, on what would be his last campaign, a reporter noticed that Hart was still reading Kierkegaard.

It was his book titled “Purity of the Heart Is to Will One Thing.”

Hart graduated from Bethany Nazarene College with a degree in philosophy, and, with Johnson’s blessing, he went on to Yale Divinity School, where the religious horizons were not so narrow.

But Tom Boyd, a divinity school classmate, recalls that Hart grew more interested in current than eternal affairs. They talked politics. And, when Hart graduated from divinity school, he entered Yale Law School.

But, ever ambivalent, he refused to abandon the sacred for the secular.

Instead, friends say, he widened his definition of the ministry to include political action. Boyd, now a philosophy professor at the University of Oklahoma, says Hart developed a vision of serving a public ministry.

Moved to Colorado

He and his wife, Lee, moved to Colorado, where he began practicing law. It was not long before he agreed to do advance work for a George S. McGovern visit--and then to manage McGovern’s presidential campaign.

Two years later, he ran for office himself.

The record of his campaigns shows instances of remarkable ambivalence--to the very end.

In 1974, he ran successfully against Sen. Peter Dominick (R-Colo.).

Hart tarred Dominick with Watergate, charging that he had laundered a contribution from milk producers through his campaign committee. He said the money wound up in President Richard M. Nixon’s coffers at the Committee for the Reelection of the President. Dramatically, Hart flew to Washington to turn over files containing his accusations to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Then he backed off. He called it “negative campaigning.”

In 1984, during his first race for the presidency, Hart showed similar ambivalence about assailing Walter F. Mondale.

Illinois Commercials

During the Illinois primary, Hart--acting on the advice of pollster Patrick Caddell--approved a series of television commercials attempting to link Mondale to Chicago political boss Edward R. (Fast Eddie) Vrdolyak. Then, at the last minute, Hart relented and announced to the press that he had ordered the spots withdrawn. Because it was Saturday, however, Hart’s staff was unable to comply with his instructions. The commercials aired, and Caddell now asserts that the fiasco cost Hart his lead in Illinois.

Even at the end of his current campaign, as he faced the biggest decision of his life, he says he vacillated on how to handle his withdrawal. He intended, he said, to quit with a “short, carefully worded political statement.” Then, he said, after a night of tossing and turning, “I woke up about 4 or 5 this morning with a start. And I said to myself: ‘Hell no!’ ”

What followed was a preacher’s angry sermon.

Hart’s ambivalence sometimes extended to the truth.

The problem first surfaced in a 1984 newspaper profile that carried two intriguing revelations: His birth certificate showed him to be a year older than he said he was. In 1961, he had shortened his last name from Hartpence.

At first, they were nothing more than curiosities. They became important only because Hart was hypersensitive about them--and could not keep his story straight. “What difference does it make how old I am?” he asked testily. “Next question!”

But reporters could not figure out why he had shaved off that single year--and would not relent without a better explanation. Hart’s initial response had been to blame his staff. “I can’t account for every piece of paper that’s been written by my campaign,” he said.

Then he was confronted with more facts. He had correctly listed his birth date through his graduation from Yale Law School in 1964. Then, three years later, he started to fudge. It seemed a calculated move.

‘A Family Joke’

Hart’s story changed. “My mother always cheated about her age, you know, a family joke,” he said. “I think I just got mixed up comparing my age with hers.”

The name change caused similar confusion. Hart said it had been his father’s idea.

But his sister remembered it quite differently, as did his uncle, Ralph Hartpence. They said Hart wanted a streamlined name for his career ambitions. “Gary thought it would look better in politics,” Ralph Hartpence said.

As the campaign moved on, the questions trailed right along. The minor discrepancies became the gist of psychological profiles.

To many, Hart seemed a self-made man in the most literal sense. He had pulled up his small-town roots and reinvented himself piece by piece. Now he was something of a brainy Marlboro cowboy with rich friends in Hollywood and a gift for delivering a speech with the mannerisms of John F. Kennedy.

“No, I don’t have any doubts about who I am,” he answered repeatedly, each time confronted with challenges to his very identity.

Signature Changed

Things only grew worse. It was discovered that he had changed his signature in 1972 and then again in 1983, finally settling on bold, stylized capital letters with a broad horizontal sweep.

Then came a flap about the Navy. In 1980 age requirements were waived so Hart could be made an officer in the reserves. It seemed an ambitious senator had made a crafty move to add a military credential to his resume.

This time, Hart gave a wildly dramatic explanation: He said he first applied for the commission in 1977 when he feared war in the Persian Gulf. In such an event, he said, he had no intention of remaining in the Senate when he could join the action, fighting alongside his son.

“I couldn’t stay in the protection of public life and vote for funds that would possibly get my son killed,” he said.

In 1977, his son, John, was only 10. Besides, Hart’s commission was in the Judge Advocate General Corps. He would not be called up in an emergency.

This year, back on the presidential stump, Hart wrote his own two-part essay--”One Man’s Luck”--designed to “set to rest” some of the quibbles that had been raised before.

‘Tracked a Timber Wolf’

Among the article’s more colorful passages, Hart described how at age 4 in Kansas he “came almost face to face with a large gray wolf,” and recently in Colorado “tracked a timber wolf 100 yards from our door.”

But, as an editor at the Denver Post pointed out and the National Audubon Society confirmed, wolves have been virtually extinct in the American West since 1930.

So Hart was back in the soup, caught in another pointless deception. From there, it got worse. Rumors of Hart’s womanizing, long passed in whispers, had made their way into print.

That was the limit. “Follow me around. I don’t care,” Hart told a reporter. “I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead.”

And that is what happened.

Deception comes more appropriately to the part of Hart that is a novelist.

In 1985, he co-wrote a thriller about terrorism with Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.). It was called “The Double Man.” Then Hart wrote another novel, also a thriller, alone, this one about intrigue during arms control negotiations that save the world from Armageddon. Called “The Strategies of Zeus,” it was published this year.

“The Double Man” was born when Hart and Cohen found themselves drinking coffee in the Senate Dining Room, bored and exhausted during an all-night filibuster.

“If you were not a senator right now,” Cohen asked his colleague, “what would you rather be doing?”

“I’d rather be in Ireland,” Hart replied, “writing a novel.”

“You can’t go to Ireland,” Cohen said. “So why don’t we write a novel?”

Hart agreed.

This was the same Gary Hart who would disengage himself from debate on the Senate floor on occasion, go the the visitors’ gallery and watch from above.

‘Very Independent’

It was the Gary Hart who disengaged part of himself even from his friends and was called a loner. “He does have good friends, but he is a very solitary figure,” says Oliver (Pudge) Henkel, a friend since law school who managed his 1984 presidential campaign. “No, that’s exaggerated. Really, it’s that he is very independent.”

This was the Gary Hart who would enter a reception in his honor, put his hands in his pockets and stand at the back of the room. “He had to be urged to go up to the front,” says Rick Stearns, who was one of Hart’s right-hand men when he managed the McGovern campaign. This too was the Hart who made few close friends during his 12 years in the Senate. It said something about Hart’s distance that only one of his Senate colleagues endorsed him during his 1984 race for the White House.

And this was the Gary Hart who seemed so passionless at times that people called him cold. “He has never been a hail fellow-well met person,” Henkel says, “even before his political life.

‘Deny His Personality’

“He wasn’t creating his candidacy from his personality, but creating it out of a movement, a depiction of issues and ideas,” Henkel says. “Those were not things that grew out of his personality. They grew out of his vision. He tried to deny his personality.”

If Hart revealed his own character anywhere, it might have been in his novels. After announcing that he would not seek a third term in the Senate and before announcing his short-lived second presidential campaign, he gave a reporter an inkling of just how important it was to him to write.

“I’ve always looked at politics,” he said, “as an interim period in my life.”

Some people saw in “The Strategies of Zeus” a mirror that reflected Hart’s self-image.

The main character, a U.S. arms control negotiator, wears boots like Hart’s. He is “a private man in a public job . . . a Westerner with an Eastern education . . . (and) a singular man who enjoyed the company of others but who used his privacy--his aloneness--as a bird uses the air.

“His aura of separateness made him seem, to those around him, strong but elusive.”

The woman he finally takes to bed is a member of the Soviet negotiating team who notices that “he had remained slender into his middle years, and that he was taller than average. He was from the American West, she knew. And he reminded her of that most romantic of American figures, the cowboy.”

Their lovemaking was hungry, “as if each wished to be lost in the other . . . urgent, quick, then later, longer and with more deliberate passion.” The next morning, “they found themselves again in the grasp of desperate passion.”

Together, they rescue the world from nuclear destruction.

At important junctures, Hart’s tendency to disengage, even for a moment, has caused him errors in judgment that harmed his political career.

One such instance came in 1980, during his bid for reelection to the Senate. Lunching with reporters, Hart offered a humorous analysis of a common problem for senators and congressmen: the monopolization of their time by constituents with local problems more befitting an ombudsman than a U.S. senator.

If he were reelected, he said, he’d love to tell Colorado voters to “buzz off.”

The outcry at home was quick and harsh.

At first, Hart’s aides denied that he made the statement. Then the aides pointed out that Hart was trying to be funny.

They criticized reporters for not taking his remark humorously.

Whatever his intention, Hart had not helped his cause. On election night that November, he eked out survival by only 19,206 votes.

More Errors

During the 1984 presidential campaign, Hart’s errors in judgment multiplied.

In an interview with reporters from New York Magazine and the New Republic, Hart said this of Anastasio Somoza, the late Nicaraguan dictator: “I don’t know if this is public information, but in the basement of his presidential palace Somoza kept cages with panthers inside. After dinner, for the entertainment of his guests, he would go downstairs and have a political opponent thrown in.”

It wasn’t public information; worse, it wasn’t true.

Hart told reporters that he had heard the story from some Sandinistas during a visit to Nicaragua and passed it along without verifying it.

“I certainly didn’t say I could verify it,” he said.

But the magazine writers say Hart left them with the impression that he had heard the story while serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

One of Hart’s biggest errors in judgment came at the end of the 1984 race.

Split Campaigning

In the final series of primaries, the big states were California and New Jersey. Together, they offered nearly 400 Democratic National Convention delegates to the winner. To cover both states, Hart and his wife, Lee, split the campaigning. He handled New Jersey; she handled California.

Eleven days before the voting, after spending the night in a Newark motel that overlooked a junkyard and a slimy swimming pool green with algae, he flew across the country, landed red-eyed and exhausted, and went with Lee to a Bel-Air party overlooking Beverly Hills.

There, on the patio of a $4.2-million home that belonged to one of his supporters, Hart disengaged for a fateful moment. He thought to have a little fun.

“The deal is we campaign separately,” Hart told the party-goers. “That’s the bad news. The good news for her is she campaigns in California, and I campaign in New Jersey.”

There was laughter. Lee broke in. “I got to hold a koala bear.”

“I won’t tell you what I got to hold,” Hart added. “Samples from a toxic waste dump.”

Californians applauded. New Jerseyites exploded. Hart’s aides cried.

Their man carried California. He lost New Jersey.

Hart was no traditional pol. He seemed to court political danger. He thought he was above the rules.

One example was an interview he gave to Vanity Fair magazine in 1984. He told the reporter of his relationship with Marilyn Youngbird, an attractive American Indian spiritualist who schooled him in healing rituals.

“She’s been my spiritual adviser for the last few years,” Hart said. “She introduced me to Indian religion. She’s a full-blooded American Indian. Marilyn’s given me eagle feathers and, well, other religious artifacts.”

The story went on to describe a sensual ceremony where their bodies were brushed with eagle feathers; the thunder spirits that protected Hart, and written advice she had given the presidential contender, which he kept in his pocket: “Get away from everybody. Go to nature. Hug a tree.”

In politics, there is something known as the “weird factor,” meant for anything far outside prevailing norms. This association had the ring of something weird enough to merit denial instead of explanation.

‘Not a Mystic’

“Terribly inaccurate,” Hart insisted. “I am not a mystic,” he said, adding that he remained “in the mainstream of traditional religious thinking.”

In the meantime, there was talk on the campaign trail about other Hart friendships, not as exotic as the one with a spiritualist but potentially more damaging.

Editors of most major newspapers agonized about what to do with rumors about extramarital affairs: whether to investigate them and what to do if they were true.

Hart had been separated from his wife for three months in 1979. They split up again in late 1981, announcing that they would seek a divorce. There was a reconciliation, however, in mid-1982, just before Hart announced his first run for the presidency.

In 1984, a frequent question of the couple was whether their marriage had become an arrangement patched together for appearances. They both denied that, though their own actions provoked doubts. He would sometimes fail to introduce her at speeches. They seemed distant even when side by side.

When the current presidential campaign geared up, the rumors were on reporters’ minds, as well as in the thoughts of Hart insiders who feared that the candidate courted political suicide and beautiful women at the same time.

‘Always in Jeopardy’

A few weeks ago, a key Hart adviser in the 1984 race, John McEvoy, told Newsweek: “He’s always in jeopardy of having the sex issue raised if he can’t keep his pants on.”

McEvoy later said he was quoted out of context, but the comment opened the way for “womanizing” to become an even more dangerous problem than “name, age and handwriting” had been the last time.

Although newspapers are reluctant to print rumors, most freely publish denials. Each time Hart said he was not a womanizer, more people learned for the first time that he might be.

Last weekend, the Miami Herald staked out Hart’s Washington town house. Reporters saw the candidate with a 29-year-old actress.

Soon, the nation learned that Hart had been with her at least twice previously, including an overnight voyage to Bimini on a yacht called the Monkey Business. He had called her “a half dozen or so” times in recent weeks.

But most of all, the nation learned what Gary Hart’s closest friends had long feared. No matter how bright, no matter how hard-working, he could blow it all in a minute.

This is what he said when he quit: “I believe I would have been a successful candidate, and I know I could have been a very good President, particularly for these times.

“But apparently now we’ll never know.”

Times researchers Nina Green, Doug Connor and Kevin Fox contributed to this story.