What It’s Like—National Politics
Gary, Bill, John, Hillary . . . and Fidel
This is one Hart you won’t leave in San Francisco.
—Senator Gary Hart to Democratic National Convention, July 18, 1984
So, you think Cuomo’s getting in?
—Fidel Castro to author, October 16, 1987, dinner at Presidential Palace, Havana
If you love policy and politics, nothing—nothing—matches the cocoonish intensity of a competitive presidential campaign. With decisions made on the fly and little time to game out alternatives, these are panoramic events where one speech, gaffe, or debate can spell the difference between the presidency and Palookaville . . . as I painfully discover trying to help my friend Gary Hart become president.
For one personal example: when Deni’s water breaks in the afternoon of March 29, 1984, I’m hurtling around NYC in a motorcade with Gary. Pre–cell phones, texting, or pagers, she has to contact the Secret Service to get to our car to tell me to get the hell to the hospital. With my brain wired into a draft for the next morning’s speech demanding that Walter Mondale return his “tainted PAC money,” the words “Deni . . . delivery . . . hospital” all sound oddly familiar when the agent utters them. Then I hightail it to Lenox Hill Hospital on 77th Street.
Gary Hart: Prophet without Honor
Richard Nixon and Gary Hart are not alike, to say the least, but their final public images—Watergate and Donna Rice, respectively—have eclipsed nearly everything each had done before. But now I realize that Gary was eerily similar to a different presidential candidate a quarter century later—a cerebral, young, aloof, long-shot senator running on generational and policy change with an obvious disdain for the usual backslapping bonhomie. In most ways except two rather big ones—race and result—Hart was the Obama of 1984.
He is born in Ottawa, Kansas, to working-class parents who never get out of high school and who strictly adhere to a church forbidding congregants to dance or go to movies. At six, Gary signs his name “Professor Hart”; at 10, he declares he wants to be a minister, and he reads so many books that a school chart using stars as books “begins to look like the Milky Way.”
Gary goes East and Ivy by entering Yale Divinity School because of his passion for philosophy and teaching. Campaigning in New Haven on Election Day 1960 for John Kennedy, however, he becomes infatuated with the president-elect’s call to service. His civic religion now public service, Hart switches to Yale Law School and after graduation goes to work in the Justice Department of Robert Kennedy. Following a stint as a lawyer in Denver, he’s recruited by the son of a minister running an uphill race for president, South Dakota’s George McGovern, who later says that he was “attracted to Hart’s churchly, almost geeky goodness, his mannerly Midwestern respect.” Hart becomes his campaign manager in that defining candidacy.
At just 38, Hart parlays his experience, smarts, and Redford looks into a successful candidacy for a Colorado U.S. Senate seat only two years later. “Gary was different from the start,” says Peter Gold, his first top legislative aide, “because of his insistence that we not view issues through the prism of traditional Democrats or Republicans. He was looking for a fresh, nonpartisan ‘Hart’ perspective based on what made sense, which he did on military reform, nuclear strategy, and industrial policy, to name a few. Once when I complimented him for some major legislation, he modestly shrugged and said, ‘well, only a fraction of the Senate even tries to have a national impact.’”
Gold is my best friend and suggests to his boss that he involve me in any of his national efforts. “After I won reelection in 1980 when so many other progressive Democrats got wiped out in the Reagan landslide,” Hart tells me in an interview in 2015, “I started hearing lots of people around the country say, ‘You really should run for president.’” Ensconced in NYC, I get calls from time to time from Gary and his staff about framing and New York politics. Then with near-linear progression, the boy who read a lot of books grows into an intellectual presidential contender running, he declares in his February 1983 announcement, on “new ideas from a new generation of leaders.” His evolving stump speech that year explains his rationale: “This nation has not passed its prime, its leaders have . . . This country cannot afford four more years of Reaganomics for the rich . . . It’s not whether you turn left or right to elect a Democrat or Republican but whether to let this nation move into the future or slip backwards in the past.”
Among other efforts, I become a one-man band pushing him to be the first major party candidate to refuse all special-interest PAC funds, the monkey wrench of democracy as I saw it in Who Runs Congress? After his finance team costs it out, he enthusiastically agrees to this “new idea” consistent with his rationale of challenging politics as usual. Still, we’re almost disappointed when Hart’s leading rival, former vice president and front-runner Walter Mondale, astutely agrees to the pledge, making our point but (apparently) mooting the issue.
Then comes a week with the biggest presidential upset since Truman-Dewey. It’s the first month of 1984. The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)” is playing repeatedly on the radio as Gary’s improbable dream starts coming into focus. Mondale wins the Iowa caucuses on January 24 by a huge 49 to 16 percent margin but Hart comes in second, “beating expectations,” as defined by the wrong guesses of pundits who talk largely to themselves. The Mondale people seem nettled by a focus on the new guy and slip into an off-putting hubris that New Hampshire-ites, in the first primary the next month, famously dislike. “Somebody had to finish second,” sniffs one Mondale strategist, while that campaign’s pollster, Peter Hart, brags “we won the gold and the silver.”
But they and most everyone miss a seismic shift among Democrats dismayed by Reagan’s cowboy capitalism. Mondale has the money and machine but Hart has the message. And while Gary has been projecting his generational approach since he entered the Senate in 1975, Mondale reminds people of Churchill’s complaint about pudding: “it lacks theme.”
Gary’s crowds in New Hampshire swell. At a traditional ax throwing contest on the Saturday before primary day, the plaid-shirted Hart buries his ax in a three-foot target 30 feet away. Commentators can’t resist overdoing “axing” Mondale metaphors. A Washington Post-ABC poll released on Sunday has it 38 to 24 percent for Mondale, with Senator John Glenn fading. But mid-Tuesday afternoon, primary day, I start getting calls from semi-hysterical friends in all camps saying that Hart is winning by 10 in exit polls! I speak to his New York coordinator, John Connorton, a highly regarded Wall Street lawyer but political novice, who’s uncharacteristically stammering in disbelief. “Can you imagine?” he says with wonder.
Gary wins 37 to 28 percent. Having gone almost overnight from inevitable to improbable, Mondale has to find the resolve to calmly absorb a potentially lethal loss and rally his troops for the next rounds in the South, then New York and Pennsylvania. “Sometimes a cold shower is good for you,” says the ex–vice president unconvincingly that night, before finding his footing two days later: “There seeped into my campaign, and maybe even into my own mind, a kind of front-runner inevitability psychology that maybe people smelled, and that’s gone now,” he tells reporters with refreshing bluntness. “We’re in for a long, tough fight.”
The next night Gary is scheduled to come to a long-planned fund-raiser hosted by ranking Democrats Howard and Lulette Samuels at their very tony duplex at 115 Central Park West. As Deni and I cab over, we pass by a ruptured street at 64th and CPW with loud hissing and a car precariously elevated some 25 feet in the air . . . took us a few gape-mouthed seconds to realize it’s a shoot from some movie called Ghostbusters. But it sets the tone for the awesomeness of the evening.
On Monday the Samuels have 30 RSVPs. But Wednesday night, after the New Hampshire earthquake, 300 pour into their spacious living room dominated by a huge painting of Lulette’s father, a former prime minister of France in the 1930s. “When Gary, Howard, and Lulette walk down our long staircase,” recalls Bill Samuels, Howard’s son, “people were going nuts. Everyone seemed to be at once thinking, ‘This is the next president of the United States.’” Gary himself is impressed because he “rode up on the elevator with Joel Grey” and at the bold-faced names there who hadn’t earlier returned calls. Hoarse, tired, pumped up, he mirrors their collective joy by concluding his 15 minutes of remarks with the crescendo, “We’re going to win the nomination and then beat Reagan.” If the room’s energy could be converted to wattage, it’d light all of Ottawa, Kansas.
As we make a path for him through a wall of bodies on the way out, he asks, “Mark, can you help me with the New York primary in three weeks and then with national communications and policy?” Not a hard question for a Sixties Democrat who is a friend of a potential Kennedy of the Eighties. “Sure,” I say casually (though inside I’m shouting the Eighties version of OMG!).
The next three weeks—and five months to the convention—are anything but casual.
In New York, we face a formidable lineup of Governor Mario Cuomo and nearly all state elected Democrats and organized labor. I move around with Gary and advise him on such New York customs as the heresy of milk with Nathan’s hot dogs, which McGovern reportedly asked for, according to urban legend. Deni (pre-delivery) and I throw a modest fund-raiser for Gary at our apartment for 50 friends and family. “Mark’s literary and strategic contributions have clearly earned a major posting,” the candidate teases the crowd, “so we’ll be holding open the Ugandan embassy for him” (this being shortly after the era of the murderous Idi Amin of that country).
Then a break: I get a tip that, despite Mondale’s PAC pledge, labor unions close to him are instead funneling $400,000 into Mondale “delegate committees,” including those in New York. Having overspent in early primaries attempting a knockout blow, it appears that his campaign is evading the federal $24 million primary spending cap. Gary green-lights a speech to expose Mondale’s hypocrisy and reliance on old-time politics. Did the vice president and his top staff know about these funds? My job isn’t to find excuses but to cast blame and let them find excuses.
The talk is set for a Midtown breakfast on the morning of March 30, four days before the primary. I’m reviewing the draft with him on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth when, as mentioned above, my wife goes into labor. I shift focus from delivering a speech to watching doctors delivering Jonah Frand Green, born healthy and beautiful at 2:30 a.m. By 6:30 a.m., mom and baby are fast asleep, whereas I am wide awake, brimming with adrenaline, ready to spend the next two hours in battle rather than in repose. Having warned Deni about such a possible situation, I slip out of the hospital and get to Gary just before he’s introduced. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asks, smiling at my backward priorities. Hearing that everyone’s in good shape, he snaps his towel one more time. “And what kind of name is Jonah? Wasn’t he a bit of a whiner? But in the end, he did his job, right?”
He then takes the stage and lets it rip: “By denouncing PAC money at the front door while his campaign sweeps it in through the back door, the former vice president has failed the test of leadership—to say what he thinks and to do what he says. No president should enter the Oval Office with strings attached.” With an un-Hart-like rhetorical flourish, he concludes, “Give the money back, Walter, just give the money back.” It’s my second-best moment of the day.
Five days later, the Hart campaign formally petitions the Federal Election Commission to investigate the Mondale delegate committees for possible violations of the spending cap. In late April Mondale agrees to disband these committees and urges them to return the labor funds.
Notwithstanding this successful battle, the Mondale campaign is winning the broader war in New York because it has the only real political infrastructure there—the governor, the Democratic Party, and Labor. Also, with far more money, he’s clobbering us on air. Gary darts around the state for these weeks, making the same closing argument about “a new generation of leaders” on the Monday before the primary in Buffalo, in Albany, and to an outdoor rally of several hundred at NYU after being introduced by Carl Sagan.
At our suite in the always-tattered Roosevelt Hotel, Gary and 20 of us Tuesday night receive the returns. The group includes Connorton, the chief strategist Pat Caddell, then-assemblyman Jerry Nadler, Ellen Chesler, Dick Beattie, other local supporters. As expected based on weekend tracking polling, Mondale wins by 18 points. I tease Gary that he was 19 down in NYS when I joined his campaign three weeks before so “by my count, we just ran out of time.” He manages a grin (OK, more like a grimace) and turns aside my suggestion that we start using a “Give ’em hell Gary” line to show he can take a punch. Then the candidate explains to us that Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, and California will likely decide the nomination in a race where “there is now no clear front-runner.” Except for the senator, we all hang until about 2 a.m., thrown off stride, still hopeful, and—as campaign junkies understand—unwilling to let go of the bonding that climaxes primary nights.
The day before the primary, however, Gary is looking beyond New York and feeling besieged by well-meaning longtime friends who all think they can just walk into his hotel suite and suggest what he should be saying. “My organization style is concentric circles, not a hierarchy. But I need a filter,” he tells us. At a Midtown meeting with many of his top national and traveling aides, he explains his frustration and then adds, “Mark, can you consolidate the process so I’m not torn in different directions, especially before debates?” Media guru Pat Caddell is not happy with Hart’s suggestion, angrily leaving the meeting and then slow-walking it to maintain his lead spot. Once the traveling campaign leaves New York, I don’t so much filter as alternate with John Holum, a Washington lawyer and later head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Clinton, as an on-the-road speechwriter and message enhancer, Hart’s message already being as sharp as any in recent memory.
I’m away about a quarter of the time over the next three months flying around with Gary, press secretary Kathy Bushkin, aide Billy Shore, the press corps—and Warren Beatty. Warren is not only beyond famous but a real character, publicly mumbly, tactically brilliant, a sounding board for the candidate who, goes the staff refrain, “wishes he were Gary while Gary wishes he were Warren.” Did I mention that whatever city we’re in, Warren books the “presidential suite” in the town’s biggest hotel where we’d all convene late night to polish off a speech or strategy for the next day?
Mondale rises to the occasion and asserts his natural strength with party super-delegates who committed to him before the first votes were cast. As significant, Mondale’s campaign knows it has to knock Gary off his pinnacle of Ideas and Change. Mondale aide Bob Beckel (who would go on to be the oxymoronic Democrat on Fox Cable) comes up with a way: at the March 11 Atlanta debate, Mondale waits for Gary to go into his “new ideas” spiel and then delivers a well-rehearsed line, “Gary, when I hear you talk about your ‘new ideas,’” he says looking directly at Hart, “I think of that [Wendy’s] ad, ‘Where’s the beef?’”
The room erupts in laughter at a joke shrewdly constructed on tens of millions of dollars in previous advertising for that phrase. It becomes one of the best zingers in presidential debate history. That few-second exchange also shifts the media narrative to Gary’s “authenticity.” Articles start flowing about his “weirdness,” his Kennedy-like moves, his family name change from Hartpence to Hart 30 years before, and even a birth certificate saying 1936 while Gary’s official vitae says 1937 (“an inside family joke,” he explains).
For a few weeks, “Who is Gary Hart?” seems to replace “Who is John Galt?” the message being, Can we trust this upstart to be our president? If you lie about your age, you can lie about anything . . . good ol’ Mondale. With the ex–vice president slowly pulling away, I try to squeeze blood from the PAC stone and persuade the candidate to triumphantly announce “welcome to overtime” since we intend to challenge many of Mondale’s super-delegates as “tainted” by dirty PAC money. With party rules not permitting such a challenge, this rhetorical gambit is a bluff but about all the leverage we have.
Then on June 25, Mondale and Hart have a summit at the elegant 69th and Park townhouse of Arthur Krim, the celebrated movie producer. Once Mondale wins Pennsylvania and New Jersey—the latter due to a 30-point swing after Hart jokes about New Jersey being a toxic waste dump—Mondale has enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. That morning ten of us from both camps wait downstairs swapping war stories. When Gary arrives first, Krim asks him what he wants to drink. “Just lots of coffee,” he says. “That’s funny,” responds the host, “I was told specifically you’d like tea with honey.” “Well, that’s been the problem of my campaign all along,” the candidate half jokes.
For nearly two hours, the two vent, hug, and then mug for the 20 cameras outside capturing their agreement to stay positive and unite behind the eventual ticket. When reporters ask about their recent rancor, Gary responds with a line we had crafted if the opportunity presented itself. “Well, neither of us accused the other of witchcraft,” a not-veiled reference to Bush’s criticism of Reagan’s “voodoo economics.”
With personal hatchets buried, so is any challenge to “tainted delegates.” Gary is promised a major speaking slot at the convention. It’s not as momentous as the “Treaty of Fifth Avenue” between Nixon and Rockefeller ten blocks north and 24 years earlier, but it effectively ends the competitive phase of the contest.
A dozen staff join Gary and Lee Hart at the San Francisco convention three weeks later. We go as a runner-up with a story to tell: Mondale has captured the popular primary vote 38 to 36 percent, but Hart won more primaries and caucuses (17–15), including 10 of the final 11. A pre-convention Harris poll has Reagan ahead of Mondale 52 to 44 percent but Hart by only 49 to 48.
I tour that great city, hanging with political pals from New York and around the country, go to a benefit concert by Hart supporter Carole King (whose solemnly sweet “You’ve Got a Friend” strikes a chord with the candidate), and attend morning meetings in Warren’s presidential suite at the St. Francis Hotel.*
Ted Sorensen and I work on Gary’s speech, which is like when Chicago Bulls guard Stacey King declared that he and Michael Jordan once combined for 68 points, on a night when Jordan scored 66 and King 2. I count up the percent of the final draft speech that is Gary’s, Ted’s, mine. It’s like 50–40–10, which is fine by me, given the classy company. (As if anyone else in the world cares.)
Speaking of speeches, Governor Cuomo gives a mesmerizing keynote address, offering a direct challenge to Reagan: “Mr. President, you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’” Weeks before, he asks me to make suggestions for his address, as he coyly does with apparently lots of others. I send him ideas. Watching enraptured and crying delegates on the floor with veteran journalist Jack Newfield, I ask Jack, a close ally of Cuomo’s, if the governor uses any of his proposed language. “None,” he replies. “I think I heard a preposition and verb tense that were mine,” I say.
Other than Cuomo, the convention is largely remembered for Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential nod, Jesse Jackson’s inspirational address, and Mondale’s self-immolating comment that “Mr. Reagan will raise your taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you—I just did.” But the week also reminds pols, donors, and journalists that, while Hart won’t be in the general election, he’s in a longer generational election for the future of America. Cuomo’s talk captures the hearts of progressive Democrats, but ideally Hart’s future-oriented vision will win their minds. It’s at his close that Sorensen appropriates Tony Bennett’s line that Hart delivers as both a farewell and a wink: “This is one Hart you won’t leave in San Francisco.”
It’s March 1987 and I’m traveling alone with Hart in a limo to a fund-raising event at the LA home of Stanley Sheinbaum, a long-time friend, Democracy Project board member, and a Democratic poobah. I get to hear more of the private Hart from a relaxed candidate than during the roller-coaster primary season three years before. How he grew up in a very repressed childhood, hated bragging about himself, admired how JFK “always looked so fresh and pressed—how did he do that?” and how “I really don’t like being in a crowd.”
“Gary,” I tell him, “you’ve then chosen a hell of a line of work to be in.” We laugh at the incongruity of someone with his introspective temperament succeeding in this most public of professions.
Then back home two months later, like on all Saturday nights, I trudge to the newsstand at 86th and First Avenue toward midnight on May 2, 1987, to buy the Sunday Times to get tomorrow’s news today—and especially on this Saturday night to read E. J. Dionne’s much-anticipated cover magazine profile of Hart. As of that moment, he’s running 30 points ahead of all Democratic rivals for the 1988 nomination and double digits ahead of Vice President Bush. I’m slotted to be his New York State co-coordinator the next year.
I devour E. J.’s thoughtful, largely positive piece and, with a Panglossian glow, take a cab the next morning to a scheduled pro-Israel rally near the UN. As I climb onto stands put up on the west end of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a colleague asks if I heard the Hart news. “You mean the Dionne profile?” I say. “No, that he was caught sleeping with some woman in Washington.” Knowing nothing more, my heart sinks (plunges is probably more accurate).
The Miami Herald’s story about Hart and Donna Rice, a 29-year-old model and actress—and his withdrawal five days later—are too familiar to detail here. Richard Ben Cramer’s monumental What It Takes and more recently Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out have chronicled this sad odyssey when, for the first time really, a major political figure is red-shirted from the political game for private misconduct.
According to Bai, the rules of journalism and politics now adjust to a brutal new vetting process by a generation of Woodward and Bernstein wannabes on the prowl for scandal, usually more personal than constitutional. (For those who missed Bai’s book, Hart’s now-famous statement that the media should “follow me” is not known by the Herald when it begins its stake-out, and the now-infamous Monkey Business photo with Donna Rice comes out two weeks after his candidacy ends.)
I’m scheduled to travel with Gary Tuesday in NYC to various events and meetings. It takes Sunday and Monday for me to absorb this stunning development and to be told that he’s going ahead with his trip, intent on pushing back on the article and headlines. We meet up at 633 Third Avenue mid-morning and are escorted by a state trooper to the thirty-eighth floor and the offices of Governor Mario Cuomo. After some chit-chat, Mario cannot ignore the donkey in the room. “Don’t worry, Gary, if this news had come out about a boring guy like me, my poll numbers would only increase!” says the governor, drawn to underdogs, which Gary is at this moment. The senator tries to explain away the incident as essentially untrue and ridiculous. No one mentions the insider pressure on Mario himself to run for president after his breakout ’84 convention speech. The two go on to review some of the big issues likely to come up in 1988.
We then head to the Waldorf Astoria, where there will be an early test of the scandal’s effect on his candidacy—a long-scheduled economic address to the American Association of Newspaper Editors. When Hart sees NBC Nightly News’ network anchor Tom Brokaw in the audience, he thinks to himself, “Uh-oh, am I a bigger story than Iran-Contra?” which is then continuing to make headlines. In an interview in 2015, Gary admits, “Half of me was trying to rise above it but half was trying to figure out what the hell was going on since there was no precedent in American history.”
He grits his way through a talk about his view of industrial policy, about how ITAs (individual training accounts) are better than picking winners and losers as a way of spurring economic growth. But given an audience thinking more about America’s potential version of Christine Keeler and John Profumo than about ITAs, Gary addresses what’s on everyone’s mind: “Did I make a mistake by putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued? Of course I did. That goes without saying. Did I do anything immoral? I absolutely did not . . . [The Miami Herald published] a misleading and false story that hurt my family and other innocent people and reflected badly on my character.”
Unfortunately for Gary, the first questioner standing up in the audience is Dick Capen, a staunch Republican and publisher of the Miami Herald (and later Bush 41’s ambassador to Spain). I listen in agony, hardly imagining how Gary must feel. The issue is not the Miami Herald, says Capen, “it’s Gary Hart’s judgment. He’s an announced candidate for president . . . who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past.” He goes on and on to a hushed audience—a live version of The Herald v. The Candidate.
Gary struggles to maintain his poise, asserting that the newspaper’s amateur sleuthing hadn’t watched the back door through which Rice and another couple had exited. But Tom Brokaw isn’t buying it. When Tim Russert suggests to John Connorton in the back of the room that the only thing that will save Hart is an hour on Meet the Press the next Sunday, Brokaw growls, “He’s finished. It will take him a million years to get over this.” After several more questions on both Rice and the economy, Hart, staff, and supporters escape to a private adjacent room for a few minutes, and then he returns to the residence of Sydney Gruson, a longtime friend and New York Times editor.
That evening I join him at a Midtown fund-raiser that Bruce Wasserstein and I had spent considerable time organizing. Before Hart walks into a room of some 300 well-heeled but very curious donors (including one Donald Trump), Ted Sorensen, who’s scheduled to introduce him, says to a cluster of us, “Well, to quote the great Richard Nixon, it’s time to stonewall!” He gives a robust opening that not at all alludes to the news on everyone’s mind.
The applause is restrained both before and after his prepared remarks, and then he adds some spontaneous and fiery comments of his own: “Anyone who wants to test my character is in for a surprise: I may bend but I don’t break.” But at our table, Donald Drapkin, a major finance person then closely associated with Ron Perelman, can’t resist commenting on the tableau’s dead-man-walking aspect. “Mark, you really know how to pick ’em, don’t you?” I feign courage but Bruce’s eye-rolling is closer to the truth.
My loyalty to Gary and dismay at how the episode is being treated like Watergate lead me to do a slew of media the next day defending him on TV and radio. I argue that if private sin is the test for public office, then America might have been denied the services of Alexander Hamilton, FDR, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Kennedy, and we’d be venerating Nixon, not King. When the devout Cal Thomas barks at me on CNN, “What could be worse than what Hart did?” I shout back, “Nuclear war!”
But resorts to history are swept aside by waves of salacious stories that drown the resolve of the candidate and his family. Two days later, at a boisterous scrum of reporters in New Hampshire, the Washington Post’s Paul Taylor asks this question for the first time of a presidential candidate: “Senator, have you ever committed adultery?” Hart: “Uh, I don’t have to answer that question.” Afterward, Taylor lets the candidate know that his paper is researching a story about other women he’s allegedly had affairs with. A forlorn Gary tells press aide Kevin Sweeney, “This isn’t going to end, is it? . . . Let’s go home.” That day, he bends and then does break, flying back to Colorado to announce that he’s “suspending” his campaign.
It’s over, except for a sad reentry into the race in 1988 under the banner “Let the people decide.”† Having given my all previously and assuming it to be impossible, I don’t participate.
A month later, as he does with some others one by one, he takes me to lunch to apologize and add that (a) he didn’t have sex with Rice, and (b) “You know, she’s awfully bright, a Phi Beta Kappa who majored in history and philosophy.”
Should his private misconduct have been publicly disqualifying? For one counter–Cal Thomas view, Rick Hertzberg writes in the New Republic: “The fact that a person will lie in the context of adultery proves nothing about his general propensity to lie . . . The point is that if Hart is a liar there must be one or two more lies among the many thousands of words he has spoken as a public man. Let them be produced.” Although years later, Bai has a hard time getting Hart to reflect much on that fateful week, it’s his wife, Lee, who goes there with the comment that “it’s what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very day.” Gary responds: “Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president and we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. And a lot of people would be alive today who are dead. You have to live with that, you know.”
All the News Is Out in 2014 both blames Hart for his stupid rendezvous but also notes his brilliance, earnestness, and ability to see around corners. As a leading example, there’s the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission Report of January 2001, which predicts a terrorist attack—“Americans will die on American soil, possibly in large numbers”—unless the new president creates a federal “homeland security” agency. President Bush and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, however, refuse to even meet with them to discuss their findings.
Bai concludes his book: “[Hart is] perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation . . . There’s a way to describe a man who holds tightly to principle, whatever the cost. The word is character.”
Years later, Gary himself addresses his fall from grace, if indirectly. His 2010 book, The Thunder and the Sunshine, uses Odysseus as a not-subtle analogy of searching for years for redemption. He writes, “Ultimate defeat should not overshadow successes along the way, and particularly successes that affect long-term outcomes.” In 2015, Hart tells me that, since he never thought it inevitable that he’d be president, he’s reconciled himself to his post-campaign life and is proud of the dozen books he’s written and the fact that he’s the only U.S. senator ever to earn a doctorate after his service in office.
Speaking of “successes along the way that affect long-term outcomes,” there’s this: he stays married to Lee for now over 50 years, and his “New Democrat” candidacy based on change helped spur and shape the very successful Clinton and Obama candidacies to come.
Bill Clinton: The Survivor
My mother is picking me up at the West Palm Beach airport in December 1987 when a familiar face is walking toward us. I had only been introduced to Governor Bill Clinton the prior year by my law school roommate, Sandy Berger. Looking impossibly young and ungubernatorial at 41, he says hello but I can see that my mother has no clue who he is. “Mrs. Green,” the governor says, “do you know who your son is?” Well, my mother sure thinks she does and is wondering why this handsome young man is asking. “He’s one of the leading Democratic thinkers and . . .” As he goes on for an uninterrupted half minute of almost believable blarney, I think, “First, this is some politician, and second, anyone who says that to my mom will have me as a fan for life.” Both turn out to be true.
Concluding that he was not quite ready to run in 1988, Clinton starts moving around the country after Bush 41’s win, preparing for a candidacy in ’92. As noted above, he gives the keynote at our Democracy Project’s “Retreat to Advance” in early 1989 and in 1990 anchors one of a series of Democracy Dinners at the hip West Side apartment of Realtor Lew Futterman, where he rubs elbows with high-end donors and continues spreading his word. There satirist (and senator-to-be) Al Franken, who’s never met Clinton, goes up to him and asks, tongue-in-cheek: “So, exactly how many states are there?” Clinton earnestly explains 50 but then delves into the exact status of Samoa, Puerto Rico, and D.C. (Six years later, President Clinton calls Franken his favorite comedian and invites him to host the White House Correspondents Dinner.)
I see him working a fund-raiser at Tavern on the Green late one October night in 1991, pre–Gennifer Flowers, pre–Comeback Kid, pre-Elvis. Meaning he’s not being swarmed by admirers so we have some quality time. As mentioned, he encourages me to organize a “Citizens Transition” book for whoever the 1992 winner might be. That’s all I need. I then raise a few hundred thousand dollars to organize the Citizen’s Transition Project and over the next year get Marion Wright Edelman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Amory Lovins, Robert Reich, and Sandy Berger, among others, to contribute agency-by-agency critiques for the forty-second president.
This project becomes my sideline obsession, given my day job as the Consumer Affairs commissioner of New York City. Clinton has a politically and emotionally traumatic February and March—including discussions of his draft dodging, pot-smoking, and womanizing—ending up, amazingly, as the likeliest nominee entering the Connecticut primary on March 24.
At 11:15 that night, however, the phone rings in my apartment. “Mark, Harold Ickes here. The governor appears to have lost the primary to [Governor Jerry] Brown and we’ll be coming to the city tomorrow morning.” Whoa. As with Mondale-Hart in 1984, that means that New York—given the Empire State’s delegates, media, and money—may again de facto anoint the nominee. “Got any ideas how we can start the New York campaign?” Having just sued H&R Block for its “tax anticipation loan” fraud, I do. “How about starting in front of an H&R Block exposing how Brown favors a flat tax, a regressive idea that our very progressive primary electorate won’t like one bit?” We chat for about five minutes and the wheels are set in motion.
Ten hours later, I walk into a small Chinese laundry next to the H&R Block on 16th and First Avenue in Stuyvesant Town where Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos and I brief the governor on key talking points. He listens intently, takes some notes on the back of a copy of New York Newsday . . . and we exit five minutes later to face a large group of reporters and cameras. I introduce Clinton and he puts the wood to Brown, explaining how “Jerry’s tax—his war-on-New-York-tax”—would hammer average families.‡
Although early polls show him slightly trailing here, a city not known for warming to southern accents, New York takes to this sophisticated charmer. He stays on the flat-tax offensive and makes no flubs. Two weeks later, I attend an event at the 59th Street offices of the Jewish Community Relations Council where Brown is speaking to 200 leading Jewish New Yorkers. Audience members are grilling him about his willingness to consider Rev. Jesse Jackson, who admitted calling NYC “Hymietown” in a private conversation in 1984, among possible vice-presidential picks. “Don’t worry, no matter who I choose, I’d be the president.”
A voice in the back then shouts out, “What if you die?” Um. Er. The usually quick-thinking governor of California has no real answer. I bolt the room to join up with Clinton as he’s walking across the rotunda of the Federal Building on Wall Street where he’s about to give a speech at George Washington’s statue, the very spot on which the first president was sworn in in 1789. I hurriedly tell him about the exchange. He instantly figures out how this will net out among Jewish and black Democrats, who together total roughly half the primary state electorate. “Then he’s lost New York,” he says with undisguised pleasure, and walks out to commune with Washington.
Clinton wins New York handily with 41 percent (Paul Tsongas comes in second with 29 percent, Brown third at 26 percent), essentially locking up the nomination. He tells a staff member as they leave the city, “The two people I most owe my win to are Mark Green and Carol O’Cleireacain [a labor economist and the city’s finance commissioner, who also prodded and briefed him on the flat-tax issue].”
I go back to my vocation as consumer commissioner and avocation of grinding out Changing America: Blueprints for the New Administration. Endorsements on the back cover of the 600-page book in November include Mario Cuomo, Bob Kerrey, Kevin Phillips—and Bill Clinton. After he wins the election, the president-elect is on a victory lap in late November and stops at the Fresh Meadows Shopping Center off the Long Island Expressway to thank the people of Queens. I’m in the crowd and get a shout-out. “Hey, Mark Green. Thanks! I read the whole thing!” I yell back “Thank you!” Now used to his expert ingratiation, however, I don’t completely inhale his flattery. But still, I think to myself, If any president-elect might read “the whole thing,” it’d be this guy.
The next month I’m in D.C. participating in the Clinton-Gore official transition project. I spend a week interviewing top appointees and managers of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the far reaches of upper Northwest D.C. Because I represent the new president and at least appear to have sway over appointments and policies as the agency shifts from R to D, I enjoy a specific level of leverage that I’ve rarely enjoyed before or since. My team’s report indeed does reshape the commission and leads to Anne Brown’s appointment a year later as its effective chair. But lacking any interest in going to Washington, I politically prefer to stay in my sweet spot in NYC. Personally, I’m enormously happy to have played any tiny role in the rise of Clinton.
Over his two terms, we stay in periodic touch in private meetings—my favorite being in the Oval Office the day before Jonah’s bar mitzvah when he also unsuccessfully tells Jenya she should go to Georgetown, not Cornell—and in public settings, like the final White House dinner described in chapter 4 (“Mayor Clinton!”). On a Saturday morning just three months earlier, with Gore in a very tight race with Bush, I arrive at Antioch Baptist Church on 125th Street where President Clinton is just beginning to rally the faithful for his vice president. He spots me from the stage and adorably announces to the congregation, “I see another clergy of color, Rev. Green, is in the house. Let’s find space for him.” He’s inspirational, convincing, smiling, as always. On our way out, however, amid the swirl of Secret Service and many well-wishers, he pulls me into his space and in a loud whisper says, “Mark, you’ve got to convince Al to use me more, not just in big cities.” Moi?
Finally, on January 20, 2001, I’m proud to greet the former president and new Senator Clinton after their 36-minute flight on his blue-and-white 747, no longer Air Force One, when they land at JFK mid-afternoon. He walks slowly from the plane to a nearby hanger filled with several hundred supporters, as a few officials—Dinkins, Hillary, me—trail behind. She’s completely composed, friendly, missing some early Senate votes because of the occasion, saying when I ask how she’s doing, “I’m fine. He will be too.”
“Thank you for coming out here in the cold weather and the cutting wind to welcome Citizen Clinton home,” says the senator in her introduction. Then, in that very familiar slow drawl, as if savoring the magnitude of the moment, he briefly expresses pride in his terms and appreciation to the crowd. Then, nodding toward the senator, he adds that from now on “she would carry the family torch on behalf of the public.”
Turns out we’d hear a lot from both in coming years.
John Kerry: The Second 9/11 Election
The Kerry brothers and their pal David Thorne are returning to New Haven from a trip south in the early Sixties when John turns to David and says, “Let’s drive through Washington.” They steer into the national capital, by the Congress, the Justice Department, and then west on Pennsylvania Avenue by the White House. According to David, John looks up, beams and says, “I’m going to live there someday.”
I meet John Kerry in 1982 through his sister Peggy, a well-known NYC activist, and Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary. He’s running for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts after losing a controversial congressional race the decade before. A popular woman has just entered the contest and John’s worried. “Just my luck,” he frets at Peter’s spacious West 67th Street apartment. But he goes on to win and then enjoy a spectacular career as a junior senator to the durable Ted Kennedy.
Over the years I’d see him occasionally as he’s traveling around NYC to catch up on state and national politics.§ I’m always interested to be with this classy war hero turned anti-war hero and am invariably impressed with his comprehensive knowledge and curiosity, notwithstanding an earnest long-windedness. (When Hart and I arrive at Sheinbaum’s home for the 1987 fund-raiser mentioned above, each of several senators there are supposed to speak for a few minutes before the main attraction . . . yet Kerry goes on for 30 minutes!)
After Gore loses in 2000 and after 9/11, I’m not surprised to hear that this senator—the son of a foreign service officer who has served for 20 years on the Foreign Relations Committee—wants to run in 2004. In mid-2003 I join businessman Dennis Mehiel as the NYS co-chair and am all in, telling one commentator with glib enthusiasm, “He’s as smart as Clinton, has the war record of JFK, the toughness of LBJ, and the hair of Reagan.” Which is largely true . . . but it’s Howard Dean who connects with Democrats yearning for a vocal anti-Iraq champion after the Bush-Cheney administration’s failed policies.
At a summer 2003 party for Dean in East Hampton, near where he grew up, a hot-hot-hot and smiling candidate wonders why “you’re not for me, given your views on the war. Come on, Green!” “Blame it on bad timing,” I defensively explain, “since I got to be friends with John first.” (Later, as restitution for my non-endorsement, Howard titles his 2004 campaign book Winning Back America, the name of my 1984 book on Reagan.)
In October, I escort John around a huge DNC fund-raising dinner at the Sheraton. His public game face—“Great to see you! Thanks for all your help”—privately dissolves from time to time. “Dean, Dean, all I hear is Dean,” he mutters to himself. By early December 2003, at a California retreat of liberal Democrats, pollster Celinda Lake tells us, “At this point there’s really no way Dean can lose the nomination,” adding that Senator Hillary Clinton agrees with that assessment.
It’s a bad time for Kerry. I recall having one of my only shouting matches with my brother, who had pledged to raise a significant amount for Kerry but who now tells me, “I just can’t. No one wants to give to him!” Feeling for my candidate, I send several thousand New Yorkers a “Pre-Iowa E-Mail to Dispirited Kerry Supporters in NYS” in early January. It cites General Foch’s famous exhortation at the Battle of the Marne in World War I and notes that “fifty years later in Vietnam a young lieutenant named John Kerry turned his speedboat into his attackers, surprising and subduing them. And today John Kerry is again fighting back. I’m proud to be with you in this campaign.”
My purple prose aside, Kerry is literally and politically a fighter. He decides to basically live in Iowa and travel with his navy crewmen to validate his heroism and with bud Peter Yarrow singing at his side. While the numbers are daunting, Bob Shrum, his brilliant strategic advisor, thinks that Dean’s 3-to-1 lead will dissolve once voters concentrate on who is most likely to beat Bush. He’s vindicated when Kerry charms, speaks, and strums his way to a come-from-behind first-place finish in the caucuses, with Dean a distant third. And after the “Dean Scream” caucus night, John goes from strength to strength, chooses rival John Edwards as his VP nominee, and enters his convention as an even-money shot to be president.
As a delegate in Boston, I watch John on the culminating evening dramatically stride through the delegates (I’m with my son Jonah on the convention floor where he’s “getting the shot” for a film he’s shooting on the candidate). The senator opens his acceptance speech with a salute and “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.” That works but, the next month at the Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden, which I attend as credentialed media, I feel queasy as the entire Bush convention merges the War President and the City of 9/11. It’s over the top, disgusting, exploitative . . . but effective.
Being neither on staff nor in the candidate’s inner circle, that summer and fall I spend my effort in two areas: fund-raising, since NYC is largely an ATM machine presidentially, given the math of the Electoral College; and imploring the candidate and Kerry advisor John Marttila to plant their flag against Bush’s war, notwithstanding the candidate’s vote to authorize it in October 2002. In one small effort, I organize a meeting with John and a dozen New York policy intellectuals/opinion-leaders concerned about his shifting Iraq policy. (Recall his disastrous “I was against it before I was for it” formulation). In a two-hour blunt meeting at Al Franken’s spacious Upper West Side home overlooking the Hudson, Fred Kaplan, Eric Alterman, and others grill him on his views and what he’d do as president. They and he are candid, smart, thorough, and, knowing both sides, feel better about each other when it’s over.
Tasked with finding a prestigious location for a major planned September address on the war, I book Kerry into the new thousand-seat Kimmell Center at NYU, a half mile north of Ground Zero. When Marttila tells me the night before, “You’re gonna be happy with this speech,” I bring Jonah with me because, as I tell him, “I think tomorrow might become an historic moment if Kerry goes on to win.”
John doesn’t disappoint in his 47-minute address. To a packed house, he condemns Bush’s “stubborn incompetence and colossal failures of judgment. If we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight.” He finishes by explaining that if Bush or a new president begins to repair alliances, train Iraqi security forces, improve reconstruction, and ensure elections, we can “begin to withdraw U.S. forces starting next summer and realistically bring our troops home within the next four years.”
Bush’s lead throughout the fall shrinks after this address and three illuminating presidential debates that Kerry clearly wins. Then comes Friday, October 30.
First, I charter two buses, and at 6 a.m. from the lobby at the Graybar Building at 420 Lexington Avenue (an S. L. Green building), 100 Green supporters from 2001 set out for Cleveland, Ohio. Dulled by political inactivity in the deep-blue state of New York, we drive eight hours to spend three days going door to door in the state that will likely pick the winner for the other 49.
These three days are like summer camp that matters. We sleep in cheap motels and are briefed in how to talk Ohioan. Our teams of two (always a man and a woman) encounter mostly black families to urge them to vote and white families who question us about our “super liberal, flip-flopping” Democrat, reflecting the massive air attacks they watch nightly. I see dirty-tricks flyers distributed in minority communities about how those voters will be allowed to vote on Wednesday so they can stay home Tuesday. And everyone’s pumped to go to the final campaign rally with Kerry and Bruce Springsteen. But I miss “No Surrender” and “Promised Land” since I have to fly back that evening to get to a long-scheduled speaking commitment at a West Side high school the next morning.
Second, also on that Friday though a bit more consequentially, there occurs the greatest October Surprise in American presidential campaign history when bin Laden releases a videotape explaining why al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11 and how awful Bush is. The tape roils the campaigns. Both issue statements agreeing that we can’t let terrorists affect America’s presidential election. But John takes a calculated risk and goes further, regretting how Bush “outsourced the job [of capturing or killing bin Laden at Tora Bora] to Afghan war lords. I would never have done that. I think it was an enormous mistake and we are paying the price for it today.” The Bush campaign harshly condemns Kerry for exploiting 9/11 (unlike, of course, their own 9/11 obsession at their convention).
No one can know for sure the impact of such a once-in-a-lifetime presidential variable. Does the tape hit swing voters in their patriotic gut—We can’t change our commander in chief mid-stream to satisfy this terrorist monster—or in their brain—The perpetrator of 9/11 is still at large because our bumbling commander in chief has not accomplished his mission? Privately, Kerry supporters are nervous that, over the final decisive days, the issue of a country at war with evil again becomes the center of attention.
After voting, I fly to Boston election night to stay at the Westin Hotel with top staff and supporters. At 6:30 p.m., we’re cautiously buoyant at a cocktail party because exit polls have John slightly ahead nationally and, more significantly, in Ohio. We then move to a larger ballroom to watch the returns. I recall two indelible images: Larry David, alone on a couch near a huge bay window looking glum, admittedly his natural visage, yet getting glummer as the night progresses. And Paul Rivera, a Kerry advisor (and later my New York attorney general campaign guru) assuring us on the half hour that the exit polling shows John winning Ohio and the presidency . . . while the TV monitors tabulating actual voters is showing Bush slowly pulling away in the Buckeye State.
As hundreds of strategists and lawyers crunch numbers searching for any hope and his campaign manager and running mate argue against any concession, the candidate—“who knows how to do math very fast,” says Shrum—decides at 2 a.m. at his Louisburg Square townhouse to concede. He wakes at 7 a.m., starts scratching out a concession speech, and, despite winning 59 million votes, the most ever for a runner-up, calls Bush at 11:06 a.m. Then he goes to the majestic Faneuil Hall at Harvard where he had announced his candidacy and, his voice breaking, tells 500 supporters and his teary-eyed daughters, “We fought hard and I wish that things had turned out a little differently but in an American elections, there are no losers . . . because we all wake up as Americans.”
Following custom, Kerry never publicly whines or explains. And, of course, he goes on to live not at the White House but largely on the secretary of state’s plane in the second term of the man he put on the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. by choosing him to give the 2004 convention keynote address. Privately, however, John confides to close friends that it was bin Laden’s tape that stopped his momentum that final week and influenced—perhaps determined—the outcome.¶
“Listening” to Hillary Clinton
It’s an early October night of the Hamptons Film Festival in 1998, a local event started by my cousin Stuart Suna to give that elite ZIP code even more cachet. After viewing some movies pre-release, Deni, Jenya, and I go over to Alec Baldwin’s home, where he’s on a panel with President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and Democratic state chair Judith Hope, a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas. This being shortly after the Lewinsky scandal breaks, Hillary gets a huge welcoming applause from the 300 guests, exceeded only by the applause when she’s done speaking. “Boy, they really like her here,” says the president to Hope. “Yes they do, Mr. President.” It was Judith who, at a White House Christmas party the prior December, was the first person to suggest to Hillary that she run for Moynihan’s seat. “You really think so?” said a surprised Hillary.
In January 1999, Hillary is making due diligence calls to New York Democratic leaders, soliciting advice about her now-inevitable bid against Mayor Giuliani for the Moynihan seat. She reaches me mid-month while I’m making daily money calls for my 2001 mayoral bid. Given my frequent sparring with Rudy, she’s especially interested in what he’s like as an opponent. We review his strengths and weaknesses—his smarts and ferocity are obvious but less so his propensity to exaggerate to win any argument as well as his prosecutorial impulse to try to destroy opponents.
Then I go outside my lane to suggest a different route for her campaign. “Instead of a standard cheering, balloon-festooned announcement speech, which could contribute to the stereotype of you as a presumptuous big-foot, how about instead a more humble ‘listening tour’?” Knowing her facility for actually listening in conversations and taking notes, I continue: “In fact, you don’t know the state well, and it’ll be an appealing way for you to learn from talkative, self-centered New York voters. Not to mention that if you screw up and mispronounce, say, ‘How-sten Street’ as ‘Houston’ Street, you can laugh it off as part of your learning curve.”
The next month, on Moynihan’s farm with the retiring senator, she launches her campaign with a “Listening Tour,” and the phrase—perhaps also proposed by someone else, for all I know—enters the political lexicon. Truth is, the idea and words came to me because of a picture in my mind of Hillary sitting at some civic breakfast at the Roosevelt Hotel as petitioner after petitioner lined up to say or ask for something as Hillary patiently listened, nodded, and aide Huma Abedin took notes to follow up. “She has this great gift,” Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) once said to a friend of mine; “she’s completely focused on you when you speak and no one else.” She tells a journalist, “I try to give my full attention to the person I’m with.” A listening tour for a listener.
She wins her contest easily after Rudy withdraws and then proves to be far more a diligent workhorse than showhorse in the Senate. After she handily wins reelection in 2006, talk of her presidential prospects gets serious.
I get a cell call the last week of December 2007, while on the beach with family in Florida, where my mother-in-law lives. “Mark, it’s Hillary, you got a minute?” She’s on with Neera Tanden, a ranking official in the Center for American Progress, the leading Democratic think tank in Washington, D.C. They ask if I’d be interested in co-chairing a new progressive transition project with John Podesta, the founder of CAP, for whoever becomes president in 2009—“like the one you did for Bill,” says Hillary. Of course the answer is yes. Again via my Democracy Project, I spend half time for 15 months co-parenting an 800-page volume for a senator (a different one) who indeed does become president. We produce a great product, but it’s a difficult delivery.
Podesta, CAP, and I host a two-day retreat at the Wye Plantation in South Carolina with many of the authors (I room with Peter Edelman) to learn from each other as we each develop our particular content. John and I share opening remarks: he provides a smart and panoramic view of our task based on his deep knowledge of federal policy both as President Clinton’s last chief of staff and his work at CAP; I explain lessons learned from our ’92 transition project for Bill Clinton and frame our mission historically. Mid-year, however, Podesta has the gall to resign our citizen’s transition to become chair for the actual Obama-Biden transition to come (a good career move, I concede). After he exits, however, I clash frequently with his successor as project co-chair, Michele Jolin, over who writes what agency chapter, deadlines, language, the introduction, that sort of thing. The problem is partly the different perspectives of a major institution in D.C. and me solo a distance away in NYC but also in part because, in hindsight, I’m too overbearing in my views of the best way to produce a transition book since I’d done one before.
Finally, after reasonable compromises brokered by both Podesta and CAP’s Melody Barnes (later to be Obama’s domestic policy advisor), Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President is published by Basic Books and sent to the president-elect as well as all his top appointees. Among its 60 writers are later Obama picks such as Elena Kagan, Jack Lew, Gene Sperling, Tom Donilan, Carol Browner, Harold Koh, and James Lee Witt—and Podesta in his second term.
On January 20, as I’m limping around from knee-replacement surgery and traveling with friends Ken and Katherine Lerer and John Sykes, Deni and I are among the million freezing, joyous attendees at the Obama inauguration. Wow, a black urban progressive intellectual in the Oval Office—with a mean jump shot, literary élan, and the cadence of both pulpit and street. I can still hardly believe it.
Comrade Castro
My friend Smith Bagley, an heir to the R. J. Reynolds fortune and a major progressive philanthropist, calls in mid-1987 to ask if I’d join him and a small delegation on a four-day trip to Cuba to advance human rights there. We’d meet with public officials, dissidents, religious leaders—and President Castro. Though I’m no Cuba expert, I’m eager to go, learn, and, if nothing else, take a measure of this historic figure.
Our group of ten—including Smith’s wife Elizabeth (later Clinton’s ambassador to Portugal) and ex-Senator Fred Harris—leave Florida on a turbo prop on October 16, after a lot of screening by State Department and customs personnel, for the flight to Havana.
As we drive from the airport to our hotel, we are struck, as is everyone who’s made this trek, by the aging infrastructure, spotty roads yet immaculate 1950s cars, captured in the popular mind by Francis Ford Coppola in Godfather II. We tour the city for two days under strict supervision, often with the very savvy Ricardo Alarcón, a Castro foreign minister and leading policy intellectual. We visit the Isle of Youth, some 50 kilometers south of the eastern tip of Cuba, where we enjoy a Q&A with an international delegation of high school students from Mozambique. I ask them if they’d ever heard of Stalin. No one had. Kennedy? No one had. Michael Jackson? Squeals of familiarity erupt. “Do you know him?” they pester me. “Do you have any of his tapes?” No and no, but I’m reminded that the global community is bound together more by culture than politics.
There’s a drill that Castro famously deploys with all visiting delegations, and now it’s our turn. We’re told that we’ll be meeting with him soon, very soon, and then hear nothing . . . until there’s the expected middle-of-the-night call. “Mr. Green, would you please come to the lobby within 20 minutes where we’ll assemble to be driven to the presidential palace?” At first groggy but then alert at this opportunity, we are driven a few minutes into the massive presidential palace, built in 1920 but still serving as Castro’s ceremonial office. (It later becomes the Museum of the Revolution.) With little security, we’re ushered into a spacious office with spare furniture and no wall art for what turns out to be the first of eight hours of meetings and meals over two days with El Presidente.
While he surely knows English, Castro, in his familiar fatigues and trending gray beard, greets each of us warmly in Spanish. He’s well briefed, saying to me, “ah, the politician and writer.” A female translator allows him time to better digest a comment or question before responding. He carries himself with the confident air of a successful revolutionary/prince/politician, seemingly knowledgeable about farming, finances, retail, trade, health, history—Cuba’s and ours. Encyclopedic, dramatic, penetrating, humorous, talkative—he reminds me of Ralph, except this virtuoso is running a country and, 25 years ago to the day, almost started World War III during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
I decide to be blunt and jokey with him in an effort to provoke candor. After he brags how popular he is, I ask “why then do you not allow a handful of dissidents to print their small human rights pamphlets but imprison them instead?” His dismissive reply—“Why waste the paper?”—tells me that we’re coming at this from very different directions. “When will you have free elections?” “Someday, when security concerns are gone.” Then he turns the tables and quizzes us about American politics.
Asking about Cuomo, Hart, and the upcoming presidential campaign, Castro grows animated when I tell him that I know each well. “So, you think Cuomo’s getting in? . . . Would Hart have been the favorite? . . . Does President Reagan perform well because he knows acting or he knows who he is?”
This is apparently a communist who hates America but loves Americans.
Beginning dinner on our second day of discussions, he says to me through his interpreter, “Did you see that your stock market fell 500 points yesterday?” I laugh. “El Presidente, you mean 50 points.” Now he sees that he has me, and says gleefully in English, “No, 500 points!” Indeed, this being before the Internet, we did not know on this day, October 19, that the stock exchange had lost 20 percent of its value, its worst day since the Crash of ’29 . . . and I’m being told by the world’s leading Leninist. We discuss what this might mean, then talk more about Cuban and American prisoners and the other big news of the week, the worldwide attention to the dramatic rescue of “Baby Jessica” from a well in her aunt’s Texas backyard.
On our departure the next day, he continues our bantering and asks if I’ll be running for office again soon [my Senate race being the year before] and, with the slightest of smiles, asks how he could help me. “Of course, please endorse my opponent.” He gets a kick out of that probably anticipated answer, winking and laughing and extending his hand. Indeed, in my first Public Advocate race in 1993, one newspaper red-baits me as “Fidel’s pal” based on a photo of him and me on my wall among 20 others.
Comrade Castro never endorses me or any opponent.
Notes
* One topic is the news that Natan Sharansky has died. We discuss what a heroic Refusenik he was and chat about some appropriately sorrowful language. “Could someone please double-check whether the story is true?” says the candidate. “We sure don’t want to bury the guy if he’s alive.” We check with AP. The report is false! (“Mark Green, the Hart aide who stupidly told the world that Sharansky died, today did . . .” is a line I never have to read in later years, but it was a near thing.)
† Going on Nightline in September, Gary finally discusses his thoughts about the week of his withdrawal: “If the question is, in the 29 years of my marriage, including two public separations, have I been absolutely and totally faithful to my wife, I regret to say, the answer is no. But I also am never going to answer any specific questions about any individual . . . It isn’t anyone else’s business . . . I just want to say, to one very special young man and young woman [presumably his two grown children] out there, how sorry I am for letting them down and for many others like them.”
‡ According to the liberal, nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice, Brown’s flat tax would mean that the poorest fifth would see their taxes grow from 6.7 percent of their income to 26 percent. The richest 1 percent averaging income of $567,000 would see the percentage of earnings they pay in taxes fall by half.
§ One morning in 1991, he says with annoyance, “What is it with Cuomo? I’ve called him three times and he never returns my call.” I recall that comment especially because, at another meeting coincidentally on the same day, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, completely unaware of my earlier conversation with Kerry, asks, “How come I can’t get Cuomo on the phone? I’m a United States senator!”
¶ In fact, while Kerry was up by five just before the bin Laden tape in battleground states, a secret Mark Mellman poll the day before the election showed Kerry up by only one, a fall of four points in the post-tape few days.