“The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.”
—H.L. Mencken
Aspen—Ted Kennedy is gone now, and all his hoary ghosts have gone with him. He left town the day after Christmas, on the same plane with Barbara Walters and George Hamilton—or at least that’s what they said at the airport. Another rumor had him hitting the road at midnight with two French girls and a half-gallon of gin in a modified four-wheel-drive Ferrari Boxer that he had borrowed from Anand Kashoggi, the richest man in the world.
Nobody knows, for sure. He either drove to Denver or flew to Dallas or checked into a private club on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. . . . The Mormons are tolerant people, in some areas, and Teddy is one of their favorites. He can do no wrong in Utah, with women or anything else. His big brothers are worshiped like half-living gods in places like Vernal and Provo, where whiskey is hated and the river is more mud than water.
But things are not like they were—even three weeks ago—when Teddy’s movements were tracked by the national media like the wanderings of a bull snow leopard in the Himalayas. By Christmas, his press coverage had withered drastically and no reporters followed him anywhere.
He is “no longer a factor,” as they say, in the 1988 presidential race. He had pulled out, with no warning, and left all the big boys jabbering. Even Pat Buchanan, in the White House, was said to be stricken with grief. The hardballers had lost a big target.
Gary Hart is the hot item now, the new and sudden front-runner in a field that was not impressive. They were rookies and amateurs, for the most part—Eastern senators and Western governors with a sprinkling of low-rent Southerners who would “give the ticket some balance,” as they used to say at the Capitol Hill Hotel, in the good old days, when men were men and women worked on their shoulder blades.
That hotel is gone, now. It was a palace of shame and depravity. The back reaches of the bar were so dark that even Wilbur Mills and Rita Jenrette could work the room with impunity. Gene McCarthy had his office upstairs, the Chang sisters lived in the basement, and most of the other rooms were rented out permanently to lobbyists for things like Gotham Trucking and Siamese Oil and the International Concrete Brotherhood.
It was a crossroads of sorts, an international safe house for rich thugs and fixers and stateless pimps with false passports. The manager was cool, the staff was corrupt, and the rugs in the rooms were crusted with spilled whiskey and old marijuana seeds.
I was known there, and they always made me welcome. Some nights were strange and intolerable, but it was mainly a nice place to stay when I came to business on The Hill. Kennedy’s office was next door and Hart’s campaign headquarters was just a few blocks south on Third Street.
These memories are hazy, now. The hard rockers are gone—some to Lorton and others to Lompoc and Miami. Only a few ghosts remain: Bobby Baker, Tom Quinn, Richard Nixon and the girls from the Bop Kaballa . . . they prowl the hallways and wet alleys down by the train station, moaning for crab cakes and liquor, and a touch of the old human essence.
Kennedy has retired, more or less, and Hart has moved his act out to Denver, where he meets the press and drinks Perrier water at a Mexican lounge called the El Rancho near an exit on 1-70.
He is there today, in fact, amusing a huge crowd of journalists with his genuinely curious decision to quit his job as the senior U.S. senator from Colorado, and campaign full time for the presidency in 1988. He is the certified front-runner, now—4 points over Mario Cuomo and 15 over anyone else except maybe Bernhard Goetz and Ronald Reagan, who is faced with mandatory retirement in two years, provided he lives that long.
There are those—Attorney General Ed Meese and CIA Director William Casey among them—who still call him “Dutch” and expect him to live forever—to change the law and rule for another four years, a third term and maybe a fourth.
But probably not. He is already the oldest president in the history of the United States—older than television or hamburgers—or even the invention of radio and the electric light bulb. Reagan is older than most parrots, which can live about 200 years.
My friend Cromwell, down the road, has a huge mottled green bird that still squawks “Off with their heads,” a dim memory from the time of Madame DeFarge and the madness of the French Revolution. The filthy, ageless animal was hatched in the slums of Paris and came over on a boat with a servant who was indentured, at the time, to Benjamin Franklin.
It is weird to stare into the crazy black eyes of a savage yet well-spoken old bird who can remember snatches of conversation between Ben Franklin and Aaron Burr, and sometimes even George Washington. You never know for sure, with these beasts, but lying is not in their nature and most smart people take them seriously. When the thing starts screeching and babbling about a thunderstorm over the Hudson River on Wednesday night in 1788, it is probably telling the truth.
Nobody knows what it means. Old Ben had a queer sense of humor, but he definitely understood the weather. Thomas Jefferson kept ferrets, which gnawed on his body at night, and eventually poisoned his blood.
Hart will not be so lucky. He is already $3.5 million in debt from his charge on the White House in 1984, and the next one will cost about 10 times that much—which will not be easy to raise, even for a bornagain front-runner with good teeth and a brand-new red Firebird and a big town house on Capitol Hill. His hard-core yuppie constituency will have to raise a serious bundle of money and make sense to people who despise them and live like winos and weasels, on the other side of the tracks.
There were not enough votes in the unions to elect Fritz Mondale, and there will never be enough yuppies to elect Hart. They are fickle and greedy, prone to panic like penguins, and naked of roots or serious political convictions. Jesse Jackson can crank more energy and loyalty and action out of 10 people on any street corner in East St. Louis than Gary Hart could ever hope to inspire in a week of huge rallies in New York and Chicago and Pittsburgh.
January 6, 1986