The Long-Term Consequences of Republican Dirty Tricks
You may remember the rising Democratic star of the post-Reagan era, Gary Hart, who was felled on his way to the presidency by a sex scandal.
Well it turns out that the whole thing was engineered by Republican dirty trickster Lee Atwater.
Atwater, on his deathbed, confessed the whole plot to an aide of Hart's back in 1990; now facing his own mortality, the aide has gone public with the story:
And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, [Atwood] told Raymond Strother [Senator Gary Hart's media consultant] that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president...
In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. After Mondale’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Hart had become the heir apparent and best hope to lead the party back to the White House....
Gary Hart had a nationwide organization and had made himself a recognized expert on military and defense policy....Early polls are notoriously unreliable, but after the 1986 midterms, and then–New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s announcement that he would not run, many national surveys showed Hart with a lead in the Democratic field and also over Bush....“Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose.”...
Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”
What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:
In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house....
“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true!”
There was no affair between Gary Hart and Donna Rice; the appearance of it was carefully set up to destroy him as a political candidate.
"[The] plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business. Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.
“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”
Of course there's no way to be certain that Hart would have won the nomination, or the election against George H. W. Bush. But if he had, there would have been no George W. Bush as president, no Cheney as vice president, no 9/11, no Iraq War, no War On Terror, no US sanctioned torture, no Guantanamo, perhaps no Great Recession...and surely no President Trump today.
On small things the great patterns and flows of history can sometimes turn, and even the perpetrators would be astounded at where they can lead.
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