Stakeouts And Shouted Questions

By Richard Zoglin

In the most famous play ever written about newspapermen, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur painted a sardonic portrait of hard-boiled, hardhearted journalists, but it was a picture tinged with affection for the profession's raffish charm. Last week, however, many people found nothing charming about the press's role in the collapse of Gary Hart's presidential candidacy. If no one actually peeped through keyholes, reporters were doing things that couldn't help looking a bit tawdry. A team of journalists staked out a man's home to discover who was spending the night there. A presidential candidate was asked, at point-blank range, whether he had ever committed adultery. TV newscasts and newspaper front pages were dominated for most of a week with talk of sexual dalliances, back doors and yachts to Bimini. Along with the questions that flew last week about les liaisons dangereuses of Gary Hart, a parallel debate was raging over whether the press had overstepped the bounds of propriety in trying to bring those indiscretions to light.

Most of the debate focused on the Miami Herald, which had set Hart's downfall in motion by conducting a 24-hour weekend stakeout of his Washington town house and finding him in the company of an attractive young woman. In his first public response to the Herald's charges -- delivered, appropriately enough, before a convention of newspaper publishers meeting in New York City -- Hart blasted the paper's surveillance and said it raised "searching questions" about journalistic responsibility. Much of the public seemed to agree. The Miami Herald's own opinion survey showed that 63% of its readers felt that press coverage of Hart's personal life had been excessive. Reporters looking for Hart's alleged paramour Donna Rice at her rented suburban Miami condominium early last week discovered instead a band of angry neighbors. "Oh, you press!" snapped one woman. "You're always getting into everybody's bed."

Journalists themselves were divided over the Herald's decision to stake out Hart's home on an anonymous tip. "The notion was to put a citizen under surveillance," says Bill Kovach, editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "To me that is a technique for police, not journalists." A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times, criticized the Herald's tactics in his op-ed column: "I would not have given such an assignment or allowed one to be made." Yet a Times editorial called the Herald's pursuit of the story "eminently justified," and many others agreed. "I would have done the same thing if I got the tip they did," says David Hall, editor of the Denver Post. "Watching the man's movements, which can be done legally and with discretion, is the only way you can learn whether Hart is telling the truth about himself."

For years there was a sort of gentleman's agreement among reporters who covered public figures that certain matters were off limits. A number of Presidents, from Warren Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt through John F. Kennedy, were widely known to be conducting extramarital affairs, or suspected of it. Yet reporters for the most part avoided the subject in print. The belated disclosure of these affairs -- especially the reports of Kennedy's many sexual flings, including one with a woman linked to Mafia figures -- helped bring about the new climate. "The rules have certainly changed," says Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who covered Kennedy as a reporter and editor for Newsweek and became a good friend. "You couldn't get away with that now."

Other changes have made journalists more willing to broach such previously unmentionable subjects. A succession of public scandals involving politicians in the '60s and '70s (including Senator Edward Kennedy's car accident at Chappaquiddick, which resulted in the death of a female companion, and Representative Wilbur Mills' drunken shenanigans at the Tidal Basin with a former stripper) brought the issue of womanizing to the forefront. With the breakdown of sexual taboos in the 1960s, public discussion of such topics became more acceptable. At the same time, with the changing status of women, society has grown less tolerant of the macho dalliances of married men.

As candidates depend increasingly on slick media advisers and "image campaigns," the press takes on a greater role in trying to illuminate the person behind the facade. What's more, the pervasiveness of the electronic media has conditioned Americans to expect a more complete picture of their political leaders. In the days before TV, a clear distinction could be maintained in the print press between politicians' "onstage" and "offstage" activities. Now, with cameras and microphones following them everywhere, that distinction has broken down. The White House tapes showed what President Nixon was "really" like; network crews pursue Presidents even on their vacations.

Even so, the Herald's decision to conduct a stakeout of Gary Hart's home marked something of a watershed for political journalism. The investigation began with two anonymous telephone calls to Political Editor Tom Fiedler from a woman who claimed that a friend of hers was having an affair with Hart. She cited several long-distance phone calls between Hart and the woman (whom she described but refused to identify), recounted a yacht trip they had taken together, and said the couple planned to rendezvous at Hart's Washington town house that Friday. Fiedler was skeptical. But when several details checked out (including, Fiedler discovered, a last-minute switch in Hart's weekend campaign itinerary from Louisville to Washington), the newspaper decided to follow up. Jim McGee, one of the paper's top investigative reporters, hopped a plane to Washington early Friday evening.

McGee took a cab to Hart's town house and stationed himself across the street. He saw Hart emerge from the front door at 9:30 p.m. with a blond woman whom he had noticed aboard the flight from Miami. His suspicions aroused, McGee kept watch and saw the pair return at 11:17. Three other Herald staffers (Fiedler, Investigative Editor James Savage and a photographer) joined the watch late Saturday morning. They did not see Hart and the woman emerge again until shortly after dark Saturday evening. At that point Hart apparently noticed the surveillance team, and he and his companion re-entered the town house. Thirty minutes later, according to the Herald, Hart came out alone, drove his car a short distance away, then "walked aimlessly up and down" a few blocks. Just outside his home, he agreed to an interview. Hart denied any impropriety but, the reporters said, acted nervous and evasive and refused to let them talk to the woman. After 20 minutes, Hart ended the interview, and the reporters went to a motel to write their story, which was rushed into a late edition of Sunday's paper.

The stakeout was not airtight; no one was on the scene between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., and the town house back door was not watched between midnight and 5 a.m., leaving the possibility that someone could have left the house unnoticed. The newspaper's initial story on Sunday failed to mention these lapses, but they were laid out in full in a follow-up story Monday.

The paper printed the story with what some felt was undue haste. While writing the piece late Saturday night, the reporters got a call from Hart's friend William Broadhurst, who claimed that Hart's companion and her girlfriend were guests of his. Broadhurst promised the newsmen a lengthier interview and an opportunity to talk to the women if the reporters would delay their story. They refused, fearing that the extra time would give the Hart camp a chance to construct a cover story and possibly hold a press conference to try to discredit the Herald's article in advance.

In his speech before the newspaper publishers, Hart charged that the Herald reporters had "refused to interview the very people who could have given them the facts before filing their story." Executive Editor Heath Meriwether sharply disputed the charge, pointing out that the Sunday story contained responses from both Broadhurst and Hart. Says Savage: "If Hart had even hinted that he wanted to talk to us again later, we would have done that. But he never told us he would give us any further information."

Many journalists faulted the Herald for not being more cautious with such an explosive story. "They rushed the story into print," says George Cotliar, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. "I think I would have waited for a day to see what Donna Rice had to say." The Sunday story, in fact, was printed before the Herald even learned Rice's name. But Howard Simons, former managing editor of the Washington Post and now head of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, defends the Herald's actions: "If they'd waited a day, they wouldn't have known anything more, except for a polished version after the people had got their stories together."

A more circumspect approach to such delicate matters was exhibited later in the week by the Post, whose behavior was surely influenced by the controversy * that engulfed the Herald. The paper's story about another Hart sexual liaison originated with a tip from a confidential source a few days after the Herald story broke, and the information, the Post said, was "effectively confirmed" by its own investigation. But before writing the story, a Post reporter informed members of the Hart staff of the evidence. A series of discussions between the Hart camp and Post editors ensued, and it was during this time that Hart made his decision to withdraw from the race. The paper, as a result, printed no details of the sexual affair, describing it only as a "relationship with a Washington woman." Executive Editor Bradlee denied in the Post's story that a deal had been struck. "There were no ultimatums, no negotiations," he said. "We simply asked to talk to Hart about the information we had gathered."

Whatever one thinks of the specific tactics of the Herald and the Post, it is clear that last week's events carried the press into new territory in its coverage of sex and politics. "What do the media do now about the other 14 people in the presidential race?" asks F. Richard Ciccone, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. "Do we stake them out and make sure they are not conducting themselves in any way that we don't deem acceptable?"

The answer, of course, is no. Hart's case was unique: issues of character had dogged his campaign, and rumors of his sexual indiscretions had been raised and sharply denied. Hart had even invited the scrutiny by his challenge to the media in a New York Times Magazine story that same weekend to "put a tail on me." Indeed, the memory of Hart's painful ordeal may make journalists -- at least the responsible ones -- more cautious about stakeouts and pursuing anonymous tips in the immediate future. (Several news organizations, including TIME, received anonymous tips about other purported Hart affairs last week.)

What may have a more lasting impact is the extraordinary spectacle of Gary Hart being asked by Washington Post Reporter Paul Taylor in a frenzied New Hampshire press conference if he had ever committed adultery. There, on network TV, a taboo of sorts was broken, and the questioning of presidential candidates is likely to grow blunter and more personal. Gary Hart's life changed that Friday night when a band of Miami Herald reporters staked out his Capitol Hill town house. The already delicate relationship between the press and politicians changed profoundly, and probably for the worse, when that ! question was shouted for all the world to hear.

With reporting by Barrett Seaman/Washington and Don Winbush/Miami, with other bureaus