All the Truth Is Out: the Week Politics Went Tabloid Free

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Lafayette Library is closed until further notice. Outdoor book drops are open. No fines are charged on overdue items. View Library updates. Lafayette Public Library. My Account. Log Out. Search for. Advanced Search. Logged In As. Contact Us or Request Items. Curbside Pickup. Curbside pickup instructions. Featured Resources. Library Information. Other FLC Libraries. Average Rating. Bai, Matt. Choose a Format. On Shelf. Lafayette Nonfiction Area. Quick Copy View. See Full Copy Details. Place Hold. Date Edition Publisher Phys Desc. Language Availability First edition. Alfred A. Knopf, xv, pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. English On Shelf. More Info Place Hold. Available Online. Online OverDrive Collection. Check Out OverDrive. Add a Review. Add To List. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then- rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht Monkey Businessand it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce. Matt Bai shows how the Hart affair marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media-and, by extension, politics itself-when candidates' "character" began to draw more fixation than their political experience. Bai offers a poignant, highly original, and news-making reappraisal of Hart's fall from grace and overlooked political legacy as he makes the compelling case that this was the moment when the paradigm shifted-private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became the stuff of Page Six. Also in This Series. More Like This. More Copies In All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. Loading Prospector Copies Table of Contents. From the Book - First edition. Loading Excerpt Similar Series From NoveList. Similar Titles From NoveList. Similar Authors From NoveList. Borrower Reviews. Librarian Reviews. Reviews from GoodReads. Loading GoodReads Reviews. Staff View. Reload Cover Reload Enrichment. More Details. On Shelf Lafayette Nonfiction Area Copies Location Call 1 of 1. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Bush by double digits in the polls. Then, in one tumultuous week, rumors of marital All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid and a newspaper's stakeout of Hart's home resulted in a media frenzy the likes of which had never been seen before. Through the spellbindingly reported story of the Senator's fall from grace, Matt Bai, Yahoo News columnist and former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, shows the Hart affair to be far more than one man's tragedy: rather, it marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media, and the new norms of life in the public eye. All the Truth Is Out is a tour de force portrait of the American way of politics at the highest level, one that changes our understanding of how we elect our presidents and how the bedrock of American All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid has shifted under our feet. NPR Choice page

Matt Bai writes in this book :. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac—Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners. Apple described what was probably a fairly typical experience for reporters covering the Kennedy White House:. In earlyfor example, a fledgling reporter for this newspaper was assigned to patrol the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel while President Kennedy was visiting New York City. There was little reason to fear being ambushed on the personal front while trying to make oneself accessible on the political front. When Thomas Eagleton, shortly after joining George McGovern on the Democratic ticket inwas revealed to have undergone shock treatment for depression, his temperament became a legitimate news story, along with the fact that he had neglected to mention it. After all, Gary and Lee Hart had fallen in love and married as kids, in the confines of a strict church where even dancing was prohibited. And so here he was, young and famous and sturdily good-looking, powerful in a city where power was everything, and friends knew that he and Lee—as so often happens with college sweethearts—had matured into different people, that she spent long periods back in Denver with the two kids, that she could drive him absolutely crazy at times. Why would they? Whose business was it, anyway? The newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek, and to a lesser extent U. And so it made sense that it was Fineman, a sharp and competitive reporter, who went where others on the bus were dying to go, and whose editors let him. Friends contend that his dating has been confined to marital separations—he and Lee have had two—nonetheless many political observers expect the rumors to emerge as a campaign issue. And so what happened next is that every reporter who scored a sit-down with Hart in the hours after his announcement, on what was supposed to be a triumphant cross-country tour, kept asking him about the long-standing rumors of his unspecified affairs, which in fact had been just as long-standing and unspecified the week before, but were only now—thanks to Newsweek—considered to have met the definition of news. When it got back to Hart that operatives for some of his rivals had been calling reporters in the days leading up to his announcement to fan the flame what would happen to the party if this stuff came out after he was nominated, when it was too late to get someone else onto the ballot? A candidate accusing rival campaigns of defaming him was a story any day of All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid week, no matter what the issue—that the issue here was sex, rather than, say, a proposal to tax foreign oil, only made it irresistible. Fiedler opened with an anecdote about Hart wandering to the back of the plane during the announcement tour, to face the reporters who were demanding he refute the rumors about affairs. Or should the media withhold publication until they have solid evidence of infidelity? The analysis ended with a quote from Hart himself. Written by McGee, Fiedler, and Savage, the 7,plus-word piece—Moby-Dick—type proportions by the standards of a front page—is remarkable reading, for a couple of reasons. It was p. Clearly, the reporters and editors at the Herald believed themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions, the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues believed themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall. And he would remember his own sense of disbelief. Which was so not only out of character, but it was out of my own sense of who I was and what I was doing. And yet, for all that, Fiedler felt compelled to be there; he recalled no doubt about that. In fact, Fiedler would always remember that his overriding emotion in that alley was anger. It was Hart who had set all this in motion, who had dragged Fiedler and the others into the dirt and muck of tabloid journalism, by refusing to tell the truth about who he was. It was Hart who had disappointed and debased Fiedler, not the other way around. That this is the guy who only a few weeks before had stood up in front of the world—and, in a sense me, because I was there with the press corps—and talked about ethics, and said he wanted to be held to the highest standards and said he was going to run a campaign that exemplified all that. And here I am in an alley, late on a Saturday night, confronting him about a relationship that just seemed completely sordid. And I kind of felt angry about being in that position. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric current to his brain. There it was, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid up at him from the page—Hart explicitly inviting him All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before…. By morning, everyone who read the Times would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. Fiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. Not only should the Herald never have been spying in the first place, they said, but this so-called surveillance was a joke. The two-pronged assault on the Herald story was as much for All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid benefit of the reporters—and their editors—as it was for their readers. But on this question of whether presidential candidates should be given the same treatment as a Jim Bakker or a Fawn Hall, the soap opera stars of nightly newscasts in the spring ofthe rest of the media still hung in the balance. By the end of the s, if you lived in a typical American city, you read about national events in your local paper if you were lucky, you had a choice between twoor perhaps in the copy of Time or Newsweek that arrived in the mailbox every Tuesday. Any other newspaper would have to be purchased, probably a day late, at the out-of-town newsstand. The locally owned newspaper—whose status as a paragon of civic virtue would be mythologized by journalists and media critics in later years, after faceless conglomerates had gobbled up most of the American media—exercised as much of a monopoly over information in some cities as the power company had over transformers and wires. Thus was it possible, as late asfor some Indiana voters to know little of the Democratic primary campaign being waged in their own state, simply because the Indianapolis Star—whose publisher, Eugene C. Pulliam, had been a Lyndon Johnson supporter—all but refused to acknowledge Robert F. The most immediate means by which information traversed regional borders was, of course, the television. But this venue, too, was limited in its offerings, and, unless a network made the extraordinary decision to preempt its regular programming, not all that immediate. In big cities, you could watch the local news at six and then choose from three nightly newscasts, aired at the same time every night by the same three networks. It was the series of clicks, whirs, and beeps known as the fax machine. Faxes had been proliferating, commercially, since the early s, but it had only been in recent years—since the campaign, in fact—that Japanese manufacturers had managed to make them small and inexpensive enough for your average office, and even for some homes. Sharp had even introduced a All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid that could double as an ordinary phone. The implications of this, for news and politics, were enormous. Ina Republican operative named Doug Bailey teamed up with a Democratic strategist, Roger Craver, to create something called The Hotline—a nonideological compendium of political news from the various papers around the country, plus some polling and late-night political jokes, faxed directly to subscribers every morning. After some weeks of this, Woodward grew uneasy and asked his buddy Gary to camp elsewhere, and that was the extent of it. It was Broder, the voice of experience and wisdom, who formulated a compromise. The Post would shortly be in the process of compiling its in-depth profiles of all the candidates, which by that time was a quadrennial rite. It may well make its way into becoming part of this thing. As it happened, the reporter assigned to do the Hart profile, the talented David Maraniss, was at that point wrapping up another assignment. He was just turning his sights on Hart when the Herald story hit. Trippi would forever remember being accosted by a guy, as he tried to get through the front gate, who identified himself as a reporter for A Current Affair. The syndicated show, hosted by the gossipy Maury Povich, had started airing a year earlier. She was represented by agents in New York and Miami. She felt swept away by Hart, despite only having known him for a few weeks, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt his campaign, about which she knew almost nothing. Capen, a staunch Republican and social conservative, would later be made ambassador to Spain by George H. Bush, which did little to quiet the conspiracy theories among Hart loyalists. But the fact of the matter remains that our story reported on Donna Rice, who he met in Aspen, who he subsequently met in Dade County—he acknowledged All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid he telephoned her on a number of occasions. It is a fact that two married men whose spouses All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid out of town spent a considerable amount of time with these people. It is also true that our reporters saw him and Donna Rice leaving his townhouse on at least three separate occasions. The Hart story led the half hour program, followed by a segment on the opening of the Iran-contra hearings. As he had in the ballroom, Fiedler nervously presented himself as a disinterested reporter who was simply following the story where it led, doing what any reporter would do when tasked with the responsibility of vetting candidates and their character. But Koppel, one of the toughest and most respected newsmen in America, showed little patience for this routine. In fact, he seemed rather disgusted by the entire story. Decades later, Fiedler would describe this first appearance on national television as one of the worst moments of his life. Scott and a gymnast named Kristie Phillips. It is getting so wild that people standing in supermarkets are rushing out to buy regular newspapers. Can I ask a favor of you? In the days after the Herald broke its story, the Post, like other major papers, had been deluged with anonymous tips of all kinds. One stood out. Someone had hired the investigator to tail Hart. Hart had apparently spent the night with this woman, who was rumored to have been involved with him on and off for many years, going back to his separations from Lee. Tydings denied it at the time. Of course Bradlee knew the woman in the photos personally or at least he knew someone who knew herand he All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid volunteered to confront her and get the truth. He spoke hoarsely but intensely, almost in a whisper, his voice quavering with the gravity of what he was about to do. He spoke at unusual length for a reporter in such a setting, as if he and Hart were having another philosophical conversation in the back of a car, rather than a terse exchange in a packed and sweat-soaked banquet room. I have a series of questions about it. Taylor took his time, with lawyerly skill. He must have been sensing the danger at that point, aware that he was being outflanked but unsure of how All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid head it off. And then Taylor just came out with it. Almost three decades later, it sounds like a plausible political inquiry, if not a routine one. Have you ever committed adultery? What would you do if your wife was raped? How did it feel when your child was killed? But in the context ofto Hart and his aides and to the older reporters in the room who would always remember it as a watershed moment, Taylor might as well have asked him to disrobe right there All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid submit to a cavity search. No reporter had ever asked a presidential candidate that kind of personal, sexual, broad question. Campaign aides had guessed that someone might, but hearing it was still a surreal experience. Hart froze. You could see it in his eyes, the sudden loss of focus. All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai

That time ended in The first victim, in May of that year, was Colorado senator Gary Hart. A still youngish, cerebral Democrat, Hart rose up to challenge the congenitally boring vice president, Walter Mondale, for the presidential nomination. Hart had the support and advice perhaps this was a sign of Warren Beatty, among other wealthy backers. Her relationship with the married Hart seemed questionable, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid that she was a pharmaceutical rep and he a likely future president of the United States. Bai reconstructs these events, and he argues that the breathless reporters who hounded Hart thought they were enjoying their own Woodward- and-Bernstein moment. They seemed insensitive to the difference in importance between a candidate having a fling and a president subverting constitutional order. News, is not the first journalist to recognize that something odd happened in the campaign cycle. And the shifts Bai detects would appear to be almost entirely negative. Hart, by contrast, suffered a public shaming that ended his campaign and, remarkably, his career in retail politics. In fact, Hart endorsed two of the four presidents who have held office since his ignominy. Bai says John Kerry granted him interviews only through gritted teeth, and Mitt Romney never let him within twenty feet. The result is a long-term pathology All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid American political life, and one in which the media have been complicit. A few years later, Bill Clinton won office despite accusations of far more sordid, non-consensual activity. The final irony to beset this politician is one Bai mentions early and lets simmer for the rest of the book. But the curse on our politics, now privileging a pageant of superficial marital happiness, as well as robotic, contentless rhetoric worthy of a Miss South Carolina competition, is likely to last even longer. Graeme Wood is a staff editor at The Atlantic. His articles and reviews have appeared in many publications including The New YorkerGood magazine, and The American. Most Recent.