Gary Hart

Gary Hart was a popular Democratic Senator from Colorado who twice ran for the presidency in the 1980s. His second campaign was cut short when he withdrew due to publicity surrounding his alleged extramarital affair with Donna Rice. He has been an outspoken critic of US military policy throughout his career and was co-chair of a commission on national security that warned against terrorist attacks on the United States just a few months before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Education in the Church, Law, and Politics

Gary Hart was born in the small farming community of Ottawa, Kansas, on November 28, 1936. He was brought up within the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, a relatively strict Protestant sect, and originally planned to enter the ministry. He studied theology and philosophy at Southern Nazarene University, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1958. He went on to Yale University, receiving a bachelor of divinity degree in 1961.

Eventually, Hart decided to abandon the ministry and pursue a legal career, receiving his law degree from Yale in 1964. He met his wife, Lee, the daughter of his church's general treasurer, during the time he was first at Yale. They have two children, Andrea and John.

From 1964 to 1965, Hart was a lawyer for the appellate division of the US Department of Justice. He worked as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall from 1965 to 1967 and then moved to Colorado in 1967, establishing a private practice specializing in environmental law.

Hart volunteered in the political campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and in 1972 he signed on as the national campaign manager for George McGovern's unsuccessful presidential campaign.

Senate Career

Hart was elected to the US Senate, representing Colorado, in 1974. The political climate was ripe for Hart's generally liberal Democratic views, as the Republican Party was in a state of disarray following the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

When Hart won reelection to the Senate in 1980, the Republican Party was staging a dramatic comeback, gaining both the White House under Ronald Reagan and control of the Senate. Hart opposed most of Reagan's policy initiatives, voting against all of the administration's economic programs. Hart called for an end to the arms race, focusing on efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This marked the beginning of his longstanding efforts to reform the US military, as he called for more debate about strategy, rather than over weapons systems. He believed more money should be spent on training and redesigning the military for greater flexibility.

Hart served on the Senate Armed Services, Budget and Environment, and Public Works Committees. He chaired the National Commission on Air Quality that produced the first official recommendations for reducing acid rain in 1980.

Presidential Campaigns

Hart mounted a campaign for the presidency in 1984, at age 46. He ran on a platform of economic reform that focused on high interest rates, unemployment and a ballooning national deficit. He opposed further military buildup, called for more spending on education and greater environmental regulation. The Democratic nomination was hotly contested between Hart and Walter Mondale, with Hart holding out hope for the nomination into the Democratic National Convention, only five months prior to the general election. Mondale eventually accumulated enough delegates to win the nomination.

Hart did not seek reelection to the Senate in 1986. Instead, he again mounted a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. However, on May 3, 1987, the Miami Herald reported that Hart had spent a weekend at his Capitol Hill home with model Donna Rice.

Hart at first denied the allegations that he had an intimate relationship with Rice, but then a photograph emerged showing her sitting on his knee. It was also reported that he had chartered a yacht named Monkey Business for a two-day trip to the Bahamas with her.

Hart said, "I made a serious mistake. I should not have been in the company of any woman who was not a friend of mine or my wife. I should not have been with Miss Rice." While critical of his treatment by the press, he announced on May 8, 1987, that he would withdraw his candidacy.

Private Life

After being forced out of politics by the scandal, Hart returned to his home in Troublesome Gulch, Colorado, and joined Coudert Brothers, an international law firm. He worked for the firm brokering business ventures in Russia and central Europe.

He is a prolific writer, and has authored more than a dozen books, including several regarding US military policy and national security, and several works of fiction, including two novels written under the pseudonym John Blackthorn. Hart completed a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford in 2001.

The Commission on National Security

Hart also acted as a liaison between Cuba's Fidel Castro and President Bill Clinton during the 1990s. In 1998, Clinton appointed him co-chairman, along with New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, a bipartisan commission chartered by the Department of Defense to conduct a comprehensive review of US national security.

That commission warned in 1999 that "some new technologies, benign as they may be for the most part could have a dramatic leveling effect, allowing an increasing array of states, and even small disaffected or fanatical groups, to inflict enormous damage on unsuspecting civilian populations-including our own." It went on to say that, "America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. . . . Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."

In the commission's final report in 2001, it criticized US national security policy for having "no coherent or integrated governmental structures" in place to face the threat of terrorist attacks.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, against the United States, Hart's commission was given credit for essentially predicting the event. While he was named as a possible Senate candidate from Colorado during the 1990s, the prescience of the commission's findings thrust Hart further back into the public eye to the extent that he was named a potential presidential nominee for 2004. Hart, then sixty-six years old, considered running, but announced in May 2003 that he would not be a candidate, saying he didn't have the enthusiasm for the necessary fundraising and that he was concerned about being able to get his message out to voters in an age of quick "sound-bites."

Later Work

Hart has continued to serve in a variety of capacities as a consultant on national security issues. He served as vice chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, part of the Executive Office of the President, from 2008 to 2011, and in 2014 President Barack Obama appointed him US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland.

Bibliography

Bai, Matt. "How Gary Hart's Downfall Forever Changed American Politics." The New York Times, 18 Sept. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/magazine/how-gary-harts-downfall-forever-changed-american-politics.html. Accessed 31 Mar. 2017.

Berman, Russell. "The Gary Hart Renaissance." The Atlantic, 21 Oct. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-gary-hart-renaissance/381737/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2017.

"Hart, Gary Warren, (1936– )." Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=H000287. Accessed 31 Mar. 2017.