But Once Story Was Out, the System Did Work

The collapse of Gary Hart’s presidential campaign following the Town-House Stakeout raises many questions. Among them: Will other candidates receive a comparable scrutiny? As a friend of mine in Washington put it, such a development could “thin out the field considerably.”

Journalists right now seem to be vacillating between wanting to seem impartial (by extending the Hart treatment to others) and wanting to seem responsible (by concentrating on “the issues”).

No one knows what will happen because no one person controls the press. The dynamics of competition are such that if one paper reports something, others find it difficult not to play catch-up by repeating the news--and then trying to develop it further.

Until recently there has been a consensus in the news media that a candidate’s drinking or womanizing were off-limits for reporting. (News people know how vulnerable they are on both counts.) This seems to have changed, however. “More and more, the national press now believes that prying into the personal and sex lives of presidential candidates is legitimate fare,” Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Albert R. Hunt wrote last week. “Journalists are talking privately about doing stories on at least three other presidential hopefuls.”

One reason for the change is that the press is unquestionably more powerful than it was, say, 25 years ago. When John F. Kennedy was President it was still possible for party and business leaders to call publishers and editors, threatening reprisals if damaging material was published. Today the parties are weaker and the editors more independent.

We, or the politicians, seem also to be caught unexpectedly between the “old morality” of fidelity and monogamy and the “new morality” of openness, candor and disclosure. The new journalistic code seems to say: If marital fidelity is not as important as it used to be, then what is to stop us from writing about it? If there are “open marriages,” why can we not openly report on them? Wielding new clout at the time of Watergate, the press defended its role by invoking “the people’s right to know.” Now the same principle looks as though it will be more generally applied.

At the same time we have found that the old morality is still very much with us. Some affect surprise at this, representing it as one more sign of America’s lack of sophistication. An important reason for this revival, however, is the women’s movement, which may turn out to have more links with the old morality than has been acknowledged. (Note the anti-pornography campaigns undertaken by some in the women’s movement.)

“I feel outraged that he would do this to (Lee Hart),” Janis Berman, the wife of Rep. Howard Berman (D-Los Angeles) said last week of Gary Hart’s behavior. Janis Berman’s goal may not be the restoration of the old morality, but the effect of such sentiments is likely to be the same. If the old double standard of sexual conduct is to be swept away, a more widespread fidelity is much more likely to replace it than a more widespread adultery.

The co-existence of old and new moralities exposes political candidates to obvious peril. To all but the chaste, the question “Have you committed adultery?” is like a knight’s fork in chess, threatening on the one hand the exposure of untruthfulness, on the other hand disloyalty. Neither quality is presidential, the voters have every right to conclude.

The issue of hypocrisy has been raised by some journalists. A candidate could be “fair game,” Hunt suggested, if he “is preaching one way from the pulpit and another from the bedroom.” This turns out to be a veiled formula for restoring another double standard, with press immunity granted to those who derogate traditional morality. Those who do bad things and acknowledge that they are bad will be in trouble. Those who do bad things and claim that they are good will be safe from the press.

Two candidates are obviously put at risk by Hunt’s criterion of hypocrisy: the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Pat Robertson. Johnny Carson said that the Hart affair took sex out of the pulpit and put it back into politics where it belongs. But politics and pulpit are increasingly intertwined. As for Jackson, an article in a New York newspaper has already reported that he is vulnerable to scrutiny. When asked by ABC’s Sam Donaldson if he welcomed the Hart treatment, Jackson’s answer digressed into the safe and familiar moral terrain of South Africa’s system of apartheid.

I am not among those who believe that the press went too far in the Hart case. The episode showed him to be a man of poor judgment and character, with a high-handed disregard not only for his family but also for his campaign workers.

In the long run Hart’s fall could easily help the Democrats. They have plenty of time to regroup around another candidate who may prove to be more formidable in 1988 than Hart. I do not agree, then, that the system for choosing candidates needs to be changed. As we said after Watergate: The system worked.