Ex-Hart Aide Tables Plans for Politics

In the kitchen at Lily’s Cafe, with the steaming and the chopping and the long steel counters wiped clean for the midday rush, Kevin Sweeney is stacking teacups.

Seven months ago, he was chief press secretary to the front-running Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States.

OK. He’s stacking teacups. Later, CBS is going to film him taking lunch orders. The patrons will take that in stride too, blinking in mild surprise at the television cameras; so now Kevin Sweeney is stacking the cups on a tray, working quickly, smiling, aware that he is being watched: two white cups, two white saucers, two bags Darjeeling tea, one pot boiling water.

He picks up the tray, balances it on one hand and turns with the most self-restrained little flourish. The former press secretary to Gary Hart, now here he is a waiter. White shirt, red beard, merry blue eyes, sneakers.

“Smoked chicken pasta salad,” Sweeney says, cracking a one-sided smile. “Grilled chicken parmigiana, grilled swordfish with sauce bearnaise. And an excellent Chicken William with Marsala sauce.”

The Chicken William, one wonders, how is that prepared?

“On a grill, dammit,” Sweeney says. “So it’s a fresh, moist piece of chicken.”

He works the lunch shift. He wears a long blue apron. He keeps a pencil behind his right ear. Before the customers arrive he cuts lemons and slices bread and makes sure the red plastic bottles have enough catsup in them.

‘Happy to be Here’

He says he’s a pretty good waiter, but that he used to be better. “I’m happy to be here,” Sweeney says. Small sigh. “There’s just a lot of ways to help.”

He talks in shorthand, self-deprecatory, counting off with his fingers: “Platitudinous,” Sweeney says. “Two things I want to do with my life. I want to make the world a better place, and I want to have a real good time. This allows me certainly to help do the latter. . . . You don’t need a title. I had a grand title a couple months ago. That was real nifty. Reporters took me out to lunch all the time, and people returned my phone calls right away. But there ain’t a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

Kevin Sweeney is 29 and living in his mother’s house in San Bruno, a suburb south of San Francisco. He’s painting the house for her. One of his sisters is pregnant and lives nearby; he will see the newborn baby, which pleases him. In the mornings he drives to the western end of San Francisco, goes to a community college Spanish class, and takes the streetcar to work at Lily’s. He’s reading George Orwell and Graham Greene and C. P. Snow, because they write about power and political nuance and the use of the English language, and he’s also reading Norman MacLean’s “A River Runs Through It,” because it’s about fly fishing.

Sweeney likes fly fishing. He learned to do it in Denver because in May of this year Hart stood up before a national television audience and declared that the presidential selection process “reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted” and that he consequently was no longer a candidate for the American presidency. So Kevin Sweeney had some time on his hands.

“It was a bad week, shall we say,” Sweeney says. “Let me tell you. Gravity-driven campaigns are no fun.”

He is tall and quick talking and immensely likable, the blue eyes direct and friendly even when he is about to be shoved toward The Subject: The Candidate’s Demise. Sweeney loved Gary Hart’s campaigns; he ran press for the Iowa primary before the 1984 convention and had seen that they were nearly all young, the Hart people, and wild with optimism. In the Denver offices of the 1984 headquarters, Sweeney and his colleagues had a running joke that was generally delivered when things were absolutely awful and it was 3 in the morning and nothing but two dozen Pepsi-Colas was keeping them awake.

“I would walk into Rick Rider’s office,” Sweeney says--Rider was Hart’s Iowa field coordinator--and say: ‘You know, Rick, there is nothing I’d rather do than what I am doing right now. ‘ “

Sweeney grins broadly at the memory of it. “Which was true. I was working on a presidential campaign. I was working for somebody I really believed in, who I thought was going to help make the world a better place. It was a great thing to do.”

California Boy

He was a California boy, political science major at the University of California at Berkeley, intent on the possibilities of Democratic politics. He had worked in research at the now-disbanded Analysis Center for the Evaluation of Energy Statistics at the Wharton School of Business. He had joined the unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and had volunteered for Hart’s initial presidential campaign, after systematically examining each of the candidates to decide who appealed to him most. It was before that Iowa primary that Sweeney was first asked--to his surprise, he says--to direct relations with the press.

Sweeney flashes a perfunctory grin. “The most formative experience I’ve ever had in my life was the Iowa caucuses. I have never in my life had such a feeling of empowerment. . . . With a lot of work, we felt we had put our boss within a stone’s throw of the White House.”

And so they had. The next time around, Hart was by all accounts the front-runner. Sweeney was a more experienced press secretary by then; he had been asked a year before the campaign to become Hart’s chief press secretary in Washington.

“Didn’t expect it,” he says. “Didn’t know if I was up to it. I mean, I didn’t know much about foreign policy. There were so many things I had to learn. But took the job--out of blind ambition! “ Full Sweeney laugh now.

Did he know what was coming?

“I didn’t know it was going to come like this,” Sweeney says. “There were rumors out there. I had heard those rumors for a long time.”

When the telephone call came to Denver to let the campaign staff know that the Miami Herald was about to publish its story detailing Hart’s now-celebrated night with Donna Rice, Sweeney knew instantly what was about to happen.

There is no bitterness in Sweeney’s voice; he says he could see the elements of an irresistible story as well as the next guy. “Politics. Sex. I didn’t know that it would turn out also to have pictures of a beautiful blond woman in a bikini.”

Kevin Sweeney is asked rather a lot these days about anger, about what the young press secretary felt when he too saw the bikini pictures. “There was a visceral response that was--not positive,” Sweeney says, and then smiles. “That was press secretary language. But after 20 minutes, you just say: ‘Well, OK, fine. Let’s get on with the business of life. Let’s worry about the campaign.’ And also it was obvious, Sunday morning, the human costs that the Hart family was going to pay. They went through hell. I’ve never seen anything so--oh, God, brutal.”

Becoming a career waiter is not one of his long-term goals, but Sweeney likes Lily’s. He worked here once before, during a 1983 respite between political campaigns, and nobody minds very much when television crews arrive at noon or Sweeney takes a few days off to make a speech about press relations and the political process. He has turned down offers from other campaigns; nothing has attracted him strongly enough yet to pull him away from his family, and from the break he thinks will have served him well when he takes up politics again.

“The six months I spent working at Lily’s in 1983 was very valuable for me--reading Jefferson, reading the Federalist Papers, reading ‘Democracy in America,’ ” he said. “I know why I am involved in politics. It has to do with making the process better, with enriching the process--because automatically, then, you will offer better candidates. Better people will percolate to the top. That’s why I’m involved. That has damn little to do with Gary Hart, and it has damn little to do with his campaign.”

Kevin Sweeney is due back at work. “I can’t wait to get back on the floor,” he says. The fog is coming in and he has jammed both hands into his pockets and his grin, as he stalks toward the big front windows at Lily’s Cafe, is huge.

“I love my job,” Sweeney adds. “There’s nothing I’d rather do than what I am doing right now.”