All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

Overview

The former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine brilliantly revisits the Gary Hart affair and looks at how it changed forever the intersection of American media and politics.

In 1987, Gary Hart-articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive-seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. 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 Business), and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307273383
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/30/2014
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

MATT BAI is the national political columnist for Yahoo News. He was previously the chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, where he covered three presidential campaigns. He is the author of The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, named a New York Times Notable Book of 2007. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Read an Excerpt

Candidates for president—and for most other significant offices, really—don’t try to explain their ideas or their theories of the moment anymore. It’s hard to know if they really have any. Technology had a lot to do with this, of course. Kerry’s controversial quote overwhelmed his campaign, at least for a few days, because of the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle that hadn’t even existed when Hart ran back in 1987—a senselessly competitive environment where inexperienced producers fixate on whatever minutiae seems new, to the exclusion of all else, and where reporters and pundits rush into TV studios armed with little more than vague impressions. (It struck me, watching some of the coverage of the Kerry “nuisance” controversy, how few of the commentators seemed to have actually read the piece they were talking about.) But the reverberation of that one comment would have been exponentially louder just four years later, with the sudden popularity of blogs and sites like YouTube and Facebook, and it would have been downright deafening four years after that, after Twitter had taken over the world.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "All the Truth Is Out"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Matt Bai.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface What It Took xi

1 Troublesome Gulch 3

2 Tilting Toward Culture Death 27

3 Out There 48

4 Follow Me Around 83

5 "I Do Not Think That's a Fair Question" 118

6 All the Truth Is Out 163

7 Exile 196

8 A Lesser Land 221

A Note on Sourcing 245

Acknowledgments 247

Index 251

Editorial Reviews

…Bai…isn't interested here in simply reconstructing the story of what happened to Mr. Hart. He wants to examine how the media feeding frenzy, which led to Mr. Hart's fall, became a pivot point in American politics, forever altering the relationship between politicians and the press…Bai…writes in buoyant, vivid prose, and All the Truth Is Out…gives the reader a visceral appreciation of how our political discourse has changed in the last two and a half decades, and how those changes reflect broader cultural and social shifts.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Bai…concedes that Hart did himself no favors in his handling of the press, but he expresses his deepest disdain for the reporters who carried "political journalism into dark and unexplored waters." To his credit, even though Bai admires Hart and thinks he got a raw deal, he doesn't stack the deck, allowing readers to consider the evidence and acquit or convict as they see fit…Returning to the story with fresh eyes, Bai has produced a miniclassic of political history that will restart the debate of 1987. But that debate will forever leave Gary Hart writhing in its grip.

The New York Times Book Review - Jack Shafer

★ 07/28/2014
Political columnist Bai (The Argument) makes a persuasive case for reexamining the career of presidential candidate Gary Hart, whose downfall in the wake of speculation about an extramarital affair, he argues, marks a turning point in the deterioration of American political journalism and democracy. Bai analyzes the forces coalescing around the scandal that brought down the Democratic frontrunner in May 1987, and captures those frenzied days in a masterfully written account. The possibility that a candidate might be lying about his sex life was not usually relevant, given the close relationship between major news outlets and politicians, but much had changed, especially given Watergate’s influence on a generation of reporters. By the time allegations of adultery met Hart’s campaign in New Hampshire, two previously separate streams, the tabloid press and political journalism, joined forces. The result has been “an unbridgeable divide... between our candidates and our media” and an accompanying lack of substance and transparency in the political process. Based on extensive interviews with reporters and campaign insiders, including Hart and Donna Rice (the then 29-year-old model photographed sitting on his lap), Bai appraises Hart the politician, political visionary, and high-minded yet obstinately private man, and asks what the country might have lost with his foreshortened career. This first-rate work of political journalism will fan embers long thought to have gone out. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Digging deep into a long-ago, mis-remembered scandal, Matt Bai has written an acutely intelligent and surprisingly moving page-turner about Gary Hart, journalistic blindness, and the trivialization of American politics.”
—George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

“In the tradition of his friend Richard Ben Cramer, Matt Bai astonishes us by delving deeply into a story and thus overturning our views about how the press should cover politics. This fascinating and deeply significant tale shows how the rules of American politics and journalism were upended for the worse by the frenzied coverage of Gary Hart’s personal life. The soot still darkens our political process.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

“A finely written, strikingly mature and thoughtful revisitation of the tawdry episode that destroyed Gary Hart’s promising political career. It would have been enough for Matt Bai just to tell that story, or to assess what it cost those directly involved, including the journalists sucked into it, but he goes much further, weighing its profound cost to us all. All the Truth Is Out is in the impressive tradition of Nixon Agonistes, only with a dramatic personal narrative at its core. I could not admire it more.”
—Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down

“What a tally of loss is to be found in this passionate and unsparing book about a turning point in modern America—an insider’s account, brilliantly told by one of America’s finest political journalists.”
—Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower

“As an account of an emblematic scandal—what we knew, thought we knew, and never knew till now—Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out is funny, sad, and riveting. As a work of cultural history and criticism, it is splendid—a clear-eyed but wholehearted exploration of the forces that have given us our (often disastrous) contemporary notions of campaign coverage, leadership, ‘character,’ privacy, and redemption.” 
—Margaret Talbot, author of The Entertainer

“The kerfuffle about alleged sexual impropriety that torpedoed Gary Hart’s presidential bid in 1987 drove an uncommonly promising leader from public life. It also helped to spawn the ‘gotcha’ journalism that has ever since sacrificed propriety and substance on the altars of prurience and sleaze. Fueled by a keen reverence for the finest traditions of his craft, Matt Bai revisits the sorry tale of Hart’s humiliation to measure the depths of journalism’s debasement today, and the harm it continues to inflict on American democracy.”
—David M. Kennedy, author of The American Pageant

 “What makes All the Truth Is Out such an extraordinary achievement is that the reader is spellbound by every unfolding detail, in the manner of a crime novel—even while, as Matt Bai makes all too clear, the true crime of the Gary Hart saga is how politics and journalism descended hand in hand into a ‘gotcha’ netherworld from whence it’s unlikely to return.”
—Robert Draper, author of When the Tea Party Came to Town

“With extraordinary care and rare insight, Matt Bai leads us from the unraveling of Gary Hart's presidential campaign in 1987 to the present day. It's a trail that leads directly to the triumph of tabloid journalism—exposing falsehoods rather than illuminating worldviews, finding character flaws and isolated transgressions rather than looking for experience and intelligence, playing ‘gotcha’ rather than examining a candidate’s capacity to govern. As Bai notes, that trail has brought American politics to a deadening end.”
—Robert B. Reich, author of Aftershock 

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2016
Bai delivers a cautionary tale of how quickly the media can bring down a politician. Gary Hart seemingly had a lock on the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination until a sex scandal destroyed his campaign. This is the first presidential election in which a candidate's lurid behavior was vigorously pursued by the media. (LJ 10/1/14)

Library Journal

2014-06-23
A new look at a scandal that changed American politics.In 2002, formerNew York Times Magazinechief political correspondent Bai (The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, 2007) wrote an article about Gary Hart’s 1987 presidential bid, a campaign that ended with the media’s splashy coverage of Hart’s apparent adultery. The author arrived “at the same psychoanalytical conclusion on which a lot of Hart’s contemporaries had settled back then—that Hart had to have harbored some self-destructive impulse to begin with,” risking his reputation by getting involved with “some model.” Now, more than a decade later, Bai takes a far different view of the episode: “It was the story that changed all the rules” for journalists covering politicians; “the moment when the worlds of public service and tabloid entertainment…finally collided.” The author argues that the Watergate scandal “left the entire country feeling duped and betrayed”; political reporters wondered how Nixon, “a man whose corruption and pettiness were so self-evident,” could have won two presidential elections. Suspicion came to focus on candidate Hart because of his widely known womanizing and his aloof and detached manner. For this book, Bai interviewed Hart, as well as reporters and editors involved in publicizing the alleged affair. TheWashington Postreporter who aggressively pursued the story told Bai that he had felt “relieved, then triumphant” when Hart withdrew from the presidential race. The way he saw it, writes the author, “he and his colleagues had managed to protect the nation from another rogue and liar.” As Bai sees it, however, the nation lost “one of the great political minds of his time.” Hart’s attempt at another run failed, and until recently, he was marginalized from politics.Hart once said that obsessive scrutiny of sex as an indicator of character would give America the politicians it deserved. In this probing narrative, Bai comes to another dismal conclusion: It would give America the news coverage it deserved—entertainment-driven, dominated by shallow pundits, and bereft of intellect and ideas.

Kirkus Reviews

This audiobook purports to define the exact date, May 2, 1987—when Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was confronted with evidence that his extramarital affair was no longer a secret—as the beginning of the end of serious political discourse in this country. Narrator Rob Shapiro’s voice plumbs the lower end of the bass scale, but, with the dark overtones and air of shame of this audiobook, his reading fits well. He provides emphasis without character voices, and his diction is clear, However, he needs to quicken his pace and vary his pitch to make the story compelling and urgent. The story of Hart’s downfall is full of humanity. It would have been better if the narration had matched some of the emotion inherent in the text. R.I.G.

DECEMBER 2014 - AudioFile