All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

Overview

Now a major motion picture "The Front Runner" starring Hugh Jackman

An NPR Best Book of the Year

In May 1987, Colorado Senator Gary Hart—a dashing, reform-minded Democrat—seemed a lock for the party’s presidential nomination and led George H. W. Bush by double digits in the polls. Then, in one tumultuous week, rumors of marital infidelity 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 values has shifted under our feet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307474681
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	883,918
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Matt Bai is the national political columnist for Yahoo News. For more than a decade he was a political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, where he covered three presidential campaigns. He is the author of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, named a notable book of 2007 by The New York Times. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
 
www.mattbai.com

@mattbai

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.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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

Perhaps you’re one of the many millions who believe something has gone sadly wrong in national politics. . . . If so, All the Truth Is Out is for you.”
—The Dallas Morning News

“A volume of insight and wisdom, an uncommon page-turner about the turning points we don’t recognize until we’re too far beyond them to turn back.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“In buoyant, vivid prose . . . 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.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“An introspective book that is set in another era but offers insights into ours. . . . Bai says what is obvious—that the Donna Rice furor irreparably hurt Hart—but he also says what is less obvious, and very wise: that it hurt us all.”
—The Boston Globe

“A miniclassic of political journalism that will restart the debate of 1987.”
—Jack Shafer, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Compelling. . . . Bai’s superb book provokes many questions, and I gulped it down in a single sitting.”
—Ken Auletta, The New Yorker
 
“This book isn’t just for politicos. It is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary politics and media.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
 
 “All the Truth Is Out offers a terrific portrait of how news gets made…It’s riveting, a slow-motion car crash . . . [with] shrewd observations on the miserable state of contemporary political journalism (and politicians). . . . The media, as Hart experienced, pick and choose raw material from an individual life and fashion an image that often bears only a slim resemblance to the human being behind it. What matters is not who someone really is or what he has done. What matters is the symbolic need he meets.”
—Salon
 
“Bai doesn’t just make an argument: He tells the juicy Hart story all over again, right down to the oil-stained alley in which reporters cornered the candidate and interrogated him about the blonde in his apartment. . . . Bai’s important call for perspective is a reminder to all of us in the press and the electorate to recognize the complexity of the human condition, whether we’re casting aside candidates because they wear a funny helmet in a tank or because they once committed adultery.”
—Slate
 
“Fast-moving [and] vivid. . . . This book will tell you a lot about what politics asks of and takes out of people, and about the highly imperfect ways in which we now assess ‘character’ and ‘substance’ when choosing our leaders.”
—The Atlantic
 
“You think you know it all: Donna Rice, Monkey Business, Hart taunting the press. You don’t. The combustible mix of new technology and politics was birthed in [the 1987] presidential campaign, and there was no turning back.”
—NPR
 
“Bai . . . tells [Hart’s] story with details that only great reporting can provide.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“A masterfully written account . . . this first-rate work of political journalism will fan embers long thought to have gone out.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Bai shows that he is [Richard Ben] Cramer’s worthy successor—his important cautionary tale will resonate with journalists and members of the media as well as with political players and readers of current history.”
—Library Journal, starred review
 
 “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
 
“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
 

From the Publisher

…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

★ 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

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

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