Gary Hart and Donna Rice's "Nose"
Matt
Bai’s essay,
“How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever
Changed American Politics,” from this past
weekend’s New York Times Magazine,
offers a gripping account of Gary Hart’s rise and fall in the year 1987. What I found most interesting, though, was
(predictably enough) the story’s counterfactual ending.
At the
end of the essay, Lee and Gary Hart mull over the “what if” dimension of the
scandal. It was not just the fact that Hart’s
withdrawal from the race represented a rupture in American political culture;
it also may have affected the course of American history.
Lee
Hart, in reflecting on her husband’s wistful sense of what might have been,
remarked:
“It’s
what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very
day,” Lee said.
And
Gary Hart himself concluded:
“Well,
at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said
ruefully.
Bai continues: "This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard
premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on
his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son
would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then
president within 12 years’ time.”
(As the
article spells out earlier: “In a preview of the general election against the
presumed Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Hart was polling
over 50 percent among registered voters and beating Bush by 13 points, with
only 11 percent saying they were undecided. He would have been very hard to
stop.”)
Hart went
on to speculate:
“And we
wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive
who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if
literally deflating. “You have to live with that, you know?”
It is overly
simplistic to evoke Pascal’s famous notion of “Cleopatra’s nose” and claim that
Donna Rice’s sex appeal led to the war in Iraq.
But the entire story underscores the ways in which chance events can
have unforeseeable consequences.
Comments