Gary Warren Hart ( Hartpence; November 28, 1936) is an American politician, diplomat, and lawyer. In 1984, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, finishing as the runner-up to Walter Mondale; he ran again for the nomination in 1988, and was initially considered the front-runner, but eventually dropped out amid revelations of extramarital affairs. He represented Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987.

Born in Ottawa, Kansas, Hart pursued a legal career in Denver, Colorado, after graduating from Yale Law School. He managed Senator George McGovern's successful campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination and McGovern's unsuccessful general election campaign against President Richard Nixon. Hart defeated incumbent Republican Senator Peter Dominick in Colorado's 1974 Senate election. In the Senate, he served on the Church Committee and led the Senate investigation regarding the Three Mile Island accident. After narrowly winning re-election in 1980, he sponsored the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, becoming known as an "Atari Democrat".

Hart sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, narrowly losing the race to former Vice President Walter Mondale. Hart declined to seek re-election to the Senate in 1986 and sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. He was widely viewed as the front-runner until reports surfaced of an extramarital affair, and Hart withdrew from the race in May 1987. He re-entered the race in December 1987 but withdrew from the race again after faring poorly in the early primaries. The nomination ultimately went to Michael Dukakis.

Hart returned to private practice after the 1988 election and served in a variety of public roles. He co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Task Force on Homeland Security, served on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and was the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. He earned a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford and has written for outlets such as The Huffington Post. He has also written several books, including a biography of President James Monroe. Hart married Lee Ludwig in 1958, who died at age 85 on April 9, 2021. They had two children, John and Andrea Hart.

Early life and education

Gary Warren Hart was born Gary Warren Hartpence on November 28, 1936, in Ottawa, Kansas, the son of Nina ( Pritchard) and Carl Riley Hartpence, a farm equipment salesman. As a young man, he worked as a laborer on the railroad. He and his father changed their last name to "Hart" in 1961 because "Hart is a lot easier to remember than Hartpence." Raised in the Church of the Nazarene (which he ultimately left in 1968), he won a scholarship to the church-affiliated Bethany Nazarene College in Bethany, Oklahoma, in 1954 Initially intending to enter the Nazarene ministry, he received a B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1961 before receiving an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1964.

Career

Hart became an attorney for the United States Department of Justice from 1964 to 1965 and was admitted to the Colorado and District of Columbia bars in 1965. He was special assistant to the solicitor of the United States Department of the Interior from 1965 to 1967. He then entered private law practice in Denver, Colorado,

George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign

Following the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota co-chaired a commission that revised the Democratic presidential nomination structure. The new structure weakened the influence of such old-style party bosses as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who were once able to hand-pick national convention delegates and dictate the way they voted. The new rules made caucuses a process in which relative newcomers could participate without paying dues to established party organizations.

In the 1972 primary elections, McGovern named Hart his national campaign director. Along with Rick Stearns, an expert on the new system, they decided on a strategy to focus on the 28 states holding caucuses instead of primary elections. They felt the nature of the caucuses made them easier and less costly to win if they targeted their efforts. While their primary election strategy proved successful in winning the nomination, McGovern went on to lose the 1972 presidential election in one of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history.

United States Senator

In 1974, Hart ran for the United States Senate, challenging two-term incumbent Republican Peter Dominick. Hart was aided by Colorado's trend toward Democrats during the early 1970s, as well as Dominick's continued support for the unpopular President Richard Nixon and concerns about the senator's health. In the general election, Hart won by a wide margin (57.2% to Dominick's 39.5%) and was immediately labeled a rising star. He got a seat on the Armed Services Committee and was an early supporter of reforming the bidding for military contracts, as well as an advocate for the military using smaller, more mobile weapons and equipment, as opposed to the traditional large-scale items. He also served on the Environment and Public Work Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. From 1975 to 1976, Hart was a member of the post-Watergate Church Committee that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. Hart served as the chairman of Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation. He flew over the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in an Army helicopter several times with fellow Senator Alan Simpson during the nuclear accident and led the subsequent Senate investigation into the incident.

In 1980, Hart sought a second term. In something of a surprise, his Republican opponent was Colorado Secretary of State Mary Estill Buchanan, a moderate candidate who narrowly defeated the more conservative choice, Howard "Bo" Callaway, in the party primary, by fewer than 2,000 primary votes. Fourteen years earlier, Callaway was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in his native Georgia. Callaway in the early 1970s had bought and run an elegant resort in Crested Butte. Buchanan hit Hart hard for supporting the Panama Canal Treaties and for backing then-President Jimmy Carter in 80% of his Senate votes. Buchanan charged in a campaign ad about Hart: "He votes one way and talks another when he is back here. He is a liberal, McGovernite carpetbagger." Hart responded that Buchanan's charges reflected her narrow viewpoint and insisted that his campaign would rise above partisanship. Said Hart in a campaign ad: "I will not ignore her. We will interact and debate, but I am going to run a campaign for the 1980s. What is her plan for the environment? For national defense? For the economy? It took me a year or so to formulate my ideas." In the end, Hart won narrowly, with 50.2% of the vote to his opponent's 48.7%.

On December 2, 1981, Hart was one of only four senators to vote against an amendment to President Reagan's MX missiles proposal that would divert the silo system by $334 million as well as earmark further research for other methods that would allow giant missiles to be based. The vote was seen as a rebuff of the Reagan administration. Hart cosponsored the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 with Senator Charles Mathias, which was signed into law. The act created a new category of intellectual property rights that makes the layouts of integrated circuits legally protected upon registration, and hence illegal to copy without permission. This protected Silicon Valley chips from cheap foreign imitations. Similar legislation had been proposed in every Congress since 1979.

United States Naval Reserve service

thumb|upright=1.35|Hart accepting his US Naval Reserve commission from Secretary of the Navy Edward Hidalgo, December 4, 1980

Citing the increasing likelihood of an armed conflict in the Persian Gulf and his reluctance to "stay in the Senate and authorize and appropriate funds to send young men like my son off to fight that war," Hart applied for a commission in the United States Naval Reserve's Standby Reserve Active Status List program in the late 1970s. He was over the statutory age limit of 38 and had not amassed any prior military experience; moreover, in contrast to his stated rationale, this category "would not be called up immediately in the event of a mobilization." By mutual agreement, Hart and United States Secretary of the Navy Edward Hidalgo deferred the consideration of the request until the aftermath of the 1980 election.

In a 2007 commentary for HuffPost, Hart asserted that his desire to "understand and communicate better with our troops" was the primary motivation for his appointment. Although he "did not routinely fulfill [his] reserve duties" and "chose not to feature this experience in subsequent campaigns", he maintained that his service "helped [him] enormously in appreciating what our military does to make us more secure." Hart could not overcome Mondale's financial and organizational advantages, especially among labor union leaders in the Midwest and industrial Northeast. Hart's campaign was chronically in debt, to a final count of $4.75 million. In states like Illinois, where delegates were elected directly by primary voters, Hart often had incomplete delegate slates. Hart's ideas were criticized as too vague and centrist by many Democrats. Shortly after he became the new frontrunner, it was revealed that Hart had changed his last name, had often listed 1937 instead of 1936 as his birth date and had changed his signature several times. This, along with two separations from his wife (1979 and 1981), Lee, caused some to question Hart's "flake factor." Hart himself admitted in an interview that he was going through a midlife crisis and focused too much on his career, neglecting his family. Reporters observed that the Harts appeared distant and distracted in public. Hart was also not close to his children, often leaving his wife to raise them completely alone. He and his wife briefly dated each other casually during their second separation, which occurred for a few months in 1981. Additionally, the Harts had begun divorce proceedings but had stopped them after reconciling. Hart and his wife later stated that the separations, caused by too much time spent apart due to politics, only strengthened their marriage. The Harts would remain married until Lee's death on April 10, 2021.

The two men swapped victories in the primaries, with Hart getting exposure as a candidate with "new ideas" and Mondale rallying the party establishment to his side. The two men fought to a draw in the Super Tuesday, with Hart winning states in the West, Florida and New England. Mondale fought back and began ridiculing Hart's campaign platform. The most famous television moment of the campaign was during a debate when he mocked Hart's "new ideas" by quoting a line from a popular Wendy's television commercial at the time: "Where's the beef?" Hart's campaign could not effectively counter this remark, and when he ran negative TV commercials against Mondale in the Illinois primary, his appeal as a new kind of Democrat never entirely recovered. Hart lost the New York and Pennsylvania primaries, but won those of Ohio and Indiana.

Mondale gradually pulled away from Hart in the delegate count, but the race was not decided until June, on "Super Tuesday III". Decided that day were delegates from five states: South Dakota, New Mexico, West Virginia, California and New Jersey. The proportional nature of delegate selection meant that Mondale was likely to obtain enough delegates on that day to secure the stated support of an overall majority of delegates, and hence the nomination, no matter who actually "won" the states contested. However, Hart maintained that unpledged superdelegates that had previously claimed support for Mondale would shift to his side if he swept the Super Tuesday III primary. Once again, Hart committed a faux pas, insulting New Jersey shortly before the primary day. Campaigning in California, he remarked that while the "bad news" was that he and his wife had to campaign separately, "[T]he good news for her is that she campaigns in California while I campaign in New Jersey." Compounding the problem, when his wife interjected that she "got to hold a koala bear", Hart replied that "I won't tell you what I got to hold: samples from a toxic waste dump."

This race for the nomination was the most recent occasion that a major party presidential nomination has gone all the way to the convention. Mondale was later defeated in a landslide by the incumbent Reagan, winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Many felt that Hart and other similar candidates, younger and more independent-minded, represented the future of the party. Hart had refused to take money from Political Action Committees (PACs), and as a result he mortgaged his house to self-finance his campaign, and was more than $1 million in debt at the end of the campaign.

1988 presidential campaign

thumb|right|Campaign logo thumb|Hart speaks at Cornell University in late 1987.

Hart declined to run for re-election to the Senate, leaving office when his second term expired with the intent of running for president again. On December 20, 1986, Hart was allegedly followed by an anonymous private investigator from a radio station where he had given the Democratic Party's response to President Reagan's weekly radio address. That alleged investigator report claimed that Hart had been followed to a woman's house, photographed there, and left sometime the following morning. This allegation would ultimately cause him to suspend his planned presidential campaign. After Mario Cuomo announced in February 1987 that he would not enter the race, Hart was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 election.

Hart officially declared his candidacy on April 13, 1987. When Lois Romano, a reporter for The Washington Post, asked Hart to respond to rumors spread by other campaigns that he was a "womanizer", Hart said such candidates were "not going to win that way, because you don't get to the top by tearing someone else down." The New York Post reported that comment on its front page with the headline lead in "Straight from the Hart", followed below with big, black block letters: "., and then a summary of the story: "Dem blasts rivals over sex life rumors".

In late April 1987, the Miami Herald claimed that an anonymous informant