Gary Hart confesses

We were standing on the corner outside a church in a small town in Texas listening to a tolling bell and waiting for the congregation to break and waiting for three men to come out and tell us how things had gone with the service for the dear departed, especially to learn about the behaviour of the President of the United States, who was the chief mourner.

We were the White House press corps which was small enough in those days to be accommodated on Air Force One, the president's plane. I was the only foreign correspondent present, the resident Brit, greeted most mornings by the Kennedy inner circle with such salutations as, 'Top of the morning to you, old chap!' and 'Jolly good show, what!' That tells you how long ago this was. Since then the arrival of The Beatles, swinging London, not to mention punk rock, orange and purple hairdos and liberal four-letter television plays, the American stereotype of a typical Englishman has been radically revised.

Well, it was, in fact, 25 years ago and this stop in Texas was not on the agenda. We were on our way to California to land at a marine base on the coast and then to be whisked off by helicopters to the huge aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, lying at anchor somewhere in the Pacific. There, we were to watch a demonstration, funded unknowingly by the taxpayer to the tune of something like $2 million, of a series of attacks by phantom jets on Soviet drag targets – fake targets, of course – high on the horizon, but we never made it to California.

En route, the word came to the president that the former, long-time Speaker of the House, the most revered, bald head in the Congress, Mr Sam Rayburn, had died overnight and the funeral service was to take place at high noon that very day in his home town of Bonham, Texas. So, there was a sudden spasm of communications between Air Force One and Washington, the nearest airport to Bonham, Texas, the secret service, the Bonham police department, and so on.

Deep regrets were conveyed to the commander of the Pacific fleet. The president had other things to do, other places to go on the morrow, so the whole demonstration would have to be put off until another time – to the despair of the crew of the Kitty Hawk and the television and radio crews already there and to the disappearance down the drain of about $100,000 of the taxpayers' contribution.

So we'd come down in Texas, been motored to Bonham, drew lots for the three reporters who would go into the packed little church and the rest of us, say, 20, 30, pocketed our notes on ground-to-air missiles and the Kitty Hawk catapult planes and all the other technology we'd boned up on. And we had nothing to do but loiter near the church and wait to file short, respectful pieces about the funeral of Mr Sam.

I doubt that many of us wrote much about that service, for while we were standing on the side-walk gossiping about this and that, a tone signal announced noon on a portable radio one of the correspondents was carrying and we huddled round him on the off-chance that there'd be some other news of consequence. There was a blockbuster, the lead item.

Mrs Nelson Rockefeller, wife of the governor of New York, a coming contender for the Republican nomination for president, had just filed for divorce. I don't think I can convey to anybody under 50, the shock to the nervous system of such a piece of unheard-of news. None of us could remember a sitting senator or congressman being sued for divorce; certainly no governor. The reaction of the reporters was immediate and uniform. As the oldest member present, the so-called 'dean' of the White House corps, put it, 'She ought to be ashamed of herself'.

And there were muttered variations in the same vein. How dare the wife of an ambitious politician, most of all one running for the presidency, be so unsporting, have the bad taste, to imperil his career just then in such a way. All the sympathy was for Governor Rockefeller. There was only one odd man out, one reporter, a cool, sceptical type, and he said, 'Well, maybe she doesn't like him'. Nobody deigned to take that remark seriously.

I appreciate that today this must sound like an anecdote from the Victorian age, the late Victorian age. In the early days of Victoria's reign, her most trusted and intimate adviser, Lord Melbourne, had a run-in twice, I think, with the divorce court, revealing his suspect relations with two ladies. He was, as I recall, technically exonerated, publicly deplored, but it didn't affect his political career in the slightest. That must have been some time in the 1840s. The 1880s were very different, when the careers of Dilke and Parnell were ruined by evidence of extra-marital affairs.

Well, the taboo against any taint of sexual scandal was still strong in the 1960s, as witness the Profumo Affair only two years after Mrs Rockefeller filed her suit. There was some pretence among the advanced pundits at the time that the divorce would not seriously damage Rockefeller's run at the presidency, but they were wrong. I realise now that the Republican party was about to take a positive turn to the right under Senator Goldwater and that Nelson Rockefeller was too liberal for the time and would be almost booed off the rostrum at the 1964 Republican convention.

But the ordinary population of most of the country knew little, or cared little, about a rising tide of conservatism. At any rate, a poll taken within months of Mrs Rockefeller's suit was brutal for his hopes. The Midwest and the South especially, did not take to the prospect of a divorced president. There'd been, by the way, no charge of adultery. Incompatibility, I believe, was the cited ground.

Now it's true that Adlai Stevenson was a divorced man when he ran for the presidency in 1952 but he'd been separated and divorced long before he came to national attention and when he did, he was already seen as, indeed, very many Americans thought he was, a gallant bachelor.

Well, the question before the House is, are the 1980s in America still like the 1880s in Britain? Or is the mass of the voting population willing to forgive and forget a little 1970s permissiveness in a presidential candidate? I submit, apropos, as you'll have guessed, the irrepressible Gary Hart we don't really know. It's impossible, just now, to moralise on behalf of any section of the population, except the evangelical right which has its own candidate in the Reverend Pat Robertson. Its answer is unambiguous and downright. Sex outside marriage is a sin and no known sinner – of that sort, anyway – should be president.

To a great many Americans, and it's impossible to say now how many, the most interesting aspect of the whole Hart affair is his own attitude which is still directed wholly to measuring a sexual lapse against political fitness. Yes, he now admits he had one affair and is willing to concede another one – since the Washington Post has a conclusive file on it, he had better.

But now he says, yes, he's sinned, like many another unexposed sinner in public life, but he is a new man, a reborn-again Christian and what matters is not the private Gary Hart, but the ideas he has in store, which he feels the country could use under his leadership, he says, ideas with which he hopes to 'educate' the people – a note of condescension that has not been lost on quite a few of the people, let's say some of the 51 per cent who believe he's making a mistake in coming back into the race.

What, however, Mr Hart cannot see and appears to have been blind to all along is the kind of doubt about his character entertained by many people, some of them sympathetic to his political ideas and otherwise ready to vote for him. The doubts focus on a character flaw. His original bluff and outright lying and the suicidal arrogance of his saying to the reporters he had nothing to hide, 'and if you don't believe me, tale me!' Which, unfortunately, they did.

What has remained as a disturbance to many people is not that he had an affair. A deep, genuine relationship might have been forgiven, but it was the frivolity of a one-night stand with a young girl he'd picked up. The hair-raising indifference he showed to the public posing on the yacht, the subsequent bluster and then the enormous self-righteousness of his farewell sermon to the press. What is in doubt, in short, is still his judgement of himself as a mature man who could be a wise, responsible leader.

The political columnists are commenting just now almost along straight party lines. The Republicans are secretly delighted that to the six Democratic competing dwarfs has now been added yet another preacher ordained who may be no dwarf but, as something of a handsome, eloquent playboy, will confuse the choice of a Democratic candidate.

And the Democrats, whether or not they accept this prognosis, are certainly divided. Some doubtful ones recall that Senator Ted Kennedy has never overcome the stigma to his character of the Chappaquiddick disaster. The more practical politicians who dislike Mr Hart worry that his reappearance makes it harder for any one of the other six to establish a conspicuous lead. His old supporters, pointing out his immediate jump in the polls ahead of the dwarfs, are saying, 'You see? He is the one original of all our men, the most eloquent and he will be seen as a man of courage who has dared to come out of the wilderness.'

I must say I think it'll be tough for Mr Hart to be a successful impersonator of John the Baptist. Meanwhile, the real John the Baptist of the party, the far more eloquent Governor Cuomo of New York looks more and more like the giant in waiting.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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