George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

the Gary Hart campaign, received a telephone call at his office. It was just after Gart Hart
had told E.J. Dionne of the New York Times, "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm
serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me. go ahead. They'd be very bored." An
extensive and well-organized network in the media was hyping the story that Hart was
promiscuous. The telephone call received that day by Fiedler was from a woman who
told him, "Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine. We don't need another
president who lies like that." The next morning at 10:30 AM the same woman called back
with the report that her female friend was likely to accept an invitation to spend the
weekend with Gary Hart at his Washington townhouse, and that the friend was likely to
make the trip by air Friday evening. Published sources and unnamed aides in the Gary
Hart campaign have identified Lynn Armandt as the woman who made this call to Tom
Fiedler of the Miami Herald, although Fiedler denies this is true. [fn 29]
These telephone calls led to the stakeout of Hart's townhouse by Fiedler and other
reporters of the Miami Herald who came upon Hart together with Donna Rice, detonating
the scandal which destroyed Hart's candidacy.
The woman caller described herself as a liberal Democrat but a foe of mendacity. She
told Fiedler that she and her girlfriend had spent time on a yacht with Hart and an older
man named Bill who was supposedly Hart's lawyer. This turned out to be a cruise by
Hart, Donna Rice, Lynn Armandt and Hart's lawyer William Broadhurst plus a crew of
five on board the Soffer-owned "chartered yacht" Monkey Business to Bimini and back in
the springtime. Donna Rice later confirmed she had met Hart at Turnberry.
William Broadhurst or "Billy B." was a Washington lawyer and Hart backer who served
the candidate as an operative on the campaign trail. Broadhurst had a Capitol Hill
townhouse near Hart's. Broadhurst later explained that Lynn Armandt had come to
Washington to consider his offer to be a social director for his lobbying and entertaining
activities in Washington. Broadhurst said that Donna Rice had come along with her
friend Lynn Armandt, and that both women had stayed overnight at his house, not at
Hart's. Lynn Armandt soon left Washington after the story had broken, and the Hart
campaign people said they never heard from her again.
There is no need to recount the ostracism and revelations that followed, leading to the
destruction of Gary Hart as a political figure. Nor is it our intention here to defend the
lost cause of the decidedly unsavory former Senator Hart. But given the situation of the
Bush campaign in April-May, 1987, we are reminded by Seneca's "Cui prodest"
proposition that the Bushmen as prime beneficiaries would necessarily qualify as prime
suspects if any "naughty stuff" were to overtake Hart, as it did. Our suspicions can only
be heightened by the obvious degree to which Bush, Aronow, Kramer, Soffer, Armandt,
and Rice must be seen virtually as one interrelated social amalgam in the setting of
Miami, Thunderboat Alley, Turnberry Isle, and the Monkey Business. Perhaps an old
score was being settled here as well, dating back to December, 1975, hearings in which
Gary Hart had taunted Bush about the Liedkte money laundering apparatus referenced in
Richard M. Nixon's "smoking gun" tape.