Gary Hart: ’We said September 11 was going to happen. I was angry with myself for not doing more’

The Monday Interview: Former senator and twice-failed presidential candidate

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Gary Hart, the former senator and presidential candidate, has been around politics for a long time. That experience is telling him that John Kerry is going to win the US presidential election when America goes to the polls one week tomorrow.

"It’s partly intuitive and partly based on several hidden votes that are not [shown in the polls]," he said. "The hidden votes are new registrants who are overwhelmingly Democratic, disaffected Republicans who won’t admit to a pollster they are not going to vote for their party, and young voters who are rightly concerned about conscription if Bush is re-elected. And many of those [have only mobile phones pollsters are not permitted to call] and do not show up in the usual polling."

Contrary to what the polls suggest, he believes the outcome might not even be particularly close. "Possibly not; two points to 48 points sounds close, or if you want to put Ralph Nader in at one, 51-48-1. But three percentage points in a massive electorate is quite a margin."

So much of politics is about the margin, about being on the correct, winning side or else finding oneself for whatever reason, on the other, a loser.

Gary Hart - intelligent, progressive and combative - is among those who came very close to being a winner, only to find himself defeated. That, of course, was back in 1987 when Mr Hart was the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, well ahead of Michael Dukakis, who eventually secured it only to lose in the general election.

But for revelations about Mr Hart’s extra-marital affair with a 29-year-old model, Donna Rice, who was photographed on his lap while on a boat called Monkey Business, he would likely have been the man who challenged George Bush Snr in the 1988 presidential election.

It is one of the great "what ifs" of American politics. What if Mr Hart had won? Would he have beaten Mr Bush? Would that have meant no Bill Clinton? Would that have meant no George Bush Jnr? Although Mr Hart may reflect on all this in his private moments, on what might have been and what he might have achieved, he says he no longer feels angry about it. He believes he was a victim of a media intent on sensationalism.

"It was just one of those things," he says, testily. "Nothing I could do about it. In the 1980s, [Rupert] Murdoch and others fundamentally changed the way the press is done in America, as in Great Britain. As it happened, I was at the station when the train wreck occurred. Do I regret the wreck? Of course I regret the wreck; so what? What can I do about it."

In the aftermath of his defeat, Mr Hart returned to his law practice in Colorado, wrote thoughtful books, including several novels, and continued to be moderately involved in public life. One of the things he agreed to do was serve on what became known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, established by President Clinton in 1998 to study homeland security. That commission warned, in late January, 2001, of the imminent and deadly danger the US homeland faced from foreign terrorists.

To Mr Hart’s huge regret, no one paid much attention, not the press, not Congress and certainly not the then-new administration of George Bush. Mr Hart used his influence to lobby Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice but no one wanted to hear what he and his fellow commissioners had to say.

"One of the reasons we felt so strongly that terrorists were coming was because of people such as [former White House intelligence chief] Richard Clarke," he says. "We interviewed him ... and his hair was on fire and he set our hair on fire. It was, in a large point, because of meetings with people like him that we reached the conclusion we did. He said that when the new group arrived in the White House he started talking to Condi Rice and others, saying, ’Terrorists are coming, terrorists are coming’. He said they would not listen to him. Every time he said Bin Laden they said Saddam Hussein. Now, why they were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein? I think it’s subject of a book that hasn’t been written."

On the morning of 11 September, Mr Hart was at his home in Kittredge, Colorado, reading The New York Times website and watching television when reports appeared saying a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Centre. Moments later he watched, live, as the second plane struck.

"Our commission did not say where or when or how," he says. "We said it was going to happen. It was so obvious to me that this was it. I was tearing my hair out. I was angry with myself for not doing more, not trying to get more attention to the issue."

Mr Hart believes John Kerry will be a better listener than George Bush. He believes the Democratic challenger will be prepared to reach out and build international alliances to deal with new and pressing problems, problems he believes the present structures and institutions are ill-equipped to deal with. But some of the measures he believes will need to be taken may be a step too far, even for Mr Kerry.

"[A Kerry administration would bring about the] restoration of internationalism to our foreign policy," he says. "Hopefully, with a new dimension which is the reformation of Cold War institutions for the revolutionary world of the 21st century. By that I mean going back to alliances but restructuring, reorganising those alliances for the new realities of the 21st century, for example the UN, World Bank, IMF, Nato. So it’s not just trying to go back to institutions of the 20th century but to make them relevant to the 21st."

Among the changes Mr Hart recommends is the establishment of an armed international force capable not just of peace-keeping but of peace-making. "If you look at the issues facing the world in the new century ... terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, global warming ... the one thing they have in common is that no one nation, including the US, can solve them by themselves. Therefore the reality forces you to become an internationalist but one which I would call a neo-internationalist."

Gary Warren Hartpence - he has changed his name - was born in Ottawa, Kansas, in 1936. After graduating from Yale University law school he went to work for the US Department of Justice then as a special assistant to the solicitor of the Department of the Interior. He spent two years there then left and worked in private practice in Denver, Colorado. From there he made his first bid for the Senate in 1974, winning on his first attempt. He was re-elected in 1980 and served until the end of his term in January 1987, by which time he was mounting his second bid for the presidency, having made an impressive run in 1984 but losing the nomination to Walter Mondale. During his second attempt, he was leading the pack until the story of his affair was broken by the Miami Herald, and the devastating photograph appeared on the front of the National Enquirer.

He dropped out of the race and returned six months later. But by that time the damage had been done: he failed to win any states.

During the spring of 2003, Mr Hart was considering what would have been his third run for the presidency and began holding consultations and putting out feelers, even setting up a well-received weblog in which he published many of his ideas. After five months of "testing the waters" he decided that, despite what some friends said, that he was unlikely to raise either sufficient funds or support for a serious run.

But he was able to spend time talking and sharing ideas with the man he is now hoping will win the White House. "Early on, when he had the luxury of thinking philosophically, we had discussions of this sort but in the heat of a campaign you don’t have the luxury of thinking this way. He is a friend;, I have known him a long time. We served together in the 1980s when he came to the Senate."

Mr Hart says he no longer has political ambitions. He says it matter-of-factly, as though that was something he used to do. A week tomorrow, he says he will be watching the events of the 2004 election unfold at a distance, on television at home.

THE CV

1936 Born 28 November in Kansas

1958 Graduated Bethany Nazarene College, Oklahoma

1961 Graduated Yale Divinity school, changed name from Hartpence

1964 Graduated Yale law school, joined Department of Justice as lawyer

1974 Elected senator for Colorado; re-elected 1980

1984 First run for presidency. Wins 25 states in the Democratic primary

1987 ’Monkey Business’ revelations ruin second run

2001 Hart-Rudman Commission reports in January on US terror threat

2003 Considers third run for presidency but decides against

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