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On nuclear arms control, Hart has well-informed, unhysterical ideas about strategic doctrine. He endorses the development of small, mobile missiles with single nuclear warheads as cheaper and more stabilizing than the mammoth, multiwarhead MX. He favors a freeze on nuclear weapons, but only halfheartedly.
"The freeze is a symbol," he has complained, "not policy." His newish wrinkle on arms control: a joint superpower "communication center" in a neutral country, staffed by U.S. and Soviet officers who would make sure both sides correctly understood each other's military moves.
Hart's "industrial policy" is more nebulous. Basically, he would coordinate disparate Government policies (banking regulations, tax laws, research-and-development funding) according to one grand strategy. Some of his specific economic plans are reasonable enough, but others seem almost too clever, as if the candidate acquired ideas wholesale from a think-tank catalogue. Hart recommends bold agreements between labor, industrial management and Wall Street. Fine, but he practically ignores the political and bureaucratic impediments. It might be a good idea to set up a presidential Council on Emerging Issues to address long-term economic strategy, but Hart's high hopes for such a council—he thinks it could help guide capital into high-growth industries—seem misplaced.
Yet he can be clear-sighted in the face of political pressure. He opposes protectionist measures like the pending "domestic content" bill, supported by Mondale and organized labor, that would effectively require Japanese auto companies to manufacture cars in the U.S., creating jobs but raising prices.
In his personal life as in his politics, the past recedes almost to the vanishing point. He was born in Ottawa, Kans., in 1936. Some years ago, curiously, his official biographies began listing the year as 1937; when reporters pointed out the discrepancy, Hart restored the lost year. "I never felt it was an obligation of mine," he says, "to go out and correct it." More curiously still, he was christened Gary Hartpence; in the late 1950s the family dropped the second syllable of its surname. Hart, he says, had been the original, 18th century family name. His parents "decided to go ahead and do it. Lee [his wife] and I agreed."
Hart's father was a farm-equipment salesman, his mother a Sunday-school teacher. At age ten, says Uncle Ralph Hartpence, "Gary could talk to adults and make sense." His boyhood was wholesome and placid: small-town Kansas just before rock 'n' roll, lazy evening drives up and down Main Street, hanging out at the Dairy Queen with Best Pal Duane Hoobing or reading at the library. "He was good-looking and could have been very popular," says Hoobing, who teaches citizenship at a junior high school not far from Ottawa, "but he wouldn't pursue popularity for its own sake." He was clearly in hot pursuit of something. He tried four sports, acted, edited the paper, played drums in the band and participated in student politics. "Gary was always worried that at the end of his life he might not have made a contribution," Hoobing says.
"There was a fire burning inside him."