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Gary Hart belongs in that somewhat mysterious recent tradition. He has often, consciously or unconsciously, tried to imitate John Kennedy. He has brushed back his hair with the same gesture that Kennedy used, walked with the same gait, held his hand in his jacket pocket with the thumb sticking out, just as J.F.K. did. He has a penchant for some of the high destinarian rhetoric that Kennedy used, the appeal to a visionary new generation. Hart kept using the first person plural in his press releases. His campaign sounded a note of the bogusly grand. Hart is Kennedy typed on the eighth carbon.
Womanizing was a side of Kennedy too: Did Hart take emulation that far? Yet one could also detect in Hart some unbidden traces of Richard Nixon. Some Americans sensed a troubling vibration in Gary Hart that was difficult to describe, but that rang wrong. Hart may be right to be bitter about the amateur psychiatry that has been practiced upon him. Still, Americans have fairly sensitive instruments of perception. Hart said last week that it was issues that gave him his "link" to the American people, a strange conceptual way of putting it -- as if he knew that he had failed to make the real, the visceral connection. Something got in the way, some opacity, or Hart's elaborate system of internal deflectors.
It was a buried anger, maybe, that ricocheted around in Hart, a dybbuk of compulsion. One sensed in him a territory of ignorance about himself. On the evidence of recent weeks, Hart has moments when he is overtaken by a denial of reality, a trait that might be dangerous in the Oval Office.
Nixon always brusquely refused to discuss himself, his character, his emotions. In a 1983 interview, his onetime aide Frank Gannon asked Nixon, "Do you consider that you've had a good life?" Nixon replied, "I don't get into that kind of crap." Gary Hart doesn't either.
What troubled one about Hart's behavior had nothing to do with sex, really. It was something deeper. Powers of light and of darkness are at war in everyone's soul. Life struggles with death. Hart dramatized the conflict more vividly and, because of his line of work, more visibly, than most of us do. Part of him aspired to great achievement, to ideals. But a self-subverting demon was furiously at work as well. A pre-emptive annihilation of self: Hart describes what a great President he would have been, and then -- poof! -- is gone. The fantasy makes reality in the air, and then annihilates it. Hart as Prospero.
If Hart wanted so much to create a new America, to enact a new vision, why ^ did he roll grenades under his own tent flaps? There is something in his Arctic eyes, his rhetoric, that gives a chill.
In November of 1962, after losing the California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown, Nixon held a "last press conference" in which he told reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." Last week, with infinitely more grace, Gary Hart told reporters basically the same thing. Of course, one must remember that six years after the last press conference, Richard Nixon was sworn in as President of the U.S.