Word: stakeout
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ostensibly for Hart, Broadhurst and the two women to have dinner together on Friday and Saturday nights. Even though Lee Hart was home in Colorado, the exhausted candidate had flown from Iowa to Washington for the weekend. But in making his social plans, Hart never figured on a stakeout by the Miami Herald...
...hindsight it is hard to believe that a lustrous political career could hang on such prosaic details. Moreover, the Herald's stakeout would have been infinitely more difficult at a later stage in the campaign, when Hart would have warranted Secret Service protection. In short, for want of a lookout a presidential campaign was lost. It ultimately made little difference that Hart told Herald reporters Saturday night, "I have no personal relationship with the woman you are following...
Most of the debate focused on the Miami Herald, which had set Hart's downfall in motion by conducting a 24-hour weekend stakeout of his Washington town house and finding him in the company of an attractive young woman. In his first public response to the Herald's charges -- delivered, appropriately enough, before a convention of newspaper publishers meeting in New York City -- Hart blasted the paper's surveillance and said it raised "searching questions" about journalistic responsibility. Much of the public seemed to agree. The Miami Herald's own opinion survey showed that 63% of its readers felt...
Even so, the Herald's decision to conduct a stakeout of Gary Hart's home marked something of a watershed for political journalism. The investigation began with two anonymous telephone calls to Political Editor Tom Fiedler from a woman who claimed that a friend of hers was having an affair with Hart. She cited several long-distance phone calls between Hart and the woman (whom she described but refused to identify), recounted a yacht trip they had taken together, and said the couple planned to rendezvous at Hart's Washington town house that Friday. Fiedler was skeptical. But when several...
...stakeout was not airtight; no one was on the scene between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., and the town house back door was not watched between midnight and 5 a.m., leaving the possibility that someone could have left the house unnoticed. The newspaper's initial story on Sunday failed to mention these lapses, but they were laid out in full in a follow-up story Monday...