He did that over and over and over again.” “And the next day, she would be hanging on her chance to talk to him, and he would walk right past her as if he’d never seen her before. “The wife of a very prominent Duke political scientist told me that he would just take every one of the college girls who volunteered to bed,” Sheehy says. The rumors had trailed him the first time he campaigned to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, and even stretched back to his time as the national campaign director for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid. Stories of Hart’s affairs had circulated long before his scandal broke in the spring of 1987 (those weeks are depicted in the new film The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as Hart). Yet according to Gail Sheehy, a journalist who covered Hart for Vanity Fair in the 1980s, the real story was bigger than just one affair-it was about Hart’s fundamental character, and whether a man like him should be president. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart withdrawing from the race after the scandal of an affair.
