The Gary Hart Set-Up Revisited:

Vindication

By: R. Roy Blake

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In 1992, two freelance Colorado based investigative reporters, co-authored an almost universally ignored book entitled The Gary Hart Set-up, based on the curious circumstances, abundant motives and odd conduct of the principals involved in derailing the Hart campaign in 1987. Yet, without a smoking gun those of us who believed that Hart had been, at least partly set up in 1987, had to put up with a good deal of ridicule. In November of 2018, however, back into the public consciousness. The events were the release of a movie based on Hart’s Presidential run in the 1987 starring Hugh Jackman, called The Frontrunner. The other was the publication of an article entitled “Was Gary Hart Set-up?” in the November 2018 issue of the Atlantic which asked “What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative and 1988 Bush Campaign manager, Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?” Realizing that the Atwater deathbed confession might well be about as close to a smoking gun as would ever be the case, questions remained. The biggest problem is that at the time of the confession, Atwater was in such a weakened state that he could only speak for five minutes. Five minutes was likely far too little time to spell out all of the details. Unknown and now perhaps unknowable is which of the principal actors, Donna Rice, Lynn Armandt, William Broadhurst, the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, CBS, etc., were deliberate co-conspirators with Atwater, and which were not. Were there other co-conspirators that are less well known such as Donnie Soffer, Don Aronow, Ben Kramer, Meyer Lansky, Oliver North or others. Is there any connection of the anti-Hart conspiracy to other alleged conspiracies and conspiracy theories? After all Hart, a critic of the Warren Commission, had pledged that, upon his election as President he would re-open the investigation into the JFK assassination. Hart was also an opponent of the Contra war in Central America, a war that was at least partially funded with drugs, and a vocal member of the Senate’s Church Committee that had called the CIA on the carpet for a variety of offenses including foreign assassinations and drug and mind control experimentation on US civilians. What is much more certain is that Hart had made powerful enemies and stood in the way of powerful ambition. The rest is history.