The man who came out of nowhere

Press, 1 March 1984, Page 11

The man who came out of nowhere

NZPA-AP New York

Mr Hart’s success in selling his “new generation” appeal to New Hampshire voters is only the latest case of the quiet, lanky figure riding in from nowhere and staking a claim before anyone noticed.

He was an unknown, 34-year-old Denver lawyer a dozen years ago when he volunteered to work for Senator George McGovern, and impressed the candidate enough with his work in the American west to be tapped to manage Mr McGovern’s national campaign, which methodically rose from nowhere to win the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination.

When the General Election was over, Mr McGovern had suffered the worst political defeat in the history of United States Presidential campaigns, but Mr Hart emerged a winner — a young, astute political planner with national name

recognition. Barely two years later, in his first try for public office, he defeated a Republican, Peter Dominick, to win election to the United States Senate from his adopted state of Colorado.

A college chum, Howard Oliver, remembers Mr Hart — his name was Gary Hartpence then — as "the kind of guy who knew where he was going and knew just how he was going to get there.” Yet it was not until he moved from Bethany Nazzarene College, a strict Christian school nestled on the Oklahoma prairie, to Yale Divinity School that his political interests were obvious.

“By the time we got to Divinity School, my interests principally were theological and philosophical,” recalls Tom Boyd. “But Gary wanted to read theology and philosophy — and ‘Time’ magazine, too. He was interested in politics

from the early days there.”

That was when John Kennedy was making his own “new generation” appeal and Mr Hart clearly was caught up in it. “He became almost enamoured of Kennedy,” Mr Boyd recalled in a recent interview. “I think that’s what catapulted him into law, the promise of the Kennedy era.” During that time the Hartpence family shortened its name to Hqrt — some say at the instigln tion of Gary. After graduating with a law degree from Yale in 1964 and a stint working for the United States Government in Washington, Mr Hart moved his wife, Lee, and two children to Denver and joined a Jaw firm. He made no particular splash in Colorado politics during the next eight years, but when Mr McGovern brought forth his antiVietnam campaign Mr Hart responded, and soon hit a political stride that has yet to falter.