American politician, a handsome and charismatic presidential candidate whose campaign lasted 26 days after he withdrew over his alleged affair with actress-model Donna Rice.
Raised on the Midwestern prairie, Hart was the only son of a gas deliveryman turned tractor and car salesman and a devoutly religious homemaker who wanted her gifted son to be a minister for the Church of the Nazarene. Mother Nina Hartpence permitted no drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no movies, no-make up and no jewelry and taught her son to study the Bible as much as he did his schoolbooks.
Preaching from the pulpit at 14, Hart found his niche and, after high school graduation, enrolled at the Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma where he became hooked on Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish religious thinker, and Russian novels. After earning his B.A. in 1958, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale Divinity School, earning a B.D. in 1961. He legally changed his name for political convenience that same year. As a member of the audience listening to Senator John F. Kennedy give a speech in the early ‘60s, a fuse was lit under Hart to broaden his definition of the ministry to include political action.
After graduating from Yale Law School with a J.D. in 1968, Hart moved to Denver, Colorado in 1969 where he set up a law practice but politics soon became his first priority. Within a year he was managing the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern.
In 1973 he was elected to the Senate and was re-elected in 1980. His platform was that of a neo-liberal seeking to combine social and environmental reform with enhanced economic efficiency. A workaholic, Hart maintained an ambivalent profile in office, fibbing about his age, creating a career in the navy, disengaging himself at critical times, alternately aloof and disdainful then biting and sarcastic. “I never reveal myself, or who I really am,” he said.
Six years later he became a front-runner for the Democratic nominee for the presidency, yet his 26 day campaign ended abruptly on 27 February 1987, five days after headlines alleged his affair with actress and model Donna Rice.Shocked, dismayed and in denial of adultery, Hart withdrew from the race as he refused to subject his family to further humiliation. He fumed that “We’re all going to have to seriously question the system for selecting our national leaders, that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted.”
Hart wrote several books including “The Double Man,” 1985 with Senator William S. Cohen, “The Strategies of Zeus,” 1987 and “A New Democracy, a Democratic View For The 1980s and Beyond” in 1983. He faded from the political arena in the late ‘80s to focus on his work in international law.
Hart’s writing career blossomed. In early 2000 he revealed that he is the thriller writer John Blackthorn, the author of the popular “Sins of the Fathers,” 1999 as well as the just-released “I, Che.”
Hart married Oleta “Lee” Ludwig in 1958. They separated in 1979 for three months and again in 1981 due to Hart’s philandering, but reconciled in mid 1982. They have two children, Andrea and John.
Link to Wikipedia biography