page_title: Gary Hart
section_title: United States Naval Reserve service
hierarchical_section_title: Gary Hart / United States Naval Reserve service
caption_attribution_description: English: Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) accepts his commissioning papers from Secretary of the Navy Edward Hidalgo, left, after taking the oath of office as a commissioned officer in the US Naval Reserve.
context_page_description: Gary Warren Hart is an American politician, diplomat, and lawyer. He was the front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination until he dropped out over allegations of an extramarital affair. He represented Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987.
  Born in Ottawa, Kansas, he pursued a legal career in Denver, Colorado, after graduating from Yale Law School. He managed Senator George McGovern's successful campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination and McGovern's unsuccessful general election campaign against President Richard Nixon. Hart defeated incumbent Republican Senator Peter Dominick in Colorado's 1974 Senate election. In the Senate, he served on the Church Committee and led the Senate investigation regarding the Three Mile Island accident. After narrowly winning re-election in 1980, he sponsored the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, becoming known as an "Atari Democrat".
  Hart sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, narrowly losing the race to former Vice President Walter Mondale. Hart declined to seek re-election to the Senate in 1986 and sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988.
context_section_description: Citing the increasing likelihood of an armed conflict in the Persian Gulf and his reluctance to "stay in the Senate and authorize and appropriate funds to send young men like my son off to fight that war," Hart applied for a commission in the United States Naval Reserve's Standby Reserve Active Status List program in the late 1970s. He was over the statutory age limit of 38 and had not amassed any prior military experience; moreover, in contrast to his stated rationale, this category "would not be called up immediately in the event of a mobilization." By mutual agreement, Hart and United States Secretary of the Navy Edward Hidalgo deferred the consideration of the request until the aftermath of the 1980 election. His application contained an incorrect birth date (November 28, 1937) that he had used inconsistently on official documents for 15 years.
  Following his reelection, Hart received an age waiver from Hidalgo and was commissioned as a lieutenant (junior grade) in the Judge Advocate General's Corps on December 4, 1980. The commission carried "no pay or allowances." Although Hart sought to be commissioned in the grades of 
  lieutenant commander or 
  commander (in keeping with contemporaries in Congress who had served in World War II and the Korean War), Navy Judge Advocate General John S. Jenkins advised Hidalgo to commission Hart at the lower rank because he "didn't bring to the program anything that was so unusual that we could recommend appointment at a higher grade." However, then-U.S. Navy Senate liaison officer John McCain (who cultivated a close friendship with Hart in that capacity, presaging his own political career) maintained in a 1984 interview that a field officer appointment would have been "appropriate." Following ten days of active duty with the United States Sixth Fleet in August 1981, Hart was promoted to 
  lieutenant on January 1, 1982. Pundits such as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak suggested that Hart's appointment was a cynical political maneuver designed to "clear the biographical decks" for the 1984 presidential election in an era when military service was perceived as a tacit prerequisite for the presidency.
  In a 2007 commentary for HuffPost, Hart asserted that his desire to "understand and communicate better with our troops" was the primary motivation for his appointment. Although he "did not routinely fulfill [his] reserve duties" and "chose not to feature this experience in subsequent campaigns," he maintained that his service "helped [him] enormously in appreciating what our military does to make us more secure."
caption: Hart accepting his US Naval Reserve commission from Secretary of the Navy Edward Hidalgo, December 4, 1980
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