Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  It’s not who you know. It’s who you get to know.

  President George Bush spent the afternoon of April 3, 1989, autographing baseballs. The fan joining him at the Orioles–Red Sox season opener, signing his name to the same balls, was Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The visitor kept telling everyone that Bush, the ’48 Yale captain, was “one of the world’s great baseball players.”

  How did George Bush win the Persian Gulf War? This is how. When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded defenseless Kuwait in 1990, friends like Mubarak and others whom Bush had spent years cultivating were money in Bush’s bank. These were people he could get on the phone to quickly talk turkey, close acquaintances he would galvanize into the greatest wartime coalition since World War II. It wasn’t our Patriot missiles that sent Hussein’s army racing back to Baghdad. It was the posse that George Bush built.

  Here’s how he did it:

  August 2: Iraq storms across the border into Kuwait. President Bush, networking in Aspen, Colorado, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, declares an Anglo-American alliance to throw back the invaders. Secretary of State Jim Baker, on a Siberian hunting trip with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, recruits Moscow to the Persian Gulf posse. Within hours the Big Three who beat Hitler are allied against Hussein.

  August 6: Canada’s Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is Bush’s White House guest. Asked where his country stands on the Iraqi invasion, Mulroney tells the press it’s “exactly” where Bush stands.

  August 7: King Fahd, whom Bush knew from his CIA days, says the United States can use Saudi Arabia as its prime military base against Saddam.

  August 10: Led by Hosni Mubarak, the Arab League votes economic sanctions against Iraq and dispatches a pan-Arab military force to join the Persian Gulf alliance. The next morning, Mubarak gets a smart thank-you call from his friend in the White House.

  This dashing, one-to-one global diplomacy was not a dance learned for the occasion. Getting to know such people as Mubarak and keeping up with them is what George Bush has spent his life doing. “He goes out and works his ass off,” aide Vic Gold once confessed to me, “networking and people-izing.”

  Press secretary Peter Teeley recalls trying to find Vice President Bush one White House afternoon in 1981. The boss, he was told, was over at the Vice President’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue “having coffee with the vice president of Egypt.” “Who’s he?” Teeley remembers asking in dismay. That fall, the death of the noble Anwar Sadat at the hands of terrorists delivered the answer. The unknown fellow to whom Bush had shown such personal respect was suddenly a very important U.S. ally.

  Sadly, Bush never forged the same close contact with the ally that every U.S. president needs to nurture most: the average American. Worse yet, his 1992 reelection challenger would be someone who excelled domestically at the same networking skills that Bush had displayed to such stunning effect globally.

  William Jefferson Clinton of Hot Springs, Arkansas, applied to a single college: Georgetown. It was not a secret passion for Thomistic philosophy or Catholic theology that led this Southern Baptist to choose a Jesuit university. What grabbed the young politico was the school’s geography. Georgetown is in Washington.

  Like Lyndon Johnson, who arrived in D.C. a third of a century earlier, Clinton wasted no time getting to know as many people as possible. He began running for freshman class president his first day on campus. He continued the same relentless networking at Oxford, at Yale law school, and as a volunteer in the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. All the while he recorded the names and small details about people that would later testify to the bond they had shared. By the time Clinton ran for U.S. Congress in 1974, he had a box of restaurant napkins and other wildly assorted scraps containing the names, telephone numbers, and addresses of classmates, professors and political activists, all stockpiled for this moment of opportunity and exploitation.

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  The charting of my own Washington career in politics and thereafter was, as you will see, more spontaneous.

  When I came to town in the early 1970s, Capitol Hill was little changed from what it had been a half century earlier. It was the same world of retail politics that young LBJ had discovered from his command post in the Dodge Hotel basement. I was also fully aware, of course, of the age-old aphorism “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” Like so many others before me, I took it not so much as a warning but as a motto and guide to action. If you don’t know someone, get to know him. That’s what campaigns are for.

  As I began knocking on Capitol Hill doors, I was hit by the relentless use of a word I had not heard since high-school civics: “patronage.”

  Every employee, from general counsel of the most prestigious committee to the guy driving the subway cars between the Senate office buildings and the Capitol, owed his job to a particular senator. Sons and daughters of friends back home operated elevators that had been automated for years. There was even a well-dressed young man who sat all day at the basement level of the Dirksen Senate Office Building; his job was to wait until a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body emerged from the elevator. He would then rise from his chair and ask whether the gentleman or lady intended taking the Capitol subway; if so, he would push a button on the wall behind him, alerting the subway car drivers. Then he would return to his chair.

  To get anywhere in this sprawling bureaucratic plantation you needed to have a “patron.” To find one, you needed to know which of its patrons, 100 senators and 435 members of the House, to cultivate and what to say to them. No patronage, no job.

  I myself came to the Hill with the general ambition of working my way up the political system. My immediate goal was to become a legislative assistant to a congressman or a senator, the job Ted Sorensen had held with John F. Kennedy. I wanted to end up where he had. With two hundred dollars left over from my Peace Corps “readjustment” check, I started to knock on doors.

  Since I had no connections, I made a list of Democratic congressmen and senators from the Northeast. My initial targets were those congressmen serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee. I figured they might go for my two years’ experience in third world development. Soon, after distributing fifty or so résumés along the halls of the Capitol office buildings, I began to sense what I was up against. I began looking for some small edge. Having gone to a Jesuit college in Massachusetts, I searched the Congressional Directory for members of a similar stripe. Exhausting the Democrats, I began looking to the Republicans. The important thing was to get a job. I was getting down to my last hundred dollars.

  Finally, I got wind that Representative James M. Collins, a redhot conservative Republican from Texas, was looking for a legislative assistant.

  Here was one liaison not destined to endure. From the moment I walked into the interview, it was culture shock. Attired in a Sun Belt suit, gleaming white shoes and the kind of haircut they give at barbershops with Old Glory in the window, Jim Collins discharged a lightning verdict: “I would say that people of my district, and I don’t mean any offense by this, would be put off by your way of speaking.” Then, turning to his aide: “Roy, wouldn’t you say that people from back home coming in this office would look at this young man and figure he brought back some idealistic notions with him from the Peace Corps?”

  Finally he asked, “Who do you know?”

  When I mumbled that I knew a guy working in a patronage elevator-operator job, he realized I had my work cut out for me. He then offered some advice that bolstered my growing beliefs about political retail.

  “You should try some of the Northeastern, big-city offices. I’ll bet there are a good number of congressmen who would like to have someone with your background working for them.”

  The decision behind us, Congressman Collins added some sage wisdom. “Politics,” he said, “is just like selling insurance door to door, which is what I used to do before getting into this business. Some people will go for you and some won’t. You kn
ock on a hundred doors, you get nine people to invite you back for a sales pitch. Of the nine, three will buy the policy. You only have to sell three people to do all right, but you’ll never find those three unless you knock on the hundred doors to start with.”

  Two weeks later, lightning struck. With eighty dollars left in the till, I went to work for Senator Frank E. Moss, Democrat of Utah. His top aide, Wayne Owens, who went on to become a member of Congress, had been an assistant to the late Robert F. Kennedy, and, sure enough, Wayne liked my background in the Peace Corps. Needing someone with a knowledge of economics, he offered a tryout. I was to take home with me a letter that the wife of the director of the Utah Symphony had written to the Senator asking about the tax situation of people working for nonprofit organizations.

  On Monday, after a feverish effort to secure the correct information from Internal Revenue, I was given my reward: I was to be a Capitol Hill policeman, with a daily watch running from 3 to 11 P.M. I was to spend my mornings and early afternoons working in Senator Moss’s office. “At least it will put groceries on the table,” said my new friend Wayne. He had a point. To win the race, you must first register as a starter.

  My education in politics and life had begun in earnest. I had learned my first lesson in political retail: the importance of one-to-one relationships.

  Through a quarter century in Washington, it has been my experience that most opportunities result from a single, identifiable human being.

  From 1981 through 1986, I enjoyed an exciting and highly visible stint as senior aide and spokesman for House Speaker Tip O’Neill. I would never have gotten that position, which brought me into the thick of top-level Washington, had I not (a) been one of President Jimmy Carter’s speechwriters and (b) worked with a fellow named Martin Franks. Marty had been research director for the Carter reelection campaign. When the Reagan crowd came to town, he became director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. One of the first things he did was ask his boss, Congressman Tony Coelho of California, to hire me as a “media consultant,” which really meant helping Speaker Tip O’Neill, the classic political retailer, fend off the attacks of the world’s greatest political wholesaler, Ronald Reagan. Within three months, O’Neill’s then top assistant went on to public relations, and the Speaker gave me his job. More than that, he gave me his trust. The next six years allowed me the kind of rough-and-tumble view of Washington politics you could never get with a political science Ph.D.

  The chain extends further. I had been named a presidential speechwriter in 1979 by Hendrik Hertzberg, to whom I had been introduced by a friend of mine from New York, Robert Schiffer, a successful investment banker and public servant, whom I had originally met while working in a campaign in Brooklyn six years earlier.

  I went to work in the Carter White House originally because a friend, Patricia Gwaltney, had been named to a top position at the Office of Management and Budget to work on Jimmy Carter’s pet project, government reorganization. I had met Pat as a fellow staffer on the Senate Budget Committee, to which I had been named by the committee chairman, Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, on the strength of a phone call from my earlier boss, Senator Frank Moss of Utah. “You want a good man? Here’s a good man.”

  In Washington, as in most places, building a career is the same as running a campaign. What distinguishes it from an election campaign is the size of the audience. Retail is the name of the game. To get ahead, there is usually one identifiable person who matters. Get that person’s vote and you’ve won the prize.

  This is how it works in politics and in most other places. If there is another way to get a job than getting someone to give it to you, I have yet to come across it. Just as the legendary Lyndon Johnson demonstrated to us in the john of the old Dodge Hotel, the trick is to find your target and zero in.

  It’s not who you know; it’s who you get to know. The applications of this rule are universal. I did not set off to work my way through the Washington political world by getting a job as a moonlighting Capitol cop under the patronage of a Mormon from Utah, but it worked out that way.

  The same ladder of personal relationships has permitted my rise in journalism. During the early 1980s, my old speechwriting boss Hendrik Hertzberg published several articles of mine in The New Republic. The very first elicited a telephone call from James Silberman, then of Simon & Schuster, who encouraged me to write a book. The result was Hardball.

  In 1987 another door opened. Visiting San Francisco for my sister-in-law’s wedding, I invited Larry Kramer, newly named editor of the San Francisco Examiner, to lunch. After a rousing meal, Kramer, whom I’d known from his Washington Post days, asked if I’d like to write a weekly political column for him. Later that summer, Kramer offered me the job of Washington bureau chief. Though it involved a huge salary cut from my CEO position with a Washington consulting company, I grabbed it—and never looked back.

  My trip to television took a similar trail. Rickie Gaffney, a family friend who once worked with my wife, booked me on ABC’s Good Morning America to talk about an article I’d written for The New Republic on the 1988 presidential candidates. When I showed that tape to CBS producer David Corvo, he introduced me as a regular commentator on This Morning and later on Front Page, a magazine show he produced for the Fox Network. Executive Producer Jack Riley and Charlie Gibson, whom I’d gotten to know when he was an ABC correspondent covering Capitol Hill, would later welcome me as a commentator for Good Morning America.

  I owe my inauguration as a full-time TV host to a similar story of friendships. In the early ’90s, author and fellow Holy Cross alumnus Joe McGinness was working on a book about Senator Edward Kennedy and wanted my thoughts from Tip O’Neill days.

  I had been enthralled by McGinness’s career ever since he was a twenty-five-year-old columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. McGinness reached heroic stature in my eyes with The Selling of the President, his knothole look at Richard Nixon’s cynical state-of-the-art TV campaign of 1968.

  Since we were both heading for Los Angeles the following week, we agreed to meet at a Beverly Hills grill. After dinner, McGinness said he was joining someone for drinks later, someone I might want very much to meet: Roger Ailes! For a moment I was taken aback. To those who’d worked on the Democratic side of the tracks, including me, Ailes was a figure of menace. Worse than electing Richard Nixon in 1968, this gifted media strategist had played even tougher hardball in shutting out Michael Dukakis’s presidential hopes twenty years later. He managed to morph a moderate Massachusetts governor into a serial left-winger who refused to salute the flag and spent his weekends letting murderers and rapists out of jail.

  Despite the partisan chasm in our backgrounds, Ailes and I hit it off instantly. As the years passed, I made a point to stop by Roger’s impressive New York consulting office whenever I was in town. We talked at length about the kind of fast-paced programming viewers might like. In 1994, when NBC named Ailes to run CNBC and craft a new talkshow network, I was on the phone with him asking for a show. In 1997, thanks to some brisk thinking by CNBC President Bill Bolster and Bruno Cohen, Hardball the TV show, was born. A year later, thanks to NBC News President Andy Lack and David Corvo, by now a top executive at NBC News, it went to an hour. Like LBJ, I’ve learned the power of personal relations to take you places. Today we’re producing Hardball at the very same Capitol Hill address where the old Dodge Hotel once stood.

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  “All Politics Is Local”

  Members are going to come in to see you with some matter that you will think is the craziest thing you ever heard. Just remember, it is very important to that member. Otherwise he would never have come in with it.

  —Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.

  It was my good fortune to be present in November 1989 as the Berlin Wall was being torn down. Anticipating this great event, I had spent the week before interviewing East Berliners. “What is freedom?” I asked a young man standing vigil in the shadow of Brand
enberg Gate. “Talking to you,” he said without pause. “Two weeks ago I couldn’t do it.”

  A thirty-eight-year-old physicist explained a more workaday source of East German indignation: the national currency. “You book a flight weeks in advance,” he told me, “then a West Berlin hitchhiker, someone who has not bothered to plan the trip, comes around at the last minute with deutsche marks, and you get kicked out of your seat.” He told me how an East German who was fortunate to reach a country that accepted his currency faced still more humiliation. “You go to a Budapest hotel and are told ‘No vacancies’; then you hear a West German couple bearing deutsche marks told there is a room after all.”

  East Berliners endured this same mortification on their own streets. They walked past state-owned hotels that did not accept “local” currency, that is. To get a room, or even buy a drink in the lobby, the customer had to pay in dollars or deutsche marks.

  It was this daily grinding, personal assault that helped kill Communism in Europe. I watched in wonder as the long grim line of East Germans passed through the wall like black-and-white movie characters into a Technicolor world, greeted by those offering free samples of food and other fare from rows of open-backed trucks. “This is where forty years of Stalinism has gotten them,” said my West German driver, “standing in line for biscuits.” What finally ripped open the Iron Curtain was not a grand, sudden revolutionary thrust at the Marxist-Leninist ideal but the local, day-to-day contempt for the Communist system, one that idealized the masses but ignored and humiliated the individual human being.

  One of the strengths of democracy is the benefits it bestows on those leaders who best address such daily, kitchen table concerns.

  Tip O’Neill, even his adversaries would admit, rarely lost touch with the tangible needs of his fellow Irish in Massachusetts who kept him in office. His long rise to one of the country’s most contested positions through a half century of successful elections was built on something hard and elemental. It is the nugget of wisdom prized by all great political figures: to understand and influence your fellow man, don’t focus too much on the grand, intangible issues; keep a tight watch on what matters most to him or her personally.