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

  I want to thank my three aunts, Eleanor, Agnes, and Catherine, and my godmother, Toby, for praying and rooting for me since I was born.

  I must also acknowledge the people who opened the doors for me over the years: Congressman Wayne Owens and Senator Frank Moss of Utah, who welcomed me to Capitol Hill; Bob Schiffer and Richard Sorenson, who ran my congressional campaign in 1974; Florida Speaker of the House Richard Pettigrew, who brought me aboard to work for President Carter; Hendrik Hertzberg, who promoted me to presidential speechwriter; Martin Franks and Congressman Tony Coelho, who introduced me to Speaker O’Neill; Larry Kramer, who hired me for the San Francisco Examiner, and Philip Bronstein, who made me a national columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; David Corvo, who hired me as a commentator for CBS This Morning; John McLaughlin, who invited me so many times to the McLaughlin Group; Jack Reilly, who made me a very frequent contributor to Good Morning America; and Roger Ailes, who gave me a show to host on CNBC.

  For the success of Hardball, I have to thank Robert Wright, Andrew Lack, Erik Sorenson, Rob Yarin, Adam Levine, Neal Shapiro, and especially the executive producer, Phillip Griffin.

  For her diligence in organizing this book I want to thank Meaghan Nolan. For the force and clarity of her editing, I want to thank Michele Slung. For their philosophical insights, I want to thank Noah Oppenheim and Mark Johnson. Thanks to Jill Eynon, my dedicated assistant; to Marc Abernathy and Professor Kenneth Jowitt; to Bill Hatfield, Elizabeth Maloy, and Peter Hamby. And to Elaine Mintzer for her timely help with the manuscript.

  Once again I want to thank my editor, Dominick Anfuso, for his courage, enthusiasm, and friendship, and my literary agent and champion, Raphael Sagalyn, who has been my strong partner from the beginning. And a proud salute to my friends at Simon & Schuster and The Free Press: Martha Levin, Carolyn Reidy, Kristen McGuiness, and Michele Jacob.

  Most of all, I want to thank my queen, Kathleen, for her love and two decades of editorial brilliance. And Michael, Thomas, and Caroline, for putting up with Dad while he figured out what he really thinks.

  THIS COUNTRY

  I liked the way President Harry Truman talked about us. He called us “this country.” He didn’t mean the government in Washington, but the American people in those splendid moments when we feel and act as one.

  Some of those moments I have witnessed firsthand. I was a college freshman when Jack Kennedy was shot, in remote Africa when Americans crossed the star-filled night on their way to the moon. I shared this country’s anger at Vietnam, Watergate, and the petty indignities of the Clinton era.

  Through it all, I have watched the American spirit not only survive but prevail. Where politicians have failed us, the country itself has always risen to the challenge, quickened at each new assault on its morale.

  I write these words in the days just after the World Trade Center horror. I have just heard President Bush say at the National Cathedral that a country, like a person, “discovers” itself in adversity.

  I expect we will discover the country of our birth. That first flag of the American revolution showed a coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”

  Japan learned that lesson in 1945, as did Adolf Hitler, as will those who attacked our homeland in 2001. This country is an optimistic, upbeat land. For two hundred years we have shown little ambition for foreign conquest, total interest in building and protecting our society here at home.

  In the days following September 11, 2001, the optimism of two hundred years began shining through the wreckage. Rejecting the role of the victim, we gave blood, flaunted the flag, rooted for our new president to do what was right.

  INTRODUCTION

  Why I Interrupt

  The big complaint I get about Hardball is that I interrupt the guests too much. I hear it from those on the left and those on the right. They all say the same thing, and I’ve heard it enough to get the message.

  Still, when people tell me to shut up and stop interrupting—“What is it, an ego thing with you?” one guy wrote me—I like to remind myself of what my hero Winston Churchill once said about this shared habit of ours: “All the years that I have been in the House of Commons I have always said to myself one thing: Do Not Interrupt! and I have never been able to keep that resolution.”

  The truth is, I can come up with some explanations for this oft-cited “bad” habit of mine. There’s the TV excuse: I refuse to let plodding guests kill my Hardball pace. I like it fast. So does the audience—and probably even, secretly, some of those who complain do too. Or there’s the professional rationale: I’m not in the PR business. I’m a journalist. Therefore, I refuse to let politicians use my show to recite their staff-scripted talking points.

  I could also offer the “I-grew-up-in-a-big-family” dodge. With five brothers around the table, we had to eat fast to get second helpings—and talk fast in order to get anyone to listen.

  But are you ready for the real reason I interrupt so much? I can’t help myself.

  It’s like that Phil Ochs song from the sixties, when he declared, “I’ve got something to say and I’m gonna say it now.” That’s me. A guest will say something, and suddenly I’ll be reminded of something I’m dying to say.

  This book is a chance to finally get it out, to tell you what I really think.

  I understand the risks. I know a lot of people have a lot of theories about my politics and where I really stand. They seem to need to know, with all the philosophical ends neatly tied up, whether I’m a liberal or a conservative.

  Well, with this book I’m forfeiting my Miranda rights: Everything I say will be used against me.

  I certainly don’t expect or want you to like everything I confess here. Like Bogie’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, “a little trouble I don’t mind.” And I’m hoping the act of exhausting my passions in print may release some of the pressure I feel to interrupt while on the air. Maybe it will stop me from repeating the same old brilliant observations that my queen, Kathleen, has been listening to at dinnertime for two decades and restore novelty to my dinnertime diatribes.

  What you’ll read here is what you’d get if you were sitting across the table from me. I have spent much of my life on a political odyssey. Born to a Republican family, I cried with Richard Nixon and was attracted to the libertarianism of Barry Goldwater. Then came Dallas, civil rights, Vietnam, the draft, and “the sixties.” I even found a new Democratic hero, Eugene McCarthy, and fell into the grip of a wild new adventure, Africa.

  I have many stories to tell. Like others of my post–WW II generation, I spent my early school years hiding under my desk counting the fifteen minutes it would take for the A-bombs to drop, an experience that may or may not explain my premature interest in politics. I spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the remote southern African kingdom of Swaziland. Back home I got my first job in politics, guarding the Pentagon Papers and other assignments with the U.S. Capitol Police. I worked for a couple of U.S. senators and ran for the U.S. Congress as a maverick Democrat against Philadelphia’s old political machine. I served in the White House for four years with Jimmy Carter, including two years writing his speeches. I spent six years as a top aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill. I covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Iron Curtain, and the first all-races election in South Africa.

  I now spend five nights a week talking to some of the most powerful people in this country, and many of the most fascinating as well. Whoever they are, it’s my job to get them to come clean. I want to know what they really think.

  But if you’ve ever watched me and wondered what I really think—you’re about to find out.

  CHAPTER ONE

  An American Attitude

  It was October 18, 2000, the morning after the third and final Gore-Bush debate. I was invited on the Today show to offer my political analysis of who had won. Gore had already declared his previous night’s performance to be his “Goldilocks” debate: “The first was too hot. The second was too c
ool. The third was just right.” And his fairy-tale verdict had gone unchallenged by the media. Until Matt Lauer asked me what I thought.

  Here’s what I said: “I think Gore was more aggressive last night, and if you look at the polls, he won on a couple of points. But clearly the interesting question again is, Who do you like? Bush won.”

  Matt Lauer leaped on me like a cougar from a tree: “Let’s be honest here, you’ve been saying that all along. Al Gore irritates you.”

  Me: “The public has been saying that too.”

  Matt (a second time): “Al Gore irritates you.”

  Me (again): “The public has been saying that too.”

  Matt: “But you just don’t like Al Gore’s style, and it’s very hard for you to look past it.”

  Me: “No, no. I think the interesting thing is—I’ve been studying this election for about a year now—the economy should get the incumbent elected. Gore should win. The issue agenda—prescription drugs and those kinds of issues—are all working for the incumbent administration. So what’s stopping the American people? There’s some tissue rejection there about Al Gore, something that stops them from saying, ‘Okay . . . Gore.’ I think the American people have a problem with him.”

  Matt: “So let’s be clear. . .”

  Me: “They may resolve it. They may say he’s better than the other guy.”

  Matt: “But the American people also haven’t taken to George W. Bush.”

  Me: “That’s true, because he’s not prepared to be president in many ways.”

  Matt: “Well, that’s a pretty bold statement you just said.”

  Me: “I think there’s a problem between a guy they know who loves government too much and a guy who doesn’t know government too much. And they have to choose between two very incomplete candidates. This is not the heavyweight championship here.”

  Matt Lauer’s resistance to my verdict confirmed what I had suspected walking into 30 Rockefeller Plaza that morning. The media cognoscenti had made their call: Gore had not only won, he had cleaned Bush’s clock! For Matt certainly was not alone in his thinking. The New York Times ruled that the Democratic candidate “dominated” the debate. Its lead editorial called Gore the “aggressor and pace-setter” of the evening who “seemed to throw Mr. Bush off balance.” The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, the top TV columnist in the country, called it Gore’s “best performance.” Times columnist William Safire, a conservative, agreed that Gore “came on strong.” Soon, the internal buzz at NBC was that I had been expressing opinion rather than analysis. The implication was that I was being biased. How could anyone who had declared that George W. had “won” that debate not be?

  I’ll tell you how.

  Right after Gore’s “Goldilocks” performance, pollster Frank Luntz, who MSNBC had hired for the 2000 election, met with thirty-six “undecided” voters. Thirty of those thirty-six “liked” George Bush better than his rival. A Gallup Poll taken immediately after the debate found that slightly more people (46 to 44 percent) judged Gore the better debater. But, by 60 to 31 percent—two to one!—they said Bush was more “likeable.” By the same two-to-one ratio, the public judged Gore to be the “unfair” debater. Bush also was viewed as more “believable” than Gore.

  Watching the night before, I, too, thought Gore had turned in his best performance. But after seeing the reactions from the Luntz focus group and the Gallup Poll I realized that Gore’s reflexive arrogance, which I had witnessed personally so many times before, was now, after three primetime exposures, turning off the heartland voter. Matt was right. Gore’s negative campaigning had long irritated me. The polling now told me it was also irritating much of the country.

  The reason Bush is the president today is simple: When millions of voters saw Al Gore campaigning and in the debates, they took away an impression of negativity and condescension. They decided that they would have to go with the unproven, as Gore would say, “risky” alternative. The debate audience preferred the notion of having a guy in the White House who often spoke English as if it were his second language to one who spoke to us as if English were our second language.

  In turned out that George W. Bush “won” that debate even more decisively than, forty years earlier, Jack Kennedy had beaten Richard Nixon. The proof was in the polls. Gore led Bush by 47 to 44 percent in the Gallup during the thirty days prior to the debates. He fell behind Bush 47 to 43 percent in the fifteen days after.

  The Gore people had thought their man’s performance in the third debate would be the deal maker. With the strong economy at his back, the Democratic vice-president would overtake the rival he and much of the media dismissed as a know-nothing frat boy and go on to score a clear-cut victory in November.

  They were wrong. The candidate with the undeniable bragging rights on the economic front tripped over his own I-know-best personality. The debates for which Gore had lusted ended up giving Bush the momentum. Had the Texas governor not suffered a pair of postdebate stumbles—an out-of-the-past leak of an old driving-under-the-influence charge and a lamebrained claim that Social Security was not a federal program—he would have ridden that Big Mo right through to election day.

  Instead, Bush lost the popular vote, needed the intervention of the Supreme Court to win in the Electoral College, and inherited a country that would remain as politically divided as it had shown itself that first week in November 2000.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: Al Gore lost one presidential election and may well lose another because of who he is and who we are. I think there’s such a thing as an American attitude. It manifests itself in the candidates we like and in those we don’t. Just as a human being possesses a soul as well as a body, this country has a spirit as well as a geography. You’re ill-advised to tread on us, our self-respect, or our Social Security.

  Above all, we Americans are an optimistic, democratic people. We will forgive just about everything from our politicians but condescension. Al Gore did worse than lie to us. He talked down to us.

  He’s not alone. The Democrats don’t have a monopoly on this crap. What about Dick Cheney cooking up energy policy in secret meetings with the oil boys? Locked doors, a bunch of policy wonks around the table, each pushing his agenda and ideology. Sounds like Hillary’s recipe for health care. I don’t like watching either party playing Father—or Mother—knows best.

  This political assessment wasn’t cultivated in a petri dish. It comes from thirty years that were roughly divided between working for politicians and covering them. Even as an insider I kept an outsider’s attitude. When I wrote speeches for President Carter, my drinking buddies taunted me during the yearlong humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. When I worked as right-hand man for Tip O’Neill, I never forgot how much I had liked Ronald Reagan all those years on GE Theater. But before all that, I grew up in the America I talk and write about—in a family that, to use a discarded Clinton line, worked hard and played by the rules. Dad was intensely self-reliant. Mom was just as intensely suspicious of the country’s cultural elite. My family background is as much a part of my political commentary as what I see in Washington.

  It’s what I know of this real America that fills these pages. The big fights today are not about economics—we pretty much agree on things like balanced budgets and free trade. It’s not even about the usual laundry list of issues the politicians mentally—or literally—pull out of their pockets when asked what the next election is all about.

  It’s about this attitude of ours.

  When you think about it, we Americans are different. That word “freedom” isn’t just in our documents; it’s in our cowboy souls. We are the most freedom-loving people in the world. We’d rather have guns than live under a government powerful enough to collect them all. We regularly say “no” to a British-style national health system, fearing it means a regime of long lines to see strange doctors. Many people with grave concerns about abortion would rather see women individually decide the matter rather than live under a gover
nment repressive enough to deny them the freedom to decide.

  Nor are we Americans as cynical as some older cultures. After more than two hundred years of existence in a complex world, we continue to see life as a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. That’s one reason Europeans love looking down on us. Why can’t we be more sophisticated, more worldly? Yet it is that very good guys versus bad guys mindset of ours that the same Europeans call upon when they face a real bad guy like Hitler or Stalin or Milosevic.

  I know that mindset firsthand. My first job when I came to Washington three decades ago was as a .38-caliber-toting officer of the U.S. Capitol Police. It was in the old days when senators and members of Congress used the police jobs as patronage. Some of the slots went to sons of political pals so that these fortunate fellows could go to law school in D.C. My 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. shift was payback for working in a U.S. senator’s office writing speeches and answering letters during the daytime.

  But the core of the force was made up of lifers from the military, enlisted guys who’d done long hitches with the Army, Navy, or Marines.

  I’d spend hours hanging out with these guys. My favorite was Sergeant Leroy Taylor. He was one of those citizen-philosophers who instinctively grasped this country’s real politics, the kind that people live and are ready to die for. He and the other country boys would talk about how they would do anything to defend the Capitol. More than some of the big-shot elected officials, my colleagues in blue revered the place and what it meant to the republic. It wasn’t about them, but about something much bigger.

  I will never forget what Leroy once told me and the wisdom it contained: “The little man loves his country, Chris, because it’s all he’s got.”