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

  By his timidity, which he undoubtedly told himself was loyalty, Al Gore ended up looking to voters like the Clinton era’s bathtub ring. Americans want more of their leaders than that.

  There is nothing final in my assessment of Al Gore, and I think he will one day build for himself a more defensible legacy. I cite as Exhibit A his stunning concession speech. It was clearly the finest thing said by anyone in recent American history. What distinguished it was its target audience. For the first time in the campaign, perhaps in his life, Gore rejected the kind of ethnic and pressure group pandering that had been his trademark. He spoke instead to the American people as a whole. In the wake of the five-to-four Supreme Court ruling that stopped the hand recounts in Florida, his message was unity, not division.

  “Not under man but under God and law,” he said.

  That’s the ruling principle of American freedom, the source of our democratic liberties. I tried to make it my guide throughout this contest as it has guided America’s deliberations of all the complex issues of the past five weeks. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the Court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.

  Gore’s words carried a sound and sense similar to perhaps the greatest American speech ever, Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Referring to the Civil War, Lincoln said, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the country survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. Then the war came.” Gore offered some of the same fatalism speaking of his own loss to Bush: “Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet, it came, and now has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy.”

  Having risen through the country’s civil institutions—the House, the Senate, the vice-presidency—Gore was renewing his oath to support them. I’ll say it again: It is the best thing Al Gore has ever said, the best thing anyone has said in this contentious society for a long, long while. What would have happened had he discovered the same strength and honor during the Clinton mess? Who knows what will happen if Gore returns to the political arena speaking with as much nobility and selflessness as he did when he left.

  I predict that when Al Gore runs again for president, and he certainly will, he is destined to command a slew of potent advantages:

  1. In 2000, he won more votes than any Democrat in history, with fifty-one million votes to Clinton’s forty-seven million in 1996.

  2. His victory in the popular vote gives him a tremendous claim on his party for another chance to win in the Electoral College.

  3. The most diehard Democrats, and this includes many African-American voters, would love to see the man they think was robbed last time take it away from Bush the next time.

  4. Gore will be the only Democrat in the field with the experience of having run a general election campaign for president.

  5. Gore knows, better than anyone on earth, which states he lost that he could win next time with a new, improved strategy. Put Tennessee at the top of the list.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: In the end, Al Gore will run for president again because it is the one, the only, thing he wants to do in life. He has not just the strong desire to run for president, but also, somewhere down deep in him, the necessary reverence for the office itself. If there’s one thing worse than spending the rest of his life thinking and rethinking how he could have won in 2000, it’s spending the rest of his life knowing that he failed to try again. Even if he runs and loses, he will leave the stage as a gutsy warrior. Moreover, Eugene McCarthy, as the perennial candidate himself, once told me, “It’s easier to run for president than to stop.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  God and Country

  I decline utterly to be impartial between the Fire Brigade and the fire.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  When people ask me how long it takes to prepare for Hardball each day, I recite my regular regimen. Kathy and I get up, we see the kids off to school, read The Washington Post and The New York Times, then I have my regular 8:45 phone chat with executive producer Phil Griffin. I could go on like this, recounting my daily routine, but if you want the honest answer to how much time it takes to prepare for Hardball, it’s half a century.

  I know that because, while I can’t always whip off the list of guests I had on Hardball last night, I can remember certain things that happened to me fifty years ago. One was a dream I had. It was in Cinemascope. I was leading a cavalry charge across the plains of Russia, leading America to victory over the Communist enemy.

  My other memory is of an argument I had with my first-grade teacher.

  “Master Matthews!”

  There were one hundred kids in our class at the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary school in Philadelphia, and Sister Mildred was looking unmistakably at the kid sitting in the far-left corner of the back row—me. Her long wooden pointer just as unmistakably tapped at a two-letter word she had chalked on the blackboard.

  “U. . . .S.,” I said, as sure of myself as I would ever be again.

  “Those are the letters,” she said, her patience well in check. “What do they spell?”

  “U. . . .S.,” I repeated, assuming she just wanted to make sure the class heard me giving the correct answer.

  “Yes,” she kept on. “But what does it spell?” At this point Sister had lost her patience.

  What is her problem? I thought to myself, as the situation tensed.

  As clear as that standoff at Maternity BVM is to me today, I forget just how it ended. Still, I’m positive it was a preview of things to come. I saw the world one way. She saw it another. To Sister Mildred the two letters “u” and “s” meant first person plural. To me, it spelled the “U.S.” It meant America. “U.S.” was the word newspapers used in the war headlines, the insignia our fighting men wore on their uniforms. Sister Mildred was talking about some mundane pronoun. I was thinking about my country.

  Such evidence, admittedly anecdotal, suggests I was operating on a different level from other kids in grade school. I always wondered, to be perfectly truthful, why I was so much more aware of America’s position in the world than they were. I wasn’t odd. They were.

  One person I have to credit for this precocious worldliness is my older brother Bert. Even before first grade, Bert and I had fought countless skirmishes in the vast “outback” of our new house on the rural Philadelphia border of Bucks County. Against the backdrop of vacant farmhouses, I would take the role of the Germans and Bert the “U.S.,” or American, side. The next day we’d switch and I would be the “U.S.” and he’d play the “Japanese.”

  When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Bert would be the American side and I’d be the “Commies.” We were happy once again to have a war going on. It made not just our games but somehow life itself grander. Even at that young age, I knew that this was America, that we were the good guys, and that we had never lost a war.

  Boomers like me who attended Catholic school back in the years just after World War II remember how patriotic we were. That Pledge of Allegiance we recited was just a token of the devotion we showed our country. Just as they would honor every “feast day” on the liturgical calendar, the nuns always seemed to be leading us in parades up and down Bustleton Avenue to celebrate one national holiday or another.

  By third grade, the threat of a new and more horrible war had come closer to home. The Communists now had both the A-bomb and the H-bomb. If war came, both sides would be using them, and there would be no winner.

  In those days we had two types of safety drills in school. The fire drill was when we marched in line out of the classroom and into the recess yard. The air raid drill was when we crouched under our little wooden desks. We woul
d then wait for fifteen minutes, smelling the varnish and imagining the predicted “flash of light”—the world’s end, and the general judgment—when all the human beings who ever lived would stand before God and be judged for their sins. (Honesty was a very important lesson to learn as a kid—especially when paired with the idea that at any moment you could die and be held accountable for any deceit, small or large, in your life.)

  Even back then this was all great material for black humor. I used to imagine how funny it would be if they got the two drill bells mixed up. How we’d be crouching under our balsa wooden desks when the fire came or how we’d be out on the “blacktop” to greet the incoming ICBMs.

  I’m sure all the crouching and counting the minutes until the promised “flash” had to have had an effect on us. The early Cold War, with its rich specter of nuclear cataclysm, added to the schizoid quality of what would be known currently as our “early childhood development.” I’m sure the nuns loved the chance to incorporate their entire worldview into that single ritual of hiding under our desks from the atomic raid. Here was America and Russia, good and evil, life and death, sin and punishment, all wrapped up into a perfectly synchronized quarter hour.

  This rehearsing for doomsday affected we boomers just as the Depression had shaped the generation before. I remember telling a kindly aunt with great pride that I’d just been hired to work for the Carter White House.

  “Is that a permanent job?” she asked.

  Her response was the result of having grown up too close to the unemployment lines. American childhoods of the early Cold War produced, I think, a different instinct. While my father’s generation might regard the basement as a place to hide a jar of quarters in case those breadlines started forming again, those of us faced at an early age with the prospect of falling A-bombs think of the basement as a place to hide.

  The live specter of the apocalypse now also encourages short-term thinking. If people my age are awkward about financial planning, it may well be because, as teens and young adults in the 1960s, we never scheduled beyond Saturday night. The reason people like me are so focused on patriotism and morality and the big picture is that we were drilled early to confront the prospect of life on earth ending in a flash and something far more daunting arriving instantly in its place. Martyrdom, and the more grizzly the better, was the central story line in 1950s Catholicism. We repeatedly heard lurid accounts of those who had died for their faiths. The most unforgettable, as told by the Sisters of Mercy, was that of the biblical “Seven Brothers” in the book of the Maccabees. It began when one brother told the king that he, his siblings, and their mother would rather die than eat the forbidden pork. Enraged, the king ordered the stubborn youth’s tongue, hands, and feet cut off. After that had been done, his mother and brothers were forced to throw him onto a boiling vat of oil. This process was then repeated for each member of the family. Thanks to the good Sisters, the fact that they all died for their faith was seared into us.

  I remember the day in the spring of 1953 that Stalin died. I remember that Sister instructed us all to offer up some prayers. I remember wondering what exactly we were praying for? That the Soviet dictator get a surefire send-off to you know where? That God would forgive him? That he might undergo a deathbed conversion to Catholicism like the Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz? Or had the nuns simply gone on automatic pilot, getting us all to pray simply because something really important was happening?

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think that growing up where and when I did explains my instinctive on-air connection between God and country, morality and politics. It’s a good guy–bad guy game in which the good guys are forever endangered. I admire a great line my friend Peggy Noonan wrote for the first president Bush: “America is not just another pleasant country in the UN roll call somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.”

  Like Peggy, I believe in American exceptionalism. We were raised to believe in it, raised to believe that when Kate Smith sang “God Bless America” she was singing our song, raised to believe that the prayer we said at the end of each Sunday mass for the “conversion of Russia” someday would be heard.

  I know that none of this is politically correct today. We’re supposed to think multilaterally, to think of ways we can behave like other countries and stop thinking of what makes us different. We’re not even supposed to call ourselves “Americans.” How chauvinist! Don’t we realize how that rankles the Canadians and the Mexicans and all the others who share this hemisphere north and south? How dare we engage in tri-umphalism?

  This is the country that sold the world on democracy, on free markets, and, increasingly, on human rights. We should be doing victory laps.

  I say this because, for my generation, the Communist threat did not die with Stalin. There were times when it looked very much like we would either lose the Cold War or perish in some horrid, all-out nuclear war begun by accident, or by what Jack Kennedy called a “miscalculation.”

  In 1956 we watched the gutsy Hungarians lob cobblestones at the Soviet tanks and could do nothing to help them. In 1957, we saw the Soviets launch Sputnik despite regular assurances from Walt Disney and his pal Werner Von Braun that America would be the first to put a satellite into space. We watched the red on the world map spread from Asia to Africa to South America, even to our doorstep. We suffered the historic tragedy of Vietnam trying to stop it. As recently as the late seventies, we watched the Soviets overrun Afghanistan and place brigades in Cuba. As late as the eighties, polls showed that many Americans still worried about a nuclear war with the slowly advancing Communists. And then, thank God, everything changed.

  Why then am I so unforgiving toward the hard left? Because they spent most of the Cold War saying that Communism was simply an alternative economic system. I’m so hard on the anti-anti-Communists because I don’t quite get them. Why would anyone have a problem with resisting what was a real threat to this country? Even when I thought Vietnam had become a horrible mistake, I never understood those who cheered for Ho Chi Minh. It’s the same reason I am slow to accept Fidel Castro as a trading partner. Had the Cold War gone the other way, he would have been in the reviewing stand for the executions. He would have relished the moment, just as he took delight in sending his sadistic intelligence officers to torture American POWs in Hanoi.

  Why do I still hate the Communists? Because we could have lost it all to them. Why do I have a problem with Bill Clinton? Because this child of the early boomer generation seems to have grown up with absolutely none of its legacy, none of the history and anti-Communist fervor, and none of the awe for the presidency he found so easy both to win and to abuse.

  Bill Clinton

  I have no idea who William Jefferson Clinton is. When he was first elected governor of Arkansas, my impression was of an Ivy League–taught southerner whom the sixties had carried happily leftward. Defeated for reelection, he made his Little Rock comeback as a capital-punishing good ol’ boy. Then when he ran for president in 1991, he offered himself as a Democratic Leadership Council conservative, blasting “quotas” and other evils of the liberal establishment. But that’s when he expected to face New York governor Mario Cuomo. When Cuomo failed to join the race, Clinton headed left again, savaging poor Paul Tsongas when he tried taking the centrist position that he, Bill Clinton, had just deserted.

  Elected president, Clinton pushed the old-time religion of boondoggle spending—a “stimulus package,” he called it—and a big-government answer to the country’s health care challenge. Losing control of Congress in 1994, he switched again, declaring the era of big government over, and signed a Republican-written welfare reform bill.

  I’d like to be able to say this ideological fickleness didn’t fool me, but I can’t.

  My first in-person contact with the man came in 1991, when I covered the Democratic Leadership Council’s annual meeting in Cleveland. Governor Clinton gave the major address, and he was a colossal success. In his speech he railed against deadbeat dads, demanding that th
ey be brought to justice and forced to pay for their children’s upbringing. He assaulted “quotas” and generally pushed all the right buttons for a crowd largely made up of corporate and trade association conservatives seeking an opportunity to gain influence in the Democratic party. He played the crowd like a banjo. On the way home, I wrote a column saying the conservative Democrats had found their hero.

  But what I was witnessing in Cleveland was not so much an illumination of Bill Clinton’s gut philosophy as it was an exhibition of his astounding skill at political positioning. Expecting Mario Cuomo to run for the presidential nomination the following year, he figured his opportunities were in the center and right rather than in the left. Once Cuomo withdrew, it created an opening in the Democratic mainstream, at which point Bill Clinton abruptly abandoned his conservative rhetoric. The revised strategy was to let poor ex-senator Paul Tsongas carry the banner for Social Security and Medicare reform. Clinton would spend the rest of the nomination fight tearing apart Tsongas’s efforts to adjust the Democratic party to the reality that the programs they had created were in bad need of repair. Clinton pandered to the party’s hope for deliverance from these cruel choices, leaving Tsongas the thankless task of telling the truth.

  In the New Hampshire primary Bill Clinton would, of course, suffer through a more personal confession. When old flame Gennifer Flowers held a press conference, Bill and Hillary were forced onto 60 Minutes to defend their marriage in front of the entire universe. But the affair with Gennifer never hurt. It was old, she was a grown-up, and its connection to official business was, at best, tenuous.

  Clinton’s problem was his lack of candor in dealing with the tempest Flowers had raised. He denied, for example, that it was his voice on a tape she played at her press conference. Then, ignoring the denial, Clinton apologized for something said on it, an ethnic slur the voice on the tape had unleashed at Governor Cuomo.