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

  My ultimate loyalty to Nixon was based on a trio of factors: We were Republicans, and Nixon looked like the stronger candidate on foreign policy. Most important, he struck me as the underdog, the plain-looking guy with no money up against the rich and handsome Jack.

  The foreign policy factor was deadly serious back then. As I said in the last chapter, the late 1950s were not a good time for our side in the Cold War. The Russians were ahead in space, and, with a firm grip on Eastern Europe, they were extending their reach all the way to Cuba. The big question, Nixon kept insisting, was whether the United States and the other democracies would make the same mistake they did in the late 1930s: appeasement. Kennedy always struck me as a tad vague on that point, especially when he refused during the TV debates to say whether he would send troops to repel a Red Chinese attack on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu.

  Exalted over this small evidence of appeasement, Nixon let him have it:

  The problem is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant. It isn’t the few people who live on them—they are not too important. It’s the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom. I think it is shocking for a candidate for the presidency of the United States to say that he is willing to hand over a part of the Free World to the Communist world. Let me say this: If you elect me president, I assure you that I will not hand over one square foot of the Free World to the Communists.

  His opponent’s assault on Kennedy carried the full sound and fury of the Cold War. The contest with the Communists had taken on the rules of a board game. Every pawn they grabbed was one fewer pawn left to the Free World defenders. Every “square foot” of real estate the other side won brought them a foot closer to grabbing the ultimate prize: us. This is the precise thinking and rhetoric that would lead America, no matter which man won in 1960, into the morass of Vietnam. Not knowing what lay ahead, however, I saw Nixon’s position as tougher and therefore smarter.

  Also affecting me was the class issue. As columnist Tom Wicker would write years later, Nixon was “one of us.” Like tens of millions of other Americans, the Matthewses were cloth-coat Republican. We were the people in the middle, equally remote from welfare and tax breaks. I remember a scene late in the campaign when a raincoated Nixon, his five o’clock shadow in full bloom, said witheringly, “You know it’s not Jack’s money they’re going to be spending.”

  For the Nixon crowd, election night proved to be a catastrophe, made all the crueler by the early projections that showed Nixon the winner. By 7:30 it was all over. Kennedy was headed for an electoral landslide. It was the first—and last—time I have cried over an election result.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think my politics are a result of where I came from. A product of the middle class, my gut impulse is to root for them politically. I care about the man or woman who gets up with the alarm clock to catch the early bus. I care about the family sweating to get the kids through college. I care about the guy who does his own taxes and does them honestly. I’m with them. I want them to know their Social Security and Medicare will be there for them when they retire. I want them to get help with college expenses. And I believe that everyone who puts in a good day’s work deserves a living income, which for me includes health care. In this country, those who work should be accorded the dignity of workers.

  I think Americans hate handouts. They can’t stand people who condescend to them. The moment this country sees an issue in terms of the elite versus the middle class, bet on the middle class. The Equal Rights Amendment would have been ratified easily had those in the “movement” had the good sense and humility to grasp this. The Vietnam War protests might have been far more effective had they not been populated by privileged college kids bent on demonstrating their cultural and moral superiority over the “hardhats.”

  The Clintons—and I think Hillary, especially—never got it. She could have won the argument over health care if she’d made it a workplace issue rather than a welfare issue. Franklin Roosevelt knew better. He insisted that Social Security never be financed out of general revenues but out of a special “payroll tax” paid by workers and their employers. He didn’t want anyone to get the idea that it was a welfare program. He wanted it to be system that insured the retiree’s dignity as well as his livelihood. He wanted Americans to know that everyone who participated in Social Security was carrying his own load.

  Most people looked at Hillary’s scheme as a way to skim benefits and options from the middle class and award them, free of charge, to the poor. They worried she was grabbing for their wallets.

  Surrounded by a squadron of propeller-headed social theorists, people who love power without the inconvenience of an election, Hillary wanted the country to know that any benefits flowing from her health care project should be credited to one person: her. No wonder most Americans saw her scheme as a turnoff. One Evita was enough.

  At the onset of the twenty-first century, this country’s greatest need was to strengthen existing programs like Social Security for the long haul, basing any new commitments on the same self-help principle on which FDR relied. The great failure of the Clinton years was the failure to do just that. When we bought that “bridge to the twenty-first century” from Clinton we might as well have been buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Hillary Clinton is a special problem. She and her crowd see themselves as a guardian class. They see their mission as molding American life according to some grand design. Down here on planet earth we get to join Hillary’s health “cooperatives.” She expects us to cheer her as she gets to choreograph things from above.

  There’s an arrogance there. It’s one people can smell, and they don’t like it.

  John F. Kennedy

  “I don’t think you’ve ever gotten over it,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to me not long ago. And he was right. The death of John F. Kennedy had told a heretofore blessed country that it could not have the leader it had chosen.

  On Nov. 22, 1963, I was a freshman at Holy Cross. It was just after lunch on Friday and I was in the basement of Kimball Hall checking my mail when a classmate burst in with the stunning and horrid news.

  I headed over to my world history class, which was taught by Jim Powers. When I walked in the door, the first thing that Powers said to the class was that those who wanted to be excused could leave without being recorded with a “cut.” I went immediately to the basement of Carlin Hall and turned on the TV set. Walter Cronkite was on the air, saying that Kennedy was dead. I remember how Cronkite just a few moments later took off his glasses, and I realized he was crying.

  I stayed at that TV set for the longest time. It’s a truism that all of us can name where we were when we heard the news and what channel we watched. Most of us watched Cronkite’s program. The astounding drama continued through the whole weekend. Holy Cross finally canceled all classes and everyone went home.

  I remember that, on my way to Philadelphia, a woman on an escalator in New York asked me where I went to school. When I told her up in Massachusetts at Holy Cross, she said to me, “Well, they must be very sad up there.” Of course it hadn’t yet sunk in the way everyone thought it would. It could be that’s the way some people deal with loss. But, in the strange ways of survivor’s guilt, Kennedy’s death may have been a stronger blow to those who opposed him than it was for some of his more casual supporters.

  The horror in Dallas certainly took the light out of politics. What came next was a grim period in American political life. Something profound was missing. Even as I became a Gold-water enthusiast, the leader I had most wanted to spend just a few minutes with was Jack Kennedy.

  There are some things I find hard to explain about myself. One is that I have never been as emotional about politics as I was the night Dick Nixon lost. And another is that I don’t think I’ve ever felt so deadened as by the assassination of Jack Kennedy.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I believe that era we call “the sixties” was sparked
by the grief engendered by our loss of JFK. Before, it was all dark suits, short hair, and thin ties. After, it was long hair, hard rock, and dope.

  But, once the sadness began to fade, there was a stirring of new excitement in the country. By late 1967 the whole world, from Berkeley to Paris to Prague, was basking in an idealistic springtime of freedom that would be marred only by more tragedy in Memphis and Los Angeles.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Freedom Is Contagious

  When an American says that he loves his country, he means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.

  ADLAI STEVENSON

  If I can’t insist you agree with everything—or anything—I say, I ask only that you believe my words and emotions are my own. The Chris Matthews you see and hear is the only one there is. Fred O’Regan, my friend since we served together in the Peace Corps, lifts my spirits whenever he says I haven’t changed in the thirty years since we’ve been back from Swaziland.

  Freedom is where my politics begin and end. To me it’s not just some word engraved in marble, but that “inner light” Stevenson so eloquently invoked.

  On my way home from Africa thirty years ago, I had a revealing glimpse into how the Third World really views the United States. With little money in my pocket, I needed to live frugally. Because of how I traveled and where I stayed, I could meet ordinary folks and listen to them. I could ask them questions and answer theirs. It was quite a lesson.

  On Zanzibar, I met a young Indian in his late teens who grabbed at the chance to tell a young American what life was like for him on this exotic but appalling island. Regimentation was absolute, whether it applied to hair length or courtship. Even holding hands in public was forbidden. Being an Indian, this young man could not engage in business. Not could he leave the island.

  The only refuge for this lonely victim of repression was his small apartment, which he had transformed into a shrine to anything American. The walls were covered with posters and album covers of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. It was his own little island to which he had transported the culture and freedom of a far-off land. He could not wait to get me into his tiny temple of rebellion.

  I’d experienced this before, this devotion to America from afar. Before the fall of 1968, when our Peace Corps group arrived there, Swaziland had been the last British colony in Africa. I worked with many expatriates who had spent careers in the colonial service and then had stayed on to work for the newly independent government. They were devoted to such icons of Hollywood as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and retained their regard for the “Yanks,” their World War II allies. It was fascinating to me to see this wonder they felt toward a country that spoke the same language but who enjoyed freedoms much more real than the class-ridden variety they had left behind.

  And I had seen the love that desperate black South Africans, struggling under the historic weight of apartheid, felt for anything American, particularly jazz, that freest of all musical forms. For these men, aspiration and freedom were synonymous with that Promised Land across the Atlantic.

  What we often can’t see from the vantage point of home is that our country’s greatest influence in the world is exerted not by diplomats in pinstriped suits but by freedom-loving Americans in blue jeans. What people find irresistible about us is not liberty in the abstract but what comes of it: the music, the clothes, the attitude. This is also, we’ve learned to our horror, what others find dangerous.

  There is a wonderful bit of dialogue in Paul Mazursky’s movie Moscow on the Hudson. It comes when a couple of CIA bureacrats are grilling the young Soviet musician played by Robin Williams on his reasons for seeking asylum:

  “Why are you defecting?” an agent demands.

  “Freedom.”

  “Artistic freedom or political freedom.”

  “Freedom.”

  Like the Eskimo who has thirteen different words for snow, we Americans make an art of subtle distinctions. Those who see the wonder of snow for the first time just want to go sledding.

  * * *

  In 1989 I had the privilege of snagging a ringside seat at the greatest explosion of freedom in my lifetime—the fall of the Iron Curtain. My personal brush with this extraordinary epoch began with an April visit to Hungary. This, remember, was the courageous country we had watched stand alone against Warsaw Pact tanks with nothing but the cobblestones from the streets and the occasional Molotov cocktail. Now, years later, I had read reports of a “reform movement” and jumped at the chance to learn about it firsthand.

  Upon my arrival in Budapest I quickly was able to see that here was a country straining from its East European imprisonment to join the West. The elevator at the Intercontinental Hotel rose and fell to the Beach Boys. The sidewalk caricaturists favored Woody Allen, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe.

  The pull of political freedom was equally manifest. On the wall of the government public information agency was tacked a wire-service photo showing Erich Honecker, the East German dictator, standing directly in front of some deer antlers. It was no accident that this image—the Communist boss looked as if he had horns—was the slyly chosen pinup.

  Before leaving Washington I had gotten the name of an economics professor, Geza Jeszenszky, who was a leader in Democratic Forum, the rump faction working to overthrow the creaky Communist regime. He lived in an old, high-ceilinged apartment building reminiscent of The Third Man. While his wife, also a professor, treated my six-year-old son, Michael, to crayons and paper in the next room, the soft-spoken Jeszenszky hosted a pipe-smoking British journalist and me to tea, biscuits, and a briefing on the incredible work in which he and his allies were engaged.

  Calmly and confidently, he described the meetings the forum was holding “in the countryside.” We learned about the “writers and intellectuals” attending these meetings. Our host insisted that after all the years of Communist repression and all the failed attempts to change things, this time was different. He spoke of the morale boost he and his fellow activists got from watching Russian Boris Yeltsin stand up to the Kremlin bosses on TV. “Freedom is contagious,” he said.

  Yes, it is. That September a new Hungarian government ripped down the barbed wire on its western frontier, allowing twelve thousand East Germans to flee its borders. With that miraculous act of political courage, the Iron Curtain was relegated to history’s dustbin. Within the year, the country had adopted a new constitution and held free elections: Hungary was now a democratic republic and that hopeful professor with whom I had shared tea and sympathy was its foreign minister.

  In November I stood in a cold drizzle on the East Berlin side of the Brandenburg Gate. The previous Saturday the faltering Communist government had allowed its people to pass through the Wall for the first time since its crude construction in 1961. A rumor was spreading that the gate itself, so long a symbol of the city’s tragic bifurcation, was about to open.

  Moving through the throngs of excited East Berliners, I began asking everyone with whom I could make eye contact what that word, “freedom,” meant to them. “Was ist freiheit?” I asked in my extremely limited German. What is freedom? Slowly a crowd began to gather around me. In the rain and gloom of a November night, I suddenly had stirred the kind of exuberant give-and-take you now see regularly on Hardball.

  “We really do believe in democracy,” a woman pleaded, as if she were speaking through me to the entire Free World. “Let us have a chance!”

  Next I asked a young man what kind of system did he want, capitalist or socialist? “We want a united Germany where the people can make the choice,” he answered. “We want a socialist country,” insisted another.

  Then a young woman suggested a mix: Western-style economic freedoms combined with “the caring for the people” of socialist countries. “I want the freedom to earn what I have worked for and not be forced to do something because I am told to,” another man said, as I continued scribbling in my noteboo
k.

  Finally, I heard the defining statement journalists wait a lifetime to record. “This is freiheit!” said a serious young man in an army surplus jacket. “This standing in a public place arguing openly about such things as democracy, capitalism, and socialism.”

  “Four weeks ago, we couldn’t have done this!” a woman chimed in.

  * * *

  “It is fun being in the same decade with you,” President Roosevelt cabled his World War II ally Winston Churchill in 1942. While television talk show hosts operate on a somewhat less majestic plane of history, those are my exact sentiments toward John McLaughlin. Early in 1988 he began inviting me on his wildly popular The McLaughlin Group. By then, everyone I knew in Washington was watching this lively look at the country’s politics.

  John runs the Group with the same tyrannical ego that a pre–Vatican II New England Jesuit—which he once was—rules over a classroom. What makes it fun is the self-satire, which I’ve never been sure John intends. Pretending to La Bohème, the show often ends up the practiced equivalent of the Marx Brothers in Night at the Opera. What makes it a great mix of scuttlebutt and entertainment is its zany ground speed. Of all John’s familiar lines, none is more exhilarating than, “Okay, let’s get out of it.” By keeping the show moving, John manages to offer a weekly syllabus on the national political buzz without wasting anyone’s time.

  Rivaling P. T. Barnum in showmanship, John is also a fabulous traveling partner. He was my companion in those historic days when the Berlin Wall opened and the Iron Curtain was in the process of crashing down.

  We began our excursion into history on a promontory above the Potsdamerplatz, the checkpoint the Berlin authorities had decided to open for the day. Through the wall poured a long, grim line of East Berliners looking every bit like people from a black-and-white movie marching onto a Technicolor movie screen. Awaiting the one-day visitors from the East were a number of West German commercial trucks, each dispensing free samples. The one closest to the wall was marked “Bahlsen Biscuits.” From its open back some guy was handing small packages to the trudging line of East Berliners.