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

  “This is where forty years of Stalinism has gotten them,” said our disgusted West German driver, “standing in line for biscuits.”

  This being the British occupation sector, fatigue-wearing soldiers from the UK were ladling out coffee from army-green jeep cans. “Poor devils,” John whispered, in his best imitation of a stiff-upper-lip British accent.

  The next day we took a wild excursion into Communist East Germany. Our first stop that Sunday morning was Potsdam, scene of the Big Three summit in June 1945. It was here that Roosevelt had gained Stalin’s backing for the final move against Japan. A souvenir pamphlet described how the United States had dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to “rule the world.” I noticed that the propaganda marked the beginning of the “anti-Hitler coalition” at 1941, the year Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. It recounted the Nazi capitulation to a Red Army field marshal in 1945. It made no reference to the western front of the war or to any general named Eisenhower.

  John and I went on to Wittenberg, the cathedral where Martin Luther had tacked the ninety-five theses on the door in 1517. The only sign that this is a major landmark of western civilization were the words “Ein Vester Borg ist unser Gott” on a banner wrapped around the spire. Later I found John in the dim sanctuary standing on the tomb of Luther, the man who had stood against the power of the papacy, indeed, against the entire European order of his time. “How did he know?” he asked me gravely.

  That evening we drove through Weimar, home to the country’s brief post–World War I effort at democracy. The pollution from the lignite stoves was so dense that we needed to close the windows of our car and turn on the air-conditioning full blast.

  Then, on to Buchenwald. We arrived at the death camp a half-hour after sunset. Searching among the shadowy buildings, we came across an elderly custodian. With the help of my press credentials we got him to open up some of the buildings.

  The entire compound was a monument to Communism. Every cell displayed a fresh wreath sent from the various Communist parties of Europe: Belgian, Dutch, etc. The weary, plump little man unlocked the door to one ramshackle shed and showed us the room where six thousand Soviet soldiers had been killed. He explained to us in ghastly detail how the Nazis had gotten the young Soviet soldiers to take seats, ostensibly in preparation for medical exams, and then had fired through a narrow slit in the wall and blown out their brains.

  “Were any Jews killed here?” John inquired, cutting through the government-issued talking points. I could not decipher the old man’s mumbled response.

  In Leipzig we stopped at St. Nicholas Church, on whose organ Johann Sebastian Bach had first played many of his chorales. It was now home to the “peace vigils” that lent a powerful moral glow to the burgeoning reform movement. We had supper in the Auerbacher Keller where Goethe had eaten and set a scene in Faust. The Germany of a great cultural tradition was about to be liberated from sixty years of Nazi and Communist repression.

  * * *

  I need to give credit to the two people who most shaped my heartfelt opinions on freedom. The first is a political figure from whom, ironically, Hillary Clinton and I both got our first philosophical interest in politics: the father of the modern conservative movement, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. I listened to his speech at the 1960 Republican Convention on the radio at my grandmother’s house. Before that election I had never heard of the “conservative” philosophy he preached, but it would soon become a big part of my life. With the 1960 election lost and JFK in the White House, I emerged as a Goldwaterite all the way. It was his philosophy of individual freedom and his opposition to any government measure that restricted such freedom that appealed to me.

  During the next few years, I would not only understand what these “conservatives” were all about, I would become one. Soon I was a regular reader of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review. My friend Tim Urbanski and I knew the suburban Philadelphia drugstores where it would arrive first each month.

  What we adherents liked about Goldwater conservatism was quite clear. The senator from Arizona advocated a maximum degree of personal freedom. That meant minimum government: Protect the country, deliver the mail, and follow the Constitution, then get out of our lives. Forget “me-too Republicanism.” Nixon had tried that, and it had failed.

  The other influence on me back then was closer to home. He was my high-school teacher, Gerald Tremblay.

  The adventures I detail in this book might not have occurred were it not for Tremblay, who taught English at La Salle College High School, in Philadelphia. It’s because of him that I began writing regularly, discovered the allure of New York and the wide door it opens to American culture, and most important, gained confidence in myself.

  “Tremblay.” That’s what we called him when he was not around. He was the first person I knew who had a foreign car, driving a VW bug in an era of station wagons. He was into Broadway, into Shakespeare, into all the American novelists he thought were any good.

  It was the fall of 1962, my senior year of high school, and I had begun contributing articles to the school newspaper, The Wisterian. Perhaps more important, I also had begun to hang around the paper’s office after school. It was a bastion of creative youth, decorated by a small phonograph with a single 45-rpm record, “Silver Dagger” by a new folk singer named Joan Baez, which we played over and over.

  “If you’re going to hang around every day,” Tremblay said to me one memorable afternoon, “you might as well be an editor!” I thereby became one of the newspaper’s two assistant editors. Not only was it a real status boost over playing in the school band, I began to realize a passion that I still practice: writing. I remember one time in the newsroom I announced, “I do all the grassroots writing around here.” Tremblay immediately replied, “Yeah, you know what’s in the grassroots . . . bullshit.”

  Even more valuable than the status was the opportunity my new position gave me to spend time with Tremblay. I had never met anyone like him. In a suburban, climbing world, he didn’t think money was important. His preference was for the latest author he’d discovered, the latest Broadway play he planned to see, the latest thinker whose ideas impressed him. His views on politics could be reduced to a single word: balance. When the country tilted too far right, we needed to move left. When it tilted too far to the left, he pushed in the opposite direction. The older I get, the more I buy this very American way of looking at things.

  The spring of my senior year brought with it several big events in my life. The first was the trip to New York, site of the Columbia University convention, for high-school newspaper editors. In a single weekend we took the Staten Island Ferry for five cents, visited the Empire State Building, ate at Mama Leone’s, wandered through the old Barnes & Noble warehouse, and saw three Broadway plays: A Man for All Seasons, Stop the World—I Want To Get Off, and A Thousand Clowns. We also saw two foreign movies: La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad. One of us was even lucky enough to get propositioned by a pimp. “I got what you want: white, Spanish, or colored.” I came home with a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” and a paperback on Thomas Jefferson. What we did not do was attend a single event at the Columbia University high-school newspaper editors’ convention.

  Whenever people bring up the subject of inspiring teachers, I know that I had one of the best. Gerald Tremblay took a suburban kid from Philadelphia and showed him a magnificent world of culture and ideas where the scorecard didn’t involve money or the size of the car you drive. Life’s success, he taught me, was measured within.

  Tremblay was responsible for another milestone during my senior year—the founding of The Gazebo, the new La Salle literary magazine. Even though his own preference was for balance, that didn’t mean he was intolerant of his students’ enthusiasms. He encouraged me to produce an essay on the foundations of conservatism.

  With apologies to Edmund Burke, below is some evidence of my adolescent capacity for deep thought:

  “The ear
ly realization of man that he was an imperfect being led him to the formation of certain principles. It was in the formation of these principles that led to the earliest foundations of conservative philosophy.

  Ironically, it was the great upheavals of the late eighteenth century which gave this philosophy its fullest meaning and significance. To understand this, we must first investigate and then contrast two revolutions of the century.

  Under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity the people of France overthrew the government in 1790, murdered the monarch and all the members of the ruling class. For these same noble goals, apparently, these free people named a man absolute dictator for life—Napoleon Bonaparte—and thus turned over all chance of the freedom of which they had spoken so highly.

  During this same century, the American colonies, because of excessive taxes and a desire for independence, forcefully separated themselves from their mother country. In sharp contrast to the short-sighted, short-lived First Republic of France, the American democrats had within ten years ratified a constitution of principles which guaranteed the preservation of the freedom of the individual that it fought so hard to achieve. The results of this deed are, in essence, the triumph of conservatism. Where the emotions of the mob had failed to obtain freedom for the individual, the goal of all government, set principles have succeeded.”

  Pretty lofty notions for a fourteen-year-old.

  My biggest honor that last year at La Salle came when I was invited to compete on the school’s College Bowl team. That, too, contained a harbinger of things to come. Modeled after the GE-sponsored TV show, it pitted a panel of four La Salle students against four from another Christian Brothers school, West Catholic. While our rival picked its team based on grade point average, La Salle picked its panel in an open competition. Three of the selectees were brilliant, National Merit scholar types. The fourth was me.

  I can still remember three of the toss-up questions to which I beat everyone else with the answer.

  Q: Who was the Norwegian who revolutionized the drama in the late nineteenth century?

  Answer: Henrik Ibsen.

  Q: Who was the philosopher that combined mathematics and geometry?

  A: Descartes.

  Q: What year was the so-called “disputed election” and who were the presidential candidates?

  A: 1876; Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden.

  This was in 1963. Thirty-seven years later I found myself making frequent references to that once singular “disputed election” when our country found itself embroiled for five weeks in another.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think freedom is this country’s greatest gift to the world. In the political arena, it’s the ability of the American people to do what they’re not supposed to. And as everyone can tell, I relish my freedom to think and speak out loud on national television five nights a week. Sometimes I relish it too much. You should know that at such moments Hardball’s executive producer, Phil Griffin, is shouting, “Punch!!!” In my earpiece. That’s our agreed-upon cue for, “Chris, you’re talking too much; please stop now!”

  But as that young man in East Berlin so poignantly declared, true freedom is the guaranteed right to open discourse and uninhibited debate. This is what we try and do each night on Hardball.

  Winston Churchill

  “There but for the grace of God,” he said of one rival, “goes God.” He called another “a modest man with much to be modest about,” still another, “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.”

  “You are my fifth favorite actor,” he greeted a star of the British stage. “The first four are the Marx Brothers!” “If I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee,” a tart-tongued gentlewoman scolded him. “If I were your husband,” he shot back, “I’d drink it.”

  What guest would I most like to host on Hardball? My resounding answer is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, whom I believe to be the greatest man of the twentieth century.

  In fact, before the twentieth century began, he’d proven himself both as a soldier and as a war correspondent. Upon graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point equivalent, Churchill went to India, where he saw action on the northwest frontier, an episode that later provided the background for his first book on military tactics, The Story of the Malakand Field Force.

  He next joined General Kitchener’s campaign to retake Khartoum from the Islamic zealots led by the Mahdi. This gave young Winston a chance to ride in the last cavalry charge by the British army. The book arising from this experience was The River War, in which this junior officer dared to criticize his superior for desecrating the Mahdi’s tomb.

  In 1899, Churchill ran for Parliament for the first time and lost. Undaunted, he then set off for the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent. Captured by the enemy, he managed to climb over a latrine wall, hide himself on a train, and escape over the border to Mozambique. Safely back in Cape Town, he regained his commission in the army and returned to the fighting, indeed, to the exact spot where he’d been captured.

  Churchill arrived in London as a hero. This time he stood for Parliament and won. As a member of the House of Commons, he exhibited the same audacity he had in battle, the same independence he’d displayed in writing about it. In his maiden address he attacked his own party’s defense budget, the same act of rebellion that had cost his father, Randolph, his career. When his own Conservative allies turned sharply protectionist, moreover, Churchill didn’t hesitate to quit the party and join the freetrader Liberals.

  As first lord of the admiralty in World War I, his taste for free thinking proved calamitous. In a bid to end the trench warfare in France he advocated a combined land and sea campaign through the Dardanelles. The idea was to grab Constantinople, thereby robbing Germany of its Turkish ally. But only a half-hearted version of the plan was enacted, disaster was the result, and its author took full blame. With his reputation scarred and his position as first lord lost, Churchill rejoined the army and headed for France. Having failed in his plan to end the bloody war in the trenches, he would take his place there.

  The man never quit. With the popularity of socialism on the rise after the war. Churchill lost three straight elections. Rather than sink into political irrelevance with the Liberal party, now unable to compete with the new, left-leaning Labour party, he rejoined the Conservatives. It’s one thing to “rat,” he gleefully confessed, it’s another to “rerat.”

  In word as well as in deed, Churchill took charge of his own destiny. Again, he placed himself at the center of the action. “I am immersed in Winston’s biography,” a senior colleague said of The World Crisis, his first work on World War I, “disguised as a history of the universe.”

  Although he was wrong about many things in his long career—he was slow to accept both women’s suffrage and India’s independence—he would be proven right about the big ones.

  A man who lost a half a dozen elections in his life, he had nothing but contempt for those who loved the word “democracy” but rejected free elections. “Democracy is not some harlot in the street to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun,” he said. “Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom and a respect for other people.”

  Churchill probably drank too much. He most certainly lived the life of an aristocrat, never, ever, venturing into a kitchen or traveling, even to war, without a valet. But he paid for his extravagances himself, supporting his taste for luxury with his verbal eloquence. He made his living, as he put it, by his “pen” and by his “tongue.” His daughter Mary recalled her family living “literally from book to book and from one article to the next.”

  One of my favorite images of him, drawn by his premier American biographer, William Manchester, is of Churchill climbing the stairs at midnight, after seeing his overnight guests to their rooms as he went off to dictate and edit well into the morning.

  How can you not be impressed with this man? Winston Churchill would have been one of the great me
n of his age even if he had not done what he did. What he did was save the honor of the twentieth century.

  Starting in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill was right about the Nazi threat when others, especially the Conservatives, were wrong. He saw Germany building both its military machine and its concentration camps. When war came, he had the credentials to face down Adolf Hitler and to say Britain would “never” surrender. Churchill’s forty years as a fighter, especially those when he fought alone in the 1930s, were his job application.

  In 1935, Hitler renewed military conscription in Germany and proclaimed the Luftwaffe now the match of the Royal Air Force. But when Churchill warned that the Germans were building 150 planes a month, he was accused of “scare-mongering.” In 1936, Hitler marched his armies into the Rhineland, an area demilitarized after World War I. Watching from London, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin told his country it had nothing to fear from Germany. Why should the British care if the Nazis grabbed a few countries on their way to fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia?

  In January 1937, Britain’s new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered to appease Hitler by handing over a few colonies in Africa. Churchill’s judgment: “This has been a good week for dictators.”

  He then predicted: “The day will come when at some point or another, you will have to take a stand, and I pray to God when that day comes that we may not find, through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone.”

  A month later, Hitler marched into Austria. A year later, at Munich, the world watched as Prime Minister Chamberlain handed over much of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. At home the British people counted him a hero. Bucking public opinion, Churchill called the giveaway a “total and unmitigated defeat.” He sought to relay the truth to his countrymen, not court their favor. “And do not suppose that this is the end,” he warned the House of Commons. “This is only the beginning of the reckoning.”