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

  In late 1986, when Tip O’Neill was nearing retirement, I went to visit Howard Stringer, president of CBS News. After a warm get-acquainted chat, I asked my British-born host if he’d consider creating a position under him similar to the deputy position Timothy Russert, a former aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had carved out with NBC News president Larry Grossman. (It was not the last time I would see Tim as a positive role model.) Stringer replied that CBS didn’t have the means to make the big budgetary commitment that a Russert-type position required. He said I should instead consider going on air.

  A year later, after I found myself hired as Washington bureau chief of the San Francisco Examiner, I returned to take him up on his suggestion. Immediately, Stringer took me down the hall to meet David Corvo, at the time the executive producer of CBS This Morning. I brought along a videotape of an appearance I had just made on ABC’s Good Morning America, discussing a recent New Republic article I’d written on the 1988 presidential candidates. Soon after, David began inviting me onto CBS to do political commentary.

  Hardball also had its genesis in a request. A decade ago I had dinner in Beverly Hills with Joe McGinniss, author of The Selling of the President and some highly successful books on reallife murder cases. He was working on a book about Senator Edward Kennedy and wanted my thoughts. Afterward, Joe said he was having drinks at the Four Seasons with a guy he thought I’d like. When he said it was Roger Ailes, it was a name I immediately recognized. He was the media genius who had worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

  Ailes had concocted the senior George Bush’s lethal ad campaign against 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and his Massachusetts prison “furlough” program. McGinniss’s hunch was right: Roger and I hit it off from the first, and I decided to stay in touch. Whenever I came to New York I would look him up. We talked politics and, eventually, of someday putting together a fast-paced TV show. That day came in 1994 when Roger was named head of CNBC and the new NBC cable network called “America’s Talking.” I asked Roger if I could do a show. He said yes.

  When you ask someone for help, you are implicitly asking him to place a bet on you. The more people you get to bet on you, the larger your network of investors and the shorter your odds. And it illustrates, also, Ben Franklin’s wisdom, advice that may seem counterintuitive: “If you want to make a friend, let someone do you a favor.” Many people hesitate to ask for help. They see it as an admission of weakness. But this do-it-yourself mentality can be lethal. It can limit and isolate a contender, denying him allies. People spend their whole lives resisting having others do favors for them. In doing so, they forfeit not only the gift directly offered, but something far more important: the power that comes from receiving.

  Never forget the basic accounting principle at work here: an account receivable is an asset.

  Once that guy across the table or woman across the dance floor says “yes,” it creates an instant bond. Just as rejection admits a chasm, acceptance begins a communion. The people who get favors are the folks with the nerve to ask for them—and keep asking! Persistence has its rewards.

  Take Jack McMacken, a guy who goes to my church. When he was at Notre Dame, he applied to Yale Law School, the most selective in the country. When he inquired at the dean of admissions’ office about getting in for an interview, his secretary said Yale Law didn’t grant interviews. But he kept calling the secretary, chatting with her about his desire to attend the school. When the acceptances went out, Jack found himself wait-listed. Again, he called the admissions office and asked for an interview. This time, the dean of admissions’ secretary relented. Although it was not the school’s practice, she invited Jack McMacken to fly to New Haven, which he did, through a blinding, terrifying snowstorm, to meet her boss, the dean of admissions. Jack graduated from Yale Law three years later.

  Another illustration is Steve Case, today chairman of AOL Time Warner. The young Case was a visionary, seeing the opportunities of the Internet before anyone else. But that’s not where he got his start. Fresh out of college, Case was rejected by every business school he applied to. Knowing that Procter & Gamble was a great training ground for marketing, he applied to work there and was rejected. He flew back to Cincinnati, P&G’s headquarters, at his own expense, and talked his way into another interview. Case was hired as an assistant brand manager.

  And he kept it up. In the early days of AOL, when the company was known as Quantum, Case flew to California to try to convince Apple Computer to let Quantum develop their online service. To show his interest, he showed up every day for three months. Finally, Apple agreed to the deal.

  HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: The passport to getting what you want is very often the simple, courageous act of asking for it. When you get rejected, when you get that “no!” right in your face, remember that “no” is better than no answer. It saves time—which is what you need if you are going to get rejected nine times out of ten. And all that means is that you have to ask ten times.

  Believe!

  Consciousness precedes Being and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.

  VACLAV HAVEL

  Ideals count, particularly the ideal you hold of yourself.

  “It was clear from our very first meeting that Ron Reagan was in politics out of passionate belief,” former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said. It’s hard to argue with that assessment, whatever your country or politics.

  Ideals matter. Geza Jeszenszky believed that “freedom is contagious.” That young man I interviewed at the Brandenburg Gate certainly knew what freedom is. “Talking to you,” he said. Five years later in Cape Town it was the democratic ideal that caused a line of voters to stretch from one horizon to another.

  Ideas matter, too, especially one’s own ideas. One has to know one’s own taste and follow it where it leads.

  When my family began spending summers in Ocean City, New Jersey, I came across a local kid who was totally caught up in pop culture. He argued that Marlon Brando was a better actor than Cary Grant, a point on which I disagreed. He knew about this new singer who was performing in front of largely black audiences in a tough part of Atlantic City named Ray Charles.

  The kid’s name was Kurt Loder. You know him today as the guy who does the commentary on MTV.

  It’s like me and politics. People who knew me in college remember me as the guy forever arguing politics down in the cafeteria. Congressman Ed Markey, a Boston College grad, often kids me that I get paid five nights a week “just for going down to the Holy Cross caf.”

  More important people with big ideas have changed history. Here are just a few of my favorites:

  Thomas Paine, a recent English immigrant to the North American colonies, wrote Common Sense in January 1776. Arguing the case for independence, it sold a half million copies. Six months later, the Continental Congress declared Paine’s idea to the world.

  In 1852, the wife of a Bowdoin College professor wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. It sold three million copies. Harriet Beecher Stowe had made slavery an issue that transcended states’ rights—in her hands it became a human issue. “You’re the little lady who made this big war,” Abraham Lincoln said on meeting her in 1862.

  A century later, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, alerted the world to the dangers of environmental pollution. And Ralph Nader began the consumer movement with Unsafe at Any Speed, his muckraking book on auto safety.

  I have often mentioned Holy Cross on Hardball and not simply out of loyalty. I’m fortunate to have had a Jesuit education, since it asks not how but why. I’m proud to have graduated from a college that has turned out a stream of such notable crusaders of both Left and Right. My fellow alumni include Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, credited with inspiring the War on Poverty of the 1960s, and Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, a proponent of the value of self-reliance. The country’s top lawyer of his era, Edward Bennett Williams, insisted on the right of the most
despised—from Joseph McCarthy to John Hinckley—to a strong defense in court.

  Holy Cross graduate Philip Berrigan committed civil disobedience, and cheerfully paid its civil price, for his opposition to the Vietnam War and what he views as the country’s excessive militarism. “It’s much better to make a statement with one’s life,” he once said, “than with one’s mouth.” Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey, a liberal to his core, opposed abortion to his last breath, even as his party tried to gag him. Former Health, Education, and Welfare secretary Joseph Califano gave up a lucrative legal practice to wage a crusade against drug abuse. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci has spent years leading the struggle for a cure to AIDS.

  The lives of these men all bear the same mark. All understand how an ideal can be a beacon. All are toughened veterans of that Jesuit education. As Harrington put it, “From the time I was a little kid the Church said your life is not something you are supposed to fritter away. Your life is a trust to something more important than yourself.” I’d bet that every one of these men—the antiwar Berrigan, the prolife liberal Casey, the steadfast conservative Thomas, the civil libertarian Williams, the anti-AIDS crusader Fauci—would recognize that sentiment as his own. I do.

  If there is a messianic quality to such lives, there is also an accompanying touch of vanity—and I recognize that as well.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Playing Hardball

  There’s nothing I love as much as a good fight.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  Dad used to say that a politician was a guy who stood out on the corner and yelled. His definition was inspired by the young pair of aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, Richardson Dilworth and Joseph Clark, who cleaned up Philadelphia politics in the early 1950s. At lunchtime this heroic duo would stand at the corner of Broad and Chestnut streets and rail against the “drones in City Hall” and demand reform. Because of them, the people of Philadelphia voted to end eighty-seven years of rule by the corrupt old Republican machine.

  This is what I try to do five nights a week on national television. I interview the people who run the country, hit them with hard questions, and challenge them to give real answers. If it’s too boisterous, too loud for you, let me leave you with a warning: Democracy is a noisy business. It’s when it gets quiet up here on the national stage that you should begin to worry.

  It’s also my experience that the cacophony that you hear coming from Washington is often the echo of a real division in the country. As famed newspaper editor William Allen White wrote, “In no other country in the world is aspiration so definite a part of life as it is in America. The most precious gift God has given to this land is not its great riches of soil and forest and land but the divine discontent planted deeply in the hearts of the American people.”

  I don’t pretend to be an idle bystander. As my friend John McLaughlin once noted, I’m a tummler, the Yiddish term for the guy at the old Catskills resorts whose job it was to stir things up on a rainy day. That’s me on Hardball. I’m the one who’s supposed to get people engaged, get them into the act. More often than not, I’m engaged already. It’s my belief that if someone has no passions, he or she has no business either running for office, standing on a downtown corner holding a bullhorn, or hosting a political talk show.

  Somebody recently described Hardball as “just entertainment.” Guess what? I’ll live with the qualifying adjective if I can get that noun. Those who think the category “entertainer” belittles my work should recall Bob Dylan. He made a point of saying his singing was just that. My dad makes the distinction in this way: He calls Hardball a “show” rather than a program.

  I’ll admit it. I love it when I can zing some guest for using “talking points.”

  A farmer named Steve wrote me saying, “Been watching you now for awhile. Always marvel at the enjoyment you seem to get out of it. You obviously like doing what you’re doing. I appreciate your even-handedness in your approach and ability to keep it on the subject even if you have to cut some hot-aired person off.”

  You’re right, Steve. Not only am I having fun, but I want the Hardball guests and viewers to have fun as well.

  As for those invited to be on the show, here is what I’d like you to bring along with you.

  1. Facts. I want people to learn something watching Hardball.

  2. Spontaneity. Please leave the talking points back at the office.

  3. Honesty. When the other side nails you, admit it.

  4. Feistiness. Why should the host be all alone in this?

  5. Laughter. This isn’t the Inquisition. No one really gets hurt. In fact, guests usually want to come back for more.

  My goal is to cover the country’s politics. My main weakness as a journalist covering them is that I love politicians. Remember that congressman who walked across the chamber to ask his political adversary what he was up to for the weekend and to say hello to his wife for him? That, to me, is democracy. If Jefferson or Adams or Madison could have seen that moment on the floor of Congress, they would have seen their dream fulfilled. It symbolizes the democratic republic for which they struggled.

  I have a particular affection for the House of Representatives and the members I worked with all those years. That is, despite the fact that many now treat me as an outsider. I know that they are angry with me for being so tough on President Clinton and other Democrats. Some even saw my movement into journalism in 1987 as a betrayal. The fact is, we are in different professions now. My job is to report on what they do, not sing their praises.

  But I also know deep in my soul that I have never been an in-stitutionalist or “one of the boys.” That explains my untrendy empathy for Richard Milhous Nixon, the man. But most important, it allows me to watch political events through the eyes of an outsider. I like it that way because it helps me be what I have to be: independent.

  I well recall that big empty 747 I took from Heathrow to New York on my way home from the Peace Corps thirty years ago. The cavernous coach cabin was empty except for a few bored, out-of-sight flight attendants. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, was playing on the forward bulkhead. I remember when the title character, an emerging newspaper baron based upon William Randolph Hearst, is being attacked from both sides. A labor boss calls him a “fascist,” while the rich financier dismisses him as a “Communist.”

  But “there was another voice,” the narrator intones. Then we see the words: “I am what I have always been: an American.” Below them is the signature of Charles Foster Kane.

  I used to think that the great Kane character was merely dodging the question with that answer. Today I think he was saying exactly what I would say. Am I a liberal or a conservative? I can give you the formula if you want it: I’ve got a conservative gut, a liberal, tolerant mind, and a heart—which breaks the tie. But I’ll settle for what Kane had to say on the subject. By reading the previous chapters, you know that I believe it.

  Now that I’ve finished writing the book, I can once again enjoy Washington. I have loved it since my first visit with my parents and two of my brothers in 1954. I love my job, as you can see. But I also love this city. I am especially fond of driving home at night past the great monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson, often looking across the Potomac to the lawn of Robert E. Lee’s mansion and that little twinkle of light guarding the grave of John F. Kennedy.

  How seductive politics can be. But how much greater is this feeling of being an American. That’s the real pull of this place. Despite all the statues of generals on horseback, Washington is a city of elected civilians. We build those monuments to the great presidents, not so much to honor the past as to goad the current president. If the dream is to endure, we must live it. If that means making a little noise, I say, that’s all in a day’s work.

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS

  Hardball

  Kennedy & Nixon

  FREE PRESS

  Rockefeller Center

  1
230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2001 by Christopher Matthews

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Jeanette Olender

  Cover photograph by Michael Bryant

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-684-86236-0

  0-684-86235-2 (Pbk)

  ISBN-13: 9-780-7432-4204-2 (eBook)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: A Self-Made Country

  Chapter 2: The Constant Rebel

  Chapter 3: The Reluctant Warrior

  Chapter 4: Action

  Chapter 5: The Common Man

  Chapter 6: Underdogs

  Chapter 7: The Lone Hero

  Chapter 8: Pioneers

  Chapter 9: Optimism

  Chapter 10: American Exceptionalism

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  To Michael, Thomas, and Caroline

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  On the last, unforgettable page of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the New World as the early sailors must have first glimpsed it. “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent . . . face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

  In writing this tribute to the grand notions that enchant this country, it’s been my fortune and joy to rediscover that wonder.