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

  Just as this new republic would, in Thomas Paine’s words, “begin the world over again,” it would certainly be a spacious and adventurous home to those hoping to do that with their own lives and ambitions. America would be a country where anyone could grab a second chance.

  Here, the way things are is not the way they have to be. They can be the way individual Americans want them to be.

  The Great Gatsby

  In a country open to such big notions, the popularity of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby should be no surprise. It’s the story of Jay Gatsby, a young soldier training for World War I who meets a beautiful young socialite named Daisy. He falls in love with her only to get a letter while he is serving in the trenches of France, telling him that she has married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy young man from Yale. At a practical level, he’d known it was coming. Rich girls like Daisy didn’t marry poor boys like him.

  An eternal romantic, our hero refused to accept the verdict. Back from the war, Gatsby makes the right connections and becomes a rich bootlegger. Whatever it takes to become the man Daisy Buchanan would marry, he is prepared to do.

  Having enriched himself beyond his wildest dreams, Jay Gatsby now sets about pursuing the only happiness he knows. He buys a giant mansion on Long Island right across the bay from the home of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. From there he maps plans to win her back. He hosts loud and lavish parties open to all in the hope that she will show up at one. Finally, he makes the acquaintance and seeks the aid of his neighbor. Nick Carraway, who he discovers is Daisy’s cousin.

  Carraway, the story’s narrator, doesn’t know what to make of the man presiding over the garish mansion next door. “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the Lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believe they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”

  But Gatsby needed more than money: he needed to be someone who had always had it.

  “I’ll tell you God’s truth,” he says to the skeptical Carraway. “I’m the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

  For Jay Gatsby, the dream Daisy inspired in him is as important as the woman herself. It isn’t what she felt, but what he felt.

  “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” Nick warns him. “You can’t repeat the past.”

  “You can’t repeat the past?” retorts an incredulous Gatsby. “Why of course you can!”

  And: “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. . . . She’ll see.”

  This blind faith that he can retrofit his very existence to Daisy’s specifications is the heart and soul of The Great Gatsby. It’s the classic story of the fresh start, the second chance.

  “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” Fitzgerald wrote. “He was the son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

  There was also Gatsby’s smile. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

  The reader, like Nick Carraway, comes to like this guy. We love his dream because we have, all of us, shared something very much like it. “Gatsby was not a character,” said the critic Alfred Kazin, “but an idea of the everlasting self-creation that Americans have mastered.”

  Gatsby, for me, is undeniably the great American novel. We celebrate its hero and his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” his “extraordinary gift for hope,” his “romantic readiness,” because we as a country share every bit of it.

  Grace Kelly

  People think of Grace Kelly, the actress who became a European princess, as someone born to the role. In reality, Grace Patricia Kelly of East Falls, Philadelphia, was never a debutante, never applied for admission nor was received in Main Line society. She was a Roman Catholic and newly rich, a double bar to the ultra-restrictive social registry of that day.

  But while she was never invited to make her debut by the Philadelphia Assemblies, she did possess an early claim to prominence: her father was a wealthy building contractor: “Kelly for Brickwork” was a familiar sign at area job sites.

  John B. “Jack” Kelly was also a famous sculler in a city that to this day attaches great importance to the rowing sports. Yet he had become famous in his hometown as much for a notorious rejection as for his achievements. In 1919, Grace’s dad was scratched as an entry in the Diamond Sculls at England’s Henley Royal Regatta on the grounds that he had performed manual labor—that is, he had worked with his hands. He was not, according to the Regatta’s encrusted code, a gentleman.

  Kelly reared his only son and namesake to one day avenge the slight. Grace, his second daughter, got no such paternal attention.

  When she gained admission to New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts in September of 1947, her dad was supremely unimpressed.

  That would change.

  Grace Kelly’s ambition was to be the greatest Hollywood movie star ever. Two factors in her makeup made that a credible goal: the blond German beauty of her mother, combined with the Irish drive of her father.

  However, the first sacrifice required of her was a daunting one. It was the way she talked: that grating Philly accent had to go. She could never be a big star with the sound of the rowhouses in her voice. She either had to lose it or give up on her dream.

  “You have got to get rid of that terrible twang!” an Academy tutor would tell her point-blank. And so she did. For this, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was perfectly suited. “It takes a trained ear to detect all errors of pronunciation, accent and emphasis,” its brochure advertised, “but by careful and persistent criticism, the dialects of Pennsylvania or New England, of Canada or the South, are at last dethroned.”

  “When Grace Kelly pronounced the word ‘rotten’ you could hear every single ‘t’ and a few more beside,” biographer Robert Lacey reports, “while her vowel sounds, tugged firmly away from East Falls, had ventured out across the Atlantic to hover remarkably close to the British coast.”

  Grace no longer talked like her father, her mother, her brother or her sisters. To make her voice deeper and more resonant still, she would spend hours talking with a clothespin clasped to the end of her nose.

  Her family was merciless. They called it “Gracie’s new voice.” A friend, hearing her at a cocktail party, decided she was actually speaking in a “British accent.” Grace defended herself, saying frostily, “I must talk this way for my work.”

  “She got away from home early,” her brother, Jack Kelly, Jr., agreed in admiration. “None of the rest of us managed to do that.”

  Her legendary film roles included High Noon with Gary Cooper; Mogambo with Clark Gable, for which she won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress; Dial M for Murder with Ray Milland; Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart; The Country Girl with Bing Crosby, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress; and To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant, which brought her to the principality of Monaco and her final role.

  It was when she came home to East Falls with that Academy Award for Best Actress—a certified movie queen—that she and her father experienced what I c
an only call a “Gatsby” moment. More than being simply her father’s daughter, Grace Kelly now was greater than that. Her stardom made her the child of her own ambition. For the first time, the self-made, self-satisfied John B. Kelly had to accept that his offspring was daughter to a greater dream than his own.

  This daughter, to whom he had given the least attention, the one in whom he had invested the least, the one who shared least in his love and devotion to athletic achievement, was now “Grace Kelly.”

  The joining of her aristocratic manner—so assiduously honed at acting school—to her American ambition was what it took to put the icing on the cake. Grace Kelly was about to become Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco. Her tabloid-glamorous marriage to Prince Rainier elevated her even above her role as an American star. A queen of the silver screen, she was now the genuine article. When she died in a car crash in 1982, she was mourned as a royal. Her memory is cherished not least in our shared hometown, Philadelphia.

  Ralph Lauren

  The acronym WASP, for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, was coined by Professor Digby Baltzell to describe the typical member of Philadelphia’s Main Line society. Its allure arises as much from its exclusivity as from any inherent charm. But let’s face it, it sells—cars, clothes, furniture, dreams.

  Just check the latest edition of Vanity Fair.

  “My look is not really European,” Ralph Lauren has said. “It’s an American’s visualization of Europe in the 1930s. I look in from the other side.” We can see in the faces in his Polo ads that easy arrogance that says “I was born to this.” Just as Daisy Buchanan’s voice carried the sound of money, Ralph Lauren’s designs would give his customers the look of money.

  But Lauren’s true “other side” is Ralph Lifshitz, the ambitious designer son of Russian Jewish immigrants. The tanned, handsome man recognizable everywhere from the gorgeously patrician layouts selling his clothing and cosmetics started out as a Bronx salesman of gloves, ties, and perfume.

  Lauren’s big break came when in 1967 he managed to convince a leading neckwear company to carry a line of neckties that he had designed. The ties, constructed from leftover fabrics found in warehouses, were wider than the narrow ties fashionable in those years. Americans loved them, and an empire was born.

  Say this for Ralph. He knew what we wanted because he was us. Growing up, young Lifshitz—just as we did—fell for screen stars Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn, attracted to their grand sense of style. And it’s precisely their classic American aesthetic he’s spent his life marketing. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the staples of his line aren’t so very different from the costumes he designed for the 1974 remake of The Great Gatsby.

  The writer Neal Gabler argues that Lauren’s popularity comes from knowing that Americans will “pay to transform their lives into their cinematic fantasies: safari outfits to make one a colonialist from Out of Africa; denim jackets and jeans to make one a cowboy from a Hollywood western; finely tailored English suits to make one an aristocrat from any number of crisp drawing room melodramas.”

  Lauren’s flagship store on upper Madison Avenue, once a stately mansion, is the temple of assimilation where the newly rich come to worship the old rich and leave carrying clothes and furnishings that promise not just a comfortable look but a comforting history.

  Lauren’s furniture is “cunningly cinematic,” writes Lauren-watcher Elizabeth Grice. “Long Island beaches, log cabins, English country houses, garden parties, the African bush. He dressed houses the way he dressed people, always mindful of the yearning for romance and escape . . . and the seductiveness of ideas.”

  The great seduction of America, he was not the first to notice, is that wildest of personal liberties: to be who you want to be.

  A Self-Made People

  To understand Americans, start with the fact that we’re a self-made country.

  It’s an important notion. Free people gathered, articulated a social philosophy, designed a government and approved blueprints for a capital. Able to choose between British rule and self-government, they chose the latter, then defended the decision by force of arms. They discarded the society of their birth and constructed a new society of their choice. Had there not been an American Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, and a Constitution—all freely agreed to—there would not be a United States of America.

  This was not the case for the British or the Germans or any other nationality from which we descended. Some of these evolved through tribe, treaty, and war, which was the pattern in Europe and Asia; others were carved up by imperial fiat, the norm in much of Africa and Latin America.

  Many Americans would also create themselves personally.

  Here a man or woman could change names, assume a new identity, hang out with other people who’d done likewise. It is the rare old acquaintance, much less a new one, who would question you seriously about your lineage or even ask casually what your father did for a living.

  Such indifference to family and background leaves doors open here in socially mobile America that would be sealed shut in other, older, more regimented societies. Had Archie Leach stayed home in Bristol, England, Cary Grant would never have been born. Were this not America, a country where such things are possible, Grace Patricia Kelly would not have become a princess.

  This freedom wasn’t given to America. Rather, we grabbed it, held it, made it part of our Constitution. It shines today as our greatest national treasure. This country wasn’t here when we got here. If we are as wise as we’ve been fortunate, that’s something we’ll never forget.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Constant Rebel

  I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Ask a group of U.S. senators if there was a movie that gripped them with the romance of politics. Most, I know for a fact, will say Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

  Their choosing it makes for an extraordinary tribute to Frank Capra’s 1939 classic—which came out in the early weeks of World War II—because it in fact casts a harsh light on the political world. We follow young Jefferson Smith from an unknown western state—presumably Montana—to a Washington that gets airbrushed from the civics books.

  This Mr. Smith, who is enshrined in American legend—almost as if he were a hero of folklore—is an idealistic young man who finds himself picked to replace a U.S. senator who has died before completing his term. But Jeff Smith quickly discovers that he’s a stooge put there by the state’s corrupt political machine. He’s been plucked from his troop of Boy Rangers to keep the seat warm and make no trouble.

  Soon after his swearing-in, however, Jefferson Smith learns of a conspiracy to rob millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money. The plan is to build a giant federal dam on land that has secretly been bought by political insiders. Huge amounts of money are to be pocketed in this boondoggle that is being logrolled through the Congress by Smith’s boyhood hero, the state’s senior senator. Clued into what’s going on, Jefferson Smith commits himself to a do-or-die fight.

  Jimmy Stewart plays the junior senator, Jefferson Smith. Claude Rains plays the senior senator, Joseph Paine. A knight in shining armor to the voter, Paine in fact does what he’s told by the state’s political boss.

  What staggered the viewers of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the conduct of Mr. Smith’s Senate colleagues. As seen here, his fellow members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” are as morally comatose as cattle. The members of the press gallery are just as bad. If the senators would rather close their eyes to corruption rather than allow some outsider to disturb the political peace, the reporters’ only interest in Jeff Smith is what an ass they can make out of the new kid in the next edition.

  The climax is thrilling: Jeff Smith takes the Senate floor all alone to wage a one-man filibuster against the effort by Senator Paine and the party leadership to railroad him. Anyone who�
��s seen it remembers the drained, hanging-on-by-a-hair look he wears on his face while struggling to keep up the fight.

  The Washington establishment hated Mr. Smith, just as director Frank Capra suspected it might. When the National Press Club offered to sponsor the premiere, he invited its officers to see the picture first.

  Given what came next, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t take up the offer. It might have spared both Washington and Capra a teeth-gnashing night at the movies.

  On October 16, 1939, Constitution Hall was packed to the last seat with men and women in formal dress. The outside streets were jammed with limousines. A Marine Band played as Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, and senators—four thousand people in all—awaited to see a major motion picture they fully expected to reflect their own smug view of public service, i.e., business as usual.

  Then, aghast at what they had seen on the screen before them, a full third of the crowd walked out.

  The offended Washington big shots had a powerful ally—U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James Joseph P. Kennedy. The father of a future president, Kennedy was best known then for backing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler. The Nazi invasion of Poland that September had made that policy both obsolete and discredited. Unfazed by his historic blindness, Kennedy wired the head of Columbia pictures, Harry Cohn, demanding that he withdraw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington from distribution:

  Embassy of the United States

  London, November 17, 1939

  Dear Mr. Cohn:

  I am afraid that we are looking at [Mr. Smith] through different eyes. I haven’t the slightest doubt that the picture will be successful in America and I have no doubt that financially, it will be successful here and will give great pleasure to people who see it. It is my belief, however, that . . . it will give an idea of our political life that will do us harm. . . .