San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
If there was a moment to remember, he was there
Chris Matthews looks back with political eye
If Barack Obama is a writer stuck inside a politician, Chris Matthews may be a politician stuck inside a writer. As Matthews grows from young Catholic boy in Philadelphia to Peace Corps worker in Swaziland and weaves through staff positions in the Senate, the White House, the House leadership and, finally, makes it big in the media, the world changes around him. He goes from watching the Kennedy/ Nixon debates on TV to grilling presidential candidates on MSNBC; from watching the Reagan Revolution as a Carter speechwriter to narrating presidential elections as a cable news host. He visits Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was in South Africa during the end of apartheid and in Rome for Pope John Paul II’s funeral. He is a more pugnacious version of Forrest Gump. The book’s main point is that, since 1970, whenever anything momentous happened, Chris Matthews witnessed it.
But history is not a roll call, and a near-perfect attendance record at the major events of the past 50 years does not make a memoir. And the book, while capably written, offers neither new historical insight nor true personal intimacy. Reading it can feel like shuffling through a bunch of postcards from the past, pictures of famous monuments accompanied by a jotted note saying, “I was there!”
Matthews is something of a political monument himself. He has built a decadeslong career in journalism as one of the most widely respected political minds in Washington, renowned for his sometimes facile ability to spot comers, recall obscure political factoids and ask abrupt, interrupting questions about how the sausage gets made. His bestseller “Hardball: How Politics Is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game,” and his MSNBC show of the same name helped define American politics for a generation. His columns were good, his analysis was sharp, and the reader knows it, because he quotes himself throughout the book. Nobody was better at identifying the political currents and predicting where they were going.
But while Matthews proved an able historian in his three books about the Kennedys and one about political opponents Ronald Reagan and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., his memoir fails to convey the complexity and nuance of being a real person living through a historical time. The book seems to be written for political junkies like himself; it feels, at times, like a string of names and dates, descriptions of long-forgotten bills and longgone
political operators, a yearbook for Washington insiders, meant to be read index-first. The problem is that Matthews was often straddling the line between politics and journalism.
This is the great tension of Matthews’s life, one that has propelled his career and enlivened his show but hobbles this book. Although he was never successfully elected to office himself (he worked as a Senate aide, a top deputy to Speaker of the House O’Neill, a speechwriter to President Jimmy Carter and ran for Congress in 1974), it’s clear that Matthews is a political creature at heart. He has a politician’s recollection for obscure names and banal anecdotes, a relentless forward propulsion and limitless confidence, a firm grasp of the political upsides and downsides of any situation. He also has a politician’s lack of introspection, aversion to showing any weakness and a general lack of curiosity about anything unrelated to the machinations of power.
Despite Matthews’s repeated insistence that politics is all about “personal connection,” at nearly every turn, he pivots away from private observations or intimate details and toward information that was already publicly known. The decades he spent behind the scenes in the 1970s and ’80s yield few new insights about the political history of that time, often focusing on obscure legislative maneuverings too outdated to be relevant to a 21st-century audience. The anecdotes are toothless and largely flattering to the subject, making the reader wonder what kind of juicy details he’s picked up after a lifetime in politics that he’s keeping to himself. He crosses paths with most of the great leaders of that time — including influential senators and Carter — but tends to spend more time quoting their public speeches than describing what they were like in person. In more recent decades, spent largely behind the anchor desk on MSNBC, Matthews recalls covering the 2008 election of Obama and the rise of Donald Trump. But even then, he rarely dips beneath the surface to tell readers something they wouldn’t have learned from watching him on TV.
Of course, the book is meant to be an account of a man living through history, not a personal memoir, and Matthews is clearly a man determined to participate fully in the times in which he lived. Yet he seems so wrapped up in the
minutiae of his own career that he often misses the more interesting narratives in his path. Throughout the book, there’s the persistent sensation of hearing about longago baseball games, often not particularly dramatic ones, where nobody can remember who won or who lost, and nobody really cares.
It’s the love of the game that has animated Chris Matthews’ life and career, and “This Country” is more about the players’ vital stats and scores than the feeling in the stands. But that political game — hardball — has changed. The rules are different now, and so are the stakes. Matthews knows this but, in typical fashion, he steers clear of any real soul-searching over his sudden departure from television. He notes that he had “remarked on a ‘Hardball’ guest’s appearance as she was being prepared in the makeup chair,” adding that “it never occurred to me to deny that it had happened or condone what I’d said” and that after a “conversation with the network” he decided to retire early. He then quotes his own on-air farewell commentary from his final show (“compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were okay were never okay”) before launching into a list of his favorite “young talent” he featured on “Hardball,” a list of the campuses he had visited on his “Hardball” college tour, a list of the types of people who “stuck with me all these exciting years.” It reads like the final speech of an embattled campaign, when the candidate acknowledges the scandal, praises his staff, thanks his supporters and walks off the stage.
His book is best read as a snapshot of a certain kind of player in a certain kind of game. He saw his share of plays, he knows the strategy better than anyone, and when history happened, at least he can say he was there.