An even more bogus denial, if we can calibrate Clinton’s work in this way, dealt with the draft notice the Arkansas governor had gotten as a young man. Clinton told the press that he couldn’t remember getting it. It’s safe to say that no one of our generation exposed to the military draft of the 1960s can imagine forgetting such an event. Yet that’s what Clinton claimed in the campaign, that he did not remember being drafted. That was the first clear indication of his chronic problem with the truth. Not only was it a flagrant lie, his arrogant insistence on the obvious untruth suggested an in-your-face feudalism: I am your master, you are the serf. I can lie to you and you have to take it.
I remember being in a mob of reporters in an airport hangar the Wednesday before the New Hampshire primary. Clinton flack-catchers James Carville and Frank Greer were wandering around in their usual spin cycle, claiming that a 1969 letter from Clinton thanking the head of the ROTC at the University of Arkansas for “saving” him from the draft wasn’t what it appeared. From what I could see, Clinton had played a number on this ROTC commander, talking him into granting a draft deferment based on a promise to join the ROTC. It’s just that young Bill never did. For him, the ROTC was a fallback position he never had to assume. To me this was yet another example of his reflexive dishonesty.
It was all hard evidence that Bill Clinton had discovered at a very young age that you can get away with making commitments and reneging on them once the situation changes. Intuitively he grasped the unwritten statute of limitations on indignation. People simply can’t stay focused forever on someone else’s alibi.
I remember the morning after the New Hampshire primary, Clinton had gone up on the stage at his headquarters after the polls closed the night before to crown himself the “Comeback Kid.” Paul Tsongas had won by eight percentage points, but somehow he let Clinton steal the night from him. It was an amazingly orchestrated charade.
Clinton walked into the Good Morning America studio that A.M. like a winner, surrounded by a phalanx of blue suits. He went directly for the doughnuts. A few minutes after he left, a sheepish guy arrived wearing a schoolkid’s book bag over his shoulder. With a lone staffer at his side, Paul Tsongas said, “Do you think I could have one of those doughnuts over there on the table?” He didn’t stand a chance.
The underlying truth to Bill Clinton’s role as the Comeback Kid is that he constantly needed to come back. He was always in the process of falling down and picking himself back up again. His return to the Arkansas governor’s chair in 1982 was a comeback victory after being bounced from it in 1980. His second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary was a “comeback” only because he had blown an earlier lead. The public would never quite get used to the fact that his dance was always a two-step, and that this self-crowned Comeback Kid would be forever creating the need for a comeback. It was all part of a cycle of alternating arrogance and apology.
I say all this as someone who found himself early in 1991 falling for the Clinton pitch. He promised early on to battle for those “who work hard and play by the rules,” a surefire connection with someone like me. As he had with millions of others, Clinton had found the combination to my political safe. He also said he wanted to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” That was another shrewdly crafted appeal to people of my bent.
The great tragedy of Bill Clinton is that so many of us wanted to trust him. And one of the great disappointments of the Clinton-Monica fandango was the desperate need for one Democratic leader, one member of his cabinet, one member of his staff to come forward and say, “I will not participate in this cover-up. I will not be a party to a president’s use of his official position to promulgate a lie to the American people.”
No one did.
Another point: Bill Clinton was less popular among men, more popular among women. That’s a switch from his purported role model, Jack Kennedy. Kennedy made men, especially those his age, feel like they were part of the action. Like many of them, he had been a junior officer in World War II. His rise to commander-in-chief was their triumph too. Clinton, on the other hand, hoarded the prize. I do not understand why a man like Bill Clinton, blessed as he is with extraordinary political skills, did not use those same political skills to become not just president, but a great president. Instead, he contented himself with a reign as the country’s prom king.
What it comes down to, I’ve come to think, is a lack of reverence. A man who shows so little respect for his historic circumstances could not find a way to win historic respect. I just don’t get how a man who could get the hard part couldn’t get the easy part.
CHAPTER FOUR
People Who Work Hard and Play by the Rules
The upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
AYN RAND
Anyone who reflects honestly realizes that we inherit our family politics the same way we do the family religion. We may not vote like our moms and dads, but we find ourselves, often against our will, feeling and even talking like them.
One afternoon in a downtown Philadelphia movie theater, a five-star general with a big smile appeared in the newsreel. I can’t remember exactly—I was six at the time—but I have a picture in my mind of him boarding a plane from one of those old portable airplane stairs.
“Is he president?” I asked Dad, who was sitting in the seat just to my right.
“No,” he answered with calm assurance, “but he will be!”
The year was 1952, and our family definitely liked “Ike”—Dwight D. Eisenhower, the military leader who had just seven years before accepted the documents of Nazi surrender.
That fall, riding the bus to school, I staked out my position publicly. I was for Eisenhower. The lonely voice of opposition was that of my second-grade classmate Mike Matthews—no relation—whose father was the local Democratic committeeman. Practically everyone else I knew either liked Ike or kept his opinion to himself.
So now you know my ideological parentage. Dad, for purposes of classification, was a practical conservative, the kind of Republican you find in the Northeast, say, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When I asked Dad who would win in a boxing match, Kennedy or Nixon, he didn’t let his politics harm his handicapping. “Kennedy would kill him,” he said, with not a second’s hesitation.
While Dad sympathized with the Communist hunters, he thought Senator Joseph McCarthy “went too far.” When I fell for Goldwater in the early sixties—don’t forget, Hillary Rodham did too—Dad questioned the Arizona senator’s plan to make Social Security voluntary. He predicted that people would opt out of the system when they were making money, and then end up on welfare when they stopped. A profoundly self-reliant figure, Dad approved of government programs of the self-help variety. He went through college after World War II on the GI bill. He put us through first-rate colleges thanks to those National Defense Education Act loans triggered into existence by the Sputnik scare.
My father was the hardest worker I have ever known. Whenever I have to work late at night and feel like quitting, I think about how dedicated he was, and how uncompromising. For thirty years he was an official reporter in the Philadelphia County court system. During the mornings and well into the afternoon, he would record hours of court testimony. Then he would come home on the train and work until ten o’clock dictating his notes into a dictaphone, breaking only for dinner.
I think Dad got his worker-bee genes from his mother. Grandmom-in-Chestnut-Hill, as we called her, was also a provider. An immigrant from Northern Ireland in her teens, widowed in her fifties, she built a one-person laundry service, serving the network of wealthy families she and Grandpop, born in England, had long worked for. Wildly beloved by all who knew her, she spoke with an Irish accent and conveyed a strong, upbeat, fun-loving attitude her entire life. She not only supported herself but made sure there was always a regular flow of gifts to her grandchildren. For birthdays and Christmas I could count on getting the latest historical biography from the Frigate Bookstore in Chestnut Hil
l.
While Dad kept a roof over our heads. Mom instilled in us our ambition and direction. Here is what I wrote about Mom in September 1996. It’s also, as you’ll see, about Dad.
“I have a picture of my mom, who died last week, from that grand trip we took to Washington in 1954. She’s standing with her three elder boys at this country’s one, true national shrine, the Lincoln Memorial.
The picture tells quite a story, not just of four sunny days in Washington, but of my mother’s aspirations for her five sons.
It is, I can see now, a very American story.
Mary Shields grew up in a North Philadelphia rowhouse at a time and a place where people—they were mostly Irish Catholic—knew each other by their parish. Mom’s marriage to Dad, a Protestant, constituted her first major break from this world.
My mother had ambitions, most of all for her sons. When Dad got out of the Navy at the end of World War II, she encouraged him to get his bachelor’s degree under the GI Bill.
She and he made the even bigger jump of moving from the old church-dominated neighborhood to an area of converted farmland near Bucks County my grandparents would forever view as ‘God’s country.’
The move was symbolic of wider aspirations that would reveal themselves in the years to follow.
Mom had dreams for us. They began with piano lessons. We were to be children of talent. Next came braces for our teeth. Then came private school. All five of us would attend one of the finest in the city. And college. I had my choice of Georgetown, Notre Dame and Holy Cross.
These totems of privilege were achieved as much through sacrifice as dollars-and-cents income. It was not the size of Dad’s paycheck but the way both my parents decided to spend it.
I never knew anyone to work as long or as hard as my father, nor anyone to dream so highly for her children as my mother. My middle-income parents somehow managed to raise their children as upper-middle-income.
My mother had known a far different childhood. College had been out of the question. The minute she graduated from high school she was made to work and pay ‘board,’ turning over each pay envelope to her Depression-weary mother. Just as her mother ruled the pocketbook, her strict father ruled the house.
The greatest restriction was on what she could do with her life. Ambition, like college, was not discussed. She was expected to live just as she was raised herself.
Mom had other ideas. Just as she hoped, her greatest gift to us, her most loving legacy, was that most American of all notions: that the way things are is not necessarily the way they are going to be.
People, given the will, can choose lives much different from those of their parents.
I will never forget the excuse letter Mom wrote my third-grade teacher to explain that ’54 trip to Washington. She said that my father was taking us for ‘business’ reasons. My parents’ real business in Washington was exposing their three older boys to their country’s capital.
The trip was unforgettable. I remember the shaded slave quarters at Mount Vernon, endless rows of ancient bicycles at the Smithsonian, the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument, the trips to those other great memorials on the Mall.
I came back from that trip with a fateful souvenir: an enduring, vivid notion of ‘Washington,’ that amazing capital to the south.
I still have the picture Dad took at the Lincoln Memorial of we three brothers and, behind us, our mother—proud, hopeful, a bit worried for her sons, not knowing she had already passed on the gift.”
I suspect Mom was less Republican than she was Irish. Her father, Charles Patrick Shields, was an Irish-American straight from Eugene O’Neill. Back in the 1950s, when he was working the night shift, he would head off to the plant each evening wearing his workman’s cap and peacoat.
Grandpop’s pride was his role as the Democratic committee-man for his neighborhood of North Philadelphia rowhouses. Long after the area began its rapid shift from Irish-American to African American, he would continue to brag about “bringing in the best division in the city.”
He was, as I said, a true classic. At night after supper he would take his grandkids on long walks through the streets of North Philadelphia, through neighborhoods terribly run down and crime-ridden today. He would light up his Phillies cigar and lead us for miles. When we pleaded exhaustion, he would calmly send us back home and continue on his own. My fondest memories are of Grandpop back at his home on Fifteenth Street after our walk. He’d sit in his chair beneath the mantelpiece to read the bulldog edition of the next morning’s Inquirer. Then, having finished the paper, he would fold it and, with a sly but approving smile, he’d look at me and announce in tones of sheer delight, “Christopher John!”
Though she might never have admitted it, Mom inherited the heart of Grandpop’s Irishness. I remember coming home in the fall of 1954 and seeing the TV on. Since Mom never watched television in the daytime, it was odd to catch her following some “hearings” in Washington. Years later I would realize that what she was watching so religiously were the Army-McCarthy hearings. Joe McCarthy’s Senate enemies were going after him for his intervention on behalf of a young draftee.
While these were the hearings that would bring the Wisconsin senator down, I have no doubt whom the former Mary Teresa Shields was rooting for—and, it wasn’t the army. Her loyalties, as I said, were less partisan than tribal. In the case of Joe McCarthy, her conversion to Dad’s Republicanism neatly coincided with her being 100 percent Irish.
Dad and Mom gave to us in ways that didn’t involve money. For one thing, they paid an enormous amount of attention to what we said. Ours was a family where you were forced, on a daily basis, to explain yourself. “What’s this?” my father would ask if some unfamiliar TV program was on. We knew to be ready to tell him exactly why we were watching it. “Where did you learn that?” was one of my father’s favorites. “Who told you that?” was another. Whatever was said had to be defended and then annotated.
* * *
I remember hearing TV host Dick Cavett ask John Huston what he looked for in life. The great film director, then dying of lung disease, came back with a single word: “Interest.”
Politics, which has become essential to my daily life, is not an interest I was born with. Yes, I wanted to save the world at the age of five and rooted precociously for Eisenhower at six, but I was hardly what you’d call a boy political junkie. I remember one long ago Monday night in the early fifties when CBS bumped the country’s highest-rated show, I Love Lucy, for an address by President Eisenhower. My brothers and I spent the half-hour mocking Ike’s bald pate. “Old Coonskin,” we kept calling him.
What recruited me, body and soul, to the political life was the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I have never again gotten so emotional about a political campaign.
I don’t want to rehash the whole race now. I wrote a book about Jack Kennedy’s and Dick Nixon’s rivalry that detailed the entire saga from their strange early friendship through the feud’s final showdown, when Ted Kennedy played his backroom role triggering the Watergate probe. What I didn’t write in that book and what I will tell you now is whose side I ended up on.
Everyone forgets that JFK appeared on the political horizon as a shooting star. I remember the first time I heard the name “Kennedy.” We were coming up the driveway to our house on Southampton Road, listening on the radio of our ’54 Chevrolet Impala to what would be the last ever floor fight at a national political convention. Nominated a second time for president, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson had thrown the choice of his running mate open to the delegates. As we listened to the roll call, the battle for the coveted slot had narrowed to Estes Kefauver, the senator from Tennessee, who had made his name probing organized crime, and the newcomer from Massachusetts, Kennedy. Not knowing the other guy, I rooted for Kefauver, aware that I’d be cheering on Ike in the fall. I even crafted a pun for the occasion: “Keef-all-for Eisenhower.”
But I soon discovered that
Kennedy was a Catholic like us. Like Dad, he was a member of the Knights of Columbus, and a war hero besides. It was soon made clear that he was the best hope to nullify the country’s rejection of New York governor Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee. His coreligionists held as a matter of faith that Smith’s Roman Catholicism had been the chief reason for his defeat.
The 1960 election threatened our family with a terrible conflict between party and religion. When I asked Dad how he intended to vote, he said somewhat firmly that he was “a Republican.” When I pushed the issue with Mom I could tell she was torn. As for me, I dreaded the prospect of having to go with Nixon over Kennedy. I had a large newspaper route at the time and remember my branch manager, an adult, asking me who I was for. “Kennedy in the primaries,” I said tactfully. I was being Clintonesque. The whole truth was that I knew I would have to be for Nixon in November.
At fourteen, I was about to take the plunge. I was about to care about an election more than I have ever cared again. I began that summer rooting for Nixon. But when I watched every hour of the dramatic Democratic convention in Los Angeles, my loyalties shifted. I watched Eleanor Roosevelt with her high-pitched voice try to save it for her hero, Adlai, “Let it go to a second,” she said from the podium. “I beseech you, let it go to a second ballot.” Caught up in the glamour of the Los Angeles convention I experienced the opposite impulse. I swooned at the whole notion of a Kennedy dynasty. How great it would be, I calculated, to have Jack reign for eight years, Lyndon Johnson eight, then Bobby and Teddy for eight more each.
Ten days later I watched Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge accept the GOP nomination in Chicago. My infatuation with the Kennedys fizzled. I became convinced that Nixon was a far more serious candidate than Kennedy, far stronger in confronting the Communists. It was not a popular position at La Salle College High School. When a teacher got the idea to poll our homeroom, the vote was twenty-four for JFK, nine for Nixon. I was surprised to learn there were even that many bucking the Catholic Kennedy tide.
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 Page 155