My basic pattern of work was first to ride my Suzuki into a rural area, then enter the local trading store and ask for the owner. I would have him take a student’s copybook down off the shelf, then begin teaching my stunned host, using my limited Zulu, how to keep a proper cash book.
As the weeks became months I got to know these fellows. A generation older than me, they could not have been nicer. Their main concern seemed to be my welfare. They would go out of their way to find a Coke for me when I turned up. They would fuss over their surprise visitor, this skinny young white guy from America.
Believe me: They treated me like a son. And while on the subject, I should note that during my entire two years in the country, 1968–1970, I never sensed a note of hostility from any Swazi. At a reception he gave for Peace Corps volunteers in the province, the new district commissioner greeted his guests by observing what an “adventure” it must be for us to come all the way to Africa.
I thought of myself as sort of a bourgeois Che Guevara. I was traveling around a Third World country preaching the ways of capitalism just as Che had been hawking Marxism in South America. If I wasn’t in Vietnam, I was serving the cause on another front. While far less dangerous, it was also more promising.
In addition to my visiting road show I organized a number of weeklong business schools. I would recruit ten to twenty traders, arrange for their housing at a local boarding school, hire a smart young student to serve as interpreter, pull together a faculty of teachers, and get some movies from the United States Information Agency (USIA) as a treat to show in the evening. The courses included basic marketing techniques, such as lowering prices to increase total revenues.
I also set up a national industrial show. It was a fairly big affair staged on the national fairgrounds. Even the king came and liked it. So did the United Nations adviser who was assigned to small-business development.
After the mamba incident, my most unforgettable moment came at a meeting with seventeen Swazi guys. All of them were small traders, the people I’d come thousands of miles to teach. What I remember clearly is that I knew each of them as an individual, knew them decently well in fact. It struck me at the time that I was the only non-Swazi in the room, the only white guy. While there were volunteers who were far better at the language, even ones far more committed to their work, this was the one time when I fully grasped the essence of the Peace Corps. The adventure is not just the travel in a foreign country; it’s the personal connection with the people living there.
Of course, the travel wasn’t bad. I remember driving my Suzuki into Lourenco Marques one Friday night. I stopped for a great Portuguese dinner, including a carafe of white wine, at a roadside restaurant. Just an hour east of Swaziland, the old Mozambique was a port city of sidewalk cafés, modern movie theaters, bullfights, and men selling lottery tickets. I remember my long train ride through East Africa; the overnight run on the Rhodesian Railway from LM to Bulawayo, then hitchhiking alone from Rhodesia to Tanzania, and finally taking a twenty-six-hour ride on a local bus carrying chickens, goats, you name it, all the way to Kilimanjaro. I remember hitchhiking to Victoria Falls from the Zambian side, catching the incredible sight of it through the trees at sunset, then, in the darkness, crossing on foot the bridge that runs over the gorge just below the falls.
What were those two years like? I know just how to tell you. Working our way home in December 1970, three or four of us were in Mombasa seeing The Wild Bunch at a big downtown movie theater. It’s the story of a tough old outlaw gang in the early years of the twentieth century. In the final scene, two survivors of the gang meet each other in a little Mexican town where one of them, played by Edmund O’Brien, has teamed up with the peasants to fight the federales. The Robert Ryan character asks him how it’s going. “It ain’t like it was,” he answers, “but it’ll do.”
As we were walking down the street after the movie, Jim Steinman, a buddy of mine from California, repeated that line. Every one of us laughed at the happy truth of what he’d just said. For us it wasn’t like it had been for the young British colonial officers who’d come out to work in countries like Swaziland. We didn’t live quite the upscale life they had. We didn’t have the cars and the clubs and the grand houses. But the positive side of the ledger was that, unlike those smart young Brits of yesteryear, we were working on the side of the people.
Like anyone who’s been to the Peace Corps, I can never fully convey its impact on me. Grandmom-in-Chestnut-Hill shrewdly saw how I’d broken free on arrival back in the United States, after I’d gone down to Washington and started my climb on Capitol Hill. She spotted what had set me on a whole different course from my four brothers. “It was Africa,” she said, fixing me with her stare, “wasn’t it?”
Yes, Grandmom, I think it was.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: The sixties changed me. If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated, if the United States had not sent five hundred thousand troops into Vietnam, if I had not spent two years in the Peace Corps, my politics would be very different today. For it is that combination of realities that cracked my conservative orthodoxy.
I still feel the death of JFK, a man who was far more conservative than his liberal legend, far tougher in life than the “Camelot” fantasy confected after his death. More than any other president, he had been growing in office. As my Republican dad once said, even as he prepared to vote for Nixon, you could hear a hint of Churchill in that young man.
Vietnam remains a chronic reminder that even the most powerful nation in the world cannot work its will everywhere. When the fight is on enemy turf, when the forces of nationalism are riding against you, beware!
And speaking of Vietnam, where were the American conservatives? Having pushed the hard line against the Communist enemy, Barry Goldwater, and later Ronald Reagan, left it to the establishment to argue the war. The home-front conflict over Vietnam was fought within the Democratic party.
The only Republican voice heard in 1968, when the casualty rate was ten thousand soldiers a year, was that of Richard Nixon, who was promising a secret plan to extract us from the war. A strategy that would replicate the casualties of the Johnson presidency and give a Republican stamp to the war.
Had I come to Washington in 1961, I would have been a reasonably thoughtful conservative, one with some doubts about the shortcomings of the party ideology in the area of civil rights and Social Security. But when I actually arrived a decade later, I was ready to look for a job with a Democrat or, failing that, a moderate, antiwar Republican.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“The Worst Form of Government”
Nobody pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all other forms that have been tried from time to time.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
I took my chair at MSNBC headquarters at 5:00 P.M. election night. At 5:00 A.M. the following morning I was still in that chair.
I’d known it was going to be tight. With three weeks left, I had predicted the 2000 presidential election would be a squeaker. I thought Gore would win points on the economy, Bush on his personality. “I think this election is going to be so close,” I told Matt Lauer on that morning after the third debate, “that the Electoral College could go in the opposite direction of the popular vote.”
What did I really think? To be perfectly honest, I thought it would go the other way, Gore winning the electoral vote, Bush winning the popular.
But who could have predicted that five-week overtime in Florida? I was on the air constantly and got an intimate look at the whole thing. Talk about political hardball! Everyone in that state had his or her hand in politics. We kept looking for a team of umpires to enter the arena, but all we ever got were more players. I could say that I’d never seen anything like it. But, as you’ve probably figured by now, it wouldn’t be true. During three decades working in and around politicians, I’ve seen backroom scrounging for votes, officeholders fighting
over jurisdictions, operatives using every lever they could to their advantage.
The five-week postelection fight over Florida, however, was unique in at least one regard: Whoever got the state’s electoral votes would become president. For many Americans, just watching the ordeal on television was hardship duty. For me, it was both fascinating and the greatest professional opportunity of my life. In those thirty days I was able to exploit thirty years of experience in politics.
You know the insect life you expose when you look under a rock? Aristophanes, the Greek playwright from the fourth century B.C., knew, “Under every stone lurks a politician.” And that’s exactly what many people saw when they stumbled upon the electoral anthropology of Florida last November. As someone who has spent years as a political bug, I found the terrain under that rock very familiar. Suddenly everyone, whatever their title, was a politician. From her first on-air appearance you could see that the secretary of state in St. John’s knit was a Republican. Almost as quickly we learned that Florida’s attorney general was a Democrat, while the people on the “canvassing boards” each had his or her own easy-to-spot allegiances. The Florida Supreme Court was packed with liberals picked by Democratic governors.
It was my joy—I have to use that word—to spend five weeks on MSNBC pointing out the inconvenient reality of how politics really works in this country. Not through made-for-TV speeches and rallies, but through real street fights, through skirmishing for votes block by block.
It all reminded me of a typical week on Capitol Hill. With the big vote set for Thursday night, the vote-scrounging would begin in earnest on Tuesday. General debate would get underway on Wednesday. All the while, unofficial party “task forces” would be out in force, figuring out how to spring one more vote free from the other side. You would see jurisdictional disputes, fights over the rules, debates over procedures, the ongoing skirmishing for numbers, numbers, numbers.
My Washington education began for me when I came to town with two hundred dollars left of my post-Swaziland “readjustment allowance.” My strategy was simple: Get a job with a senator or member of Congress and work my way up the political ladder. My dream was to be a legislative assistant to a senator, because that was the job Ted Sorensen had performed for John F. Kennedy. His memoir of those early years was a book I had devoured eagerly while serving in the Peace Corps; it was my companion one particular night on a long overnight train ride from Mozambique to Rhodesia.
So I went up to Capitol Hill and starting knocking on doors, introducing myself to perfect strangers much as I had done with Swazi traders during the previous two years. Fortunately, it worked. Wayne Owens, then a top aide to Senator Frank Moss of Utah, loved the fact that I’d just come from the Peace Corps and hired me, though not before he made me try out. He asked me to write a response to a very difficult letter from a woman who was very influential in cultural circles in Salt Lake City. She wanted to know if her husband was eligible for a tax shelter for people who work in nonprofit organizations. I went over to the IRS and sat down with a tax expert. I typed up everything he gave me, did a number of revisions, then walked into the senator’s office Monday morning with the product.
I remember standing there waiting for Wayne’s verdict. He read it, liked it, and said, “I’m going to give you a job as a Capitol policeman. I know that’s not what you had hoped for, but it will pay for the groceries.”
I took it.
My heart in my stomach, I said it wasn’t what I had hoped for but I was grateful, and, of course, ready to go to work. The drill was, I would work daytimes in the office answering complicated letters from constituents and writing short speeches. At 3:00, I’d don my uniform and .38 special and take up my guard duties. One evening I was posted outside a backroom in the Capitol and told to let no one past. I was protecting the “Pentagon papers.”
By summer’s end I had pestered Wayne into making me a legislative assistant to the senator. I drafted speeches and suggested amendments to pending bills. I also began to learn some potent insider lessons about politics.
One was “patronage.” I found out that to get any job on Capitol Hill you needed a senator or member of Congress to appoint you.
I also began to grasp the truth of that old Hemingway adage, “Don’t confuse action with movement.” I discovered that the signature you get on a letter from a senator saying how he’s working diligently on the matter you raised in a letter is probably the penmanship of a state-of-the-art signature machine. I learned that a bill passed in one body of Congress may be predestined to go nowhere in the other. (In fact, amendments are often allowed precisely because the chief counsel of the committee of jurisdiction knows they’re going nowhere.) I saw sixty-five senators grab a bit of positive publicity by passing an “ironclad” ceiling on federal spending only to, hours later, jam past a pair of amendments rendering it useless. I saw senators defeat a bill indexing the minimum wage to inflation and productivity so that they—I’m talking about the Democrats—could keep their good buddies in the labor unions dependent on their good graces.
These are valuable things to learn when you’re just starting out.
After two years with Senator Moss, I got some encouragement from him that I have never forgotten: “Chris, maybe you ought to dip a little deeper in the political waters.” So, in December 1972, following Nixon’s big reelection, I wrote a long piece for the old Washington Star headlined, “An Issue Democrats Ignore at their Peril.” That issue was fiscal responsibility. Either the Democrats should kick their deficit-spending habit, I wrote, or they would never be taken seriously. Four years later Jimmy Carter would win the party’s presidential nomination with a promise to make government more efficient. It would take Bill Clinton, though, to show voters that the Democrats meant business.
In spring 1974, I decided to follow Senator Moss’s advice and challenge the incumbent—and the Democratic machine—in a Philadelphia congressional primary. I had no money, no big-name support, no small-name support, no plan. It was quixotic and exhilarating. I remember that the guy who volunteered to do my printing wrote me in a letter: “Matthews, you’ve got steel balls.”
My first step was to get myself registered to vote locally; the next was to file as a candidate. I went down to City Hall and found out how many signatures I needed for the petition. Then I went out and started walking along my old paper route, down Southampton road to Londontown, collecting names. My campaign consisted of visiting high schools, asking kids to volunteer, then assigning them areas where they would distribute my literature.
The “Matthews for Congress” campaign did wild things, such as having a volunteer rock band play to drum up crowds at shopping centers. My favorite gambit was to have a crowd of volunteers, which included a number of very cute Catholic high-school girls, stand alongside the district’s main traffic artery, Roosevelt Boulevard, waving “Honk ’n’ Wave” signs. We had four hundred kids signed up.
I told my volunteers that I was running against the corruption revealed by the Watergate probe, the fat cat campaign gifts aimed at controlling the men in office. I told them I had nobody giving me money—that was certainly true—and that, therefore, they were my fat cats. My kids were “good government” through and through, and if any of those great people are now reading this, I want you to know how grateful I am to this day.
Beaten badly on primary day, I nonetheless gained new stature back in Washington. Senator Moss got his friend Edmund Muskie of Maine to hire me to work for the new Senate Budget Committee. Muskie had been a big reason I’d voted for Humphrey in ’68. He had run for president in ’72 but lost the nomination to George McGovern. But in the Senate he was the one man with the guts to make Congress design a budget every year and stick to it, just like a family has to. I remember Hubert Humphrey—he was a big spender and knew it—passing Muskie, his friend and colleague, in the Senate chambers and telling him, “You’re doing great stuff, Ed. I couldn’t do it.”
Ed Muskie was the senator who pa
ssed the Clean Water and Air Acts on the budget committee. I saw how he got things done. While other senators would come, get their pictures taken, give short speeches, and leave, he would just sit there and work. He would not even go to the bathroom. We on his staff used to call him “Iron Butt.” Because of that, he became a very productive legislator; while other members came and went, he stayed and legislated.
You might say Senator Muskie was practical to a fault. I remember saying to him, after working for three years on the budget committee, “You know, if we had a parliamentary system in this country, you would be prime minister.” His response to my tribute was blunt: “But we don’t, do we?” That was Muskie. It took a lawmaker that stoic to spend all those years telling senators to spend only what they were willing to tax.
During my years on Capitol Hill, I was always working on my speechwriting and public-speaking skills. I accepted every speaking opportunity regardless of the group: the Close-Up Foundation, Presidential Classroom, the Brookings Institution. I joined the Capitol Hill chapter of Toastmasters. While other staffers were content just knowing their stuff, I forced myself to practice getting that stuff across to other people. I desperately needed to overcome my stage fright.
In 1977, former Florida speaker of the house Dick Pettigrew hired me to work in the White House on President Carter’s number-one campaign promise: government reorganization. Two years later, chief presidential speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg hired me to join his team. Of all the jobs I’ve had until Hardball, being a presidential speechwriter was the most fun.
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 159