Chris Matthews on Jfk | Jfk Library

TOM PUTNAM:  Good evening, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for your patience. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, members of the Foundation's Board of Directors, many of whom are here with us tonight, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for joining us this evening. Let me first acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: Lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, Raytheon, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.   Let me also acknowledge two special guests here this evening:  The first, a member of the Kennedy Administration, Richard K. Donahue, and also the former Chair of the Kennedy Library Foundation Board and former United States Senator Paul Kirk. [applause]

In his captivating new biography, Chris Matthews sets out to answer the questions: What was JFK like? How did he go from being a rich kid and Joe Kennedy's son to becoming the man who saved the country during the Cuban Missile Crisis? What was the genesis of this unforgettable man described in the title as an elusive hero?  In answering these and other queries, the book also offers us a glimpse of what Chris Matthews is like. We learn about a young Catholic boy who, influenced by his father's Republican leanings, cried on behalf of Richard Nixon when the 1960 election results were announced [laughter], and about the man who readily admits that he has never gotten over the loss of John F. Kennedy, thus initiating him into what he characterizes as a knighthood of the soulful. 

The ideals JFK stood for serve, in part, as the genesis of Mr. Matthews's service – as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, as a Presidential speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, as a top aide for Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, and as one of the country's most respected journalists.  He is a hero to many in this room and throughout the nation. Though in this case, less of an elusive idol than an effusive one. [laughter] In fact, one of the book's many attributes is how vividly it conveys Mr. Matthews's exuberant voice, a voice that throughout the writing of this biography hurdled through my office phone as Mr. Matthews wished, first, to try out a new theory:  "Tom, it's Chris Matthews. I think it all begins at Choate with Lem Billings. That's the moment when Jack recognizes his own charisma and realizes how effortlessly he could gain the loyalty of friends. What do you think?"  Or to verify a fact: "Tom, Chris Matthews again. Listen, was Smathers on that trip in '56?"  Or to learn more about a source: "Tom, it's Chris. Explain to me the provenance of these Kenny O'Donnell oral histories. They're simply terrific."

We're honored to have him here in person, not separated by phone lines, to discuss this new bestselling biography, which is on sale in our bookstore. Mr. Matthews has agreed to sign your copies at the conclusion of the Forum and nothing says Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukah better than an autographed copy. [laughter]

Our moderator this evening is Marty Nolan, who was a legendary reporter and editor for the Boston Globe from 1961 to 2001. During those 40 years, he coined the term Joe Six-Pack to define the typical American voter; earned a Pulitzer Prize for investigating inconsistencies in testimony from a nominee for a federal judgeship supported by the Kennedy family; and secured a spot on President Nixon's enemies list. [laughter/applause]  One might have predicted the latter when Mr. Nolan was a young boy growing up right here in Dorchester. It's reported that he asked his first tough question at the age of 12 when challenging a nun in his parochial school during more reactionary times, "Sister, how do you know Dean Acheson is a communist?" [laughter]

Mr. Nolan has participated in past Forums here, from the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debates, to discussions on one of his favorite pastimes, professional baseball. We thought of him and another of his famous lines this past September when our hopes for the hometown team were dashed, "The Red Sox killed my father," he once stated, "and now they're coming after me." [laughter]

One might argue that this same Irish wit helps connect John Kennedy and Chris Matthews and allow me one brief example from the last time Mr. Matthews spoke from this stage. His co-panelist that day, E. J. Dionne, was explaining that one study suggested in the 1960 election that JFK got 95% of the Irish Catholic vote nationally and then quipped that one doesn't need a study to understand that JFK also received 120% of that vote in Chicago. [laughter] To which Chris Matthews, without skipping a beat, replied, "Yes, he always polled well with what we call the Catholic Triumphant." [laughter]

Among the glowing reviews of Mr. Matthews's new book was this comment posted on the Internet: "I just finished reading Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, and there's a deep lump in my throat. Chris Matthews captured in his biography what has been missing in so many other books about John F. Kennedy, his soul."  In short, in this fresh and compelling contribution to the Kennedy canon, Chris Matthews's accomplishment is nothing short of triumphant.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Marty Nolan and Christopher Matthews to the Kennedy Library. [applause]

MARTY NOLAN:  Chris, I was watching a lot of television, all those guys running for President, you know, the Republicans? And several of them said, "Well, when I get into office, national security, I'm going to rely on my generals. I'm going to listen to my generals. I'm going to do whatever the generals think is a good idea." And I thought, well, they haven't read Chapter 14 of Chris Matthews's book about an October surprise in 1962. Some of his generals had a different idea from the President.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  By the way, Gerry Doherty's here. I remember you from Tip days; nice to see you. Paul Kirk, of course. I forgot you were Senator, I'm sorry. It was great, it was unforgettable, actually. And Connie Kastelnik. A lot of people I know. And one of my heroes is here, Marty Nolan. 

I don't know how to pronounce the French, Georges Clemenceau, the French leader, once said war is too important to be left to the generals. Every time I hear one of these characters say, "I'm going to wait and hear from the generals on the ground"– Cain seems to like that formulation. If you don't know anything, it's good to learn something, I guess. [laughter] And that's a pretty colossal statement, actually. 

The news I was able to pull together about the Cuban Missile Crisis, we all grew up with it.

My brother was at Holy Cross a year ahead of me, and he told me about the Confession lines. This was a time all of us grew up hiding under those little school desks, when the nun told us it was 15 minutes till the first flash and the general judgment would follow, quickly. [laughter] This was all tied together with our religion and it was all one big history/religion/current events class when we got under those desks. [laughter] I was a wise guy back then. I said, "Suppose they get the air raid and the fire drill mixed up?" [laughter] We'd be out there to greet the incoming or be under the desks, whatever. 

I was thinking like that, and I still am. But here's Jack Kennedy, a guy who had learned the lessons of not trusting people through all those years of getting back operations. He learned not to trust experts. Thank god he did. Experts.   These guys weren't experts. They thought nuclear war was like any other kind of war. MacArthur had come to him a couple weeks before with the idea, "You know, I really was frustrated back in the Korean War because I wanted to outfit all my infantrymen with holster-mounted nuclear weapons because that would give them a great morale boost." And Kennedy, of course, was babying the guy. He said, "Let's get it straight. It would clear 120 yards in front of you and then it would go up in a puff." I mean, even Kennedy in those days completely understood the reality of nuclear fallout and nuclear material. You don't just shoot it in front of you and it goes up if you don't hit the guy, like a ray gun or something. Yet, this was the mindset of the people around him.  Curtis LeMay wanted a first strike. You know what a first strike was? That's when you hit all of the Soviet Union and all the satellite countries in one big shot and kill everybody. That was his preferred reaction to the situation. 

Kennedy knew that if they moved on Berlin, which Khrushchev had warned him, "If you move on Cuba, we're going to Berlin right away." He knew we'd be in the first shoot situation then, which means we go to a tactical because we're facing 350,000 Red Army troops surrounding our 15,000 NATO troops, we had to go to first shoot.  So he knew all these horrible next-steps in this Rube Goldberg reality we were facing. So he said, "Wait a minute, I read Barbara Tuchman. Don't take the first step; they'll take the next, and we're there."  Because leaders do what they have to do if they don't stop that clock somehow. The generals are just thinking, "Oh, we've got more nukes than they do, so we'll hit them hard, we'll win, relatively."  Kennedy said, "We call ourselves civilized, what are you talking about here?" And Bobby said, "I feel like Tojo, we're going to hit them first."

So it was a great example of why we elect our Commander in Chief. It's an amazing system the Founding Fathers figured out. I wish the Tea Party types would remind themselves -- or if they ever knew -- the central aspect of our Constitution, which is it's us ruling the country and us deciding on war and peace, especially with the nuclear age upon us.

I think the Kennedy story in here is overwhelming, that this guy was able to stand up … He actually took his first big step, Marty, when he said no, when he found himself surrounded by Dick Bissell and Allen Dulles and Lemnitzer and those guys, who caballed against him, in effect, in the Bay of Pigs, to convince him that once we put 1,500 middle class Cuban exiles on that beach in the Bay of Pigs, somehow they would win. But the trick is they convinced the President to go that far so that when it did happen, he'd be forced to bring our troops in and engage the Cubans, which is what they wanted to happen. 

It turns out that Kennedy made the biggest mistake he could have made, and it was a learning experience but a horrendous one. All we had to ask was, “How many Cuban regular troops will be there the first day to meet the 1,500 exiles?” That's all we needed to ask. 25,000. There wasn't even a chance to establish a beachhead. They said, "Oh, well, they'll just go into the Escambray Mountains" -- however you pronounce it. Well, the problem was there were 80 miles of swamp separating the beach from the mountains. They lied to him, this guy, Dick Bissell, an Ivy League buddy of his, who really liked him but he wanted to trick him and he did; he admitted later he'd lied to him. They tricked him.

Kennedy at that moment said, "No, I've made this big mistake to go along with this thing, but this moment I say no, I'm not invading Cuba." Because he said, "We've got Russian troops there. I don't know how many we'd have to kill. We're going to war with Russia. And I know Khrushchev, I know all about Khrushchev. This guy would have to fight, too. We'd go into war, we'd have a world war."

I do believe that in 1989, when I was there in Berlin and the world changed when we saw that Berlin Wall coming down, I began to realize we got through this thing -- those of us who hid under a school desk -- because of Kennedy.  Without nuclear war. Which we all thought growing up, by the way, would sooner or later happen; let's remember that. Nobody wants to remember that, but we all figured sooner or later there'd be a nuclear war. There had to be.  Both sides had nuclear weapons, there'd always been a war. We had two World Wars; we'd have another one. Kennedy stopped that. He got us through it. That's what I think.  

MARTY NOLAN:  Ted Kennedy told me once that his grandfather, Honey Fitz, was a grand man for taking the kids around to walk around Boston, to learn the history. And JFK must have been on that trip because several times he quoted from Boston statues. The "City on a Hill" is a phrase that Reagan adopted, but it was originally John Winthrop abroad the Arabella out here. JFK used it to lecture the Massachusetts legislature on not stealing too much. [laughter] 

I covered the night of his big birthday party at the Commonwealth Armory in 1962 when he was on his way to meet Khrushchev for the first time and he said, "I'm going to quote a phrase written on one of our statues and a statement from a vigorous and distinguished New Englander, William Lloyd Garrison: 'I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard.'" It was a great moment.  Another monument I think he looked at was the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, right across from the State House. I thought that today when I walked by it of the statement, its dedication. William James, the great Harvard philosopher, came up with the idea of the moral equivalent of war at that dedication.

He said, "We need a kind of civic courage, not the gregarious courage that Colonel Shaw and his brave men showed." And that made me think of the Peace Corps, of which you are an alumnus.

What did Kennedy say that made you sign up for the Peace Corps?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Well, I reminded myself in the Peace Corps when I could, what would Jack do? He'd have some fun, first of all. That's a big part of it.  I was in the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War, so I had a lot of regular guys with me, you think? So it was alternative service and a lot of us chose that. It was positive, it was pro-American, it was patriotic, and it was a lot of adventure.

There's this great moment I found at the Cow Palace. They were down at that hotel down on Market Street in San Francisco -- the old one along the Market Street there -- and he was scared because Ike was catching up. He was helping Nixon in '60, and he was getting scared. He said, "I'm on a sandbar and the tide's going out, and they're catching me. This Ike, Nixon's pushed the panic button and it's working." Ike was amazingly popular as he was retiring. His popularity popped up again in '60.  And he said, "Oh, my god, this is close.  But I've got to tell you about that speech I'm giving tonight at the Cow Palace." And here are these two guys who were going through a war together, close friends, talking about this new thing, where guys like him, instead of going to war, would go around the world and really try to change it. 

I really thought that that was something positive. I always wanted to go to Africa. I always wanted to go out there.  It probably goes back from Ramar of the Jungle and Tarzan and African Queen, all that stuff, but I wanted to go to Africa. I applied to the Peace Corps two or three times. One time they wanted to send me to Venezuela. I said boring. And they wanted to send me to Afghanistan and learn Farsi or something. I didn't want to do that. I'm sure I would have prevented everything from going wrong over there. [laughter]

Of course, I got 1A facing me and I keep saying, no, that's not my cup of tea. I said,  “No, how about something a little more African?”  I wanted to go to Cambodia because it was a neutralist country and I thought I was going a little left then, so I thought I'd go over there but they weren't in that country. Then finally they gave me some other country and I said, “No, no, no, no!”  Finally I got Swaziland and I said, “Good, I'm at graduate school at North Carolina and this is really doing something exciting.”  I've got to tell you, it changed your life. Anybody in the Peace Corps? Changed your life, right? Best thing that ever happened to you? My grandmom was an immigrant from Northern Ireland, and one time she said to me -- she had the brogue, she was like Mrs. Doubtfire only the real thing, gender-wise and she was formidable.  She was one of these women that used to stare at you over the dinner table.

When I was getting ahead in Washington, I got a Capitol Hill -- like Barnicle -- a Capitol Hill cop job, and I was working …

MARTY NOLAN:  It's a top row clique.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I know, it's embarrassing.

Then she said, "It was Africa, wasn't it?"  It changed your life.  It gets you off your butt and gets you out of your rut. You start looking at your religion differently. You start looking at the world differently. You start to think about other people in the world looking at things differently than you. Then you find the common in it. You find yourself in the middle of nowhere, about 17 African guys, black guys, you're a white guy, you're different than them, and yet you know them all personally. We're connecting here.  I was teaching business, and I'm sure these guys are all zillionaires now. [laughter] I had a motorcycle and I was bumming around Africa. You can't ask for anything better than to do that for two years, bumming around up and down the east coast of Africa.

MARTY NOLAN:  You were probably in more danger than I was at Fort Dix. [laughter] But I did keep the Bolshevik hordes out of New Jersey.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I thought of myself as a bourgeois Che Guevara. I'm teaching capitalism and he's out there teaching communism. I did have a heroic notion of myself.

MARTY NOLAN:  The chapters in this book are all concise. They're either one or two words, I like that. And there's one called "Bobby," and of course I covered Bobby a lot. When I was reading it, I was thinking there's a big gap here in our perception of the Kennedy Cabinet. And it is this: Because JFK appointed his brother – now, there's nothing wrong with nepotism; I know where I am here – to this high office, he almost felt forced to appoint total strangers to State and Defense.  I wonder if he regretted that. You quote him as saying that he wished he'd sent Bobby to the CIA or somewhere else. But isn't that a thought, that if he had people he knew and trusted at State and Defense, the Vietnam enterprise might have not got under way?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Yeah, well, he basically made a hot button decision to keep Dulles, Allen Dulles at CIA, and I think that was the pressure of the establishment.

MARTY NOLAN:  And J. Edgar.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Of course, it was almost like the Federal Reserve in those days. It wasn't just that Hoover was out there snooping around all those years since he went out with Inga Binga, and always snooping around on the Kennedys and everybody else and using stuff against them. But I think it was primarily – you never know internal motive, ever -- but I think it was the notion of continuity. He had won the election by nothing, basically; it was a 50/50 election. It was a good electoral college victory, but the popular vote was even-steven. 

I think he thought he should pick a couple of people like Doug Dillon, an establishment Cabinet member, a sub-Cabinet member from the Eisenhower Administration. By the way, Ike really did not want that to happen. Ike spread the word, "Don't anybody join this guy's team and make it look bipartisan." 

I think he also wanted McNamara there, a Republican, a nominal Republican, at the Pentagon. He wanted those two Republicans. You're right, Rusk is a great example of a guy who he had no idea who he was -- I think his great regret -- that he wasn't an administrator, he wasn't a policy guy, he wasn't a gutsy guy, and he would never give any advice, really. He kept asking for advice from Rusk and he wouldn't get any.

I think he really liked McNamara. He really trusted him. And he loved Bobby, of course. He ended up liking Dillon, although Dillon was wrong about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dillon wanted to go in there and bomb them. He was in with the hawks, and McGeorge Bundy was a hawk. 

But he wanted to have both sides. He really was smart enough to handle a conflict of opinion. He was totally unlike W, to be obvious. [laughter] He was curious and he liked a good argument; he wanted to hear from the academics. Like Lincoln, he wanted to balance out the academic liberal guys -- like Walter Heller at Joint Economics -- with a Doug Dillon, establishment Wall Street guy.  So he could hear both sides. He liked to do that, and he liked to play the politics of it, too. Kennedy was a gut conservative, Jack. I don't think Teddy was. But he was a gut conservative who had to sort of teach himself liberalism and learn the arguments and broaden his thinking. But inside, I think he was a pretty traditional conservative about a lot of things, especially communism, his whole life.

MARTY NOLAN:  That leads me to the next question. I do recall that JFK once said about the Americans for Democratic Action -- all big Cambridge and Manhattan people -- "I'm not comfortable with those people." The earlier biographies …

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Chester Bowles was an example.

MARTY NOLAN:  Oh, perfect example.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  He couldn't stand Bowles. He couldn't stand guys who would give these liberal speeches when you're just two of you in the room together.

MARTY NOLAN:  Joe Rowell, people like that.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  "Why are you giving me this speech?" He just couldn't believe they would. He also had that Irish defiance of the academic intellectual or the establishment thing, period. He would root for the underdog. He had a sort of tribal connection -- very hard to decipher -- with Joe McCarthy, very hard, because the family connection, the old man's connection, the sisters' connection, Bobby's kids' connection with him, Bobby's strong affection for him. 

But I keep reminding people, as I do in the book, Bobby wrote the censure resolution against McCarthy. It is not so simple. They were in a very difficult bind there in terms of this Commonwealth, Kennedy's feelings about they'd gone too far, the Bobby-antipathy towards Roy Cohn, especially Roy Cohn's relationship with David Schine. Ridiculous thing that got completely out of hand and McCarthy was completely involved with that. It was a total embarrassment, besides being an outrage, the whole thing. Bobby didn't like that, but yet he stuck with Joe to the grave. Bobby went to the funeral, and he went to the grave. Bobby was such a loyalist.

By the way, if he's not a hero of this book, I didn't write it right. But what a brother. I mean, he saved his life in '51 over in the Far East. He got Jack's second episode -- at least public episode of Addison's disease -- 106 temperature and Bobby out of nowhere, like a Saint Bernard, comes out of nowhere and saves his brother and gets him to a military hospital. Finally, Jack, who was a bit elitist about his youngest sibling, said, "My god, he's not just pious and churchy, he's my protector." It was an amazing development for the brothers.

MARTY NOLAN:  And the real profile in courage was taking on the Ambassador.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Kenny deserves all that credit, because Kenny O'Donnell, who understood the Kennedys, said it takes a Kennedy to challenge a Kennedy. Old Joe was just getting too much in the campaign in '52. He thought, “Hire a bunch of hacks and kick them in the butt.” That's not how you beat Henry Cabot Lodge. You have to have a very sophisticated campaign that picks out the communities of people that left Boston, the BC Law grads and the Harvard Law grads who are Irish or Italian and moved out beyond Boston, were very independent in their politics. You had to reach those pockets of support. You couldn't just run Boston against the rest of the Commonwealth or you would lose. You had to pincer him. Go to the right of him on the Cold War, go to the left of him on jobs. It took a sophisticated campaign that Kenny and Bobby had to put together, and the old man wasn't capable of it. You're right, he had to keep him out of the campaign.  

MARTY NOLAN:  The earlier biographers of JFK would generally describe his change in positions as growth. Remember, James MacGregor Burns, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  You mean move left?

MARTY NOLAN:  Well, growth, yes. We would call it flip-flopping today, I think.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  He moved left is what he means.

MARTY NOLAN:  Isn't that right? 

CHRIS NOLAN:  Arthur Schlesinger likes to say he grew, to agree with me.

MARTY NOLAN:  Dick Donahue is here, and Dick Donahue gave the best description of the reaction of ordinary mortal politicians to Theodore H. White on the night before the election. It's in Teddy White's Making of the President, 1960. Boston Garden is jammed. I was there. I have a wonderful photograph of Ed Kelly that the Globe took, spotlight shining on Kennedy. And Dick Donahue says to Teddy White, "Look at all those guys," that White described as these pasty-faced, predatory politicians. And Dick says, "They're looking at Jack.  He's got some trick, doesn't he? If I can learn that trick, I can be President, too, right?"  There was something that was not the trick. Now, it wasn't growth. You tell us what it was, what was the trick?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Well, that's the elusive part. Jack Kennedy, from what I've been able to figure out -- and the reason I thought I could write the book after I decided I wanted to try -- he was very loyal to old friends. He wasn't an overwhelmingly faithful husband. He was difficult, but Jackie was completely in love with him and a man who could earn love in a different kind of way. But he was a great friend.  He could dispense with staff people as he had to. But he was so loyal to the old pals, like Lem Billings, who, as the old man, Joe, said, “Moved in with his tattered suitcase when he was a teenager and never left.” He had a room at the White House -- figure that one out. He had a room there, he was always there. He didn't have to have a pass to get in.  The guards knew him.  He had Red Fay, of course, and Chuck Spalding, who had this sort of chemistry relationship with him, and Charlie Bartlett.  He didn't like new friends. He had a few, like Smathers, who he met in Congress through the old man, basically, down in Florida, Hialeah Race Track, really. But he liked the old buddies. 

As Jackie said in that incredibly revealing interview with Theodore White the week after Jack was assassinated, she told … Boy, did she know Jack Kennedy. She knew him. She loved him, even with all the difficulties, she loved this guy as a guy and she seemed to get him almost objectively, which is an incredible love, if you think about it. To understand a person, despite all the difficulties and the unfaithfulness, the ability to love a person as they are, she seemed to have that. She said this kid, this handsome guy with the tan and everything, everybody thought he had it made.  She knew he didn't have it made. She knew he was still inside the sick, lonely kid, really lonely, who had been left alone and spent so many months and years, really, in infirmaries and hospitals, thinking he wasn't going to get past his teenage years, thinking he had leukemia. Bobby used to say if a mosquito bit him, the mosquito'd be dead. This guy had everything wrong with him.

All those diseases, a lot of them were congenital – the colitis, the bad stomach, the back injury. It was only the injury came later he had actually had a congenital back problem that got worse and worse, because of bad treatment and bad surgery. He just once said to her, "I wish I had more good days."

Now, if you think about a guy who everybody envies, he says, "I wish I had more good days"? Because so many of his days were just in pain. So much of his growth came from not being a jock, like he pretended to be, but being an intellectual as a kid, a kid who read and read and read:  the history of World War I when he was 14 years old, Churchill, The World Crisis.  The New York Times he read. He got it by mail, I guess, at Choate and read it. Rip Horton, one of his roommates, talked about how he would lay down and just try to distill each article and try to get the heart out of each article, not just read the newspaper. A guy who really was curious about everything. Jackie said in these new tapes he would stop getting dressed and read and read; he read all these newspapers. He was always trying to figure things out with everybody. A deeply curious guy to the day he died. I think that's the key to him, and Jackie understood that about him. 

I was able to write this almost because these 12 guys around him all his life all had their separate memories of him. I tried to, with their recollections, create a holograph in the middle. Like theater in the round, they could all reproduce him.  Judge Reggie just wrote me the most wonderful note last night, Vicki Kennedy's dad. He was an old ally of Jack. He said, "You brought him back." 

MARTY NOLAN:  Oh, very nice.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Can't get a better letter than that.

MARTY NOLAN:  Reading your book, religion just doesn't seem to be as big an issue in

American life today. I mean, it certainly doesn't disqualify anyone, although Governor

Huntsman and Governor Romney may find otherwise.  But I was really struck by the statement that Eleanor Roosevelt made to Les Hyman. Is this the same Lester Hyman who was an aide to Governor Endicott Peabody, was Chairman of the State Committee? [laughter]

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Yeah. He is so funny, Lester Hyman. 

MARTY NOLAN:  He goes to see Eleanor Roosevelt and then she says, "Well, we don't want the Pope living in the White House, do we?" Whoa!

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Marty, you know this like I know this. There's an anti-Catholic thing from the left as well as the right.

MARTY NOLAN:  Absolutely. Oh, very much.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Does anybody read the New York Times occasionally? I mean, sorry, it does exist. 

MARTY NOLAN:  Harry Truman had a better line. He talks about Senator Kennedy and he said, "It's not the Pope, it's the Pop." [laughter] But this religious thing, I mean, just for the heck of it, I went downstairs here and looked at the acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1960 and a good 20% of it is Kennedy saying, "Don't worry, the bishops and the Pope aren't going to tell me what to do." That was a really big issue.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Let me talk about two things religious, because anybody here who is Catholic will find this fascinating about Jack and his religion. I am absolutely overwhelmed by what I've been able to dig up. The religious thing, he thought, first, in Massachusetts it was probably a plus.  He was able to rally a lot of people tribally, basically, in '52 against Lodge. Once he was able to connect as a person worthy to take on Lodge, and as good a man as he was in terms of his potential statesmanship and ability to represent the Commonwealth, he was able to take advantage of his background, obviously.

But once he hit the country, I think he was just overwhelmed by this anti-Catholicism out there. The '56 convention, guys like Sam Rayburn, when he threw it to the Oklahoma delegation so they could screw him, they knew what they were doing. I mean, he was ready to win that thing. He was about to take the lead over Kefauver and they threw it to the Gore delegate, so that old man Gore would throw his delegates to his fellow Senator from Tennessee.  He saw the game these guys were playing. At that moment, Jack realized two things. He had to become a total politician.  He had to get other politicians to do what he wanted them to do. He had to become a bit intimidating, not just charming. Charisma is one thing, but you need to use the backroom stuff, too. That's where he needed Bobby. He knew he was going to have to twist some arms to win the nomination as well as win primaries. He began to realize he had to become, as he called it, a total politician at that point. But he also realized he's up against these Protestant guys who were willing to screw him at he end. He knew that. He said, "My god, these guys take religious seriously when it comes to this." 

What happened was he thought he'd overcome it in Wisconsin when he won out there, and old Cronkite goes on the television that night and does the entire election victory by him over Humphrey, which he really won a substantial victory against, as just the Catholics coming out for him. Kennedy was ripped over that. My god, there's a great tape of in the Drew documentary called Primary. We actually see him sitting there, smoking his little, thin cigars, watching Cronkite do the old, "Oh, he got the Catholics. So what?"   Basically, one of the people said at the time, "We got nothing done in Wisconsin. Now we've got to go to West Virginia." The great irony, of course, is by going to West Virginia, he really did lock it up before the convention. 

But the minute the Lou Harris poll added one word to his poll, which was, "The guy's a Catholic," all of a sudden it went from 65/35 to 60/40 the other way. So religion was a problem for the guy.  Then of course, Humphrey, the Hump – I'm sorry – comes out and he does his Give Me That Old-Time Religion as his campaign theme song, which is right out of Inherit the Wind, and he's with the other guy, he's with Frederic March in that movie.

[laughter] Old Hubert knew how to play the religion card. 

So Jack, of course, kept playing rough after that. They brought in FDR, Jr., and they hit him on his lack of a war record, and they played it pretty tough, and they won it. But a lot of it was, I think, Jack was very honest about his religion in West Virginia and because he was -- where Al Smith wasn't -- he admitted, "Okay, I'm a Catholic." As Bobby would say, "Hang a lantern on your problem." "Okay, I'm a Catholic, let's talk about it."

So he went down and he thought he had it beat. Then he gets down to Southern California, he arrives, and Norman Vincent Peale – good, old Power of Positive Thinking – is organizing a big event at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, right in public basically, organizing the Prots against the Catholics. Pretty obvious. No secret there. And Kennedy arrives, he's got to fight this thing.  So he goes to the Houston ministers. Bob Strauss once told me a great story, the former Chair, that he got the word from somebody in the Kennedy camp, "Get me the ugliest Protestant ministers you can and put them in the first row." [laughter] Then Kennedy walked in all by himself without an entourage, which is always the smart move, come in alone. The other thing he was concerned about that night is he had brought his brown shoes instead of his dark shoes, his black shoes. He was mad at Dave Powers for that, because Jack was something of a clotheshorse.

MARTY NOLAN:  Yes, indeed.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  And he was concerned about that. Of course, Dave Powers, who could get away with murder with Kennedy, said, "Well, you'll be behind a podium, nobody'll notice." [laughter] But Jack had that on his mind.  But he went in there and he basically figured there's a legitimate concern about the Catholic Church, and then there's illegitimate. The real concern is who's going to be your boss? Of course, the Catholic Church occasionally gets involved in secular matters, and sometimes they have to be sort of disengaged by Catholics and told "Back off, this is Caesar's, this is not yours. Back off." It has to be done in America, and it's done regularly now. Jack had to do that.

Then once he'd convinced himself that he had convinced the serious doubters, he said “There are bigots out there.” Then the bigots, by the way, showed up the last week of the campaign. Although Kennedy benefited from his religion in the big cities, as we all know, in Chicago and Philly -- where I'm from -- he got hurt. If you look at the map, it started around Ohio, right up there, Nebraska. That's where it began to hurt him.  They called them the silent bigots. And Kennedy's with Teddy White that night and he says, "I'm angry." Of course later he said, "I was hungry." But he was angry and it began to cause a very close election. 

As for his own personal religion, a friend of mine, Andy Athy, who was Tip O'Neill's son's law partner, told me a great story, which I dug up, and is true. Here's Jack with Inga Arvad, his girlfriend -- this beautiful, European, absolute movie star, literally a movie star -- back when he's in the Navy in Intelligence. He'd been sent down to Charleston because he'd been messing around with her, and J. Edgar Hoover said she's a spy because she had her picture taken with Hitler, but I can go into that later. But she wasn't a spy.  So they put him down in Charleston to get him away from her, but she followed him down there. They were four days shacked up at the Fort Sumter Hotel. And this is my funny story about JFK:  They're together for four days and the only time they leave the hotel is to go to church. [laughter] You've got to love this guy. 

A lot of this story I've been able to figure out about him was just along those lines. He was very devotional, almost old church, about his religion. Anybody Catholic here will know what I mean. Old church, meaning lighting candles for his brother, Joe, which he was very devoted to; going over to visit the grave of Kick, who he was so close to. I mean, he lost the closest people to him early in life.

MARTY NOLAN:  His brother and sister.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  And he, like all the Kennedys, are very close to those that are passed away. They do feel that family crossing from life to death, they do feel it all together.

It's just really a profound thing. They're all part of the family.

And Jack was very … He'd be driving along in the car with Mark Dalton, his first campaign manager. He said, "What are you thinking about, Jack?" He says, "I'm thinking about Joe." He would go and sneak off after the Harvard/Columbia game in '63, up here, and he go to the gravesite in Brookline and visit the grave of Patrick, who they lost a few hours after he was born.  Jack was really emotional, obviously, about that.  He would do things like go to Confession to the very end. He didn't have to go to Confession. Nobody's watching. He'd go to Confession right to the end of his life, and he'd usually have the Secret Service. Now, I've heard a couple accounts of this, and I never got it quite clear for the book, but I got it clear enough. Some priest one night said to him at Confession, "Good evening, Mr. President." He didn't like that. That was a little too much information. [laughter]  But he did go to Confession to the end, and he would have a Secret Service guy wait in line for him so he wouldn't have to be standing there all day. But I've also heard theories that he would get a couple guys with New England accents around him so he could mix it up a little in line, so the priest wouldn't know who was talking to him. But he could probably have figured it out. 

But he would go to Mass his whole life. He really never didn't go to church on Sunday, ever, when nobody was watching. So it's fascinating to me. Kneeled every night to pray. When Dave Powers told me in this building, years ago, he'd pray every night, I said, "Okay, so somebody"– my editor was Jewish, he said, "Be careful here, you don't know he prayed every night. You've got to say he said." "Okay, he said." So I took a little edge off it.  But then I read Jackie's tapes a few weeks ago. She had it in there almost condescendingly, like, "Oh, he's superstitious about praying every night like a little boy, but he did every night.” Lem Billings – I went back and read the oral histories --  Lem Billings said he prayed every night at his bedside.  He had that old church … Look, I've got it, too. I think most Catholics have it. We're Catholic. We don't know it's turbulence in the airplane. [laughter] But we are Catholic, you cannot get it out of us. It's there, and whatever he was doing in his life in these other compartments, he had a true marriage with Jackie and he had a true relationship with God that is very hard to figure, except it all his life was in these compartments. They only came together, I think, at war and in the Cuban Missile Crisis when he had to face everything as one soul. That's what I find fascinating and what I've been able to put together, about a guy who really was this person in life. 

MARTY NOLAN:  And the loyalty he got wasn't just Catholic. Although I must tell you that one time Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for somebody in Brooklyn, who was a Senator, and Bill Barry's his driver. And Bill Barry said, "I know there are some churches here. We're going to get to the evening Mass." And he goes, "Nope, not that one, not that one. Whoops, I thought that was a Catholic church." Finally Bobby says to me, "Marty, I think God's going to forgive you and me, but he's not going to forgive Bill Barry because we're going to miss Mass." 

The loyalty he had. You came up with something Bobby said:  The vast army of Kennedy Protestants were unpaid. Nobody gets paid. Nowadays, you'll be called before the Federal Election Commission. You'd be violating six kinds of McCain-Feingold. How dare you use loyalty in politics? You're supposed to hire somebody, right? That was amazing and that was new, because, as you quote Tip O'Neill saying, the Kennedy Party. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  The Kennedy Party was a big thing, and I think it's so … Well, Paul Kirk's here. It's about loyalty to the family, it's loyal to this candidate. It started by necessity, like most things in life. When he ran in '46, he faced the Tip O'Neill crowd, the Mike Nevill candidacy. He was going to win, he was the big star in Cambridge. Kennedy had to put together a campaign that once again was smart. It was almost like the Obama campaign in '08 against Hillary Clinton. You can't win the big centers; Obama lost every state, held every major state in those primaries, except Illinois. You've got to go around the edges, like Kennedy.   So he said, "Okay, I come in second in every one of the towns and I'll win. So I won't beat Cotter, won't beat Neville, but I'll win second in all those places." He sent Bobby up to an Italian neighborhood, Russo, he would come in second up there. Maybe a distant second, but he would. Bobby did that sort of hard work up there.  So it was all those things about forming your own party. 

Now, I sort of had this apocryphal notion. I'm not even sure it happened, but I have this notion: If you went into a Kennedy storefront out of curiosity, somebody would grab you and say, "Why don't you start doing some work here? We're going to put you to work. Start writing letters. I don't care who you are, write some letters to the guy who was in here yesterday, thanking him for coming by on behalf of the family, or something." They knew the trick in politics; it's not a trick, it's human nature: Get people working. The minute you get people working, you get them invested. Machiavelli figured this out 500 years ago. Loyalty in politics doesn't come from people doing you favors. People are generally ungrateful. It's through having invested yourself in something bigger than you that you are always loyal to.

As an old cop once said to me, "You know why the poor guy loves this country? Because it's always God." And when you have given to the Kennedys, whether it's the '60 campaign with a PT-109 tie-clasp or whatever, you feel that all your life because you gave something to something. It's like a service guy feels, or a service woman. It's the big thing in your life is what you've given, not what you've gotten.  The Kennedys understood that. They built a party based on giving. It is ask not, it is that. It's that line. Ask not what you can get, but what you can give. 

In '52, Dever told him, "You've got to do it on your own, thank you. I don't want to get tied to you." So Dever's running for re-election and Bobby and Kenny went out and formed their own campaign. And when Dever came begging them, "Can we unite our campaigns," they said, "Nice try." In fact, typical of Jack, he said, "Bobby, you tell them." [laughter] Because Bobby was always getting the job. Jack would say, "Go see Mike DiSalle and tell him to go public with his endorsement. No more messing around. Get off the pot if you're not going to do it." And he'd say, "And keep me out of it." Bobby would look back him and say, "Thanks, Jack." Because Bobby had to be the ruthless one, all the time, and Jack was calling the shots. 

MARTY NOLAN:  Now, you've worked more recently, since you left Swaziland, for Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill, and it made me think of …

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  They were a lot alike, weren't they? [laughter]

MARTY NOLAN:  I was just thinking of Presidential and Congressional relations, because Jack did get along. Whatever difficulties he had with John McCormack, they were not that serious. And he had plenty of friends in the House, like Tip and others and Mike Mansfield.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Eddie Boland.

MARTY NOLAN:  Eddie Boland, who is supposed to manage Ohio, which Jack never let him forget. He said, "The place I get more applause and fewer votes than any other state."  I was thinking -- because you were there when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan would say, "Okay, after 5:00 we're friends, let's have a drink." We don't see that much nowadays, do we?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  No, and I think it's not a good time. Just to be not sentimental about it -- although I can give you some good sentimental stories about Tip and Reagan -- the way that worked was this -- and it's the way it doesn't work now. It's somewhat mechanics. When you win an election dramatically -- like they did, the Republicans did in '80 – and Tip could say all the time, the Speaker, "Oh, they didn't want a mandate." Well, you sort of say, it's not a mandate, it's not a mandate, just it was Carter blew it.  Tip realized, the Speaker realized that they'd won the election. They carried the Senate, they carried effectively the House when we had the Dixiecrats then, the Boll Weevils. They had the numbers so he said, "I'm going to post them, but I'm not going to put up obstructions. I'm not going to spend a lot of time using the parliamentary tricks to screw them. I'm not going to play that game." The voters had their vote. We'll have the election. We're going to have some results here. That's what you should have. The voters should know that if they vote a certain way, they get a reaction. Then after he won the '82 race, picking up 26 seats, Reagan came to him. I haven't got this fully reported. I mean, Tommy O'Neill, somebody told me that Reagan said, "Let's go for a walk on the South Lawn." Reagan basically offered him a Democratic solution to Social Security.

So he knew -- or they both knew, these guys -- that when you win an election, that means the next deal is in your favor. But there has to be a deal. The trouble with the Tea Party people is they don't want a deal. They don't want any deal. Ten-to-one, it won't work. Nothing. It ain't gonna be that way. It's going to be no deal.  But the whole idea of coming to Congress is to make a deal. They think the word deal is bad. They think compromise is bad. They don't understand that that's why we have an assembly of people coming together so there'll be 51 … As Thomas Jefferson said, a majority of one is a majority. They don't want to have that majority rule. That's what's really gone wrong in the system. Until the voters untangle this and say, "No, we want you to go there and make the best deal you can for the conservative side, but we want you to make this government work." The voters haven't said that yet to those people. 

MARTY NOLAN:  As Abe Vigoda said to Robert Duvall at the end of The Godfather, "Nothing personal, strictly business." Right? Any disagreement can be business.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  They're not doing business.

MARTY NOLAN:  Right, that's right.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  They're not doing their job of legislating.

MARTY NOLAN:  Before we let these good folk ask questions, you've got to read the book. There's some great stuff about where "ask not" comes from. And there are other things. But tell us, at the end of the book Chris relies on two of the most darling people who have ever appeared in Washington, Mary McGrory and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I think the exchange was, Mary said to Pat, "We'll never laugh again." And Pat says, "Oh, of course we're going to laugh again, Mary, but we'll never be young again."  Pat told you -- young Assistant Secretary of Labor to President Kennedy, who made Pennsylvania Avenue really look Parisian -- what did Pat with his very generous appreciation say to you?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I love Pat Moynihan. And Tim Russert worked for him. Lucky to have that experience. I once met him and I was just overwhelmed. He's the only Senator, by the way, that ever said, "Call me Pat." Most Senators say, "That title's okay, I'll live with that one." 

MARTY NOLAN:  Senator, yes. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  "I'll live with it, Senator's about right." And I don't mind that, they earn it. But he said Pat, which is just …Pat Moynihan says Pat. So I still call him Senator. But he came up to me one time. We were talking about Dallas and he said, "We've never gotten over it." Which I believe, and then he looked at me and says, "You've never gotten over it."

It was kind of a knighthood kind of thing. I felt like he had brought me in, because he was a first degree relic of the Kennedy Administration. He was there. Not a first degree, actually, third degree is if you touch the person. See, Jack Kennedy did a lot of little things which I talk about in the book. Bunny Mellon, Rachel Mellon, who was Jackie's close friend, who helped to restore the White House, said that Jack personally told her how he wanted the Rose Garden made. He went to the trouble of saying, "I want 1,000 people there. I want it for 1,000 people. I want to have three steps. I want the top step for the person I honor to stand above me here." 

I mean, this is great stuff. She talked about how, up on the Cape, she had taken his boat over some day and started talking to her about this stuff. He had a firsthand interest in making Pennsylvania Avenue a Champs-Élysées, a beautiful avenue for the inaugural parades, not this waffle shop and firecracker store junk pile, the honky-tonk it was all those years growing up. Although when you're in high school, you love that stuff, because, "Hey, great, let's stop here on the bus, let's get some firecrackers." I mean, all it was was waffle shops and firecracker joints.  Now, if you go there at night now, it's absolutely beautiful, Pennsylvania Avenue. It's French. That Beaux-Arts building, the Willard, is gorgeous at night. Those buildings all along there are fabulous. Even the Reagan Building fits in. That's always one of the great ironies of our time, that Reagan has this gigantic, bureaucratic building there. But he sure does.

MARTY NOLAN:  Well, we're going to have questions from these nice people, and they're going to ask a nice, concise question. If you start filibustering, take a hike. [laughter] Questions. Yeah, get up to the microphone. There are two microphones in the aisle here.

Q:  Good evening. You spoke about our legislators not compromising and the electorate has to, in the next election, get them to do so. Could you describe how you think that process could possibly happen? [laughter]

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I don't want to create any headlines about the current complement of troops on the Republican side. I cannot believe I live in a country that it's come down to those two on that side. [applause] It's astounding. 

I guess it reminds me, as a Philly guy, of Gene Mauch in the Gee Whiz Kids. I mean, they're coming right up there, they've got the magic numbers, about two, and they lose 12. I don't know how the Republicans can do this. You're familiar with that kind of thing up here, too, I know. [laughter] I don't know how you boot it like this. It's going to be a close-as-heck election next year. And it is going to be close with a 9% unemployment rate, it just is. Any historian, anybody who knows anything knows how close it's going to be. 

Pennsylvania is in play. It is in play. If they lose Pennsylvania, the Democrats cannot win 20 states. So anybody that doesn't think that people are willing to vote against an incumbent because they have questions about the opponent is wrong. This country treats politics like baseball. The guy on the mound is the one that has to deliver. The guy in the bullpen, we don't know what he's going to do. But they're really looking at the guy on the mound.

So the Obama people can make a lot of shots against the opponents, but in the end, the voters are going to judge the incumbent:  Has he got it or doesn't he? What's the next four years of this guy going to be like? We've got four more years of this? They're going to make a decision. It's tough on President Obama. It's going to be one tough reelection campaign. I don't know if he knows it. That's what I think, it's going to be really tough.  Yet, their bench looks pretty good. The trouble is all their stars are on the bench. Christie sort of appeals to me. He's a wise ass. I think people like him; they're in that mood. Most people are in that kind of mood; "Yeah, none of your business," that's the mood most people are in.  So to answer your question, this country is in a crabby mood right now, and Republicans, by the way, I think they might run Newt. It looks like he can win this thing

MARTY NOLAN:  Have you ever thought of Newt as a character that Mel Brooks invented? [laughter] 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I just find him amazing.

MARTY NOLAN:  Really, and the character is Max Bialystock [laughter], who doesn't know what to do with success. He can only handle the flop.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  This could be, that they really do want to have a failure of a show.

MARTY NOLAN:  He can only deal with a flop, because whatever happens to Newt, it never goes … He's a grand critic from the sidelines. He's a bomb-thrower, but give him the gavel and he doesn't know what to do with it.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  To answer your question is the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, has been an organized party. There usually is a group of governors that get together and decide, almost like in every big – not in cities, but around the country. Utah, I'm familiar with, and Oklahoma, they basically get together about seven or eight guys in some club somewhere and sort of decide how to run these things. They're usually governors and they say, "Well, it's W this year. We'll go with Reagan finally." 

That kind of structure of the Party seems to be missing now on the Republican side. They don't seem to have a party anymore. It's just a bunch of guys that thought they might like to be President. Nobody would have said, "Hey, Newt, why didn't you run?" [laughter] "Hey, Herman, how come you didn't run this year?" [laughter] Nobody would have thought of these guys that are running. Santorum? Bachmann? Nobody would have said, "I wish Michele had ran this year, god, everything would have been different." Nobody thinks these people should be candidates.

Now, Mitt, of course, has decided he wanted to be President probably when he was about 18 and has been just sort of fine-tuning his policies ever since. [laughter] They call him a walking agenda WASP, by the way, in formatting. He just sort of figured it out, that he wanted to be President, so he'd find some way to get there. But it's all a question of tactic for him, I think. He's willing to do what you have to do to get there. I understand that; he has a particular goal and I think that's what he wants to do. But he's not an ideologue in any way. 

Yet, Newt isn't either. Newt is a complete practical person about how he wants to get there.

He will basically adapt.  So they have these two guys who aren't ideological ready to lead a Tea Party-led Republican Party. It's so odd. People out there in the country who are so angry, they have beliefs, they don't like this, don't like that. These two guys don't particularly have those feelings. They would never go to a Tea Party meeting. Can you imagine Mitt at a Tea Party meeting? [laughter] He's not going to mix with those lowbrows. It's never going to happen. 

MARTY NOLAN:  I was just thinking recently of the 1980 New Hampshire primary. Do you remember the great scene with Reagan and Bush? But the line-up …

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  That was interesting. Phil Crane.

MARTY NOLAN:  But Phil Crane looks pretty solemn in this crowd. [laughter] George H.

W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Howard Baker, John Anderson, John Connally, Phil Crane. I mean, they're right from Ringling Brothers. [laughter] I mean, that's a big change, and Reagan was a guy they'd seen before, and the Republicans liked a guy they've seen before. Isn't that right?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I mean, the normal route for the Republican Party is whose turn is it? And the Democratic Party is who's got the hot hand? The Democratic Party's like an inner city basketball court:  Who's hitting? Give them the ball. They like rookies. The Republicans like guys who've been around, like the Knights of Columbus, like whose turn is it? [laughter] Who's going to do it now? Okay, so I guess it's his turn.

Q:  Does anybody today on the political scene remind you of John F. Kennedy?

MARTY NOLAN:  Right down the pipe, just hit that one out there. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  That's why I wrote the book. Barack Obama has pieces of it. Of course, Bill Clinton has pieces of it. And Hillary Clinton has pieces of it. Kennedy grew and he learned. Arthur Schlesinger, who I've come to respect more and more the more I read him. What a beautiful writer, what a beautiful thinker. I used to think he was pretty hard left; he's not. He was a relatively conservative guy.

MARTY NOLAN:  As journalist, he's very good.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  And very thoughtful. I heard him say this at the Ideas Festival out in Aspen one time, he said, “Politics is essentially a learning profession.” You have to learn it and you have to learn it, like Kennedy learned it all the way through the retail, the leadership stuff, the hardball, the backroom stuff. The leadership, when he found himself in the White House, he was surrounded by people who weren't his people anymore. It wasn't the Kennedy Party, it was a CIA Party, it was a Military Party and he had to make it all work for him, so he had to keep learning.

Barack Obama's problem is that he's an inspired speaker. I've been ridiculed for saying how thrilled I was by his speaking, but anybody that was in those rooms of 200 people in New Hampshire, back in '08, and actually up here in Boston in 2004, when I first made my comments about his thrilling rhetoric, because he talked about our country in a way that was so bracing and real. My god, here's a guy with a weird, different background and he can talk about how great this country is better than a lot of us who grew up in sort of more normal ways. Here's a guy with a father who ran away when he was two years old, he's got this sort of Middle Eastern-sounding name.  Yet, all this seems to still work. This is the country of exceptionalism, and he's the proof of it. I still get thrilled thinking about what he said about our country. Yet, there's a lot of it you have to learn that he didn't learn about leadership. You're not a leader if you're a speaker. You're a leader if you look behind you and there are people following you. That's a leader. Other politicians have to be put in line behind you. You have to use intimidation sometimes. You've got to work them. You've got to make them follow you.

I don't see that part of the Kennedy thing. Maybe he needs a Bobby. But I don't see other politicians afraid of him. When somebody of middleweight stature, like Eric Cantor, can deliberately go into a meeting with him with the idea of getting a reputation for trashing the President, in his place, in the White House, you've got problems because that guy did that with impunity. That guy. I'm not saying he's a squirt. [laughter] Well, I'll give him the credit of being a middleweight, because I got quoted calling him a squirt, so I won't call him a squirt. He's not a squirt. [laughter] But he is a middleweight. That's the quote. Here's the complete sentence: Eric Cantor is a middleweight. That he can walk into a room and trash the President is a problem for the President. So I think there's a lot of things this President has to learn and still has to learn on the job, and that's the challenge for him.

But he has a lot of the tickets:  the look, the education, certainly he's more intelligent, I think, than most politicians, including all the Kennedys. He's got to be one of the highest IQ people around I've ever come across. Of course, that's probably true of some of the guys you don't like. 

But I don't have any heroes today like Kennedy. I do think that we have had a drop in class. From all these years of trashing government public service, it has earned what we've gotten from it, the whirlwind. We have got nobody who wants to be risking their butt going into public life. The kind of people that are coming in, I think, have lowered the standard. There are people in the Senate today who I can't – Tim would say – I'm not going to quote him, but some people from the South especially, but not only the South, I go, "They're in the US Senate?" I can't believe some of them are.

I grew up where Bob Dole was a middleweight. Bob Dole's a giant compared to these people. Muskie was a light heavyweight. Muskie is historic. I think he is historic compared to these people. The fact that we have a Senate composed of Humphrey and Everett Dirksen and Jack Javits. Javits was amazing. And Hatfield and Percy. I mean, even the light heavyweights were amazingly good. And up in New England you had them. And Teddy, of course. I do say something about Teddy in this, that his brother thought he wasn't going to be serious. But if he had gotten to pick the greatest Senators of our time, if he were able to look forward, he would have picked his brother. I think that was one of the great, wonderful developments of the Kennedy family. The brother, the younger one, ended up being the great historic Senator. 

MARTY NOLAN:  Last question before Mr. Matthews will sign your books. Last question.

SALLY FAY:  Hi, Chris, I'm Sally Fay. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Oh!

SALLY FAY:  Nice to see you.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Sally, you're in the book. 

SALLY FAY:  I know.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Because I saw you in that wonderful thing that we both had part of, the family pictures, the family movies, the Kennedys.

SALLY FAY:  Yes, that's exactly right.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  And you said how great it was every time Jack Kennedy called your house and how thrilled the family was when Jack Kennedy called the Fay family.

MARTY NOLAN:  And another movie reference. Your dad could sing Hooray for Hollywood.

SALLY FAY:  I know, I wish he was here to do that. He would love to do it for this crowd.

MARTY NOLAN:  And as history goes, that happened to be the very first film role of Ronald Reagan, The Hollywood Hotel that that's from. Go ahead, Sally.

SALLY FAY:  There's been so much written about the President and so many wonderful sources, and we have all known so many things about him. What were the more surprising things that you discovered? Was there anything that …

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Okay, I'll just quickly tell you how I wrote the book. First of all, I wanted to write it. I wanted to write about a guy, not a historic figure, but a person. I wanted to find the him in him. And I wanted to find the answer to the question Marty started with tonight, which was, “What's he like?”  Because a kid, even when I was a Republican kid, teenager, with a Republican family, I always said to myself, “That's the guy I want to meet.

Not Goldwater or Nixon, this is the guy I find interesting.” He's unbelievably interesting. Today, I have about three people I'll read anything about – Hemingway, him or Churchill. If I see the names, I'll read the whole thing. 

You knew him. I just knew him as this distant figure. I wanted to answer that question. I was lucky to dig into the archives at Choate. The Irish, by the way, have taken over Choate, it's great. [laughter] I was able to get to the "ask not" stuff.   Lorraine Connolly was the head of public relations up there and her kid goes to Holy Cross, and this is how things work. [laughter] And what else? And the headmaster's name is Ed Shanahan. So I was able to get in there. 

Helen O'Donnell was wonderful to give me … She transcribed all 64 tapes of her dad in the Sandy Vanocur interviews he did years ago, which are incredibly rich. Now, there's too much in there for anybody to swallow. It's like a fire hydrant unless you're a real political nutcase, like me. But everything about every detail. So you had to sort of listen to it and read it all to find the fabulous stuff. 

Your dad's book, The Pleasure of His Company, is spectacular. I hope you do get the reprint. I stole a bunch of stories in there. They're so good, because they're about a guy whose friends with another guy. Their going out to see Spartacus, is my favorite story, the sneaking out. The President of the United States calls up his buddy, Red Fay, from the Navy and says, "Let's go see the movies Friday night." These two guys, "Let's go to the movies, I want to see Spartacus.” So they go off to some neighborhood movie theater, the President of the United States and your dad got the tickets.  So they go into the movies. He comes in a little late … By the way, the best credits of any movie ever, Spartacus credits, the best credits. 

MARTY NOLAN:  Kirk Douglas.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  So he goes into the movie late and he finds out the Secretary of Agriculture, the guy Freeman, Orville Freeman's a couple seats in front of him. It was the days when they used to change the reels at halftime at a movie, intermission.  So they go back into the office of the guy running the theater -- and this is typical Jack Kennedy. He says to the guy who's running the theater -- he put out a bunch of booze and food for them and everything, which they didn't want -- and says, "So what kind of an actor do you think this guy would make, Red Fay?" This was typical Kennedy. He had this guy, "What kind of an actor would make him out to be?" And this guy is just forced to completely BS the President of the United States.

Anyway, I love that stuff. It's totally meaningless. I love your dad's stuff.

SALLY FAY:  Thank you.

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  And he was great to me when I did my first book on the rivalry, on the Kennedy/Nixon rivalry. He was great. 

SALLY FAY:  Well, I'm loving your book. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  We've got to get together, Sally.

MARTY NORTON:  He's available. He hasn't had writer's cramp yet, so line up. Thank you, Chris.  [applause]

THE END