Chris Matthews received a chair from the College of The Holy Cross (his alma mater and it was just that — a wood office chair emblazoned with the Holy Cross seal.) The only thing more deflating would be a "Chris Matthews cubicle" in the men's room of the Dinand Library at Holy Cross rather than naming the library itself for him. All of the libraries at Holy Cross already are named for more illustrious personages in the school's history. So, the "Chris Matthrews Chair" at Holy Cross sits in his office at MSNBC. And, across the way in DC from Matthews (Holy Cross '67) sits Justice Clarence Thomas (Holy Cross '71); neither has a chair nor a building in his name on the campus in Worcester, MA. If this is (fair & balanced) underachievement or fantasized achievement, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap Magazine]Chris Matthews, Seriously. (O.K., Not That Seriously.)
The Aria of Chris Matthews
By Mark Leibovich
Whenever Chris Matthews says something he likes, which happens a lot, he repeats it often and at volumes suggesting a speaker who feels insufficiently listened to at times. “Tim Russert finally reeled the big marlin into the boat tonight,” Matthews yelled — nine times, on and off the air, after a Democratic debate that Russert moderated with Brian Williams in late February at Cleveland State University. Matthews believed that Russert (the fisherman) had finally succeeded in getting Hillary Clinton (the marlin) to admit that she was wrong to vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution in 2002. “We’ve been trolling for that marlin for what, a year now?” Matthews said to Russert.
Comparing Hillary Rodham Clinton to a big flopping fish will do nothing to stop criticism — from Clinton’s presidential campaign, among others — that Matthews and his network, MSNBC, have treated the former first lady unfairly. But this didn’t keep Matthews from bludgeoning the marlin line to death in the postdebate “spin room.” “Russert caught the marlin; he got the marlin,” Matthews shouted to a school of downcast reporters who had been hanging on every canned word of Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn.
The spin room is a modern political-media marvel whose full-on uselessness is perfectly conveyed by its name, but Matthews appeared in his element. He wore a dreamy smile, walking around, signing autographs. As he went, Matthews seemed compelled to give his “take,” which is how he describes his job each night at 5 and 7, Eastern time, on “Hardball” — “giving my take.”
Someone from Matthews’s staff mentioned that the office of Senator Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican who got in trouble for his “wide stance” in an airport men’s room, had been looking for interns. “Ha!” Matthews exploded, a trademark outcry. “Guess what, Mom and Dad, I just got an internship with that senator from Idaho, you know the one.
“Ha!
“Did you get a load of Lou Rawls’s wife?” Matthews said as he left the spin room. Apparently the Rev. Jesse Jackson was introducing the widow of the R&B singer at the media center. “She was an absolute knockout,” Matthews declared. It’s a common Matthews designation. The actress Kerry Washington was also a “total knockout,” according to Matthews, who by 1 a.m. had repaired to the bar of the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. He was sipping a Diet Coke and holding court for a cluster of network and political types, as well as for a procession of random glad-handers that included, wouldn’t you know it, Kerry Washington herself. Washington played Ray Charles’s wife in the movie “Ray” and Kay Amin in the “Last King of Scotland.” She is a big Obama supporter and was in town for the debate; more to the point, she said she likes “Hardball.” Matthews grabbed her hand, and Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC who was seated across the table, vowed to get her on the show.
“I know why he wants you on,” Matthews said to Washington while looking at Griffin. At which point Matthews did something he rarely does. He paused. He seemed actually to be considering what he was about to say. He might even have been editing himself, which is anything but a natural act for him. He was grimacing. I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews’s skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended.
“He wants you on because you’re beautiful,” Matthews said. “And because you’re black.” He handed Washington a business card and told her to call anytime “if you ever want to hang out with Chris Matthews.”
Then, a young Irish-looking woman walked up shyly and asked if he was “Mr. Matthews.” “Ah, an Irish girl has come to my aid,” Matthews said, placing his hand gently on the woman’s shoulder. She was in law school and said her name was Margaret Sweeney. “I went out with a Sweeney once, a nurse,” Matthews said, taking her hand. This Sweeney attends law school at Cleveland State, “where Russert went,” Matthews told her, before starting again on the marlin thing.
The postdebate tableau at the Ritz was another media-political bazaar, minus the riffraff of the spin room. This is about as glitzy as you’ll get on a snowy night in Cleveland at 1 a.m. The Ohio congresswoman, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, came over from the next table to visit with Matthews, along with the former Ohio congressman, Dennis Eckart, and a guy who told Matthews he ran for attorney general in Ohio and a bunch of suited money people and the actor Timothy Hutton and some fancy Hollywood director. “This is all sort of like a big play world,” Griffin, the MSNBC chief, said, surveying the room. “You have all these politicians and media people and Hollywood celebrities in here. It sort of embarrasses me. It feels a little incestuous.”
(A disclaimer that advances this notion of incestuousness: I have been a guest on “Hardball” on occasion, but probably not more than a half-dozen times over the years. The New York Times also has a partnership with NBC in which the news organizations coordinate some aspects of their political coverage, posting politics-related stories and videos on each other’s Web sites. And Matthews and I have the same book agent, for what that’s worth.)
“People are a little impressed with themselves,” Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. “It’s a bit of an echo chamber.” Matthews is central to that echo chamber — at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Matthews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of “Hardball.” “Hey, there I am — it’s me,” he said, staring at himself on the screen. “It’s me.”
There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential campaign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize — as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband “messed around.” He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the “thrill going up my leg” after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC’s Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site (“The Matthews Monitor”) to cataloging Matthews’s alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.
In addition to doing “Hardball,” Matthews is the host of a Sunday morning show on NBC, “The Chris Matthews Show,” has been a staple of the network’s coverage of presidential debates and has helped moderate two of them. He is also a frequent guest on NBC and MSNBC news shows and an ongoing spoof target on “Saturday Night Live.” It can be difficult not to hear Darrell Hammond’s long-running impression of Matthews when Matthews himself is speaking. Matthews, for his part, says he loves the Hammond impression and sometimes catches himself “doing Hammond doing Matthews.” If parody is an emblem of pop-culture status — signifying a measure of permanence — Matthews belongs on any Mount Rushmore of political screaming heads.
Matthews is as pure a political being as there is on TV. He is the whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street. (“Rain Man,” NBC’s Brian Williams jokingly called Matthews, referring to his breadth of political knowledge.) He wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, worked as a top advisor to Tip O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for Congress himself in his native Philadelphia at 28. In an age of cynicism about politics, Matthews can be romantic about the craft, defensive about its practitioners and personally affronted when someone derides Washington or “the game.” He can also be unsparing in his criticism of those who run afoul of his “take.” “I am not a cheerleader for politics per se,” Matthews says. “I am a cheerleader for the possibilities of politics.”
This election season, MSNBC has placed great emphasis on politics, devoting 28 percent of its airtime to the subject last year (compared with 15 percent for Fox News and 12 percent for CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism). The thrilling 2008 presidential campaign has been a boon, and in the first quarter MSNBC’s prime-time audience rose 63 percent over the previous year (compared with 12 percent for the Fox News Channel and 70 percent for CNN, though MSNBC still draws many fewer viewers overall). As Matthews is clearly a signature figure on the network, and one of the most recognizable political personalities on the air, this has been something of a heyday for him.
Yet for as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback — to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the ’60s and the O’Neill-Reagan battles of the ’80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-’90s, when “Hardball” started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga.
Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.
Nothing illustrated Matthews’s discordance with the new cable ethos better than an eviscerating interview he suffered through last fall at the hands of Stewart himself. Matthews went on the “The Daily Show” to promote his book “Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success.” The book essentially advertises itself as a guidebook for readers wishing to apply the lessons of winning politicians to succeeding in life. “People don’t mind being used; they mind being discarded” is the title of one chapter. “A self-hurt book” and “a recipe for sadness” Stewart called it, and the interview was all squirms from there. “This strikes me as artifice,” Stewart said. “If you live by this book, your life will be strategy, and if your life is strategy, you will be unhappy.”
Matthews accused Stewart of “trashing my book.”
“I’m not trashing your book,” Stewart protested. “I’m trashing your philosophy of life.”
Matthews told me that the interview was a painful experience. Not only did Stewart humiliate him, but the interview exposed an essential truth that people by and large don’t want to hear advice from politicians, a breed that, in many ways, has defined Matthews’s value system. “I think Stewart was right in that he caught the drift of antipolitics,” Matthews said.
So has Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown.” While Matthews is clearly a stalwart on the MSNBC menu, he is hardly a flavor of the month, or the year. Olbermann is. “Countdown,” on at 8, is getting good ratings, usually second in its slot to “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News. Olbermann draws considerably more viewers than Matthews — about one million a night, compared with 660,000 for the 7 p.m. broadcast of “Hardball” (which typically runs third in its time slots after Fox News and CNN but is up in the ratings this year). There is a view within the TV industry that MSNBC is positioning itself as the younger, edgier, left-tilting cable network, and no one there embodies this ideal better than Olbermann. NBC executives have been promoting him heavily, and three network officials asked me why I was writing about Matthews and not Olbermann.
Part of this can be viewed purely through a bottom-line lens. Matthews’s contract expires next year, and NBC officials clearly would like to renew it for considerably less than the $5 million a year he is making now. Whether it’s a formal talking point or not, NBC officials seem bent on conveying the message that they could get the same ratings, or better ones, for considerably less money.
But the broader issue involves whether Matthews is a man trapped in a tired caricature. And it touches on the future of his archetype in general — in other words, whither the cable blowhard? The “What happens to Chris” question — a hot topic at NBC these days — infuses the Matthews story with a kind of “lion in winter” urgency, if not poignancy. It also goes to the core of how Matthews sees himself, how cable news is changing and how Americans perceive of and consume their politics.
The morning after the Cleveland debate, Matthews was walking through the airport to catch his flight home to Washington. People kept squinting at him, double-taking, stepping in and out of his monologue.
“I like the fact that people don’t think of me as famous, but that they know me,” Matthews said. “They come up to me and say, ‘Chris, what do you think?’ There’s no aura. It’s a different kind of celebrity. People assume they have a right to talk to me. They want to know my take.”
A woman picked Matthews out of the security line and declared herself a fan. “Don’t tell me, you’re a liberal NPR-listener type,” Matthews said, reducing said fan to a psychographic niche (though warmly).
She described herself as “just an old lady going to Florida.”
“Who are you voting for?” Matthews asked.
“Hillary,” she said, adding in a whisper, “but I don’t want her to win.”
“Hey, what’s your name,” another person in line asked him.
“I’m Chris Matthews.”
“Oh, yes, we watch your show every night.”
“Thanks,” Matthews said, wondering aloud to me whether it would be possible for someone to watch his show every night and not know his name.
The security agent working the metal detector told Matthews that he had seen him at this airport before, and Matthews volunteered that he was in Cleveland a few years ago to speak at the Case Western Reserve University graduation. “But they didn’t give me an honorary degree,” Matthews said. “Can you believe that? I spoke at the graduation and didn’t get an honorary degree?” He gets a lot of honorary degrees, by the way — 19 if you’re counting, and guess who is counting?
As we approached the airport gate, Matthews mentioned that he and his wife, Kathleen, have been contemplating a trip to Damascus. It’s something they have wanted to do for a long time. But he worries that he might make an inviting target for a kidnapper. “I can imagine getting some big-name media figure would be a big propaganda catch for them,” Matthews said. “You can imagine what the neocons would say if I were kidnapped. They’d be like, ‘See, Matthews, terrorism isn’t so funny now, is it?’ ”
There is a level of solipsism about Matthews that is oddly endearing in its self-conscious extreme, even by the standards of television vanity.
“Did you see me on the ‘Today’ show?” Matthews asked when I called him one afternoon in early March. “I quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think I’m the only guy around who quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald on the ‘Today’ show.”
A few days later, Matthews greeted me with a report that he was up at 6 a.m. that day did “Today”; did “Morning Joe,” MSNBC’S morning political program; taped the Sunday “Chris Matthews Show”; then talked to a bunch of people in Pennsylvania, his home state, about the primary. He’s big into the Pennsylvania primary, talks a lot to “Eddie Rendell” and urged me repeatedly to call the Pennsylvania governor’s office and “talk to Eddie Rendell about me.”
“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta understand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.”
Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous. On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. “Here he is; here he is, the man,” Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit “off the record.”)
Matthews has berated Russert to several people at NBC and has told friends and associates that Russert is like John F. Kennedy while he is more like Richard Nixon. Kennedy was the golden boy while Nixon was the scrapper for whom nothing came easily. It’s an imperfect comparison, certainly (Matthews is Irish Catholic, for starters, and Russert is not charismatic by any classic Kennedyesque definition), but it does offer a glimpse into how Matthews perceives himself, especially in relation to Russert. It’s also worth noting that Nixon was obsessed with Kennedy, and Kennedy could be dismissive and disparaging of Nixon.
A number of people I spoke with at NBC said that Russert can be disdainful of Matthews, whose act he often sees as clownish. They also told me that Russert believes Matthews is something of a loose cannon who brings him undue headaches in his capacity as NBC’s Washington bureau chief. This friction was immortalized in notes revealed during the trial of Scooter Libby. Mary Matalin, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was quoted as having suggested that Libby call Russert to complain about Matthews’s rants against the White House’s Iraq policy. “Call Tim — he hates Chris,” Matalin supposedly told Libby. Russert denies that he felt this way then or now. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Chris,” he told me. “We do different things.” Matalin, for her part, insists that she doesn’t remember ever saying that Russert “hates Chris.”
Regardless, Matthews has an attuned sense of pecking order — at MSNBC, at NBC, in Washington and in life. This is no great rarity among the fragile egos of TV or, for that matter, in the status-fixated world of politics. But Matthews is especially frontal about it. In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”
He wanted to feel part of the “first team,” he added. “You can be on the second team at 25 or 36. But at some point you say: No, this is my opportunity, my life. I want to be on the first team.”
Matthews, the second-oldest of five boys, often talks about birth order and sibling rivalry. One day when I was with him, Matthews kept calling his son Thomas for his 22nd birthday. “You always have to pay special attention to the middle one,” Matthews said. “They need to know you’re thinking of them.”
Matthews and his brothers deploy the standard line about how their crowded family dinner table made for nightly battles over food and the right to be heard. It is also clear that MSNBC’s political dinner table is getting crowded. NBC views MSNBC as a major source of potential growth and is encouraging its big name talents — Russert, Brian Williams and, from time to time, Tom Brokaw — to appear as guests on the cable channel. It makes for crammed sets, limited airtime and a lot of personalities to keep happy on important campaign nights.
Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews. Before the flight from Cleveland to Washington took off, an NBC staff member noted that Matthews, Russert and Andrea Mitchell were all on board, and if the plane were to crash, it would devastate the network’s talent pool. Matthews quipped that Gregory was outside the plane arranging for just that. (“I hadn’t heard that,” Gregory told me. “I’m quite sure he was joking.”)
Matthews is also aware that little brother Keith Olbermann has become the signature talent of MSNBC. Matthews seems less than thrilled with “co-anchoring” MSNBC’s election coverage with him, as he has done on many nights during this campaign. When Olbermann is on the same set, Matthews appears different — restrained, even shrinking at times. According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”
But Olbermann does acknowledge that their on-air marriage has been rocky. Stylistically, Olbermann is scripted and disciplined while Matthews is free-form. While Olbermann is a natural anchor, Matthews struggles with its basic mechanics — staying on time, not talking into breaks. “There is a sense at times that we are always joining Chris Matthews already in progress,” Olbermann told me. Matthews has been on 10 years, he went on to say, “and he has no idea when it stops and starts. My responsibility sometimes is to grab the wheel when he doesn’t hold it.” Matthews has also called their joint appearances “Hardball,” which annoys Olbermann and which he has not been shy about correcting on the air. “No, this is not ‘Hardball,’ I will say, and in those instances, a correction is appropriate.”
Sometimes during commercial breaks, Matthews will boast to Olbermann of having restrained himself during the prior segment. “And I reward him with a grape,” Olbermann says.
Chris Matthews loved politics from a young age — starting at around 5, his brothers say. He spent a lot of time with his grandfather Charles Patrick Shields, a Democratic committeeman from the working class North Philadelphia neighborhood of Nicetown. Shields’s “office” was a neighborhood newsstand. “He was a good man of the parish,” Chris’s younger brother Jim told me. Chris revered him. “I think Tip O’Neill reminded Chris a little of Grandpa,” Jim added, meaning they both fit the urban-ethnic prototype of the backslapping operator from the neighborhood.
Matthews’s father, Herb, was a court reporter and worked all the time. Chris spent his early childhood in a row house, before the family moved to Somerton, a leafy neighborhood at Philadelphia’s northeast tip. The boys went to Catholic schools and took family trips to a summer house on the Jersey shore. The family generally voted Republican. Chris loved John F. Kennedy in 1960, but wound up falling harder for Nixon by the end and cried when he lost. “We weren’t a huggy family — we had our fracases — but we basically got along,” Jim Matthews, now the Republican chairman of the board of commissioners in Montgomery County, Pa., told me.
Matthews attended Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He studied hard and engaged in long, loud political debates in the cafeteria. His political allegiance evolved from Barry Goldwater to Eugene McCarthy (“just like Hillary,” he says). He also nurtured a passionate affair with television. He loved Johnny Carson, particularly his persona as a wide-eyed Nebraskan, awed that movie stars were actually talking to him. “Carson was great company,” Matthews says. “He was big company. Best company in the world.” He identifies with this. “Now, I am people’s company,” he told me. “Do you know that women come up to me all the time and say, ‘My husband watched you until the end, until he died’?” (Also, Matthews added, Carson “had babes on the show.”)
After graduating from college in 1967, Matthews went on to the University of North Carolina to pursue a doctorate in economics, but he left in 1968 to join the Peace Corps. The following year, he was posted in Swaziland, in southeast Africa, where he taught business skills to villagers and rode around on a little Suzuki motorcycle. “He often wore a necktie,” recalls Fred O’Regan, a fellow volunteer.
“I remember we were out hitchhiking once,” O’Regan told me. Matthews started arguing about Nixon and Vietnam. “It was just like watching his show today. Chris would ask a question, then he would answer it himself and then the person was invited to comment on Chris’s answer to his own question.”
Matthews returned after two years and in 1974 ran for Congress in northeast Philadelphia. He lost in the Democratic primary, but it started what became an exhaustive job search that landed him on Capitol Hill and then in the White House as a speech writer for President Carter. He parlayed the White House job into a series of positions on Capitol Hill that would culminate at the side of Speaker Tip O’Neill during the 1980s. Matthews was essentially his media and message guru, such as they were in those days. He would help the lumbering, untelegenic speaker do battle with Ronald Reagan. “Chris was an important bridge for my father between the old and the new media world,” said Rosemary O’Neill, the daughter of the late speaker. “You always knew Chris was there. He was a big personality, even then. He was never hiding behind the ficus trees.”
Matthews’s 1988 book, “Hardball,” distilled lessons from his life in politics and became a best seller. It also could be read as a how-to guide to social and career climbing in Washington. “It’s not who you know; it’s who you get to know” is the title of the first chapter and has been something of a mantra for Matthews throughout his ascent.
After O’Neill retired in 1987, Matthews was offered a columnist’s job at The San Francisco Examiner. He earned $200 a week for his twice-weekly column and envisioned himself a big-city scribe like Jimmy Breslin, who could walk into a bar and have people give him grief about his column. But San Francisco wasn’t one of those newspaper cities. “It looks like an Eastern city,” he says. “But it’s pretty hard for people to read newspapers when they’re riding a bike.”
Still, the column — at The Examiner and then at The San Francisco Chronicle — gave him an affiliation that helped get him on TV. He appeared on “CBS This Morning” and “Good Morning America” and begged himself onto the political shout fests like “The McLaughlin Group.” Fox News’s Roger Ailes gave Matthews his first show, “In-Depth,” on an obscure network called America’s Talking. “Hardball” had its debut in 1997, on CNBC, and was catapulted by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Matthews built an instant following, and loathing. In his book about the media’s conduct during the Monica saga, Bill Kovach, the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, anointed Matthews as part of a “new class of chatterers who emerged in this scandal . . . a group of loosely credentialed, self-interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV.”
Matthews is clearly an acquired taste, and some of his most devoted followers are Washington media figures and politicians. “The things people complain about I actually like,” says Roger Simon, the chief political columnist for the Politico news Web site and an occasional guest on “Hardball.” “His interruptions are invariably a reaction to something you just said, which indicates that he is, in fact, listening.” Simon calls Matthews “a major political force” whose shows are closely monitored by campaigns and journalists. “I know when I go on the show, I get comments, I get e-mails,” Simon told me. “He drives conversations.”
If Matthews has an overriding professional insecurity, it is being confined to the pigeonhole of cable blowhard. The insecurity is well founded, since this is how many people view him. “The shorthand for Chris in the gossip columns is always ‘blabbermouth’ or ‘cable yakker’ or something,” said Nancy Nathan, the executive producer of “The Chris Matthews Show.” “It’s not fair or accurate. But it’s obviously out there.”
Matthews takes great pride in “The Chris Matthews Show,” as if its select Sunday morning time slot, just before “Meet the Press,” confers him a spot on the coveted first team. “We envision viewers watching up on the West Side of New York,” Nathan told me. “They’ve been to Zabar’s. They have their bagel, juice, coffee. These are smart people who want smart analysis. We like to think we’re a complement to ‘Meet the Press.’ ”
When I asked Matthews about the bloviator stigma, he dismissed it as jealousy or at the very least ignorance among those who don’t know him or who don’t regularly watch his Sunday show or who have not read his books or who are not aware that he is a student of history and film or that he is on the board of trustees of the Churchill Center or that he has received — did he mention? — 19 honorary degrees. (Breaking honorary-degree news: Matthews told me in late March that he expects to be up to at least 22 later this spring.)
He also mentioned — more than once — that he has heard that the historian David McCullough watches “Hardball” every night and that “Arthur Schlesinger watched ‘Hardball’ ” and that sometimes “Joan Didion watched ‘Hardball’ with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, before he died.”
Matthews envisions his role in this presidential campaign to that of Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite in 1968. “Your job is to illuminate, illuminate the game,” Matthews says. He faces a nightly challenge to “bring to life” the unfurling of history. Matthews says he wants to be synonymous with this campaign, like Howard Cosell was with Muhammad Ali.
“Imagine bullfighting without Hemingway,” he says. “I can’t.”
Is Matthews comparing himself to Hemingway?
“No way,” he says. “Don’t you, don’t you [expletive] do that.”
Matthews fashions himself a blend of big-think historian and little-guy populist. Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, who is also from Philadelphia, says that Matthews has internalized the “inferiority complex” of his native city. Matthews says that although he’s now 6-foot-3, he was little as a child and has always viewed himself as “a short guy.”
“I don’t think people look at me as the establishment, do you?” Matthews asked me. “Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so.”
But he attends many of the same events they do. He is diligent about showing up at the city’s tribal rites — hotel dinners, book parties, tributes. He is dutiful about traveling to family weddings, funerals, graduations and first communions. “I place a high premium on showing up,” Matthews says. “It’s the Woody Allen thing. And one of the things Tip said about certain people — and he meant this as a put-down — was, ‘You never see him around anymore.’ ”
It’s important to be around. When our plane from Cleveland landed in Washington, Matthews learned that William F. Buckley Jr. had just died. Matthews appeared stricken, though he barely knew Buckley. He said he would attend the funeral.
Washington has no dearth of events honoring Matthews himself. Serial bashes seem to follow every Matthews milestone. Within a few weeks last fall, Matthews was feted at the Georgetown home of the socialite and Democratic fund-raiser Elizabeth Bagley to mark the publication of “Life’s a Campaign.” He was toasted at a bigger 10th anniversary party for “Hardball,” which doubled as a book party for “Life’s a Campaign,” at Decatur House in Washington.
“I don’t go where the politicians go,” Matthews told me, though he is grateful when they show up, and he keeps track (“Teddy was at the Decatur House,” he said, meaning Kennedy). As I began researching this article, Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesman, gave me the names of about a dozen people that Matthews recommended I speak to, all famous — everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Marvin Hamlisch. But gatekeepers for more than one of these people expressed confusion as to why Matthews would refer me to them. “Please keep us out of this,” pleaded a spokesperson for one prominent politician whom Matthews had recommended via Gaines.
For someone so steeped in the ego-manglings of politics and television, Matthews can be spectacularly thin-skinned. He sulks at mild put-downs and lashes out at critics (though rarely holds grudges). At one point, I teased him gently about his tendency to repeat things — it was the item about how Arthur Schlesinger, Joan Didion and David McCullough all watched “Hardball.” It seemed to deflate him. He sunk in his chair. “It’s tough, it’s a rough cut,” Matthews said of criticism. “I’m not completely Nietzchean about this. That what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger? I’ve always wondered about that. I’m not sure that’s true at all.”
When I asked his wife, Kathleen, how he takes criticism, she told me: “He hears it; he absorbs it. Then he comes home and wrestles with it.”
The 2008 campaign has provided Matthews with much to wrestle with. He has been attacked, repeatedly, for his perceived pro-Obama/anti-Clinton perspective — a bias he disputes. He notes that he and the former first lady like to “kid around” when they see each other and that he did a memorably tough interview with an Obama surrogate, State Senator Kirk Watson of Texas, who failed — despite Matthews’s grilling — to identify a single legislative accomplishment by Obama. “That was an iconic moment,” Matthews said of the Watson interview.
Still, it’s hard to watch Matthews and conclude that he has been anything less than enthralled by Obama and, at the very least, is sick of Clinton. The antipathy dates back some time. Just before the start of Clinton’s first campaign for the Senate in 2000, Matthews said: “Hillary Clinton bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people — like maybe me on occasion. . . . She drives some of us absolutely nuts.” During this campaign he has repeatedly referred to her sense of entitlement and arrogance. Meanwhile, David Shuster, a correspondent for MSNBC who appears frequently on “Hardball,” was suspended for two weeks earlier this year for asking whether the Clinton campaign had “pimped out” Chelsea Clinton by enlisting her to court celebrities and superdelegates.
By contrast, Matthews has called Obama “bigger than Kennedy” and compared the success of his campaign to “the New Testament.” His reviews of Obama’s speeches have been comically effusive at times, as when he described “this thrill going up my leg” after an Obama victory speech. (“Steady,” Olbermann cautioned him on the air.)
“I love Chris, but he definitely drank the Obama Kool-Aid,” Ed Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor and a Clinton supporter, told me.
In a recent interview on “Morning Joe” with Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who had just endorsed Obama, Matthews described the “stunning picture” of a Latino governor (Richardson) standing with an African-American candidate and how inspiring it was for so many voters. “That is where we should be putting our focus, not on the feelings of the Clintons, about what people owe them and their sense of entitlement,” Matthews said.
Richardson tried to say something, but Matthews just kept going. “We’ve got to stop talking about this as if this were a sitcom,” Matthews continued. “We had eight years of the sitcom. . . . It’s a sitcom, and it’s gotta end.” He lamented that 4,000 people are dead in Iraq “because of decisions made by politicians like the Clintons.”
Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of “Morning Joe,” then asked Matthews whether he was endorsing Obama.
“Why would you say that?” Matthews said, looking dumbfounded.
It can be amusing if slightly painful to watch Matthews’s facial expressions and body language on the set of “Hardball” when others are talking; he will, at times, bounce in his seat like a Ritalin-deprived second-grader who is dying to give an answer but has been admonished too many times for interrupting. He appears to go through the same pained exercise in his own home. Indeed, as I learned at Sunday brunch there, the degree to which the cadences of the Matthews dining room mimic “Hardball” is striking.
Kathleen Matthews had invited me over. “The queen would love to receive you,” Chris said on the phone by way of extending the invitation. Matthews’s effusiveness toward women certainly extends to his wife of nearly 28 years, a longtime local news anchor in Washington who now works in communications and public affairs for Marriott International. “Everyone who meets Kathy thinks she’s a monumental figure,” Matthews promised.
The Matthewses have three children — two sons and a daughter — and Chris is quick to boast about all of them, often in terms that convey an acute case of status consciousness. “Caroline is at Penn, Thomas is an actor at N.Y.U. and Michael went to Brown,” Matthews told me on multiple occasions. Kathleen “graduated from Stanford,” he mentioned one day, adding that “she had a 3.7 there.” That was 33 years ago.
Chris gave directions to his white-frame Victorian house in Chevy Chase, Md., built in 1885. “Right across from Tommy Boggs’s house,” he said, referring to the Washington lobbyist, son of the former House majority leader. The Matthews house is sun-lit, art-filled and cozy, with three Mercedes of various sizes and degrees of wear in the driveway. I arrived at 11 a.m., just as Matthews was leaving.
“I promised a bunch of Koreans I’d get my picture taken with them, so that’s where I’m going,” he explained. “I’ll be right back.”
The morning had been a small fiasco at the Matthews home. Chris and Kathleen had overslept, and instead of waking at 10 a.m., as they typically do on Sundays — in time for “The Chris Matthews Show” — they woke at 10:30 (and Russert!), and then Chris had to run off to this photo thing he had forgotten about.
So Kathleen made lattes in the kitchen while Caroline — home on a break from Penn — sat at an island-table spread with Sunday newspapers. She is finishing her freshman year and active in the Obama campaign. Kathleen, meanwhile, contributed $2,200 to the Clinton campaign.
Chris returned after 20 minutes, and Kathleen served seafood pasta in the dining room. When he realized the pasta was whole wheat, Chris helped himself to seconds.
After we finished eating, I placed a tape recorder on the table, which would later yield many sequences of indecipherable cross talk, along with long, loud monologues from guess who. “We all talk about the Clintons,” Matthews said at the conclusion of a diatribe about the national obsession with Bill and Hillary. “I have never been at a party where it doesn’t become a topic. Who are we gonna talk about? Bob Dole? John Kerry? Al Gore?”
Kathleen added, “Also, we’ve had so much time with them. We’ve watched them in this fishbowl.”
Chris: “I find it very hard to do.”
Kathleen: “With the Obamas, we can’t even speculate.”
Chris: “I watched the D.L.C. convention in 1991.”
Kathleen: “And even McCain.”
Chris: “I sort of get him. We went out with the McCains for dinner one night.”
Kathleen: “Chi-chi Vietnamese.”
Chris: “Here’s the thing about the Clintons.”
The conversation moved to what Matthews calls “the sexist thing,” or what Media Matters calls Matthews’s “history of degrading comments about women, in which he focuses on the physical appearances of his female guests and of other women discussed on his program.” This would include Matthews loudly admiring the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham (“You’re great looking, obviously — one of God’s gifts to men in this country”), Elizabeth Edwards (“You’ve got a great face”), Jane Fonda (“You also dazzle us with your beauty and all the good things”), CNBC’s Margaret Brennan (“You’re gorgeous”) and Erin Burnett (“You’re beautiful. . . . You’re a knockout”), among others. The Burnett episode was especially remarked upon. In the video Matthews instructed Burnett to “get a little closer to the camera.” As Burnett became confused, Matthews persisted: “Come on in closer. No, come in — come in further — come in closer. Really close.” It was, at the minimum, uncomfortable to watch.
Matthews says the notion that he is sexist has been pushed unfairly by blogs, women’s groups and, to some degree, the Clinton campaign. His remark that Clinton benefitted because her husband “messed around” triggered much outrage from the Clinton team. Matthews eventually apologized in a rambling on-air explanation, but he hardly sounds contrite now. “I was tonally inaccurate but factually true,” he told me. I had asked him earlier if he was forced into the apology. “Oh, yeah, of course I was forced into that,” he said, laughing. “No, no, no . . . Phil [Griffin] asked me to do that.”
Matthews vigorously denies the broader charge that he demeans women on the air. “I don’t think there’s any evidence of that at all,” he said at brunch. “I’ve gone back and looked. Give me the evidence. No one can give it to me. I went through all my stuff. I can’t find it.” I mentioned Erin Burnett, and the name landed like a brick on the dining-room table.
“Ask Kathy, she might have a view,” Matthews said.
Kathy began to give her view, but Chris interrupted. “She was doing peek-a-boo style,” he said of Burnett. “She was doing in and out of the camera, and I said, ‘Can you get any closer to the camera?’ And she said, ‘What are you kidding about — is there something wrong with the way I look?’ And I said, ‘No, you’re a knockout.’ ”
Anyway, as Kathleen was saying: “I think it’s pure Chris appreciating a good-looking woman. And from her standpoint it was embarrassing because she wasn’t sure what to do with it.”
Her husband jumped in and added that before the Burnett interview, he had “made a decision to do a whimsical Friday-night show.”
“I guess the bottom line is, What does it show?” Kathleen said. “Is it disrespect for women? Objectifying women?”
“It’s a show,” Chris replied.
“Or does it show appreciation for a pretty woman?” Kathleen said. “I think that’s the question.” It was unclear exactly where Kathleen stood on this question. “I think his greatest worry,” Kathleen said, “is that I might watch it on TV and scream at him.” It wasn’t clear in this case whether she did or not.
“It’s a show,” Chris said again, interrupting. “It’s a show. That’s my basic response.”
He bemoaned political correctness. “We’ll, we’re just going to have to survive this era,” Matthews said, sighing.
He looked down at the tape recorder. “We’re taping all this, aren’t we? I’m giving you a lot of stuff here.”
It had now been more than three hours at the Matthews home without a commercial. Chris drove me to a subway stop. “Don’t talk to anyone who hasn’t known me 30 years,” he instructed, not for the first time. That, he said, will show readers that Chris Matthews hasn’t changed, that he has always been the way he is. The implication, also, is that it would be hard to change him now.
I visited Matthews at NBC’s Washington bureau on the night of the Mississippi primary. He would be broadcasting a special edition of “Hardball” after the returns came in. Since Mississippi was a smaller primary, none of the NBC first-team would be cluttering the set, and it would be Matthews’s show, with help from his regulars — Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, Chuck Todd of NBC and Howard Fineman of Newsweek.
Matthews was scheduled to do a taped interview with Obama. When I arrived, he was sitting in his office with a bunch of “Hardball” staff members arrayed around his desk. Matthews can be temperamental and sometimes explosive, but his employees evince ease in his presence. They were thinking of questions for Matthews to ask Obama. Prof. Orlando Patterson of Harvard had written a column in that day’s New York Times suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone-call ad was not meant to evoke fear of terrorism but rather crime. “Is this an ad about 9/11 or an ad about 911?” Matthews said. “Ha!” He loved this line. We would hear it again.
“Hey, you haven’t looked around in here, have you?” he asked, gesturing toward me. He was already up and leading a quickie tour. “Did you know that Holy Cross gave me a chair?” Matthews said. “I was excited. I thought it was going to be something like, the Distinguished Chris Matthews Chair of So and So at Holy Cross.” But no, he said. He received an actual chair from the college, emblazoned with the school logo. The chair is now in the middle of the office. And, for what it’s worth, it’s lovely, made of solid wood. “But I was disappointed, I have to admit,” Matthews said.
He taped the Obama interview, which went smoothly if uneventfully. “Hardball” began. During a cut-in, Dan Abrams, the host of the previous hour, mentioned that the Clinton campaign was going after delegates who were already committed to Obama. Matthews pounced: “They do that for the reason North Koreans dig tunnels underneath the D.M.Z. at the 30th parallel. They get people jittery on the other side. That’s why they do it. They can’t get through those tunnels. They can have the tunnels to scare people, but they ain’t going through the tunnels.”
It was vintage Matthews, as was the scene while his interview with Obama played, without volume, on a monitor. Staring at the screen, Matthews squinted, cocked his head and leaned forward. “Have you noticed,” he said to no one in particular, “that my head looks about four times as big as Obama’s?”
Later, I talked to Matthews about his TV franchise. He’s clearly proud of it, but he also seems restless. Friends who have known him a long time say he worries that “the suits” at NBC want him out. He has been openly contemplating “the second act” in a career that has already featured several.
“I have a lot of options,” Matthews told me. “I’m a free man starting next June.” There has been long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer, whenever he retires, as the host of CBS’s Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.”
The more intriguing notion is that Matthews could challenge Senator Arlen Specter, who is up for re-election in Pennsylvania in 2010. This has been rumored before, but Matthews has been particularly obsessed with Pennsylvania of late, devoting hours on and off the air to the state’s upcoming Democratic primary, staying in close contact with the state’s party apparatus. “I talked to Eddie Rendell today,” Matthew told me on the phone a few weeks ago, urging me again to call the Pennsylvania governor.
My phone call with Matthews also yielded the following: His recent appearance on “Ellen” is getting “all kinds of pick-up.” He had dinner the previous night with Nancy Reagan in Beverly Hills. The film rights for his book on Kennedy and Nixon were optioned. He is speaking at Harvard in May.
I asked him about the Senate rumors. He thinks Specter has hung on way too long, he said, but running would require Matthews to give up a career he loves. Still, “I get a great feeling when I go home,” he told me. “Is Thomas Wolfe right? Can you go home again?
“Really, you should talk to Eddie Rendell.”
[Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.]
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company
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