This Country: My Life in Politics and History

Simon & Schuster/June 2021

Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen

August 1, 2021

There’s something quintessentially American about Chris Matthews. To Canadian political junkies who watched the Hardball host every night on MSNBC for more than two decades, he’s like the positive flipside of the Trumpian caricature: blunt but honest, pugnacious but patriotic, tenacious but rational, brash but BS-averse.

Unlike Trump, Matthews is a romantic about his country — a quality that infuses his new autobiography, This Country: My Life in Politics and History. That sentimental worldview — of America as the beacon of freedom, the foundationally flawed but ever-aspirational democratic project — has guided Matthews’ ambitions like a GPS. It doesn’t seem outdated these days so much as assailed by a daily diet of breathtakingly corrupt propaganda that only serves to confirm its value.

His Philadelphia childhood as one of four sons of an Irish-American Catholic mother and Irish-American Protestant father who worked as a court reporter gave him a grounding in politics at the local level, and an introduction to journalism with a daily Philadelphia Bulletin paper route. A trip to Washington with his family as a second grader provided an early look at the place whose landmarks, including the White House and the Capitol, he’d one day spend his days in. “For me, it was an eye-opener to a city that would become my workplace, my discovered home, my love.”

On his way there, he would attend Holy Cross College, pump gas for a summer, march against the Vietnam War and do graduate work in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In June of 1968, Matthews took a trip with a friend to Montreal — “a perfect hybrid of North American commerce and French charm” — where, with his grad school draft deferment expired, he sat in a park and determined his next move — joining the Peace Corps. He woke up in Montreal hours after the heartbreaking shooting of Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles, turned on the radio and thought, fleetingly, that he was hearing a replay of coverage of the JFK assassination. “The giant has stubbed his toe,” the cab driver, in a classic bit of neighbourly Schadenfreude, said of America on the ride to the airport.

Matthews spent two years in Swaziland as a Peace Corps trade development advisor, touring a network of 200 small traders on his Suzuki, immersed in the post-independence governance boom and learning practical economics a world away from the lecture halls of Chapel Hill.

He returned to the United States in 1971 and took a job as a Capitol Hill police officer on the evening shift while working in Utah Senator Frank Moss’s office during the day (Matthews told Stephen Colbert recently that watching the events of January 6^th as a former Capitol Hill Police officer was like “seeing your church invaded”). At 28, he ran and lost an upstart primary campaign in Pennsylvania’s 4th congressional district. One of the morale-boosting letters he received after that defeat was from Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who wrote “stay actively involved in Democratic politics.”

Matthews thrived in the pre-siege version of democracy that valued truth and punished corruption — he made a career representing those norms — so evidently doesn’t bear a grudge against the system.

After working for Maine Senator Ed Muskie, Matthews was hired by Carter as a White House speechwriter in 1979. The experience of working through Carter’s primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy and brutal loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980 amid the Iran hostage crisis provides an invaluable look at the alchemy of personality, politics and events that could make or break a presidency in the days when outcomes were more straightforward. In the era of the often implausibly too-close-to-call election — not just in America but everywhere — the descriptions of a president and his staffers on the eve of a vote they know will be a rout seems downright exotic.

After Carter lost, Matthews went to work for the politician he is perhaps most closely associated with as an aide and advisor, legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill. When O’Neill retired, Matthews found what proved to be his calling as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. He wrote an insider book about Washington politics called Hardball, then came the show.

Through it all, a particular approach to politics prevails; the belief that it can both bring out the best in people and unify them. That may sound quaint if not radical these days, especially in hyper-partisan America, but Matthews thrived in the pre-siege version of democracy that valued truth and punished corruption — he made a career representing those norms — so evidently doesn’t bear a grudge against the system. His books — from this one to Hardball to biographies of John and Bobby Kennedy to Tip and the Gipper, about how O’Neill and Reagan duked it out as ideological rivals all day, were able to compromise for the benefit of voters and were friends after 6 pm — all present the flaws of both democracy and politics but applaud the humanism of the first and embrace the moral crucible of the second. It makes This Country a perfect summer read as a sanctuary from the nihilism afflicting so much of politics these days — an epic personal story delivered in a fast-paced, conversational 318 pages.

Matthews wielded power in Washington for decades by holding the powerful to account – an occupation that, with American democracy now being undermined from within, made him as much of a target as any other powerful element of a status quo under assault. When he left MSNBC in 2020 over inappropriate off-air comments about a female guest’s appearance three years earlier, he issued a mea culpa and made an elegant exit. “The younger generation’s out there ready to take the reins,” he said on his final show. “We see them in politics, in media, in fighting for their causes. They’re improving the workplace.”

Maybe it only follows that a politico memoir by a guy whose go-to tell for SNL impersonators is a foghorn laugh produces no shortage of LOL moments. My favourite is the bit where the late Lee Atwater, notorious Republican master of the darker political arts, advises Matthews to skip Machiavelli’s The Prince as a primer on the acquisition, uses and abuses of power and just crib the Cliff’s Notes. Such a priceless testament to a certain kind of politics.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.