Playboy Interview: Chris Matthews

a candid conversation with the smart-mouth hardballer about how washington really works, whether tv creates news and just what goes on inside bush's brain

Forget Bill O'Reilly, Geraldo Rivera and Larry King—Chris Matthews' Hardball is, as one paper wrote, a "no-holds-barred cable talk show that has become must-see TV for American political junkies." Hardball has the energy of the McLaughlin Group in its prime, the intelligence of Tim Russert on Meet the Press and little of the self-congratulatory partisanship of almost anything on Fox. Hardball, wrote The Dallas Morning News, "sometimes makes Crossfire look like badminton."

"I want every show we do to deal with the question, 'What kind of country do you want to live in?'" says Matthews, who describes himself as the everyman "personification of the-red-meets-the-blue" on the now ubiquitous postelection map. As such, being on Hardball is more like debating around the dinner table: Opinions fly and everyone has to speak up to be heard. As paterfamilias, Matthews is part in-your-face schoolyard jock, part leader of the debate team and all provocateur—the Howard Cosell of political talk. He prods, challenges, dismisses, debunks, rapid-fires questions and often steps on answers with answers of his own. "Hey, I'm not on the air to let politicians come on and just do their talking points," he once told a reporter. "Not on my show. I want answers. And I want to get the truth out. That's what journalism is supposed to be. You don't just let them make their statement and go home."

Says Matthews' wife of many years, Kathleen, a longtime news anchor for the local ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., "Chris is smart. He doesn't suffer fools or slow talkers. If you don't make your point quickly, or he realizes you don't have something interesting to say, that's when he steamrolls over you."

At 6'3" inches, he could. Matthews, 55, has a big Irish mug, a messy blond thatch of hair (off camera), a disposition to dress casually and a voice that, when he really gets going, sounds like a car alarm. He also has tons of insider savvy gleaned from a lifelong fascination with politics and 16 years on Capitol Hill before becoming a full-time journalist in 1987. No wonder George Will called him "half Huck, half Machiavelli."

Matthews is one of five brothers from the Somerton area in northeast Philadelphia. His father, who was raised a Presbyterian, was a court reporter. His mother was the Catholic daughter of a Democratic committeeman. He attended Holy Cross, then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a doctored student in economics. When it looked like he would be drafted, Matthews joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching business skills in Swaziland in southern Africa.

In 1971 Matthews came home and headed for Washington. His first job was in the office of Utah senator Frank Moss, where he wrote speeches and moonlighted as a Capitol Hill policeman. He next worked at a news service supported by Ralph Nader. By 1974 Matthews was ready to run for office himself, from his old neighborhood in Philly. He lost, but then took a job with Maine senator Edmund Muskie and worked on the Senate Budget Committee until 1977. Matthews then got a job in the Carter White House, working first on governmental reorganization, then as a speechwriter for the president.

When Carter lost in 1980, Matthews went to work as a senior aide for Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, and he stayed until O'Neill retired in 1987. A short stint as the head of a think tank followed, and then the San Francisco Examiner offered him a column. He took it, not in the least part encouraged by Jimmy Breslin, who had once told him, "Become a columnist. You'll stand up straighter." Soon he became the paper's Washington bureau chief and in 1988 published Hardball: How Politics Is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game. The book, a best-seller recently reissued in paperback, is now part of the curriculum of some political science courses and required reading for aspiring Capitol Hill staffers, according to Brill's Content. In 1996 Matthews published a decade-long project, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America. A third book, Now Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, is due this fall.

Matthews broke into TV as a commentator on CBS This Morning and in 1991 moved to ABC's Good Morning America. In 1997, after a talk show on the short-lived America's Talking cable channel, he launched Hardball on CNBC. Riding the crest of Monica and impeachment, Matthews made his TV bones and survived to cover not only the myriad Clinton crises, but, on the strength of the show's soaring ratings, everything that followed: election 2000, the pardons, the energy crisis, the Bush presidency.

Hardball moved to MSNBC in 1999, after Matthews signed a five-year deal with NBC that also makes him a political contributor to the Today Show and regular substitute host of its weekend edition. Hardball now airs twice a day on MSNBC and CNBC.

We asked Contributing Editor David Rensin to go to D.C. and sit down with Matthews as the new Republican era dawned.

Says Rensin: "Even though I am a regular viewer of Hardball, only in person (and occasionally on the phone) can one comprehend the tidal wave of words, ideas, experiences and references crashing forth from just one guy.

"I arrived at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. We spoke nonstop for two mornings, breaking only for coffee and to chat with Kathleen, who was on her way to interview Lynne Cheney. We also talked in the car while we picked up his clothes at the dry cleaners, had a turkey sandwich and took in the sights on the way to his office. The conversation continued over dinner, in his office before the show and, frankly, just about any time we were alone together—whether the tape was running or not. Chris let the conversation lapse only once, while he mentally prepped for a speech he was to give that night. Otherwise, he has a lot to say, if he doesn't mind saying so himself."

[Q] Playboy: Did you talk loud and fast as a kid?

[A] Matthews: Yeah. I had four brothers at the kitchen table. If you wanted seconds, you had to grab them. If you wanted to be heard you had to speak up.

[Q] Playboy: Does it bug you that Hardball is called "Scream TV"?

[A] Matthews: It bugs me. I don't think it's true. It's more like a conversation at a great Thanksgiving dinner among people who don't see each other very often. There's occasional raucous behavior, anger, strong disagreement. And it's fast. The program's speed is essential to its success. It must move quickly. We have to stop all wastes of time, including the excelsior that continues to come out of people after they have made their main point.

[Q] Playboy: Most of the criticism centers on your personal style.

[A] Matthews: It's about talking in cable-ese, listening in cable-ese: "I get it, now let's move on." As we discovered when the Supreme Court heard the Florida recount arguments, they have a wonderful rhythm. They are polite but tough. Scalia, just like Koppel, has a genius for spotting the full stop a couple words ahead, so he's ready to go. Sandra Day O'Connor, too. I want Hardball, at its best, to be like a Supreme Court session. That succinctness and intellectual firepower, the back-and-forth and surprising, brilliant interruptions, would make a hell of a show.

[Q] Playboy: Things just seem to spew out of you.

[A] Matthews: It's called id. You get too much superego out there, too much of a stopper, and you start talking like everybody else. Larry King, of all people—you'll be surprised by this because he doesn't seem that daring—said all his life he's had the question pop into his head: "Should I go this far? Should I ask this question? Should I dare?" And he said he's always asked it. I still hear that question in my head when I use a term that may be borderline, like balls—out, or a joke or reference I want to make. But I think you have to keep pushing yourself to ask. If you say no too many times you're going to be a hack. If you don't follow your intuition because it might cause trouble, then you're in trouble.

[Q] Playboy: We have a few examples of what the critics have said.

[A] Matthews: Get 'em.

[Q] Playboy:Entertainment Weekly wrote, "He yammers his hammering questions and cuts off the answers if the guest doesn't yell back. Matthews can motor-mouth complete sentences, which in TV terms renders him intelligent, and he's learned to accompany his sneering jibes at whatever passes for liberalism these days with a big grin on his mug."

[A] Matthews: I don't know this writer's politics, but a lot of my critics simply disagree with my point of view. They attack the surface, but underneath, the barbs are ideological. They attack manner, but what they're really attacking is my sensibility.

[Q] Playboy: Meaning?

[A] Matthews: These guys have a certain aesthetic sensibility, a kind of Glass Menagerie liberalism. It's a fragile, dainty kind of social programming, and if you don't support that, then you are somehow not a liberal. I would argue that I support all the freedoms of this society. However, I take an iconoclastic view from the center and I criticize the left—their leaders and their tactics, sometimes—in a way they're not used to. That bothers them. They don't think I share their fragile protection of the sacred vessels.

[A] Look, I try to shake up things. It's frisky and it's sometimes rough elbows, but it's generally a respectful look at institutions. I have a tremendous aversion to those who desecrate those institutions and those offices—e.g., Bill Clinton. The critics don't like that, because their blue-part-of-the-map liberalism is based on a kind of "we of the Upper West Side" or "we among the liberal aesthetic community" sense that their liberalism is waging a battle against the Philistines out there in the red part of the map.

[Q] Playboy: Meaning the post-presidential election map that you love to display on Hardball, which divides the country into blue (Gore supporters) and red (Bush). But aren't they at least in part correct? The cultural division seems so sharp.

[A] Matthews: Let's get serious. This country is arguing within the 40-yard line. This isn't a battle between the socialists and the fascists. I refuse to say that liberalism is us, here in the more sophisticated environs, looking out at the great unwashed and feeling that our job is to protect against and to be offended by those coarse people. We're all in it together, and it's my job to arouse the debate and let people come out and say what they feel, occasionally loudly. And by the way, what about James Carville, the liberals' large protector? Is he somehow not scream TV? Find me a middle-of-the-roader or a moderate or conservative critic. Any in that category?

[Q] Playboy: "Heat-seeking attention-getting," wrote The Dallas Morning News.

[A] Matthews: Our show is heat-seeking. We look for what we think people are arguing about. Controversy and conflict are the syntheses of politics. You argue and argue and argue, and somebody eventually wins and the other side says, "You've got a point there."

[Q] Playboy: Maybe on Hardball, but otherwise that hardly seems to be the case. For the past few years what we've mostly seen is not real argument but inflexible pure partisanship. No one concedes a thing.

[A] Matthews: I think our show is better than that. When you argue you have to come in with the attitude that the other side has as much right to their opinion and nobility to their cause as you do, only you're right. During the Clinton mess we weren't getting that from the Tom DeLays and the Dick Armeys. We got nothing but demonization from those guys, and it caused all kinds of distortion in what should have been a civil argument over valid points of view.

[Q] Playboy: So what do your critics want from you? Polite conversation? Different values?

[A] Matthews: They want comfort. They probably want to have themselves read with authority, and for other people to leave the punditry or opinion to them. I don't expect the criticism to stop or everyone to like me. I just don't want to have to think about it. There's a great line in The Maltese Falcon where Spade says, "A little trouble I don't mind." I don't mind a little criticism. What I don't like is when it's cloaked as aesthetic or professional. I hope this shows up in your interview: I don't think I'm any different from any of the people you've ever interviewed, in terms of reacting to criticism.

[Q] Playboy: How are you taking the Saturday Night Live send-ups?

[A] Matthews: Love it. Darrell Hammond's got me. He's got the chest out. He's got the way I still don't know how to go to break, but he does it better than I do. When somebody says something truly idiotic, he does that pause, like I'm trying to absorb the nonsensity of what's just been said. If I were Paul Begala I wouldn't love it—they destroyed him. He's not a bad-looking guy, and that guy who played him looked awful.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever considered showing up at SNL and walking on?

[A] Matthews: I'm sure I'd do it if I were invited. The trouble is, that means it's usually the end of the game, because they don't do you again afterward.

[Q] Playboy:The New York Times said, "The nexus between mega-event and talk show has grown ever tighter since the hostage crisis created Nightline. Now it seems naive to speak of such events as existing independently of their coverage. The shows live from event to event, circus to circus. Hardball creates Monica, not the other way around."

[A] Matthews: I don't believe that. It's news 24 hours a day if there's news. How many times can you hear the breaking stuff? You either want to know more, or you've got enough and you turn it off. But when an event hits hard, people know where to find it immediately.

[Q] Playboy: But without all that cable-news time to fill, and- the inherent repetition, would some of these events seem as significant?

[A] Matthews: Television does place a spotlight on events. The Kennedy–Nixon debate was a lot bigger because of television than if it had just been on radio. The Vietnam War. The Iranian hostage crisis would not have been as big a deal to the American people had they not seen, night after night, Americans forced to walk around blindfolded as the crowds humiliated them.

[Q] Playboy: But when do the media cross the line into playing up the story just to keep viewers coming back?

[A] Matthews: Can too much attention be given to a story? I think it's possible, but not always predictable. Let's look at Princess Diana. A lot of people saw that as the tragic, premature death of a beautiful woman, and left it at that. They thought it was a story that might last a few days. But what happened was, we went over to the British Embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, and saw all those incredible letters from single and young women, all addressed to Diana. To a deceased person. I felt a sense of discovery when I started reading those letters. There was something there that had nothing to do with press coverage. Although Diana was privileged and beautiful, many women felt she shared the same experiences they'd had of being mistreated by men. They reacted in a way that was personal, individual and, I assume, spontaneous. The media reacted to that. We discovered the audience, and people wanted to know more. That ended up being a longer story than I would have ever thought—a couple of weeks. We didn't create it; the legs were the individual sympathies of young women who identified with her life and her tragedies.

[A] On the other hand, after the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., there was really nothing to talk about. There was no conflict, no good guy–bad guy. It was simply an accident.

[Q] Playboy: And yet the media tried to puff it up into the tragic death of a prince in America's royal family. It was a horrible thing; he was a special man. But the extent to which the press tried to push us into national mourning was maudlin.

[A] Matthews: And I don't think it worked. I had been visiting a friend in Vietnam and had been there only 24 hours, and I came all the way back for that story, being led to believe—and believing—that it was going to be a major story for us to cover. Our ratings the week after that were lower than normal. People watched Geraldo because he was on-site, out in his boat. There was a certain drama to the way he handled it that appealed to those who were interested. We spent the week talking about the significance of the Kennedy family, politically, which is what people didn't want. They wanted a lot of on-site information the first couple of days, when they were trolling the site, and then they wanted a lot of funeral. They wanted the tragic evocation, not an intellectualization of it, not a historic perspective on it. Other shows were better at it than we were.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying——

[A] Matthews: Let me answer your question. If Chappaquidick had occurred recently, it would have been a natural, with legs for weeks, because there was a mystery. What exactly happened? There was conflict—the denial, which continues—and there were sources to be dug up and worked on. And there was a tragedy—a person died. When Elvis died, I think we would have had something similar to Princess Diana. Take Dale Earnhardt: The major media, located in the blue part of the map, were shocked by the red part of the map's response. It was a huge story in the hinterlands.

[Q] Playboy: Do you love television or just doing television?

[A] Matthews: I love what I do. I love television. If I could do prime—time talk for 20 more years, I'd love it. The big—picture stuff that Bill Moyers does also appeals to me. I don't think I'm meant for Sunday shows or anchoring, obviously. That night mean more money, but it's not me. Here's what I'm good at: I can think spontaneously, I have a tremendous capital of memory and familiarity with the M.O. of politics. I can draw on that immediately. Washingtonian magazine just did a list of the top 50 journalists in D.C. I'm like 36th, and Tim Russert is number one. I would argue for a higher position for myself, but after all the niceness, I just want recognition that I belong here. I'm 55. I want to feel that I'm part of the first team. 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.

[Q] Playboy: So you wouldn't do a Sunday show, like Russert?

[A] Matthews: Tim's the best at what Tim does. He's very muscular, aggressive. He does his homework better than anyone. He can study an issue, have the toughest questions and move that story the next day. Tim also has a guy quality, an Imus quality. He re-created Sunday television—it was duller than anything. Now people really want to watch, just like they watched David Brinkley years ago after Roone Arledge brought him back and made him a star.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you still write your column?

[A] Matthews: Because it's great mental discipline. When you write and then do TV, you come on having thought things through. You have a premise.

[Q] Playboy: In New York magazine Michael Wolff said Russert was part of a trend, along with George Stephanopoulos, Jeff Greenfield, Dee Dee Myers and you, in which journalists are first political operatives and therefore aren't really journalists.

[A] Matthews: Tim went into journalism 17 years ago. His experience per se is as much as most of the guys who are criticizing him. Tell me it isn't to the advantage of a war correspondent to have been in a war.

[Q] Playboy: What about Stephanopoulos?

[A] Matthews: I don't know how you could go from being a guy's loyal insider, to whom he's whispering his worst fears every day, to then negatively criticizing him in public. And yet, I think it must have been hard for George, in his soul, to step back every time he commented on Sunday and not let his sense of loyalty calibrate his criticism. In the end it's not really a critique, but just enough of one to show independence. It's a shadow. When you leave those big jobs, don't go for the trough immediately. George should have waited until Clinton left the field. [Laughs] Of course, there's a paradox: Clinton's probably never going to leave the field.

[A] I was lucky that Tip retired and Carter was out of the White House before I made my move into journalism, and that was only after I'd run something called the Government Research Corporation in 1987. That wasn't leading anywhere.

[Q] Playboy: After leaving the White House, you wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter and announced you wanted to be a pundit. Why?

[A] Matthews: I think George Will was my paradigm. He had worked on the Hill, started a column around 1974 and then did TV. I liked that combination. Guys like Safire are my heroes. But basically, it started back with Joe McGinniss, who wrote three columns a week for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was the guy who had something in the paper that morning and people talked about it on a radio show that morning. I just never thought it would happen to me until the San Francisco Examiner called out of the blue and offered me a column. Pretty soon it was 150 pieces a year, syndication, television, this.

[Q] Playboy: What made you think you could succeed in D.C.?

[A] Matthews: I think I knew more. I was ready for this. From the first day I got to Washington, when I was a Capitol cop—I was a policeman at night and wrote speeches during the day—I had the confidence to sit down and write for a senator. I wanted to be a speechwriter for a president, like Ted Sorensen, who wrote for Kennedy. I just believed that what I wrote would be good, valuable and better than anybody else's. And now I've done a lot of the things I've wanted to do all my life. You could say, "Matthews, you planned." No. I had the dream but no idea how it was going to happen—and it could easily have not happened. Life is a series of sometimes very important, abrupt moves. Anybody who thinks this was some sort of strategy implemented point by point as some brilliant hardball play is maybe just jealous of my luck.

[Q] Playboy: Some say it's not only luck. For instance, it's been suggested that you relentlessly worked the Lewinsky issue to get bigger ratings. Did you?

[A] Matthews: That's a good question, but there is a little nuance here. Let me give you the contours of the 1998 ratings. First quarter, when it broke, we were already rising in the numbers. We were at like .5 and .6. That sent it to .8. After the first two or three months, we went down to .7 for the summer. Then the fall quarter went up to 1.0. What made the show really big the first time was the impeachment, not Monica.

[Q] Playboy: Is that how you imagined your breakthrough?

[A] Matthews: I can't script it. It happened. It could happen again. People have told us the programs we did on the Florida recount were the best we've ever done, and I agree. It took a lot of information to understand the story. It was our finest hour at MSNBC, bar none. We had a first—rate team in place. Anytime I tuned in I could catch up immediately. And America got a rare look at real politics. People think debate on television is politics, or rallies or commercials, or little quotes for the evening news. No. Politics is in the back room, where you're fighting it over numbers and you're conniving to get a little edge over the other guys.

[Q] Playboy: How would you have handled the Florida vote recount situation?

[A] Matthews: A wonderful way would have been, back in late November, to say up front, "We'll do a complete recount, but shake hands on this for now: Unless there's a hole in the ballot, it doesn't count. Let's do it right now." I'm not sure the Gore people would have gone along with any deal. But it would have been big casino, and it would have been over sooner.

[Q] Playboy: And the outcome?

[A] Matthews: It would have been so damn close, almost dead even.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Matthews: Florida is hard to read because it doesn't have the usual black-white-suburban-rural-inner-city breakdown. It's more like Yugoslavia: There are so many different groups. On the West Coast it's all WASPs, snowbirds from the Midwest. It's practically Iowa. On the East Coast it's New York: Jews, gays, Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians and African Americans. In Miami there is a wild, ethnic, not especially English-literate immigrant group-and they're Republicans, which explains why the Miami undervote was so even. Anywhere else in the country, those people would be Democrats.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you when the Supreme Court stayed the recount?

[A] Matthews: That Saturday morning was a beautiful day. I was sitting on a park bench on Sixth or Seventh and Pennsylvania, in front of Starbucks. I had my coffee, I was reading the Post. It was perfect. No pressure. The Post reported that the Florida Supreme Court had ruled for Gore; it looked like Gore was going to be president. My thought was that the country could live with it, feel good about it, that the result would be good for everybody but Bush. Then at two in the afternoon we got the call that the U.S. Supreme Court had put a stay on it. We had to go back to work.

[Q] Playboy: And now is it the converse: good for everybody but Gore?

[A] Matthews: No. Bad for a larger segment. Bad for the confidence we've had in a close-to-pure democracy. We now have a sense that it depends on who's counting, on what kind of machinery is used. That's not as strong a base for society. But I think the PR battle is being won by the liberals, because people are saying the Supreme Court intervened and that it was a decision, not an election. That's very bad for the Republicans.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't Gore give it one last try?

[A] Matthews: I think Gore was shocked by the fact that the Court went against him. We were all shocked. I'm sure he had people around him who were ready to go once more into the breach, and to an extent I admire them. I respect that zeal. You get enough critics. You want guys around you who say, "You're right, damn it." But in the Bible, when Solomon proposed cutting the baby in half, the true mother was willing to give it up rather than see it dead. Great stuff, whoever wrote it; it's as good now as it was then. The true test of love and worth is the willingness to sacrifice. In the end, Gore's concession speech was more eloquent than anything he'd ever done. He said, "The system isn't perfect. But I've relied on and lived by this system on the way up, and I'm going to die by the system now." It was a wonderfully fatalistic view of a citizen recognizing the system's limits. It didn't have any anger or defiance in it. It didn't have any of the "We're getting screwed, you guys are bastards" mentality, which I think is the trouble with the whole thing. There may be a time in life when that works, but at this time in our history, we don't want that strife. He gave us a sense of grandeur in a campaign that had none.

[Q] Playboy: So, Al Gore gave up the baby, and——

[A] Matthews: We'll see. Gore could win the next one, and then there will be a rubber match in 2008. That would be great shit [Laughs].

[Q] Playboy: Any advice for Gore, if he runs?

[A] Matthews: Based on that concession speech, no matter what's right or wrong politically, go back to your feelings. If it felt good, do it again. Get away from all the gimmicks that come from your people. If you loved kissing Tipper in front of 100 million people, do it again. If not, don't. One thing I can predict right now: The next election is going to be incredibly close. If the Democrats are smart, next time they'll run a guy or woman who's acceptable to some of that red part of the map. All they've got to do is pick up two or three states. It must be very appealing to them to think they can hold what they've got and grab a couple of states. All this is good for the country, because we get a choice. But I don't think it's going to be a battle of heavyweights. I think it's going to be a battle of middleweights again. Both guys are so extremely limited as candidates and leaders.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Matthews: Gore had his ambition ascribed to him. He was told to follow his father's footsteps and to seek the victory that eluded his father. To be almost personally irrelevant is a horrible thing.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Kennedy live out his father's ambition for his older brother, Joe?

[A] Matthews: Jack was always the skipper. There are some great photographs of him and Jackie at a black-tie dinner, and Jackie's trying to woo him, trying to get him to laugh, trying to get his interest. And he's sitting there like Michael Corleone, with that cigar, like "I am God. I'll give you a couple seconds, if you're lucky. It doesn't matter that you're beautiful and well bred and fun. I have a world to choose from here." The godly power of that guy.

[A] Gore is the dauphin. He's stiff and awkward and cold in person. He can put the T-shirt on and be friendly, but as many times as I've been with him in that situation, I still think it's just another form of work. But Al has a great sense of humor and he's not a phony. In another world he'd be just another rich-kid jock.

[Q] Playboy: What is Bush?

[A] Matthews: Anti-intellectual and incurious, but for the wrong reasons. He hasn't examined or studied what he's in opposition to. He hasn't read enough philosophy, enough history, to have a real strong opinion. Forty-five minutes into an intellectual discussion, George Bush loses any ability to compete. He just folds. He just doesn't have the interest or the firepower. I think he's a guy who went to college and somehow, systematically, avoided bull sessions. I think he resented the elitism he found around him, and the fact that those people didn't like him. But if he were the great anti-intellectual, why didn't he come out and challenge the intellectuals, Fight with them? He doesn't have the stick-to-itiveness for that kind of argument, and that's what comes through.

[A] He's got another problem: He still can't talk to the Northern or Midwestern suburban voters. As long as he can't talk to them, he's going to have one hell of a time running the U.S. as a Bible Belt country. This country is not Bible Belt. I just spoke to my classmates from high school, all Catholics. Most of them, no matter what they say, are pro-choice. But pro-choice is a subset of their cultural values. They are secular. They are cosmopolitan. And those people do not want to see some Jesus-on-the-radio kind of guy calling the shots. In a way they're like Jewish voters: opposed to theocracy. They don't want Billy James Hargis running the country. To them it's "down there." Bob Dole was a secular political leader. Gerry Ford was secular. Ronald Reagan was, no matter what he pretended to be. Bush is not secular, and that scares people. They think he has cut a concordat with those people down there. What university was Ronald Reagan most identified with? Notre Dame. "The Gipper." Bush? Bob Jones. That's all you need to know. That is his fundamental problem.

[Q] Playboy: And we're back to the red versus the blue.

[A] Matthews: I love showing the red-and-blue election map because it explains so much. [Pauses] I am the personification of both. Mentally I clearly am blue, but my gut is viscerally red. I can understand the resentment toward elitism of any kind, and domination by the media. I understand that skepticism and share it to some extent—but not the anger. I also understand that human rights in a polyglot society have to be respected instinctively. The minute you start setting up a theocracy, you're setting up something anti-American. It may seem all right for a day or two, because in your little community everybody agrees. But if you step back from it, you say, "Wait a minute."

[Q] Playboy: So no Bush dynasty?

[A] Matthews: I think he could easily be a one-termer. In fact, it would be smart of him to say that he is a one-termer. Just turn the tables on the establishment and say, "Look, I'm going to get some things done and I'm going to live with the facts. There's no way I'm going to get reelected, because the North's going to screw me and Florida's all messed up, but I'm going to try to get some things done." Everybody has a dream of being a senator for one term, just one year of being Jimmy Stewart, going out on the floor and saying, "I don't care what anybody thinks, but...." Then they all get sucked into wanting to get reelected.

[Q] Playboy: Even Martin Sheen on The West Wing wants to get reelected.

[A] Matthews: I love that show. The writing and the public response to the show proves to me that there is reverence for the office, not just the cause and the guy. There's also that wonderful scene in Dave where Kevin Kline walks down the hall near the end and everybody applauds. You get goose bumps. You gotta have a hero, and we always want that to be our president. It's so noble.

[Q] Playboy: Where does your passion for this life come from?

[A] Matthews: The early-stuff passion is driven by a sense of right and wrong, and stark choices. Catholic school, the godless Communists, Stalin being a demon. Grew up in a Republican family that was very pro-Ike—a lot of Catholics were. That made for conflict in the 1960 election. I was pro-Kennedy, dreaming of a Kennedy dynasty followed by Johnson, then Bobby, then Teddy. Then I watched the Republican convention and I was completely smitten by Nixon. I said, This is the guy, he's the real guy. I cried on election night when he lost. But when Kennedy was killed I felt miserable, almost guilty. I got into the Goldwater thing like a lot of people—including the young Mrs. Clinton—but realized he didn't have all the answers on Social Security, on civil rights, on a lot of questions. By the time he ran, I felt he was sort of old hat. Gene McCarthy seemed like a thoughtful, liberal, smart, antiwar guy—and the war became everything. Then I was for Bobby because he was the only chance of beating Humphrey and ending the war. Then Bobby was killed and it was horrible. Then Gene McCarthy never delivered. And so on.

[Q] Playboy: How much did you love writing speeches for Jimmy Carter, and being in the White House?

[A] Matthews: Of all my jobs, it was the most sublime experience. You're basically writing from what you came in with, and you have only so much "capital" when you come in. It's all about how many words, references, metaphors and poetry come to mind. You're always sitting in that room, trying to come up with jokes or something. We were all single—I got married in 1980—and we'd work until two in the morning, then stick around and clean it up. Sometimes we'd take it over to the White House at four o'clock, five o'clock in the morning. We'd write a first draft—a B draft—then circulate it to Jody Powell, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever have to persuade the president to see it your way?

[A] Matthews: No. Carter was, most of the time, a remote presence. We'd drop a speech off and he'd read it, and you'd get it back with his remarks. There was no back-and-forth. You didn't fight for your jokes. Once he went through with a pencil, which he did prodigiously, with big Xs, that was it. I saved the marked versions.

[Q] Playboy: OK, what was Clinton's problem—if it's possible to put it into a few words.

[A] Matthews: Yes, we could go into this for hours [Laughs]. He is Mick Jagger. He is Elvis without the pounds. Joe Ezsterhas was right about Clinton. He never wanted to be a grown—up. He didn't want to be a sacred emblem. He went through all the trouble to win the presidency, but in the end he didn't want to go through the trouble to be a great president, to leave a legacy. Why win the prize and quit there? I think people who want to be great, who are great, try to be great. What I never found in Clinton was true, gut, almost religious belief in something.

[Q] Playboy: You'd think from that picture of him shaking Kennedy's hand that he understood.

[A] Matthews: I've thought about that myself. Why did he know the emblematic importance of the White House and the presidency, and yet never recognize it when he had the opportunity? He wanted the victory. He wanted to own it, like a prize, like a trophy. The problem with this guy is—I could give you a hundred. The one I always start with is: Why did guys root for Kennedy and not for Clinton? Both guys have a reputation for being a ladies' man, a playboy. The answer: Kennedy was a leader of men, not a guy who could just seduce women or get them to giggle. It was not only about being charming and great-looking and using the right cologne. Men looked up to him. "What are the orders, Skipper?" Nobody asked Clinton what to do.

[A] Also, Kennedy shared. You could sense it in his being. When he won, every ethnic group won. Bill Clinton says, "I won, you lost." Men don't like Clinton because he's not a stand—up guy. He's not a grown—up. Most men are basically loyal to their wives. Guys don't like guys who screw around.

[Q] Playboy: Was Clinton reduced by his ability to seduce?

[A] Matthews: [Sighs] I know that at the heart of the Monica thing, for most people, is a moral question about behavior. I think it's different. No one really cared about Gennifer Flowers. She didn't cost him any votes. It was off campus. Two adults. But there's something about an intern in the White House, a master-slave relationship; when you read it all, it has that aspect to it. I know it sounds pretty Catholic, but the word desecration comes to mind. He could have had an affair with any one of the well-known movie stars—everybody assumed he did; nobody cared. We weren't prudish about it. If it didn't seem to bother Hillary much, why should we care? But something about Monica struck us. And then there was the perjury. If [Clinton pollster] Dick Morris had said, "Mr. President, don't believe these stupid polls because they don't mean anything. If you go out there and tell the American people you made a mistake and you were caught off guard by that question, and now you want to correct the record," he could have walked away from this! It was the willful decision to lie to our faces, when we knew he was lying, and imply we were below him in some way. He was asking us for a level of subjugation we aren't used to in this country. Give us some credit for being mature, for being secular, for being nonjudgmental. Don't treat us like we're a bunch of rubes who have to be treated with lies.

[A] I never said he should be removed from office. I never said he should be impeached. My interest wasn't in the sex, it was in the president lying to the American people, and doing it with the support of his entire presidency and cabinet. And the Democratic Party. Half the country had been recruited into the Army of Liars because at any dinner table, at any bar in the country, some of the Democratic loyalists were hooked into lying for him. Obviously they weren't lying on purpose, but they'd been used to sell the lie.

[A] And all this because he took the advice of a guy like Dick Morris to poll a question of human frailty, of human love, of the human heart.

[Q] Playboy: And what of Monica's part in all this?

[A] Matthews: Well, they were pushing that stalker theory. There was a willingness to hang this woman out and to make her—this kid—pay for what was at least half his responsibility, and probably more, because he was the grown—up. Monica needed someone to tell her she was doing the wrong thing. She didn't have a dad to tell her. She didn't have a mother; in fact, her mother was pushing her. Her friend Linda Tripp? No, she's got the tape running. So who? The president. He should have said, "You're a cute young girl. You're very attractive. I don't mind saying you're very sexy. But I'm president of the fing United States, and I'm not having anything to do with you. You can come by and eat pizza with me, and that's it."

[Q] Playboy: Hillary and Bill: divorce?

[A] Matthews: No opinion. I have no problem with divorce, but all marriages are tricky, and any marriage that lasts is interesting and should be respected on that basis. I'm not talking about politics. In that way I think their relationship might diverge a bit. Let's face it: She wins both ways, as a victim and as a partner.

[A] David Gergen had an interesting analysis of the Clintons. There's always one up and one down, and when one is down, the other one takes advantage of it. Clinton turned over health care to his wife, as a payoff: "Here, you do this. I'm embarrassed by Paula Jones right now." She had the upper hand, and he yielded to her, like, "All right, you can have the car tonight." She took over what should have been the central push of the administration and turned it into boutique politics, like, "I'll do it over here with the propellerheads."

[Q] Playboy: Do you admire anything about Clinton?

[A] Matthews: He's the greatest politician we've ever seen. Remember the first Star Trek movie, where this incredible, daunting entity called V—GER arrives and they have to deal with it? It was a probe sent out years before, programmed to explore and defend itself. That's Bill Clinton. Somewhere in our political history, we as a society designed, through our voting patterns, the unstoppable political personality, and Bill Clinton is that person. He was sent into space and has come back. He's a very skilled, state-of-the-art, unstoppable political machine. He's learned every trick of politics, every offense and defense of survival. He has learned what to do when caught. He has learned how to exploit an opportunity. He has learned how to graft himself onto every bit of good news and separate himself from every bit of bad news. He's learned how to be avuncular in times of tragedy. He's learned how to dodge bullets and make bullets that hit other people somehow benefit him. His identification with Oklahoma City after the bombing was a great political move. I said, "This guy gets it." He could exploit even horror effectively.

[A] But the question is, how did he use his instrument? He increased his political capital, so he would leave office with a high popularity level. He never used it to fix Social Security or Medicare or any of the real tough things. His proposal on the Middle East, which was extremely courageous, wasn't offered until January 3, when it was hopeless. He could have pushed two or three years earlier and really stuck his neck out. Instead, he used his capital for the Marc Rich pardon. Why would you use your capital for dreck like that? The pardon of Rich was not acceptable, but maybe it was a good educational thing. In the end we understand our system better. Clinton's pardons helped us stop being so naive. We used to think that only in Mexico could you be bought at the top. No. On the show I said, "Do you feel like you're in Manila now, where if you can reach a brother-in-law or a brother, you get it?" Do Americans like that feeling of being in a country where it's a little rotten at the top? It's a delusion to think we don't have that problem in this country.

[Q] Playboy: You're a political junkie. Most junkies have days when they desperately want to kick the habit.

[A] Matthews: I'd be afraid of the day when I did. I look at it like this: Dick Cavett interviewed John Huston one night and said, "What do you most want?" Huston was dying of emphysema, and at his age it obviously wasn't poontang. He said, "I want interest." And that is it. I want to be interested in something. My interest is politics. It's formulated by years of being a student of it and taking sides.

[Q] Playboy: When do you personally play hardball?

[A] Matthews: It's a hard discipline. I try to keep my rivals and critics in front of me and be friendly with them. I've had people write tough pieces about me. I call the editors and say I just want to dispute these few points, and I end up having a nice conversation. I think you should clear the air quickly and not let those things become stupid grudges that go on for 20 years because some guy said something once—which is common in this city.

[Q] Playboy: What's your new book about?

[A] Matthews: People ask where I'm coming from: Are you a Democrat or a Republican? I'm a hybrid, and I want to explain (continued on page 169)Chris Matthews(continued from page 84) this hybrid background.

[Q] Playboy: Like others of this ilk, will it contain a prescription for America?

[A] Matthews: You're building it up, and I'm not going to build it up. I write about the Peace Corps, about working for Tip, about working for Carter. It's my goal to show why each step affected my thinking. There's a chapter called "Wisdom," which collects a number of things I've learned about life, and my values. But otherwise, no. There's always the appeal of zealotry, but my airplane has windows in it. That's how I'm different from these other guys. I don't tell people to get into the plane and keep the windows shut. I say look out the window while we're flying and decide where we're going. It's like I do the show. I say, "Wait a minute, there's another point of view here." I don't try to say this is what I think is gospel.

[Q] Playboy: You'll be going head-to-head with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's second book. What if he outsells you?

[A] Matthews: I'm a competitive guy, but I just want it to be about what's true and valuable and me. O'Reilly's is about being permanently blue-collar and having this attitude that the elite are pushing you around, and "Morley Safer jumped ahead of me in line once." Mine's a little different. You can call it a memoir if you want, but it's mainly about how I developed my sort of hard-to-read politics.

[Q] Playboy: Give us the short course.

[A] Matthews: I have a complicated political closet. My dad was a Presbyterian who became a Catholic after getting married. A classic moderate Republican: self-reliance, nobody needs government, pay your taxes and obey the law. He was a court reporter in Philadelphia, and all he saw was crime and problems. Mom was a classic Irish Catholic. Her father was Charles Shields, a Democratic committeeman from North Philadelphia. In Catholic school there was a strong identification between religion and the enemy. Stalin was the bad guy. It was very Manichaean, good and evil.

[Q] Playboy: How strongly does your Catholicism resonate in your job?

[A] Matthews: I'm not saying we're better than anyone else, but truth is a big thing to Catholics. I grew up in the post-World War II era. Catholics were just beginning their period of assimilation into our society. Out of that came an attempt by all Catholic ethnic groups—the Polish, the Italians, the Irish—to become really patriotic. In school there were a lot of patriotic displays, almost like Georg M. Cohan. We marched up and down the avenue in front of our school, with flags and everything. It was the Bishop Sheen era: anti-Communist, pro-American, Kate Smith and God Bless America, fight for your faith, this is the Blessed Country. Mary is the patron saint of America. But I'm not a tribal Mick. I'm a lot more liberal than that, a lot more tolerant. I think diversity is a positive thing. But instead of using the word diversity, I'd like to see the word American. We're a melting pot, remember? In the end, what connects is the way we resolve our differences: democratically and with respect for minority rights. That's what makes us American. That's what this country is about. We should stop being so hard on one another.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds like the gospel according to Chris Matthews after all.

[A] Matthews: Well, it's not as if I haven't tried to come to some beliefs.

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Matthews: The idea of a living income. I believe this society should discriminate between people who work and try to contribute, and those who don't. Maybe that's too judgmental, but if I see a person at six o'clock in the morning, in a tough neighborhood, catching a bus for work, that person deserves health care and a living income. At a certain level, life is really just work. Real work is carrying two-by-fours around all day. It's a guy washing a window on the 27th floor. These people should be treasured.

[Q] Playboy: What else?

[A] Matthews: I don't necessarily feel any sort of sympathy for guys on death row. I don't have sympathy—more than the natural—for drug addicts.

[Q] Playboy: Guns and school violence?

[A] Matthews: Chuck Schumer said something really intelligent the other day. We can outlaw state-of-the-art semiautomatics that can be converted into automatics. We can outlaw assault rifles. But you can't get rid of .22 handguns. It's a stupid argument in America. That kind of weaponry is endemic to American life. They're what fathers in Kansas teach their kids to use. Schumer recognized that there's a blue-and-red thing going on here—and it's not going to be gone. So what you do is ask, what do the blue and the red have in common? The answer: a sense of personal responsibility. Schumer said parents have to accept a certain level of responsibility. Why does the father have the gun in the house? Teaching? Hunting? Safety? Fine, but find a way to keep that gun away from the kid. Don't put it in a glass cabinet so the kid can look at it all day. Also, work with the NRA, figure out ways to prevent a parent's gun being used in a crime.

[Q] Playboy: What about the anger that causes kids to kill their classmates?

[A] Matthews: If you put 30 kids in a classroom and each one of them has a gun—a loaded .38 police special, the standard revolver—how long will it take for one of them to kill another one? Maybe, in a nice, proper school, where everybody is sort of upper middle class and pleasant and they know how to shout at each other and insult each other pleasantly, it would take a couple months. At another school, where they're a little more basic in their way of fighting with each other, it could take a couple hours. There's a caste system in high school, and it's brutal. Every time you read about one of these cases, scrawny is the word used. The kid obviously was picked on. High school never goes away. Some people still want to go back to it; that's why there are reunions. I went back two weeks ago to my high school, and I was put in the Hall of Fame. There are 10 or 20 guys in it. One came up to me—he's a doctor, a real smart guy and we used to hang around together a lot—and he said, "Isn't it great that one of us got it, and not one of the big athletes?" To me, that captured the feeling that we all shared. High school reunions tend to be celebrations of previous conquests, by the people who were the stars. A lot of guys in my class will not go back under any circumstance.

[Q] Playboy: What about abortion?

[A] Matthews: Abortion is generally a moral problem with me. But I also ask myself if I want to live in a society where there is so much repression and state power that someone can stop a woman from having this procedure. That's a big question that a lot of people don't answer. Ninety-five percent of the country would like to see less abortion, and they certainly don't want it used as a birth-control device. But in the end, if the price is a society in which people lack basic personal internal freedom, that's an awful high price to pay.

[Q] Playboy: Let's wrap this up by playing some hardball. Can you name a baseball team——

[A] Matthews: I have never allowed baseball metaphors or references on the show. Hardball is not about baseball, it's about hardball. It's in The New York Times now: On the front page last week, it was "Bush is playing hardball." Partially because of me, hardball is now a term in the American political dictionary.

[Q] Playboy: We mean name a team of your own, staffed with your regular guests.

[A] Matthews: Oh. OK. Without offending anyone, I hope.

[A] Howard Fineman: Lead—off batter, catcher. Howard has never let me down. I say, "What happened today?" and he tells me. He knows what's going on that hour. He can not only report, he can digest and he can analyze and he can excite. The poor thing about Howard is, he doesn't know he's that good.

[A] Third base, the hot corner: Christopher Hitchens. He's spectacular at "The Buzz," the nitty-gritty segment at the end of the show. That was my producer Phil Griffin's idea. Hitchens is a genius—he's so tough, so British. I think Chris was the model for the hard-drinking, brilliant writer who was always in trouble in Bonfire of the Vanities.

[Q] Playboy: So what do you think of Al Sharp on?

[A] Matthews: I had to be sold on him, but he's great stuff. Of course, you've got the Tawana Brawley problem, and I guess we could bring that up every night and remind everybody of it. I don't think he should be forgiven for it, nor should it be forgotten. But talk about rock-and-roll stars—he has that aspect. As long as we have this divided society, and a couple million people in New York who are completely rejected as part of the mainstream of the operation, there is going to be a leader who comes to the fore and says he represents those down-and-out people. That's Sharpton. Give him left field.

[Q] Playboy: Who's shortstop?

[A] Matthews: Carville.

[Q] Playboy: When you recently had him as a guest, you two were really going at it.

[A] Matthews: Look at the tape. I wasn't fighting with him. I was coldly taunting him to the level of almost explosion—and that's what I wanted to do. Sure, the next morning Imus said Carville beat me; I can live with that. What I can't live with is the perception that we screamed back and forth. I'm the moderator. I can't win that shouting match. People think you control the show, but you don't control the show if the other guy wants to shout. All you can do is control yourself and to some extent taunt him in the direction you want. I was pushing him because Carville just comes on the show and bullshits.

[Q] Playboy: Is Doris Kearns Goodwin on the team?

[A] Matthews: Center field. She always has a great, deep answer for everything. Put Bill Buckley in right. John Fund at first base.

[Q] Playboy: Some people find Fund smug and annoying, though more so on other shows.

[A] Matthews: I don't. He's fun. That weird kind of smirk gets to you, but he's very friendly and supportive of the program. I appreciate that. Ha! How's that? [Pauses] But look, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is not a bastion of diversity. It has a strong Catholic feel to it. Very moralistic. But nobody's always right, and if you say you're always right, you're an idiot or a fraud.

[Q] Playboy: Who else?

[A] Matthews: Put Norah O'Donnell on second base [Laughs]. This is going to offend so many people. But you're naming names.

[Q] Playboy: And you're just being spontaneous. What about Pat Caddell?

[A] Matthews: Oh, you gotta have Caddell. Designated hitter.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't he once a Democrat?

[A] Matthews: [Laughs] He is. I had dinner with him at Warren Beatty's house one night. He is a complete liberal. But like me he's angry about the Clinton thing. As a group, the Carter people don't like the Clinton people. He's a total loyalist to the party.

[Q] Playboy: And who's on the mound, firing the hardballs?

[A] Matthews: [Smiles] Gotta be me.

I love television. I could do prime-time talk for 20 years. I want recognition that I belong. This is my opportunity, my life. I want to be on the first team.