It’s A Hardball Life: The Chris Matthews Book Where It Began

His life has been all about politics -- and the media.

In this 1988 interview Chris Matthews talks about his first book, Hardball.
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You may also enjoy my interviews with Barry Goldwater and Pat Schroeder

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#Politics # Washington # hardball # Ronald Reagan

clout and getting to know them. It's not what you know, it's not
who you know, it's who you get to know that matters in
politics. Political commentator Chris
Matthews Today I'll Now I've heard everything.
I'm Bill Thompson. Chris Matthews says he has been

(00:27):
a political junkie since childhood, and his career path
would seem to bear that out. After a degree at Holy Cross and
postgraduate work at the University of North Carolina,
and after a Harvard teaching position, Matthews came to
Washington while he was still inhis 20s, went straight to
Capitol Hill, where he worked under and worked with and worked

(00:47):
for some of Washington's most powerful politicians.
And it was there that he learnedthe trade craft that he came to
call Hardball. It is, he says, how politics
gets done. In fact, he says, it's how
everything in business gets done.
After politics, he turned to writing a newspaper column and
did that for several years before ultimately becoming a

(01:10):
popular cable TV talk show host.Now, just before that
transition, he wrote his first book in 1988, a book called
Hardball. That's when I first met him.
Now, we talked one day in the summer of 88.
Now, be sure to stick around forthe second-half of this
interview because we'll get his predictions for the 1988
presidential contest. And he'll also explain why you

(01:33):
and I both should be using Hardball in just a moment.
Our conversation. Well, we may not own a DeLorean,
but we are about to take you back in time just a little way.
This interview is from the 30 year archive of national radio
personality Bill Thompson. Enjoy.
So I'm here now from 1988, ChrisMatthews.

(01:58):
As well as being a political junkie and having been
interested in politics since I was a very young person, I have
been in politics in Washington professionally since 1971.
I worked on the Capitol Hill formany years, for Senator Muskie
particularly, and then I went tothe Carter White House and for
four years I served President Carter as a speechwriter.
And then for six years I spent, I since spent six years as

(02:22):
administrative assistant and spokesman for House Speaker Tip
O'Neill. And so I've seen a lot of
politics played from both ends of the of Pennsylvania Ave.
And I've also come up against a lot of tough adversaries in that
capacity, like President Reagan,who's the best in the business
as far as I'm concerned when it comes to wholesale politics.
Very impressive credentials you have, but there are still, I
know there going to be some skeptics who say you're a kid

(02:44):
you haven't been around. Who are you to say what the
rules of the game on? Well, it's not the I'm not the
one to say I'm the one to observe.
I am a great listener. I spent many, many years sitting
in rooms with major politicians listening to them and I decided
when I was going to write a book, it wasn't going to be a
petty revelation, it was going to be a grand revelation.
I was going to reveal for the ages how these guys do what they

(03:06):
do. I don't know how many times I've
been in a hotel conference room watching 2 or 3000 serious big
time businessmen sit in rapt attention at a politician and I
know what they're thinking. How did this guy get here?
What's his? What's his number?
How'd he get to the top? How come he holds on the power
so many years? This guy's not handsome.
This guy's not charming. What's his trick?

(03:29):
And what I try to do and then Hardball is to try to figure out
what's the trick? What are the numbers that
Johnson and Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Tip
O'Neill, LBJ, all these characters, what is their
number? How did they get there and why
did they stay there? Because I didn't put them there.
They got there through through tactics, through hardball
tactics. And I think I found out in most
cases what was their their number one trick that got in

(03:51):
there. And I think it's most of the
time something most people can use.
Most people can do what any of these guys have done if they put
their mind to it. The number one trick is.
Well, in each case, I will be glad to tell you how each guy
got there. The Lyndon Johnson story is a
is, is a, is a mastery of retailpolitics, which is one-on-one
politics. It's like selling insurance.
You go door to door. You go to 100 people and nine

(04:13):
people say you can give them a pitch and three by.
If you don't go to the 100, you don't get the 9 presentations,
you don't get the three sales. Lyndon Johnson did that from the
day he arrived in Washington. He's not a charmer as much as
he's a man who focuses completely on the other person's
point of view. When he was in Washington, he
checked into the old Dodge HouseHotel down near Union Station.
It's kind of a fleabag when I came to Washington, but it used

(04:35):
to be a pretty good hotel. First thing he did was check
into the basement floor where all the other top aides were
living. There were 75 administrative
assistants living there. And he went down to the hall and
took a shower, and he met somebody and he liked it.
And back 2015 minutes later tookanother shower.
And four times that night, the man took a shower and met new
people. And it wasn't perversion that
was driving him. It was politics.

(04:56):
He wanted to meet people. And the next morning, he brushed
his teeth five times at 2015 minute intervals.
And so Lyndon Johnson, within a matter of months, became the
most well known staff member on Capitol Hill and became elected
the speaker of the Little House,which was the staff organization
at the time. And his whole career is based on
that. Just campaigning.
You know, campaigning isn't brain surgery.
Politics isn't brain surgery. Getting ahead in any

(05:18):
organization is simply a matter of finding out who's in charge,
who has the votes, who has the clout, and getting to know them.
It's not what you know, it's notwho you know, it's who you get
to know that matters. In politics.
Getting to know people is what campaigning is.
It's what politics is. Some people if, if you're
talking in an office that you expect politicians to act that
way, you expect politicians to to seek out the ones that they

(05:42):
have to that the one that they have to get to know.
But if you're doing that in office politics, that's awfully
obvious, isn't if somebody's kissing?
Well, I think. I think the key question is not
to be obvious. He didn't tell everybody, this
is my 4th shower tonight. This is my third shower.
You know, when he first became asenator in 1948, he won in the
old landslide, landslide Linden campaign by 80 votes,
questionable parentage those votes.

(06:04):
And the first thing he did in Washington is he came back and
he he spent 4 hours talking to the young page who answered the
phone in the Senate cloakroom because having been a member of
the House, he knew how powerful the cloakroom manager was.
The manager is the guy who answers the phone and tells all
the senators what's coming up. He's supposed to know when the
votes are, when to be around, when not to worry about being
around. And he sat down with that man

(06:24):
and he and he examined him across, questioned him for hours
and found out who was the most important man he had to deal
with in the Senate. It was Richard Russell.
Richard Russell was in fact, thepower behind the throne, the man
who read, who led the Southern contingent in the Senate, who
basically didn't want any big job.
He just wanted to decide who gotall the big jobs.
So he decided to marry the guy. And as you point out, you can't

(06:44):
be too obvious about it. Well, what he did was he made a
point of getting on the Armed Services Committee because this
man, Richard Russell, was chairman of the Armed Services
Committee, which required that he spend a lot of time with the
man #2 he became a military reformer.
He wasn't pro military, anti military.
He just wanted to make the military more more serious about
its mission, which is what we need today maybe.
And he would do things like cometo work early.

(07:05):
And he had breakfast in the Capitol, the senators dining
room. And Richard Russell, being a
bachelor was there. He'd work late at night.
Senator Russell was there, just happened to bump into him.
Johnson never met anybody, bumped into them on weekends.
He knew that Russell was a bachelor.
And so he invited him over to have breakfast with the with he
and Lady Bird and read the paper.
He knew he was lonely, wanted tosit around and read the paper at

(07:26):
somebody's house. He didn't want to do it alone
because he hated weekends. Russell, he just wanted to get
get down to business on Monday. And so you could call that
kissing up to somebody. But the fact of the matter is he
did such a, he did it into such style that he became the Senate
Majority Leader within four years of being elected a senator
because the job opened up. And Russell said OK.
And I think I think you can get ahead in most businesses if you

(07:48):
simply focus on who the boss is.You know, one of the rules is
Tip O'Neill's rule is all politics is local.
A lot of students make do the mistake of performing the error
of studying the books hard and not studying the professor.
Imagine if you could go back to school now.
What would be the one lesson you'd teach your kids?
Focus on what the teacher says, because what the teacher says he

(08:10):
or she she thinks is important. And what they say the first
couple of days of class is a real giveaway.
They're going to tell you, if you listen closely, what the
course is all about. And they're going to, in that
last day or two of class, they're going to try to catch up
with what they failed to really sink in.
They're going to try to tell youone more time what it's all
about. If you just take those notes and
listen closely and give it back to the teacher, they're going to
give you a good grade. Every Monday morning when you

(08:32):
come to work, instead of worrying about what you've been
worrying about all weekend yourself, think about and write
on a little piece of paper. What do you think the boss is
worried about this week? Just write on the list and
forget about it. Because all through the week you
will have in the back of your mind what's what's moving that
boss all week. And if you've got that in the
back of your mind, when you bumpinto him in the hallway or in
the bathroom, you're going to betalking about what he's worrying
about and you're going to be on the same wavelength.

(08:53):
It's the trickiest thing in politics is to forget your ego
and to think about the other person's ego because it's the
only way to communicate. Now you there's a word you've
used a number of times and I think it's it may form a key to
this whole thing. You've used the word No.
Knowledge is power, isn't it? Yes.
You have to know what the other person is thinking.
You have to know what the other person is interested in.

(09:14):
You have to know that Russell isa bachelor.
You have to know those things soyou can take advantage.
Of, well, I don't know how many people have worked in offices,
whether in Washington or any other city Mecca where you go to
get a job and, and you work your, your rear end off and, and
you see somebody getting ahead of you and you say it's office
politics, it's favoritism, it's backstabbing.
And you can't understand why they get ahead.
Well, if you watch them closely,they're probably doing a lot of

(09:36):
the techniques that Lyndon Johnson performed or a lot of
the techniques. They're just smart about the
politics. They may not work as hard as
you, but they make sure that anywork they do is fully exploited.
And they may work 5 hours a day and you work 8:00, but that five
hours they put in, they make sure the boss knows about, they
make sure that that's work that's related to what the boss
cares about. And they also know how to

(09:57):
protect themselves against backstabbers.
I mean, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people in
this town, Washington, who I have learned count their success
by the body, count around them, how many people are dead on the
floor. And I've seen it in every office
I've ever worked in. And whether it's a newspaper or
whether it's a congressional office, some people are
gladiators and you've got to deal with them.

(10:20):
And my, my rule is you better learn some hardball to protect
yourself from these people because they're going to use
that hardball from the day they're born to the day they
die, and they're never going to change.
And if you're going to deal withtough guys, you better learn
some of the tricks. Because if you just say all I'm
going to do is work hard and nobody bothers me, you're crazy.
People come down on you. After this short break, Chris

(10:40):
Matthews explains why you and I should both learn how to play
hardball. You know, AI is not just for 22
year old coders. A lot of us older adults are
drawing on our life experience to find unique and creative ways
to use AI at home or at work. Got an AI success story you'd
like to share? Tap the link below to visit our

(11:03):
YouTube channel, AI After 40 andLet's keep learning together.
Now back to my 1988 conversationwith Chris Matthews.
Now, is knowing the game enough?In other words, could newspaper
columnist Chris Matthews decide to run for U.S.
Senate? And could you win?

(11:24):
And could you be an effective USsenator?
Come here to Washington, play the game and become a powerful
figure. I think if you decide that,
that's what you're willing to take the chances on, if you're
willing to play the risks, meaning the odds are tough on
any, any political career, any career.
I mean, I've decided to make my career as a column writer
because I think the odds are pretty good.
I think I can win the game, but it's going to take a lot of

(11:45):
work. Being a senator requires that
you there are some entrance requirements.
You have to be from somewhere. You generally have to live
there. And one of the games we have in
our constitution is you have to pretend you're from places like
Oklahoma City in order to represent Oklahoma City.
So even if you went away to Harvard, you better get home
there fast and pretend you neverleft and you better hang around
and talk with the right accent. That is the game that all

(12:06):
congressmen play. I, first of all have never made
it. I've never made the decision to
go do it. But if I did it, I'd try to win.
I think it's doable, but it's a big sacrifice to go back and
live in Tuscaloosa or to go livein Pocatella or anywhere and say
I'm going to live here and pretend I never left for about 5
years. Then I'm going to run for
office. That's called carpet bagging.
And let me let me tell you, it works if you're willing to play

(12:27):
that game. I prefer to put my time to use
being a commentator because I'd rather not face a constituency
on a daily basis like that congressman I wrote about from
New Jersey in the trash. You know, the bottom line is you
talk big picture, like this guy was elected to Congress, Bill
Hughes from New Jersey, he gave a speech to his constituents.
He said, look, I'm in charge of the big picture.

(12:49):
I do federal budget policy, foreign policy, a little stuff,
potholes. See your local ward leader or
somebody. So a lady raised her hand and
said, congressman, they're supposed to collect my trash on
Thursday and they don't get around till Friday and the dogs
get in and it's always a mess. And he said, Madam, I thought I
explained to you that I'm the big picture guy.
If you want those problems solved, go see your local City

(13:11):
Councilman or Alderman. And the lady without a trace of
sarcasm said, I didn't think I should start that high.
And that's politics. You know, if you want to do it,
fine. But I'll tell you, all politics
is local. And to your boss, you'll be
surprised. A lot of cases your boss cares
about the trash being picked up.He doesn't care how good the
speech is and, and, and the bottom line is you've got to
figure out what that trash collection is.
What is it that he or she cares about in politics?

(13:33):
And you get ahead in the office because, you know, I, I worked
for Speaker O'Neill for a numberof years and people would say to
me, just remember what he cares about and when for a good bit of
time there he cared about his son getting elected governor.
You know, that was a very important thing to think about.
I didn't do enough of that. I mean, thinking about the other
person and stop thinking about yourself.
It is such a powerful political instrument, retail politics.

(13:54):
If you simply think all politicsis local.
There's another trick that nobody follows outside of
politics, which is let somebody do you a favor.
Machiavelli figured this out. The most powerful way to build
an ally, to recruit an ally, is to let someone do you a favor.
If you can do something and you can get somebody else to do it,
it's much better than someone else do it because then you not

(14:14):
only get the job done, but you develop an alliance.
People serve people they've served in the past.
Secretaries are loyal to their bosses for 35 years, and the
more they work for them, the more loyal they are.
The longer they work, the more loyal they are, the harder they
work, the more they they want towork hard.
And sometimes the boss even forgets their name.
And that is life, ladies and gentlemen.
You may not like it, but but therule of that is that what that

(14:35):
teaches you, the lesson there islet people work for you because
they'll become more loyal for you the more people do favors
for you. Lincoln knew this, Machiavelli
knew this, Ben Franklin. Nobody said if you want to make
a friend, let someone do you a favor.
But the worst thing you can do is do it.
Be one of these one man band operations like Jimmy Carter
became at the end or Bob Dole orto some extent Jim Wright.
I mean, one man band. That's not the way to do it.

(14:57):
You've got to have allies. You've got to work it.
You've got to develop a lot of alliances and a lot of friends
and be and be and to be basically in debt to people.
You should be indebted to people.
Let them help you. I think you become more powerful
that way. Who's the better hardball
player, George Bush or Mike Dukakis?
Dukakis. He's ferocious.
He's ferocious because Michael Dukakis, although he is boring

(15:19):
as anyone ever was born to be and will remain so for eight
years when he gets elected president, he will be as boring
at the end of the eight years ashe is now.
He is extremely effective. Look at it.
He beat Jackson and yet people don't really hold it against
him. Jackson's supporters don't hold
against. They just figure he won.
He beat everybody else, did it in undramatic fashion, outspent
them out, affected, and it was just more effective than they

(15:41):
were. He certainly wasn't more
exciting. He couldn't give a speech to
save his life. But you know what?
He wins and he wins because he focuses on his strengths.
He plays his strengths, his ethnicity.
I mean, the guy may not have known he was Greek until two
months ago, but he certainly knows it now.
Every time he goes to New York, he plays bocce with the
Italians. He goes to Gaelic football
games. He he was out in Chicago and
that bakery thinking like actinglike he was a character in

(16:02):
Moonstruck. The guy is the most ethnic paw
we've ever seen and he's not. He's Swarthmore, he's Harvard
Law. He's the most buttoned down
Waspy person you'll ever meet inyour life.
He's somebody called him March. Mark Russell called him Zorber,
the clerk the other night. That's a great line.
I mean, this guy, this guy is not ethnic in the way we think
of ethnic, but yet he knows it'sa plus because you know, carry

(16:23):
California because he's ethnic. I think it be the first Democrat
to carry New Jersey in a long time because he'll play up the
ethnic thing and he's running against the guy who was so
socially remote. He seems silly.
George Bush. George Bush seems to learn his
English from kids in serial commercials.
I don't know where he learns it.Hey, a guy can you know, he's
actually, he talks like he's always saying, hey, hey, why
don't we bring those so many 10 commanders back here and fix our

(16:45):
cars. Hey, the guy comes up to me.
I mean, nobody talks like this guy except those kids in serial
commercials. Like, hey, Mikey likes it, you
know, that kind of talk. That's how George Bush talks,
you know, and this stuff about my, my supporters didn't show up
at the caucuses because they're,they're coming out parties, you
know, telling people that that Chicano's out in California that
they should be satisfied with not going to college because we

(17:08):
need hard working people in our country that don't really go on
to higher education. I mean, that's a great line for
a guy who's been to Yale. I mean, when are you going to
start working hard, buddy? I just don't think he has the
basic commutative skills that even some of our wealthiest
politicians have had. Like, like Rockefeller could
talk to anybody. And certainly the Kennedys know
how to play the game. They didn't know what it was
like to be an average person. They still don't know what it's

(17:29):
like to be an average person. They never have any money in
their pocket. They don't know how to pay for a
cab. They still don't.
You get a cab with them, you pay.
I don't think, I don't think theKennedys are any more down to
earth than than George Bush. But George Bush hasn't figured
out how to talk yet. He can't talk.
And that's a that's a hazard here in politics.
Do you have to be ruthless to succeed?

(17:50):
I think you have to be a missionoriented, as they say in the
military. You have to keep an eye on where
the target is and where you're headed.
Yes, you have to be pleasantly ruthless in the sense you've got
to keep your eye on where you'regoing.
I mean, if Lyndon Johnson hadn'tkept his eye on where he was
going, he wouldn't have gotten here if Ronald Reagan didn't go
through. I'll give you, let me say what I
mean by ruthless. Ronald Reagan memorizes the

(18:12):
names of all reporters before hegoes into a press conference by
using a reverse camera which pans the room and put gets a fix
on every face in the room, even the nobodies.
He checks it with his with a card with all the names on it
with a seating card. And he also has some the
people's duplicate ID cards he uses as a as a memory aid.
So clearly that's ruthless. I mean, anybody goes to the

(18:34):
trouble of memorizing names justto look like Jimmy Stewart out
there, to seem like a regular guy is ruthless.
But he's not hurting anybody doing this.
It's just a little charade. Reporters all go along with it
because they're not going to say, Mr. President, what's my
last name? They're not going to try to,
they're not trying to screw him up that way.
So that's hardball politics. Ronald Reagan is the world's
greatest political wholesaler since Lenin.
He knows how to get a message across.

(18:54):
And the message is Ronald Reagan's a nice guy.
He's worked very hard at this image.
He does radio like this every Saturday.
And you'd think he was Paul Harvey or somebody because there
he is this right wing critic of government.
Who is this guy that fired JamesWatt?
Who is this guy anyway? I mean, it's him at three weeks
early. He fires James Watt on the
radio. He's blasting these people in
Washington. Who ran this guy out of office?
He did. He's he snapped up his

(19:15):
resignation. And so Ronald Reagan is
brilliant at using radio, which no one has really thought of
politically in a while. He knows how to to make, He
knows how seductive radio is. And he knows that radio allows
him to step back from the trappings of office and seem
like just a regular guy out in the Midwest complaining about
the government. And when Nixon used to have go

(19:36):
on vacation in California, he would call this place the
Western White House. And he'd have an office out
there and he'd carry his books out there and his papers.
And he'd walk up and down the beach with his wing tipped shoes
on, his black wing tipped shoes,looking very serious and
plotting. Ronald Reagan was off with a
ranch with a woman he loves and has a great time and let's
everybody know he's on vacation.And people love it because they
don't like their president beinga pure government bureaucrat.

(19:57):
They want the president to be a regular guy.
And so all the messages Ronald Reagan sends have created this
Teflon. Teflon is not magic.
It's what he does for a living. He creates that he weaves the
Teflon like a spider weaving a net.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
Radio on Saturday is not an accident.
Those press conferences, those phony first name bases he has
with those reporters is not an accident.

(20:19):
I mean, he, he works very hard at this business at creating
Ronald Reagan. It's a hell of a creation.
No, I just think that the, the one of the things that people
don't understand about politics is that when you say phrases
like there's a lot of politics in that place, I don't like
working there. Why don't you, before you quit
the job, try some of the politics yourself and then quit
if that still doesn't work, but don't give up by I mean, why

(20:41):
should only the bad guys play politics?
I mean, it seems to me the good guys ought to play a little
politics, just a little, just tokeep yourself in the game.
Why did somebody get ahead of you?
Because they're being political,I think I don't care if you work
in a beauty parlor, somebody's playing politics.
I don't care if it's a surgery room.
I'll bet you chief of surgery isa political guy or a political
woman. It isn't just the best surgeon.
I assume that the best pilot doesn't get to be head of the

(21:03):
airlines either. I think that, you know, I think
a lot of politics and a lot of people just ignore that part of
the job. They'll they'll work their rear
ends of, as I said, work hard. I mean, hours to put in 20 hours
a day practically and they don'tget ahead because they haven't
spent 15 minutes thinking about the politics of the situation.
You don't have to kill yourself,but just think politically once
in a while. And most people don't because

(21:24):
they say I don't like it becauseI'm not good at it.
Well, get good at it. You don't have to be a good
time, Charlie, to remember the boss's wife's name.
And I'll tell you one thing, if you don't remember it, you're a
fool. It's as simple as that.
If you say that's not part of myjob description, fine, keep it
up. You'll be right at the bottom.
And the person remembers the boss's wife's name.

(21:44):
It's pretty smart because that'sworth knowing.
Every time I go to a party with my wife, I say, now who's
everybody's names? And I help me out, you know,
help me out because it's important to know.
People take offense when you don't remember their names.
And if you do remember their names, and this is the most
ultimate thing in politics, theyremember that you remembered.
It's as simple as that. You remembered because you're
not such a big shot. You can't take the time to do

(22:05):
something that's not that intellectual.
It's not brain surgery, as I said, But it's important to
life. And politics is life.
Chris Matthews. Will be 80 in December.
He retired from his cable TV gigin 2020.
Now you can get your copy of Hardball by Chris Matthews by
tapping the link in our show notes by clicking the link in
the description below. If you're watching this on
YouTube or by going to our website heardeverything.com, we

(22:29):
may earn an Amazon Commission ifyou make a purchase.
Heard everything.com is where you can also find my 1988
interview with one of the masters of Hardball, former
Senator Barry Goldwater, and I'll tell you.
Politics has become a very, verydirty business.
It was bad enough when I was in it, but now it's become even
worse and I don't like it and it's not.

(22:51):
Just men who play hardball. My 1998 conversation with former
congresswoman and former presidential candidate Pat
Schroeder, where I found the. Most politicians getting in
trouble is when they always start trying to deny something,
straighten their Halo post for holy pictures, and then the
press is off to the war. You know, because they know they

(23:14):
know. And of course.
We post new episodes of Now I'veHeard Everything every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday, and you can find us wherever you find
podcasts. And thank you so much for
listening next time on now I've heard everything.
My 2005 interview with a former TV star who wrote a a
magnificent emotional tribute tohis close friend Tony Randall.

(23:35):
My 2005 conversation with formerOdd Couple Co star Jack Klugman
and when I got sick and I. Lost my voice.
He was the first one at the hospital beside my kids.
The cancer was worse than they thought and I was, so I said I
lost my voice. He said.
Let's face it Jack, he never did.
So I wish it burden. Anyway, that's next time.
On now I've heard everything. I'm dual Thompson.