Chris Matthews in conversation with David Gregory
CHRIS MATTHEWS
Host of Hardball on
MSNBC
Chris
Matthews has been following American politics since the first Eisenhower
campaign. As a very young teenager, he became enthralled with the historic
rivalry of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. It was a time of big downtown
rallies and ticker tape parades on Wall Street, when supporters wore boater
hats and bright campaign buttons.
Hardly a
decade later he was engaged in American politics professionally. Back home from
the Peace Corps in Africa, he was working in the US senate. Then came his tour
in the White House as a presidential speechwriter, followed by his front-row
seat as top aide to the legendary Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip”
O’Neill, Jr.
In the late
1980s, Chris switched to full-time journalism, serving as Washington Bureau
Chief for the San Francisco Examiner. In this capacity he covered some of the
great historic events of the late 20th century, including the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the first all-races election in South Africa.
He began his
career on television in 1994 as host of a two-hour nightly program on the
NBC-owned America’s Talking network. Three years later, he launched Hardball,
now on MSNBC, which was the title of his best-selling handbook on real-life
politics published in 1988. He has been on the air every weekday night
since.
In all the years Chris has been involved in the country’s
public life he’s kept an abiding faith in electoral politics, his quadrennial
hope that the American people will make the best judgment on who should lead.
He has kept that faith through war and peace, good times and bad, through great
leaders and not-so-great. He has never lost his vigorous love of democracy and
how it can serve to make this country, through all its challenges, a more perfect
union.
He is the
author of seven best-selling books. They are, Tip and The Gipper: When
Politics Worked; Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Hardball: How
Politics is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game; Kennedy & Nixon:
The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America; Now, Let Me Tell You What I
Really Think; American: Beyond our Grandest Notions; and Life’s a
Campaign. His most recent book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit,
was published in November 2017.