! I don't know when he looked across the committee chair desk in those Senate hearings and these horrible mafia figures who burned people alive. I mean, I put them up on hooks like Gian Cano. Was he afraid that they were going to come get him in the middle of the night? Did he have guards around? I don't know. I mean, he was just fearless. And in an interestingly different way, when he went to in front of an African-American crowd and told them Dr. Martin Luther King has just been killed by a white guy and he walked into that neighborhood and he stood up on that truck and he just said to the faces of those people who were death-stricken that this had just happened and he accepted sort of his white responsibility for it. He said, my brother was killed by a white guy. And it was just remarkable when you went to these governors of Ole Miss and said, we're having, we're going to let black kids into this school. It's going to happen. James Meredith is coming to that school and it happened. And today there's a statue of James Meredith down there in Oxford, Mississippi. And George Wallace has changed his mind before he died. He changed his mind. He said segregation was wrong. We're talking with Chris Matthews. He has a new book out called Lessons from Bobby. It's a powerful look at why Robert F. Kennedy still matters today. Speaking of courage and having big balls, knowing about your journey, some very fascinating stories with Chris Matthews and your late 20s you hitchhiked across Africa. And I heard you say that you felt safe. You felt connected to strangers. But you also said you would not recommend hitchhiking today. What do you think happened to us, Chris? What has changed in our culture all these years later? The culture of Africa is different. I mean, I guess in the colonial period there was this residue of support or belief in the role of the white person. I guess that was different. But I never felt I was in danger. I may have been crazy. I was one night, it was getting dark and it was in Tanzania and I'm out there nowhere in the middle of it in the bush. And I said, what am I going to do if it gets really dark here? Where am I going to stay? What am I going to do? And I ended up hitchhiking a ride with an Irish guy who was looking out for an estate. And I got a ride to this place and lucked out. But maybe I was just lucky. Yeah, man. You were pretty courageous yourself, similar to Bobby Kennedy. And that Kennedy name still carries this kind of electricity in American politics for people who didn't grow up in that era. Can you take us through this origin story? Who is the patriarch? How did this family? Joe Kennedy was the money, was the guy that made the money, that made a lot of it possible. But Bobby Kennedy volunteered to be his brother's campaign manager in 1952 when he ran for the Senate. I don't think he would have won that Senate race without Bobby. After that election, Jack Kennedy said that he was the toughest guy in the history of Massachusetts, really, a tough organizer. But everybody said this was the best organization they'd ever seen in that state. He had to be Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a prominent figure who had brought Eisenhower to the presidency, really, in 1952. And then in 1960, he did the same thing in a very close election with Richard Nixon. I think Bobby was essential to Jack. And he was essential to everything Jack did in civil rights and everything in civil rights. In fact, the nuclear war situation we faced in 1962, it was Bobby that got us through. He said, no, let's not attack the Russians in Cuba. Let's have a sanctions. Let's do this slowly. Let's do it effectively. Let's kind of deal behind the scenes. Also Chris, I noticed about Bobby Kennedy, he always was compassionate for the New Yorkers when he was in the Senate seat there. He really tried to understand and fix hunger, poverty, the working class struggle. He got this new mayor, Mondami. He kind of ran on those same themes, affordability, lifting people up who left behind. Do you see any parallels between Bobby and this new New York mayor? I'm hopeful about Mondami. There was an old expression about it came from one of Bobby Kennedy's rivals, potential rivals. We got elected from 1965 as a Republican in New York City. And Lindsay used to say, there's no Republican way to collect garbage. Meaning, let's just do the job. And I think of LaGuardia way back in the 40s said that too. I mean, the job of being mayor is a job. It's not about giving speeches on the Middle East. I mean, he's going to give them there. They're incidental. They're not the key to the job. His job is collecting the snow when he's on the streets and making sure that trash is collected and giving people a sense of life in New York City. So he has the job of being mayor before anything else, before all the rhetoric and anything else he has to say, because he won't be reminded. He won't remind us of himself by giving great speeches. He'll remind us that he was a good mayor. Are you supportive of Mondami? It seems like there's a lot of pushback. He was definitely not an establishment pick. Well, I don't know where I stand in an establishment question when it came to Cuomo. But I think Cuomo should have been the brand. I think it was way too late for him. I think he really set up a bed question mark, which is should we go with the former governor or with new guy? I think we should have had other options. I agree. We're talking with Chris Matthews. He's got a brand new book out. He's a New York Times bestseller. I think he's from Bobby, very powerful look at Robert Kennedy and why he could really help us in the conflicts that we're seeing today. When I did my research, Chris, on Bobby, I thought, well, the guy was assassinated. Maybe it was the mafia, but it was not the mafia. It was a man who was motivated by his support for Israel. And here we are, Chris, all these decades later, we're still seeing violence, heartbreaking conflict between Israel and Palestine people. How has this conflict evolved since the sixties to where we are now? It hasn't evolved. He was a Christian, Palestinian, Serhant Serhant. He's still in prison, the Kennedy family. He still wants them there. I think it's a, he was concerned. It's an interesting dynamic. Bobby did not get in the race against Lyndon Johnson until later. Gene McCarthy got in in November of 1967. Bobby didn't get in until March, the day before St. Patrick's Day in 68. He had lost the college kids, the college, like today, the break between college kids and non-college. He had, he had to get the working class whites and blacks. And so he had to campaign very hard in tough neighborhoods. But he chose to campaign that way. I mean, he went through Los Angeles. He'd be standing in an open truck and people would be grabbing at him. He said, you have to let people touch you when you're campaigning or they don't really believe in you. I mean, that, it was a really a dangerous way of campaigning. And so in a way, when he went into that kitchen in that hotel and that guy shot him, that was the way he was campaigning. And in fact, Arthur Slesinger said he would have known how his campaign and his life was going to end because he was campaigning this way in a sort of feverish way. So he did get shot by somebody about the Middle East. It was like, I know all the politics. I mean, Gene McCarthy would talk to me about Bobby would accuse him of not giving aid to Israel. But he said, we were giving aid to Israel under the table. We just weren't doing it publicly. You know, it wasn't as he was trying to get the Jewish vote away from Gene McCarthy because in many ways the Jewish vote was still loyal to Adelaide Stevenson and McCarthy was a big Stevenson guy. He gave a big speech for Stevenson in 1960. There are a lot of intertwined pieces to this. I know that there's a loud America first voice now in our politics. A lot of people questioning whether United States should be supporting Israel at all costs. How do you see America's responsibility abroad? It seems like we send a lot of money to different places. Well, I think it depends on the cause. I think, I think the fight for Ukraine is real. I mean, my brother, one of my brothers voted for Trump and he's very anguished about the Ukraine situation. It's horrible. The bombing of Kiev. It's horrible. The use of power by this country, Russia. I wonder whether the Cold War was really about communism or was it really about Russian aggression. But it's a horrible thing. I mean, taking back Ukraine, it was clear from the beginning that the people of Ukraine wanted to be independent. I think we're on the right side there. On Israel, we all know the same common sense reality. The Israel went in strong, went into Gaza. They didn't have a clear cut solution for Gaza. The Gaza is going to live. I mean, it's a real challenge. Netanyahu looked like he wanted to continue the war forever. Where are they going to live, the Gaza people? Where are the Palestinian people going to live? It's still up in the air. Yeah, it's definitely a sticky situation. I know that there is a lot of politicking that goes on. People accusing A-PAC of spending a lot of money to pad the politicians' hands. Do you think there is corruption involved in some of that stuff? Everyone has a different motive. Some people may have grabbed the money from A-PAC because they just wanted to get paid. They wanted the elections to be financed. A-PAC is a very strong organization. It's like, it really is capable of bringing a lot of allies in. Not just its members, but it can make the right calls and get people to contribute money. It's a fact. Israel always looks better when they're weak, when they're strong, they don't look as good. It's just like, whenever they need our help, we go, oh, we're with them now. After the Six-Day War in 1967, everybody, they're talking about the 68 campaign, everybody was pro-Israeli because they were the little guy. They took on all these countries, attacking them at the same time, and they won. They were heroic. And people said, this is our guy. These are people. And when they get strong, it's not so simple. It just isn't. That Iron Dome, it seems like you can't penetrate it. We're talking with Chris Matthews. Can I have one of those, baby? Yeah, I need one of those at my place. We're talking with Chris Matthews. He was a presidential speechwriter as well. Can you take us inside that world? What did the actual process look like? I like to write songs, so I know that it takes time. And sometimes getting that first line is what you need. But what was it like when you're about to craft a major speech for a president? Well, you know, I have a Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, and I run the former point-out speech writers. It's my partisan. And everybody's got their own story. I took a bunch of them down to the University of North Carolina recently and talked about what it was like. Now, with Jimmy Carter, you would get in there and you'd drop a speech off near the Wall Office, and it would be like four o'clock in the morning, and Carter was already up. You could smell the coffee. He was already up working away. He liked being president when no one was around. He just liked being president all by himself. He just did. The other people, like Gerald Ford, who was an appointed president, he would crowd all the speech writers around the Oval Office table, his desk, and chat with them about speeches. I mean, in a million years, Jimmy Carter didn't want to do that, collaborating on a speech. But he did. And Gerald Ford did. Kennedy had Ted Sarnson, who traveled with him for years, knew exactly what Kennedy was thinking. In fact, he could think of it before Kennedy thought of it and wrote most of his speeches, wrote profiles in courage. I mean, some of these guys are really pegging new and wrote beautiful speeches for Reagan. She wrote the Challenger Crash, the Space Shuttle. She wrote the Normandy speech, beautiful writing, and did it on deadline. So some people would just be squirreled away somewhere in an office, head down, and writing brilliantly, and the president would get credit for it. That's the way it works. The president doesn't sit down. There are some, Franklin Roosevelt used to work with people, where he would go into the office in the cabinet room in the middle of the night and check in with his writers and participate in the thing. I think Barack Obama wrote a lot of his own speeches. I think he wrote the big one in 2004 at the convention in Boston. That's when I said, you've just heard the first African-American president right there. That speech was a piece of work. He could write. Lincoln could write. Winston Churchill could write. There's some people that can do their own writing, but most people can't write. I look at Schumer, I go, who wrote this stuff? I mean, Schumer, Chuck Schumer, I go, who wrote that? There's nothing lyrical about that. It's just boring stuff. I spent so much time raising money for the Democrats that he doesn't have time to think or be creative. He's not a creative person. He's a hard working person. Sometimes I think Chris, it comes down to who can read the prompt or the best, you know, Barack Obama was very smooth on the microphone. Did you ever get annoyed maybe when one of these guys is reading your speeches and they're not delivering the line as you wrote it? Have you ever been sitting there cringing? Well, essentially, here's a great one. So, Tippa Neil, and I, when I was his top eight, he would stand next to me. And we were watching Reagan delivery the challenger speech after that. Christie McAuliffe had been killed in that crash, that horrible crash. He said that Ronald Reagan was the greatest speechmaker he had ever heard who had a prepared text. That was his little shiv, he put it. If he had a prepared text, he was dynamite. Well, he was an actor, so he was trained at delivering lines. And people would talk about how they'd get him a couple of notes and Reagan could just know how to, just how to perform it. He could just make it work and he'd say, don't worry, I got it. I can do that one. You know, he'd just say that there's people, I can handle that one. And when you look back across time, Chris, what do you consider the greatest political speech ever delivered in your opinion? Not in my time, but it was, it was Lincoln's second inaugural. Right before he died, was killed. And he talked about the biblical explanation for the punishment of America, of slavery, and how slavery had led, what's taken from the last will be taken in blood. That whole incredible turn of phrase where he said, this is biblical. We are paying for the horror of slavery in this war. 600,000 white people killed. This was about us and what we did wrong. So nobody could do it better than Lincoln. And then of course, after Lincoln, I would have say, there's so many good ones, Ishtbanine Berlin or when Kennedy went to Berlin and aroused those people, that speech, you just turn it on now and watch it on YouTube and you go, I don't believe this speech is so great. The new book is called Lessons from Bobby. It explores why Robert F. Kennedy's life and message still matter a hundred years after his birth. What is something that the main key component out of the syllabus of Bobby Kennedy that these modern day politicians could learn from him? Well, it's pretty basic. America is great when it tries at its best to be good. And if you think about it, it sounds so simple, but when we try to expand civil rights in our country beyond just white people, to black people, brown people, if you think about that, that's when we were at our best. When we fought the Second World War, when we were the good guys, when we were the good guys. It's a remarkable fact that when we're good, we're great. Well, Chris, you've been really good. We loved watching you on Hardball and now you can actually log in and subscribe to Hardball. He's now producing that show once again. It was a real honor to have you on. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom and your passion with us today. And everybody, go grab the new book, Lessons from Bobby, a Must Read. We appreciate you. We celebrate you and we hope that you'll come back again soon. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. All right. God bless you. Thank you.
