CHRIS MATTHEWS

Chris Matthews, born and raised in Philadelphia, served for two years with the Peace Corps in Africa. Returning home to the United States, he became a presidential speechwriter, a top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip,” O’Neill Jr., a syndicated columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and now hosts MSNBC’s Hardball. He wrote Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.

We met in Matthews’s office in Washington, D.C. After our talk, Matthews brought me downstairs, and showed me the studio where one of the Kennedy-Nixon debates took place.

Kerry Kennedy: What do you think would have been the difference in this country had my father survived the 1968 campaign?

Chris Matthews: One way to answer that question is to look at this country when we were left without him.

I attended the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The mood of those protesters of the Vietnam War was hopeful. There were young couples pushing baby carriages, religious leaders and all kinds of young people. We believed we were making a difference, that change might be coming, that we might be able to end the war.

This sense of optimism grew as, first Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and then your father entered the contest for president. There was a strong, resilient antiwar message out in the country. The people supporting the war, President Lyndon Johnson and later Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were being challenged. Voters knew they now had an option. Even with the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, there was still a small measure of hope.

With the loss of Senator Kennedy after the California primary, the mood of this country turned ugly. The most bitter scenes of all came at the Democratic National Convention that August in Chicago.

But think about it. Imagine that instead of the rioting between students and police we saw in that convention city, Robert Kennedy had arrived to champion the antiwar cause. Think of the scene in that convention hall if it was Bobby Kennedy standing at the podium. It could well have been like the 1964 convention when every delegate applauded him seemingly forever. Imagine that instead of the rioting and the tear gas, the Democrats might have left Chicago united and inspired. Instead they left like the walking wounded, headed toward defeat in November.

KK: How were things different between the time you left the country for Africa and the Peace Corps in the fall of 1968 and when you returned home in early 1971?

CM: It was the difference between day and night. Before I left, the mood in the country, even in the anti–Vietnam War movement, was hopeful. When I returned home, I felt a real negativity in the air. Drugs had become common. People were cynical and downbeat about where the country was going.

We had Richard Nixon as president. Instead of a war cut short, which Bobby Kennedy proposed, Vietnam continued to rage. Young Americans continued to die.

That’s the big thing that would have been different. With Robert Kennedy as president, we would have ended the Vietnam War in early 1969. Instead, it went on for four more years with Americans still doing much of the fighting.

KK: What led you to make the big effort to write a book about my father?

CM: One is history. In researching and writing about President Kennedy, I discovered the huge, central role Bobby played in his life and career.

It was Jack who credited his brother with getting him elected to the US senate in 1952. He said Bobby had the best political organization in Massachusetts history. Without that success in ’52, it’s hard to see how John F. Kennedy could have run for the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956 or the presidency in 1960. Becoming a senator was key and it was Bobby who ensured that his older brother did just that.

It’s widely recognized that Bobby Kennedy was one of the greatest-ever presidential campaign managers. No one knew that better than the man who won the election. Jack gave Bobby full credit for putting everything together and making it work. His one big mistake was his stubborn resistance to his brother’s selection of Lyndon Johnson as his vice presidential running mate. Jack needed Johnson to win Texas and elsewhere in the south. Without those states, there would have been no New Frontier.

KK: What was that second reason you mentioned for writing the book?

CM: It’s about today. I believe your father personified what we need now in this country.

Think of those people standing in salute of Robert Kennedy when his funeral train rolled down from New York to Washington. All those faces, white, black, many of them poor. Bobby wanted to unite those faces. He wanted to build a coalition of the country’s working people.

I often think of one particular family standing along those railroad tracks in June 1968. The father has his arm in a crisp salute. So does his son. All three members of the family, including the wife and mother are dirty from work. Yet they’ve come out this day to register their respect, more than that, their patriotic affection for Robert Kennedy.

It reminds me of some folk wisdom a country boy from West Virginia once shared. “Do you know why the little man loves his country?” he asked. Then, looking me direct in the eyes, he gave the answer. “Because it’s all he’s got!”

That’s the kind of deep patriotism that was shown to Bobby Kennedy’s funeral car as it passed on its way to Arlington Cemetery. People who have nothing loved this man born to wealth. Why? My hunch it’s because he so clearly and passionately loved his country just as much as they did. Like them, Bobby was a gut patriot.

I’d like to think it’s because of such families that Bobby Kennedy ran for president. He feared that the Vietnam War and the social conflicts at home were bringing real division, real trouble to the country.

Preventing that division and trouble was the goal he set himself: bring the country back together. “If the division continues,” he said, “we’re going to have nothing but chaos and havoc here in the United States.”

A unifier at the top is what we don’t have in current national politics. Instead, we have leaders who divide people in order to gain and hold power. Poor and working whites are urged to vote for a candidate because he opposes the aspirations of minorities. They are told that they climb upward when others are shoved downward.

Bobby Kennedy argued the opposite. He would do anything to get across the ideal that we’re in this together. In the Indiana presidential primary, he even rode around the city of Gary with the city’s first African American mayor on his right, the city’s most popular citizen, the former middleweight champion Tony Zale on the other side.

I wanted to write about a political leader who united. It’s the reason we need someone like RFK today.

KK: What could he teach us today?

CM: You told me a couple times that the key to your father was getting the boot off people’s neck. It’s to show compassion for people in trouble.

Today, there’s a nastiness in our leadership, an attitude of every man for himself. It’s hurting the country, robbing America of our soul. Your father believed that America was a great country. He wanted America also to be a good country.

KK: What was the first clue to my father that you came across?

CM: When I came back from two years in Africa with the Peace Corps, I wanted to be a legislative assistant to a senator, much the way Ted Sorensen had started out with JFK. The first job I was able to get was working for a Democratic senator from Utah. Wayne Owens, the senator’s top aide, had been Rocky Mountain coordinator in the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign.

The best job Wayne could offer me at first was that I’d work in the office during the day, answering mail and doing some basic legislative work. Then, I would moonlight as a Capitol policeman. That’s where my salary came from. It was a patronage job.

It was a familiar arrangement back in those days. Harry Reid, the future Senate majority leader, worked on the Capitol Police when he went to law school. Mike Barnicle, political commentator, was also on the force.

Personally, I learned a lot during those few months as a Capitol Policeman. One of the stories I learned was that there was one Democratic senator who made a point to always greet the Capitol Police officer on duty when he passed him in the morning. The others didn’t bother; they just walked past like the man wasn’t worth their time.

It showed that a figure I had always saw as a liberal, concerned for minorities, people in trouble, had respect for men responsible for enforcing law and order. My other reaction, which cut closer, was that he wasn’t some elite liberal who supported the people but didn’t have time for individual people out doing their job. In other words, he was the real thing.

Bobby would say that cops, waitresses, firefighters, construction workers were his people. I think losing a reputation for that kind of one-to-one affection with working people is the big reason the Democrats lost states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in 2016.

KK: What more did it tell you that he seemed to go out of his way to greet the police?

CM: I knew Bobby Kennedy stood up for people in trouble, including minorities. What made him truly impressive is how he stood up for law enforcers as well. He believed that the law and justice should work hand in hand. A good police officer can be a force for good. He or she should be a protector of rights, including those of minorities. He believed that law and order is the only way to protect those rights.

KK: What led you to entitle your book about my father A Raging Spirit?

CM: I believe Bobby Kennedy was, from the time he was very young, a deep believer in good and evil. He saw the world as a Catholic. There is right and there is wrong. He spent a good many years of his life, especially on Rackets Committee in the late 1950s and later as attorney general as he put it, “chasing bad guys.”

There were the crooked labor leaders like Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, a man Bobby saw as pure evil, who stole brazenly from the Teamsters funds. Later came the Mafia figures themselves, frightening characters, true menaces to society.

That said, I don’t think Bobby Kennedy ever pursued a goal halfheartedly, whether it was backing his brother Jack in a political fight or taking after hit men in organized crime.

Bobby also displayed some of his “raging spirit” running his brother’s campaigns. Jack wanted to be liked. When it came to getting the job done—winning!—Bobby was willing not to be so likeable. He took the responsibility personally of ridding the campaign of hangers-on, the one willing to tell workers they were not going to get paid, that the Kennedy operation was strictly a volunteer effort.

Let’s face it. There were particular roles in the campaign Jack avoided for the obvious reason that doing those jobs made enemies. In such cases, he put his brother to work.

One case was when late in the 1952 Senate race, Jack decided he wanted to keep his campaign separate from the governor’s. He did not want the other Democrat’s collapsing campaign to bring down his.

Keeping the governor at arm’s length was Bobby’s job. And it was Bobby who the governor ended up blaming for his loss, not Jack.

That was another part of Bobby Kennedy’s “raging spirit.” He was ferocious in looking out for his family.

KK: How do you see my father’s role in the New Frontier?

CM: After writing Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero I knew that the history of that administration could not have happened without your father. Bobby Kennedy was central—I would say indispensable—to his older brother’s presidency.

Just two examples: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Civil Rights speech in 1963.

In the first case, Bobby started out as a “hawk,” someone who wanted to go into Cuba and blow up the nuclear missile sites the Soviets had built there. Then, as he often did, he reconsidered. He realized the number of Cubans and Russians who would be killed in such an attack. Like his brother, he worried how the Soviets would react. Would they take West Berlin? What would the US do then?

Bobby also played a critical part in the resolution of the crisis. It was he who leaked to the Soviets the idea of removing the US nuclear missiles in Turkey if the Soviets agreed to remove theirs in Cuba. That secret trade ended up saving the world from the risk of a nuclear war.

On civil rights, it was Bobby who pushed his brother to give the historic speech he gave in June of 1963. You can see him doing just that in that excellent documentary by Robert Drew.

KK: Why do you think people across the political spectrum so respect my father?

CM: A number of reasons: courage, honesty, passion for the cause. Name another politician who would go into a tough inner-city neighborhood knowing he had to tell the crowd that Dr. Martin Luther King had just been killed. Or another candidate who’d tell tough gun owners in Oregon we have to do something to keep guns from criminals and people with mental problems. Or tell college students that they shouldn’t have draft deferments while other young people are being called to fight in a war.

There’s something else: nobility. I remember reading what writer Patrick Buchanan, really an archconservative, said about your father’s concession speech when he lost the Oregon presidential primary. He said that he could not have been more impressed by Bobby’s performance than if he’d won.

KK: Would Robert Kennedy have won the election in 1968?

CM: I think it’s impossible to say. Certainly, events would have gone greatly different. Had RFK won in New York after winning California, he would have finished the primary season on top in the polls. From there it would have been trench warfare, delegate to delegate. I do believe if he’d beaten Hubert Humphrey for the nomination, he would have beaten Richard Nixon. I think he would have drove him crazy.

Then, again, who knows? Bobby Kennedy himself didn’t. He believed he was engaged in an “honorable adventure.”

“I can accept the fact that I may not be nominated now,” he said in his last days. “If that happens, I’ll go back to the Senate and say what I believe, and not try again in ’72. Somebody has to speak up for the Negroes, the Indians and the Mexicans, and poor whites. Maybe that’s what I do best. The issues are more important than me now.”

I think that fatalism of his is one reason for the strong love for him. I can remember conversations over in Swaziland with a fellow volunteer. It is hard to appreciate now the level of hope people placed in your father.

KK: How do you think President Kennedy’s death affected my father?

CM: People write about the dramatic change in your father after what he could only refer to as “the events of November 1963.”

I think the loss of his beloved brother was traumatic. His younger brother Ted worried if he would make it through the loss.

But the fact is Bobby was very much the same person early in life as he was late in life. For one thing, he always had a generous streak for people in trouble.

From childhood, Bobby Kennedy showed a large heart and a generous spirit. Your family friend Lem Billings once said what a “generous little boy” he was.

His high school roommate and lifelong friend Dave Hackett said he always had compassion for those facing problems.

When a Catholic priest on Harvard Square began preaching a doctrine of “no salvation outside the Church,” Bobby wrote a letter of complaint to the Cardinal.

Look at the courage he showed inviting diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, down to speak at UVA law school, then insisting the audience be integrated. On top of that, they had their guest stay overnight even though your mother recalled people throwing things at the house all night.

What changed in Bobby after Jack’s death was his shift in purpose. Before he focused on, as he put it, “chasing bad guys.” After the shock of Dallas, he focused on the victims. As a member of the Kennedy family hinted to me, he may have decided that villains take care of themselves; they create their own hells on earth. So he decided it was better to focus on life’s victims.

I remember telling your mom what I thought was the difference between President Kennedy and your father. “Jack was charm; Bobby was soul.” I think she liked hearing that.