HARDBALL
Christopher Matthews
New York: Summit Books, 1988
233 pp., $17.95
Christopher Matthews, who served as senior aide and spokesman for Tip O'Neill, Jr., the speaker of the House of Representatives from 1981 through 1986, has written an enjoyable and illuminating book about American politics. Hardball is not The Federalist Papers. It is an anecdote-filled cross between Machiavelli's Discourses and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Matthews is quick to delineate the scope of his book in the first paragraph of his introduction:
“Be warned. This is not a civics book. It is not about pristine procedures, but about imperfect people. It is not an aerial judgment of how leaders of this or any country ought rightly to behave, but an insider's view of the sometimes outrageous way they actually do. Its subject is not the grand sweep of history, but the round-the-clock scramble for position, power and survival in the city of Washington.”
Matthews then defines the work he has aptly chosen as his book's title:
“Hardball is clean, aggressive Machiavellian politics. It is the discipline of graining and holding power, useful to any profession or undertaking but practiced most openly and unashamedly in the world of public affairs.”
Matthews takes his readers on a colorful grand tour of American politics. We peek into the Senate cloakroom to watch the masters at work, and we are treated to the successes and failures of Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, and Tip O'Neill, for whose lunges and parries on the field of honor Christopher Matthews enjoyed a ringside seat. Reporters and political junkies who have often wished that they could have been a "fly on the wall" as Washington's greats fought and compromised are, through these pages, slipped through a back door into these rooms of yesterday and today courtesy of Mr. Matthews.
But Hardball is not simply an interesting collection of quotations and anecdotes. Matthews has woven his personal experiences and learned snatches of history into fourteen "lessons" or "rules" of political life, several of which are at first glance counterintuitive. He offers us these great rules because, as he admonishes us, "To get ahead in life, you can learn a great deal from those who get ahead for a living."
Retail Politics
Matthews first introduces us to a man Theodore White described as having an instinct for power "as primordial as a salmon's going upstream to spawn," and who practiced what Matthews calls "retail"--person to person, one-at-a-time--politics: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson did not enter Washington, D.C., rich, famous, or well connected. He learned, or rather proved, "It's not who you know; it's who you get to know."
Checking into the Dodge, a rundown, inexpensive hotel that housed many
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