| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Rubenstein, are people afraid of inviting you over to their house for dinner because they'd be afraid that the food wouldn't be good enough for you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When people cook with love for you, it is great, but you know, you know, the dry turk in Thanksgiving is unnegotiable. | |
| It's always dry. | ||
| But yeah, turk is hard so dry. | ||
| That's why gravy exists. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club with Jose Andres Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Chris Matthews joins us now. | ||
| As an author, he's written four books about the Kennedys, two specifically on Bobby Kennedy, the latest lessons from Bobby. | ||
| It came out this month on the centennial of Bobby Kennedy's birth. | ||
| And toward the end of that book, Chris Matthews, you write this. | ||
| It is fascinating to me as an American and as an historian how Bobby Kennedy's memory has survived these many years. | ||
| I think it is the feeling that he left behind. | ||
| What feeling did he leave behind him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think a bit of vulnerability. | |
| Arthur Schlesinger, the great historian, said that Bobby seemed like a guy that needed some protection from the country, whereas Jack Kennedy seemed like he didn't need protection. | ||
| He was just immutable. | ||
| Bobby was, you know, he was the runt of the litter, his father called him. | ||
| Imagine their father saying, you're the runt in this family. | ||
| It's a big litter, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and all the brothers, Joe, Joe Jr. and Jack and Teddy, were all six-footers. | |
| He wasn't as good looking as his brothers, you could say, but he was a believer, and he felt for the people much more, I think, than his brother Jack. | ||
| I think he managed to identify with civil rights. | ||
| And what he did on civil rights is just extraordinary. | ||
| I mean, people like John Lewis really knew him. | ||
| John Lewis took him to Indianapolis the night that Dr. King was killed. | ||
| And he had to speak to a black crowd of people who hadn't heard the news because I dug it up on NBC cameras. | ||
| You could actually hear him saying, do they know yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do they know? | |
| Because there's no cell phones in those days or social media. | ||
| You waited for the nightly news. | ||
| And he had to tell them. | ||
| So he's telling this crowd, some white guy, to be blunt about it, has just killed your hero. | ||
| And he had to explain it to them. | ||
| And he talked about a member of my family was killed by a white guy, which I always thought at the time as kind of an awkward statement. | ||
| So what? | ||
| A white guy kills a white guy. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| That's not a racial issue. | ||
| But his account was a way of saying, I know what suffering means. | ||
| I think it meant that to me. | ||
| That speech, one of the speeches included in this book, you spent 400 pages with Bobby Kennedy back in 2017's Bobby Kennedy, a raging spirit. | ||
| Why did you feel like you needed to revisit that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Simon ⁇ Schuster called me up and said, we won a book on what he taught us. | |
| And I think the unity question, I think, you know, when his funeral train, just to be blunt, when that funeral train was carried from St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City down to Arlington Cemetery, where he was joined with his brother, black and white, Philadelphia, where I grew up, 20,000 people singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic spontaneously. | ||
| As the train comes by. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then intermittently between the cities of Trenton and Philly and Newark and Philly, white people had come out. | |
| And you see them like military guys. | ||
| They're all enlisted guys because they've got a salute and all their kids in birth order. | ||
| It's astounding the devotion people had to him. | ||
| And I think it holds on. | ||
| I've been on this tour for the last week or two. | ||
| I got to tell you, people know what no Bobby Kennedy was. | ||
| The title of the book, Lessons from Bobby, 10 Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters. | ||
| And the first reason that you turn to, the first chapter of this book, is the lesson on healing division in this country. | ||
| What can Bobby teach us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanksgiving's coming. | |
| I don't know about your family, John, but my family is divided. | ||
| We have people in the family that are on one side of Donald Trump, where if you say a word about Donald Trump in any negative way, you're going to pay for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a minefield. | |
| This is within families. | ||
| And I think it's, you know, it's not just racial and things like that. | ||
| It's about within the core families, brothers, brothers-in-law, cousins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, come on. | |
| I don't want to. | ||
| I'm going to the Philadelphia Library this Thursday, Wednesday night to speak. | ||
| And I got to tell you, my cousins are coming. | ||
| I've got to be very careful about what I say about Trump, one way or the other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, there's a lot of trouble out there. | |
| Bobby disagree about everything. | ||
| What did Bobby tell us about doing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He had an ability to appeal to white working people that he has to black people. | |
| He didn't distinguish. | ||
| He rode around in a car in that book I taught about. | ||
| He would drive around in a car, an open car, which is dangerous today, politically. | ||
| And he had Tony Zale, former middleweight champ who had beaten Rocky Gaziano, two out of three times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On the right side of him, he had Richard Hatcher, the first black mayor of that city. | |
| And he wanted a show. | ||
| Hey, I'm here. | ||
| I'm for both people. | ||
| So he made this. | ||
| And, you know, Jack Newfield, the writer about him, a big New York liberal, said that he had the same feeling for American Indians and for Hispanic people, Mexican-Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Somebody, it was Newfield who wrote, he died, he spent his life with diplomats and aristocrats, rich people, financiers, movie stars, mountain climbers, all kinds of big shots. | |
| And he died reaching for the hand of a $75 a week dishwasher, a Mexican-American dishwasher. | ||
| That's who he campaigned with. | ||
| And, you know, he took a lot of chances. | ||
| You know, he had shoes taken off him. | ||
| I don't know how this happens, but people managed to grab the shoes of a candidate and pull them off as souvenirs and cufflings, easy enough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But he said, if you campaign, if you talk to people, they'll hear you, but they want to feel you. | |
| They want to touch you. | ||
| And that's a risky business. | ||
| It was for him. | ||
| He got killed. | ||
| Another lesson from Bobby that you don't hear a lot from politicians today, admitting mistakes. | ||
| If you write this, Bobby had a useful expression in this regard. | ||
| Hang a lantern on your problems. | ||
| To him, it meant admitting your weakness before someone calls you out on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, he's the attorney general. | |
| His job is to enforce court orders, federal court orders. | ||
| So he gets down to Old Miss, an all-white university at the time, in the 60s, just 60 years ago, entirely white. | ||
|
unidentified
|
University of Alabama, entirely white. | |
| Now look at their football teams. | ||
| I mean, give me a break. | ||
| What would they be doing? | ||
| They would not be top 20 teams. | ||
| These guys are athletes. | ||
| They've integrated this school with race on academics and everything else. | ||
| You know, he did that, but at the same time, he was a liberal. | ||
| But when it came to law and order, he would actually campaign in cities like Aria, Indiana, saying, I'm for law and order. | ||
| And he also said, if you don't have law and order, you're not going to have liberalism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How can you defend people's rights if they're disobeying the law? | |
| So he said, we've got to obey the law. | ||
| And it was a tough, there's not many people around like that who are tough liberals, who are sort of Irish cops when it comes to the law, and yet for people's rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he opened up those universities. | |
| He pushed his brother to pass the civil rights bill. | ||
| I mean, he pushed that bill with his brother. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| Dr. King said, that white man has just hit the ball out of the park, which is an amazing quote from Dr. King, that this white guy had advocated the civil rights bill. | ||
| And it was the Kennedys. | ||
| Lessons from Bobby, 10 Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters. | ||
| Chris Matthews is the author of this book, and he's with us taking your phone calls. | ||
| Phone lines, as usual, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll get to those calls, but as people are calling in, is Bobby Kennedy's son, Secretary of Canada? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're doing it to me, aren't you? | |
| You're doing it to me, aren't you? | ||
| You're doing it to me right now. | ||
| Is he living up to the lessons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, all I can say is when he was 14 years old and his father was killed, he was at Good Samaritan Hospital crying. | |
| So he's a son of Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| And I called him up when I finished the book. | ||
| I got his phone number, his private number, and I called him and I said, I've written a book about your dad. | ||
| It's positive. | ||
| I don't mention you. | ||
| So what can I say? | ||
| I think what do you want me to say, John? | ||
| Did he respond when he said it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He thanked me for saying it. | |
| It was a short conversation. | ||
| I've talked to the other members, Carrie, Rory, Kathleen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I talked to other members of Douglas. | |
| I've talked to a lot of his siblings. | ||
| And I think they all will love this book. | ||
| What did they think of your previous book about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, let me say, who liked it? | |
| Joe Kennedy really liked it, his son. | ||
| And I think they all did. | ||
| Did you ever talk to RFK Jr. about Bobby Kennedy, a raging spirit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But I did know him quite well. | ||
| I mean, he was a great environmentalist. | ||
| We were down in Baja, California, Mexico, fighting the Japanese over a desalination plant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he had a lot of guts. | |
| I watched it. | ||
| The plane, we're in a little private plane flying up from Tijuana, and the plane's running out of gas. | ||
| So what are we going to do? | ||
| We're at the Federale's police station, and what do we got? | ||
| No gas. | ||
| Bobby goes running off two miles away to find the guy operating the pump and comes back with him. | ||
| I said, you're a Kennedy and you just go running off out in the country here? | ||
| And he did it. | ||
| He also did a thing where a guy was playing music for us, and he had a big sombrero on. | ||
| And Bobby grabbed the sombrero and goes around the room collecting money for the guy at the end of the session. | ||
| He had a lot of natural guts. | ||
| Not always nice, a little bit arrogant, but he had guts. | ||
| For folks who don't know, what has been your relationship with the Kennedy family over the years? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ethel Kennedy, known her, Kathleen very well. | |
| All of them. | ||
| I mean, basically, Vicki Kennedy, we're having dinner with her this week. | ||
| Ted's widow. | ||
| You know, Teddy was at our house, and I've always been friends with him. | ||
| And of course, I was with Jimmy Carter. | ||
| I was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, so Ted ran against us. | ||
| I wasn't thrilled by that. | ||
| But I'm a Kennedy guy. | ||
| What's your first memory of Bobby? | ||
| Running against Gene McCarthy, the two anti-war candidates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, flip a coin. | |
| I prayed for Bobby to win. | ||
| How old were you then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was in grad school. | |
| I was at North Carolina, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. | ||
| And I'll tell you the memory I had when he was shot. | ||
| I was up in Canada. | ||
| A friend of mine was looking for a job up there, like a lot of people did, unfortunately. | ||
| And I turned on the radio at 3 o'clock in the morning, and I thought it was a replay. | ||
| I thought they were replaying the tragedy of Dallas of 63. | ||
| It was 68, and there was another tragedy. | ||
| It was unbelievable that when you finally realized, wait a minute, this is another shooting. | ||
| This is another Kennedy shot, assassination. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stunning. | |
| And as I was coming home in the cab the next day to the United States, the French-Canadian cab driver said, the giant has stubbed its toe. | ||
| Like it was a nationalistic thing, like America, the giant has stubbed its toe. | ||
| I mean, it was a huge issue, but it wasn't like the Kennedy Funeral, which was parades and music and marching bands and drums and all the glamour that Jackie Kennedy had sort of put together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was just a loss. | |
| You just felt the loss of Bobby. | ||
| And I think that's one of the reasons why he has the appeal. | ||
| He's also five years later, it may not seem like that much difference, but five years later, you have a different generation coming in there. | ||
| For people who right now look at this country divided and say it's worse than it's ever been, is it worse than it was in 1968? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Difference fight is a battle among siblings, among college versus non-college, which really bugs me. | |
| This condescension of people had the break of going to college, the 30% of the country that went to college and the 70% who didn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Looking down on these people, just cool it. | |
| Cool, that one. | ||
| But there's a sense that elitism, there's a big thing about, I think there's a big thing about class, which I've never heard about before. | ||
| A lot of that today of you're Mr. Big Shot. | ||
| I think a lot of Democrats have suffered from that. | ||
| What was the division in 1968? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Father and son. | |
| Hey, I fought in World War II. | ||
| Why don't you fight? | ||
| We were fighting the bad guys. | ||
| What are you fighting in Vietnam exactly? | ||
| I've been teaching in Vietnam every year for the last five years. | ||
| I go over there to teach for a while. | ||
| And it is astoundingly nice, the country. | ||
| The war has been forgotten. | ||
| You know, it was a civil war, just like our, as we're learning about our civil wars, civil war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are people on our side. | |
| In fact, if you go to South Vietnam, which is still South Vietnam, it's all business. | ||
| It's very business-oriented. | ||
| It's not a communist-like country. | ||
| You don't see communist officials walking around or soldiers. | ||
| I'm sure there are. | ||
| You write an op-ed in the newspaper, you'll hear about it, maybe the worst possible way. | ||
| But it's a booming, 12 million people in Ho Chi Minh City, which they still call Saigon, by the way. | ||
| It's a nice city. | ||
| A lot of coffee shops, a lot of high-end stores, you know, Hermes, Ralph Lauren. | ||
| You go, where's the money coming from in this country to buy all this stuff? | ||
| What do you think, the what-if history of it, what do you think would have happened when it comes to the Vietnam War if Bobby Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination and went on to November and won the presidency? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If he had won the presidency, I think he would have pushed for a coalition government. | |
| I think we don't like coalition governments with the Reds because the Reds are not reliable, the communists. | ||
| They don't really go along with the deal. | ||
| But Walter Cronkite said that at the end after the TED Offensive in 68, he said, we're going to end up with a stalemate here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got to live with it. | |
| It's not going to be a happy stalemate. | ||
| But the war will end and the American part of the war will end. | ||
| You know, that's the part we wanted to end, I think. | ||
| You know, we killed a lot of people over there. | ||
| We should never have killed. | ||
| And a lot of Americans got killed, guys my age, a lot. | ||
| And, you know, we had to end it. | ||
| And we finally did in 72. | ||
| We could have ended it in 69. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We ended it in 72. | |
| The book, again, Lessons from Bobby, 10 Reasons. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters. | ||
| And Robert F. Kennedy was born on November the 20th of 1925. | ||
| So it'll be the 100th anniversary of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it's centennial, yeah. | |
| Taking some phone calls with Chris Matthews, the author of that book. | ||
| Michael is in Denver up first line for independence. | ||
| Michael, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John, good morning. | |
| Thank you so much for taking my call. | ||
| And Mr. Matthews, first of all, I just want to say it is such an honor and a privilege to speak to you. | ||
| And thank you so much for your creative insight and for writing the book. | ||
| And I had a quick comment and a question. | ||
| So you talk about in your book, Lessons from Bobby, how Bobby Kennedy pursued his ideals even more after his brother was assassinated. | ||
| And, you know, Bobby Kennedy took on a new agenda. | ||
| You know, he accepted the moral obligation of helping Mexican farm workers and black suppression in South Africa. | ||
| And he was out to pursue his ideals. | ||
| And, you know, you write about how in March of 1965, Bobby was actually leading the migrant workers' strike against the grape growers in Cuba. | ||
| And Bobby Kennedy basically stood up to Cesar Chavez against those protesters that were being arrested. | ||
| And, you know, Cesar Chavez said it was basically the first time anybody crossed that line politically in Cuba's history, saying it was more than Kennedy's political courage. | ||
| What really grabbed Cesar Chavez's attention was his authenticity. | ||
| And you say the ideal of our current president is to idealize himself. | ||
| He speaks of annexing Canada, buying Greenland, or retaking the Panama Canal. | ||
| So, Michael, Michael, what's your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I wanted to kind of ask you about Robert Kennedy's ability to pursue his ideals and sort of how he matured throughout his career and how President Trump, President Trump, can kind of build on that and learn from that. | |
| Sounds like Michael's reading the book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think there's a very close reading of the book. | |
| Thank you so much, Michael. | ||
| You've read the book carefully. | ||
| I think, you know, I don't go crazy over some things, but I do think at the White House, and I think about the White House the way it was when John Adams moved in, and the way that Harry Truman made some adjustments to the Truman balcony, some improvements in the structure of the building so it wouldn't fall apart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they were all improvements. | |
| I'm not sure the aggrandizement of the big ballroom is going to be so popular. | ||
| The shape of the White House will be different. | ||
| I don't know about repainting the executive office building next to the White House white. | ||
| I'm not sure what that's going to accomplish. | ||
| Some of this is marking your trail, which is I'm going to buy Greenland or I'm going to buy, I'm going to take back the canal. | ||
| Well, first of all, it's never going to happen. | ||
| We're not going to take back the canal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We made a deal. | |
| We're going to stick to it. | ||
| And it has avoided a war in Central America, which is a good thing. | ||
| We did not go to war down there, not then. | ||
| I think ideals should be about other people. | ||
| I think ideals should mean morality. | ||
| I said in a book in the beginning, I said, if you want America to be great, try hard to make it good. | ||
| And I think when we did those civil rights bills in the 60s, we improved our country. | ||
| We opened the door to African Americans to come to our best universities, our state universities, all of them. | ||
| We did things to make our country better. | ||
| Nothing's perfect, but we were on the road to improvement. | ||
| And I think he wanted to end that war in Vietnam. | ||
| And I think he would have opposed the war in Iraq. | ||
| I think some of these wars are, as Donald Trump has said, stupid wars. | ||
| John is in Plainfield, New Jersey, line for Democrats. | ||
| John, you're on with Chris Matthews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Mr. Matthews. | |
| I used to watch you on television on MSNBC. | ||
| I agree with you on the point about Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| And I think one of the problems is from 1968 all the way into 1982 to even as far as 1992, we've been fighting the death of at the Democrats on the death of Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| And there were a lot of things he did that was great. | ||
| Like you talk about the train going to Arlington with him and how both sides of the black and also the white working class were mourning him going through the subway from the line from New York all the way through Washington. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of things around it that I think we're still fighting to this day. | ||
| Chris Matthews, are we fighting the same fights? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're fighting over DEI. | |
| We're fighting over diversity, equity, inclusion. | ||
| I think the issues of opportunity and colleges and university, you know, I think we're probably going to pay a price for some of these changes that this president has done in terms of civil rights, closing the door on some people. | ||
| I think it's interesting, and I find the American people trying to read them like you do every day, trying to read them. | ||
| Nobody's complained about the border being closed, which is so interesting because that was the hot issue, the border being wide open for four years under Joe Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The border's been slammed shut since January 20th. | |
| Nobody's complained. | ||
| People don't like the way the deportations are handled because you're going after people that have been here 20, 30 years and their kids are involved and everything else. | ||
| Because that is really tricky because morally, once you're here and you're paying taxes and you're even paying into Social Security and you're going to church and going to work every day, what's the problem? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think, except ethnically, that's a problem with some people. | |
| The Democrats just realize it's not a winning issue? | ||
| Well, they know that, I think they know that it's not an issue on the border. | ||
| You're not going to hear people saying, I want to open that border again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No way. | |
| That was a bad decision. | ||
| Every country has a right to a border and to enforce it. | ||
| But deportations, they're never going to have 11 million people taken out of the country. | ||
| Let's just be honest. | ||
| This is not going to happen. | ||
| But it's going to be in the newspapers every day. | ||
| It's going to make people feel bad. | ||
| Let's get the religious groups like the Cardinal, the Catholic Church, upset about it. | ||
| But it's not going to succeed. | ||
| It's just going to make people angry. | ||
| So I think part of it, fix the problem with the near-term problem. | ||
| Don't go after people 20 and 30 years here who have built lives here. | ||
| Go after criminals. | ||
| Nobody's complaining about that either. | ||
| But, you know, people are reasonable. | ||
| They are much more reasonable than any politician, I think. | ||
| Let me go to Mobile, Alabama, Bill Republican. | ||
| You're on with Chris Matthews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was a law student when Kennedy came down to the University of Alabama to announce that he was going to run for office. | |
| And we were supporting a black candidate who, William McKinley Branch, who was one of the first to run since Reconstruction. | ||
| And we wanted to get a picture with Kennedy, but we couldn't ever line it up. | ||
| So I came up with a clever plan of putting the law professors that were supporting him out in the hallway where we knew Kennedy was going to go after his speech. | ||
| And I had another student up in the steps to take pictures and Branch down there to shake his hand. | ||
| And when they came through that doorway, Roosevelt Greer was the first one. | ||
| He was a giant. | ||
| And he was in front of Kennedy. | ||
| And then this white guy that was even bigger was next. | ||
| Our law professors were scattered all around the walls. | ||
| Branch was knocked down. | ||
| And our picture, we got the picture of the top of Kennedy's head as he went through. | ||
| Three, four months later is when Kennedy got assassinated. | ||
| And I can tell you with what was around him that we saw, there was no way Sir Han Sirhan could have gotten within 15, 20 feet of him. | ||
| And he got within six inches of him in California and shot his head off. | ||
| And that had to be a setup. | ||
| That's all I'm telling you. | ||
| It was set up by whom? | ||
| By whoever wanted him assassinated. | ||
| Well, who's that? | ||
| You got me. | ||
| No, no, you got me. | ||
| I don't know who it was. | ||
| I think it was Sir Han Sirhan who did it. | ||
| And by the way, the Kennedy family still believes it was Sir Han Sirhan because he's still in prison. | ||
| And I think he got close enough to him. | ||
| Rosie Greer, these guys all wrestled him to the ground. | ||
| Kennedy, after he was shot, said, is everybody else okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I think, I mean, I know. | |
| Do you like all conspiracies, sir? | ||
| I think the caller hung up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they do. | |
| I think the guys who believe Jack Kenny was killed by somebody else and John W. Kennedy by somebody else. | ||
| You know, it's not, it's not, life isn't that complicated. | ||
| When the guy's got a gun and he points it at the guy and he fires it a couple times and kills the guy, he did it. | ||
| It was the night that he gave the California primary victory speech. | ||
| You include that speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I have a poster at home of that event, yeah. | |
| In this book, you include several speeches. | ||
| Why is it important to read the speech? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted people to read it as he said it. | |
| And a lot of the eloquence is in there to see for yourself. | ||
| And I thought it would be, you know, when I did the audio version, they asked me to read the speeches. | ||
| I said, no, I think he should be reading the speeches, but because of the government shutdown, we couldn't get access to the library. | ||
| One of the hazards of the government shutdown. | ||
| By the way, that last core. | ||
| There are so many people out there who have conspiracies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The mob did it. | |
| The FBI, the CIA did it. | ||
| Everybody's got a lot of people don't like the way it was done. | ||
| Fighting with Bobby over the Middle East, that a Christian from Palestine, from the Palestinian territories, did it, bothers people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they have to come up with another possibility, somebody vaguely out there. | |
| I think a lot of people on the left can't stand the idea that Oswald did it, because Oswald was a far lefty, had been in Russia, living in Russia as basically an expatriate of the Americans. | ||
| And it's very hard to accept the fact that somebody generally from your side, generally, because people on the left are not all communists, did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you say, well, it must be somebody from the other side. | |
| Rob Reiner believes this. | ||
| I mean, the actor, I mean, he's big on this. | ||
| He's got a whole big, massive investigation that somebody else killed Jack Kennedy. | ||
| But, you know, Teddy Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy both believe that the Warren Commission was correct, that the guy who killed it did the killing. | ||
| They believed it was accurate. | ||
| This is Norm Wading in New Hampshire, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Chris Matthews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Chris. | |
| Good morning, you people. | ||
| Listen, I grew up in Massachusetts, and I met John and Bobby Kennedy when I was five years old, Maccarelli's lounge down there in Cambridge, because my uncle had served in the military. | ||
| I'm a veteran and married the mayor of Cambridge's daughter, Joanne Bobucci. | ||
| But anyways, my concern was because I'm up in New Hampshire now, but I've always had a high sense of pride growing up in Massachusetts. | ||
| And I always wondered if maybe the CIA worked behind JFK's back, both in Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, and really put them on the spot. | ||
| And his brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| Because, you know, politics is not the same. | ||
| For instance, these senators from New Hampshire, Gene Cheheen, Maggie Hass, and even Angus King from Maine, they're not even from New England. | ||
| These people are implants from other parts of the country, you know. | ||
| That's Norm. | ||
| Concerned about a deep state even back then, this term that we have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So where did they come from? | |
| I mean, Angus King, I was just with him on a program the other day. | ||
| I mean, he's, look, where are we going with this one? | ||
| I can't figure out where we're going. | ||
| Are we more inclined to conspiracy theories today? | ||
| Is it the internet? | ||
| What do you attribute it to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think people feel that the government has lied to them, that it's all together. | |
| It's like you go into a party and everybody's there. | ||
| Oh, they've been talking about me before I get in there. | ||
| They're all talking about me. | ||
| And there's a sense of conspiracy in people's being right now. | ||
| It's a very tough society we live in. | ||
| And it's Vietnam. | ||
| People fight about race. | ||
| They fight about gender. | ||
| They argue about what generation you're in. | ||
| People don't like kids in their 20s, and there's so much hostility out there. | ||
| I think it's the thing I talked about in this book, and it's a tough world out there. | ||
| People have a right to be angry. | ||
| Things aren't, affordability is an issue. | ||
| I've tried to explain to people this thing about inflation. | ||
| It's not inflation. | ||
| It's not 5% a year or 3% a year or 2% a year. | ||
| It's how much higher does this thing cost than it was when you can remember it. | ||
| If you can remember five years ago what something cost, And you remember, see what it is now, you go, wait a minute, look at how much more it costs today than it did five years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's affordability. | |
| And if you're a young person with kids, we have a daughter with one kid, she wants two kids, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you got to get a bigger house. | |
| You can't live in a one-room apartment. | ||
| It doesn't work anymore. | ||
| You've got to find somebody bigger place, you know? | ||
| So there's a lot of problems with just living in big cities or rural areas. | ||
| And it's not as much fun and rural areas. | ||
| You go to a small town of Pennsylvania, you go into a town. | ||
| It used to be to be a gift shop. | ||
| There'd be something a local newspaper could talk about. | ||
| There's none of that anymore. | ||
| It's just a gas station and a couple people angry at you if you're a journalist. | ||
| Who'd you vote for? | ||
| If you ask somebody how they're going to vote, they say, who'd you vote for? | ||
| It's hostility out there. | ||
| It isn't the small-time charm of the county seat. | ||
| And a lot of these places in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, they're not that joyous out there. | ||
| I want to return to the speeches for a second. | ||
| There's the speech that Bobby Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the Stars campaign, the first campaign speech. | |
| It was in March of that year, and he talks about gross domestic product. | ||
| And it's part of that speech that has always struck me, especially now as we're talking about affordability. | ||
| It's a little extended, but I want to read it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think I know this part. | |
| I want to get your reaction to it. | ||
| He said, too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. | ||
| Our gross national product now is over $800 billion a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising. | ||
| Ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. | ||
| It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. | ||
| It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. | ||
| It counts napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. | ||
| It counts Whitman's rifle and Spec's knife and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. | ||
| Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. | ||
| It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials. | ||
| It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. | ||
| It measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile. | ||
| And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pretty good line. | |
| Because it's really GDP is something for the Wall Street Journal, but it's not necessarily good for everybody. | ||
| It's good for growth. | ||
| During this last election, last November, when all the people would talk about, oh, GDP is up and the economy is on the march, I say, wait a minute. | ||
| Every time you say that just about the GDP, it's raising prices. | ||
| Every time GDP goes up, prices go up. | ||
| Trump's talking about $2,000 to every person. | ||
| Prices are going to go up. | ||
| More money, choosing fewer goods. | ||
| He talks about tariffs, higher prices. | ||
| He talks about bringing down interest rates by putting a different Fed chairman in there, higher prices. | ||
| Everything he's doing is going to drive affordability up by next election. | ||
| I think he's doing it for what seems like good reasons, get the GDP, get the growth going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All this is spending more money on fewer goods. | |
| And it's just going to happen that by next year, it's going to be much more inflation and higher affordability problems. | ||
| And so I think next year, I'll make a prediction here on this show, 30-plus seats for the Democrats. | ||
| Anybody can holler about it between now and then, but watch what happens. | ||
| Because there's either a change election or a hold election. | ||
| A hold election is when you like Ronald Reagan, you re-elect George Bush Sr. | ||
| You like Reagan so much you kept board George Bush. | ||
| That's a hold election. | ||
| You have a change election like 1980 where I was working for Carter, that's a change election. | ||
| People want a new president, they wanted Reagan. | ||
| Do they want a new president right now in this mood right now? | ||
| I think they don't like this president right now. | ||
| It could change, but right now we're heading towards 30 seats. | ||
| 30 House seats, do they take the Senate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's very tough. | |
| I think, look, there's people that I root for. | ||
| I root for Sherrod Brown in Ohio, but I'm not sure that'll happen. | ||
| I think Canada, I think Maine will change. | ||
| Yeah, I think some states will change. | ||
| I think Cooper in North Carolina, yeah, I think he can win. | ||
| The governor. | ||
| It depends on the local issues at the margin, the margin. | ||
| If so, is it Speaker Hakeem Jeffries? | ||
| Is that the right person for the job? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Stenny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi both agreed on something for the first time in a long time. | |
| The two top leaders. | ||
| I think he has to learn something more about communication a little better. | ||
| In what way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just getting better at communicating. | |
| He and Schumer are having a problem. | ||
| They're using staff-written stuff, and it doesn't seem very illuminating. | ||
| They should have powerhouse people writing for them, and they should be able to stand in the podium in the House of the Senate and say something that's really notable and memorable and have people think about it for a couple of days. | ||
| Well, that's a powerful statement. | ||
| And they're not. | ||
| They're not using that part of the job. | ||
| They're fundraising all the time. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Schumer must be blind. | ||
| He's on the phone so much raising money. | ||
| The reason he's a leader is he's raising money for the rest of the Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the problem of the leadership. | |
| Is it time for Chuck Schumer to step aside for the Senate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| That's the Senate to call. | ||
| And I think they'll keep him for as long as they want. | ||
| Because it's not about, it's up to New York whether he's a senator or not, but it's up to the leadership. | ||
| It's up to the U.S. Senate whether he's the leader or not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know why he's the leader? | |
| Because he's a good leader. | ||
| Because he raises money for people and he takes the heat for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By the way, right now he's taking the heat because I think they didn't like that. | |
| By the way, does anybody think those eight senators were defectors? | ||
| When I hear people refer to them as defectors, are you crazy? | ||
| You don't think they worked it out with the rest of the Democrats in the Senate? | ||
| They're all together on this. | ||
| We need eight seats to beat the filibuster. | ||
| Okay, let's come up with eight seats. | ||
| So they come up with eight seats. | ||
| There's a reason why it wasn't nine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, they didn't need nine. | |
| They only needed eight. | ||
| It's so clear they put it together. | ||
| And not every, not Bernie Sanders, but most of them agreed that it was time to end this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won in New Jersey. | |
| They won in Pennsylvania. | ||
| They won in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won in Virginia. | |
| They won out West, Mississippi, and Atlanta. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won in so many places. | |
| You're winning. | ||
| Get out of the game right now. | ||
| It's time to discard. | ||
| It's time to move on. | ||
| Because if a plane crashes over Thanksgiving or Easter, I mean Christmas or New Year's, Democrats get blamed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because Donald Trump will point the finger so hard at them and say they made this happen. | |
| And I wouldn't have trusted him on that one. | ||
| Less than 10 minutes left with Chris Matthews. | ||
| Time for a few more calls. | ||
| This is Kay, East Lansing, Michigan, line for Democrats. | ||
| Kay, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm good to hear you, Chris Matthews. | ||
| Still, I wish you were still advising people in Washington. | ||
| What I'm calling about is the funeral of Ethel Kennedy. | ||
| Normally, I wouldn't, I would call it a bit morbid to sit around and listen to eight hours of a funeral going on. | ||
| But when they came to Joe Biden's tribute, I thought it was positively wonderful. | ||
| It brought tears to my eyes, and he didn't look at all central at the time. | ||
| And I'd like to know a little bit more about how you feel that relationship was and you could elaborate. | ||
| Are you talking about the Bidens and the Kennedys? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The Bidens and the Kennedys. | ||
| Oh, I think whatever else you argue about the politics of the Bidens, they were Kennedy people all the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Joe Biden grew up with the Kennedys as an adoring Democratic supporter. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, Biden tends to speak too long sometimes. | ||
| Not that time, but I've been to other funerals where he comes in at the end and he continues too long. | ||
| But he obviously has the sentiment, the feeling toward that family. | ||
| Just the other night, they had a party to raise money for Ted Kennedy at his institute up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the star performer was Joe Biden. | |
| This is two weeks ago. | ||
| So obviously he's committed to the Kennedy. | ||
| You can look that up. | ||
| I mean, he is committed to the Kennedys all the way. | ||
| The caller said that she wished you were still advising Democrats. | ||
| Are you still advising Democrats? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Advising Democrats. | |
| On the air here. | ||
| I don't have any secret meetings. | ||
| No, I never did that. | ||
| I generally voted Democrat almost all the time, but some exceptions. | ||
| I voted for Arlen Specter the first time. | ||
| He was a reform candidate. | ||
| And now, I do root for them, but they're not always right. | ||
| They weren't right about the border. | ||
| They've got some issues with the trans issue. | ||
| They've not figured out how to address it. | ||
| They have to address it properly. | ||
| There's some of these issues that are going to come back to haunt them, and they're not going to go away. | ||
| One of them is they got to nail the Republicans. | ||
| I know this is ironic for a Democrat. | ||
| You're spending too much money. | ||
| What $3.2 trillion? | ||
| I mean, that is going to cause more affordability problems. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Shout out to Hawaii. | ||
| It's still pretty early in Hawaii. | ||
| Alan's up independent. | ||
| Alan, you are on with Chris Matthews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I wasn't sure if you'd catch me in time. | ||
| Very nice to speak with you, Chris. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| I actually was going to relitigate one more time with you because the issue of RFK's assassination, and I understand that wasn't your real focus in your research. | ||
| And my family were really big Kennedy fans. | ||
| I was very young when he died. | ||
| I was supposed to go to L.A. and see him the night he was assassinated. | ||
| So I was close. | ||
| I was in Orange County, which was a little bit south of LA. | ||
| So my parents couldn't get me there. | ||
| But anyhow, what I wanted to say was I worked with some researchers, including a guy named David Lipton, who was an expert on the Warren Commission before he died two years ago. | ||
| He did some research with some other extremely very credible researchers, and they felt there was a pretty darn good case to be made about this man named Caesar, same Caesar. | ||
| Chris Matthews, do you want to relitigate this again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, let me tell you, sir, you're right about the first thing you said, the first instance you spoke today on this air. | |
| You said I've not researched that. | ||
| When I wrote my first book on Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, the elusive hero, and then Bobby Kennedy, A Raging a Spirit, I made a point. | ||
| If you read the chapters at the time of their assassination, I go around it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go the moments preceding that event, and then I resume right afterwards. | |
| I did not want to get into the issue because this is going to be contentious forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The people will always take different sides. | |
| You're one of the sides. | ||
| Other people take other sides. | ||
| It's just a matter of personal experience in life, I think. | ||
| You have a certain pattern of life, and you go, this seems like this would have happened with the FBI, the CIA doing it or the mob doing it. | ||
| And there's certainly a case with Bobby, who spent his life, a big part of his life fighting the mob, Giancano, and these terrible people, the horrible characters in the mob. | ||
| And they had reasons to dislike him, especially since he went after them after he got into office. | ||
| He didn't exactly do them any favors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And as for the CIA, there's always a question about the CIA because an earlier car brought this up. | |
| The CIA screwed Jack Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs. | ||
| They told the Cuban revolutionaries, the counter-revolutionaries that went in there to try to retake their country, their own country, that if there's a problem on the beach and Castro has got their people pinned down, the U.S. government's coming in there with all force. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they never told that to Jack Kennedy. | |
| He never said, I'm going in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He made it pretty clear he was not going in there. | |
| And I think they screw him into thinking, oh, we're going to basically make them think he's coming in so they'll be mad at him if he doesn't come in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But he never promised. | |
| Never promised. | ||
| Two minutes left. | ||
| Two questions for you. | ||
| The book is Lessons from Bobby. | ||
| What's the most important lesson? | ||
| And is there going to be another book in your future about the Kennedys? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I have another one in mind, but I have to sell it. | |
| Not here. | ||
| I have to sell it to the publishers. | ||
| I think it's Thanksgiving is coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it does come down to this. | |
| I feel very uncomfortable with this notion that people that went to college are condescending the people that didn't. | ||
| And some are. | ||
| Let's face it. | ||
| Some people are big shots. | ||
| They go, I went to Harvard. | ||
| I mean, Jack Kennedy, when he was writing in the White House before he was killed, he was writing his memoirs. | ||
| And one of the things he said was, my only claim to living in the district of the 11th district of Massachusetts, Cambridge, was that I went to Harvard. | ||
| And he said that wasn't particularly prideful. | ||
| The people up there don't like that Harvard crowd. | ||
| I mean, they know that they're condescending, and they go, wait a minute, you're a big shot. | ||
| You get into Harvard. | ||
| Well, I live here. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| I mean, so I think there's a difference of town versus gown. | ||
| This goes on way back in history. | ||
| The town people are the regular people, and then there's the big shots that come in and go to college there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's irresistible, this problem. | |
| But, you know, it's one of the problems today that's in politics. | ||
| The Trump people, a lot of them go to college, and they're working people, and they're voting for Trump. | ||
| Okay, well, that's going on. | ||
| That's what Democrats have to address. | ||
| That's one thing that Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, he said last year, nobody has to have a college degree to go work for the state. | ||
| What an interesting thing. | ||
| No college degree required. | ||
| We're not going to make it a college versus non-college. | ||
| We're going to let everybody apply for these jobs. | ||
| Now, whether it works out or not, it was the right sentiment to end this division. | ||
| And we'll end there. | ||
| The book is Lessons from Bobby, 10 Reasons. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters. | ||
| The author is Chris Matthews. | ||
| We always appreciate you stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great being in here, John. | |
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | ||
| From Washington and across the country, coming up Tuesday morning, we'll talk about the vote in the House to release the Epstein files with the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Hughes. | ||
| And Mona Yakubian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies covers U.S.-Saudi relations and this week's investment summit in Washington, D.C. Also, Lauren Harper Pope with the center-left political action committee Welcome PAC discusses the role of moderates in politics and the future of the party. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Tuesday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| On Tuesday afternoon, the House will debate and vote on a measure to force the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. | ||
| The bill will have 40 minutes of debate and will need a two-thirds majority to pass. | ||
| Epstein abuse survivors have been demanding the files be released. | ||
| If agreed to, the discharge petition would head over to the Senate for a vote. | ||
| Follow live house coverage on C-SPAN, on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| There are many ways to listen to C-SPAN radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| In the Washington, D.C. area, listen on 90.1 FM. | ||
| Use our free C-SPAN Now app, or go online to c-SPAN.org/slash radio on SiriusXM radio on channel 455, the TuneIn app, and on your smart speaker by simply saying play C-SPAN Radio. | ||
| Hear our live call-in program, Washington Journal, daily at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to House and Senate proceedings, committee hearings, news conferences, and other public affairs events live throughout the day. | ||
| And for the best way to hear what's happening in Washington with fast-paced reports, live interviews, and analysis of the day, catch Washington today, weekdays at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to C-SPAN programs on C-SPAN Radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| c-span democracy unfiltered c-span is as unbiased as you can get You are so fair. | ||
| I don't know how anybody can say otherwise. | ||
| You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country. | ||
| I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices. | ||
| You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds. | ||
| I absolutely love C-SPAN. | ||
| I love to hear both sides. | ||
| I've watch C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased and you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments. | ||
| It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country. | ||
| You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruption. | ||
| Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark. | ||
| C-SPANshop.org is C-SPAN's online store. | ||
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our non-profit operations. |