Host of MSNBC weeknight program Hardball with Chris Matthews
Host of Sunday NBC syndicated program The Chris Matthews Show
Top aide to Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill during 1980s
White House speechwriter for Democratic President Jimmy Carter
Worked for Ralph Nader in 1973
Since 1997 Chris Matthews has been the host of Hardball, an hour-long political show that airs weeknights on the cable television channel MSNBC. In 2002 he also began hosting an NBC-syndicated half-hour weekly program called The Chris Matthews Show.
Matthews was born into an Irish Catholic family in a blue-collar neighborhood in north Philadelphia on December 17, 1945. He attended Holy Cross College and then served as a Peace Corps "trade development advisor" in Swaziland from 1969 to 1971. This work gave him a draft exemption during the Vietnam War era. He later attended classes in economics at the University of North Carolina.
In 1971 Matthews moved to Washington, DC and took a job as a Capitol Hill security guard. Two years later he went to work for Ralph Nader.
"I was one of the poor people Ralph Nader hired to run the Capitol Hill News Service back in 1973," he told The American Enterprise in 1999. "I did it for three months and didn't like it. It was investigative, hard, and negative. I didn't want to go to politicians and test them on financial disclosure. You'd nitpick and break these little stories that ruin their lives for a month, and maybe end up on the front page. I didn't think that was interesting. I was more pro-politician. I respect anybody who has the guts to run for office. There's a big price to pay."
From 1973 to 1987 Matthews worked for politicians, initially for Senators Frank Moss of Utah and Edmund Muskie of Maine. He became a speechwriter during the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter, mostly for Vice President Walter Mondale but towards its end for Mr. Carter as well. Thereafter for six years during the Reagan era Matthews served as the top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill (D-Massachusetts).
Returning to journalism, Matthews worked as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner from 1987 to 2000, and later for a time wrote 100 syndicated columns per year for the San Francisco Chronicle.
His on-air passion as a guest pundit on TV talk shows such as The McLaughlin Group landed Matthews his own spots on television, beginning in 1988 as a commentator on CBS This Morning and later on ABC's Good Morning America.
Matthews was offered his own show on the small NBC cable channel America's Talking that was the forerunner of MSNBC. In 1996 he became host of the CNBC cable network program Politics, which in January 1997 metamorphosed into Hardball on MSNBC. (Since February 2004, MSNBC's President and General Manager has been Rick Kaplan, a close friend of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.)
Matthews' on-air style is distinctively blunt and excitable. He has said that his approach is to look not at which side of a particular issue is right or wrong but to ask which side is "winning" politically and why. "If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things," Matthews explains. "But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals…. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."
In 2003 Matthews suggested that he might run as a Democrat against incumbent Republican Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania the following year. Specter narrowly fended off a challenge from a conservative in the 2004 Republican primary. Ultimately, Matthews did not run.
As the 2004 presidential election neared, Matthews exhibited an increasingly pro-Democrat partisanship on his television shows. In August 2004 conservative columnist Michelle Malkin appeared as a guest to promote her latest book, but Matthews asked her instead to discuss ads by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that were critical of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Another guest on the program mentioned, as a way of discrediting the ads that had damaged Kerry's credibility, an allegation in the ads that Kerry had gotten a Purple Heart for what might have been an accidentally "self-inflicted wound." When Malkin asserted that this allegation involved a legitimate issue meriting investigation, an angry Matthews threw her off his program.
In 2008, Matthews candidly and passionately supported Democrat Senator Barack Obama for U.S. President, stating, during a live broadcast, that he got "a thrill going up my leg" when hearing Obama speak.
In a February 2008 interview with the New York Observer, Matthews said: "I've been following politics since I was about 5. I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising."
On another occasion, Matthews said: "If you're actually in the room when Obama gives one of his speeches and you don't cry, you're not an American."
On a Tonight Show appearance, Matthews told host Jay Leno:
"[Barack and Michelle Obama] are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they're great looking, and they're cool and they're young, and they're — everything seems to be great. I know I'm selling them now. I'm not supposed to sell, OK? But the fact is, I wouldn't be an honest reporter if I didn't tell you what the spiritual experience is like of being in a Barack Obama rally."
In a November 2008 interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe program (shortly after Obama had been elected President), Matthews pledged to do "everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work." When host Joe Scarborough asked him to clarify what he meant, Matthews stated that his job was to "make this work successfully. This country needs a successful presidency more than anything right now."
On Inauguration Day in January 2009, Matthews celebrated the supportive role MSNBC had played for the Obama campaign, calling it "the network that has opened its heart to change, to change and its possibilities."
Matthews has authored four books: Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who Knows the Game (1988); Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America (1996); Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think (2001); and American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions (2002).
Matthews' wife Kathleen, whom he wed in 1980, is a San Francisco native and a 1975 graduate of Stanford University. Since 1979 she has been an award-winning reporter and anchor at the ABC television station in Washington, DC, WJLA-TV 7, and for five years she also hosted her own nationally syndicated TV program Working Woman. Chris and Kathleen Matthews live in Chevy Chase, Maryland and have three children -- Michael, Thomas and Caroline.
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