Chris Matthews Coming to Music Hall

Writers on a New England Stage, the celebrated author series presented at The Music Hall with partners New Hampshire Public Radio, Yankee Magazine, and RiverRun Bookstore, welcomes Chris Matthews to the stage on Friday, December 2., to discuss his latest book "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero." 

The acclaimed host of MSNBC’s Hardball, Kennedy expert, and New York Times bestselling author masterfully presents a full picture of JFK’s life and presidency through interviews and firsthand accounts from people who knew the famous president.

About the book: What was he like? Chris Matthews has devoted years of his life to answering that question about the 35^th president himself. "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero" is the stirring result.  Drawing on his strong connections, Matthews connected with Kennedy’s closest circle of intimates.  From prep school classmates and college friends to war buddies and political associates, he gives us an intimate picture of John F. Kennedy’s coming-of-age.  It is not the Jack Kennedy you have been led to imagine. 

Expect to visit a golden youth and you find, instead, a sick, lonely boy either stuck in the Choate infirmary or being hauled off to a Boston hospital.  Expect a young athlete and you discover instead an incessant reader.  “History made him what he was,” Jacqueline Kennedy said a week after Jack’s death. “This little boy in bed so much of the time, was reading history.  History made him, this lonely sick boy.”

In the book, we learn the source of Jack’s great inaugural call-to-duty: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”  At Choate we come across the young rebel challenging the old-school order.  In 1940, we meet the second son rejecting his powerful father’s World War II views.  Later, we meet the young skipper who saves his crew after PT 109 is chopped in half by a Japanese destroyer.  We see him carrying his badly-burned engineer on his back through four miles of Japanese-held waters.

Then comes the political rise to power. We watch the young war hero teach himself the hard art of electioneering.  In one episode we see him sneaking into the State House after dark to file his late nominating papers.  We see him in his first debate with Richard Nixon – in 1947!  We see the future liberal hero as a Cold War firebrand exposing communist influence in the labor movement. 

Kennedy’s rise to the presidency shows a different kind of courage. With his brother Bobby at his side, he learns to wage political battle in the backroom, like the successful move to knock off “Onions” Burke as leader of Massachusetts Democrats.  We see the harsh tactics the Kennedy brothers employ to win over the country’s governors.

All this presages the tougher fights as president: the harsh lessons of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the fight with Big Steel, the tough battles with southern governors over de-segregation, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  We discover that, had it not been for Kennedy’s exquisite restraint in that last episode, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev intended to direct those Cuban-based nuclear missiles at New York.

In the end we get Jacqueline Kennedy’s view of Jack Kennedy, the man.  “That elusive, unforgettable man,” she called him.  “All men are a combination of bad and good,” she said just a week after his assassination.  “His mother never loved him,” perhaps trying to explain him.

“What I discovered,” Matthews writes, “was an inner-directed self-creation, an adult stirred and confected in the dreams and loneliness of his youth. I found a serious man who was teaching himself the hard discipline of politics up until the last minute of his life. What’s hardest to see clearly, though, is often what hides in plain sight. So much of this man is what he did. His life is marked by events and achievements that speak for themselves. In searching for Jack Kennedy, I found a fighting prince never free from pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.”

Submitted by Margaret Talcott, Writers on a New England Stage, The Music Hall