Summary: In this week’s Reagan Forum podcast we go back to July 8, 2021 for our virtual conversation with bestselling author and former MSMBC Hardball host Chris Matthews. Chris Matthews has been following American politics since the first Eisenhower campaign. Following two post-college years in the Peace Corps, Chris served on several staffs on Capitol Hill. He traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue to serve as a White House speechwriter to President Carter before returning to the Hill as a senior aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill. That means that Chris saw up close the defining friendships of American history… the friendship of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. In the late 1980s, Chris switched to full-time journalism, serving as Washington Bureau Chief for the San Francisco Examiner and then beginning his career on television in 1994. In all the years Chris has been involved in the country’s public life he’s kept an abiding faith in electoral politics, his quadrennial hope that the American people will make the best judgment on who should lead. He has kept that faith through war and peace, good times and bad, through great leaders and not-so-great. He has never lost his vigorous love of democracy and how it can serve to make this country, through all its challenges, a more perfect union. Chris Matthews was joined in conversation with Reagan Foundation and Institute executive director John Heubusch to discuss his brand-new book, This Country: My Life in Politics and History, a sweeping memoir of American politics and history.
