I bumped into Chris Matthews on the Acela this past week. He was on tour to promote his new book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, I asked the veteran MSNBC anchor about his new book, and about what the president should be reading. “Should the president read your new book?” I asked. Matthews responded, “of course.” I asked him why.
In his reply, Matthews recounted something the historian Arthur Schlesinger had said in a lecture at an Aspen Ideas Festival, that “politics is essentially a learning profession.” It’s a refrain that Matthews often draws on. (It’s the epigram in the ninth chapter of his other best-selling Kennedy biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.) Matthews believes that learning made the Kennedy brothers more effective politicians.
On learning while on the job, Matthews said, “I think that’s something Trump doesn’t do. I think he starts at 6:30 in the morning with id and that’s all you get, day after day, it’s the same id, [he’s] got to learn: It’s a profession—like dentistry. Read the manuals.”
Matthews seemed to think that Trump could learn about learning from Bobby Kennedy: “If you look at the life of Robert Kennedy, he was always learning. He was wrong about Joe McCarthy, then he figured him out and he wrote the condemnation resolution. In the Cuban missile crisis, he first wanted to bomb away, but he became a dove. He said ‘this isn’t right.’ So he was always in the process of learning things.”
Matthews’s Bobby Kennedy: Raging Spirit, is currently the third most sold book on Amazon. Perhaps one of those copies will land in the hands of the president.
