Chris Matthews
Chris Matthews is the host of Hardball on MSNBC and The Chris Matthews Show on NBC.
A television news anchor with significant depth of experience, Matthews has distinguished himself as a broadcast journalist, newspaper bureau chief, presidential speechwriter and best-selling author. Matthews covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa, the Good Friday Peace Accord in Northern Ireland and the funeral of Pope John Paul II. He has covered every American presidential election campaign since the 1980s.
Matthews worked for fifteen years as a newspaper journalist, thirteen of them as a Washington bureau chief for The San Francisco Examiner and two as a national columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Before that, he had a fifteen-year career in public service: five years in the United States Senate; four years in the White House under President Jimmy Carter, first on the President’s Reorganization Project then as a presidential speechwriter; then for six years as the top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.
Matthews has received the David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism and the Gold Medal Award from the Pennsylvania Society. He was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics. He holds twenty-four honorary degrees.
Matthews is the author of seven best-selling books: Hardball (1988—updated release 1999), Kennedy & Nixon (1996), Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think (2001), American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions (2002), Life’s a Campaign (2007), The Hardball Handbook: How to Win at Life (2009) and Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (2011).
A graduate of Holy Cross, Matthews did graduate work in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matthews served for two years with the U.S. Peace Corps as a trade development advisor in Swaziland, Africa.
He is married to Kathleen Matthews, executive vice president of Marriott International.
