American

Beyond Our Grandest Notions

Chris Matthews

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476764702
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Chris Matthews, former host of MSNBC's Hardball and NBC's The Chris Matthews Show, and New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, and Tip and the Gipper, comes a definitive work on the lifeblood of America—its enduring spirit. People have often wondered what makes America truly great. With a citizenry of vastly different races, religions, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds, what intangible bond unites and defines us as "Americans"? In his own inimitable style, Chris Matthews offers a portrait of a country born of contradictions. We are a people reluctant to fight, who become ferocious when threatened or attacked. We are a deeply practical nation, yet we stand as the world's great optimists. Inherently suspicious of governmental power, we still embrace our flag in times of danger. Fiercely independent, in love with freedom, and eager to face the future, we are like no other people on earth.Matthews asserts that our greatest strength is a set of distinct notions that comprise our national character. The self-made man. The reluctant warrior. The lone hero. We celebrate them in our popular culture and throughout our history, from 1776 to 9/11. In American, Matthews explores the best America stands for and portrays our country as a beacon for the modern world—unafraid of challenges, moving ever forward, and ready and willing to prevail.

CHAPTER 1

A Self-Made Country

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

There was once an upscale men’s shop in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that featured a shiny metal nameplate over the door of its dressing room. It noted that the shop had been honored to have had among its patrons Mr. Cary Grant. It seemed that the gentleman had experienced some unusually warm weather during a visit to Washington and needed a lighter weight suit than he’d brought along. It concluded the historic note by saying Mr. Grant had used this very same changing room to try on his unexpected purchase.

Why would a relatively posh men’s store in a high-end neighborhood make such a big deal out of a movie star stripping down to his underwear on its premises? Why would a store serving the well-to-do and the sophisticated get so wobbly in the knees as to give this guy the “George Washington Slept Here” treatment?

The best answer is to see one of his movies.

In a whole string of roles from Topper, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and Gunga Din in the 1930s to His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Notorious in the 1940s to To Catch a Thief, An Affair to Remember, and North by Northwest in the 1950s, Cary Grant was the very model of the debonair American gentleman. He was both democratic and aristocratic, a man so charming and self-assured that every woman wanted him, every man wanted to be like him. He was an acrobat in a business suit, a man of dignity with the subtle physicality of a clown, a regular guy knowing full well how fortunate he was to be wearing such an expensive, well-tailored suit.

“Do you know what’s wrong with you?” one of his screen partners had pretended to scold him. “Nothing.” Director Alfred Hitchcock dared to say, “Cary’s the only thing I ever loved in my whole life.”

As a matter of fact, the man we know as Cary Grant loved the idea of becoming this world-class charmer so much that he decided early in his adulthood to do it. Born in Bristol, England, in 1904, Archibald Alexander Leach was the son of a tailor’s presser. How he got from there to having his nameplate on a Georgetown men’s shop is a great American story.

He began as a working-class English kid doing pantomimes at the theater. Then he got himself into music hall acts mimicking the popular singers of the day. He later picked up some magic tricks. The praise he was denied at home he earned at the theater. Stagestruck, he came to America. Here he picked up odd jobs, earning five dollars a day, ten dollars on Saturday and Sunday, as a stilt-walker on Coney Island.

By 1931, Archie Leach was what he wanted to be—a working American actor. Landing the part of Cary Lockwood in a Broadway play, he liked the character’s first name and decided to take it. He added “Grant” to make him sound more American.

Watching the great playwright-actor Noël Coward in Private Lives he decided to be Coward.

To achieve this transformation, he spent endless hours practicing how Coward walked, how he spoke, even his facial expressions. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person,” he would confess years later. “Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”

At the age of twenty-seven, the man we would love as Cary Grant was born.

It wasn’t as easy as it appeared. “I cultivated raising one eyebrow, and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn’t get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration.”

What won Grant special devotion, however, was his refusal to deny who he was born. When we in the audience forgot about his background, he would remind us. “Listen!” he erupted in His Girl Friday, “the last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before his throat was cut.”

“It was a knowing wink to the audience, his audience, a secret shared with strangers,” Grant’s biographer Graham McCann noticed. “It was the kind of gesture that would have endeared someone like Cary Grant to someone like Archie Leach. Cary Grant was not conceived of as the contradiction of Archie Leach but as the constitution of his desires.”

We couldn’t imagine him ever dying, of course. This was especially true as he aged gracefully, giving up films to become an executive with Fabergé. “I don’t know how I consider death,” he said. “So many of my friends have been doing it recently. My only fear is that I don’t embarrass others.”

He didn’t. Grant died at eighty-two during rehearsal for a touring one-man show featuring his old movie clips. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” the actor once admitted amid all the fawning. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Much like this beloved matinee idol, America itself is a confection. In the years after the Revolution, the Founding Fathers had a vision of a country and government they wanted. They then very consciously, not unlike Archie Leach, turned that vision into reality.

Confecting a Capital

On a June afternoon in 1791, two gentlemen on horseback looked down from Jenkin’s Hill onto a stretch of Maryland flatland banking the Potomac River. One, an architect, had designed a new national capital for this spot. The other, a trained surveyor, was the new government’s first president.

Both Pierre L’Enfant and George Washington were men of vision and optimism. They had settled on a grand plan indeed: a capital city fit not for what had been just thirteen seaboard colonies but for a vast continental power. Jenkin’s Hill, which L’Enfant called a “pedestal waiting for a monument,” would one day be called Capitol Hill. L’Enfant’s blueprints would become the world capital bearing the name of his companion on horseback that day.

When you think about it, this country designed itself. Just as L’Enfant and Washington built a capital from scratch, so did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the others design a new kind of government on a blank page. And if it seemed precocious for a French-born architect who’d never before done anything like it to design a national capital, it was more precocious still for a group of men who had never done anything like it before to confect a country, to guarantee as “unalienable” a set of rights the world had never before recognized, to ensure not only its citizens’ lives and liberty but also their right to pursue “happiness.”

And just as Washington and L’Enfant set wide bounds for the future growth of the new capital’s geography, the designers of the Constitution generously conceived the new nation’s freedoms. Americans could decide who they wanted to be and try to become it. A country that had dared design itself based on its own grandest notions would not stand in the way of its citizens harboring and pursuing their own grand notions. America would be a place where a person could be who he or she wanted to be.

And it was to be a place were people thought big.

If L’Enfant could choose a “monumental concept, with a capitol building and a ‘president’s house’ ” connected by a grand “public walk” to serve as the national seat for thirteen recently united colonies, then the American people could dare to be equally monumental in charting the contours and heights of their own lives.

Just as this new republic would, in Thomas Paine’s words, “begin the world over again,” it would certainly be a spacious and adventurous home to those hoping to do that with their own lives and ambitions. America would be a country where anyone could grab a second chance.

Here, the way things are is not the way they have to be. They can be the way individual Americans want them to be.

The Great Gatsby

In a country open to such big notions, the popularity of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby should be no surprise. It’s the story of Jay Gatsby, a young soldier training for World War I who meets a beautiful young socialite named Daisy. He falls in love with her only to get a letter while he is serving in the trenches of France, telling him that she has married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy young man from Yale. At a practical level, he’d known it was coming. Rich girls like Daisy didn’t marry poor boys like him.

An eternal romantic, our hero refused to accept the verdict. Back from the war, Gatsby makes the right connections and becomes a rich bootlegger. Whatever it takes to become the man Daisy Buchanan would marry, he is prepared to do.

Having enriched himself beyond his wildest dreams, Jay Gatsby now sets about pursuing the only happiness he knows. He buys a giant mansion on Long Island right across the bay from the home of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. From there he maps plans to win her back. He hosts loud and lavish parties open to all in the hope that she will show up at one. Finally, he makes the acquaintance and seeks the aid of his neighbor. Nick Carraway, who he discovers is Daisy’s cousin.

Carraway, the story’s narrator, doesn’t know what to make of the man presiding over the garish mansion next door. “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the Lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believe they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”

But Gatsby needed more than money: he needed to be someone who had always had it.

“I’ll tell you God’s truth,” he says to the skeptical Carraway. “I’m the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

For Jay Gatsby, the dream Daisy inspired in him is as important as the woman herself. It isn’t what she felt, but what he felt.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” Nick warns him. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“You can’t repeat the past?” retorts an incredulous Gatsby. “Why of course you can!”

And: “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. . . . She’ll see.”

This blind faith that he can retrofit his very existence to Daisy’s specifications is the heart and soul of The Great Gatsby. It’s the classic story of the fresh start, the second chance.

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” Fitzgerald wrote. “He was the son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

There was also Gatsby’s smile. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The reader, like Nick Carraway, comes to like this guy. We love his dream because we have, all of us, shared something very much like it. “Gatsby was not a character,” said the critic Alfred Kazin, “but an idea of the everlasting self-creation that Americans have mastered.”

Gatsby, for me, is undeniably the great American novel. We celebrate its hero and his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” his “extraordinary gift for hope,” his “romantic readiness,” because we as a country share every bit of it.

Grace Kelly

People think of Grace Kelly, the actress who became a European princess, as someone born to the role. In reality, Grace Patricia Kelly of East Falls, Philadelphia, was never a debutante, never applied for admission nor was received in Main Line society. She was a Roman Catholic and newly rich, a double bar to the ultra-restrictive social registry of that day.

But while she was never invited to make her debut by the Philadelphia Assemblies, she did possess an early claim to prominence: her father was a wealthy building contractor: “Kelly for Brickwork” was a familiar sign at area job sites.

John B. “Jack” Kelly was also a fa...