The Hardball Handbook: How to Win at Life by Chris Matthews

Author:Chris Matthews [Matthews, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Commentary & Opinion, Public Policy, Social Policy, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Success
ISBN: 9780307755551
Google: -Ysi2TV3DNYC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

Who’s in the room? This is my favorite political question. When all hell breaks loose, whom does a leader call into the room to be there beside him? Whom does he or she trust for the toughest, best advice when the options are awful and the solutions elusive? Fortunately for the Reagan presidency, especially in that crucial first year that saw both an attempted assassination and significant legislative achievement, Jim Baker was in the room.

George W. Bush has not been so fortunate. He selected as his vice president the very same man he had enlisted to help him search for and choose his administration’s vice president. That says it all. Thus, Dick Cheney, a former congressman, leader in the House of Representatives, and secretary of defense, convinced the younger Bush he himself was the best choice, setting the stage for him to become the most powerful vice president in history.

Cheney’s strength is his bulldog pleasure in a fight. Yet in his role as Bush’s top deputy, pugnacity posed an occupational danger. Rather than refine his boss’s impulses, as Baker had done for the first Bush, Cheney encouraged the son to cross boundaries. Where Bush needed discretion—in assaying the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear potential, in confronting the consequences of an Iraq invasion up front—Cheney was worse than useless. Rather than temper President Bush’s urge to attack, he loudly blew the bugle.

Dick Cheney had returned to public office in 2001 with a mission of his own, a desire to topple Saddam Hussein, something he and Bush’s father had decided against doing in the Persian Gulf War. He was now a deputy with a dangerous agenda of his own.

Because it’s not crowded at the top, a few people, those in the room with the leaders, possess a vital power. A prince, Machiavelli wrote, needs to be an “extensive questioner” of those around him, and “should even show his anger in case anyone should, for some reason, not tell him the truth.” George W. Bush never thought to ask the tough questions before attacking Iraq, and since Dick Cheney and his fellow hawks were themselves so primed to send in the troops, they were hardly going to raise them.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

It’s not crowded at the top. Think about your own workplace. Who gets invited to meet with the boss? Who doesn’t? Who’s in the loop? Who can tell you what’s really happening? It’s worth remembering the instructions Franklin Roosevelt once gave his most trusted aide, Harry Hopkins, when he sent him on a mission to wartime London to get a fix on the influences on Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “Find out the men he sees after midnight.” It was exactly the right question to ask, and told him everything he needed to know about the man championing Great Britain through its “finest hour.”

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