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Winning in Washington
| Article
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14668 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1988 |
3,762 Words |
| Author
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Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. |
HARDBALL
Christopher Matthews
New York: Summit Books, 1988
233 pp., $17.95
Christopher Matthews, who served as senior aide and spokesman for Tip O'Neill, Jr., the speaker of the House of Representatives from 1981 through 1986, has written an enjoyable and illuminating book about American politics. Hardball is not The Federalist Papers. It is an anecdote-filled cross between Machiavelli's Discourses and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Matthews is quick to delineate the scope of his book in the first paragraph of his introduction:
“Be warned. This is not a civics book. It is not about pristine procedures, but about imperfect people. It is not an aerial judgment of how leaders of this or any country ought rightly to behave, but an insider's view of the sometimes outrageous way they actually do. Its subject is not the grand sweep of history, but the round-the-clock scramble for position, power and survival in the city of Washington.”
Matthews then defines the work he has aptly chosen as his book's title:
“Hardball is clean, aggressive Machiavellian politics. It is the discipline of graining and holding power, useful to any profession or undertaking but practiced most openly and unashamedly in the world of public
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