Former Sen. Fred Thompson makes his presidential debate debut. Will Thompson deliver a blockbuster performance or will Fred flop? “Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle with guests Eugene Robinson, Ed Rollins, Peter Baker and Jack Welch.
Will the president’s top military man tell him it’s time to get out of Iraq? “Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle talks to cycling legend Lance Armstrong on how the next president can win the war on cancer. Plus Michael Eric Dyson, Marcia Dyson, Julian Barnes, Charlie Hurt, Dan Gilgoff, and Susannah Meadows.
A new intelligence report says Iraq’s government will become more precarious over the next six to twelve months. Does that mean we stay or we leave? Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Melanie Sloan, David Rivkin, Perry Bacon, Julie Mason and Eamon Javers talk with “Hardball” host Mike Barnicle.
President Bush looks to history for help on his unpopular war, but will comparing Iraq to Vietnam really rally the county? Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America discusses this with “Hardball” host Mike Barnicle.
Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama has no experience, he says she has no judgment. What will voters say? Holly Bailey, Chris Cillizza, Jeffery Rank, Jeffery Rank, Nicole Rank, Jon Soltz, Pete Hegseth, Peter Baker and Chrystia Freeland join “Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle.
Mike Barnicle, filling in for Chris Matthews, talks with Brian Katulis and Mike O’Hanlon about the surge in Iraq.
Today, top U.S. generals tell senators that the violence in Iraq could turn into a civil war. Will American troops get caught in the crossfire? On “Hardball,” host Mike Barnicle talks with Saxby Chambliss, Jack Reed, Dan Gerstein, Al Sharpton, Mark Zaid and Max Cleland.
The Minnesota bridge collapse and the politics of disaster. “Hardball” host Mike Barnicle talks to Tom Ridge, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Chuck Hagel, Ryan Murphey, Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, April Ryan and Pat Buchanan.
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells Congress there was no cover-up in the Pentagon’s investigation of Pat Tillman’s death. “Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle talks to Sen. Joe Biden, Holly Bailey, Chris Cillizza and John Feehery.
Mike Barnicle, filling in for Chris Matthews on “Hardball,” talks with Sen. Joe Biden about the war in Iraq, General David Petraeus, the Bush administration, Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, and running for President.
American troops sweat it out as Iraq’s Parliament and Congress go on vacation. “Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle talks to Rep. Duncan Hunter.
If Hillary fatigue sets in, could Barack Obama become the Democratic alternative? “Hardball” host Chris Matthews talks with the Hardball Hotshots: Mike Barnicle, A.B. Stoddard and Craig Crawford.
Mike Barnicle Program, on 96.9 FM Talk, WTKK-Boston. Guest: Col. Oliver North, host “War Stories with Oliver North” on FOX News Channel.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., joins Hardball” guest host Mike Barnicle to discuss the imminent jailing of Scooter Libby and the progress of the war in Iraq. Scooter Libby could be in prison in six to eight weeks.
BOSTON GLOBE
May 19, 1998
POYNTZPASS, Northern Ireland — She came into the pub through a back door that led to a courtyard alongside a stone house that is actually an extension of The Railway Bar, where two men were murdered a few months ago in a rural village that had always provided residents with great pride because faith never infringed on friendship and blood never spilled due to religion. She came past a door shattered by bullets, carrying a pot of tea and a plate of sausage.
“My supper,” she smiled. “It has to last me the night. “Who was working then?” she was asked.
“Who do you think?” Bernadette Canavan said. “Me. I was right here behind the bar. They put the lads down on the floor and killed them. Both of them. Damien and Philip, killed them for no reason. Just hate.”
Bernadette Canavan is 69. She and her husband, Des, along with their son Brian, 39, run the place plus the grocery next door. At 9 p.m. on March 3, Damien Trainor, a 26-year-old Catholic, and Philip Allen, a 35-year-old Protestant, were murdered inside the Railway, a snug stop with five stools and a 20-foot bar that attracts customers throughout the quiet area.
“They grew up together,” Brian Canavan said. “Damien was going to be best man at Phil’s wedding. There was never any religious war here.”
The Allens live 50 yards from the tavern. Their son, a truck driver, is buried 200 yards up the road, behind the Presbyterian Meeting House.
“I’ll never be right again,” his mother, Ethel, said. “I can think of nothing else. I don’t know that I can bring myself to go vote.”
The country is days from a referendum aimed at reducing the terror that has haunted Ireland, a measure that would drastically alter how people live. But the ballot arrives too late for a place so small it remains crushed by the type of mindless murder that created a violent claustrophobia within the culture of the North, keeping people apart on the basis of religion and fear. Always, the village seemed immune to the illogical reality around them, until two of their own died on a barroom floor.ative to a land hardened by dark shadows of gunmen.
“I was sitting right here at home,” Trainor said in her living room. “I ran up to the pub. I leaned over and told Damien I was there with him.
“He’d been shot four times, three in the chest, one in the head by those savages. They took him to the hospital in Newry, but he died. I told them I wanted to see him. They brought me to him. I put my forehead on his and kissed him. I shut his eyes. I pulled back the white sheet and straightened the crucifix around his neck. Philip was there in the same room, the two of them dead side by side. I never cried.”
“Having Damien was hard work,” she continued. “Raising him was hard work. And he’s still hard work because it hurts so much to think about him. My friends send me memory cards, but I don’t need any cards to remember how wonderful my son was. To everyone.”
“I’ll tell you something,” the victim’s mother announced. “There might be peace in Northern Ireland someday. But there will never be any peace for me.”
The men charged with the murders of two friends who lived yards apart in a hamlet where news arrives by word of mouth, and there are no secrets, were caught within a week. In jail, seven days later, one of them was executed by Catholic inmates. Killing is contagious here.
Yesterday, Ann Trainor walked sadly up the hill from her home to St. Joseph’s Cemetery where Damien is buried. She stood in silence, and when she looked up from her son’s plot, out past a low stone wall, she could see Philip Allen’s grave 100 yards away, behind the Presbyterian church; the two men together forever, in a village scarred and ruined by a historical hate that finally found the last few innocents of Poyntzpass.
BOSTON GLOBE
May 18, 1998
BELFAST — Ian Paisley stood yesterday at the pulpit of a fairly new church in order to preach ancient hatred to a dwindling congregation of old people, afraid they might be losing their future on Friday. Paisley, besides being a politician who prospered over the years on a platform built with bigotry, is minister at Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church, which is directly across the street from the 12th fairway of the Ormeau Golf Club.
Yesterday morning, promptly at 11:30, Paisley climbed the steps of a high pulpit inside his modern church, where no more than 50 men and women sat scattered through the huge double-decked arena waiting for word on what to do this week when Ireland votes on a referendum that could end decades of unreasonable death. He is a big man with a huge head covered with a shock of white hair. He has thick lips, strong hands, and a booming voice, and all were employed yesterday to push his faithful followers toward rejection of work done by George Mitchell, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerry Adams. “I had a confrontation the other day with a very nasty journalist,” Paisley shouted. “He asked me why I always say, `No,’ and I told him that God gave us 10 commandments and He said no in nine of them.
“The body says `no’ to germs or it will die. The soul says `no’ to sin or it dies too. And we must say `no’ Friday or our nation dies.”
Paisley built a constituency as well as a congregation around themes of contempt, revenge, and pure, raw anti-Catholicism. Yet, as election day nears, his grip on Protestant East Belfast — where many are poor and tired of visiting cemeteries or jails — seems weaker than ever.
“He’s a faker, he is,” Freddy Wilson was saying. “He’s only trying to keep himself in power now. He led us up the top of the mountain years ago, telling us all the time the Catholics would never get this and they’d never get that. And oh, how he hated the pope! But Protestants got just as tired of all the killing as Catholics did. Old Paisley, he just never changed. He’s still in it for himself, is all.”
Wilson is a 37-year-old unemployed dock worker and a Protestant. He stood at the bar of the Park View Lounge down the road from Paisley’s church, where the politician-preacher was merely halfway through a Sunday schedule of prayer meetings and speeches where his words become weapons hurled at anyone who favors peace. Paisley’s version of religion is simply prejudice from a pulpit; his sermons are cold and cruel and leave no room for any of the forgiveness found across town yesterday where 15,000 Catholics gathered at Milltown Cemetery for the annual blessing of the graves. How utterly Irish.
Milltown is a huge burial ground off Falls Road. Ten years ago, several people were killed here during a funeral for three unarmed Irish Republican Army members shot to death by British security forces in Gibraltar. Yesterday, the place was teeming with relatives saying the rosary in unison under a hot sun on Belfast’s version of Memorial Day, where the past is never farther away than the very next sentence out of someone’s mouth and where every headstone is a marble memory of a son, brother, uncle, or father lost in a long, weary war.
“My Tommy died two days after his 24th birthday,” Tom Kelly said about his son. “He was stabbed to death downtown by Protestants. They caught someone for it but nothing ever happened. My wife took a heart attack from it, and she died too. She’s over there.” He pointed past a row of granite Celtic crosses toward his wife’s grave. “So it has to be `yes’ Friday, doesn’t it? Otherwise it’s back to the same old thing.”
And as one crowd seemed comforted by hymns and rosary beads, Ian Paisley was across the river getting ready for the ritual of his evening sermon, where he twists prayer into a polemic and faith is defined by the depth of a parishioner’s fear. His thunderous hate has always been the beating heart of so many Protestants, but this week that thunder seems, more and more, to be off in the distance and part of a past that people on both sides want to bury.
BOSTON GLOBE
February 24, 1998
Like most major American cities, Boston is like a layer cake. Some elements are as obvious to the eye as frosting while others remain obscured by simple geography.
Yesterday, for example, a gray Monday, if you walked from the Public Garden to Kenmore Square and back along Newbury Street you could easily think the city was filled by either the young or the wealthy with not many others in between. The eye devours people going to classes along with residents riding a wave of national affluence as well as platoons of out-of-town shoppers — part of a plastic army — arriving in force, ready to toss down their cards as a statement of strength All of it is a distance removed from Egleston, Oak Square, Dudley, Savin Hill, Hyde Park and Roslindale, stops on a transit map to most. Yet even here, fresh paint, economic ventures, and a new broom on old stone sidewalks have delivered the gift of optimism plus an increased sense of security to neighborhoods that not long ago were dark with gloom and fear.
There is the tourist town. And there is the traveled town.
There is the town that swells by day with workers who fill office buildings, insurance firms, and brokerage houses and then depart at dusk. And there is the town where people actually live, pay taxes, put their kids in school, and look to trash collection, public safety, a clean park, a functioning traffic signal, or a visible STOP sign as daily barometers of whether government is indifferent or involved.
Away from the bright lights and the allure of bistros stuffed with symbols of expense account confidence, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a majority seems satisfied. As always, the public is smarter and more aware than it is made out to be by a media infatuated with negativism, chronic bad news, and suffering from the infection of cynicism.
Ordinary people don’t require polls to get through their day. They don’t need to put a “spin” on every move. They know that life is not a sound bite. That image is not reality and perception isn’t nearly as important as a paycheck.
One lingering image of Boston — one hashed and rehashed each time the city is mentioned — is that it is extremely liberal, almost abnormally left. But, like the frosting on the cake, philosophy differs once your feet take you away from the center.
There isn’t another state in the union where the biggest city happens to be the center of commerce, media, industry, and education in addition to its political capital. New York has Albany. Pennsylvania has Harrisburg. California has Sacramento. In Illinois, it’s Springfield.
And, as is often the case, people are not necessarily as they are portrayed by polling data or even election results. They are, at their root, sensible rather than confrontational; not much different than others from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Austin, Texas, to Battle Creek, Michigan.
Sometimes, the view through a prism of pre-ordained judgment and instant observation isn’t simply flawed; it’s flat out inaccurate: Boston, the Kennedys, Harvard, McGovern in ’72, hopelessly, romantically and nostalgically liberal.
You might want to keep this in mind while watching a tremendous two-part documentary that began last evening on PBS devoted to the life of Ronald Reagan. Scorned in places like Back Bay and Beacon Hill, Reagan will find more favor in history than the fellow who occupies the White House this morning.
Maybe because, like a lot of average Americans, Reagan — admire him or not — had beliefs. He had an internal compass, a bit of character, and a life apart from politics.
Oddly enough, he seems not to have been consumed with ambition. Not ever. Always, he was comfortable with himself, happy with whatever part he played. And — a huge asset — he had the ability to make others comfortable, to soothe rather than supplicate himself or seek sympathy.
Sure, he presided over the Iran-Contra scandal, the arms-for-hostages debacle. But then, he went to the country and apologized for not being fully engaged and admitted a mistake. How different!
He did something not many politicians, other than Roosevelt, managed to do: Change how people think about government — that it actually might be too large, might truly play too powerful a role in the everyday life of ordinary Americans.
Like a city, Reagan’s life and presidency had layers that were not always obvious or appreciated. Turns out, the man was more than just frosting on a cake.
BOSTON GLOBE
February 22, 1998
He was thinking across all the lost years this week as he witnessed three important people sitting on a stage in Ohio like a collection of houseplants, incapable of explaining why we are on the verge of dropping tons of bombs on Iraq to do a job that actually requires a single bullet. The presentation was jarring because it reminded the man of so many things that took place three decades ago, each of them, in retrospect, various acts of a play critics were unable to close.
“During the Cuban missile crisis, I was working at the Peace Corps during the day and going to Georgetown Law at night,” Harold Pachios said yesterday. “And I can recall Kennedy coming on TV to make the case for the blockade. He had charts and pictures and he explained the whole thing to us “I was thinking about that when I saw Madeleine Albright at Ohio State,” Pachios continued. “Where are the pictures? Where’s the evidence? They haven’t made the case yet.”
Today, Hal Pachios is a wonderful lawyer in Portland, Maine. He left the Peace Corps to work at the White House as an assistant press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, who had a dream of building a great society only to see it evolve into a nightmare, concocted by his own hand, which he was unable to remove from a bomb bay door over Vietnam.
Now, Pachios is talking about Johnson and a morning in 1966 when the two of them were at Bethesda Naval Hospital after the president had a gallbladder operation. Later, Johnson would pull his shirt out of his trousers to show reporters the scar from surgery. But that day in the hospital, he wanted to visit the wounded from a war that was killing the whole country along with LBJ’s good intentions.
“We went to a ward filled with wounded Marines,” Pachios recalled. “There was a small room with two beds in it off the main ward. It was for patients with severe head wounds. There were two Marines in that room.
“I’ll never forget it. The president walked in — I was with him — and we looked at the two Marines and it was shocking. They were children. Just kids. Maybe 18 at most.
“Johnson was stricken,” Hal Pachios said. “That’s the only word for it. That’s the only word I can use: stricken. Both boys were dead; they just didn’t know it yet.
“It was pretty rough stuff. It’s one thing to order bombing and move troops around, but then to go see the victims and realize that these were the children we send out to fight these wars, it’s tough,” Pachios pointed out. “People accuse Johnson of many things — some true, some not true — but I can tell you he was not insensitive to the price those kids had paid. I can tell you that for sure. He was shocked.”
All these years later and we’re treated to the hideous spectacle of another president at a different time who can’t even explain a ludicrous situation with a young intern, never mind clearly define the reasons why America might bomb an entire people because of our consistent failure to deal with their dictator. It’s as if the FBI decided to take out all of Brooklyn and Queens simply to get John Gotti.
That Iraq is not some Third World sewer seems lost on many of those in charge here. It is a huge nation of middle-class citizens who live without aspirin, penicillin or hot water and are used as human shields by their government to protect a butchering madman — an international crime boss, actually — who surely must have posed just as great a threat to world security in November as he does in February
So, the logical questions: Why now? And why mutilate innocents when, by Clinton’s own admission, there is no guarantee we will eliminate Hussein or end his ability to develop chemical and biological weapons?
Earlier in the week, speaking from the unthreatening environs provided by a Pentagon audience, the president smugly informed America it must not dwell in the past because the future had to be secured. But the past is critical to any assessment of action today because it is proof that when a nation’s culture becomes confused or corrupted by the foolish maneuvers of isolated leaders intent only on clinging to office, the scar left on our society is real and lingering. When the dust settles, we will see that hitting Iraq is not some antiseptic Nintendo-64 game where smart bombs leave no victims.
America is many things. However, a culture capable of glibly and safely easing itself into the 21st century after playing a lead role in the slaughter of innocents is not among them
BOSTON GLOBE
January 25, 1998
It is Friday night. I am in a hall filled with a thousand other admirers who have driven through snow and sleet to salute a wonderful woman, Eileen Foley, who was born in February 1918 and was mayor of Portsmouth, N.H., longer than anybody else. And, because the room was packed with political people, I kept returning to another evening nearly six years ago, when New Hampshire helped pull Bill Clinton’s candidacy in off the ledge he had walked onto, hand-in-hand with Gennifer Flowers.
Then, as now, the charge was reckless infidelity. Then, as now, Clinton, a skilled semantic contortionist, confronted it with the language of lawyerly loopholes in a tortured effort to put forth some preposterous claim that he was answering the questions and telling the truth “It’s like he’s accused of robbing a bank,” Eileen Foley’s son Jay was saying. “And he gets up there and says, `Absolutely not. Those allegations are untrue. I did not rob a bank.’ Later on, when he gets caught, he tells us, `You don’t understand. I didn’t lie. I never robbed a bank. It was a savings and loan.’ “
Initially, some felt a weary sadness upon hearing that the president may have had sex with a 21-year-old intern. Now, frustrated and angered by his inability to issue a flat-out denial devoid of linguistic tricks, the crowd lives with the uneasy knowledge that they have a terribly flawed man in the White House whom they trust with the economy but not with their own daughters.
But you can hear the inevitable assault coming from Washington, the attack on the former intern. Within a week — either by innuendo or off-the-record “briefings” — she will be described as an emotionally insecure girl, a flirt, a delusional coed with a crush, someone who, clearly, should have been carted off to an asylum, rather than allowed to work in the White House.
This is the predictable pattern with this president, a man of tremendous gifts and abilities: His public life too often involves a forced retreat from the truth. Isolated from reality, surrounded by power, obviously under the impression that he is both invincible and invisible, Clinton always turns himself into the victim. His battlefields are littered with the remains and shattered reputations of former friends and old lovers.
He succeeds because he is smart enough to know he can make today’s culture complicit in his conspiracy. Apart from his wife, the women who swirl around him are of a type: They are young or vulnerable or ill-equipped to deal with the klieg lights of propaganda and publicity. They are interns, state workers, widows, or fortune seekers.
Class dominates our society. The rich, the powerful, the connected and the pretty know how to get the benefit of the doubt. Brass it out by pointing a finger at an accuser who has big hair, nervous eyes, a temp’s credentials or only one story to tell. Surely, you can’t believe them!
With Clinton, you’d need a platoon of psychiatrists to even approach the problem. Raised without a father, he has probably never been told to sit down, keep quiet, admit the truth and accept the consequences. For 50 years, he has — all by himself — been the man of the house; charming, smart, handsome, glibly articulate and ferociously ambitious, his very own role model.
When you think of that late winter six years ago, the arrogance is breathtaking: The draft, the women, the marijuana, all of it explained away with a wink, a nod and an eye toward a trapdoor knowingly built with evasive language.
Six years later, in a room where citizens assembled Friday night to salute a magnificent woman, it was clear that the country is fine and will survive any assault that has its origins in a sad episode of a man’s own self-destruction, assembled with the assistance of a pathetic inability to control himself.
Eileen Foley’s family spoke of their mother with humor and affection. And then, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska stood to tell the crowd he was not in Portsmouth because of February 2000, but because of February 1918, the month and year when Eileen Foley was born, “the year of the Great War when men from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard stood in the frozen snow for the idea of freedom,” Kerrey said. “She is a woman of honor and courage whose life tells us the wonderful story of America.”
We might end up limping through three years of a government headed by a kind of Joey Buttafuoco with Ivy League polish. But on a night when a terrific 80-year-old woman heard the applause of heartfelt gratitude, two things were obvious: It’s Clinton’s legacy, but it’s our country.
Phew! Good thing Ted Kennedy didn’t decide to throw his weight around the other night because then he would’ve absolutely crushed Mitt ”I’m Talking As Fast As My Nervous Little Motor Mouth Will Move” Romney. That collision would’ve looked as if an 18-wheeler loaded with dumpsters had plowed into one of those teeney-weeney old Nash Metropolitans. As it was, he slapped him silly. Kennedy slam-dunked the bragging Boy Scout from Belmont so often that The Mittster is down to a couple of options prior to tonight’s debate: Either jump-ugly at the senior Senator over, ahh, the character issue, or cut his losses and save a pile of dough for another run at another time because this one is halfway through that last revolution in the toilet. How quickly things change.
Seems like it was only days ago that all the haters and a lot of the professional thumb-sucking pundits were writing Kennedy off. He was too old, too fat, too dumb, too tongue-tied, too entrenched, too isolated, too removed, too arrogant, too elitist, too tied in to the status quo to win anything.
Listening to them, you half-expected Kennedy to walk out on stage at Faneuil Hall, peer at the crowd and holler: “This Bud’s on me.” Or maybe demand that the moderator hit him with a pinch and a couple of cubes.
A funny thing happened, though: Romney arrived with a knot the size of an official NBA basketball right where he fastens the top button of his hand-made shirt.
He is a nice fellow, a pleasant man. He is handsome, polite, glib, smiling, smart, rich, goes through life without a single hair out of place, waves at poor people one day a week and thinks a walk on the wild side means drinking a cherry Coke.
However, he has no idea how much his health plan will cost taxpayers and sure isn’t responsible for anything that occurs at some plant he helped purchase. Why should he know that? He’s only the owner.
Kennedy, on the other hand, has managed to become a somewhat sympathetic figure. Before Tuesday, many observers were convinced the night would be a disaster for the senator, whose use of language manages to make the late Frank Fontaine or Professor Irwin Corey sound like Abba Eban or Adlai Stevenson.
They were ceding the thing to Romney on appearances alone. His waist size equals the number of years Kennedy has served in the US Senate. He has never suffered so much as a pimple, never mind any personal pain and, according to his own answers, he is pretty much without a flaw.
Meanwhile, the negative build-up and dread surrounding Kennedy’s difficulty in finding verbs to go with nouns and objects, plus the added burden of putting action words in their proper place throughout a spoken English sentence, so lowered the expectations that the mere fact he didn’t fall off the stage into the audience was a victory.
And you know what? It was great. It was a victory for old guys, for out-of- shape guys, for guys who are counted out before the bell, for guys folks figured would never hit in the clutch.
Ted Kennedy won because he is stubborn in his beliefs. You may not like his views, and you may not like him, but at least he’s not running around suddenly seizing upon the electric chair or welfare cheats as the trendy ticket he needs for a return trip to the Senate.
He’s the government guy, the go-to-guy when you’re looking to have the feds pick up the cost of 16 additional weeks of unemployment compensation, get you the extra bounce in child care and Head Start appropriations, get money back from Washington to help lower astronomical MWRA water bills. Maybe you think stuff like that is a bunch of liberal horseshirt.
He doesn’t. He makes no apologies for who he is and what he believes. He has a philosophy that isn’t pushed around by pollsters. Perhaps some of it is dated, but the man is consistent.
He’s 62 and looks it. He has lived through a cargo of grief, and inflicted a lot of it upon himself. He has had some terrible difficulties and they have not been hidden. His life has been a long, public sorrowful mystery of the rosary.
Ted Kennedy is many things, but none of them is a secret. He might be in the back of his van this morning eating quarter-pounders and fries between every stop and it wouldn’t go unnoticed. (I never thought ears put on weight until I saw his on TV Tuesday.) Why, if you put Bill Parcells and Kennedy on either end of the Boston Public Library, they could serve as human bookends for a whole building.
For a long time, people were down on him, figuring he was afraid to take his turn at bat against a formidable young foe. Well, the other night Ted Kennedy gave the young guy a good old-fashioned arse-whipping because he still wants to win.
