Matthews reflects on early ‘Capitol Cop’ days

I would discover only later that the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey had problems on his hands far bigger than the need to fill a legislative assistant’s slot. Two years earlier, while I’d been out of the country, Life magazine, then still in its heyday, had run a two-part exposé headlined “The Congressman and the Hoodlum: The Case of a Respected Lawmaker Caught Up in the Grasp of Cosa Nostra.” An eight-month investigation had unveiled what the magazine called the congressman’s “second life.”

After klieg-lighting his jaunty charm, his commendations for heroism in World War II and Korea, and his place on Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 short list for running mate, it got to the dirty backstory:

“Behind the façade of prestige and respectability lives a man who time and time again has served as a tool and collaborator of a Cosa Nostra gang lord.” Life detailed the congressman’s tape-recorded phone conversations with the Democratic boss of Bayonne, New Jersey, as he interceded on behalf of a mob capo to stop the police from probing local gambling operations.

Then came the story’s sugarplum — an unsavory tale of the time in 1962 when the congressman had summoned a mob hit man to his house to remove the body of a local loan shark from the basement.

I learned all of this later, including the embattled congressman’s defense, that he was the victim of FBI anger over his support of federal legislation to restrict “invasions of privacy.”

So the congressman’s world was closing in on him in those early months of 1971. Chased by the law, he was also getting the bum’s rush from his political pals back in Bayonne. He would eventually serve time on federal tax- evasion charges.

Call me a romantic, but I’ve always chosen to believe that the congressman didn’t “work things out” for that LA job because he could see I was too nice a young man to be involved in all that.

A few days later, I renewed my campaign. This time I won what I’d set out to achieve so many times before — an interview with a real life AA. His name was Wayne Owens and he would change my life. Wayne ran the office for Senator Frank Moss, a well-known Utah Democrat. He had worked as Robert F. Kennedy’s western states coordinator during RFK’s ultimately tragic presidential campaign, and later as a top aide to Senator Ted Kennedy. I would soon learn that Wayne was planning his own race for Congress in his native state of Utah.

Most important to me, he loved the fact that I’d been in the Peace Corps. Also, it struck me later, he liked that I was a Catholic who’d gone to college in Massachusetts, that is, in Kennedy country. A devout Mormon from the West, he made it clear at our first meeting that he valued the assets I brought to the table. They may well have been the reason I got in to see him in the first place.

After that meeting with Wayne, the prospect of my becoming a U.S. senator’s legislative assistant suddenly looked a lot brighter. But, first, as a test of my abilities, he asked me to draft an answer to a complicated letter that a prominent Salt Lake City constituent had sent Senator Moss on a tax matter.

When I returned with it several days later — having leaned on staffers I’d gotten to know at my hometown Philadelphia congressman’s office, along with an IRS technical expert to whom they referred me — I was able to deliver exactly what Wayne was looking for.

Then came the bad news. Wayne wanted to hire me, but the only job he had available, even after my passing that grueling take-home exam, was the position of Capitol policeman. The idea was that I would toil in Moss’s office three or four hours a day answering complicated mail and writing short speeches for the boss to read on the Senate floor, then go to work from three to eleven p.m. as a cop guarding the Capitol.

It was one of those patronage gigs that senators and congressmen had to offer, like working in the mailroom or operating the House elevator. They were start-from-the-bottom slots usually awarded to well-connected sons or daughters attending Georgetown or George Washington.

In my case, I was being given a chance to say yes, grab the salary, put in my time — and wait to see what came next.

“It’ll pay for the groceries,” Wayne pointed out, seeing the disappointed expression on my face.

Glumly, I agreed. I had a college degree, a year behind me spent working on a doctorate in economics, two years of challenging service in Africa, and eighty dollars left in my pocket.

With a few hours of training on the House of Representatives firing range, I was soon walking around the Capitol with a .38 special in my holster. One night I sat armed and ready outside a door containing the “Pentagon Papers,” though they’d already been published by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Usually I manned a lonely post somewhere deep in the Capitol basement, studying the Congressional Record, writing and rewriting speeches for Senator Moss. I met the other patronage cops who were paying for law school as they moonlighted in what one called a “Max Sennett costume.” But I also got to know the country boys, those former MPs who made long daily commutes from as far as West Virginia and guarded the U.S. Capitol with dedication.

“You know why the little man loves his country,” Sergeant Leroy Taylor once explained to me. “It’s because it’s all he’s got.” And I remember the middle-aged guy who stopped me on the West Front one sunny day before a big antiwar demonstration to say, “Hit one of them for me, will you?” Yeah, I remember that fellow. For someone who just spent two years in Africa with the Peace Corps, it was an abrupt but useful reunion with a country divided over Vietnam.

As I said, most of my time was spent reading and practicing speechwriting in an underground Capitol tunnel. When nightfall came and the tourists, the congressmen, and their staffers left, I was pretty much by myself down there. It was, in fact, the safest place in the neighborhood. The only danger I faced while on duty came during those evening jaunts across Pennsylvania Avenue to grab a quick supper at one of the old-style eateries that used to line the street.

What if an actual robbery had been under way in this then-high-crime neighborhood? What if someone — a bystander or the robber — had taken me for a real cop? It was a terrible possibility that luckily never happened. In the end, I developed a strange liking for the job. Every day at three p.m. I’d put on that starched police shirt, tie, trousers, and .38 and feel that a whole other life was kicking in. On top of that, the history really got to me. I remember one night lingering alone in the Capitol Rotunda, where John F. Kennedy had lain in state those cold November hours in 1963; I was lost in reverie, as I conjured up those memories.

Excerpted from “The Hardball Handbook” by Chris Matthews Copyright © 2007 by Chris Matthews. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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