CSI: American Carnage (Friday, June 28, 2019)
Brian says, We turn now to our colleague Chris Matthews in Miami. Chris says, Thanks Brian. This was really something, these guys, and women, they didn’t pull any punches, well, maybe a few, maybe not, my old friend, Tip O’Neill, used to say after six we can be friends, but before six it’s all politics, but I wonder how Tip would handle things today, we’ve got the internet around the clock, the news cycle around the clock, there is no down time, nobody sleeps, and it’s all drugs and sex. Sex, okay, but round the clock? Tip was old school, he used to keep Sundays completely free from the job because he thought Sundays should be totally for family and friends, he liked to say. Saturdays, a different story, he’d go down to the wharves in Charlestown, talk to the longshoremen. He’d walk the streets in East Boston and talk to people about the airport noise. He’d go down to the Star Market in Porter Square, and talk meat prices, that was Tip, who was also good friends with Bobby. Bobby was a little different, but he learned, he learned, he went into the shacks of poor black people in the Delta and he’d see his brother’s photograph on the wall, and the pope, well, he’d see the pope more in South Boston living rooms, very catholic, and very upset by the busing back in the 60s, the busing got them riled up, in the streets, lots of angry protests. Kamala Harris, who was alive when Bobby Kennedy was on the front lines for the black people. Senator, what an amazing night in history tonight I thought. In the picture tonight we saw you turn to him, turn to Vice President Biden, look him in the eye almost in the way a prosecutor points a finger at a defendant, the way Bobby and his late brother , but Bobby, particularly, would look George Wallace in the eye, although not on television, and say, You did these things. It was very dramatic. Kamala says, I felt that. I felt that. Going back to when I was a young girl. Everything I said on that stage was the truth. I grew up where the kid next door said she couldn’t play with us anymore because we were black. Chris shakes his head. He says, Do you feel that memory? Kamala stares at Chris. She says, Of course I do. It’s the memory of a child who felt pain. I’ve gotten beyond it. Obviously. I didn’t let it cripple me. Chris says, My old friend Bobby Kennedy, white guy, he’s white, he could feel what the blacks were feeling. And people knew what he was feeling. So what was the hurt? Kamala looks at Chris. She says, Listen, if those men — those segregationists — had had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate and I certainly would not be a serious candidate for president of the United States. And so the harm that they did and that they attempted to do because frankly, they built not only their careers but their reputation off of that, which is their quest to ensure the segregation of the races. Chris says, Watching the former vice president do you feel he had an adequate answer to you emotionally, intellectually, historically to what you were raising tonight? Kamala says, I think I would like to hear him acknowledge what was wrong. Chris says, Thanks for being here, Kamala Harris, alive when Bobby Kennedy was feeling for the blacks and now some 50-plus, 60 years, less than that, some years later, feels for them too. — Friday, June 28, 2019