Chris Matthews Named as Commencement Speaker at MCCC
April 23, 2008, Blue Bell, Pa—Montgomery County Community College is pleased to welcome Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball” and “The Chris Matthews Show,” to campus as the keynote speaker during the College’s 2008 Commencement ceremony, which will be held on May 22 at 7 p.m. in Blue Bell.
A television news anchor with significant depth of experience, Matthews has distinguished himself as a broadcast journalist, newspaper bureau chief, presidential speechwriter, and bestselling author. Matthews covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa, the Good Friday Peace Accord in Northern Ireland, and the funeral of Pope John Paul II. He has covered every American presidential election campaign since the 1980s.
Matthews worked for 15 years as a newspaper journalist, thirteen of them as a Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner and two as a national columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that, he had a fifteen year career in public service: in the U.S. Senate for five years for Senator Frank Moss of Utah and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine; in the White House for four years under President Jimmy Carter as a presidential speechwriter and on the President’s Reorganization Project then for six years as the top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.
Matthews has received the David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism and the Gold Medal Award from the Pennsylvania Society. He was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics and holds nineteen honorary degrees.
A graduate of Holy Cross College, Mr. Matthews did graduate work in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matthews also worked for two years as a trade development advisor with the U.S. Peace Corps in the southern African nation of Swaziland.
Matthews is the author of four best-selling books, including American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions (2002), a New York Times best seller. His first book, Hardball (1988) is required reading in many college-level political science courses. Kennedy & Nixon (1996) was named by The Readers Digest “Today’s Best Non-fiction” and served as the basis of a documentary on the History Channel. Now, Let me Tell What I Really Think (2001) was another New York Times best-seller. His latest book, Life’s a Campaign, was released in 2007.
He is married to Kathleen Matthews. They have three children, Michael, Thomas and Caroline.
