Anchor Away

Saying goodbye to 30 years on local television news won’t be easy for Chevy Chase’s Kathleen Matthews. But with a big job waiting at Marriott and Chris Matthews as her husband, life will be anything but dull

By Kathleen Wheaton

When longtime WJLA news anchor Kathleen Matthews leaves broadcasting in December to become a corporate executive at Marriott, she’ll be going from one glamorous job to another. But the preparation for her new job has been anything but glamorous. In recent months Kathleen has been working a variety of hotel shifts, including desk clerk and maid. One evening she donned a chef’s toque and prepared trays for room service.

“According to Winston Churchill, anything outside your normal routine can be considered a vacation,” she says with a smile and a shrug.

The move from respected (some might say beloved) television journalist to spokesperson for a multinational hotel chain might seem a curious detour, but Kathleen insists that it’s all of a piece with her lifelong interest in world events and her desire to build bridges between people. “Post 9/11, there’s a role for iconic companies to do public diplomacy,” she says, adding that she was enticed by Marriott’s being a local company with a sterling reputation for satisfying both employees and customers. “That’s why I got into journalism—to serve the public interest. The more people travel, and become familiar with the rest of the world, the less talk we’ll hear about ‘Freedom Fries.’”

If “comforting the guests” doesn’t have quite the same ring as journalism’s mandate to “comfort the afflicted,” it’s easy to see why Marriott would woo her. “Anything that happens that’s a big story is a big story for Marriott—the tsunami or unrest in the Middle East,” she says. A vice president for communications as well-versed as she is in global issues is clearly a catch for a company with some 500 hotels in foreign countries. And she’s adamant that her exit from Channel 7 was voluntary. “They didn’t want me to leave, but I was itching to try something new, to really learn the workings of a business.”

While husband Chris is nationally known—the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball” and NBC’s “The Chris Matthews Show,” best-selling author of four books and spoofed by Darrell Hammond on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live”—Kathleen is more of a local celebrity. People greet her, she says, as a friend who’s been popping into their homes for years. Recently, a woman hailed her on the street with overflowing enthusiasm, and Kathleen asked for a hint about where they’d met before. The woman reminded her that it had been some 20 years earlier, when WJLA had reported on her and her children’s eviction from their home. “It was at the Pitts Motel,” Kathleen recalls. “And that place really was the pits. She told me, ‘I just wanted you to know that I did OK, that I made it.’”

Journalism, Kathleen says, is “a passport that takes you out of your orbit and into other people’s.” Covering local news in Washington for 30 years has meant reporting on everything from terrorism to stem cell research to interviewing first lady Laura Bush, but her beat has encompassed not only power but the powerlessness that is the other, grimmer story of the capital. The charitable organizations on whose boards she sits reflect her familiarity with the issues they tackle: the Black Student Fund, which provides scholarships to elite D.C.-area schools for African-American children; the Best Friends Foundation, a network of school-based clubs that encourage middle- and high-school-age kids to avoid drugs, alcohol and premarital sex; and Suited for Change, which provides poor women who have completed job training with everything from donated clothing and accessories to help with résumés and interview skills, so they can enter the job market and turn their lives around.

Kathleen, 53, credits what she calls her “visibility” to her effectiveness on the charity circuit, but those who’ve volunteered alongside her point to a less high-profile attribute: She comes through, whether as an elementary-school room mother or as co-chair with her husband for Catholic Charities’ capital campaign. “When Kathleen says she’s going to help, you can take her at her word,” says Elayne Bennett, president of the Best Friends Foundation. Bennett, a Chevy Chase neighbor of the Matthews’, adds, “She believes in showing up. If we have a backyard Halloween party, she’s there, in a costume.”

Andrea McCarren of Bethesda, a fellow WJLA anchor, recalled a Suited for Change event where Kathleen invited every woman on-air reporter and anchor in the metro area to donate a suit and tell the audience a story about why the outfit might work well for a job applicant. “We all marveled at the fact that never before had an event brought all of us together,” McCarren wrote in an e-mail. “It was an incredible testament to her influence and popularity…we women, who were technically competitors, had the most wonderful evening together!” McCarren says that afterward Kathleen sent each participant a handwritten thank-you note.

As the eldest of five, her leadership qualities were, if not genetic, then set early on. “Her siblings all looked—and look—up to her,” says her father, Bob Cunningham of Los Altos Hills, Ca., where Kathleen grew up. “Three of them moved to Washington, I think, because she was there.” Colleagues and sisters universally describe Kathleen as a role model, a woman who appeared to get the complicated career/mothering dance exactly right. She confesses, “I love being there in a crisis,” recounting that during the Washington sniper episode of 2002, a viewer told her that she finally understood what a TV anchor was: “She said, ‘You anchored us emotionally, you kept us sane.’”

 “I’m convinced I married Wendy,” says Chris, referring to the nurturing, big-sister character in Peter Pan. Of the torrent of words pouring forth daily on the blogosphere about Chris, none so far has compared him to Peter Pan, though at 60 he looks preternaturally youthful and rosy. Of course, it may be the TV makeup, which he asks to be reminded to wash off before leaving to meet his wife for dinner at the British Embassy.

Their evening schedules, seemingly no less hectic than their day jobs, might include, in the space of a week, Kathleen emceeing a fundraiser for the Nyumbani AIDS orphanage in Kenya, an anniversary celebration for “The Chris Matthews Show” and a benefit for the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where Chris, reading from “Henry V,” makes sure the audience notes the parallels between the English monarch’s ill-fated invasion of France and the current war with Iraq.

How much of their on-air personalities—hers reassuring, his confrontational—translate into real life? “Well, Kathy is calmer,” her father allows. “But there’s a real mutuality in the conversation. They care about the same things.” 

Meeting her husband’s literary metaphor with an automotive one, Kathleen says, “Chris is the spark plug and I’m the constant steady engine. He nudges me out of my comfort zone. He really encouraged me to explore the possibilities with Marriott.” Of their disparate temperaments, she believes that her being the eldest and his being the second son “works better, in terms of the dynamic, than if we’d both been first children.”

Upon hearing this, Chris agrees: “The eldest is part of the parent team. The second child is the rebel. I was the black sheep of my family.” How so? He’s momentarily at a loss. “My dad thought I was a little preppy,” he says finally, which sounds, as rebels go, pretty tame. 

Having both grown up in large, close-knit Catholic families, “there was a lot that was understood, that we didn’t have to negotiate,” says Kathleen, who, with Chris, regularly attends Mass at Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase, D.C.  She believes the values they share have their roots in Catholicism: “truth, concern for other people, loyalty, public service.” 

“They’re wonderfully supportive of each other, and they could have been rivals,” says pundit David Gergen, who’s been a guest, along with Chris, on ABC’s “Capital Sunday,” with Kathleen hosting. “The first thing he says when you see him now is, ‘Did you hear about Kathy’s new job?’ He boasts about her. She’s given him good counsel about being on television. She was there first, so he listens.”

It must be only playful rivalry, then, that leads Chris to show off a stack of honorary doctorates leaning against the wall of his office and say, “I’ve got 17, and she’s got 10.” Then he says, “She’ll end up with more than me.”

It’s fitting, perhaps, that the couple first met at a large Washington event: in 1978 at the annual black-tie Radio and TV Correspondents’ dinner. Kathleen stopped to chat with a former WJLA colleague who was working in the Carter White House. Chris, then a speechwriter for Carter, joined the conversation. “I had a hunch after just a few minutes that Chris and I would end up on a date,” Kathleen recalls.  A couple of weeks later, he called. They had dinner at Ruby’s in Chinatown, followed by drinks at Matt Kane’s Irish bar, and married two years later, in June 1980, at Trinity College Chapel in Northeast Washington.  Kathleen knew the church well, having coordinated coverage of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Washington a year earlier.  

Recently Kathleen had a rare morning at home, recovering from an eye operation related to sun damage. She says she found it reassuring that soccer star Mia Hamm had the same surgery—“it's all that looking up at the ball without sunglasses,” says Kathleen, who played varsity tennis at Stanford, and who, with her blond good looks and easy, friendly manner, embodies the East Coast notion of “Californian.” She says she hasn’t had time for tennis in years, but still misses it. 

The original plan for an interview was morning coffee with Chris and Kathleen in their Chevy Chase kitchen, but Chris has been called away at the last minute to interview Colin Powell. Kathleen apologizes, as though the competing appointments had presented a true dilemma.

Kathleen conducts a quick tour of their 1888 white frame house, built when Chevy Chase was still a weekend getaway for Washingtonians. Moving briskly through spacious, high-ceilinged rooms filled with oriental rugs and handsome, comfortable-looking furniture, she lingers over framed photos of the three Matthews children arrayed on the grand piano—Michael, 24, a writer and filmmaker who graduated in 2005 from Brown; Thomas, 20, an actor studying at New York University; and Caroline, the only child still at home, a 17-year-old senior at Georgetown Visitation High School. The wide front porch is in the midst of repairs, and as the hammering and sawing reach a crescendo, Kathleen suggests going out for coffee. At the doorway to the dining room (where the large pedestal table is round—the shape reputedly most conducive to conversation) she says, “Some of my happiest memories are of times the family all sat around that table arguing about politics.” 

Perhaps only a Matthews would utter “happiest memories” and “arguing about politics” in the same breath. But news and politics are “in the DNA”—both Kathleen and Chris (later, in his office, after the day’s taping of “Hardball”) use that phrase to explain their more than quarter-century of fascination with the affairs of the nation’s capital. In both their cases, the Washington-politics gene seems to have been activated by a stint abroad.

For Kathleen, a sophomore-year term at Stanford’s campus in Tours, France, provided a vantage point from which she rethought her pre-med ambitions and decided that what really interested her were current events and media. She declared a major in American Studies and began volunteering at the campus radio station, KZSU. She graduated with honors in 1975, and after a few months at WJLA radio news, eventually landed a production job with the Washington ABC-TV affiliate, where she has worked ever since. Now co-anchor for the 5 p.m. news show, she’s won nine local Emmys, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Peabody and David Brinkley awards, as well as the Gracie Allen Award for Women in Radio and Television. 

Chris, in his 2001 book, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, claims he was both a political junkie and a provocateur from grade one, when he insisted to Sister Mildred at the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary school in Philadelphia that the letters “u s” spelled not the first person plural but the initials of the United States. As an alternative to Vietnam he served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, where, as “a sort of bourgeois Che Guevara,” he advised local businessmen on American entrepreneurial technique. Upon his return to the U.S. he began knocking on hundreds of D.C. doors, and was thrilled at last to be offered a job as a Capitol policeman—he was confident it would lead to bigger things. It did: to an unsuccessful run for Congress, and then to jobs as top aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, and, finally, host of his own political talk shows, “Hardball” on MSNBC and “The Chris Matthews Show” on NBC, recently ranked No. 2 among the Sunday morning talkfests.

Interviewing the couple separately and across town is oddly suggestive of detective movies where the suspects are questioned apart. And yet, gradually, their narratives merge, as different angles of the same story come into view. Kathleen, on one hand, relates a Herculean effort to preserve the family dinner hour during the years when she anchored both the 5 p.m and 10 p.m. newscasts: rushing home between shows, making sure the children had a substantial after-school snack in order to be able to survive until they could sit down at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. Of that time period, Chris says simply, “We ate as if we were living in Paris.” When their eldest, Michael, was small, Kathleen says, she deliberately did not hire weekend babysitters in order to involve Chris more in his care. His solution: Michael went wherever he went, did whatever he did. One photo on the wall of his office shows Tip O’Neill and Chris sitting at the House speaker’s desk, talking, while 3-year-old Michael watches cartoons—or is it C-SPAN?—on TV in the foreground.

The Matthews have always been inclined to combine their public and private lives, says Kathleen’s youngest sister, Carol Seitz of Chevy Chase, who lived with the family during various summer internships in high school and college. “It might have been easier to have the kids upstairs, out of the way, but they never did that. The kids were always around, no matter who was coming to dinner. They took them to Africa. They took each one to New Hampshire for the presidential campaigns. You’re always learning something over there.” The learning, Seitz says, went both ways: “Chris and Kathy are very open to what their kids think. It sounds funny to say, but they’re a little in awe of them. It’s not a ‘we know better’ attitude.”

As the chair-elect of the National Council of Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, Kathleen says her engagement with theater was influenced by son Thomas’ fledgling career. Although none of the Matthews children has shown an interest in journalism, she believes the chosen fields of her two eldest—writing and acting—are, in part, expressions of the observers’ world in which they grew up. Caroline says that as the youngest in a household where current events were like water and air, “I was definitely aware of things, even when I was little.” Her travels to Africa with her family led to her volunteering at the Nyumbani AIDS orphanage in Kenya over last year’s Christmas break; her ambition is to go to medical school. Now that her brothers have left home, she says, she and her parents still talk politics a lot. “It’s nice having them to myself for a bit,” she says.

Of the political debates Kathleen recalls fondly, Chris concedes that his “way-to-the-left-of-us” children have changed his mind on some issues. “Probably on gay marriage—they’ve made that case.” His offspring, he says, persuaded them not to join the exclusive Chevy Chase Country Club. “They wouldn’t let us join a place like that. Wouldn’t hear of it,” he says.

Chris and Kathleen are, in her words, “lucky enough to have done well in the careers we were passionate about.” They have a place on Nantucket (“It’s the best-looking house there, and it has a 60-foot swimming pool,” he boasts, with kidlike relish). Their children have attended good private schools. But they also donate fees for speaking engagements to charity. Among their neighbors, Chris is famous for mowing his own grass—twice over, so that every blade is perfect. They’re people one bumps into at the dry cleaner, or buying tickets for a movie at Bethesda Row or at the Chevy Chase Circle Starbucks, where, standing in line for coffee, Kathleen appears to know virtually everyone.

She says that people who approach her these days often congratulate her on her new job. “I think they like to be able to say something personal and friendly, rather than just, ‘Don’t I know you from TV?’” she says, empathetic toward the strangers she’s been reassuring for so many years. Before her final sign off, she says, she’ll “try to get some big interviews, people who said no to me before—Dan Snyder, President Bush.” She pauses as this thought appears to lead to another: “I’m not saying goodbye to journalism so much as à bientôt.”  

Writer Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda.