Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galing. Today I'm joined by Jeff Greenfield

in award-winning television journalist and author focusing on politics, media, and culture.

Over the course of his career, he served as a senior political correspondent for CBS,

a senior analyst for CNN, and a political and media analyst for ABC News.

He is also authored or co-authored 13 books and written for Time magazine, The New York Times,

The LA Times, National Lampoon, Harpers, Slate, and Politico, among others. Jeff, thanks for joining me today.

Nice to be here. So, a couple things we want to talk about today. First is your op-ed in Politico,

about the quote-unquote GOP Civil War, and a little bit about the National Political Media,

but first I want to talk a little bit about your background. I didn't know until reading up on

you that you started as a speechwriter for then-Senator Bobby Kennedy. I went out of law school and

they always hired one law school graduate to join as kind of a junior assistant or whatever you

want to call it, and I was lucky enough to get that job, and even if you're Robert Kennedy,

freshman senators, they're always understaffed, and it failed to me to start writing the less

significant speeches. I'm at pains to tell people that you know he did not call me in as a 24-year-old

and say, well, what should I do about Vietnam, Jeff? It wasn't quite like that, but it was an

extraordinary opportunity to work for an extraordinary man, and the fact is that politics had been in

my blood since indecently early childhood. It hooked me in a very early age, and I never got

unhooked. And so, what was that? I mean, obviously, as an opening bid in politics and a political

career working for A-Canody, but certainly RFK is certainly not a bad one, but how did you get

hooked before then? I got hooked because I couldn't listen to a baseball game. I was saying with my

mom at my grandfather's little cottage, and back then there was no TV we had. We had a radio,

and my mother said, you can't listen to the Yankee game today, because there's a convention going on,

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