This entry is more
personal than some and requires a more personal introduction.
As far back as I can
remember I was obsessed with the Presidents of the United States. No doubt part
of it came from having a father and grandfather who were historians but the Presidency
was something I took to heart very early and read about the most.
By the time I was in
junior high, I knew far more about every President than probably any child my
own age: I certainly knew more than they
did about such unknowns as Franklin Pierce and Benjamin Harrison. I knew when
every President had served and what party they had belonged to. I knew which
ones had been assassinated, which had died in office, and the Vice Presidents
who had succeeded them. I knew much about their careers before they became
President and what many of them did after they left the White House: I’d known
John Quincy Adams had served in Congress before Amistad ever came out; I
knew that Theodore Roosevelt had run as a third party candidate. I knew which
state produced the most Presidents and I knew many of the major political acts
they had sponsored as President. And I knew why certain Presidents were
considered ‘great’ by historians and why some were considered failures. (Though
that was in flux at the time; when I was growing up Woodrow Wilson was
considered a near great President and Eisenhower just average.)
But it was not until
I was well into my late teens that I finally began to wonder how they had
become President in the first place. Who had they run against in their
elections? Were the people they had defeated better than them or worse? Few high
school classes dealt with opponents in elections if they did at all, and while
I knew some figures from my own studies I hadn’t concentrated on it much. In my
senior year of high school I began to focus on it more and one of the critical
factors in that, in hindsight, occurred during the summer of 1997.
I was in a used
bookstore in Vermont and managed to find, purely by chance, three of the four
books in Theodore White’s Making of The President series. At that point,
I was slowly getting the broad strokes in some books about Presidential
campaigns but I don’t know, if at age eighteen, I even knew who White was. I
just wanted to read about Presidential campaigns and they were all selling at
99 cents apiece. I bought all three.
I read bits and
pieces of all three books over the summer and when I returned home, I learned
that we had a copy of the one I was missing – 1968 – in our house. The rest, as
they say, is history. I don’t necessarily date my fascination with American
politics to that point, but it was one of the bigger factors.
Over the years I have
read and reread them to the point where their bindings, already thin when I purchased
them, wore out. I bought newer editions of them at Amazon and when the entire
series was reissued a decade ago, I bought some newer copies of three of them.
All four volumes have a prominent place in my library and if you have read my
historical series this past year, I have used all four heavily as source material
for many of the entries and will no doubt continue to do so in the future.
What strikes me every
time I have reread them in recent years is not just how brilliant they are when
it comes to getting a picture of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s or even
how well-written they are but how objective they are. I have written
recently that any true objectivity is impossible in any aspect of our lives
because a narrator’s prejudice towards their subject will slant their narrative
a certain way. Indeed, many current historians on both the left and right have
accused White of having a liberal bias particularly when it comes to the first
volume involving JFK and his campaign. I can understand why they might think
that, particularly considering that it is this volume that is one of the key
factors that so many Americans and historians have used to get their first
image of John Kennedy and that it seems to have contributed to the mythology
around him that still stands to this, no matter how hard many – including myself
– have tried to puncture it.
And to be clear, reading not only that volume but all of White’s
books, it is clear there are candidates he respects more than others and some
he thinks less of. But what makes the entire series such an incredible record
is how fair White tries to be not only to the candidates he clearly likes but
the ones he doesn’t. No matter how many times I reread the 1960 volume while
White clearly has a favorable opinion of John Kennedy, he is objective to the
approach he takes in campaign and goes out of his way to be equally fair to
Richard Nixon in his campaign. To use a famous slogan but not in the sense that
many on either regard it these days, in his approach to reporting White truly is
fair and balanced in a way that no reporter was before and almost none have
been since. (I’ll get to that in a context later in this article.)
So yes he notes
Kennedy’s approach to the primaries as a success to the nomination, but he also
notes that in the twelve primaries he won, he would lose seven of them in the
general election. He makes it very clear that while Kennedy’s campaign is
arduous, Richard Nixon’s fifty state campaign is no less so. And he looks at
the debates through a clearer eye than we have done so with the benefit of hindsight.
Most important to the book is his breakdown of the campaign at the end of the
it, in which he makes it very clear how close Kennedy’s campaign was and does
so by geographic terms rather than by demographic. He is very clear about the
mistakes Richard Nixon made but he also makes it clear that Kennedy was lucky
to win.
And far more important,
in my opinion, is how much he covers the candidates who were trying to get the
nomination in either party. He spends several pages with Nelson Rockefeller,
explains why he chose not to run, and why that decision actually irritated the
Nixon campaign. He spends as much time with Hubert Humphrey in the early stages
of the book as he does with Kennedy, and it’s clear that he respects him as
much as JFK – if not more so. And in what will be a trend in every volume, he
spends a fair amount of time with candidates who make an effort but fail: I
would never have known who Stuart Symington was, much less his run for the
President, were it not for White’s work. You see this in each of the volumes: Henry
Cabot Lodge is referred to more than a bit in 1964, you learn that George
Romney was far more important to Republicans than just being Mitt’s father in
both 1964 and 1968 and you get a look as such as interesting possibilities as
Edmund Muskie and John Lindsay in 1972.
And if there is a
bias that White has in the 1960 volume, it is clearly for Adlai Stevenson, the
twice defeated candidate who many wanted to run again and many considered JFK’s
biggest threat. In the book on the convention, White spends as much time with Stevenson’s
campaign behind the scene, and every time they hit a blow to their plans, it
clearly hits him hard. He tells us the highpoint of the drama at LA comes from
Eugene McCarthy’s nominating speech for Stevenson, and the thunderous demonstration
on the floor. He describes the galleries erupting and the genuine inability of
the convention to hammer it back into order. But he also notes even as he
describes it as ‘the greatest authentic demonstration…since the galleries
called out ‘We Want Willkie’ in 1940, he also notes that ‘nerve and demonstration
alone’ can not nominate a President. The saddest part is that he follows it up
with the fact that Stevenson himself knew this and knew that his cause was
hopeless before it ever happened. He notes the end of Stevenson’s political
career sadly but argues that there should be neither sorrow nor bitterness
because now Stevenson has moved on to play in the field he truly wants. In a
footnote, he notes that Stevenson is now Ambassador to the UN. (He clearly does
not know Stevenson had hoped to be Secretary of State and felt double-crossed by
the Kennedys that he did not get it.)
While the first
volume is a masterpiece, the three that follow each are in their own way just
as brilliant and show both snapshots of the era and pictures of what he
considers the future. White can not be blamed for not be able to see where history
would go.
He opens the 1964
volume with an America reeling from JFK’s assassination and its immediate
aftermath. He then spends the lion’s share of the volume dealing with the civil
war that the Republicans are about to go through between Nelson Rockefeller on
one side and Barry Goldwater on the other. He notes that this clash was one
that the rank and file were terrified of playing out and that they had all
wished Eisenhower, the great man of the party, to come up with a viable alternative.
They note Eisenhower is squishy on the subject and that after the assassination
of Kennedy, both Rockefeller and Goldwater take different approaches. Goldwater
does not wish to run but is forced to by the conservative bloc. Rockefeller not
only decides to run but believes he can truly win; despite the fact the rank
and file of the party are against him (White notes almost in passing that one
of Rockefeller’s key advisers is a Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger.)
The critical issue,
noted at the time, is Rockefeller’s divorce and subsequent remarriage to a
younger socialite named Happy Murphy in 1963, something that in the 1960s was
considered a death knell to a political campaign. He notes that by the end of
the New Hampshire primary, Barry Goldwater has no realistic chance of ever
being President because of his gaffes on the campaign trail. He states that
were it not for the presence of Henry Cabot Lodge being the subject of a
write-in campaign in New Hampshire, Rockefeller would no doubt have swept to
victory in the primaries. And he notes one of the key factors in the California
primary – on the eve of voting, Happy Murphy gave birth reminding America of
his divorce. The rest seems inevitable to him; chapters involving the Republicans
in the aftermath are calling ‘Dance of the Elephants’ and ‘Coup at the Cow
Palace’ as he notes how frantically the moderates trying to come up with a way
to stop Goldwater before he could be nominated and how horrible it was.
White also notes in
several extensive chapters other critical political factors: the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the rioting in the streets during that summer and
Johnson’s attempt to pick a Vice President. He doesn’t think much of George
Wallace, but he does note the backlash that everyone feared. And in the afterward,
he briefly mentions what he has only occasionally discussed in the book: the
conflict in Vietnam. It is worth noting even then White clearly can see that
dealing with it is going to be messy and that how to do so is ‘a question that
for which, at the moment, has no real answer.” White has no idea that LBJ, now
President in his own right, will never come up with one.
The 1968 election has
been written about so many times in so many perspectives that it’s telling that
even after reading so many other volumes, I still think White’s telling has the
most clarity: somehow he managed to keep his head when America was losing its
everywhere. He reports every aspect of both LBJ’s fall and Nixon’s rise. He
notes the challenge of Eugene McCarthy and what it meant. And while he
acknowledges the tragedy of Robert Kennedy’s death (in a chapter titled ‘Requiescat
in Pacem’ in the forty pages he writes
he has more clarity about the Kennedy campaign than any I’ve seen in the
half-century since. He makes it very clear that it started disastrously. He
admires Kennedy’s primary campaign but makes no secret it was always going to
be an uphill battle. And even while he acknowledged that no one can foresee
what would happen had Kennedy lived, he refuses to concede that it would have
led to a victory at the convention. He also counters that the Republicans might
have been willing to change their nominee from Nixon to someone such as Reagan
or Rockefeller who might have been able to defeat him in the fall. White acknowledges
that RFK’s assassination has cemented the Kennedy legacy but he does not blink
at showing the man’s flaws and how truly vicious he could be. Anyone who wants a
look at Robert Kennedy without the rose-colored glasses of the future should
look at White’s perception from the moment.
White goes into every
detail on the tumult for the Democratic nomination in 1968 and every detail
possibility on the convention. (The chapter has the subtitle ‘The Furies in the
Streets’ which is dead on.) It is clear that he is sympathy for the position
Hubert Humphrey is in from the start of the convention (Humphrey is a prominent
figure in all four volumes) as a man who seems doomed from the start of his
campaign. He notes that LBJ’s reconsidering his renunciation of the Democratic
nomination before the convention began and that the McCarthy wings deserts him.
And there is a notice of negotiations in Paris – and how Nixon stifled it and
Humphrey chose not to expose it. When the election is over, White notes clearly
this is a reversal in just four years of LBJ landslide that was the greatest Democratic
victory since FDR’s 1936 win. He does not know yet what will happen.
The 1972 volume is
the last one White wrote and there is a reason for that. White had perhaps more
access to Richard Nixon than any journalist who was working at the time and his
reporting of Nixon both the candidate and the President is infinitely more even
handed than any of his contemporaries. The passages in the book in this volume
often have some truly laudatory passages. But it’s clear that White has been
seeing the forest but missing the trees. In a passage that he makes no real
pertinence of he gets a hint both of Nixon’s enemies list as well as his hatred
of the press and doesn’t seem to realize what he’s gotten a hold of. There is
an entire chapter devoted towards: “the Watergate affair’ and the White House Plumbers
are mentioned by name. He clearly has a picture of some of the key players,
Haldeman, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Colson are all name checked in this chapter.
And he details what was known in the early stages of 1972 and 1973 - and his conclusion is that it is tragic
because it was unnecessary.
Worse there is a
chapter devoted to how Nixon refused to make himself accessible to the press at
all during his entire campaign – he has only seven press conferences in all of
1972. But White’s position is to argue that this is the press that is treating
the President unfairly rather than see the plain bigotry of Nixon and how
dangerous that is. White clearly has no
use for the New Journalism as it is unfolding, but it’s also clear he has been
blindsiding as to just how much contempt Nixon had for the ‘Georgetown elite’.
White has a front row seat as to not only how Nixon but many of his followers
will regard the media going forward – and not only does he not see it for what
it is, he fundamentally thinks the media is wrong in their approach. After this
book and the explosive revelations of Watergate, White would stop covering
campaigns.
But it’s also clear
reading his coverage of the Democratic campaign of that year that he is beginning
to lose patience for what the future of campaign will look like going forward. Throughout
the coverage of the primaries, he makes it clear over and over how little
respect he has for how primaries work or even if they should be involved in
picking the candidate. He clearly admires George McGovern’s approach to campaigning
and how it works (he notes McGovern’s campaign manager Gary Hart with respect)
but he has very little respect for not only McGovern’s approach for campaigning
but for how by letting in the new left – i.e. minorities and women to critical
campaign slots – he thinks the Democratic party has lost a critical part of its
soul. He also refuses to acknowledge George Wallace’s significance in the
primaries with more than a few pages, giving him just a brief section in the Florida primary. And
it’s clear that he thinks that there were superior candidates throughout:
Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey in particular. He has a front row seat to just
how horrible McGovern choice for the Vice Presidency unfolded, but in his eyes
its just one in a long series of blunders that are what are going to come when
you let campaigns go to the people instead of the power brokers who know what
they’re doing. (It’s sad that are many people in the media who seem to
currently think this is an approach we should return too.)
In his later years
White came to regret the kind of journalism he had helped pioneer, almost
wishing he’d never created it. “Who gives a damn if the guy had milk and Total
for breakfast?” I remember him being quoted in a book on the 1988 campaign. And
while White does bear responsibility for the proliferation of volumes that come
out every four years and the kind of political articles we are deluged by in
every form of media, I don’t think he deserves the blame.
I believe that there
were many factors in the 1970s – Watergate, the rise of investigative journalism,
the increasing spread of political primaries
- that would follow the style that White pioneered but lacked his grace.
Indeed when I bought the first three volumes of Making of the President, I
also purchased Marathon, a book on the 1976 campaign written by Jules Witcover,
who would take up the baton of covering Presidential elections until 1992. And there’s
a very clear difference in Witcover’s approach and White’s: his tone has the
same eye for detail but there’s a clear contempt for every aspect of it.
It's clear in how he
views Gerald Ford as essentially a lightweight, whose actions were doomed from
the start. It’s how he doesn’t understand how millions of voters embraced Ronald
Reagan in the GOP, a man that he considers a storyteller who isn’t serious and
that Jimmy Carter is a nice guy but whose fogginess on the issues are not
worthy of a real politician. Witcover covers every aspect of the primaries and conventions,
the debates and the campaigns, but he barely seems to tolerate any part of
them. He actually seems happy that the voter turnout was the lowest in decades,
because in his mind that justifies just how little he thought of them.
Witcover (and Jack
Germond, who would collaborate with him on future volumes) clearly model
themselves after White’s work when it comes covering the story. But there’s a
distinct difference in their work and White’s. In White’s work, you got the
feeling that he was doing it out of some kind of duty of a journalist to tell
the story and it was the reader’s job to make their own judgment. In almost all
of Witcover’s books, you get a sense of resignation each successive volume that
permeates every page: “Crap. We have to deal with these people again.”
White may not have cared for the primary campaign but you did get the sense he
believed that democracy was a sacred rite, something to be respected and he was
dismayed at the slow but steady decline of eligible voters with each successive
election he covered. Witcover and all of the people who followed in their vein go
into great detail on every aspect of the candidate and the flaws (they love
centering in on them) but don’t seem to care much for the actual process of choosing
a President. You get the feeling with all of them that they want to be Theodore
White, but they actually don’t want to do the job he did.
The reason that White’s
book are the gold standard when it comes to political journalism has, in my
opinion, nothing to do with the candidates being better than before (though
some of them clearly were) but rather his approach. I don’t know how White
managed to write his books about the most divisive issue in America and not
take a position that one side was better or worse than the other. His pictures
of the most prominent political figures of his era may have been flawed by his
perceptions and his access but his approach to how we should look at them is
not. It may not seen possible to view the Donald Trumps or Hilary Clintons with
an impartial lens; perhaps it isn’t. But I really believe it should be the goal
of everyone who wants to try and cover politics to try. I don’t know if
objectivity is possible in today’s era. What I do know is that White’s Making
of the President series show that it once was possible to truly be so and
that we would do far worse to try and follow it going forward.
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