Lessons From Theodore White: How He Was One of the Few Writers, Then Or Now, Who Rejected Camelot

 

There's a belief that's a big part of  revisionist historians about Theodore White and JFK. The right wing as I said in the introduction argues that White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start to the point that they all but accuse him of getting him elected. That's laughable considering the book was published in March of 1961 and no one, least of all White, could have predicted just how successful it would become. It's like a conspiracy theorist suggested that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was staged not by the CIA or the neo-conservatives but ABC because Ted Koppel wanted the anchor's job on the nightly news and they decided to stage the hostage crisis to give him something to do at 11:30. (I really hope that I didn't start something on the Dark Web with this.)

Even if you wanted to believe White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start, it collapses if one actually reads the book. Yes White was with JFK and his camp on election night 1960. But he was one of two nominees for President. Somehow I doubt if he'd been with Richard Nixon the right would have argued his presence was responsible for Nixon losing. Because having read the book White spends as much time covering the Republicans as he does the Democrats, giving basically the same number of pages to Kennedy and Nixon in the fall campaign.

To a larger point, and I've written this multiple times, White may have been the own member of the 'Georgetown Elite' who went out of his way to give Nixon a fair shake. He would later acknowledge he had been taken in by him as President but in the 1960 edition (and indeed in the following two publications before Nixon was elected President) he went out of his way to treat him in a fair and balanced method. If he had any prejudice towards Nixon at the time I don't see it in his writing, if anything in the 1964 book he expresses sympathy and empathy for Nixon's political fortunes to that time.

Yes he did cover Kennedy extensively but that doesn't per se mean he was in awe of the man's charisma and aura. If there is a candidate he clearly admires in that book its Adlai Stevenson who gets by far the most sympathetic treatment in the boo. We see a similar approach to all four of the other candidates White follows for 1960: Rockefeller on the Republican side; Humphrey, Stuart Symington and LBJ on the Democratic side. He clearly has respect for those men and their accomplishments at the time (he would later write that he believed Stevenson, Humphrey and Rockefeller were more than qualified to be President) and I have little doubt had any of the also-rans been the nominees of their party who would have treated them with the same respect he did Kennedy.

The other argument from revisionists (I've made it myself at times) is that White was so taken in by the charisma and charm offensive of the Kennedy family that he overlooked so many of their sins that we now know about. The first is foolish, of course: White didn't have the benefit of more than sixty years of hindsight to do the research and judge them. There's also the fact that much of this is the issue of so many writers who wouldn't exist without White as their foundation judging their predecessors for not looking with today's glasses, which is a tail as old as time.

And most importantly there's the fact that it's not like this would have been a failure that existed solely to Theodore White. To this day, there are people of a certain age and even younger ones who will overlook, if not excuse, the truths we now know about JFK with that saying: "It was a different time." That was true, I should be clear, of the journalism of the era. Back then, the idea of looking into the bedrooms of political candidates was considered the stuff of tabloid journalism and exploitation. (And as we shall see White would indeed end up covering the first prominent effect of this on Presidential politics in his next book and do so relatively clear-eyed.)

Now its clear that White was granted an unparalleled amount of access to the Kennedy campaign – or to be more accurate the kind of controlled access that they allowed the media and the public to see for consumption. They were crafting an image that has held to this day in some circles and for a journalist writing his first major book (one whose success he couldn't possibly imagine) White would have been a fool to ignore. But that said having read his book multiple times its clear that while the Kennedys did much to curry favor with him he was pretty close to impartial when it came to reporting the bare facts of their campaign and it didn't stop him from talking with every candidate and having more empathy for some than others.

Having read the books its clear that while he may admire Kennedy and what he's doing he clearly has more sympathy for Humphrey during the primary fight. He admits that the Kennedy's wealth and stature appear as remarkable to the masses and actually argues that his ordinariness hurt him: "Humphrey was just like everyone else and a President, unfortunately for Humphrey, must be different from everyone else." Not for White is the belief in the likability of a candidate; he would mock the idea of the appeal of a President being based on whether you'd want to have a beer with him that has now become gospel.

Kennedy's ability did seem preposterous in Wisconsin in the winter of 1960. White relates how he went out of his way to shake the hands of so many people on the campaign trail and by and large they were aloof, even hostile, to him. The Kennedy charisma that won over the masses in the fall was not present to White in Wisconsin during that period. He acknowledges that the main reason Kennedy one was not so much a charm offensive but an organizational one, which money was the main driving factor. The Kennedy family did put a hue amount of resources into Wisconsin.

And as White reports the Kennedy family knew how badly they'd failed. They did win with 56 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 44 percent but it broke down on religious grounds. The four heavily Catholic districts all voted for him and he lost the four that were heavily Protestant. White makes it clear that Kennedy knows this at the time how badly he's failed.

What does that mean?" asked one of his sisters.

"It means," (Kennedy) said quietly yet bitterly, "that we have to do it all over again. We have to go through every one of them – West Virginia and Maryland and Indiana and Oregon, all the way to the convention.

Even at the time, it’s worth noting that even if Humphrey won in West Virginia, he had no chance of being nominated after he lost in Wisconsin: the fact he couldn’t win in a neighboring state crushed hopes of his electability. Indeed, if Humphrey had gotten out right then, there’s a real chance the Kennedy machine might have stalled right there: the primary path that they were travelling would have been meaningless if there were no viable contenders challenging them.

If realizing this, Humphrey had withdrawn at that moment, Kennedy would have faced zero opposition in West Virginia, thus any Kennedy victory there would have been worthless and been meaningless in terms of gaining power vis-à-vis the Eastern bosses.

White knew of what he spoke. In the 1952 Democratic primaries Estes Kefauver had won the lion's share of the Democratic primaries against limited competition. And because of that fact the party bosses had been sure he couldn't win and withheld their support at the convention, thus setting up the circumstances for Adlai Stevenson's eventual nomination on the third ballot.

Symington and LBJ had decided not to compete in the primaries, holding out for a convention deadlock. Aside from Humphrey there were no real candidates in any of the other states Kennedy was competing against. In a footnote White points out that Kennedy's only competition in the New Hampshire primary – the first primary in the nation – had been basically uncontested with Kennedy's only opposition coming from a ball-point manufacturer he doesn't even bother to name. Wayne Morse and Mike DiSalle might have had some more political weight behind them but no one considered them serious contenders for anything in Oregon or Ohio, respectively.

And it is worth noting that  White is ambiguous at best at how much the wins in the primaries in the states Kennedy campaigned in were to the long term strategy. As he points out in a footnote of the seven states that Kennedy chose to openly contest, five of them ended up going to Nixon in the general election. (For the record, those five states were  New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon and Nebraska. Only Maryland and West Virginia went for Kennedy in 1960 – and one wonders how much of that vote was driven by the presence of Lyndon Johnson as Vice President.)

During the lead-up to the Democratic convention and the convention itself White spends much of his time with the Adlai Stevenson campaign – one which, I should add, is basically going on without Stevenson agreeing to lead it – then he does with the Kennedy campaign itself. He clearly admires their efforts; however futile they end up being and there's an argument his heart truly is with Stevenson. And while he follows the Kennedy campaign from behind the scenes he makes it very clear that not even they were certain of a first ballot victory: it took until Wyoming, the last state in the role call for them to get the 763 votes they needed to clinch the nomination. White makes it very clear that for all the brave front they put forward no one was sure until the end of the role call that they got the nomination.

And it's worth noting that for all his clear admiration for Kennedy, White makes it clear it was Nixon who started the fall campaign like gangbusters and that Kennedy's faltered in the early weeks. He makes it clear that Nixon's vow to campaign in all 50 states clearly impressed the voters in a way that Kennedy's campaign struggled to in what he calls 'Round One. At the end of the Republican convention Nixon was ahead 53 percent to 47 percent in the Gallup polls and it took until September for them to build momentum. And its clear he has more sympathy for Nixon then Kennedy because of 'a series of episodes that wrung sympathy for him even from his most embittered opponents." He focuses on how Nixon struck his kneecap on a car door in North Carolina that became infected and eventually forced him to spend nearly two weeks in Walter Reed. He makes it clear how badly it hurt his health. And White makes it clear from the vantage of the press corps just how much contempt the press held for Nixon – making it pretty clear that Nixon's contempt for them may well have been justified.

Its worth noting while the verdict on the Kennedy-Nixon debates as to how important they were, White himself thinks that they little to actually educate the audience. And he makes it clear that throughout the campaign neither campaign did much to contrast the difference between their views on the issues he considers important to the voters. In a sense he agrees that perception of Kennedy to Nixon was importance but never once does he think Kennedy ever did anything to clarify how he was different than Nixon on the issues.  In his book on the 1972 campaign White gives a list of the four Presidential elections that he believed offered the greatest contrast between the two candidates – and 1960 is not one of them. (I will mention which four later on.) At the end of the day he thinks Kennedy won the election because he seemed to win a popularity contest, not because he was necessarily more qualified to be President.

He comes to the conclusion at the end of the book that he doesn't know whether Kennedy's election is a consequential one in American history and he has no illusion about the fact that Kennedy didn't get a mandate as the Republicans gained two seats in the Senate and 25 in the House of Representatives. The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress by a considerable margin but Kennedy had not provided his party with that most glorious things: coattails.

If the Democratic Party at best, in 1960, held even with the Republicans and at worst suffered a defeat, then only one lesson can be drawn therefrom: that this was a personal victory for John F. Kennedy and not his Party.

And White is unclear at the end of his book if that is a good thing for the country or a poor one.

Ted White acknowledges Nixon’s campaign was more successful as part of a general map: he divided the country into eight regions, and said Nixon carried five. The three Kennedy carried were New England, the Northeast, and the South. Indeed when it comes to the total number of states carried Nixon carried 26 to Kennedy's 22. And he makes it clear the real accomplishment Kennedy managed was convincing the overwhelming majority of Protestant voters – who had famously rejected Al Smith, the previous Catholic candidate for President in an electoral landslide – to end up choosing to vote for him to provide his narrow margin of victory. And he makes it clear how it  

Like everything else related to the Kennedys I think Making of A President came to be viewed as a favorable portrait looking back through history and after the assassination.  To be sure White reports all of the well known anecdotes, puts up a favorable look at both the candidate and his family on the campaign trail and off and makes him sound knowledgeable on subjects. But that's no different then the other candidates he talks to during the book or indeed many of the ones that will come in the future. He's clearly impressed by Kennedy's accomplishment and winning both the Democratic nomination and the Presidency against seemingly impossible odds but that means little once when has power.  He ends the book the way he will all that follow: looking at the obstacles the President will have to face and whether he is up to it. And after giving a picture of the country and the world this what he says about the man's ability to do so:

It can be certain only, at the incumbency of the now 35^th President of the United States, that he would certainly try.

That's essentially a variation of what George W. Bush would say about Obama when he took the Presidency in 2008: "I want him to succeed." That's all White is prepared to say even after spending a year in his company. He has no idea of the future any more than the rest of us would and no certainty that he will.

In the next part of the series I will look at how White viewed both Robert and Ted Kennedy in his books in a way that makes it very clear that they he never looked at either man as part of 'the Restoration of Camelot' future generations would.