I make no secret on how much regard I
hold for Theodore White, the journalist and author of the groundbreaking Making
of the President series of books that covered political campaigns during
four of the most consequential elections in American history while giving a
snapshot of America during an era where the reverberations are still being felt
to this day.
I have regularly used White's writing
as a primary source for so many of the articles I've been writing about
American history and politics, whether in regard to the Kennedys, Hubert Humphrey,
George Wallace and the antiwar campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George
McGovern. His clarity on political issues at the time, whether the U-2 flights,
the Civil Rights movement, the growing antiwar movement and the conservative
movement that came out of the Goldwater campaign have given insight into this
critical period in American history. And the views he has on both political
parties, even more than sixty years after he published his first book,
incredibly still have tremendous insight into so much of partisan and internecine
fighting in both parties to this very day.
White is still held in enormous regard
by historians and other journalists that followed, all of whom have tried with
varying degrees of success to capture what he did so well in his first four
books. Yet in recent years revisionist historians on either side of the political
aisle have done much to reject him, whether by vilification on the right or omission
by the left.
The far right's behavior, as one might
expect, follows the same pattern they've basically held long before White came
on the scene. They believed White was an agent of the so-called 'liberal media'
and was therefore suspect. That said, the main reason he is dismissed by
conservatives is because of the false flag that somehow White was able to throw
the 1960 election to JFK and creating a false narrative about both Nixon and Republicans.
That part doesn't stand up to scrutiny
if one actually reads White's books, not just in regard to 1960 but
every subsequent book he did right up to America In Search of Itself. The
idea that he was in the tank for the Kennedys pretty much goes out the window
when one reads 1960 and by the time he gets to the follow up books, its
clear the bloom is off the rose. As we shall see in the articles I've written
White may have been the only journalist who never bought into the Myth of
Camelot and while he might have been fooled initially by John, that blindness
was not granted to his younger brothers when they made their runs for office.
The left's decision in the course of
time to increasingly ignore White's writings is more understandable when you
consider the time. White's look at the decade, particularly when it comes to
the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement looks at it objectively and
with a candor that belies the one both movements did in the immediate aftermath
of the rise of the conservative movement. The left has always tended to argue that they
were this close to a revolution and America let them down and the further one
gets away from that era, the more rose-colored their glasses become. White, who
was actually there and was writing how it unfolded in real time, shows all of
the flaws of the movement under a microscope and it is not flattering to any
part of it. He understands the issues and what is being discussed as well, if
not better, then many of the protestors and demonstrators did and he asks
questions that very well may never have occurred to them at the time – and more
importantly that they still haven't been willing to answer.
Most controversial to the left may be how
he chooses to sit in judgment of their approach to politics as the 1960s progressed
and moved into the 1970s. White clearly had liberal principles – that much is
hard to ignore – but it was liberalism as it had been defined classically for
nearly two centuries. He saw both how the liberal policies were starting to
stagnate even before Nixon took office and just as importantly how what was
becoming the liberal approach was increasingly leading the Democratic Party to
disaster. Considering that the
Republican revolution basically was taking its roots as the Democrats were
increasingly making this part of their platform gospel is a standard that in
the 21st century the left has done everything in its power to argue was
a moral failing of both Republicans and the nation. That they have no reached the point that the
word 'liberal' itself became so toxic that it has currently been replaced by
the left with 'progressive' shows another example of how this branch of America
will deal with language more than policy.
And it's worth noting that at the end
of every book White would take a look at the results of the election and try to
predict where the country was going to end up going under the next
administration. He would look at the patterns of the vote but not in the
breakdown of identity politics that has become gospel among pollsters. Rather instead
he looked at America through its various regional sections and tried to see why
the winner had appealed to one candidate and why the loser had failed. He also
picked up on trends in both the political and general sphere of the nation that
gave insight into the problems America might have as well as trying to see the
future. In many ways he was more correct then he knew about where America was
going and its hard to argue that we as a country might be better off had more
people in power at the time taken the lessons White was telling the country
into consideration.
White was very much a colleague of the
old school of politics and he was increasingly becoming uncomfortable with the
growth of the presidential primary and how he thought it was ruining the
electoral process. This is a view, I should add, that is increasingly becoming
common among scholars and other elitists who worry about the health of
democracy. With that said, White gives a very clear view of what conventions
were like before primaries eliminated all the drama and they became made
for television events. You couldn't get
a clearer snapshot of what political conventions and the nominating process was
like then from reading White's books.
And because he's clearly an objective
reporter he makes it very clear that those processes might not have been
as great at nominating candidates as so many reporters and other scholars think
when they think about using them today. This is true not merely when he covers
the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which was just the climax of a year
of chaotic politics in the party but when he covers the leadup to both the 1964
Republican Convention that nominated Goldwater and the leadup to the 1972
Democratic Convention that nominated McGovern. He makes it clear that the
disasters that led to two of the biggest electoral landslides in history climaxed
in genuine onscreen drama for both parties – and it makes it clear that in all
politics, there is such a thing as bad publicity.
As an amateur historian I find White's
books increasingly comforting in a turbulent time because they tell me
something that in today's endless news cycle, and where everything that happens
is picked apart by everybody on social media, the average person would do well
to remember: all of this has happened before and the past can give us lessons
if we are willing to learn them. And since increasingly the media that followed
after White has failed spectacularly in learning these lessons and far too many
politicians show a similar lack of cognition, I believe we as a society have a
moral obligation to try and learn from them ourselves if we are too move
forward.
What will follow will be stories from
all five of White's major books, both popping the bubble of myths that so many
generations that have followed have taken as gospel and relating narratives
that have either been forgotten or telling familiar stories with the
perspective of a first-hand observer. Many will involve politicians who are
still familiar names from that era as well as other major figures from that
perspectives. Others will involve incidents and individuals that may very well
have been forgotten completely by history but whose actions foreshadowed many
of the struggles that we see to this day.
I believe that true objectivity from
any historian may be impossible but I also think White tried, with all his
power, not to let his internal bias show in his writing. That cannot be said of
those who came after him and it is something I respect him for and judge his
successors. I strongly urge the reader of these columns to seek out the first
four books: they were issued in a reprinting in the 2010s and no doubt can be
found on eBooks or Kindles if one tries.
Are they the best record of what happened during this period? I can't
say with certainty. But if you want to
see a perspective of what America was like when it was in search of itself as
White put it, this is a great place to start for anyone.
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