Politics as History
In Search of History: A Personal Adventure.
by Theodore H. White.
Harper & Row. 561 pp. $12.95.
Theodore H. White is one of the most influential political writers of our time. His Making of the President series has taught a generation of journalists a mode of writing about politics, and a generation of politicians a mode of behavior. If White has not himself transformed the nature of American presidential politics, he has at least had a significant effect on the way we view our Presidents, and hence indirectly on our election campaigns and even on the administrations which emerge from them.
White’s success is the product of a brilliant mind, long experience as a reporter, and extraordinary writing ability—and, perhaps most important, of an idea of history which has allowed him to give meaning to the story he has so skillfully been telling. As he wrote in 1975 in Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, White believes in the “simplest definition of history”: that it is “the tale of the great forces that bear down on solitary men who accidentally stand at their junction. And it is the reactions of such men to the pressures on them that shape decisions, history, and lives.” White is, then, in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and his undertaking has been to recount the history of modern America through the biographies of its great men—the men who seek its Presidency—and through the story of their quadrennial battles for public support.
In this undertaking, White early on invented a new form of political reporting, which combined the smallest detail with the widest conclusions. He did not simply report what any citizen could see—namely, what candidates said and did in public. Rather, he reported what was not visible—what the candidates wore and ate, who gave them advice, what their tactics were, and then, in the end, how they fit into the continuing story of American politics. He did this, at least, until 1976. As he began to cover the 1976 campaign, White found himself “confused,” even “bewildered.” The clarity was gone; the “old ideas no longer stretched over the real world as he saw and sensed it to be.” White found that “he no longer knew how to string the stories together in any way that connected them with history.” And so he stopped, deciding that “it was probably more useful to go back than to go on.” Instead of The Making of the President 1976, we have White’s memoirs, In Search of History, an aptly named and beautifully written volume.
As might have been expected, White’s new book is a delight to read. He has led a wonderfully active and interesting life, and he writes of it with an attractive alternation between objectivity and passion. White was born in Boston into a lower-middle-class Jewish immigrant family which became very poor during the Depression. Yet despite his family’s, and the nation’s, economic condition, America was still a land of opportunity: his brains won White admission to the (free) Boston Latin School, and from there a scholarship to Harvard. A summa cum laude in history led to a fellowship which required only that White travel for a year and thereby educate himself; having studied Chinese language and history (under a young tutor named John K. Fairbank), he went to China. There he found a nation in the midst of war and revolution, and began to write about it. Ultimately, he was named chief Asia correspondent for the new Time magazine, and stayed in China from 1938 to 1945.
Returning to the United States after seven years, White published Thunder Out of China, an account of the Communist revolution which earned him a place on a substantial number of blacklists for his failure to hate Mao and hail Chiang Kai-shek. Soon White was abroad again, covering the European recovery from 1948 to 1953. Out of this emerged Fire in the Ashes, another great success. Yet when White returned to America in 1954, no crowd of editors clamored for his services. In the McCarthy period he was a questionable figure, and if he plied his trade with distinction—at the Reporter magazine and at Colliers, and as a free-lance—he achieved no great fame or wealth. These came only upon publication of The Making of the President 1960. After its appearance, White was a star, welcomed by the greats as their chronicler and as a talisman of good political fortune. Everybody had to touch base with Teddy White, for he was going to write it all up for history.
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No brief summary can convey the richness of White’s account. His opening chapters, on the Boston ghetto, high school, and Harvard, are insightful, witty, at times moving. His chapters on Asia communicate well the excitement of a young man in his twenties, living in the midst of a revolution, meeting the rebel chieftains, Mao and Chou, watching a local war, and seeing in it the origins of a world conflict. The chapters on Europe explain the workings of the Marshall Plan, and report on the politics and politicians of early postwar Europe—Adenauer, Eisenhower, Clay, and Monnet, to name but a few. They also show the changes in White’s own perspective as he sees American money rebuild freedom and free markets all over Western Europe. White writes of the “dynamics of the trader’s world”:
It came to me slowly as I reported affairs from 1947 to 1950, that the values liberals cherish flourish better in the trader’s world than in the Pharaonic world. . . . The Marshall Plan had won because it had linked gain with freedom, had assumed that the movement of minds and the movements of peoples must go with the movement of goods and of merchants.
Finally, White’s accounts here of the presidential races of the 1960’s and 1970’s are masterly in then-view of tactics and personalities.
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By the end of these memoirs, indeed on the very last page, White answers the question with which he opens them. Why did he find himself lost in the 1976 campaign? Why did it all, for the first time, seem almost without meaning? His answer is predicated on a theory of American politics—and of American society—that has become more and more explicit in each of his succeeding volumes. White believes that America is a society bound together only by a common faith, politics. In other nations, such as France or Italy, “nationhood descends from ancestral loins” (Breach of Faith); Americans, by contrast, come from too many diverse heritages to form such a community. Instead, “politics in America is the binding secular religion.” In Breach of Faith, White writes of politics as “the faith that had glued Americans to each other in the beginning to make a republic,” as “the myth that binds America together.” And of all the political myths and common beliefs, the “crowning myth” is that of the Presidency. It is the one office which represents all Americans, and which all Americans act together to fill, choosing the best among them to lead.
All this, White believes, became weakened in the 1960’s as one President was assassinated and another forced not to seek reelection, and was then finally destroyed in the 1970’s by Richard Nixon. By 1976, instead of serving as a great unifying force, the presidential election campaign had become a mere power struggle between individuals; the nation which had been held together by politics was divided and disunified. White glumly concludes In Search of History wondering “whether America would be transformed . . . into a Place, a gathering of discretely defined and entitled groups, interests, and heritages; or whether it could continue to be a nation, where all heritages joined under the same roof-ideas of communities within government.”
The trouble, in White’s view, lies not so much in our Presidents, or in our way of selecting them, as in ourselves, a society that has lost its faith and is therefore in decline. But is this so? White is certainly persuasive in arguing that the 1976 campaign was a mechanical operation, largely devoid of real purpose. But why not conclude from this not that our society is flawed, but rather our way of choosing Presidents? It is surely an error—most of all in America—to confuse electoral politics with social conditions. And it is another error to think that the only ideas or myths common to all Americans are political, and indeed presidential, in nature.
Consider a single example. In the last twenty-five years, a dominant theme in American life has been the need to expand equality of opportunity—for the poor, for blacks, for women. Equality of opportunity is surely one of the ideals central to the American system, but it is a social as much as a political ideal, and Presidents are marginal to it. One might argue, indeed, that the broadening of equality of opportunity would have proceeded at roughly the same rate in this period had the result in every presidential election been reversed. As Ben Wattenberg has demonstrated in The Real Majority and The Real America, social progress is poorly gauged by the fate of one’s favorite candidates, or even by the condition of the electoral system; it may be measured directly by looking at relative income levels, education, life expectancy, and the like. To White, such data are important in that they ultimately affect electoral outcomes. Yet the reverse is true: the data are important in themselves, more important than the electoral outcomes, for the data describe the realities of life in America, and American life is not centered around, nor can it be measured by, electoral politics.
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In his refusal to cover the 1976 race, White was among the first commentators to notice its remarkable emptiness. Jules Witcover has described that race as “the ultimate media event,” and the campaign struck other observers, too, as an intellectual wasteland in which personal power struggles rather than principled political differences were played out. The difficulty with White’s version is that, seeking the broader social meaning of this, he neglects the narrower meaning: that the presidential selection system is faulty. And it is not surprising that he also neglects some of the contributions he may inadvertently have made to the development of its faults.
Many critics of the 1976 campaign have called it too media-oriented; too manipulative; too closely focused on the candidates’ personal styles rather than on issues or parties; too much like a great game rather than a fateful choice. One can fairly say that White’s view of presidential races, as great contests among individual men for a place in history, is one of the sources of this problem. The recent cult of the Presidency is in no small part his creation, and the present concentration of the media on strategy, tactics, and personality rather than on issues can in some degree be traced to the success and to the influence of White’s accounts of our presidential races.
All of this is ironic, if not perverse. Theodore H. White has searched for the tissue which connects the mechanics of our election campaigns with the broader experiences and purposes of our society. Yet his work has been taken by many as exemplifying not a concern for deeper issues but a concern for personality, for inside dope, for details, for tactics. In an odd way, the less talented or more cynical observers have had a clearer view. Our elections are not our history, and our politics is not our life. Politics—even presidential politics-provides us with high drama, but is peripheral to the concerns of most Americans. In seeking too deep a meaning in our electoral mechanics, White has mistaken politics for life in society, and political biography for history. Rather than being the historian of America in our time, White is (as, indeed, he often calls himself here) primarily a reporter, and he must be satisfied to know, as his readers do, that of them all he has been the best.
