The Making of the President, 1968 [Hardcover]

Theodore Harold White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1969

In The Making of the President 1968, the third volume of the groundbreaking series that revolutionized American political journalism, Theodore H. White offers a compelling account of one of the most turbulent presidential campaigns in history: the 1968 election that put Richard M. Nixon in the White House. Viewing the electoral process from an insider's perspective—capturing both the vast scope and the intimate, behind-the-scenes details—White chronicles a campaign that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, was marked by protest and violence in the streets of Chicago, and that came down to a neck-and-neck finish between the tenacious but ill-starred Hubert H. Humphrey and the most fascinating politician of the modern age: the finally, unexpectedly, victorious Richard Nixon.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Theodore H. White (1915–1986) was an American political journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for the Making of the President series: his accounts of the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 presidential elections, all of which are being reissued with new forewords by Harper Perennial Political Classics. His other books include Thunder Out of China, America in Search of Itself, and In Search of History: A Personal Adventure.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 459 pages
• Publisher: Atheneum (June 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689102933
• ISBN-13: 978-0689102936
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America On Fire, October 6, 2004

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Making of the President, 1968 (Hardcover)

Theodore White's considerable acumen and access to the corridors of power made him a worthy chronicler of the 1960 and 1964 presidential campaigns, but his tone of genteel liberalism made him seem an anachronism by 1968, the year of the Tet offensive, race riots, and the generation gap. But his "The Making Of The President - 1968" may be the best of his election chronicles precisely because of White's position at the nexus of one of America's great culture clashes.

It was the year Vice President Hubert Humphrey tried to shake off the cold grip of his unpopular boss, Lyndon Johnson, and run as his own man, while Richard Nixon sought to convince the electorate he was new and improved from the 1960 figure they rejected. Which one would be more successful?

There's not a lot of tension in the contest itself. White's readers knew who won, as do you. But White does shine in the wealth of detail he offers on the race, his philosophical analysis of shifting attitudes, and a cast of unique characters including the racist third-party candidate George Wallace, prickly peace advocate Eugene McCarthy, and hapless George Romney, an early GOP frontrunner of whom another Republican comments: "Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football."

There was tragedy in the 1968 race, too, most especially the murder of Democrat Sen. Robert Kennedy after his win in the California primary. White dedicates the book to Bobby and Jack Kennedy, and it's clear the reporter's heart was broken by what happened to them. Yet he manages to stand back and give an objective account of Kennedy's foreshortened run.

White seems to be everywhere, with Kennedy and his family at a California home the night before his assassination, with Humphrey at the Democratic convention in Chicago the night the town blew up in rioting and tear gas, with Nixon on Election Eve, flying over the nation as Nixon stares out a airplane window "as if by looking down and concentrating he could pull in more votes."

Nixon comes off well in this book. 1968 was his year, and White gives him his due. Perhaps White bought too much into Nixon's new public image; time showed those demons inside him were not dead but resting. But Nixon was also a figure of great dimension and brilliance, and White provides expert testimony for that. Plus Nixon best articulated a position on one core issue, law-and-order, which White and many other concerned observers, liberal though they were, could see America needed more of in 1968. Claiming this issue for his own gained Nixon the support of much of the moderate middle, the "silent majority" he spoke of on the stump.

White does have an ornate style that may bore some, and there's a lengthy postscript on what it all meant which was probably already outdated by the time the book was published. But "The Making Of The President - 1968" is by no means an outdated book. It's instead a primordial account of national politics as we now know them, with its sharp divides along racial, class, and ideological grounds, where the old ways, for better and worse, were being changed forever and the politicians were struggling to keep up. It should be required reading for political science majors; it's worthwhile reading for any citizen.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Political Narrative, March 30, 2005

By 

K.A.Goldberg (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Making of the President, 1968 (Hardcover)

In this his third book about U.S. Presidential elections, Theodore H. White chronicles the campaign in a year when everything seemed to go wrong. As the author shows, 1968 saw stalemate in Vietnam, campus unrest, race riots, rising crime, and assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. White captures the flavor of the campaign, beginning with President Lyndon Johnson, whose popularity had fallen so far that he quit the race and rarely left the White House. I felt the author went too easy on Richard Nixon's questionable law and order campaign (and lack of specifics on Vietnam), but his description of Nixon's comeback is otherwise on target. We see Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey's as a decent, well-qualified candidate whose narrow loss may have stemmed from the convention riots in Chicago. The author drops all objectivity in his disdainful look at third-party candidate George Wallace, whose race-baiting campaign won five southern states and nearly 10 million votes nationwide. The book isn't perfect, but it captures the tenure of the times; a nation awash in wealth yet troubled by war and violence.

Theodore H. White (1915-1986) was a superb chronicler of U.S. politics during Presidential campaigns (1960-1972, plus 1980). Despite minor flaws, this superbly readable book captures the tenure of the USA in that troubled year.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A decline, but still good, December 11, 2006

By 

Matthew Rozsa (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Making of the President, 1968 (Hardcover)

In his previous books, Theodore H. White was able to use the presidential election as a platform upon which an impartial, fact-based, and compelling drama could be told. His chronicle of the election of 1968 still contains many of those assets - his description of the Nixon campaign is probably better than that provided by any of the other reporters at the time, his objectivity and fairness toward Humphrey is admirable (especially in light of the undeserved persecution he received from most other media outlets at the time), and his coverage of the emerging New Left (as found in the presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy) is detailed and compelling. So what is the problem? It lies in one serious deficiency - White's lack of understanding for, and virtual unwillingness to detail, the extremist groups that rose to prominence in 1968.

As much as White might have been loath to admit it (and as much as many thoughtful pundits rightfully regret it), the fact is that one of the most important phenomena of the 1968 presidential election was the way that it brought to national attention sections of the far-left and far-right that would eventually integrate themselves into the fabric of the two major political parties. When discussing the yippie movement, White throws objectivity out the window, and dismisses them all as being venereal diseased malcontents, "crazies", whose circus-like antics were not worth a moment's consideration; his moral contempt for the far-right (as represented by the third-party candidacy of George Wallace) caused him to hope that not discussing them would make them go away, and consequently, he barely gives them twenty pages of discussion in a book almost five hundred pages in length, despite the fact that Wallace won much of the South and received more than one-seventh of the popular vote. This does not make for either good storytelling or good reporting; some of the most interesting and important drama occurred within the fringes of American politics in that year, and the fact is that those same left-wing and right-wing extremists whom White wouldn't even grant the time of day are now significant players in American politics (the former compose the core of both the Green party and the campaigns of extremists like Al Sharpton, and the latter's descendants are now one of the most powerful constituencies in the Republican party). This inclination to turn a blind eye to that which he finds distasteful takes away from the comprehensiveness that made his first two books such classics, and are a serious shortcoming in this work.