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The Making of the President, 1968

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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.

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.

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.

The third entry in the "Making of the President" series continues to show that Ted White is a cut above other political journalists. White manages to balance the blow by blow of a presidential campaign with his quadrennial assessment of where the United States and the world are and where they are going. Few political authors begin a discussion of cities by explaining the etymological origins of the word. When political journalists talk about a candidate's swing through Chicago, few dissect each ethnic enclave of the city. Although perhaps a bit grandiose for some readers, White digs deeper into what makes politicians tick and how they assemble votes than any other political journalist before or since. Those that have claimed to be the next White are legion, but none have come close to the delicate balance he is able to deliver.

White even manages to keep his personal views from obstructing his writing. Just as in 1960 it was clear his favorite was JFK, this time White's personal connection is with RFK and later, he seems to be rooting for a Humphrey come from behind victory. But his treatment of Nixon, who he had covered for decades and showed dislike for in 1960, is more than generous. His relationship with Nixon would only improve by the 1972 book. Perhaps if I were reading White when he wrote I would find his personal relationships with the candidates more intruding, but I think he has found the right balance.

A few thoughts:
1. A reviewer notes that the conclusion of the book was likely outdated by the time the book was published. That is probably true. Specifically, White's warnings of a strong, Southern third party turned out to be false. However, a stronger Democratic candidate in 1972 and a healthy George Wallace may have made a Southern party more of a possibility. Regardless, there is still some relevance to White's concluding comments. In particular, his dissection of the Electoral College, its flaws, and its alternatives could have been written today.
2. White also concludes his books with a discussion of the issues he expects to affect America in the future. For example, in the 1964 book he discussed immigration. Here he discussed Japan among others. It turns out, White has excellent foresight.
3. White favors the insider primary process. When he discusses the proposal to replace it with a national primary, he shows his disdain. That may be because the insider process is easier to cover. After 1968, the amount of candidates entering the primaries would explode. Where previously lots of candidates may enter their names into the convention, many as favorite sons, post 1972 most primaries in either party would include candidates in the double digits at least as a starting point. White seems to prefer a world, and is great at covering a world, where two or three candidates are vying for the support of Mayor Daley in Chicago, a random union leader, or Nelson Rockefeller.

I do not just recommend picking up this book, but the entire series of books. The authors of political books today seem to have nailed down the blow by blow that White captures well, but they have failed to capture the deeper issues that White distills.

1968 was a pivotal turning point in U. S. History in which there was a convergence of historical forces that caused distinctive changes and was marked by unexpected eruptions in the state of affairs. The reading of this book is much like a reading of Homer`s Iliad as it very engaging and very readable. As I personally recall this period in my memory when I was young (aged 13) I relive most of these events especially the time around Christmas when all these events were played out and the final act of the year was the circumnavigation of the moon by the Apollo astronauts and the first ever view of the Earth from space. We knew that we were in a new era.

I love Amazon..I got the book in great shape and in a timely manner.
And the book is very good..

Outstanding reportage of the election of 1968. Shows the contest between President Johnson and Senator McCarthy. Theodore H. White visited with the camps of all of the principal candidates. He spent valuable time with both former Vice President Nixon and Governor Romney. Reviews the assassination of Senator Kennedy.
This is Mr. White's third of four books on presidential elections. He knows an awful lot about some of the candidates, like Vice President Humphrey, because Vice President Humphrey ran for president in his first book and ran for vice president in his second book.

White was what another reviewer here has called a "genteel liberal", a man born into culture and privelege who was something of an idealist and perhaps more like the image of the Kennedys than the Kennedys themselves. This work is better than the 1960 book primarily because there is less Kennedy man-love. The whole 1960 tone reads like a long love letter to JFK, full of "the candidate sat wearily, closing his still sharp blue eyes behind which lay thoughts unknown perhaps even to himself, this time in his cream slacks, brown loafers and a tweed jacket, gazing wistfully out over the dunes of Hyannisport like a knight after a necessary but distasteful duel....". This volume has only about two or three chapters on the ill-fated crazy train of Bobby Kennedy's candidacy. Personally I think Bobby would have lost to Nixon. So what we do get with the less man-love is a more objective account, with White's liberalism perhaps sliding into doubt in the face of the turmoil of race riots, Vietnam, student protests and assassinations. White is puzzled by all this, much less certain than he was in 1960. What makes this a great history is that White was also a thinker, albeit a liberal one, and it is an education to try to watch him make sense of events through a liberal perspective. This is essential reading for any American born in the 1970s or later and can still explain events today. Why is Detroit bankrupt today? One might start with the fact it nearly burnt to the ground in 1967/68. White flight was not, as many history textbooks in schools like to say, an irrational response to irrational fears, it was the only response to a very real fear. On civil rights, it is an eye opener to read from the optimism of 1960, with even Nixon alienating part of his conference in Chicago by pushing for a firmer civil rights plank - which many say lost him winnable states like Louisiana, and thus the election - through to the riots of 67/68. To put it politely and mildly, it is sad to say that the legally priveleged blacks and recent influx of other minorities into America have probably taken far more than they have given back to their hosts, the white population of what is now a fast dwindling majority, imperilling the USA into a slide into a dangerous, divided large third world nation more like Brazil. This history, the slide of the great power also chronicles the slow death, a necessary one, of white liberalism. White is perhaps at his best here when he chronicles the protest behaviour of the student masses, as he correctly states 'the children of the bourgeoisie'. On the infiltration of extreme viewpoints into American education I recommend reading a great, but controversial work, Culture of Critique by MacDonald (scroll down the many reviews and you might find one from your humble reviewer). White is sometimes much of prophet, particularly when he muses on the size and rising power of the American college system. Why does a nation need so many students, he asks? Over 100,000 students studying international affairs, yet only about 150 jobs annually available at the state department. These figures are probably even higher today. Worth thinking about, as the continuing and perhaps never-ending, as the dollar loses international status, financial crisis hits the MBAs, law schools and other parts of the American education for profit industry.

I have read Making of . . . .1960 and 1964. This time I got the soft cover version and the print is too small for comfortable reading for my old eyes. White adds many footnotes and they are in tiny font size. Besides the print is faded and the paper yellowed which adds to the difficulty.

White says little or nothing about the personal side of the candidates. I guess that's how he got access to them. He does a good job describing the dynamics of each of the elections which helped me see how strongly the process of candidate selection is influenced by the personal will of factions within the parties.

Despite Theodore White's lofty intentions and his coming to conclusion that peacemaker rather man of action won the Presidential Election in 1968, White betrays hostility to racial minorities who were too eager to cooperate and step into the shoes of whites in an effort to be mindful and considerate to those whites who bent backward for historically persecuted and disadvantaged minorities as whites brace themselves for CHANGE at a pace and speed unforeseen and unprecedented in USA with "undigested legislation" set motion by LBJ when White writes "[R]ace relations are measured by recording exclusion and inclusion, achievement and failure, in chromatic percentages[.]"