This brilliantly conceived and executed book pulled back the curtain on the culture of covering presidential campaigns much like Theodore White's The Making of the President before it. Smooth and seemless prose is marred only slightly by the contrived tactic of attempting one line physical descriptions of principals "a bull of a man," "a lovely and smart woman," etc.
Structurally, the book proceeds from the failed Muskie campaign and an introduction of some of the icons of the industry at the time (two, David Broder and Robert Novak, must be packed in ice every night and only thawed out to give television appearences, such is their longevity) to Nixon's campaign, the not yet completed Watergate investigation of Woodward and Bernstein, and then finally the doomed McGovern campaign once again. The technique is man on the scene, interspersed with set interviews in which the interviewer is an actor.
Crouse's classic is entertaining and informative. It is entertaining because of the colorful portraits of a gang of mostly fun loving guys and a few jerks, and informative because it shows that the true bias of the press is an establishment bias, much more complicated than a simple left-right dichotomy, it's the institutional pressures of the job that leads to the press's often distorted views. Yes, the reporters trend liberal, but the editors and publishers trend conservative, and in recent years the line has blurred between the interests of the publishers and their employees. These guys are not scrappily taking in about the same salary as a bus driver or construction worker anymore, their vibe is much more movie star. Yet now as then, the real distortion is the pack mentality and fear of being the outlier in coverage, suspect by editors with no other framework for evaluation. We've become much more aware of this in recent years, with discussion of the press's "meta-narrative," an overarching theme like "Bush dumb" or "Kerry flip-flops," or yet more infamously, the fiasco of weapons of mass destruction, but it is still instructive to see a character study into the precise details of how it happens.
Hunter Thompson's book on the same campaign "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" provides a good contrast to this book, as does Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago : An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968." Both are worth examining if you are interested in politics and the period.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2005
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2015
This is a MUST READ for political buffs, especially if said buff was active in politics in the '60s.
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2014Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2016
