In Search of History: A Personal Adventure
White, Theodore H.
BOOK REVIEW In Search of History: A Personal Adventure Theodore H. White / Harper & Row / $12.95 John R. Coyne, Jr. Someone's always mad at Theodore White. From the late 1930s until 1945, when...
...The scene with Jacqueline Kennedy is powerful...
...Maps are worthless...
...and the larger the canvas and the greater the detail, the easier it is to isolate the flaws...
...The theory of history as the story of great men is a venerable one...
...But the old questions remain...
...Among the Nationalists, White felt unloved...
...But I also believe that the way Kennedy treated him, making him a friend and one of the boys, had a great deal to do with his perception of Kennedy's qualities...
...White couldn't be expected to like Nixon, of course, but his adulation of Kennedy seemed excessive...
...True, White convincingly documents key elements that led to the Nationalist collapse, among them the great inflation and the famine in Honan Province, during which Chiang's tax collectors continued to bleed the peasantry, thus producing a generation of Communist converts...
...You can see, however, why he managed to enrage so many people...
...White did not particularly like Douglas Mac Arthur...
...That White managed to cover China as thoroughly as he did is a testimony to his enthusiasm, his energy, his dedication, and his high professional standards...
...White may have looked at some of the wrong parts...
...but he saw more of them than any other Asian reporter of his time...
...Imagine, if you can, landing alone in a country like China, with both a war against the Japanese and a civil war raging...
...From the late 1930s until 1945, when White was a correspondent in China, Chiang K'ai-shek and the Nationalists were mad at him for the increasingly pro-Communist tilt of his dispatches...
...You have no friends and few contacts...
...the single most touching section of this book describes the period just after the assassination, when Jacqueline Kennedy called him to Hyannis Port and attempted to tell him through her grief what she thought her husband's brief administration meant...
...some might even say they conned him...
...Yet you're expected to report the whole thing...
...Communications and transportation are either primitive or non-existent...
...Had we not waffled in our support, might Chiang not have pulled it off...
...Most reporters find it a full-time job to cover the courthouse in Akron...
...And could it just be that much of that negative commentary was the direct result of the nature of journalism, the great-man theory of history, and White's own emotional makeup...
...Then came 1960, the first Making of the President installment, and with it a revelation: White discovered that he could make millions of Americans mad every leap year...
...But that may also be his greatest weakness...
...His canvases, after all, are huge ones...
...One may quarrel with some of his interpretations...
...You can't get mad at the author of In Search of History, a mellow summing-up of three decades as White reported and interpreted them...
...White gives us many reasons, perhaps the most convincing being that, as the son of immigrants himself, he saw in Kennedy the culmination of the American dream, the election of the first "ethnic outsider" to the presidency...
...among the Communists in Yenan, where the real action was, he was one of the boys...
...So he hopped to it...
...Then there is the Kennedy-Nixon relationship...
...It is easy for those of us who work at comfortably limited jobs and paint on small canvases to fault White...
...Had it not been for the steady stream of negative commentary flowing out of China from our own men on the scene, White chief among them, would we have waffled...
...The dance [at party headquarters] I attended while I was there seemed to me reminiscent of the old-fashioned Jewish weddings I had known as a boy, while to John Davies it seemed more like the church sociables he had known when he was young...
...And nothing could make liberals and the American Left madder than that...
...To be sure, it is personal journalism...
...Nevertheless, journalists run the risk of being caught up in the sweep of events and the immediacy of the moment, the result being that they frequently become participants and even partisans...
...In the end, White has to be seen as a man of feeling...
...White set out to search for history, and ended by writing it...
...In the chapters on China, easily the most fascinating in this book, the problem becomes central...
...Therefore one must seek out the leaders as men...
...Yet, despite what may be a weakness- his emotionalism-White is undoubtedly a great reporter...
...The pattern repeats itself...
...But in such a situation, reporting and interpretation must necessarily be synecdochical...
...You can observe only certain parts and from those parts you must arrive at some apprehension of the whole...
...The danger here is personalization: Chiang didn't like White, didn't ask him to drink tea with him, and White didn't like Chiang...
...But then came Watergate and the resignation, and this time White got mad-mad John R. Coyne, Jr., is an associate o/The American Spectator and a contributing editor of National Review...
...The Communists were very nice to White...
...but MacArthur, who unlike Chiang possessed a highly developed sense of public relations, was nice to him...
...Nor should there be any argument here about journalists functioning as historians: In the United States, where those certified as professors of history sit cloistered in university libraries grinding out pleonastic little studies of interest to no one except tenure committees and footnote collectors, journalists are our only historians...
...Even worse, the corollary of this disenchantment was a grudging growth of respect for Richard Nixon...
...Add to this a strong emotionalism and a wide streak of sentimentality, and you've summed up the basic problem with the journalist-historian as exponent of the great-man theory...
...True, he may also have helped to make it...
...Nor was Making of the President 1972 any better, for White simply couldn't warm up to the McGovern-ites, who had institutionalized leftist militancy within the Democratic Party...
...His Washington memoir, Fall In and Cheer, was published by Doubleday in January...
...Chou En-lai, on the other hand, did drink tea with him, as did the other Communists in Yenan...
...But given the mellowness and good nature and genuine concern for our country that shine through the pages of In Search of History, that can't really make us mad any longer...
...At this point, I suspect, White felt very much like the girl whom you promise the night before you'll respect just as much the morning after...
...Difficult...
...For a decade and a half, White careened about the world of journalism, both here and in Europe, irritating various groups of readers and politicians as he went...
...and I defy anyone to read it and not feel a great wash of grief for that lady-or deep respect for the man who wrote it...
...After Making of the President 1960, Republicans in general were mad at White, for they believed, quite correctly-and White admits this readily-that he loved JFK and didn't like Nixon at all, and therefore functioned as a Kennedy cheerleader...
...Politics, in the process of becoming History, is the story of a handful of men reaching for the levers of power...
...In 1946, he came thundering home with Thunder Out of China, a book that played a pivotal role in swinging sentiment against Chiang and so angered White's boss, Henry Luce, that he fired him...
...Making of the President 1964 had a similar effect on the American Right-not always to be confused with Republicans or Nixonites-although in fairness there was never a romance with LBJ...
...Now it's 1979, this wretched decade is nearly dead, and there's a small, hopeful sign that the next one may be just a bit better: For the first time in 40 years, no one's mad at Theodore White...
...With Making of the President 1968, however, it was the turn of liberals and the American Left to get mad, for White insisted on reporting a basic truth: If you wanted to know who was ripping our society up during that decade, you had to look leftward...
...but the best journalism is always personal, and is always a good deal more than journalism...
...Toward the end of this book, when he slips into a peculiar and somewhat ponderous Maileresque third-person analysis of his career, White theorizes on his craft: "History is Story...
...But to focus on the flaws is to miss the depth and breadth of White's work...
...at Richard Nixon and mad at himself...
...That may be why White, surprisingly, writes of MacArthur with at least semi-approval...
...One of White's great strengths as a reporter-historian lies in his ability to bring the men he writes about alive...
...At any rate, whatever the psychological nuances, the product of White's anger in 1975 was Breach of Faith, a book that made many people mad-and not just Nixonites...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
