A Liberal Looks at Theodore H. White
Wattenberg, Ben J.
A Liberal Looks at Theodore H. White A Soon after The Making of the President 1972 had come out Bill Kristol and I were having lunch with Ben Wattenberg who was then just finishing his own...
...The McGovern people got this notion that politics has to do something beyond economics and beyond education...
...It has got to do with the psychology of the people of which any president or any Congress has relatively little to do with despite all the rhetoric we are hearing right now about how Richard Nixon can or cannot lead the nation...
...And if you accept that notion of American failure during the 1960s and early 1970s, you can then very easily make the political transference to say therefore the logical outgrowth of a failed liberalism was McC~vernism...
...Even if you increase real income about 50 percent, which is about what we did in this last dozen years, it is tight...
...I think that whether you look at it in terms of the hard objective data or whether you look at it through the lens of public opinion data and attitudinal data, it is very mistaken to describe these years as years of despair punctuated with a few exclamation points of success...
...People are trying to do a lot of things that they have not been able to do before, and they are economically behind the eight ball...
...Material success plus attitudinal change means progress to me...
...In the 1960s, starting with the election of John Kennedy, the so-called liberal wing of the Democratic Party first set up a new kind of rhetoric...
...This is a Great Society program that worked resoundingly well...
...The strides made in civil rights and in actual black economic progress and in black social progress in terms of integration, desegregation, jobs, housing, and education are impressive...
...There are some cuts and passes in that that don't make it quite as good a s it seems, but it is an astonishing story because ten years ago it was not 9 percent of the college population that was black...
...Everything that made up the Great Society they were for...
...Wattenberg came at White from a totally different p e ~ i v e . Because this perspective is again a rnatt~ of serious public debate, and because Mr...
...Now, in each of these instances Americans have also drawn a line in the sand, saying so far and no further--"civil rights makes a lot of sense, busing and quotas I won't buy...
...The legislation pretty closely followed the rhetoric...
...You have rhetoric and you have rhetoric that led to specific legislation...
...I disagree...
...It's not until you get to 'r do you think of America," "How is the country going," that people start saying "We are in trouble...
...If everything is so good, how come everything is so bad...
...Attitudinally, I do not know exactly what makes people say America is on the skid...
...For dessert we all cheu~ on Mr...
...White misperceived the Republican Party's essential conservatism, and that his discussion of public policy's failures would have been improved had he cited the work of men like Edu~rd Banfield and Milton Friedman...
...In 1976 we shall see whether McGovernism was the natural outgrowth of liberal politics or whether it was an aberration...
...In each of his books he tries to tell you wh~/t's happening in America...
...About 9 percent of the college population in America is black, bearing in mind that blacks make up about 11 percent of the population, you are getting very close to parity...
...That is not what White does, and there is no question about the fact that he is the consummate master of his form--~e piecing together of a presidential campaign...
...Are you in favor of medicare...
...So he is in his own way not just a political reporter, but also a commentator on the American social scene...
...White's analysis...
...Ben J. Wattenberg OPI~I TO GOI.I.EQE ~ T I ~ ONLY OEAIXJNE: JULY 15 The Alternative June-September 1974 31...
...But politics is a limited tool...
...Of environmental laws...
...In every one of these instances they bought the basic, valid core notions and rejected the flamboyant, the far-out and the nonsensical...
...The essential social premise of White's book is, first, that American life in the dozen years from 1960 The Making of the Pre~dent 1972 by Theodore H. White Atheneum $10.00 to 1972 was on a downhill slope and represented some form of American failure...
...But what about the programs that worked, the ones that go unmentioned...
...There is no reason to think that in any government of men, 460 out of 460 programs are going to work...
...So, in my opinion, White's base premise that the 1960s was an era of failure which led to an era of political extremism, is simply wrong...
...No, the Great Society is terrible, I am against the Great Society, would be the response...
...Traditional liberal Democrats of the non-New Politics, non-McGovern-type did two things in the last dozen years...
...When President Johnson left office, they gave him a present...
...He does a fantastic atr~unt of legwork...
...That is cultural, even metaphysical politics...
...The book I have written, The Real America (coming out in September), takes very strong issue with the bedrock notion that the dozen years between 1960 and 1972 were years of failure and years of despair and years of bankruptcy...
...Nonetheless, he does something else, because he is an ambitious and a thinking man...
...So you have two steps in the progression...
...If you were to catalogue the things people wanted in 1960, for instance, living in a suburb, owning a second automobile, owning a washer and a dryer, and sending their kids to college, and compare their 1960 aspirations with their situation today, you would have to conclude that in terms of what the people hoped for, this decade-or-so has been a success...
...The greatest antipoverty program that anyone knows anything about is still our economy, a stable one and one that has a lot to do with the business community...
...I am thinking of medicare, the enormous increases in social security, and the tremendous change in the environment...
...Busing is not the wave of the future in this country, and they know it by now...
...Part of it, in my judgment, is exactly what I mentioned above...
...The number of kids going to college in this country went from 3 million to 8 million in a decade...
...And that is the interbsting thing about the book over and above the straight election stuff...
...And you can go from incomo to housing~ to the kinds of goods we own, to what kind of houses we live in, to where we live, to the number of washers, dryers, automobiles--all the things that have really coma to represent middle-class life in America--and you find that in the last dozen years Americans have achieved in large measure what I have called this massive majority middle class...
...It is the same question and it is what I have just written a book about, and so I am anxious to 'talk about it...
...P,~I' THE FntST TmNG One has to say about The Making of the President 1972 is that Theo...
...It had to be done to preserve editorial confidentiality...
...Our present state has all the hallmarks of progress if you believe progress represents something better than what it replaces and if you believe that in a democratic society it is not up to elites to determine what constitutes truth, beauty, and progress, but up to the people themselves...
...And what ~ Kennedy said was "let's get America moving again...
...Then there is education...
...First of all, if you ask people how they individually are doing, you get very high responses: 'Tin okay, my kids are in good schools, my house is nice, my income is all right, my job is okay"--very h i g h responses...
...It was a big desk blotter listing all the bills passed during his five years in office...
...Both those numbers, incidentally, are in constant 1972 dollars...
...SO you try to sum this thing up: Has America succeeded...
...So there has been a tremendous attitudinal accommodation...
...Needs expand geometrically...
...Today, they say America is a fascist, blue-collar, Joe six-pack nation, they won't make any progress, they're stuck in the mud...
...Hard drugs are not the wave of the future in this country...
...Of aide to education...
...After acknowledging that it is a finely wrought narrative, that it is good reading, that White knows his politics, that he has done his research, I still have two specific bones to pick with him First, about what happened to our politics and secondly, about what happened to America during the past ten or so years...
...The answer I come to is that the objective data says we have succeeded...
...I would say that it is something a little different...
...They write a lot of newspaper pieces and stitch them together and say "here is a book...
...Rather, it was the other way around, years of success punctuated by a few exclamation points of failure...
...Then they would be asked the question: Do you approve of the Great Society...
...We halved the poverty rate...
...They are fed up...
...And here is where I have problems with this book...
...It makes a lot of sense to avoid polluting our environment, but it makes no sense to throw away our automobiles and turn in our washers and dryers and put on sackcloth and ashes because we are using up toe much of the world's resources...
...Secondly, in the midsixties, mostly after Kennedy's death, partly by accident and partly because Johnson was somewhat of a legislative wizard (he was an activist who knew very well when the iron was ready for striking), Demo~ats legislated a watershed of social and economic legislation...
...And at the same time that "the movement" was changing America, America was changing "the movement...
...He is a skilled writer, and he has a fine narrative sense, a sense which is lacking in most journalists who attempt to go t o the book form...
...It can deal with certain kinds of things but it cannot deal with religious and emotional issues...
...one thing Americans want in abundance is education...
...I felt that Mr...
...He originated this form, and he is able as are very few people in American letters either in fiction or in nonfiction to write an interesting book...
...Ecology swept this country like the bubonic plague, the peace movement in many ways was accepted, though in many ways it was not accepted...
...The American failure not only involved Vietnam, it involved crime, it involved race riots, it involved cities, it involved this whole feeling of '~eing fed up," ~being alienated," and all those o t h e r wonderful clichds that we have been hearing about...
...We want to help the poor, we want to help the blacks, we want to do things in civil rights, we want to do things for the elderly, medicare, the environment, the cities...
...Wattenberg is always thoughtful and often right, I recently held a similar conversation with him in Washington, which--in keeping with local custom--we taped...
...People are not buying nonsense...
...It really wraps up into the same issue...
...Second, he specifically says that politically it was liberalism that failed, and that liberalism in its failure dead-ended into McGovernism, a logical outgrowth of this American failure...
...He has gotten the things he wanted in 1960 and how he must pay for them...
...A Liberal Looks at Theodore H. White A Soon after The Making of the President 1972 had come out Bill Kristol and I were having lunch with Ben Wattenberg who was then just finishing his own book, ~ Real America, which will appear in September...
...America should disarm unilaterally---doesn't make sense...
...dote White is a master at what he does...
...Rather he is mad about inflation...
...Now, people say everyone feels lousy about it...
...What the people wanted made sense without revolution, without repression, without riot...
...In other words, if you take a man in 1960, making $8,000 a year, living in an urban house, owning one car (an old one), not owning a washer or a dryer, and not sending his kids 30 The Alternative June-September 1974 to college and you view his equivalent situation today...
...It is easy for some to say that all these people should not be in college and they are really not equipped for college, but these people wanted to go to college...
...Attitudinally we have made great changes, tempered by common sense...
...The third step in this progression is to analyze the results of this legislation...
...It is the realization of realized expectations...
...When White says that this is the natural outgrowth of liberalism, I am tempted to say he is dead wrong...
...They thought that it had to deal with depersonalization and with automation, with bigness and with a whole lot of other things that even religion cannot solve...
...We believe in a society of self-determination and pollsters have reported authentically that the...
...Today, there are 726,000 black kids in college in Anmrica...
...He spins an interesting yarn...
...His kid is going to college, he lives in the suburbs, he has two cars, he has a washer and a dryer and makes $12,000 a year...
...This has been a bubbling, turbulent, successful decade and the hero in this drama is the American people...
...This nation can lead Richard Nixon a lot better than Richard Nixon can lead the nation and that's true with any president...
...But my point is that this is the reality of realized expectations...
...You always need more than what you have...
...They are alienated, There are some polls that support this, but it is interesting the way polls break down...
...There are a lot of problems in this country and aroumt the world...
...They lead you into cloudy and ominous political struggles and peopl~ in this country are too smart to buy such stuff...
...you see a profoundly improved situation...
...What follows is the authentic transcript of that historic conversation, emended only by the customary deletion of vulgarities and expletives--that this diminates every single utterance made by me is ox~ittedly history's loss...
...On women's liberation, many of the basic precepts were adopted by men and women all over this country...
...Disruption is not the wave of the future in this country, and they know it now...
...That made up about 460 different bills on every conceivable subject, social welfare, environment, race, cities, national wilderness, and so forth...
...It is kind of a side effect of success...
...I think it is very important both politically and socially in tetras of viewing what happened in this country to look at it in terms of this sort of a progression...
...Members of "the movement" have learned that nonnegotiable demands could come from the other side also...
...Because of Great Society legislation, we opened a new junior college in this country every ten days for eight years...
...A lot of their sillier notions were knocked out and they have learned that, 1. think...
...He might be mad, but he is not mad about his poverty...
...America should not be the world's policeman-that makes sense...
...That, in my judgment, is the source of much of the economic malaise...
...During the Johnson years some of the pollsters asked questions about "the programs...
...And lVlcGovernism is what led to Nixonism or to the election of Richard Nixon, in the landslide proportions by which he was elected...
...He does it better than anybody else...
...If you look carefully at the 1970 census, looking at the hard-objective data of the dozen years between 1960 and 1972, you will see more social and economic progrem in this country than has ever been seen before...
...it was 2 or 3 percent...
...This does not mitigate the fact that he spins a wonderful yarn, he has a lot of good stories, but his basic analysis of what has been happening in America, in my judgment, is flawed...
...I_~ok through the attitudinal polls in America in terms of all those issues that the New I_~ft or New Politics fanned to white heat: war and peace, civil rights, women's liberation, counterculture, environment, all these kinds of things...
...There is no question that some of these did not work...
...They got their people elected and they helped America...
...And if that is not what a political party is for, then what is it for...
...Some say it is the revolution of rising expectations...
...But politics still does have some role in social policy, and when I review the data I conclude that liberal Democratic politics worked...
...And the entire increase in recent years of people going to college has been to public colleges...
...That's plain crap because what happened in those last dozen years is a tremendous amount of attitudinal change mostly halfway to what the Movement espoused...
...This, as I see it, is essentially the intellectual underpinning of The Making of the President 1972...
...The hard data indicates a tremendous amount of absolute progress in this country in the very terms of the Great Society rhetoric and the legislation that Teddy White considers so baleful...
...Has America failed...
...First came the lofty rhetoric, then the Great Society legislation, and finally results...
...The counterculture notions that we were a little too uptight, a little too materialistic, also hit home...
...But what I shall settle for saying is that we are going to find out in 1976 who was right...
...Well, this is something you live with in politics, and I am not one who believes that politics directs destiny in America, that it's all programs and the government controls everyting...
...In other words, there's been a tremendous liberalization of civil-rights attitudes in this country...
...And seeing as that is really the pay-off skill for any kind of a writer, journalist or novelist, it is an excellent book...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
