THE CASE FOR TEDDY WHITE

...On the other hand, when the standard of comparison for this book is not previous Whites but the works of his most recent contemporaries— most particularly Blue Smoke and Mirrors by Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Watershed by John F. Stacks, and Portrait of an Election by Elizabeth Drew—you can't help but come away thinking that America in Search of Itself stands up remarkably well...

...What had once been so obscure was now so obvious: How else could you report a campaign if you didn't dig behind the scenes, collect those anecdotes, and find out what was really going on...

...On another level, interesting details and anecdotes are useful simply in keeping the reader reading...

...Joseph Nocera is an associate editor of Texas Monthly and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...And there were at least six writers sitting in the corner...

...Thus was the first of Teddy White's lessons quickly absorbed: details are important...

...Who gives a fuck if the guy had milk and Total for breakfast...

...We have been lucky to have had him around to help explain that change, and his departure from the campaign press plane will leave a void...

...In his 1964 book, White again had an issues chapter...

...By 1968 White had become an institution, and the style of reporting he pioneered had firmly taken hold in the journalism business...

...when you read all four books in succession (as I did not too long ago) that is the first difference that strikes you...

...It wasn't just reporting that had changed in the 12 years since White's first campaign book...

...One of the best parts of White's book describes the recent history of the primaries, from the point at which they first became crucial to a candidate's chances (1956, in White's opinion) to the present...

...And not just among the voters, either, folks...

...One example of this last point can be found in Germond and Witcover's coverage of a tiny event called the Maine presidential forum, which took place a year before the election...

...For starters, they were more cynical than they used to be, and some of that cynicism rubbed off in their attitude towards the man who had originally pointed the way...

...Twenty-two years later, The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White—a best-seller for nearly a year...

...a Pulitzer Prize winner...

...Teddy White's example offers a way for reporters to do much better than that...

...No, make that terrific...

...Smith hitched a ride in a network car and raced to the airport, vainly seeking the entrance to the proper military gate at the vast O'Hare complex...

...Time's idea of recreating the drama of election night was to give an hour-by-hour countdown of the vote tally...

...Both have been political reporters for a long tin*Germond has been on the national political beat for over 20 years and Witcover nearly 30...

...really, who cares if Terrence Smith almost missed his plane...

...At the same time the fraternity was turning against White, he had a few complaints of his own about what the fraternity had done to "his" reporting method...

...One of the many little nuggets in that chapter: between 1945 and 1960, the ratio of blue-collar workers to white-collar workers at Boeing changed from 3:1 blue-collar to 3:2 white-collar...

...Read White's books and you will quickly realize that there are always two distinct threads running concurrently through his narrative...

...White's books have stood up so well over the years it hardly matters that he occasionally fawns...

...What White was writing then is accepted wisdom now, but no one was thinking about it much at the time...

...These chapters are anything but dull...

...The other has to do with the large, overriding problems facing the country and how those problems interconnect with the day-to-day campaigning...

...it has to offer its audience something they don't get in their daily news diet...

...With all that experience, all that accumulated savvy, you would think they would bring to a book some sense of "what it all means," or at least some feel for how politics has changed in the time they have been covering it, and how that affected the process of getting elected in 1980...

...In 1964, Time's coverage improved dramatically, due in no small part to a new-found attention to inside skinny and reportorial detail...

...In 1960, it was the "O'Brien Manual" (authored by Kennedy strategist Lawrence F. O'Brien), which provided "the diagram of organization for every Kennedy campaign from beginning to end...

...this time he wrote about the history and growth of the civil rights movement...

...By 1972, Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of The New York Times, was telling his troops (according to Timothy Crouse), "We aren't going to wait until a year after the election to read in Teddy White's book what we should have reported ourselves...

...Through that first The Making of the President book, then, there is this constant intermingling of the tiny campaign details with the larger themes...

...For example, nothing seems to pain White more than America's fall in power and prestige, and his reaction to it is almost irrationally apoplectic...

...And it seems to me that it is precisely his balancing of the large and small that gives the book its resonant quality...

...When tackling these larger issues, he is not coy about his purpose...

...His fawning over Nixon is what stands out most today ("Richard Nixon, the peacemaker, had written his first message of the campaign of 1972"), but White fawned almost as much over Kefauver, over Stevenson, over Humphrey, over all of them...

...Continue Germond and Witcover: "If the voters had thought much about it, of course, they might have realized there was something more to a presidential election campaign than...

...White's latest effort, to be honest, isn't in the same class as the first and subsequent volumes in his The Making of the President series, and it lacks the grace and intimacy of In Search of History, the volume of memoirs White published in 1978...

...Campaigns had drama...

...There he came upon one of Carter's young press aides and they hopped into the network car on the run and all together they barely made it to Air Force One...

...The leading candidates are Jack Germond and Jules Witcover...

...shaking hands on a street corner...

...Gulping down mounting returns, network computers giddily upped the odds on Kennedy...

...And boy, did they ever get it...

...Now I want to save him from the country.' ") What a moment it must have been in Washington when White's book first appeared...

...Nixon, you'll recall, was using the code words "law and order" as one of his big themes that year, but White went well beyond the code and beyond the purely political ramifications of the crime problem (though he didn't ignore the politics of crime, either...

...The planeload of reporters had a much better story than they had anticipated—a 'stunning victory,' to use the favored cliche...

...it was his 1960 book, after all, that had observed: "[Kennedy] asked Dave Powers to cook something and Powers fried him eggs in butter, offered him toast and jelly and served two glasses of milk, and the nominee went to bed...

...It occurred to me as I was rereading that chapter recently that the only other reporter who had as good a feel for how America was changing—though he approached it from a completely different direction—was Tom Wolfe...

...The Detail Detail The easy lesson Teddy White taught, of course, and the one everyone in the business understood instantly, is that there was more to a campaign than stump speeches, a couple of conventions, and a count of the votes at the end...

...but also tells us what it was about America in 1960 that allowed John Kennedy to become its president...

...As for those telling behind-thescenes anecdotes, Time's way of getting inside the campaign was to reprint whatever self-serving pap the press secretaries threw its way...

...He recalled for Crouse the scene in George McGovern's hotel suite immediately after McGovern had nailed down the Democratic nomination: "McGovern was like a fish in a goldfish bowl...

...And to these accusations, there was some truth...

...What has set White apart—then, and now—has been, first, his desire to give the election he was covering some larger, historical meaning, and, second, his belief that to tell the full story of a presidential campaign, one also has to tell some of the story of the country at large...

...Details are necessary all right, but sometimes the frantic search for them reveals how thoughtless political reporting has become...

...Teddy White, they now thought (again, according to Crouse), was "a pathetic, written-out hack"—too nice to his subjects, too coddled by people in power, too easily conned, too eager to curry favor with presidents and prospective presidents...

...One has to do with the minutiae of the campaign itself and the strategies and memos—the little details that lodge themselves in the reader's memory...

...That lesson is that there is more to great political reporting than simply telling stories...

...I remember thinking at the time (having just graduated from journalism school, full of the appropriate fire in my belly) that this was a sin for which Teddy White deserved to be roundly flogged...

...And what anecdotes they have that are new are often a good deal less than telling...

...There were three different network crews at different times...

...reporters had changed too...

...Elizabeth Drew, who makes some attempt to address the larger issues, is constantly trying to sneak her message through the seams of the story she's telling, as if she feels that actually saying what she thinks about something would be a crime against literature...

...In 1960, for instance, White spent 40 pages, in a chapter titled "Retrospect on Yesterday's Future," lingering over the recently released census...

...Both themes have been there from the very first book in the series...

...It happened to be the easiest lesson, and one they learned all too well...

...White describes Kennedy walking on the beach with his father—and he also describes the state of the nation's public school system...

...He tries to go into the bedroom with Fred Dutton to go over the list of vice presidents...

...Their account of the forum is straightforward and workman like it also borders on the surreal...

...And if this penchant for gathering details has turned into a mania, somewhat out of control (more on this later), you still have to concede that we're better off than we were before White ended our collective innocence...

...Then in 1968, his subject was crime and violence in America...

...Why this side of White's work never generated much excitement within the profession is hard to understand, but it surely wasn't any fault of White's...

...I had reported...

...9 to 10 o'clock...

...What rises now from my notes and recollections of 1956," he notes sadly, "is indigestible...

...Instead, they offer a classic case study of reporters who have learned White's first lesson but not his second, and their book is the poorer for it...

...The census, of all things...

...What Germond and Witcover offer in Blue Smoke and Mirrors is details, many of which give the serious student a deeper understanding of the 1980 campaign...

...It's got numbers, of course, but it also has one of the best explanations you'll ever read of how the country was changing demographically during Eisenhower's ad minittration: the exodus to the suburbs, the growth of the large public and private bureaucracies, the explosion of white-collar jobs in America, and so on...

...But then go to the library and look up some preTeddy campaign coverage, and suddenly it's clear...

...Yet the title was the only thing boring about that chapter...

...It has its share of inside skinny and color, but it also adheres to the more traditional reporting of the day: the requisite interviews with all the announced candidates, gobs of speech coverage, and two chapters on the respective conventions that contain some behind-the-scenes reporting but not a lot...

...As the 1984 election approaches it is likely that most reporters will continue to avoid substantive examinations of what the candidates believe and how well they understand history and government, in part because the reporters themselves often lack such understanding...

...He also wanted to show how America was changing...

...This, alas, is the first cranky chapter to be found in The Making of the President series— White can't hide his resentment toward the hippies and the rioting blacks who dominated the news during that election campaign—but it is also full of good information...

...Any reporter young enough to have missed the pre-Teddy era is bound to be struck, upon reading The Making of the President 1960, by how tame it seems...

...Here's one fairly typical instance: "The motorcade sped away," they write, "leaving behind one member of the press pool notified late, Terrence Smith of The New York Times...

...Later that night he told his wife, McMahan, and another close adviser, James Cannon, 'It may not be possible to recover from this.' " A respected senator gets knocked out of a presidential race by 20 votes...

...Let me quote a bit of it to show you what I mean: "When the ballots were finally counted, George Bush had defeated Howard Baker 466 to 446...

...They didn't have to spend all their time during election season filing reports on the latest campaign speech...

...z-z-z-z-z...

...And of Iran, the country more than any other that symbolized America's new impotence...

...almost none of it will really inform...

...He also wanted to get at the real problems facing the country—whether the candidates were talking about those problems or not...

...But most people hadn't thought about it, and there was an inevitable loss of innocence...

...It turned out that people were really interested in all that information that had previously been labeled "For Cognoscenti Only...

...His raw-rubbed nerves jangled all the more with his determination to win...

...It is a country, he writes, full of "wild people" living in "a world where civilization as we have known it is ending...

...He does not try to disguise his larger points, or hint at them between the lines, or let them seep up, implicit but unsaid, through the cracks in the narrative...

...A full year before the election...

...Yet his second thoughts fell on deaf ears (remember—he was a "pathetic, written-out hack...

...Some of this will be entertaining...

...White was not guiltless in the matter...

...Missed Connections There's no better way to appreciate the richness of White's political observations than to read closely the works of those who consider themselves heirs to his throne...

...As Germond and Witcover point out in their introduction to Blue Smoke and Mirrors, White was the first reporter to explain to readers that candidates had written, long-term strategies well in advance of the first primary...

...Had it been too heavily weighted in one direction or the other, I suspect today it would seem either too dull on the one hand, or too ephemeral on the other...

...When I first began this campaign,' he said grimly, 'I just wanted to beat Nixon...

...There is no heir in sight...

...How else indeed...

...On one level, the details help explain what is going on in the campaign—what the strategies are and how they are being played out, what the candidates are thinking and feeling, and so on...

...Total Coverage It is the second lesson of Teddy White's books that has turned out to be the harder one to grasp, a lesson that even today is beyond the reach of most campaign reporters...

...And this has turned out to be a slow season for the genre...

...We've come a long way since then...

...In certain respects America in Search of Itself is also a cranky and annoying work...

...and both offer lessons for the hundreds of other political journalists who have covered presidential campaigns in the ensuing 22 years...

...In other words, he always had one eye on the big picture...

...To reread The Making of the President series is to quickly realize that Teddy White never met a presidential aspirant he didn't like...

...and all of us are observing him, taking notes like mad, getting all the little details, which I think I invented as a method of reporting and which I now sincerely regret...

...both have been equally important to White's success as a political journalist...

...Some 22 years after the fact, both the details of the campaign and the larger themes still hold our interest...

...In fact, it is precisely because the milk-and-Total approach has become such a staple of newspaper and magazine campaign reporting that a book has to do more...

...White was interested in more than the Quemoys and Matsus...

...They instead will focus on the details of each candidate's organization, speculate on who will win the next primary, and stay ever vigilant for the inevitable gaffes that attend any campaign...

...The president had already boarded...

...Germond and Witcover are hardly the only guilty parties...

...Looking back, this seems like a quibble...

...In 1960 John Stack's employer, Time magazine, managed to turn one of the most exciting stretch drives in American political history into snoozeville...

...It doesn't make the process itself any less crazy, but at least it makes it more understandable...

...All over town, scales falling from the eyes as it suddenly dawned on the nation's corps of political reporters that . . . could it really be true...

...There were details and anecdotes that could be woven into the fabric of campaign reporting—that told volumes more than speech reporting ever could about the character of the candidate and the shape of his campaign...

...He just comes right out and makes them, in plain, unvarnished language...

...campaigns for a quarter of a century," writes White in this last installment of his campaign reports, "and had seen what was, in retrospect, one of the great periods of change in American history...

...The Associated Press told its people that "when Teddy White's book comes out there shouldn't be one single story in that book we haven't reported ourselves...

...their work didn't have to be boring...

...In 1972, White again took on the census and successfully wrestled it to the ground...

...But an even more important reason reveals itself when you look at how White's contemporaries have sought to emulate some of his techniques, and how they've chosen to ignore others...

...So Teddy White was always interested in more than the Quemoys and Matsus, the $1,000-to-everyfamily promises, the "lust in my heart" faux pas, and all the other two-day "issues" that ebb and flow as part of the rhythm of any campaign...

...The still photographers kept coming in in groups of five...

...This is partly because Teddy White is a more gifted writer than the others...

...Here, Teddy White can scarcely contain himself...

...But in the modern era, everybody from The New York Times to The San Jose Mercury is after those very same details and is busily printing them during the campaign...

...To him, the beginning of the end came in 1956, when America, "moved more by moralities than by realities," refused to back the French and British in the Suez dispute...

...whether it's Stacks's once-overlightly recap of the campaign's major events or Drew's accounts of major speeches that include the auditorium's interior design, this eagerness for irrelevant detail constantly reveals itself...

...He explains the attraction of Richard Nixon to the people living in the farm belt, but then goes on to explain the state of the farm economy...

...watching him work on his acceptance speech, poor bastard...

...Harrumph...

...that in itself is a tribute to White's skill as a writer...

...He wanted to explain the issues that were uppermost on people's minds, to show how the country was changing and what those changes meant to us as a nation...

...in 1968 there were 17 such post-election tomes...

...Baker himself was aware of how serious a loss he had suffered...

...We all know what happened after that...

...So quite often, Germond and Witcover's telling anecdotes are bound to give a reader a distinct sense of deja vu...

...To get an idea of what Germond and Witcover could have done with this same material, we need only to turn to Teddy White...

...There, in America in Search of Itself, we learn how the country got to the point where something as trivial as the Maine presidential forum could knock out a Howard Baker...

...That something is—or ought to be—thought...

...If anything, the milk-andTotal approach to campaign reporting is even more a part of the culture of the press today than it was a decade ago...

...8 to 9 o'clock...

...By the time you've finished the convention chapters, you've begun asking (or at least I had): This is the book that started a revolution...

...Both are worthy goals...

...To be sure, most of the details and anecdotes took place behind the scenes, but thanks to Teddy White, it was okay now to write what was going on behind the scenes...

...White's latest book, awkwardly titled America in Search of Itself—The Making of the President 1956-1980 (Harper & Row, $15.95), stands on the shelf alongside at least a half dozen other books, all purporting to tell "the inside story" of the 1980 campaign...

...In their quest for details Germond and Witcover sometimes fail to make any distinction between the important and the frivolous...

...The tragedy of political reporting in our time is that White's successors—and this includes Germond and Witcover, Stacks, and (to a lesser degree) Drew— learned only one of the lessons Teddy White was teaching...

...But then again, one of my favorite moments in any Teddy White book is that point where he puts the balancing act aside for a moment and devotes an entire chapter to some issue he considers important...

...He tells what John Kennedy did the day after he was elected ("The movies began with an action picture with John Wayne, and since that satisfied no one, they interrupted it...

...From reading that, you get some idea of how primaries have snowballed to the point where they're out of control, and how non-primary events like straw polls and caucuses have also become important in the weeding-out process...

...Up to a point, there was nothing wrong with the approach...

...But until they learn to heed White's second lesson, until they realize that caring about the country is as important as writing down the details, until they learn that history is more than what happened in the last campaign—until that day comes, Teddy White will remain the king of the hill...

...It seems crazy—it is crazy—but Germond and Witcover, and the rest of the press who reported it at the time, are perfectly willing to accept the event on face value...

...immediately recognized as a landmark event in the history of political journalism—still stands as the best book ever written about an American political campaign...

...Excitement...

...They wanted more...

...But they don't...

...Nixon winged ahead in early bird returns...

...So ingrained was this attitude that even the wire services—who practically pride themselves on the blandness of their reporting—were on the team...

...In their quest for details, Germond and Witcover sometimes fail to distinguish between the important and the frivolous...