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...
...But that may also be his greatest weakness...
...White couldn't be expected to like Nixon, of course, but his adulation of Kennedy seemed excessive...
...The Communists were very nice to White...
...Imagine, if you can, landing alone in a country like China, with both a war against the Japanese and a civil war raging...
...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...
...Politics, in the process of becoming History, is the story of a handful of men reaching for the levers of power...
...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...
...In the chapters on China, easily the most fascinating in this book, the problem becomes central...
...It is easy for those of us who work at comfortably limited jobs and paint on small canvases to fault White...
...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...
...True, he may also have helped to make it...
...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...
...The pattern repeats itself...
...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...
...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...
...That may be why White, surprisingly, writes of MacArthur with at least semi-approval...
...but he saw more of them than any other Asian reporter of his time...
...But the old questions remain...
...White may have looked at some of the wrong parts...
...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...
...His canvases, after all, are huge ones...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The theory of history as the story of great men is a venerable one...
...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...
...White set out to search for history, and ended by writing it...
...White did not particularly like Douglas Mac Arthur...
...but MacArthur, who unlike Chiang possessed a highly developed sense of public relations, was nice to him...
...You can see, however, why he managed to enrage so many people...
...Yet, despite what may be a weakness- his emotionalism-White is undoubtedly a great reporter...
...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...
...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...
...To be sure, it is personal journalism...
...But in such a situation, reporting and interpretation must necessarily be synecdochical...
...Among the Nationalists, White felt unloved...
...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...
...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...
...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 the best journalism is always personal, and is always a good deal more than journalism...
...So he hopped to it...
...and the larger the canvas and the greater the detail, the easier it is to isolate the flaws...
...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...
...some might even say they conned him...
...But to focus on the flaws is to miss the depth and breadth of White's work...
...His Washington memoir, Fall In and Cheer, was published by Doubleday in January...
...Had we not waffled in our support, might Chiang not have pulled it off...
...Maps are worthless...
...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 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...
...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...
...You can observe only certain parts and from those parts you must arrive at some apprehension of the whole...
...Most reporters find it a full-time job to cover the courthouse in Akron...
...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...
...Chou En-lai, on the other hand, did drink tea with him, as did the other Communists in Yenan...
...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...
...Then there is the Kennedy-Nixon relationship...
...One of White's great strengths as a reporter-historian lies in his ability to bring the men he writes about alive...
...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...
...Yet you're expected to report the whole thing...
...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...
...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...
...at Richard Nixon and mad at himself...
...One may quarrel with some of his interpretations...
...The scene with Jacqueline Kennedy is powerful...
...And nothing could make liberals and the American Left madder than that...
...Difficult...
...Communications and transportation are either primitive or non-existent...
...Even worse, the corollary of this disenchantment was a grudging growth of respect for Richard Nixon...
...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...
...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...
...Therefore one must seek out the leaders as men...
...In the end, White has to be seen as a man of feeling...
...among the Communists in Yenan, where the real action was, he was one of the boys...
...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...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
