America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President 1956-1980
White, Theodore H.
B 0 0 K R E V 1 E W S A few months ago I watched a lot of people (the count varied from 200,000 to 800,000 depending on the counter's politics) milling around Manhattan, chanting peace...
...I learned for the first time that William Marcy Tweed, the most famous and corrupt of the Tammany sachems, was a WASP...
...Certainly there has been no such thing as a German vote, not even in Cincinnati or Milwaukee, for at least a century...
...Carter is a decent man, if riot a strong one, and no doubt his religious belief helped make him so, but when his fundamentalism collided with his liberal principles, it came out second...
...Not one to waste good material, he' has rimed through his files and pieced out chapters with swift sketches of eminent politicians of two or three decades ago who never quite made the White House, his notes on the civil rights movement of the sixties, and a short history of Tammany Hall, all very readable and instructive...
...for not since the disaster of 1948 have their predictions been seriously at fault, but they add some excitement, too, for the electorate has become so volatile that a candidate can blow a lead in a few days...
...The premise is sound, the conclusion is not...
...About half of America in Search of Itself is in fact simply The Making of the President--1980, in the usual format...
...Moreover, democracy has other advantages than being less inefficient than dictatorship...
...White calls "old stock" Americans, who probably still make up a majority of the population...
...The most discouraging aspect of the show was that in all probability not one in a hundred of the demonstrators was consciously implementing Soviet policy...
...White thinks that the facts of American political life in the 1980 campaign were as different from those of 1956 as the latter were from the Lincoln-Douglas debates...
...TV is also responsible for the rise of the "image =makers," mostly recruited" from the upper levels of the advertising industry...
...I recently lost a chance to acquire for a dime a volume entitled "Paul V. McNutt: Portrait of a Statesman...
...Sprinkled throughout the book are acute observations...
...The men seem to me generally more likable than the women, although Connecticut never had a more popular governor than the late Ella Grasso, who preferred to think of herself not as the state's first woman governor but as itsfirst Italian one...
...Most of them are by definition likable men and women...
...The seams show where material of only marginal relevance, but too good to discard, has been stitched into the main fabric...
...The balanced ticket--one Irishman, one Jew, one Italian--is still part of conventional political wisdom in New York...
...White's reporting is that he actually likes politicians...
...John Lindsay was a loser because he overestimated the importance of the nonwhite vote and cultivated it even when black interests differed widely from those of Italians and Jews...
...they regularly support Teddy Kennedy, although few of them can like his left-liberal opinions...
...Of all the political circuses the best is the quadrennial election of the President of the United States, with freak and other side shows if the action in the main tent fails to hold Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...One reason for the readability and knowledgeability of Mr...
...Young, it may be remarked in passing, was an aspect of another Carter policy which, though it offered short-term advantages, hurt his chances in the long run--the introduction of affirmative action and (high) quotas for blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and women in appointments to executive and judicial office...
...A large majority of Jews contin/~ed to vote Democratic (where possible for Jewish Democrats), but more of them THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 29 defected in 1980 than at any time since FDR's first election...
...Balance does not, however, require a black or a Puerto Rican, probably because so small a percentage of them--particularly as compared with Jews, of whom 80 to 90 percent will vote in any election--bother to register and vote...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982...
...White devotes a longish chapter and parts of several others to the enormous changes wrought by television since 1956--as he points out, a great boon to a professional actor like Ronald Reagan...
...Slogan-chanting is easier and more emotionally satisfying...
...so longer Gerald Ford would have won...
...Whether they will find the political institutions of the United States more congenial and comprehensible than its language is a question only time can answer...
...But Mr...
...Despite John O'Hara's pronouncement that "the Irish are unassimilable," they seem to be going the same way, through intermarriage, material success, and the virtual disappearance of prejudice against them...
...And even after that performance, Carter seemed close to tears as he fired him...
...In the future it seems probable that the only minority groups whose voting pattern will differ significantly from that of other Americans will be blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos, i.e., those most in need of public assistance and least concerned about taxes...
...It is interesting, if dispiriting, to reflect on what William Bernbach or Gerald Rafshoon would have done to Abraham Lincoln...
...White also goes back and sums up the campaigns of 1956 and 1976, both omitted from the earlier canon...
...Churchill and Roosevelt were abler leaders than Hitler and Stalin, let alone Mussolini...
...As White, himself a Bostonian, points out, however, the Boston Irish are still a powerful ethnic vote...
...The descendants of the last great wave of Caucasian immigration (Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs), although rapidly moving into the suburbs and the mainstream of American culture, still tend to vote for politicians with names like their own, although in 1980 many of them abandoned their traditional allegiance to the memory of Roosevelt II...
...White places great emphasis on his born-again, fundamentalist Christianity, his belief that every word in the Bible, including its account of creation, is literally true...
...The same thing is true of Scandinavians...
...it is like the circus no longer selling pictures of the fat lady...
...Except for its account of the 1980 campaign, the book is thus somewhat disjointed...
...It is, of course, possible to hold rational opinions on science, business, or politics, while fervently believing religious dogmas that contradict everything the believer knows in other compartments of his mind...
...Honest elections at regular intervals control popular discontent better than the Gestapo/ KGB...
...Looking at this sample of the demos, I found myself wondering how democracy could possibly survive in a world of ruthless despots...
...He likes them all, from Teddy Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, and writes about them with affection, with the exceptions of Richard M. Nixon and the late Joe McCarthy...
...he downplayed the low state of human rights in the Soviet Union by saying that there were hundreds or thousands of political prisoners in the United States...
...Statistics showing the disadvantages under which "blacks" labor are distorted by failure to distinguish between the two black communities: Liberal politicians such as LyndonJohnson and Jimmy Carter were largely motivated by compassion for the'black underclass, but the money and programs intended to get the slum-dwellers out of the hopeless cycle of welfare moms breeding welfare children benefited largely the educated, upward-mobile blacks, who got the government and foundation jobs...
...The book's title is more or less justified by chapters on the great changes which in the last quarter century have occurred in the composition of the American electorate--e.g., the declining importance of the ethnic block votes, deliverable by urban bosses like the late Richard Daley--and in the rules of the American game of politics...
...Evidence of the vast entertainment value of the show is the fact that Theodore White, a very knowledgeable political reporter, has made a career out of writing best-sellers about "The Making of the President"--1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, and now 1980...
...There is no love lost between him and the Moral Majority...
...Iran was almost as difficult to ignore, especially since the President at first seems to have thought it would work to his political advantage...
...Carter never resolved, and perhaps never realized, the dilemma created by the conflict between equality of opportunity, where merit is the sole criterion, and equality of result, where race and sex become important factors...
...That holy man, who apparently did not realize what a useful propagandist Clark would have been, refused to let him in the country...
...There is also a good deal about pollsters in the book...
...They take some of the fun out of an election...
...in the United Nations he voted--apparently without informing the President and the secretary of s t a t e - - t o deny Israel sovereignty over Jerusalem...
...the audience's attention...
...These were all interesting pop art forms, and I regret their disappearance...
...bumper stickers, and campaign biographies...
...No comment on the first is necessary...
...Suppose the whole nation could have heard and seen William Jennings Bryan deliver the cross-of-gold speech...
...White discusses at some length the question of whether ethnic votes are still important, and seems to stand on both sides of the question...
...B 0 0 K R E V 1 E W S A few months ago I watched a lot of people (the count varied from 200,000 to 800,000 depending on the counter's politics) milling around Manhattan, chanting peace slogans, carrying placards, listening to-rock music and left-wing rhetoric, in the simple-minded belief that, if they could only shout loudly enough and turn the rock decibels up high enough, the danger of a nuclear war would somehow be conjured away...
...But it is hard to imagine a graduate of the United States Naval Academy (near the top of his class, at that) believing that the Earth is flat and square and harder to imagine a strong opponent of racism taking literally the teaching of Genesis 9: 22, 25-27 that the descendants of Ham shall be the servants of the descendants of Shem and Japheth, verses which before the Civil War were often cited to prove that Negro slavery was of divine institution...
...White justly compares him), he was too virtuous and pious to appreciate fully the capacity for mendacity and ruthless brutality possessed by some of the people with whom he had to deal...
...Ed Koch is a winner because he did not...
...Candidates must allocate most of their money to TV commercials, unless (as an incumbent President usually can) they are able to create genuine news, so that the piablicity is free...
...Nobody ever paused to consider that Eisenhower is a German name...
...I remain convinced that if the 1976 campaign had lasted a week or...
...TV probably accounts for the virtual extinction of campaign buttons (I myself can remember "Keep Cool with Coolidge" and "Who But Hoover...
...These elections also serve the function of the Roman circus, for they are absorbing entertainment for the masses, especially since the rise of TV...
...Perhaps, like the sainted Woodrow Wilson (to whom Mr...
...AMERICA IN SEARCH OF ITSELF: THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1956-1980 Theodore H. White / Harper & Row / $15.95 Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...As for Andy, the President stood for everything, merely wringing his hands occasionally, until the Ambassador to the United Nations violated a basic American policy by negotiating directly with the Palestine Liberation Organization and, when questioned, lied to the President and the secretary of state...
...But the vast majority of the human race is averse to hard, rational thinking...
...White is also one of the first to see the fallacy in generalizations about +Afro-Americans, to realize that there are two black communities, with very little in common and little liking for each other--the black upper and middle class and the black underclass with its crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancies, and enormous number of illegitimate births...
...I have already mentioned the decline of the machines and bosses...
...Carter entered the White House an unknown quantity to most people...
...Andy Young made James Watt look cautious and tactful...
...Carter did talk like that, but I think White exaggerates the depth of his religious belief...
...the descendants of German immigrants (except a few anachronisms like the Amish) have been so thoroughly fused in the melting pot as to be simply, along with WASPs, part of the homogeneous mass of what Mr...
...is Richard Ely Professor o fLaw at Yale Law School...
...he accused the British government of racism...
...But, as always, such gloomy reflections can be dispelled by remembering Winston Churchill's aphorism: "Democracy is the worst form of government imaginable, except all the others...
...His policy on the h'anian kidnapping of American diplomats, vacillating between appeasement and surrender and culminating in the payment of billions in ransom, was typified by his decision, shortly after the kidnapping, to send Ramsey Clark to Tehran to appeal to the Ayatollah's better nature...
...it created fear and anger in everyone except the really rich...
...when he left he was not much better understood...
...White correctly refers to "the cleavage in the black community-between those accepted and moving forward and those despised and ever more resentful...
...He said nice things about Communist Vietnam, about the presence of Cuban troops in Angola, about the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...White is one of the first to raise the thorny problems implicit in the fact that many of the new immigrants are nonwhite and illegal, not only unable to speak English but (unlike the old ethnics) not particularly anxious that they or their children learn to do so...
...Which brings me to the most interesting part of the book: White's description and analysis of the factors that licked Carter in 1980...
...I doubt that many of them, had they been asked, would have said that they believed their demonstration would have an effect on the governments of Russia, China, France, and the rest of the nuclear powers: They were simply too ignorant, and too muddleheaded, to think about the problem in any terms more complex than the undoubted fact that nuclear explosions are bad and that the United States must therefore abandon its arsenal of such weapons...
...Carter's laandling of these large and small crises was pathetic and, at times, comic...
...He handled inflation with the least ineptitude, by doing substantially nothing...
...Many of these appointees were competent, but some were not...
...It was only after his time that the Wigwam was taken over by a succession of Irish pols, such as Big Tim Sullivan and Richard Croker, who according to the old New York Sun once had his portrait painted "with his hands in his own pockets...
...They were, in approximate order of importance, inflation, Iran, and Andrew Young...
Vol. 15 • October 1982 • No. 10
