The View from Above
GLASS, ANDREW J.
The View from above The Making of the President 1972 By Theodore H. White atheneum. 391 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by andrew J. Glass Every four years, during the Presidential campaign season, Teddy...
...What severity may be found in White's book is directed mainly at George McGovern...
...This is, at bottom, a European way of viewing the role of the press, but it is one with which White is comfortable...
...Once, when I was working as a reporter for the Washington Post, I covered a feud between the then Jacqueline Kennedy and one of her late husband's biographers, William Manchester...
...Of course, Watergate has forced White to alter somewhat his image of Nixon...
...McGovern's successful march to the nomination White sees as the result of the fossilization of the Democratic party's political philosophy...
...But he was paid-handsomely-with fresh insights, enabling him, in his current book, to write of the President: "There hung over him the wary loneliness of a man always excluded from the company of those he admired...
...He equates the publishers of the nation's few great newspapers to owners of fine racing stables, grooming their highly strung, if thoroughbred, Washington correspondents for the annual Pulitzer Sweepstakes...
...I asked the well-informed Teddy White whether he could be of help in unraveling the Manchester affair...
...Cruising downstream with White, we get authoritative perspectives on such tangled matters as McGovern's convention strategy...
...He views the best reporters as personal activists and "creators of the news," locked in a power struggle with the President and his beleaguered courtiers...
...To hammer home his point, the reporter chooses the testimony of a seasoned political observer-richard Nixon...
...White has an unusual amount of access to those in the know, and they tend to be even more free and honest with him than with each other, possibly because of the innate respect politicians show people they regard as historians...
...and the ruthlessly efficient vote-getting machine fabricated by the humanoid engineers at the Committee for the Reelection of the President...
...although Nixon and White support each other in depreciating the Great Society, the evidence is a lot less clear than their sweeping denouncements would allow...
...Moreover, he appears to have come to terms in his own mind with his book's main protagonists, Richard Nixon and George McGovern...
...For instance, isn't it important that some of the black "bureaucrats" who got a big leg up in society while doling out cap dollars might otherwise not have broken through so quickly into middle-class status...
...the Eagleton affair...
...But the real measure of The Making of the President 1972 lies in White's unerring ability to get to the nub of the issue and inform us, after the shot and shell have fallen away, what the struggle was all about...
...The flaw fissured from the top down...
...the candidate of radical reform had merely to step over its bones...
...He regretfullv told me he could not, since he was playing an insider's role as an adviser to Mrs...
...But in the end, White concluded that McGovern was unable to put his full faith and trust in a single administrative manager, a fatal flaw in Presidential politics...
...at bottom, though, White does not view Watergate as the inevitable result of Nixon's thoughts and actions...
...One senses that before the campaign began White liked and even respected the Senator...
...Reviewed by andrew J. Glass Every four years, during the Presidential campaign season, Teddy White climbs aboard the lead press bus, trails the candidates through the grueling quota of media markets, neatly checks off each political pit stop on his mimeographed schedule, and generally shares in the sardonic and largely unpunishable banter of the traveling re-portorial chorus...
...White is prepared to brew sage personal advice out of the book-writing process as an election unfolds...
...The scandal blossomed into full flower just as he was going over his galley proofs, and it is clear that he quickly had to paint a glossy new coat over his previously drawn portrait of a leader overcome by "a personal melancholy which added wisdom to his reflections...
...after Nixon was defeated for the California governorship in 1962 and moved to New York, however, White sought out the humbled enemy, inviting him to dinner...
...Last year, for example, Richard Nixon gave White a warm reception...
...The result of White's diligent efforts is splendid political journalism...
...the outcome, and the reasons for what transpired were molded long before the votes were counted...
...During a meeting last March, the President told White that he had wiped the antipoverty program off the Federal roster after discovering that 85 per cent of the $2.3 billion spent on the community action program (cap) "had gone to the bureaucrats who ran it," and only 15 per cent had gone to the poor...
...He merely fills up notebook after notebook with his daily observations...
...at that time, Nixon's stock wasn't even being traded on the political market, and White may simply have been seeking to atone for past journalistic sins...
...This was a distinct asset for the Democratic nominee...
...the Salinger affair, in which McGovern sent Pierre Salinger to negotiate with the Hanoi Communists, only to disavow him in the finest Mission Impossible tradition when things got hot...
...If, at this point, White's judgment fails him, it is only because he, unlike the President, is too rational a man to be a born hater...
...and each evening, wherever these political circuses pitch their tents, he inevitably seeks out the major performers and their trainers for a private chat...
...Yet, unlike his journalistic colleagues, White has no pressing deadlines to fulfill, no film pouch that must meet the courier plane, no editors demanding to know how this or that state's voting pattern will emerge on Election Day...
...members of the regular White House press corps thought themselves lucky the few times they felt the prop wash from the President's helicopter in their faces...
...White's manner of examining the various interrelated aspects of the political landscape has ripened and matured over the years, and consequently his account is less romantic and theatrical than when he began dogging the travels of John F. Kennedy in 1959...
...Kennedy and for Life, which had entered an unsuccessful bid for the serial rights to Manchester's book...
...he guarded his hurts...
...In this book, he has again set a high standard for others to follow, if they can...
...as White puts it: "The beautiful Liberal Idea of the previous half-century had grown old and hardened into a Liberal Theology which terrified millions of its old clients...
...There was no foreseeable political reward...
...he had taken the McGovern movement quite seriously at a time that other big-league reporters were dismissing it as a poor joke...
...He catches their underlying assets and failings while reflecting at length upon the spirit that each evoked...
...In 1960, White, a Kennedy confidant, did a hatchet job on Richard Nixon...
...White also accepts and develops the Nixonian analysis of the press corps...
...as a deep-channeled river, the election of 1972 flowed through its various tributaries to the wide delta of the Nixon Middle...
...Still, if White seems occasionally to tilt toward the White House view, he has nonetheless written the definitive account of the campaign...
...There were five, six, seven or more major plans for winning the election, which is natural in any national headquarters," White reports...
...His 1972 chronicle is the fourth of the series and, I think, the best of the lot...
...Only no two of them fitted together...
...In this volume, as in the others, the nuggets are all there, ripe and juicy as ever...
...and he does so in a reasoned and reasonable manner...
Vol. 56 • September 1973 • No. 17
