Searching for America
GEWEN, BARRY
SPRING BOOKS SEARCHING FOR AMERICA BY BARRY GEWEN AS A REPORTER, Theodore H. White is a public treasure. A generation ago, he had the brilliance—a Henry Luce kind of brilliance—to see that a...
...Along with many other commentators, White considers the 1980 election a watershed...
...Although White sometimes appears to accept the first of these interpretations, most of his remarks place him in the second camp...
...The volume glitters with striking tableaux—It is rich in revealing anecdotes and irresistible, often troubling facts: 1980, White tells us, was the first election year when congressional candidates raised more money from political action groups than from individuals...
...Intended as a summary and overview of 20 years' experience, it carries White, so knowledgable about the minutiae of the political mechanism, away from his area of expertise to larger questions of national goals and directions...
...He is too much of an old-fashioned liberal for that, too ardent an admirer of John F. Kennedy (a reader might even close this book suspecting White believes Reagan to be a bit of a dolt...
...On these his writing is less precise, his arguments less persuasive...
...Problems seem to overwhelm us because the old liberal ways of coping with troubles no longer work, and appropriate solutions for new situations are not at hand...
...Book clubs are featuring it as a main or alternate selection...
...America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President 1956-1980 (Harper & Row, 465 pp., $15.95)displays White's rare virtues to the full...
...The work that resulted, American Journey (Simon and Schuster, 399 pp., $15.95), has been remarkably well received...
...In short, it's a bore...
...For them, the 1980 election was a signal that Americans, after years of incompetence and humiliation, had finally had enough, and were ready for a restoration of the values that made the nation great...
...Not that he is a neoconservative, or has swallowed Reaganomics whole...
...Not only has he written indispensable primers of American politics and of living history, he has created superb dramas of personalities in conflict for the highest stakes, grasping for power in Shakespearean struggles of maneuver and intrigue...
...They spread out over weeks and months, ebbing and flowing in rhythms that were lost to the most devout followers of the New York Times or Washington Post...
...But American Journey has no drive, no direction, no necessity to it, because the governing idea is so arbitrary...
...LIKE WHITE, Richard Reeves is a journalist who went in search of the country...
...It is hypnotically readable, ice-cream smooth...
...In this environment, voters reach out in their discontent for any change from the unsatisfactory status quo...
...Despite its title, the dominant topic is the 1980 Presidential race, and on his specialty there is simply no one who can match White...
...Nor is the territory between goodwill per se and the excesses of goodwill adequately charted...
...some Arab embassies keep tabs on which television reporters and producers are Jewish...
...And the primaries, White argues with considerable force, have become a monstrous, jerry-built contraption, "the most vulnerable point in the American process...
...Precisely when the ship of state went awry depends on who is doing the talking...
...What unites those who hold this position—many Republicans, the Moral Majority, neoconservatives—is the belief that we can solve our problems if only we return to the true path...
...The jumble of pre-election elections has increased the power of the media to focus attention on particular candidates while ignoring others, and White's history of the emergence of television to a position of dominance in our political system equals his dour assessment of the nominating process...
...He leaves a gap in our national literature...
...Certainly, many of White's specific complaints are warranted, especially as they pertain to politics (the comments on economics, on the other hand, are not entirely on the mark...
...What other writer could discover magnificent theater in the behind-the-scenes wrangling of faceless bureaucrats like Edwin Meese and John Sears, Stuart Eizen-stat and Patrick Caddell...
...Today, image makers and psephologists have replaced political bosses, the televised Presidential debates have greater influence on voter opinion than the two summer conventions...
...Whereas White built his volume around a central event of overarching importance, Reeves employs a gimmick, a retracing of Tocqueville's travels across the U.S., as a clothesline upon which to hang his opinions...
...He interviewed a smorgasbord of people, some of whom, inevitably, have interesting things to say and seem like they would be worth spending an evening with...
...Every reader of the "Making of the President" series owes White an enormous debt of gratitude for recognizing this, and his announcement that he is abandoning the project—understandable after all these years—inevitably brings a twinge of regret...
...According to the former, ours is an inchoate age...
...Pursued incautiously, or disembodied, goodwill can get us into a lot of trouble, as most of us know now if we didn't in 1960, but White should have been more careful than he is about criticizing the impulse itself—the foundation, after all, for everything else...
...Some events could not justly be covered on a daily basis...
...They might be called the Closed Chapter Theory and the Wrong Turn Theory...
...His description of the shambles quotas made of the 1980 Democratic Party is devastating, beginning with his simple reproduction of the formula used for determining convention delegates: A = 1/2 (SDV '68, '76/101,276,222 + SEV/539...
...The wrong turning he perceives is extremely abstract: the triumphof goodwill over realism...
...Literature is the proper word, too...
...Five hundred words or more...
...Of the numerous important stories that did not comfortably fit the Procrustean demands of the workaday press, none was more intractable than our quadrennial main even t, the Presidential election...
...So inspired does the mere idea of the books appear today that one might easily overlook White's contribution to them as a writer...
...Of the straight forward mechanics of politics, the nuts and bolts that hold the system together, we have no better analyst than White...
...A turning point was 1963, the year more Americans began acquiring their news through television than through newspapers...
...through his skills White has raised journalism to the level of artistry...
...For all of its intelligence, talent and sheer professionalism, however, the book is not an undiluted success...
...There is talk of democracy, race, Catholicism, values, the power of the press, how it was then compared to how it is now, whether the majority is tyrannizing the minority or vice versa...
...Absolutely none of this is what the Founding Fathers imagined for the United States, but it is what we have, and anyone wishing to know where we go from here will have to read America in Search of Itself just to know where "here" is...
...Others sound like setups for instant high school themes: "Potter Stewart states, 'In my lifetime the courts have replaced the frontier.' What does he mean by this...
...Reviews have been generous in their praise...
...It is exemplified, he suggests, by the muddle of the primaries and, most tellingly, by the emergence of quotas in American life: "One movement in the grand transformation slowly developed, year by year, into a monster whose shadow hangs over all American politics today: the division of Americans by race and national origins into groups, each entitled to special privileges...
...The Wrong Turn Theory is closer to Reagan's own views...
...Not any reporter could have brought the volumes off...
...He traces their growth from the pioneer-ing Estes Kefauver campaign in 1956, when the Tennessee Senator contrived to pull the Democratic Presidential nomination out of the smoke-filled rooms, through the arcane reforms of the Democratic Party after the 1968 debacle, to the present exfoliation of rules and regulations across 50 states that has turned the nominating process into an incomprehensible mess: "There was no longer any way of making a simple generalization about how Americans chose their candidates for the Presidency____No school, no textbook, no course of instruction, could tell young Americans, who would soon be voting, how their system worked...
...Reagan's triumph, far from signifying the endorsement of his ideas or of any ideas, was merely an impotent squawk of frustration at the lack of clear purpose in turbulent times...
...Yet the notion of the wrong turn, so popular these days, seems profoundly misguided, resting on futile and sentimental hopes about recapturing some mythical Better—if not Golden—Age...
...Do you agree...
...At the risk of oversimplifying a complex subject, I would say there are two prevailing interpretations of Ronald Reagan's victory, both based on the belief that the liberal / New Deal era has come to an end...
...Consequently, every time White rises to do battle against idealists and reformers, scarcely pausing to make necessary distinctions, one is reminded of the line from Kant: " It is impossible to conceive of anything in the world or out of it which can be considered good without qualification, except a good will...
...Frankly, its virtues elude me...
...In White's case, the "realism" he would have us return to is never spelled out: Apparently, it lies somewhere in an area bounded by JFK and Richard Daley...
...Where he warns of a possible breakdown we should take the problem seriously...
...Reeves also quotes large amounts of Tocqueville and smaller amounts of his companion Beaumont...
...SPRING BOOKS SEARCHING FOR AMERICA BY BARRY GEWEN AS A REPORTER, Theodore H. White is a public treasure...
...The New Yorker ran lengthy excerpts of it in two recent issues...
...Somewhere in the past, America veered off from its destined course, landing us in our present fix...
...Who else could make us wish to know more about former Reagan adviser Martin Anderson...
...The difficulty is deciding what kind of watershed it was...
...A generation ago, he had the brilliance—a Henry Luce kind of brilliance—to see that a journalist could alter and enlarge his contribution to general awareness by expanding his time-frame...
...the President, for instance, seems to feel it was in either the 1930s or the 1960s...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 10
