The Old Pro and the Comeback Kid

...He’s like Wayne Morris or John Garfield in those old boxing movies, sluggers who got in the habit of taking dives...

...1 recognize now that I also consciously withdrew from a reportorial area of intense past interest to me-arms and defense, weaponry and combat...

...The archival approach bled stories of any trace of life...

...Having risked their lives in the cold and mud of Europe or the heat and mud of the Pacific, they wanted a safe harbor...

...Stillwell’s diaries...

...At first the impact was felt only in the columns of magazines...

...The weaknesses of the movement were apparent from the beginning...

...It’s particularly hard as one grows older and as it becomes increasingly painful to face the fact that large parts of one’s life may have been misspent or that truly serious mistakes were made...

...It began with John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published in 1946, and was based heavily on interviews with participants in the events described...

...Just when you thought he was washed up (remember The Making qf’ the President 1972, where he missed all his opportunities to get the Watergate story), he picked himself off the canvas with Breach uf’ Faith and now scores a genuine triumph in /n Search qf’ Histor...

...1 know that from then on and for years I deliberately ignored the dynamics of foreign policy and defense because too much danger lurked there...

...and only four articles on Vietnam...

...What was Charles Peters is editor-in-chief qf The Washington Monthly...

...The other major flaw was a tendency to sentimentalize, to be too kind to the interviewee-(if movies were made of these books, an amazing number of their key sources would have to be played by Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart)-out of gratitude for his help or out of a desire to preserve a source, or simply because the kind of people who enjoy extensive interviewing often hate to hurt other people’s feelings...

...The accounts of the interviewees’ experiences, quoted from living speech, had an immediacy, a believability, an impact that had been impossible to achieve when history had to rely on embalmed prose as its source...

...H avi ng been persecuted -almost denied security clearance-because of his truthful reporting from China in the forties, he chose the safe grounds of Europe and the Marshall plan in the fifties, where unlike China, objective reporting would please the establishment...

...We might have avoided the deaths in Korea-if you’re in your late forties now, a few of your friends lie there today-for White knew the Chou En-lai, who, in the late 1940s, was desperately t r y i n g to bring the reasonable men in his camp together with the reasonable men in our government...

...Collier’s, even though it required White to do some cotton-candy stories-White reminds one that for people of his generation to manage to stay in journalism as he did, to be permitted by the system to function in a job he liked, and to make a lot of money at the same time was the greatest victory in life one could hope for.The beauty of Teddy White is that he now realizes what happened to him...

...The rest didn’t want trouble, they wanted the comfortable life-and soon Teddy White joined them...

...The MacArthur whose planes were destroyed on the ground at Clark Field and whose troops were surprised and routed by the Chinese Communists was the same man who brought democracy to Japan and a victory at lnchon that has to rank as one of the most brilliant in military history...

...Then in the fifties came two popular histories of World War I1 that were based largely on interviews-John Toland’s Battle: The Sror.l* ofthe Bulge and Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Da.i...

...But a third -of the way through his book Manchester convinces us that they were wrong and bores us as he heaps proof upon proof thereafter...

...Here is the Harvard “meatball,” whose nose had always been too obviously pressed against the window of the Porcellian Club, now saying: “. . . older and wiser and having been tugged too often by friendship and affection for men I have reported, I am as wary of friendship with the great as a reformed drunkard of the taste of alc o h o 1. ” And the man who sought safety in the fifties could now see clearly what he had done: “As for myself, no amount of self-reproach will reconcile me, even today, to the self-doubt that followed my clearance...

...Self-awareness is hard to come by at any time...

...Theodore White suggests one reason why these authors avoid “hot”subjects or joining the debate on major issues...

...This style of reportage became very common by the end of the war...

...A current historian might interview a governor or a president or a general, but most of them were the sort of people who live their lives for the sake of their memoirs, and who always had their official version of events neatly typed somewhere in their brains and ready for any questioner (before the tape recorder, of course, oral history was also a far more daunting task...

...This weakness had its good side, however, for it increased the possibility of empathy with and full understanding of participants...

...Connoisseurs of boredom will tell you that the absolute peak experience, guaranteed to induce instant slumber, is reading The NeM, York Times of the 1930s...

...newspapers, especially the Tinies, went on their familiar, dull way...

...That may be why World War 11 is such a favorite of these writers...

...so that when Hersey went to Japan he, too, interviewed the average man...

...in the sixties, he wrote about political campaigns-the horse-race aspect rather than the ideological...

...As Richard Reeves said about White, “Hell, he’s soft on everybody, and that’s not such a bad thing as one begins to realize rather late...

...But with the exception of Hersey’s Hiroshima and White’s writings about China, Manchester and the other authors of this school have tended to select tame subjects that will not risk the wrath of any significant part of the public...

...1 had gone down that road far enough in reporting the Oppenheimer case to know I had made powerful enemies in the defense establishment...

...Dugout Doug” stories were, to be sure, legion among veterans of the Pacific...

...In his gratitude to thase who spared him that fate-Henry Luce, even though he cut White’s copy, Max Ascoli of The Reporter magazine, even though he and White were constantly at war...

...And in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons, instead of the World War 1 Uncle Sam fighting Kaiser Wilhelm over a globe, we found Willie and Joe slogging through the mud or peeling potatoes on KP duty...

...Douglas MacArthur was a similar mi x t u re, as W i 11 ia m M a nc hes t e r ’s American Caesar shows...

...Based on 522 personal interviews and diligent documentary research, the book combined a clear analysis with a full human understanding of the man who built some great parks, and some disastrous highways and buildings, during his long career in the public agencies of the state of New York...

...Academic historians also embraced the interview, and oral history projects were started a t Columbia and other universities...

...A self-censorship imposed not by government but by prudence, circumscribed me-as it circumscribed countless others...

...And what was true of the papers was also true of the way academics approached current history...

...It also influenced coverage of the society as a whole through another of its off-shoots, which came to be called the new journalism...

...In choosing this course, White and the others were typical of the World War 11 generation...

...You didn’t just interview the owner of the blazing building, you also talked to the people who were living or working there...

...Until Hersey and his group came along, most history was based on documents, and the part that wasn’t was limited to interviews with the predictable major figures...

...Manchester becomes tiresome only in his repeated efforts to prove MacArthur’s physical courage...

...One has the sense that ninety per cent of Manchester’s story could have been discovered by diligent, thoughtful reporters at the time it was happening...

...Unfortunately there was only one Teddy White among the journalists, and only a few John Stewart Services in the government...

...The Old Pro and the Comeback Kid by Charles Peters Theodore White and William Manchester are leading figures in the school of current history pioneered by American journalists after World War 11...

...From 1954 to 1972, I never wrote another article about the China 1 knew so well...

...In a sense they deserved safety, but the country suffered terribly because of it...

...First was the danger, which very few escaped, that the author would hide behind quotations and avoid responsibility for figuring out and explaining to his readers the significance of the events described...

...During World War 11, journalists like Ernie Pyle began to cover the war through the eyes of the enlisted man...

...true of the Times was also true of other papers’ coverage of current history, or at least of that part of it that was considered serious news-occasionally individual reporters or whole papers would breathe life into stories about sex, crime, or disaster...

...and for that shirking I am now ashamed...

...Now the new technique was at the service of a truly gifted writer...

...The breakthrough came with World War 11, and may have had its roots in the tradition of disaster reporting that had sprung up in the twenties and thirties...

...This makes White’s book all the more remarkable...

...He could distinguish himself from “men like me suffering from such charges who dropped out ofjournalism-to become press agents and real estate agents, to go into brokerage houses, to live in exile, to hide if they could in TV...

...Manchester deserves praise most of all for his adherence to truth when the truth at one point explodes the conservative myth about Mac Arthur, while at another it shows how wrong the liberals were about the same man...

...In the sixties and the seventies, helped by the widespread availability of inexpensive tape recorders, the genre flourished, with, among others, White’s Makingqf the Presiden t se r ies , Manchester’s Death ?fa President, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Da,iis...

...Suppose, for example, more writers had helped White tell the truth about China...

...Of course these truths would have been even more useful if they had been published when MacArthur was still an actor on the world stage...

...In 1974 the movement’s masterpiece appeared with publication, first in The NeM- Yorkerand then by Alfred Knopf, of Robert Caro’s The Poci*er Broker, a marvelous book about Robert Moses and his effect on the physical and social landscape of New York...

...Hersey’s account of how the people of Hiroshima reacted to the explosion of the first atomic bomb changed the way history would be written from then on...

...Manchester’s storytelling is distinguished by his ability to recognize relevant detail, for which we can be truly thankful at a time when we are told that a biographer’s subject had a painful corn (Mary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt), or that he found a c,ertain view “pleasant” or thought the soup was “good” (Barbara Tuchman quoting from Gen...

...But at the time he didn’t upderstand that he was going there...

...This movement had enormous impact on the reporting of politics, largely because Teddy White inspired scores of imitators...