Theodore White Lite
Shapiro, Walter
Theodore W Since Vne Making of the President, it\ by Walter Shapir Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Bal Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, As I think back on it now, reading Theodore White's The...
...the competition from newspapers and newsmagazines...
...Sure, there is something addictive about the mindless adrenaline rush of covering a campaign, the fraternity (and sorority) of the press bus, the late-night drinks in some hotel bar, the ability to step outside your life and sign on with the closest thing that America has to a traveling circus...
...The Twentieth Century Fund Quality Time...
...The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Public Television With background paper by Richard Somerset-Ward Published by The Twentieth Century Fund Press A call for reform of the public television system, I including more emphasis | on national programming...
...September 1993/The Washington Monthly 55 What comes across as particularly one-dimensional is their inside analysis of the Clinton campaign in Mad As Hell...
...So it is alas easy to tick off the reasons why a true reprise of The Making of the President series seems impossible: the prohibitive travel costs...
...Based on the list of sources in the "Acknowledgements" section, it seems clear that the only women in the Clinton campaign they ever interviewed were media consultant Mandy Grunwald and press secretary Dee Dee Myers...
...Cuomo: I think I have been much more persuasive on this issue, but I'm going to defer to your judgment...
...a change in the | deployment of federal funds...
...That's it...
...Most flagrantly, Germond and Witcover gloss over the strategic importance of Hillary Rodham Clinton as the disciplined insider who forced her ever-reluctant husband to make difficult, but necessary, decisions on the structure of the campaign...
...To be fair, there are several strong chapters amid the dross in Mad As Hell...
...Theodore W Since Vne Making of the President, itby Walter Shapir Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Bal Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, As I think back on it now, reading Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 at the impressionable age of 14 probably changed my life...
...The difference between you and Rollins is, I like you...
...the bloodless, technocratic nature of modern politics...
...There is no punchline, no kicker, no hidden payoff—just standard, empty-your-note-books-it's-deadline journalism...
...They also fail to grasp the significance of keeping the campaign headquartered in Little Rock and largely outside the sway of the Beltway political establishment...
...Twentieth Centurv lurid Press publications are distributed through The Brookings Institution...
...September 1993/The Washington Monthly 57...
...Please give reference code OW93...
...and the well-earned cynicism of voters and readers about the political process itself...
...With the publishing industry now convinced that campaign narratives don't sell, the once-proud genre has been winnowed down to the quadrennial now-it-can-beWalter Shapiro, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is Esquire's White House correspondent...
...56 The Washington Monthly/September 1993 In the end, Mad As Hell is one of those vaguely useful reference books that you can plop on the shelf in case you someday need to conjure up the Buchanan campaign in New Hampshire...
...Cuomo: Clinton really wants me...
...Brown: Yeah, Clinton really wants you to do this...
...And as for the poetry and drama of Clinton's last, sleep-defying 72-hour-cam-paign marathon, Germond and Witcover distill it down to this evocative sentence: "The final day was a blur, as both Bush and Clinton raced frenetically by jet around the country...
...White, to be sure, could be seduced by top politicians ranging from Jack Kennedy to, sadly, the Richard Nixon of 1972...
...He talks to the media too much...
...But all reporters (save, of course, the saintly Janet Malcolm) are to some extent prisoners of their sources, and this occupational hazard should not minimize White's lasting contribution to political literature...
...Other young would-be writers fantasized about running off to Paris to emulate Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but romance for me could be found here at home, chronicling the pageantry of a presidential campaign...
...I don't like Rollins and don't trust him...
...The literary flowering that followed White sadly lasted little more than a decade...
...the report a m twentieth Century Fund Task force a. Public toisoN 1-800-PRESIDENT The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Television and the Campaign of 1992 With background papers by Kathleen Hall (amieson, Ken Auletta, and Thomas E. Patterson Published by The Twentieth Century Fund Press This report examines television's influence on the 1 992 presidential election and offers specific recommendations for continued improvements in campaign coverage...
...Brown: As long as you want it to be, Mario...
...the self-consciousness and self-importance of the handlers...
...But if three years from now, fate finds me trudging off one more time to Iowa and New Hampshire, I hope that I will be impelled by reasons that transcend habit, boredom with civilian life, and a craving for the limelight...
...the lowly status of print in a video age...
...the omnipresence of self-serving "spin...
...I read the speech, and it had a great endorsement [of Bush]," recalled Bush adviser Jim Lake, who had previewed the text...
...What's missing, for example, is the bitter battle within the campaign after the California primary that led to the elevation of James Carville and the fabled War Room, as well as the de facto demotion of campaign chairman, Germond and Witcover source, and now Trade Representative Mickey Kantor...
...Political reporting, my chosen trade, has become a burnt-out genre, as derivative as medieval Scholastics trying to ape the rhetoric of Cicero...
...the 1968 and 1972 elections alone produced The Selling of the President, The Boys on the Bus, and the gonzo posturing of Hunter Thompson...
...Coming from a family of last-gasp Stevenson Democrats, I was transfixed not so much by the saga of Kennedy triumphant as by the small, lovingly etched portraits of thwarted dreams—a forlorn folk singer crooning a ballad for Hubert Humphrey on the eve of the West Virginia primary, the packed galleries at the Los Angeles convention in hopeless thrall with Adlai...
...Washinotnn !VI«ntV>W<;»r.f.roVicr 1 CHV} What Germond and Witcover offer instead is politics seen at a middle distance viewed exclusively through the prism of the strategists, the operatives, and the pollsters...
...Most of the other versions tell the story from the self-serving perspective of turncoat Republican consultant Ed Rollins...
...new, non-taxpayer sources of funding...
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...Nothing in their life experience prepared them for the first campaign in American history in which women were as much the key players as men...
...It's not that Germond and Witcover are unfair or inaccurate but that their narrative seems woefully incomplete...
...Without talking with scheduler Susan Thomases or research director Betsey Wright, let alone anyone close to Hillary, it was easy to get a distorted view of what actually was going on in Little Rock...
...Cuomo: You really want me to do this, don't you...
...What intrigues me far more is wondering what a reporter like Teddy White in his prime could have done with a presidential campaign as rich, complex, and mysterious (Perot again) as 1992...
...I recall and appreciate Clinton strategist Paul Be-gala's election eve crack, "Politics is show business for ugly people...
...Brown: Yes, I really want you to do it...
...A few more lines like that, and I could almost muster a little sympathy for the Texas billionaire who spoke to some of the best and worst aspects of the American character...
...But all that aside, I still feel a yearning to strip off the veil of presidential politics, to use the campaign as a metaphor to get at something deeper and more evocative about America, about idealism, about ambition, about character, about the media, and about the meaning of democracy itself...
...This last point underlines where Germond and Witcover probably went astray: They were genera-tionally ill-equipped to cover the Clinton campaign...
...Only Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, his landmark character study of six 1988 presidential contenders, rises from the muck to redeem White's legacy...
...According to Jordan, Perot told him this in early July: "It probably was a mistake to hire you guys...
...and a renewed I commitment to educational programming...
...oi\i.m TIME...
...Germond and Witcover also provide the fullest account that I have read anywhere of the days leading up to Perot's precipitous withdrawal from the race in July, perhaps the single event that vaulted Bill Clinton into the Oval Office...
...How hollow that dream feels 30 years later...
...This is just another business deal for him...
...Instead, I hope that I will be motivated by the quest to rediscover what it felt like to read The Making of the President, 1960 at age 14...
...But since then, the void...
...much with the candidate after the early primaries for understandable financial and logistical reasons, Germond and Witcover also never managed to sit down with such key sources as Clinton confidant Bruce Lindsey and issues director Bruce Reed...
...Not traveling As for the poetry and drama of Clinton's last, sleep-defying 72-hour-campaign marathon, Germond and Witcover distill it down to this evocative sentence: "The final day was a blur, as both Bush and Clinton raced frenetically by jet around the country...
...I was amused to discover, for example, that none of Bush's handlers grasped the divisive potential of Pat Buchanan's fire-and-brim-stone "religious war" speech on the opening night of the Republican National Convention...
...the difficulty of winning access...
...I really paid no attention to anything else...
...He's got the Washington disease...
...A typical passage argues, "What Perot could not or would not grasp was that it was essential for his campaign to control the message that went out," but the authors fail to grasp that 20 years of this kind of political message control spawned the voter cynicism that made Ross Perot's candidacy possible...
...Germond and Witcover's idea of an exclusive tidbit is Democratic National Chairman (and now Commerce Secretary) Ron Brown's riveting reconstruction of his phone conversation with Mario Cuomo that led to the New York governor placing Bill Clinton's name in nomination at the Democratic convention: Cuomo: How long is that speech supposed to be...
...The authors' disinterest in substance blinds them to the intense internal policy debate that led to the publication of the Putting People First economic plan in June...
...Calling on ties that date back to the Carter White House, Germond and Witcover counterbalance the Rollins bias with a revealing interview with Hamilton Jordan, who also was advising Perot...
...Having covered Clinton myself for Time magazine, I will concede that my standards may be unduly demanding and perhaps a little self-serving...
Vol. 25 • September 1993 • No. 9
