Books in Brief

How Jimmy Won, by Kandy Stroud (Morrow, 442 pp., $10.95). Presidential elections spawn books about themselves. Ever since Theodore White began his quadrennial accounts of the process with The Making of a President in 1960, analysis has taken on the pretension of understanding. So the startling victory of Jimmy Carter last fall was bound to produce its own exegetical, indeed oracular, literature, and Mrs. Stroud has initiated it with what is on the whole an agreeable bang. She calls her book How Jimmy Won, and certainly she shows how, as far as actual events can show it. We have here a minute description of Carter’s long and careful planning—of the primaries, the convention, and the election itself—told from the point of view of a reporter who covered it (for Women’s Wear Daily) scrupulously and exhaustively. We also have her observations of Carter, his family and background (especially Miz Lillian, Rosalynn, and Billy), his campaign staff, and the Atlanta “family” which gave him his principal political backing from the days when he ran for governor of Georgia. We have, finally, Mrs. Stroud’s personal contacts with the President from that first vibrant conversation among the azaleas in front of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta in 1974 through all her subsequent encounters with the candidate during the campaign. These were interesting, fruitful encounters, and Mrs. Stroud’s own reactions to him as a candidate and a person are, naturally, the best things in the book. But the real “how” of Carter’s victory escapes her, as it escapes everyone. Somehow the springs of his action still defy convincing definition by those who chronicle his career. To the articulate chorus of American political drama he remains a mystery. No one can get a fix on him; the co-ordinates refuse to cross, and so to tell it all is to tell very little. In the chapter on his religious beliefs, Mrs. Stroud, typically, is reduced to writing like someone from the National Geographic describing the rites of a tribe, for to journalists the Plains Baptist Church has nearly always been an institution too alien to be taken seriously. Of his political victory, she says, weakly, that he won “because he offered the hope of something better.” Surely there must be more to it than that. Given these limitations the book is honest and useful. And Mrs. Stroud’s personality is always friendly and diverting. Here is a professional newspaperwoman who is a credit to her trade, who shies away from occupational poses and bogus seerdom, and who tells what she has to tell with skill and gusto.

NICHOLAS KING

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How Jimmy Won, by Kandy Stroud (Morrow, 442 pp., $10.95). Presidential elections spawn books about themselves. Ever since Theodore White began his quadrennial accounts of the process with The Making of a President in 1960, analysis has taken on the pretension of understanding. So the startling victory of Jimmy Carter last fall was bound to produce its own exegetical, indeed oracular, literature, and Mrs. Stroud has initiated it with what is on the whole an agreeable bang. She calls her book How Jimmy Won, and certainly she shows how, as far as actual events can show it. We have here a minute description of Carter’s long and careful planning—of the primaries, the convention, and the election itself—told from the point of view of a reporter who covered it (for Women’s Wear Daily) scrupulously and exhaustively. We also have her observations of Carter, his family and background (especially Miz Lillian, Rosalynn, and Billy), his campaign staff, and the Atlanta “family” which gave him his principal political backing from the days when he ran for governor of Georgia. We have, finally, Mrs. Stroud’s personal contacts with the President from that first vibrant conversation among the azaleas in front of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta in 1974 through all her subsequent encounters with the candidate during the campaign. These were interesting, fruitful encounters, and Mrs. Stroud’s own reactions to him as a candidate and a person are, naturally, the best things in the book. But the real “how” of Carter’s victory escapes her, as it escapes everyone. Somehow the springs of his action still defy convincing definition by those who chronicle his career. To the articulate chorus of American political drama he remains a mystery. No one can get a fix on him; the co-ordinates refuse to cross, and so to tell it all is to tell very little. In the chapter on his religious beliefs, Mrs. Stroud, typically, is reduced to writing like someone from the National Geographic describing the rites of a tribe, for to journalists the Plains Baptist Church has nearly always been an institution too alien to be taken seriously. Of his political victory, she says, weakly, that he won “because he offered the hope of something better.” Surely there must be more to it than that. Given these limitations the book is honest and useful. And Mrs. Stroud’s personality is always friendly and diverting. Here is a professional newspaperwoman who is a credit to her trade, who shies away from occupational poses and bogus seerdom, and who tells what she has to tell with skill and gusto.

NICHOLAS KING