Books in Brief

Politics as a Noble Calling, by F. Clifton White with Jerome Tuccille (Jameson Books, 270 pp., $21.95)

THOUGH he spent his entire adult life deeply involved in politics, F. Clifton White ran for office only once: unsuccessfully, in a congressional primary at age 28. After that he turned to the nuts-and-bolts work of party organization, and before he died at 74 in 1993 he was recognized as one of its greatest practitioners. In a foreword to these memoirs (which White dictated in his final illness, and which have been expertly polished by Jerome Tuccille), the Washington correspondent David Broder writes that “Clif White was different. He was always teaching—and few people in postwar politics had more to teach than he did.” White began by winning dominance of the national Young Republican organization in the 1950s, and turned the cadre of politicos that he formed there into the Draft Goldwater Committee, which captured the Republican Party in 1964 and changed American political history. In the next two decades he seemed to be almost everywhere: leading the unsuccessful drive for Reagan at the 1968 convention, managing the victorious campaign of James Buckley for a senatorship from New York in 1970, and serving as a senior advisor to manager Bill Casey in Reagan’s triumphant 1980 campaign. White’s memoirs are a relaxed and entertaining account of it all—not neglecting such high points as his service as a World War II bomber navigator over Germany, but concentrating on politics. No serious student of American politics should miss this absorbing account of a career in its vortex.

WA

About the Author

William A. Rusher

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Politics as a Noble Calling, by F. Clifton White with Jerome Tuccille (Jameson Books, 270 pp., $21.95)

THOUGH he spent his entire adult life deeply involved in politics, F. Clifton White ran for office only once: unsuccessfully, in a congressional primary at age 28. After that he turned to the nuts-and-bolts work of party organization, and before he died at 74 in 1993 he was recognized as one of its greatest practitioners. In a foreword to these memoirs (which White dictated in his final illness, and which have been expertly polished by Jerome Tuccille), the Washington correspondent David Broder writes that “Clif White was different. He was always teaching—and few people in postwar politics had more to teach than he did.” White began by winning dominance of the national Young Republican organization in the 1950s, and turned the cadre of politicos that he formed there into the Draft Goldwater Committee, which captured the Republican Party in 1964 and changed American political history. In the next two decades he seemed to be almost everywhere: leading the unsuccessful drive for Reagan at the 1968 convention, managing the victorious campaign of James Buckley for a senatorship from New York in 1970, and serving as a senior advisor to manager Bill Casey in Reagan’s triumphant 1980 campaign. White’s memoirs are a relaxed and entertaining account of it all—not neglecting such high points as his service as a World War II bomber navigator over Germany, but concentrating on politics. No serious student of American politics should miss this absorbing account of a career in its vortex.