Once upon a time there was a book by Theodore White called The Making of the President. Everyone, even those who would rather have made some other President, agreed that it was a very good book. So successful an idea was bound to be copied; its possible applications seemed limitless from the parish pump to the Soviet Presidium (and the brave Comrade who attempted that would really deserve a Pulitzer Prize).
The first imitation in fact is British. Indeed, in England it was published as The Making of the Prime Minister, although in the United States it is called The Road to Number 10. It deals with the 1964 General Election, and its authors, Anthony Howard and Richard West, are young leftwing journalists, who describe themselves as “lazy supporters of the Labor Party and wary admirers of Mr. Harold Wilson.” They acknowledge their debt to Theodore White; they could scarcely have attempted to conceal it. The trouble is that the contrasts are often more conspicuous than the resemblances. In point of sheer journalistic skill, Mr. Howard and Mr. West are not in the same league as Mr. White: their hero is made of very different and more graceless stuff than his; and whereas Mr. White’s book, though his own affiliations were undisguised, could be read by Republicans without much complaint, the bias of this thinner work groans from every chapter.
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