Hero Worship

In Search of History By Theodore H. White Harper & Row, 476 pp., $12.95 Not least among the gifts of Theodore H. White has been his timing. After Henry Luce forced him to leave Time, Inc. in 1945, he wrote his book about China (Thunder Out of China), which quickly ascended the best-seller lists. When his money started to run low after four years of freelancing from Europe in the late Forties and early Fifties, he gambled a year on another book, Fire in the Ashes, about postwar Europe, and saw it, too, climb to the top of the lists. His first try at writing about the Making of a President was in 1956, for Collier’s magazine; the abortion of the project by that magazine’s demise was in its way a stroke of luck, too. Because of it, the actual debut of The Making of the President followed instead the more interesting campaign of 1960 and was a much more spectacular success (best-seller for exactly one year) than it would have been in 1956. And now, when a gaggle of reporters have adopted their own variations on White’s theme and have crowded the field, White himself has withdrawn and written his memoirs of the first part (until 1963) of a remarkable journalistic career.

This, too, is probably just as well. The 1976 election had less poetry in it than any election White ever wrote about; he is an inveterate sprinkler of stardust over scenes where a little salt and pepper would do, and Ford and Carter might have led him to embarrass himself terribly. White’s greatest defect as a political chronicler is a wideeyed stare where there ought to be laughter. Irony is not White’s strong suit, either, and the 1976 election was quintessentially ironic: Carter’s effort was in its way as magnificent as anything ever undertaken in presidential politics, and yet the man Carter was so endowed that he rendered it, finally, a dull affair; and what could be said of Ford’s effort to retain office by appearing “presidential” that would do justice to the performance? It was as if someone pushed forward a pile of stones, and announced that he had moved the Matterhorn. Far better, under such circumstances, to have the businesslike report of Jules Witcover’s Marathon than to watch the mist start to form in White’s eyes.

MR

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Mitchell S. Ross

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In Search of History By Theodore H. White Harper & Row, 476 pp., $12.95 Not least among the gifts of Theodore H. White has been his timing. After Henry Luce forced him to leave Time, Inc. in 1945, he wrote his book about China (Thunder Out of China), which quickly ascended the best-seller lists. When his money started to run low after four years of freelancing from Europe in the late Forties and early Fifties, he gambled a year on another book, Fire in the Ashes, about postwar Europe, and saw it, too, climb to the top of the lists. His first try at writing about the Making of a President was in 1956, for Collier’s magazine; the abortion of the project by that magazine’s demise was in its way a stroke of luck, too. Because of it, the actual debut of The Making of the President followed instead the more interesting campaign of 1960 and was a much more spectacular success (best-seller for exactly one year) than it would have been in 1956. And now, when a gaggle of reporters have adopted their own variations on White’s theme and have crowded the field, White himself has withdrawn and written his memoirs of the first part (until 1963) of a remarkable journalistic career.

This, too, is probably just as well. The 1976 election had less poetry in it than any election White ever wrote about; he is an inveterate sprinkler of stardust over scenes where a little salt and pepper would do, and Ford and Carter might have led him to embarrass himself terribly. White’s greatest defect as a political chronicler is a wideeyed stare where there ought to be laughter. Irony is not White’s strong suit, either, and the 1976 election was quintessentially ironic: Carter’s effort was in its way as magnificent as anything ever undertaken in presidential politics, and yet the man Carter was so endowed that he rendered it, finally, a dull affair; and what could be said of Ford’s effort to retain office by appearing “presidential” that would do justice to the performance? It was as if someone pushed forward a pile of stones, and announced that he had moved the Matterhorn. Far better, under such circumstances, to have the businesslike report of Jules Witcover’s Marathon than to watch the mist start to form in White’s eyes.