Panorama of 1968

Not long ago, dipping into Donald Earl’s scholarly The Age of Augustus, I was struck anew by the huge gaps in our knowledge of that distant and momentous era. “Exactly what form the [political] arrangements of 19 and 18 B.C. took is difficult to determine,” Dr. Earl observes with commendable caution. “Augustus makes no mention of them in the Res Gestae, but there is much of importance which that document omits.”

Thanks to Theodore H. White, future specialists in the political history of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century A.D. should have few such problems. Beginning with The Making of the President 1960, he has taken our Presidential elections as his special province, and—unless he can wrench himself free of a contractual commitment to Atheneum—-he will preside over it at least through the quadrennial madness of 1976. With unbelievable energy and an omnivorous appetite for detail, he vacuums the pre-convention campaign of every serious contender every four years, and, for an encore, chronicles the grand climax in the election campaign itself. To say that these performances are tours de force, and that White’s contemporaries, let alone posterity, are in his debt, is not merely an understatement; it is a cliche.

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William A. Rusher

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Not long ago, dipping into Donald Earl’s scholarly The Age of Augustus, I was struck anew by the huge gaps in our knowledge of that distant and momentous era. “Exactly what form the [political] arrangements of 19 and 18 B.C. took is difficult to determine,” Dr. Earl observes with commendable caution. “Augustus makes no mention of them in the Res Gestae, but there is much of importance which that document omits.”

Thanks to Theodore H. White, future specialists in the political history of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century A.D. should have few such problems. Beginning with The Making of the President 1960, he has taken our Presidential elections as his special province, and—unless he can wrench himself free of a contractual commitment to Atheneum—-he will preside over it at least through the quadrennial madness of 1976. With unbelievable energy and an omnivorous appetite for detail, he vacuums the pre-convention campaign of every serious contender every four years, and, for an encore, chronicles the grand climax in the election campaign itself. To say that these performances are tours de force, and that White’s contemporaries, let alone posterity, are in his debt, is not merely an understatement; it is a cliche.