Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968 by Theodore White. 459 pages. Atheneum...
...previous chronicles of President-making, Theodore H. White's talents were more than equal to the task: the creation of historical documents that read like suspense novels. This time the odds were against him. White's best reportage delineates character; portraiture is his forte. In 1968, events overshadowed individuals. It was a year of frustration and disruption, of groping and dismay. Many were killed, the timid endured, the vague were exalted, the hesitant lost. Finally the managers stepped in, good and gray but hardly the stuff to invigorate the imagination...
...While White was dashing among the candidates-a day here with Nixon, a day there covering Romney (remember Romney?), with Rockefeller, with Robert Kennedy, even Johnson-the events that ultimately shaped the election were taking place elsewhere. In Viet Nam, the Tet offensive was finally shattering hopes for a clear-cut American military victory. On campuses across the country, a young political amateur named Allard Lowenstein was meticulously organizing a network of students to a force that would decisively help unseat the President and carve a niche in history for Eugene McCarthy. In cities a continent apart, two maimed minds...
...White's reconstruction of these events often bears the pastepot smell of news paper clippings. From Chicago, where he was an eyewitness to the uproar in the streets during the Democratic Convention, his reaction is detached and too concerned with the pattern of the old politics. He offers little more than a neat categorization of the participants in such efforts. There are "the curious . . . who want to be able to yell, 'I seen it, I seen it, I seen it myself.' " Next, "the crazies," identified by "their diseases (mainly venereal), their health (decayed from malnutrition and drugs...
...Portrait. White is more at home in smoke-filled rooms than tear-gassed streets (which in 1968 were probably more important...