Campaign Casualties

Next to the politicians and the pundits, the most confused and contused victims of this year's roller-coaster politics are the writers and publishers of campaign books. Warehouses are crammed with tons of tomes outdated by events. Writers, editors and printers are scrambling to keep pace with the mercurial exits, abrupt entrances and coy waitings-in-wings of the 1968 candidates. Reporter Clark Mollenhoff of Cowles newspapers saw his George Romney: Mormon in Politics rolling off the presses just as the Michigander's presidential hopes were being buried in New Hampshire. Said Mollenhoff: "Now I know how it felt to build an Edsel."

Romney's sudden obsolescence--together with that of at least three Romney campaign biographies--is only one instance of the perils of hard-cover handicapping. Until recently, writers and publishers had all but forgotten Hubert Humphrey, except for an anti-H.H.H. tract entitled The Rise and Fall of a Liberal. They had virtually overlooked Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon. Bookmen had also underrated Eugene McCarthy, who perspicaciously published a collection of his own views last fall. But they hardly ignored Bobby Kennedy, who has been the subject of about one book a month in the past.

Along with much of the country, publishers' row figured Lyndon Johnson a cinch for renomination, re-election and reexamination. That was a costly caper, not only for the sponsors of impending paeans such as The Case for Lyndon B. Johnson (Coward-McCann) but also for those who had hoped for easy pickings from a crop of anti-Johnsonia. Even a sympathetic study, the forthcoming A Very Personal Presidency by TIME White House Correspondent Hugh Sidey, stands in need of extensive updating. Taking account of the backlash of sentiment for the President, New American Library has already dropped plans for a paperback edition of the cartoon anthology L.B.J. Lampooned, will retitle Larry L. King's My Hero L.B.J. and Other Dirty Stories. Simon and Schuster's Quotations from Chairman L.B.J. is suddenly mustier than Mao, and Macmillan's Sam Johnson's Boy, an unflattering account of Lyndon as a Texas politico, due in June, now seems hardly momentous. Though continued reader interest in Johnson may help rescue many of the books scheduled before his--or their--withdrawal, publishers all at once seem more interested in biographies of Ivan the Terrible and Ethelred the Unready.

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