Makings and Unmakings

Since 1961, Theodore H. White's colorful, magisterial narratives of presidential campaigns have become a standard part of the election returns, a quadrennial post-mortem on the body politic. In The Making of the President--1972 (published this week by Atheneum), White faced his severest test to date. The 1972 campaign, dominated by a challenger who could not get started and an incumbent who would not come out to fight, was short on political blood and guts. More important, the campaign's invisible drama--Watergate and related skulduggery--did not begin unfolding until White was in the final stages of writing. Now Watergate overshadows the visible campaign of 1972.

White admits these handicaps. But in the record of a frustrating campaign, he sees signs of a momentous change in the national psyche, a visible shift in the U.S. cycle between bouts of idealism and fits of hunkering down. The election, he says, signaled the retreat of New Deal domestic and postwar foreign policies that had "increased the power of the state beyond the experience of any previous generation." In White's view, McGovern was the spokesman for an increasingly tarnished liberal orthodoxy, advocating ever greater use of federal legislation and revenues for social tinkering. Nixon heralded a welcome standdown, promising voters a withering away of the giant federal state and its intrusive demands. "The Americans," White concludes, "were for slowing the pace of power, and they chose Richard Nixon."

What the voters saw, White adds, may not have been what they got. Nixon, after all, concentrated power in the Executive Branch to an extent that is only now becoming clear, and his Administration gave law-enforcement authorities new access to private lives. McGovern, for his part, had considerable difficulty in appealing to the Democrats' traditional liberal constituency, and may yet be viewed as the forerunner of some genuinely new politics--or merely as a quirk.

White portrays McGovern's nomination as a well-intentioned but undeniable disaster. The McGovern "guerrilla" movement, as White tells it, was born on a hot, violent night in Chicago in 1968, when distracted delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted to reform their party during the next four years--and unwittingly bound themselves to what in effect became ethnic, sexual and youth quotas. Dominated by a staff of zealous reformers, the resulting commission succeeded in passing a series of sweeping new rules favorable to women, youth and blacks virtually under the unsuspecting noses of many party regulars.

Militant Elitism. White persuasively argues that the formula devised to determine the makeup of delegations to the 1972 Democratic Convention could not help working against the goal of fairness. The "quota idea," White says, inevitably excluded as well as included. "By insisting on a fixed proportion of youth, for example, and ignoring a fixed proportion of the elderly, it excluded the old. By insisting on a fixed proportion of blacks, Indians or Spanish-speaking and ignoring, say, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, old-stock colonials, it restricted." The Democrats' Pepsi delegations, White suggests, were ready-made for McGovern's antiwar crusades, but left their candidate hostage to a militant elitism that excluded much of the country. Although McGovern sought to edge away from the New Left, in the public mind he was saddled with radical positions on drugs and abortion, among other issues of his farther-out supporters.

White's powers of reportage have if anything improved over the years. Often more thoroughly than the candidates, he illuminates areas peripheral to the campaign but crucial to the country. Sometimes these forays seem to be simple stalling, but often they clarify and enlighten. His summary of America's dwindling power in international trade and economics sweeps the reader across oceans of abstract finance and deposits him squarely in the Nixonomics of Phase I, inaugurated in August 1971. "Nixon had offered a makeshift, transitory response to a problem of bread-and-butter, because politically he could not do otherwise," White says. "But in doing so he had opened a new chapter of American history. The postwar world was thoroughly over, at home as abroad, at the meat counter as in Viet Nam."

White masterfully conveys those few instances in the campaign when real drama flared, including the selection and dumping of Thomas Eagleton as McGovern's running mate. But like the election, the book belongs to Richard Nixon. The President strides into China, and in the moment of a handshake with Chou Enlai, "China was erased as the enemy."

At home, he manfully wages war not so much with the floundering Democrats as with a more dangerously hostile press, "which claimed it understood and spoke for the people better than he did himself." For years a critic of Nixonian hatchet politics, White has grown increasingly sympathetic to the now quieter Nixon style. Proudly and yet often painfully aware that he was "essentially alone" in everything he did, White writes, Nixon developed a remarkable "fatalism of outlook and a personal melancholy which added wisdom to his reflections."

The book was to have ended on a triumphant note, a "view from Olympus," on March 17, 1973, as Nixon described his use of a President's power in an exclusive interview with the author. White records a self-confident Nixon, trained by four years in office to ignore public tumult and exclude all but highest-priority matters from his attention; such tough-minded devotion to long views is, White decides, the stuff of history. At that time, he writes, "my judgment . . . would have cast Richard Nixon as one of the major Presidents of the 20th century, in a rank just after Franklin Roosevelt, on a level with Truman, Wilson, Eisenhower, Kennedy." Six days after White left the President, James McCord's letter to Judge John Sirica blew open the Watergate coverup. In evident distress, White writes: "I was to be brought down from Olympus to consider, with the President and millions of other Americans, the housekeeping of power--and its abuse."

Frantic Pace. This unexpected turn threw a kink into White's narrative that no amount of last-minute revision could disguise. White had originally allocated only ten pages to Watergate (in a book of nearly 400), prudently holding four more in reserve for postelection developments. The string of Watergate explosions in March and April rendered that plan thoroughly inoperative and forced White into a frantic race against future disclosures and the clock.

"On about May 1," he says, "I knew I was never going to make a May 15 deadline. I got page proofs on May 9, and I had to start tearing them up and rewriting." The last words were added on the evening of June 8--a scant two months before publication. Even if the scandal had come fully to light before the election--and Nixon had reacted to it by ordering a thorough housecleaning of his Administration--White maintains that the President's popular majority would not have fallen below 55%. Perhaps so, but the reader wonders whether White would have found in that result a resettling of national priorities quite so epic as the one he reads into the 60.7% landslide actually recorded.

Busy preparing a television documentary on the campaign and awaiting reviews, White continues to follow Watergate and admits to some third thoughts arrived at too late for inclusion in the book. "The White House special intelligence unit--the plumbers--shakes me; the economy going out of control shakes me." White continues to praise Nixon's first-term accomplishments while "suspending judgment on the President until Watergate is over." He is saddened by the summer's disclosures, but not in the least convinced that his views have been fatally outdated. "I am not," he says, "competing in the piety and outrage sweepstakes of 1973."

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