The Making of the President, 1968
by Theodore Harold White
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Book Summary Information
Author: Theodore Harold WhiteEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1969-06
ISBN: 0689102933
Reading Level: Young Adult
Publisher: Atheneum
Book Reviews of The Making of the President, 1968
Book Review: A decline, but still good
Summary: 3 Stars
In his previous books, Theodore H. White was able to use the presidential election as a platform upon which an impartial, fact-based, and compelling drama could be told. His chronicle of the election of 1968 still contains many of those assets - his description of the Nixon campaign is probably better than that provided by any of the other reporters at the time, his objectivity and fairness toward Humphrey is admirable (especially in light of the undeserved persecution he received from most other media outlets at the time), and his coverage of the emerging New Left (as found in the presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy) is detailed and compelling. So what is the problem? It lies in one serious deficiency - White's lack of understanding for, and virtual unwillingness to detail, the extremist groups that rose to prominence in 1968.
As much as White might have been loath to admit it (and as much as many thoughtful pundits rightfully regret it), the fact is that one of the most important phenomena of the 1968 presidential election was the way that it brought to national attention sections of the far-left and far-right that would eventually integrate themselves into the fabric of the two major political parties. When discussing the yippie movement, White throws objectivity out the window, and dismisses them all as being venereal diseased malcontents, "crazies", whose circus-like antics were not worth a moment's consideration; his moral contempt for the far-right (as represented by the third-party candidacy of George Wallace) caused him to hope that not discussing them would make them go away, and consequently, he barely gives them twenty pages of discussion in a book almost five hundred pages in length, despite the fact that Wallace won much of the South and received more than one-seventh of the popular vote. This does not make for either good storytelling or good reporting; some of the most interesting and important drama occurred within the fringes of American politics in that year, and the fact is that those same left-wing and right-wing extremists whom White wouldn't even grant the time of day are now significant players in American politics (the former compose the core of both the Green party and the campaigns of extremists like Al Sharpton, and the latter's descendants are now one of the most powerful constituencies in the Republican party). This inclination to turn a blind eye to that which he finds distasteful takes away from the comprehensiveness that made his first two books such classics, and are a serious shortcoming in this work.
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