A short life of the author
Theodore H. White invented a literary genre — the presidential campaign narrative — that transformed American political journalism and gave the American public a new way of understanding how their leaders were chosen. Before White’s The Making of the President 1960 (1961), campaign reporting was a matter of speeches, rallies, polls, and editorial endorsements. After White, it was a dramatic narrative — a story of character, strategy, ambition, and luck, told from the inside by a writer who had access to the candidates and their inner circles and who shaped the raw material of politics into compelling literature.
From Boston to Chungking
Theodore Harold White was born in Boston in 1915, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He grew up in the Dorchester neighbourhood, attended Boston Latin School on scholarship, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied Chinese history under John King Fairbank. He graduated summa cum laude in 1938 and went to China as a correspondent, eventually becoming the chief of the Time magazine bureau in Chungking during World War II.
Thunder Out of China (1946, with Annalee Jacoby), his account of wartime China, was a devastating critique of the Chiang Kai-shek government — a book that argued that Chiang was losing China through corruption and incompetence, and that the communists were winning because they had the support of the peasantry. The book infuriated Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, who was a passionate supporter of Chiang, and White left the magazine. The break with Luce was painful but liberating: it freed White to develop as an independent writer.
He spent the 1950s in Europe as a correspondent and novelist, producing Fire in the Ashes (1953), a study of postwar European recovery, and The Mountain Road (1958), a novel based on his China experience.
The Making of the President 1960
White’s masterpiece — the book that changed political journalism — was The Making of the President 1960 (1961), his account of the Kennedy-Nixon election. The book was revolutionary in its method: White embedded himself with the campaigns, gained the trust of the candidates and their staff, witnessed the key moments firsthand, and then shaped the raw experience into a narrative of extraordinary dramatic power.
The opening chapter, describing primary day in New Hampshire, is a set piece of American nonfiction: White places the reader inside the voting booth, inside the candidate’s hotel room, inside the television studio, and creates a sense of lived experience that no previous political writer had achieved. The book’s account of Kennedy’s victory — from the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries through the convention to the razor-thin general election — reads like a novel, with fully drawn characters, rising and falling action, and a sense of destiny that reflected both White’s literary skill and his genuine admiration for Kennedy.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize and sold over four million copies. It created an audience for campaign narratives and spawned dozens of imitators — Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes (1992), Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus (1973), and the entire genre of insider campaign reporting descend from White.
The Sequels and Diminishing Returns
White wrote three subsequent volumes: The Making of the President 1964 (1965), The Making of the President 1968 (1969), and The Making of the President 1972 (1973). Each was competent and commercially successful, but each was less innovative than the first. The formula that had been revolutionary in 1961 had become conventional by 1972, and White’s intimate access to candidates — which had been his greatest strength — began to seem like a limitation: he was too close to the people he wrote about, too sympathetic to their ambitions, too willing to see politics as a contest of character rather than a struggle of interests and ideas.
Breach of Faith (1975), his account of Watergate and Nixon’s downfall, was a more critical and more analytical work that showed White’s capacity for moral judgment.
In Search of History
In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (1978) is White’s finest book after 1960 — a memoir that combines autobiography with political and intellectual history, tracing his journey from the streets of Boston through China, Europe, and the corridors of American power. The book is beautifully written and unflinchingly honest about both White’s ambitions and his failures.
Collecting White
The Making of the President 1960 (Atheneum, 1961) in first edition with dust jacket is the key White title and a landmark of American political writing. Thunder Out of China (William Sloane, 1946) is also collected for its historical importance. The subsequent Making of the President volumes are common in first edition but complete sets are desirable.