The Making of the President 1960 (1961)

אחד מהסדרה האינסופית והמרתקת של וויט על בחירת הנשי​א האמריקני. בזמנו הייתי מעורה ומעורב בפוליטיקה האמ​ ( )

Ah, that politics were so accessible today. A fine work of the subtleties of political struggle. ( )

With this book, Theodore H. White invented a new genre: the blow-by-blow campaign chronicle told by someone who had access to, but was not part of, the candidates' staffs. At the time, it was an exciting concept, and readers felt that they were looking into the smoke-filled rooms, watching political titans in combat. Half a century on, we know that White missed a great deal, particularly about the character of his central figure, John F. Kennedy. He saw the intellectual acrobatics and veneer of high culture - and missed the prostitutes, risky medications, deals with sleazy power brokers and (certainly in the decisive West Virginia primary, very likely on the national election day) outright vote fraud.

Overall, The Making of the President, 1960 is a charming book that fits its subject into a naive template. Its innocence makes for pleasant reading, but it shouldn't be confused with history. ( )

Theodore White taught a whole generation of us to read a presidential campaign. He did so at precisely the time in USAmerican history when presidential campaigning was being transformed. I remember the summer of 1962, sitting on the tree-shaded campus of George Peabody College (not yet a part of Vanderbilt University), reading The Making of the President 1960 (Atheneum, c1961). I was teaching at Peabody Demonstration School, with plenty of work to do (papers to grade, lessons to prepare, encyclopedias to sell—well, teachers have to make a living on the side), but every day I’d permit myself time at lunch to read one more chapter. I remember saying to myself, and how right I was, that this is the future of presidential campaigning.

I had voted for the first time in the election of 1960, but I had been following politics ever since the national conventions of 1948, when I was twelve. I had clipped an article out of the newspaper with a thumbnail sketch of each candidate, and I followed their efforts on the radio each day of the convention, taking reports to my father at his work. It was at that Democratic Convention that the young mayor of Minneapolis spoke, rasing a ruckus. Supporting a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform, he told the Convention: "To those who say, my friends, to those who say, that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years too late! To those who say, this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!" His heart-felt speech caught the attention of he delegates, and the civil-rights plank was narrowly adopted. A number of Southern delegates walked out of the hall to form the Dixiecrat Party. That young mayor was Hubert Humphrey. He went ahead to become senator in the election that fall, running as the Democratic Farm Labor Party candidate in Minnesota. He also became a voice for the people and, almost immediately, a prospect for the presidency.

I had not followed the primaries carefully in the spring of 1960. I was accustomed to decisions about the nominee being made at the conventions. That’s what had happened when my hero, Estes Kefauver in his coonskin cap, won the primaries in 1952 but was supplanted by Adlai Stevenson with the support of party leaders in the back rooms of the convention hall. What does it matter who wins the primaries, I said to myself in bitter disappointment. I did not live in a state that had a presidential primary in 1960 (and in the eleven campaigns since, I have never lived in a state where the presidential primary has been influential in the final decision). So when I settled in to watch the 1960 Democratic Convention on television, I was expecting to witness the decision being made. It was not to be so. For all practical purposes, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had already been selected. Oh, there was a last-minute flourish of opposition on which I pinned my hopes (for I was not a Kennedy supporter), but to no avail.

Therefore, my reading of Theodore White filled me in on the history I could have followed more carefully but had not. I remember coming away from that reading with three distinctive convictions about the future: (1) Henceforth, primaries not conventions or caucuses would be decisive, and the early primaries would test the candidates and be important in determining the final winner. (2) Image rather than issues would dominate the media, and manipulation of the media would be of overwhelming importance. The Kennedys, with their young, handsome, articulate candidate, knew that and established the campaign pattern for at least the next five decades. (3) Affluent families would have a decided edge; their opponents would be required to spend more time and effort in raising funds than in addressing voters. White taught me all that with his first Making of the President, and of course White was right.

For history’s sake, White’s book is still a good read. If you do not have time or interest to read the whole book, at least you might want to check out Chapter Four, “The Art of the Primary: Wisconsin and West Virginia.” There were only sixteen state primaries at the time: Humphrey could afford only five. He had neither the time (he was an active, conscientious senator) nor the financial backing for more. Kennedy chose seven: he had to make the point that a Catholic from New England could attract attention and gather votes in Middle America. From their very first, lonely day on the campaign trail in snow-covered Wisconsin, White followed them both. He was with them; he heard what they said and saw what they did behind the scenes. So how did Kennedy win these two primaries? First, there was image.

“Above all, over and over again there was the handsome, open faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns. The documentary film on TV opened with a cut of a PT boat spraying a white wake through the black night, and Kennedy was a war hero; the film next showed the quiet young man holding a book in his hand in his own library receiving the Pulitzer prize, and he was a scholar; then the young man held his golden-haired daughter of two, reading to her as she sat on his lap, and he was the young father; and always, gravely, open-eyed, with a sincerity that could not be feigned, he would explain his own devotion to the freedom of America’s faiths, and the separation of church and state.”

Second, there was money, and the organization that money could buy. In West Virginia, the Kennedy campaign spent $34,000 on television alone; the total budget for Humphrey was $25,000. And the financial figures are deceptive, for Kennedy had supporters from family, Harvard classmates, and wealthy supporters who could work full-time as volunteers, hence providing a staff that would otherwise not have been affordable, even to him. “Up and down the roads roved Kennedy names, brothers and sisters all available for speeches and appearances . . . .” There were sixteen campaign headquarters in West Virginia, with at least fifty highly educated and talented staffers (free!); Humphrey’s total staff was less than ten. With this kind of staff, incidentally, every local volunteer was made to feel a vital part: “. . . every citizen likes to feel he is somehow wired into the structure of power; that making a man or woman seem useful and important to himself (or herself) in the power system of American life takes advantage of one of the simplest and noblest urges of politics in the most effective way.” The organization was there to give make-work jobs to all local volunteers, incorporating them into the mainstream.

Third, and perhaps the ultimate deciding factor in West Virginia, was the issue that was a non-issue. Kennedy had to prove that he could appeal to non-Catholic voters—in a state in which only five percent of the population was Catholic. How could he attract those voters? He did it in this proud, independent country by making tolerance his principal issue: prove you are tolerant by voting for this handsome, open young Catholic who says it would be a sin to violate the separation of church and state. Of course, there could have been no opponent who would have been more tolerant than Humphrey, who had staked his whole political career on human rights, tolerance, and fair play, not to mention separation of church and state. On real issues, both men were liberals, and Humphrey had by far the more active and more effective record. But, with the help of the press, the media, and the volunteers, the Kennedys could make Humphrey’s issues (and his record) non-issues. Media and money, image and organization, non-issues and not previous records: the Kennedys taught campaigners and candidates from then on out how to win primaries; and Teddy White taught his readers what to look for in primary campaigns.

Humphrey, as always, spoke from the heart, and from his solid record, but in this new age of USAmerican politics, even he sensed that that would not be enough—though he spoke with hope to the last: “To elect a President,” he said near the end of the campaign in Wisconsin, “it’s more important that he be good of heart, good of spirit, than that he be slick, or clever, or statesmanlike-looking.” One could wish!

This first up close, and personal, view of a presidential campaign was quickly imitated but never equaled or surpassed, even when White went on to cover and write future campaigns. Evocative reading about a time long past. Be warned: The Kennedy charm, before we all recognized it, worked on White too. ( )