Theodore H. White (1915–1986)

A wonderful book which manages to impart a real (as closely as I can remember it - I was born in mid 1961) feel for the early 1960s as well as for the characters involved. Paradoxically, though he is far and away less psychologically "attractive" I found myself drawn to the figure of Nixon -- not as a fan of his political stances but as an informal student of human psychology (which we must all be to some extent in order to navigate life). There is real pathos there: conflict, darkness and show more suffering. I'm of the opinion that this bore fruit in his presidency and eventual disgrace ... but seriously, if one were to draw parallels between this story and that of Milton's Paradise Lost (and those are some REMOTE PARALLELS), Nixon is definitely Satan, and more interesting in his way than Kennedy.

And, no, I'm not calling Richard Nixon Satan. Nor am I calling John Kennedy Jesus. I'm merely making a call here similar to William Blake when he said of Paradise Lost "Milton was of the Devil's Party without knowing it." Losers can be more interesting and complicated than winners, and I thought that was the case here.

Note: I always squirm internally when writers use the term "stock" with reference to human groups. White does this a lot. show less

Really a dense and dry, textbook-like read full of an orgy of statistics, personages and granular facts, there is still much enlightenment in the reading. For some reason I previously though of the Kennedy election as a landslide referendum on a fading conservative America at the threshold of the progressive, liberal 60s. This book paints a much more complex picture where the election, on the popular and thus fundamental scale, was a squeaker in Kennedy’s favor. (“…this margin of show more popular vote is so thin as to be, in all reality, nonexistent. If only 4500 voters in Illinois and 28000 voters in Texas changed their minds, the sum of their 32000 votes would have moved both these states, with their combined fifty-one electoral votes, into the Nixon column...The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs...")This seems to have more to do with Nixon’s sabotaging his own chances (dropping the ball during MLK’s arrest, rudely ignoring his own advisors, refusing to engage Eisenhower for support, etc.) than any Kennedy or Democratic Party destiny.

Among the wisdom in this book written by a very able political observer who was embedded with Humphrey, etc. is nuggets such as Adlai Stevenson’s observation on American: “We're a self-indulgent consumption society, and our standards have been so terribly tarnished around the world.” Also, the author’s own observation that “Though Republican politicians use the same public phrases and private techniques as their Democratic rivals, the two great parties operate in different world of reality. Seizure of power on the Republican side is so different from seizure of power on the Democratic side that it sometimes seems that the fauna who contend in these separate jungles come of different orders of political zoology. For despite the cynic's dictum that the national parties of Americans offer only the choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Republican Party is completely different from the Democratic Party […] But one cannot begin to describe Republican reality, as the Party leadership approached 1960, without exploring that spectacular Republican schizophrenia which for a century has baffled all observers.

The Republican Party, to be exact, is twins and has been twins from the moment of its birth—but the twins who inhabit its name and shelter and Jacob and Esau: fratricidal, not fraternal, twins. Within the Republican Party are combined a stream of the loftiest American idealism and a stream of the coarsest American greed.”

It also seems to me that the author could make a case from his knowledge that later punk rock pogoing is derivative of street-side Kennedy fanatics: “The jumpers were, in the beginning, teenage girls who would bounce, jounce and jump as the cavalcade passed, squealing, “I seen him, I seen him.” Gradually over the days their jumping seemed to grow more rhythmic, giving a jack-in-the-box effect of ups and downs in a thoroughly sexy oscillation.”

What really makes the book worth reading and keeping in print a half-century after its events is such insight into the American soul that take my breath away, like “If other nations falter in greatness, their people remain still what they were. But if America falters in greatness and purpose, then Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.” show less

A generally good account that tends to fall prey to White's characteristic veneration of the winner as if they are a saintly classical hero (particularly ironic given the way Nixon's presidency ended). This extends to strange self-contradictions such as the chapter which insists the Nixon "southern strategy" was a myth before then going on to describe the Nixon campaign deliberately stoking concern in southern whites along racial lines to make Nixon feel like the safer choice. That was the show more southern strategy which White denied the existence of pages earlier and is just one example (to my mind, the most egregious) of the massaging of history to fit White's preferred "cometh the hour, cometh the man" narrative approach. show less

Hillary Rodham Clinton was a high-school Young Republican and "Goldwater Girl" in 1964 but swung to supporting Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972. "I wasn’t born a Democrat," she writes on page one of her autobiography Living HistoryLiving History, but was a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it" (page 11). Her 9th-grade history teacher was also a very conservative Republican who encouraged her to read show more Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, Conscience of a Conservative, which inspired Clinton to write a term paper on the American conservative movement. "I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan 'AuH20.' … I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide."

I think this association with Clinton and similar contexts had given me the perception that "Goldwater Republican" meant someone more progressive or at least centrist compared to a typical Republican. However, as the excellent and detailed reportage clarifies, here, ultra-conservative Goldwater differs from today's libertarians (both big-L and little-L) in that he was an advocate for strong national defense and even a hawkish interventionist and pro-tactical nukes, etc.. This is the guy, remember, who suggested we should “lob a nuke into the men's room at the Kremlin." This alarmed many and reinforced LBJ's determination to defeat him - the Trump of his day it seems - and eventually out-hawk him with The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and run the unforgettable "Daisy" ad. I wish the book went into more detail on the Johnson machine that led to that ad and the organized operatives detailed to hound and disrupt the Goldwater campaign.

This book does go into detail on how LBJ was not the shoo-in some may think in retrospect and his ship almost got caught up on the rocky shoals of the sudden scandal around Walter Jenkins, longtime top aide to Johnson. Jenkins' career ended after a sex scandal was reported weeks before the 1964 presidential election, when Jenkins was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct with another man in a public restroom in Washington, D.C.'s YMCA ("so notorious a gathering place of homosexuals that the District police had long since staked it out with peepholes for surveillance"). LBJ was largely saved by sudden events that pushed voters away from supposed Goldwater warmongering and toward the stability hoped from continuity of government:

* On October 14, 1964, the Presidium and the Central Committee accepted Khrushchev's "voluntary" request to retire from his offices for reasons of "advanced age and ill health." Brezhnev was now on the scene and there was a new Soviet government for the U.S. to be concerned about

* "596", the People's Republic of China's first nuclear weapons test, detonated on October 16, 1964, at the Lop Nur test site.

* Labour won the 1964 UK general election with a narrow majority of four seats, and Harold Wilson became Prime Minister, the youngest person to hold that office since Lord Rosebery 70 years earlier. The election was held on 15 October 1964, just over five years after the previous election, and 13 years after the Conservative Party had retaken power.

While the term "October surprise" did not come into usage until the 1972 election and the Kissinger-Nixon secret talks over Vietnam, there was certainly fortuitous October surprises for LBJ that pushed Jenkins' story off the headlines. show less