Over at Politico, Scott Porch and Mariel A. Klein have a retrospective look at the book that “invented” modern political reporting, Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960. It’s not bad, but it misses a few things.
As Porch and Klein note, Teddy White got his start reporting on China during World War II and the years immediately thereafter, but they simply pass over the “real story.” White’s informed reporting made him a fair-haired boy for Time founder Henry Luce, the Rupert Murdoch of his day. Luce, the son of missionaries, grew up in China and had a passionate interest in that country and a passionate hatred for communism. White, on the other hand, though not a communist, was deeply enamored of the communist cause in China. It was long a liberal legend that White, striving to tell the “truth” about the gross incompetence and corruption of Chiang Ki-shek’s Nationalist regime, had all of his sweat- and blood-stained copy rewritten by Time editor Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who had become a strident and florid anti-communist. In fact, Chambers did rewrite White’s copy, downplaying Nationalist corruption but highlighting the truth that White sought to hide, that Mao and his followers were not democratic rural land reformers but rather ruthless totalitarians.
When the Hiss-Chambers case exploded in 1948, and, in particular, when Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, White’s position in American journalism was not particularly stable, but he was able to make his way, as both a journalist and a novelist. After the great success of The Making of the President 1960, White was ready to take up residence in the American Establishment and become the official chronicler of its elections/coronations, which he did in The Making of the President 1964, The Making of the President 1968, and The Making of the President 1972, making the not-too-surprising transformation from lefty to incipient neo-con as he did so.
Yet anyone who reads White’s presidential quartet in detail will find a tell-tale footprint of White’s progressive past, a low-key yet persistent disinformation campaign that White waged for decades. Every so often, while listening to an American politician—Hubert Humphrey or Scoop Jackson, someone who can connect with the common man—White will recall another man of the people, another guy with the common touch, like Mao Tse-tung or Chou En-lai. Yeah, those guys, they cared about people, and they cared about peace. It was so strange that, once they were in power, they turned into the worst mass-murderers in history! Who could have guessed!
