David Hoppe

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:: 1968 according to Theodore H. White

A walk down memory lane

By David Hoppe

During the winter and spring of 1968, I went door-to-door in my politically conservative neighborhood, trying to drum up support for Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar run for the presidency. I was in high school at the time and, while I don’t think I was able to rustle up many votes, I remember people being unfailingly courteous. I ushered at a rally McCarthy threw with Paul Newman at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. And it was my job to organize a rock dance at a suburban community center to rally teen-age volunteers. Nobody but the bands showed up. We called it a night when a woman in her nightgown strode across the empty dance floor demanding the band “turn it down!”

These were a few of the memories that came to me recently as I read a discarded library copy of Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1968. I don’t get the impression that people read White (who died in 1986) much anymore. But, for awhile, he had extraordinary success with a series of widely read books chronicling the presidential campaigns in 1960, ’64, ’68 and ’72.

White’s prose can seem a bit fusty and overwrought by today’s standards. His tendency to believe that a country’s character can be judged by the sophistication and accomplishment of its leadership also betrays an old-fashioned elitism that many contemporary readers might find quaint, if not off-putting.

But White was a keen observer of how our politics play against America’s larger cultural backdrop. Today, reading his on-the-ground reporting about the people and events of what turned out to be one of this country’s most tumultuous years, is a revelation.

Part of the fascination in reading White’s account of 1968 lies in what he couldn’t know at the time. He is willing, for example, to accept the Johnson Administration’s account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that Johnson used as pretext for escalation of the Vietnam War. In 2005, declassification of government documents proved the suspicions of anti-war activists that intelligence reports were jiggered to suit Johnson’s desire to make war the way he wanted.
And White’s inability to know what would become of Richard Nixon’s looming presidency deepens his book’s already tragic undertow. White admits that he didn’t like the Nixon who ran for president in 1960. But he also believes that Nixon changed during his time away from politics. “None has shown himself, on the way to power, so susceptible to strain,” White wrote, “yet apparently learned better how to cope with strain within himself…no passage of this public wandering has been more impressive than the transformation of the impulsive, wrathful man of the 1950’s, so eager for combat and lustful for vengeance, to the man in the White House, cautious and thoughtful, intent on conciliation.”

We know what White couldn’t: About the infamous enemies list, the reliance on “dirty tricks” and, ultimately, the Watergate conspiracy. To White’s credit as a writer, we read his portrait of Nixon and feel not just that Nixon has fooled White, but that, on a profound level and for a time, he probably fooled himself as well.

But Nixon’s tragedy is yet to come. What White shows is that the full impact of Nixon’s failure was tee’d up in 1968, by the unraveling of public trust in its political leadership. Lying optimism about the quagmire that was the Vietnam War, coupled with race riots in the cities and student protests on campuses and at the Democratic convention in Chicago, not to mention the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, cracked the foundation on which our political culture was based.

White is particularly prescient when he writes about George Wallace’s insurgent candidacy. “His message,” wrote White, “was absolutely simple, short and clear. He was telling the people that their government had sold them out. Alienation is one of the more fashionable words in current American politics. It is the negative of the old faith that America was a community, and that government served the community. Alienation is disillusion…with the derivative that government must be seized and compelled to work…or ignored and overthrown.”

Fragmentary resentments that were drawn to Wallace in 1968 would later coalesce to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 and take over the Republican party. Today, they are the so-called Republican base – the pissed-off, paranoid fraction of the electorate that’s fueled by talk radio and internet feedback loops. People who know what they’re against, but can’t say what they’re for.

You have to wonder what White – whose attitude about race seemed to alternate between condescending perplexity and despair –would have made of Barack Obama’s candidacy. Surely, he never would have predicted it; but he would also have been attracted to Obama’s intelligence, self-assurance and grasp of the historical moment. He would also, given the wars that entangle us in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis at home, have doubtless offered Obama the same caution he offered Nixon: “He must make his way, certain of being abused whether rightly or wrongly, before his achievements permit sober judgment to be passed.”