The Press: Makings and Unmakings

Since 1961, Theodore H. White's colorful, magisterial narratives of presidential campaigns have become a standard part of the election returns, a quadrennial post-mortem on the body politic. In The Making of the President—1972 (published this week by Atheneum), White faced his severest test to date. The 1972 campaign, dominated by a challenger who could not get started and an incumbent who would not come out to fight, was short on political blood and guts. More important, the campaign's invisible drama—Watergate and related skulduggery—did not begin unfolding until White was in the final stages of writing. Now Watergate overshadows the visible campaign of 1972.

White admits these handicaps. But in the record of a frustrating campaign, he sees signs of a momentous change in the national psyche, a visible shift in the U.S. cycle between bouts of idealism and fits of hunkering down. The election, he says, signaled the retreat of New Deal domestic and postwar foreign policies that had "increased the power of the state beyond the experience of any previous generation." In White's view, McGovern was the spokesman for an increasingly tarnished liberal orthodoxy, advocating ever greater use of federal legislation and revenues for social tinkering. Nixon heralded a welcome standdown, promising voters a withering away of the giant federal state and its intrusive demands. "The Americans," White concludes, "were for slowing the pace of power, and they chose Richard Nixon."

What the voters saw, White adds, may not have been what they got. Nixon, after all, concentrated power in the Executive Branch to an extent that is only now becoming clear, and his Administration gave law-enforcement authorities new access to private lives. McGovern, for his part, had considerable difficulty in appealing to the Democrats' traditional liberal constituency, and may yet be viewed as the forerunner of some genuinely new politics—or merely as a quirk.

White portrays McGovern's nomination as a well-intentioned but undeniable disaster. The McGovern "guerrilla" movement, as White tells it, was born on a hot, violent night in Chicago in 1968, when distracted delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted to reform their party during the next four years—and unwittingly bound themselves to what in effect became ethnic, sexual and youth quotas. Dominated by a staff of zealous reformers, the resulting commission succeeded in passing a series of sweeping new rules favorable to women, youth and blacks virtually under the unsuspecting noses of many party regulars.