In Search Of History: A Personal Adventure – Theodore H. White, 1978 ★★★

Prioritizing the Political Over the Personal

Tragedy nearly struck journalist Theodore H. White twice in November 1963. Right after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, White’s aged mother suffered a heart attack while White was visiting her in Massachusetts.

At that very moment he had a summons from the President’s widow, Jacqueline. She wanted White’s services immediately for an article to honor her husband’s legacy in the next issue of Life magazine. He asks: “[I]f the widow of my friend needed me and my mother needed me, what should I do?”

The answer: He left Mom to await a doctor with his wife, and sped off to Hyannis Port where Jackie told him how her husband’s Presidency reminded her of the popular musical Camelot. White dutifully made the comparison in his article; a myth was born.

Even White admits in retrospect that Camelot comparison was a stretch. But it didn’t matter. He writes: In politics, it is not the way things really are that counts, but the way they appear to be.

His mother survived her heart attack; whether she ever talked to her son is not as clear as he never mentions her again.

White's JFK memorial article as it ran in the Dec. 6, 1963 issue of Life magazine. "For one brief shining moment there was Camelot," it reads, paraphrasing the Lerner & Loewe song at Jacqueline's request.
Image from https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/THWPP/059/THWPP-059-009

An incredibly broad overview of one man’s very exciting career in journalism, Theodore White’s In Search Of History puts us at his shoulder as he explores war-torn China and reconstructed Europe, does battle with leftist zealots and right-wing hoods, and apotheosizes the ephemerality of the world and the fleeting cast populating it.

Yet there is a hole in this autobiography. White makes little time for family or his less famous friends. Presenting his life story as a piece of a larger experience, a prelude to his four “Making Of The President” books, White writes it for the most part in the same formal, objective way, focusing not on himself but the famous and powerful he knew.

The exception to that are short interstitial chapters, where White writes of himself in the third person. “He was a born organization man, most comfortable when he had a place in a collective body that would pay him regularly and fairly and offer a dash of honor and dignity as well,” is a sample passage. Otherwise, he is in full reporter mode, catching you up on what was going on in and outside America pre-“Making Of.”

The result is by turns infuriating, self-serving, captivating, boring, glib and profound. The stuff of life, in other words, if a very interesting one.

Theodore H. White in what became a more common role for him in the 1960s, television pundit. He admits to being uncomfortable on air and once declined an offer from his friend Edward Murrow to join CBS News.
Image from https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/theodore-h-white-on-thinking-unlike-your-friends-2015-11-24

Growing up in Boston during World War I, White was a Horatio Alger story, a poor Jewish paper boy who made his way to Harvard University through hard work and a belief both in himself and the country that produced him.

Harvard Yard, he writes, impressed him like nothing else he ever experienced. The university became a cradle for his ambition:

We had come to Harvard not to help the working classes, but to get out of the working classes. We were on the make. And in my own case, the approach to Harvard and its riches was that of a looter.

Best-known today for his “The Making Of The President” series, White launched his career as a foreign correspondent for Henry Luce’s Time magazine, where the focus was always on individual “makers of history.” Though he fell out with Luce over their different takes on communist China, White held fast to that “compelling personality” concept throughout his career, latching on to various figures he met with a curiosity so immersive it bordered on idolatry.

That certainly was so with Kennedy, which White readily admits:

Those who knew him well loved him too much. Those who hated him did not know him at all. Between the conflicting memories was the man, and the man I followed wrapped me in such affection that I have never been able completely to escape.

John F. Kennedy presenting himself as a writer. White notes JFK was exceptionally well-read, and more enthusiastic about journalism and journalists than most politicians. "Kennedy had an almost insatiable appetite for high- or low-level gossip," White notes.
Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-F-Kennedy/Congressman-and-senator

White began covering Senator Kennedy in the 1950s. By 1960, JFK was running for President and White was writing his first “Making Of The President” book, covering Kennedy as a Democratic candidate. “It’s probably a good book if Kennedy wins,” White quotes his then-wife Nancy saying. “But if Nixon wins, it’s a dog.”

In part this was because Kennedy made for better copy than the Republican vice president, but also because the Whites, like everyone they knew in their East Coast social circles, were die-hard liberals. White readily acknowledges Kennedy’s platform did not differ much from Richard Nixon’s. It was more the promise of progressivism, matched with a young and handsome face, that captivated him.

Even when White is at his most dogmatic and blinkered, which he is on JFK, he still makes for enjoyable copy. His style is stodgy but lathered with personal insights and descriptive detail that give the book resonance beyond its own age. This is especially true with the early part of the book as he spotlights what amounted to his first big assignment, covering the China front during World War II.

White once harbored illusions of competency regarding China’s leader, Chaing K’ai-Chek, as Chaing waged war against both invading Japanese and a Communist insurgency led by Mao Zedong. These were shattered by the corruption and needless death he witnessed:

No government in Asia, or anywhere else for that matter, was ever so completely penetrated by “Americanists” as was [Chaing’s] government in Chungking. And no government, except perhaps that of the Republic of South Vietnam, was so completely ruined by American ideas, aid and advice.

Chaing's military strategy, supported by the U. S., was to let peasants like these bear the brunt of Japanese attacks: “If the people die,” said an officer to me, “the land will still be Chinese. But if the soldiers starve, the Japanese will take the land.”
Image from https://factsanddetails.com/asian/ca67/sub426/entry-5340.html

Eventually White would befriend one Communist leader, Chou En-lai, and urge U. S. officials cut ties with Chaing. This eventually led to the break of White’s friendship with Luce, and also an end to his employment at the magazine Luce owned, Time.

White saw American might better deployed in the other two major stories he covered, the surrender of Japan in 1945 and the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Aid plan of 1948-1950. He is especially pleased with the latter accomplishment, which he notes saved Western Europe from likely Russian aggression:

In the noblest terms, it had enlisted the good will of free peoples against the discipline of orderly peoples. In the crudest terms, it had enlisted greed against terror. In any case, we had won.

White’s pride in both successes is palpable, making clear where his loyalties lay, even when those on the Right expressed their doubts given his take on Chaing (and if they could have read this book, perhaps on Mao and Chou, too.)

After returning from China in 1946, White co-authored his first book, Thunder Out Of China, a best-seller which triggered his eventual dismissal from Time. "Those of us who have been so criticized for romanticizing the Chinese Communists can claim forgiveness," he writes. "Chinese Communists were different then; we were not duped."
Image from https://www.abebooks.com

For White, Mao and Chou were great because they were two of the hinges of history upon which better things came to be, helping to sum up his belief in individuals who through pure will, can positively direct the course of the world. He explains this in one of his third-person interludes:

In twenty-five years of reporting, he had met so many definitely good men in places of high or critical power, he simply could not ignore the importance of heroes in history.

More risible for today’s reader perhaps is his full-throated endorsement of a media elite, of which he counts himself a member, an elite who help favored politicians hone their message to a wider public:

In every capital I have ever worked, from Chungking to London to Washington to Paris, there has always been a select group of American newsmen who presented themselves as surrogates of the entire American people, and demanded that men of state explain themselves – off the record. Press conferences are for the record and for everybody. But the “inner few” device is for trying to draw perspectives which the principles may deny, but which may guide the reporters’ writings.

Marshall Plan aid being put to use in West Berlin, 1948. White writes: "The money that Americans gave away in the years 1948 through 1950 worked best when it found its way through governments to groups, or industries, who knew how to use what they could buy with the money, and turn investments into results."
Image from https://afsa.org/helping-europe-help-itself-marshall-plan

One can see his point more clearly when talking to leaders overseas regarding something like implementation of the Marshall Plan; less with a candidate like Kennedy, who clearly flattered and beguiled White to the point where White became, knowingly or not, a courtier; until that night he left his stricken mother to write a puff piece for Kennedy’s widow.

If White sensed something was off about this, he doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he rhapsodies about Kennedy some more, agreeing it was a shame about the infidelities and Vietnam, but adding he only knew three presidential candidates who didn’t cheat on their wives, and that Republicans were in fact to blame for that stupid war for not having cut ties with South Vietnam when Eisenhower was president.

However he frames things to fit a specific agenda, at least he’s open about it. I found White’s account fascinating more often than not, even when he gets into less dazzling parts of his life, like a stint at Collier’s magazine and a pair of novels he wrote to some success. Even when quoting statistics, which he does at length more than I’ve seen done in an autobiography, he has a way of making them matter, at least while you are reading him.

When I first read this book, I rated it higher than all but one of the “Making Of The President” books, the one on 1968. Today I am more ambivalent about it, and about White in general. I think his third-person interludes run on too long, and that he spends too much time on historical trivia at the expense of drawing more on his personal life.

But his observations still carry weight, his anecdotes entertain, and his short glimpses of a life defined by journalism are revealing, perhaps more than he intended. So despite a notable absence of self, it’s a memoir worth a read.