The Making Of The President 1972 – Theodore H. White, 1973 ★★★½

Nobody Loves a Winner

The problem with total victory is that victors often have a hard time overcoming them. It offers no moral guardrails, no ego checks to counter bad impulses, while falsely beguiling the victor into seeing only a clear road and an open horizon ahead.

All this was a problem for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign long before the votes came in. The fourth and final volume in Theodore H. White’s “Making Of The President” series examines what happens when four years of success becomes its own poison pill.

In so doing, White turns in an engaging book even while it struggles to get a handle on the elephant in the room: the arrests of men connected to the Nixon re-election campaign who had broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel.

The spirit of the nation was low. Yes, American involvement in the Vietnam War was closing down, but the human cost had been high, and utterly wasted. The economy was chugging along, but can-do spirit had been replaced by a sense of ennui, or what was termed “malaise” in a later 1970s presidency. White saw it, too:

Public spirit and social conscience had worn low by 1972 – a war had worn out the spirit, and random experimentation had worn out conscience. Few, except for the blacks and deprived, asked what the country could do for them, and fewer still asked what they could do for their country.

Former POW Jay Hess greets his daughter Heidi after his release by the North Vietnamese, March 17, 1973. The fates of U. S. personnel captured in the war was a major campaign issue in 1972 and furthered the drive to end the war.
Photo by Ben Olender from https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives-vietnam-pow-welcomed-home-20170419-story.html

Nixon’s Democratic opponent in 1972 was South Dakota Senator George McGovern. He spent the primaries winning over the party’s left wing but found it much harder to claim the center.

True believers were the crux of his problem. An idea had formed in the 1960s that delegates to the Democratic conventions had been too white and male. More diverse representation was desired, and thus mandated by party law, requiring delegates chosen in primaries be replaced by people who were Black, female or both.

This left some party stalwarts in the dust, including those of Irish, Italian, and Polish ancestries who had traditionally identified with the Democratic party. White quotes Mike Royko, liberal columnist for the Chicago Daily News: “Anybody who would reform Chicago’s Democratic Party by dropping the white ethnic would probably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.”

While dominated by Nixon and the looming shadow of Watergate, the book’s most compelling takes are on McGovern. You sense how torn on the guy the author is. McGovern spoke for the right causes, but he lacked passion and personality. He was a nice guy, maybe too nice. “Goodwill was the pattern of George McGovern’s frailty,” White writes.

McGovern and his first running mate, Tom Eagleton. The phrase "Come Home America" was from McGovern's excellent acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, delivered at 2:48 AM Eastern time. "Presidential campaigns are always run by amateurs," White writes. "But the McGovern campaign added a new variety of disorganization."
Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/184605945431

Plus St. George was more than a little naïve:

…in George McGovern’s mind, the polarity was always that of Good and Evil. He was a virtuous man; he knew what was right and wrong. His mind, like Richard Nixon’s, had a pragmatic knack of political organization; but, unlike Richard Nixon’s, it accepted input only if it fitted the polarities of his previously fixed thinking.

The fatal blow to McGovern’s candidacy came for many when he pulled his support for his original running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton from Missouri, when it emerged Eagleton had undergone extensive mental-health therapy that included electroshock treatments.

For White, it came when McGovern similarly abandoned supporter Pierre Salinger, an old Kennedy hand, after a Democratic peace mission to North Vietnam backfired. McGovern emerges in White’s account as not only a wimp, but a bit of a weasel, too.

Nixon also had his dark side. White just can’t quite bring himself to call it out here. An open admirer of Kennedy in Making Of The President 1960 who had begun to regret disliking Nixon when he wrote Making Of The President 1968, White now wants to give the devil his due.

A portrait of Theodore H. White. The fourth installment of his "Making Of The President" series finds the author in a pensive frame of mind. "For several years the sense has been growing in me that nothing any longer was the same, no rules held, the world we knew was coming to an end," he writes in the prologue.
Image from https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/theodore-h-white/m0dwsl2

Nixon’s foreign policy successes were many and remarkable. His domestic agenda was far more moderate than critics predicted. But his longstanding dislike for the liberal intelligentsia and their media allies had hardened into a kind of institutional paranoia. Nixon insiders vied to show their loyalty in the form of “dirty tricks.”

White puts it this way: “The conservative cause in 1972 might have been, and someday may be, transformed into a genuine movement of spirit. But Nixon in 1972 failed to seize the moment to give his cause, or his campaign team, that horizon of spirit and dream which urges men to deny themselves evil.”

White recalls a sign that hung from a wall at the situation room for the Committee to Re-Elect the President headquarters: “WINNING IN POLITICS ISN’T EVERYTHING. IT’S THE ONLY THING.”

When Making Of The President 1972 was being readied for publishing, the depth of Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal was not known. The fact the president was not involved in planning the burglary was correctly assumed. But what he knew and when he knew it was still undetermined. His fatal part in the cover-up emerged later.

G. Gordon Liddy was an obscure Republican party operator until he was revealed as the "mastermind" behind the June 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters. "A thoroughly dangerous man," White calls him, while wondering what possible purpose the burglary could have accomplished.
Image from https://deadline.com/2021/03/g-gordon-liddy-dead-watergate-miami-vice-radio-talk-shot-host-1234724994/

Like many others, White couldn’t understand what anyone thought could have been gained by the break-in. “A good clipping service would have provided the Committee to Re-Elect with more information than any number of wiretaps,” he marvels.

The 1972 Presidential election was a 520-17 electoral-vote blowout, the biggest since 1936, with a percentage gap of 23 points in the popular vote. White, however, thought those margins could have gone wider without Watergate garnering so much press attention in the final months:

Had it not been for Watergate, it is quite possible that Richard Nixon’s margin would have been increased by another three or four million votes – that, indeed, his stunning 61-38 victory might have gone as high as 65-35, for a record that might never again be approached in American two-party history. The Watergate affair blew that opportunity.

Nixon’s re-election proved a surprisingly isolated success for Republicans in 1972. Running against a Democratic-dominated Congress, they managed to win an insignificant 12 seats in the House of Representatives, while actually losing a net two in the Senate.

The 1972 House elections were not nearly as one-way as the Presidential results. Republicans did pick up a dozen seats, as seen in dark red, but the overall landscape remained firmly in blue Democratic hands.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections 

White notes that a President can usually count on picking up ten seats per every percentage point over 55%. Here, even some notable GOP incumbents were unseated:

Margaret Chase Smith! An absolute fixture in the Republican firmament being defeated by a newcomer Democrat in Maine. And J. Caleb Boggs of Delaware, of whom it was said he had shaken half the right hands in the state in his thirty years of public office, being defeated for the Senate by a young man, Joseph Biden, Jr., who would reach the Constitutional Senatorial age of 30 only a few weeks before he was due to take office.

White goes on to explain these losses as the likely result of Watergate’s shadow, especially as they involved more centrist Republicans. Even while enjoying his apogee as a politician and statesman, with an arms agreement with the Soviets and a path forward with Red China, Nixon was reinforcing his self-destructive reputation.

A wild card in 1972 White briefly addresses is Alabama Governor George Wallace, a Democrat who won seven primaries that year running to Nixon's right. A would-be assassin put an end to his campaign in May, but the paralyzed Wallace, seen here two days after the shooting with his wife, still picked up delegates even after officially dropping out.
Image from https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28581908

The book begins with Nixon making his famous visit to China in February 1972, accompanied by White, who had covered China for Time magazine in the 1940s. Over the course of the book, White enjoys unusual access to the President. They spend a couple of hours in the Oval Office, where White complements Nixon on the yellow décor.

“We call it gold,” he replies, “crisply.”

Then Nixon unwinds and talks candidly about the delicate balancing act he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were then undertaking with China and Russia. He also discusses his domestic initiatives, like his “New Federalism” initiative to transfer oversight of key powers to the states:

“‘This President is grasping for power,’ they say. What I’m trying to do is get power out of here.”

White doesn’t try to hide his sense of Nixon emerging as a leader with the potential for true greatness, even calling out his fellow liberal media elites for being too sour on the man.

First Lady Pat Nixon watches her husband address the Russian people in a televised 1974 address. By 1972, White notes how television, a bane in past elections, ironically became Nixon's favorite tool for bypassing a hostile media and speaking directly to the people.
Image from https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2014/07/president-nixons-address-soviet-people/ 

That McGovern and the other Democratic challengers don’t rate so highly is noteworthy. Early in the book, White notes how changed the world is from what he knew just a few years ago. Stranger times seemed to call for tougher people:

For Nixon, peace was a need of the American people, to be won by hard, tough negotiations and deals with other hard, tough governments overseas who took the word “brotherhood” as skeptically as did he.

White would not formally return to the “Making Of The President” series, though he later published a couple of spiritual sequels. While the series was always popular, White’s style of journalism, with its focus on individuals over movements, had fallen out of fashion with more trend-conscious members of the commentariat.

The Making Of The President 1972 thus isn’t the template-setter Making 1960 was, or as bracing in its insights and descriptions as Making 1968. But it is a solid, worthy continuation which sorts out the worldly and idealistic strains of the body politic as it entered a critical crossroads.