America In Search Of Itself – Theodore H. White, 1982 ★★½

Once More Unto the Breach with Teddy White

Before Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980, American politics had fallen into a rut. Elections had been between two clear known quantities who generally agreed on the state of the world and what the United States needed to do. Differences centered on process, not goals.

Reagan was different. While fellow Republicans saw some use for government, his view was far more negative. After decades of expanding jurisdictional reach, Reagan wanted not only to cut taxes but slash the bureaucracy that made Big Government big.

For many liberals, the arrival of Reagan in 1980 came like a slow-motion nightmare. With an incumbent president seemingly powerless under the grip of inflation and an embassy full of American hostages in Iran, Reagan’s ascendency had the makings of an existential crisis.

For Theodore White, the crisis was very real. Could the America he believed in, an example of progressive legislation fostered by inspired leaders like John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, survive a telegenic quipster who wanted to gut the Great Society? And would it be so terrible if he did?

In America In Search Of Itself: The Making Of The President 1956-1980, he puts it plainly:

There is no escaping the stark fact of the repudiation, in the election of 1980, of a regime that had outlived its time, and though the personalities of the candidates played a vital role, ideas, and the programs that flow from these ideas, are more important.

In the spring of 1979, an energy crisis triggered by the fall of Iran to anti-American fundamentalists forced Americans to do without gasoline for extended periods. "The pinpoints of acute shortage, as in growing states like California, provoked anxiety and panic," White writes.
Image from https://calisphere.org/item/5ad6372c8df0d3eda9282bcd39f9f8ab/

In fact, White seems ready to consider that a different type of leadership after decades of fairly liberal Presidents might work. This book amounts to a struggle session with his own conscience on that point.

In beginning my review this way I may be making America In Search Of Itself sound more interesting than it is. White was a powerful writer who readily takes on ideas in this book no less scary today than they were then, and he airs them out impressively. But America In Search Of Itself is also an overlong book that swamps you in details and never settles into focus. It might as well be titled Author In Search Of A Thesis.

From 1961 to 1973, White published a series of presidential campaign histories in four-year increments. The first of these, The Making Of The President 1960, won White a Pulitzer and revolutionized how politics were written about, creating a more personal and exciting journey for readers.

None of his later entries had the same impact, though, even if they maintained the same high standard. The game was changing. Popular political writing was more subjective, less constrained by journalistic norms. The Selling Of The President 1968, The Boys On The Bus, and Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72 were all about peeling back the layers of public statements and getting at the heart of what made candidates and the people who supported them, often ripping them up in the process.

Another 1979 development that shattered the order of things for Americans was the November 4 seizure of the U. S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. White notes that the date of the hostage-taking, which would last 444 days, was exactly one year before the 1980 election.
Image from https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/27/middleeast/gallery/iran-hostage-crisis/index.html

White took the 1976 campaign cycle off and returned here for what is pretty-much-but-not-quite The Making Of The President 1980.

For the first 200 pages, he steps back and reviews past presidential elections, going as far back as 1956, his first year covering them. Conventions then were how candidates got nominated, while primaries were “almost entirely ornamental.”

In 1956 Tennessee Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver changed that, running against the party’s designated candidate by using primaries to build momentum. That helped get him the party’s nomination for vice president, passing over young Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy.

White explains this a bit, recalling how election rites were different more than twenty years before. It was pretty much all men making decisions in smoky rooms behind closed doors. The main difference between the party conventions then, he recalls, was “Democrats pour by the bottle, Republicans pour by the jigger.”

"Ah'm Estes Kefauver," White recalls the Tennessee senator saying on the hustings in New Hampshire. "Ah'm up here to ask for your he'p." His 1956 primary run against Adlai Stevenson won that state, but was finally stopped in California.
Image from https://www.knoxfocus.com/archives/the-greatest-campaigner-of-them-all-senator-estes-kefauver-part-one/

White then speeds through the next two decades to arrive at the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. This was the election White himself missed out on covering; in a footnote he graciously recommends Jules Witcover’s Marathon: The Pursuit Of The Presidency, 1972-1976, a campaign history written in the White style.

Making up for the missed opportunity, White speeds through Carter’s successful outsider campaign before identifying three key themes that together served to undo his hopes of re-election, and paved the way for Reagan: “Great Society” social policies, inflation, and television.

Then there was the man himself. White writes: Jimmy Carter was always a mystery, this man with the straw-colored hair and clear blue eyes, whose enemies came to despise him while those who would be friends could not understand him.

With a thoroughly Democratic legislature backing him up when he strolled into town like a breath of fresh air after Watergate, Carter should have been a president liberals like White dream of. He was open, optimistic, honest to a fault. Unfortunately, he was also a bit of a prick, unwilling to give Democrats outside his circle of trusted Georgia intimates a chance to be heard and feel like they were on his team.

Jimmy Carter's first day at work, January 20, 1977, began with promise: He and his wife Rosalynn stepped out of their limo to walk in front of the crowd. White recalls an earnest early interview where Carter spoke of healing racial divides and regaining national trust.
Image from https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/jimmy-carter-facts-and-photos

White describes the teetotal Carter avoiding parties and one-on-one meetings, instead opting for tennis matches. Each time one of those people identified as important by Carter’s staff had had their day on court with the President, Carter crossed them off the list.

He followed a similar approach with everyone else:

Carter distrusted the seasoned experts of the State Department as he distrusted Congress; and distrusted that informal collegium of Washington foreign policy veterans as he distrusted the entire Washington establishment.

Carter had more than Reagan to contend with in 1980. He had a Kennedy, too. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, brother to the late president, was one legislator annoyed by Carter’s cool distance. He became more annoyed when Carter gave a televised speech in July 1979 declaring Americans needed to pick up their spirits and pull together to help get through what he called a “crisis of confidence.”

As the gas crisis went on, President Carter makes a televised plea on July 15, 1979 for Americans to be more moral and less materialistic. One Carter domestic adviser recalled his anger at the speech: "What was wrong with the country was not the people themselves."
Image from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/jimmy-carter-energy-crisis-malaise-speech-biden-supply-chain.html

After meeting with Carter and telling the president he would contest his renomination, Kennedy threw his hat into the ring, sharing his feelings with close friends like Teddy White, who writes:

No real difference of politics separated Kennedy from Carter. What did separate them was, very simply, the growing contempt Kennedy developed for Carter as a national leader, the contempt of a master machinist for a plumber’s helper.

White’s affection for the Kennedys, a prime driver of the access he made such good use of in Making Of The President 1960 and a shaper of the pathos White expressed eight years later covering another Kennedy assassination, weighs this book down. He can’t bring himself to write in depth about the many personal issues Ted Kennedy had going on at the time. So he writes instead of unfair media treatment worsened by a candidate who struggled to find his voice.

While his wife Joan looks on, Edward Kennedy makes his case for the presidency. White notes the dissension within the Democratic party, "between the liberals of the Carter administration and the humanitarian left of the Kennedy cause," helped them lose the White House in November.
Photo by Dennis Brack from https://www.dennisbrack.com/image/I0000YKSZwRNxYRk 

Even White has to admit Kennedy proved himself less than a master on the 1980 campaign trail. White writes of a lunch the two men shared, where the candidate asked White for his advice on what to do. Never mind journalistic ethics, this was a friend asking:

I knew his campaign was hopeless. But I did not want to depress him, for he was aching with the pain of his injured back, which he had put to torture in the rounds of New Hampshire. I urged that he carry on at least as far as the New York or Pennsylvania primaries, so as to keep faith with his supporters. And after that, quit.

Kennedy stayed in the race until the convention, which Carter had sown up, before giving a speech that White enjoyed a lot but did nothing to affect the final outcome.

Reagan was a mystery to White, even more than most Republicans. Their lone one-on-one happened while Reagan was flying back home to California, in which he was quite tired while reflecting on the incumbent president: “I wonder whether he’s confusing some of his own statements with having come from God.”

During his speech accepting the Republican nomination in Detroit, Ronald Reagan asked for a moment of quiet prayer. White writes: "And with that, the convention rose, bowed its many heads, and silently prayed."
Image from https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movie-portrays-deep-faith-former-033000878.html

Was Reagan’s subsequent election, in which he won a commanding 489 electoral votes and 44 states, an affirmation of his anti-Big Government platform or just a repudiation of Carter’s ineffectual leadership? As White was putting this book together, the case against Reagan seemed a lot stronger than two years before. The country was gripped in a recession, the Mideast was still dangerous, and the country’s morale was low. It would take another election cycle for Reagan to make his case.

There is a good book at the heart of America In Search Of Itself. White asks a lot of probing questions about race, immigration, the role of women, and the excesses of the nation’s growing culture of complaint. However, it is encased in a lot of windy reminiscence and laborious detail. White loved national census information, so there is a long chapter of him detailing how different the nation had become in 1980.

“America is, above all, about ideas and dreams – far more so than interests,” White writes. At its best, America In Search Of Itself lays out and explains these ideas – even if another straightforward campaign history without such an extensive backdrop would have been preferable.