Theodore H. White: Making of a Historian

Theodore H. White is dead. He is gone with Jack and Bobby and so many others flung together by fortune in those iridescent months of a quarter-century ago when the world seemed to swarm with such sweet possibilities. And soon enough the rest of us will go, bequeathing the times to history or legend or oblivion.

When I first met Teddy White he was standing along the rail that separated the crowd from the grass-fringed Tarmac where the candidate, having emerged from his small Convair, “The Caroline,” was reaching for the outstretched hands of the people who had come to witness the embarkation of a prospective President of the United States at their obscure town in the mountainous middle of the continent.

A would-be writer myself, I hastened to introduce myself to a man who had already written two best-selling works of contemporary history. He was writing a book, he told me, about the campaign. Everyone knew, he explained, that political books didn’t sell many copies but it was something he had always wanted to do. He loved politics and now, having achieved some security with the success of his earlier works, he could afford to undertake this work for the fun of it and with some prospect that it might do well enough to make up a small trust fund for the future education of his children. Later, I understand, it took lawyers and accountants much labor to redistribute the unexpected wealth that had flooded the trust far beyond the demands of the most lavish education imaginable.

He talked to me, a kid one year out of law school, a novice taking his first fumbling steps into the hazardous labyrinth of the practical world, with the same excited openness and sensed mutuality of respect that he brought to his contacts with the great and the famous and the rich. And though in later years our paths and politics diverged, I always loved the man. And I love him still. Why? The answer trails off into a multitudinous litter of cliches. There was one thing: He was always ready to believe the best about the people he met and the country they sought to master--a passionate, often misguided, naivete that could make you, for the brief moments of encounter, feel better about yourself. If he failed at times to see the cynicism and greed of grim politics, the very blindness enabled him to know a greater truth--that in the multiformed maelstrom of the human spirit, romantic idealism could exist alongside the most menial, cruel and indifferent hungers.

It is often said that he invented a new form of journalism. It is more accurate to say that he revived a form of journalism as old as Western civilization itself, practiced brilliantly by Thucydides as he set down his “insider” accounts of the Athenian debates that led toward the collapse of that great society. It was not journalism at all, not as we usually conceive it, but a form of history; a craft born of the conviction that the engaged observer could give historical dimension to the events of his time with a significant accuracy that was different, but not less, than the studies of those who seek to exorcise the spirit of a distant past.

He did his work well. Had they been read by only a handful, his efforts would still be a substantial contribution to the chronicles of America. The relationship between intrinsic merit and popular success is wholy fortuitous. I am writing this not far from places where Hawthorne, Melville and Poe labored on the most titanic works of our literature in virtual anonymity. But Teddy White was also lucky. He practiced his trade at the moment when the American presidency was entering the age of celebrity--when political leaders were to enter the castle of fame once reserved for movie stars and Babe Ruth. And it was also the time when America had climbed to the pinnacle of nations in wealth and power and in protection of the democratic freedoms it had introduced into the modern world.

In 1959 one could not have foreseen all this. That is why Teddy White looked upon his political narratives as a labor of love, a temporary abdication of the drive for success. He was interested in understanding, exploring and recording the process by which leadership was created with as much truthful integrity as the duplicities of politics allowed. And because the time was right, his archeologist’s pick exposed a startling vein of gold. Teddy struck it rich--money, fame and the almost deferential respect that the most powerful give to those whose words can influence the millions whose approval is necessary to their ambition. Good for him! He was rewarded as he deserved, a form of justice allowed to few writers in any generation.

It is true that his success alerted an entire generation of journalists to the golden possibilities of political journalism. But he was not their progenitor, any more than they were loyal practitioners of some artful craft he is supposed to have invented. Most of the works that now pretend to take us “inside politics” relate conversation, anecdotes and alleged “strategy decisions” for their interest as gossip or for the shock of exposure, rather than to illustrate or ornament the great themes of the American experiment. It is like writing about the superstitious changes in the all-chicken diet of batting champion Wade Boggs without trying to uncover the fierce obsession that allows a man to focus his entire being on the 60-foot trajectory between a pitcher’s arm and a meticulously poised bat.

Labeled as “history,” we are given anecdotes; the subtleties of truth are overridden in the demands of simplistic, best-selling, “narrative drive,” and an unremitting cynicism is used to mask ignorance of that multihued, clashing realm of ambition and desire that is contained in all who strive to master their world--in the worst of men and in the best.

Teddy White was not the schoolmaster to a new generation of commentators and journalists. His work was of varied quality. But it was his alone. Just as he was alone in what he did. Perhaps what separates him most decisively is that he cared; that even in the exercise of the most brutally detached observation he was passionately, lovingly connected to the people and events of the ongoing American story. And he wrote it down--not only the facts, but also the love and the romantic beliefs, all of it tempered with the historical intelligence that gave his work such unusual range. He was, in the tradition of his Jewish heritage, a person of the book. And if, occasionally, he seemed excessively sentimental, it is because he was a better man than most of those he wrote about.

One of his best-known pieces, trivial as history but graven into the memory of his contemporaries, was an interview with Jacqueline Onassis, shortly after John Kennedy’s murder, which retrospectively bestowed the title “Camelot” on the Kennedy White House. In the final lines of that musical, the dying king commands a young observer to flee the final fatal battle. Return alive and grow old, he says, and, in future years:

“Think back on all the tales you remember.

“Ask every person if he has heard the story

“And tell it strong and clear if he has not.”

Now the storyteller, faithful to his inward mission, is also gone, his instruments and his song vested in the lap of time. Others will relate the tale. But it won’t be the same. No one will ever do it the way you did it Teddy. It was a great performance. Thanks for coming. Thanks a lot.