NONFICTION - Dec. 20, 1992

THEODORE H. WHITE AT LARGE: The Best of His Magazine Writing, 1939-1986 edited by Edward T. Thompson (Pantheon: $35; 681 pp.) . Theodore H. White, author of the “Making of the President” series, has taken some knocks of late as contemporary political journalists attempt the obligatory Oedipal patricide. White’s reputation, however, is safe; whatever doubts have been sown will be quickly dispelled by this volume, which shows White’s non-presidential reportage to be, with significant exceptions, unconventional, authoritative and sometimes brilliant. As a war correspondent in China, he grounds his analysis in Asian resentment of Western imperialism, and while recounting famine in Honan, he doesn’t fail to note that the journalists ate well; in a political-economic article on postwar Poland, he closes with a visit to Auschwitz, his description beginning “The paths are neat, the guide has a set piece, the human hair is stacked in bins”; in the classic “The Battle of Athens, Tennessee,” he shows a group of World War II vets changing their local political machine, having realized that those who fought for democracy abroad should enjoy it in their own back yard as well. The exceptions? Much of White’s nonpolitical writing from the mid-1960s onward, when White began acting, and thinking, like an insider. This collection makes clear that the attributes making White a first-rate journalist--his sense of history, vivid writing style and willingness to take moral positions--became liabilities in the self-appointed sage; as an essayist and commentator, especially on domestic race relations, he often sounds pompous and patronizing. Skip the last 200-odd pages in this book and you’ll likely agree White was one of the best reporters of the last 50 years.