Books

Where It All Ends..

By Michael Janeway
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1972 by Theodore H. White Atheneum, $ 10.00
Toward the end of The Making of the President—1968, Theodore White describes himself, with candor, as “a reporter who loves the American political process.”Nineteen sixtyeight. with its assassinations, violence. and disappointment, was enough to test abiding love for our politics, but White plugged on. and now we have The Making of the President—1972. The trouble is, White’s election-year chronicles are published in the year after the election they recount, and this book has of course collided with the unclothing of the emperor—1973. For anyone who loves the American political process. Watergate is a heartbreaker, not to mention a complication in getting to press. White got to press, but I’m not sure where that leaves him, and neither is he.
He has worked diligently to catch up with the Watergate revelations, and at the same time to hold to his first order of business, which is to tell the story of the contest of 1972. And as in his previous volumes, amidst the flood of hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly campaign coverage. he has somehow managed to make off with some fascinating interviews and capture in notes and memory revealing pieces of the action that went unreported. But for White as for just about everyone else in America. Watergate poses problems and questions.
It would be unfair to expect him to have cracked any more riddles than any other well-informed reporter or investigator had by the time the book went to press. But there is a special problem here. By his own account in this book. White turned from a scornful view of Richard Nixon—“one of life’s losers,” he called him in his 1960 volume—to an admiring one. And whereas he had been denied access to Nixon in 1960 (which he duly and modestly noted at the time, as he did with regard to Lyndon Johnson in 1964). he had won a good deal of access by 1968, and quite a lot more in 1972. He writes, “As I came to know him. to observe his mind changing, my respect began.”The diplomacy of the first Nixon Administration, he asserts, “could only be called majestic.”White interviewed the President last on March 17 of this year, and he writes now, “My judgment, suspended at that date, would have cast Richard Nixon as one of the major Presidents of the twentieth century, in a rank just after Franklin Roosevelt, on a level with Truman. Wilson. Eisenhower, Kennedy.”How to reconcile this revised view of Richard Nixon with what White readily calls “that family of obscenities which were to be jumbled together under the name ‘Watergate’"?
“I had to build a shield around myself.” said Richard Nixon to Theodore White in that March interview. A cynical soul can accept the duality of a man in need of a shield secluding himself with the co-producer of his foreign-policy extravaganzas—Henry Kissinger—on one flank, and the Watergatemen on the other. But White is no cynic. Certainly he is realistic in noting that the Watergate “obscenities flowed from the same management of power which had created the great diplomatic triumphs.”But he knows that begs the question. So he goes on to draw the now familiar picture of a beleaguered White House in which “the President had ... by the end of 1970, created a private climate of intemperance.”Although White is appalled by the “corrosion of decency in power and fouling of the political process" perpetrated by the President’s loyalists, for now he has chosen something like the President’s explanation for how it all came to pass. He gives a convincing description of 1970-197l’s intemperate climate:
. . . In the words of one of the hard men of his staff, “we were a film of dust on top of the table; underneath was the bureaucracy. Ike did nothing to replace the bureaucracy. Democratic appointees are all through the woodwork of this government.” In the minds of many at the White House, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers it seemed that something akin to political treason was going on in the administration.
But then it comes time to talk about who did the dirty deeds—and who covered them up. White:
One can only invent an imaginary scene to explain it all—a scene akin to that in the court of Henry II when that intemperate king burst out in the hearing of all. “Oh, who will rid me of this troublesome priest!" and a band of knights set out that day at dusk to murder Thomas a Becket at the high altar of Canterbury’s cathedral. Historians. playwrights and novelists have mused ever since whether it was the king’s intent to incite murder in the cathedral; they have generally blamed the act, for which Henry II did such grievous penance, on swordsmen who misinterpreted his wishes. The same kind of debate will follow the Nixon administration through history: but this moment is much too early for any outsider to pass judgment.
Nixon as Henry II? As John Ehrlichman used to say in his glory days. “Will that play in Peoria?" If it doesn’t, there is another imaginary scene. In it, White goes through a complicated football routine in which “the coach, who understood best what the campaign was all about, was preoccupied with action elsewhere"—that would be the “majestic foreign policy.”
White had another problem this time round: that is, to some extent, a ft er George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton got done with each other there really was no campaign in 1972. White is quite right to maintain a sense of sequence and perspective, and to say that “the story of Watergate was only one of a number of major stories in the election of 1972. . . . The elections of 1972 were determined, basically, by the record Richard Nixon had written. . . .”He believes Watergate turned off a lot of voters; indeed that both candidates did (the percentage of those voting for President was the lowest since 1948). Fuller knowledge of Watergate was, as White says, “to become a story of 1973.” So, faced with what he calls “a dull election in the reporting.” White fixes on what one might call a surrogate opposition candidate. Nixon’s “chief adversary,” he says, “was not George McGovern, but that vanguard of the press which claimed it understood and spoke for the people better than he did himself.”
He gives the press and its “primordial” power a chapter. He writes of “an opinion center radiating out of New York,” and of the “Liberal Press”:
This “vanguard” sets the agenda of public discussion: and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about— an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.
No major act of the American Congress, no foreign adventure, no act of diplomacy, no great social reform can succeed in the United Slates unless the press prepares the public mind. And when the press seizes a great issue to thrust onto the agenda of talk, it moves action on its own the cause of the environment. the cause of civil rights, the liquidation of the war in Vietnam. and. as climax, the Watergate affair were all set on the agenda, in first instance, by the press.
Speaking as an interested party, I find this inaccurate, exaggerated, and something more: it has the sound of someone who has been talking to presidents, would-be presidents, and their alter egos. Johnson and his aides used to say much the same thing; if any men hated the press more than Nixon and Agnew did in 1972, they were Edmund Muskie and George McGovern. The press, elitist or plebeian, more often than not lives off news created by government and politicians. It is a parasite in that respect. It records politicians’ troubles and triumphs, and when the troubles get frustrating the press is an obvious, available cal to kick. Nixon and Agnew, of course, started kicking the cat before their troubles got out of hand, but that is another story. What is troubling here is that White accepts so much of their bogeyman view of the modern press, which includes the unlikely portrayal of big-name television commentators as deep thinkers. He does go on to admit that the press didn’t do very well as a surrogate candidate in 1972, which undercuts his case. The press’s achievements in adversary dealings with Nixon & Co. in 1973 are of course considerable, but I would argue that—with now famous (and honored) exceptions—the press, as is its nature, has been more passive than active in the last year; more in the business of recording the Nixon Administration’s historic self-destruction than engaged in a premeditated campaign to destroy it. On this important issue my vote goes to that painstakingly restrained reporter John Osborne, no knee-jerk Eastern Liberal Pressman, but rather a Mississippi-born conservative-turned-moderate. The Fourth Year of The Nixon Watch (Liveright. $6.95). consisting of Osborne’s 1972 White House coverage for the (OK) knee-jerk liberal New Republic, has just been published, and contains this entry made in late August of last year, in the wake of the press’s reaction to McGovern’s and Eagleton’s own self-destruction;
The immediate effect [on the Nixon entourage] was to make ridiculous the paranoiac illusion that the President is uniquely exposed and vulnerable to critical coverage and comment and to impair the companion illusion that the country’s most influential journalists and commentators are determined to see that he is never liked because they don’t like him and his policies. . . .
If White’s love for American politics leaves him still, in mid-1973. somewhat beamish about Richard Nixon, there is plenty in The Making of the President— 1972 that we would not have if White were a less energetic or reflective paramour. An easy target now (like Nixon), White is also a good read. There is a fascinating interview with the President, in which Nixon explains his strategy of ignoring the rest of the Republican ticket;
He . . . was working for this new majority, not a Republican majority, because, “Well.” he said. “I’m not stupid.” He was working to get the people he called Truman Democrats. . . . They were calling him up. . . . The moment he tied himself to the theme of a “new Republican majority,” well, “the moment I do that, I pull myself down to their level, and . . . part of our probtem is that we have a lot of lousy candidates; the good ones will go up with me. the bad ones will go down.”
We see Ehrlichman and Haldeman referring to their old friend Robert Finch as “the Pasadena Hamlet.” McGovern, exhausted and living on fantasy: “Frank [Mankiewicz] and Gary [Hart] have a scenario, but I don’t see it as a scenario. I have this feeling I’m working with a historical trend, history is going for me. . . .” There is an account of the triumphs of “McGovern’s Army” before success spoiled it and fate foiled it that renders the whole story more excitingly, and makes its lessons more worth pondering, than do the several books that army’s own leaders have published so far. There is an episode on the Eagleton tangle, supplied by Eagleton to White and (I believe) hitherto unrecorded, that goes in part like this: It was the eve of the day on which McGovern dumped Eagleton. Eagleton had just appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation; meanwhile McGovern aides Jean Westwood and Basil Paterson had been sending Eagleton the bad news on NBC’s Meet the Press. In Eagleton’s account for White,
George complimented me on my “Face The Nation” performance. I complimented him on Jean Westwood’s hatchet job—and I used just those words—on Meet The Press.” . . .
To this McGovern rejoined, “Tom, believe me I had no idea what she was going to say. Only this afternoon when she and Basil Paterson came by my house did I first learn of what she said.”
“Don’t shit me. George,” I said. This was the first time in our recent political linkage that either of us had said to the other anything that was less than kind. George smirked. Not a smile of f a i n t amusement. Not a frown of slight irritation. A smirk, that’s what it was. . . .
And there are discussions of the busing issue in 1972, and of the divisive aspects of some of the Democratic Party’s efforts to reform itself—in particular, the quota issue—which are more thorough and informative than any others I’ve seen. They also happen to be weighted toward White’s proposition that “the story of an election always belongs to the victor, as does this one.” White takes the view that McGovern and his supporters set themselves on a Goldwater-like disaster course, forcing “the liberal idea” into “the liberal theology.” In this case, hindsight may be right, but I question the way he lumps the Democratic camp’s pragmatic reformers—fighting real abuses, grappling with real dilemmas—in with the numerous bungling zealots. Does hindsight really assure us that no amount of revelation about Nixon and his bungling zealots would have lost him the election, as White suggests; and that the Democrats were simply going too far, too fast? I wonder.
White writes. “Mr. McGovern persisted in the Lincolnian tradition of hoping an appeal to the better angels of people’s nature might summon them to new visions; Mr. Nixon proposed to deal with Americans as they are.” It seems evident that by the time of the making of the president—1976, the fact that McGovern bungled his mandate will be less important than what Nixon has done to his office, and what has happened to the Nixonian conception of politics as distinct from the Lincolnian one. I hope that Theodore White will be recording that story. The odds are that for those of us who love the American political process, as well as those of us who are merely platonically fascinated by it, the storv will have a happier ending than this one had.
GOODBYE, MR. CHRISTIAN by Richard Dougherty Doubleday. $7.95
RIGHT FROM THE START by Gary Hart Quadrangle. $7.95
THE LONG SHOT by Gordon L. Weil Norton, $8.95
The remains of the McGovern campaign, as warmed over in these books by three of its aides, are not tempting fare. For one thing, you wouldn’t believe how much time McGovern’s staff spent in Mickey Mouse struggles for this or that advantage over each other, and on occasion for the seat next to him on the campaign plane. New Politics or Sloppy Politics, none of it makes George McGovern look much like presidential timber in retrospect.
Dougherty’s book is by his own admission “concerned as much with Dougherty as with McGovern, perhaps more so.” But Dougherty—reporter. novelist, on again, off again McGovern press secretary—is an entertaining writer on just about any subject, not least of all himself, and when all else fails there are Frank Mankiewicz’s famous one-liners. At a convention of the New Democratic Coalition in New York:
New York reformers would rather wrangle than eat. Indeed at one point there was a dispute over whether the rules allowed an adjournment for lunch. It was already mid-afternoon and they might have lunched twice in the time it took to fight it out; but on thev went. Mankiewicz. who had flown up from Washington for the occasion, turned to me and—paraphrasing the old song—said: “Every little meaning has a Movement all its own.”
Campaign director Garv Hart has written a spare diary with some colorful moments, such as the time after the Eagleton disaster when two operatives of George Wallace. Tom Turnipseed and Dr. Peter Beeter, came to call,
pulled their chairs against my table-desk, and began a breathless, Semi-whispered discussion. Turnipseed: “Can you be trusted? I mean can you really be trusted?” . . . Beeter: “Who do you want to be President? I mean, who do you really want to be President?” These guys used “really” like a secretsociety code word. . . .
Their message was that “Wallace is your man” to replace Eagleton. But such moments are few in the book, and it will for the most part be of interest to the McGovern faithful, as will Gordon Weil’s.
All three books drop hints about aspects of the Eagleton matter. Taken together, they suggest that McGovern staffers learned more, earlier, about Eagleton than was generally supposed; that McGovern found out more about him before the affair climaxed than anyone supposed; and that the Nixon Administration may have known about Eagleton’s medical history and helped the story along.