Biography on the Bias

The classic campaign biography should sound like a chorus of When the Saints Go Marching In. It should present its hero as both liberal and conservative, fearless and cautious, witty and generous, as a model of propriety and sagacity, and a lover (figuratively and respectfully speaking) of American womanhood. In this presidential year, as usual, nearly all of the major candidates are on view.* Some of the portraits present the usual saintly features, while others are outright smears. A few are honest attempts to measure the candidates in more than one dimension.

In the halo tradition are Stuart Symington (Doubleday; $3.95), This Is Humphrey (Doubleday; $3.95), The Real Nixon (Rand McNally; $3.95), and Nelson Rockefeller (Harper; $5.50). All four are tender love letters that would do credit to Elizabeth ("Let me count the ways") Barrett Browning. The Rockefeller book is an attempt to bring a glittering millionaire down to the aw-shucks level, e.g., he got a niggardly 25-c--a-week allowance as a boy, didn't go to "any exclusive preparatory school," but to Manhattan's progressive Lincoln. It also contains some odd facts about the Governor; e.g., one eye is bluer than the other; he is ambidextrous. Except for the color of their eyes, the geographical locations and the political proper nouns, the heroes of the other three biographies are interchangeable. All had remarkable, up-from-the-shoetops careers; all are so faultless and sinless that they must certainly be potential candidates for beatification as well as the U.S. presidency. The Nixon biography is the work of Bela Kornitzer, a Hungarian refugee who, according to the dust jacket, learned English by going to American movies. This is undoubtedly true. The book includes a replica of Mother Hannah Nixon's handwritten recipe for cherry pie, as well as the information that young Dick won one of his first elections (president of the student body at Whittier College) by campaigning for dances, which had been banned at the Quaker-founded school. The Kornitzer book seems to be about an entirely different man from William Costello's bleak study, The Facts About Nixon (Viking; $3.95), which first appeared in abbreviated form in the New Republic. Reporter Costello shows his bias in every turn of phrase, and the sinister Nixon he presents is no closer to the real man.

The paradox is repeated in Candidates 1960 (Basic Books; $4.95), a spotty collection of sketches by Washington correspondents, edited by CBS News Analyst Eric Sevareid. The Dick Nixons portrayed by the Baltimore Sun's Philip Potter (anti) and the New York Daily News's Frank Holeman (pro) are different people. Potter's Nixon: "He has all the ambivalence of a college debater, who can make as forceful an argument on one side as on the other." Holeman: "He has the training, brains, and courage to be a good Republican President. He has the heart and faith to be a great one."

More objective are Stewart Alsop's twin study, Nixon and Rockefeller (Doubleday; $3.95), which had the misfortune of reaching the market four weeks after Nelson Rockefeller decided to quit, and James MacGregor Burns's John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, Brace; $4.75). Alsop presents a light-and-shadow Nixon, a candidate whose "cool toughness and simple guts . . . would be markedly useful in a President." Burns, a Williams College professor who once ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress on the same ticket with Jack Kennedy, is frankly biased, but he does recognize faults and shortcomings in his hero (e.g., Kennedy's failure to take a stand in the Senate censure of Joe McCarthy), and the result comes closer than most of the other books to being a portrait of a human being--certainly closer than The Kennedy Family (Little, Brown; $3.95), a friendly romp with a large and formidable clan, in which the candidate is all but lost from view in the throng of adored ancestors and siblings.

Scattered among the biographies are nuggets of incidental information that could be useful to future historians, or possibly even to voters in the polling places next November. Items:

P: When Dick Nixon made his harrowing arrival in Caracas in 1958 and was stoned by Communists, another Red mob was waiting for him, armed with explosives, at the tomb of Simon Bolivar. Although he had no foreknowledge of the mob, Nixon probably saved his life by countermanding the orders of the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, ordering his car to bypass the tomb and go directly to the U.S. embassy.

P: Kennedy was an atrocious speller and grammarian as a boy, graduated 64th in a class of 112 at Choate, but improved sufficiently to turn his magna cum laude thesis at Harvard into a bestseller (Why England Slept) with the help of New York Times Elder Arthur Krock.

P: Hubert Humphrey is an expert dancer, courted his future wife to the tune of an orchestra led by a young unknown, Lawrence Welk, who later became President Eisenhower's favorite music man.

P: It is virtually certain that the next President of the U.S. will be the first to be born in the 20th century. Stevenson, the oldest of the candidates, made it by 36 days; Kennedy, the youngest, was born 17 years after the century's turn.

P: None of the seven major candidates smoke cigarettes.

* Exceptions: Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson, who, however, are already on view in older biographies.

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