Cliffhanger

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1960 (400 pp.)--Theodore H. White--Atheneum ($6.95). John Fitzgerald Kennedy was slumped wearily on the edge of his bed, grizzle-chinned and wearing rumpled white pajamas, when Ted Sorensen, his closest aide, brought him the news that he had won in California and had thus been elected President of the United States. (Sorensen was right with the news, wrong with his facts: absentee ballots shifted California's electoral votes to Richard Nixon a few days later, but Illinois finished in Kennedy's column and clinched his hairbreadth victory.) The two men, soon joined by Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, sat on the bed and mulled over the early-morning statistics. There were no congratulations, no jubilation: the three were much too tired, and Kennedy's triumph was much too thin. Afterward, the President-elect waved his aides away and retired to his bathroom to shave, with a straight razor. In such homely fashion the great political drama of 1960 came to its end.

Strategy & Hope. In The Making of the President, Theodore White abandons his unhappy sortie into fiction (The View from the Fortieth Floor) and returns to a field he knows intimately: factual reporting. For more than a year, White, assisted by a legman, roamed the nation on the trail of the seven men who openly aspired to the presidency. For details and events he inevitably missed, he mined the published stories of a thousand reporters. White has used his material well. The campaign of 1960 is recaptured in all its detail and excitement, and White manages to tell his story with suspense, a rare achievement in a work of political non-fiction whose outcome is known.

Any U.S. presidential election is a stirring drama, but the election of 1960 is without doubt the political cliffhanger of the century. The story begins in the fall of 1959, with the secret strategy meetings of all the aspirants and their campaign cadres (Adlai Stevenson, an exception, brooded alone in his Libertyville library), and it continues to the relentless long count of election night, when half the nation stayed mesmerized by television until dawn.

Along the way, there are some arresting scenes: Joe Kennedy, the silent partner in his son's campaign, working quietly and effectively among his friends and associates to bring 80 of New York's 114 convention delegates into camp. Or an elated Dick Nixon, watching the nervous, weary image of Jack Kennedy delivering his acceptance speech on his TV screen and deciding then and there that the television debates would be a pushover: "The Vice President offered the observation that he thought it a poor performance, way over people's heads, too fast. He could take this man on TV--so he felt ... He could not foresee what time, illness and strain would do to his own image on such a screen in the fall."

Anguish & Bathos. The first rounds are awarded almost entirely to Kennedy: the murderous primary rumbles in Wisconsin and West Virginia that finally killed off Hubert Humphrey; the impact of the glamorous and numerous Kennedy family on a startled nation; the surge of Stevenson's forces and the taut control in the Kennedy camp at the Los Angeles convention. Then it is the Republicans' turn, and Dick Nixon steps onto the resin. There is the anguish of the Vice President, halted at the very beginning of his campaign, in the midst of his triumphant tour of the South, by a staphylococcus infection, and there is the bathos of his speech in Centralia, Ill., recalling the story of how his father decided to buy his brother new shoes instead of a hoped-for pony.

There is real drama late on election night, when Dick and Pat Nixon, struggling with their emotions, appear on TV and refuse to concede the election. (Viewing the scene from his Hyannisport headquarters, Kennedy silenced his grumbling staff with six words: "Why should he concede? I wouldn't.")

Hostility & Achievement. Author White strives for objectivity, but there is no question whose campaign button adorned his lapel. The TV debates were a "disaster" for Nixon. Kennedy's campaign was "brilliant." His coverage of Kennedy is more complete, more successful than his picture of Nixon. Nor was it entirely his fault: Nixon kept to himself, and his campaign staff was hostile to the press. White sums up a prevalent attitude toward the reporters with a quotation from a Nixon staffer: "Stuff the bastards. They're all against Dick anyway. Make them work--we're not going to hand out prepared remarks. Let them use their pencils and get out and take notes."

The book suggests all of the obvious clues to why, by 1% of the votes, the election went the way it did: the TV debates; Bobby Kennedy's telephone call to Martin Luther King Sr. when his son was jailed; the failure to exploit the dismal summer session of Congress; the drift of Catholics and other minorities.

But a complete analysis of the 1960 campaign will have to await a later day and more penetrating research. As reporting, the book is a notable achievement. White has written a fascinating story of a fascinating campaign.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.