Old Pro

By WALTER ISAACSON

AMERICA IN SEARCH OF ITSELF: THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT, 1956-1980

by Theodore H. White Harper & Row; 480 pages; $15.95

They don't make Presidents the way they used to. Theodore White should know; he has been making them for a generation now. In what he says is his last campaign chronicle, the old pro riffles through his old notebooks, and places himself on the bridge between journalism and history to give a grand overview of the passage of power. "This time," he says, "I wanted to add it up."

The arithmetic begins in the postwar period when ward leaders could deliver ethnic blocs and "American voters still came in packages." With a touch of nostalgia for what seems a less troubled time, White recalls the county fairs and urban machines that dominated politics in the '50s. "Television and education were soon to rupture this tradition," he writes, "but the way the national system worked then seemed simple, though coarse."

Out of this ingenuous era came the ideals that shaped politics during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: belief in individual equality and civil rights, in the limitless abundance of the U.S. economy, and in the power of the Government to solve all problems, foreign and domestic. The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, exalting these notions, ended by undermining them. This is hardly a bold new summary, but White adds his own interpretation. The civil rights gains were twisted, he argues, until a legitimate goal was turned into "a monster whose shadow hangs over all American politics today: the division of Americans by race and national origin into groups, each entitled to special privileges." In addition, the U.S. economy was not invulnerable to stagnation and inflation; the Government's power to solve domestic problems seemed to decay along with the inner cities; and the country's military might translated only into impotence abroad. "Somehow, public affairs had gone off the track, almost as if the country itself had lost its way into the future," he writes. "There was no sense of coherence in government; it did not respond." --By Walter Isaacson

Such themes converged on Nov. 4, 1979, the day that the U.S. hostages were seized in Iran and exactly one year before America elected Ronald Reagan. White chooses this moment as the starting point for what amounts to a book within a book, the chronicle of the 1980 election: "What had come to issue...hi 1980 was the nature of the Federal Government's power."

White's descriptions of that campaign are laced with his customary admixture of canny insights and colorful details that vivify the sweep of history. But his main concern this time is not with the interpersonal drama of the campaign trail. His goal is to discern the grand forces, economic, social and psychological, that culminated in the watershed election of Reagan. In the process, he constructs an eminently recognizable America in Search of Itself, a ceaseless pursuit, like that of happiness. "America has always been a questioning nation, always in search...of what it means, and of what it promises to do," White says. By 1980, he feels, the quest had become nostalgic, based on a yearning "to find again an old civility of life, and communities in which that civility can reign."

Thus his 1980 campaign chronicle is not the familiar insider's tale of life on the trail. He is no longer a boy on the bus seeking out the behind-the-scenes moments that give dimension to the electoral odyssey. "The outdoor reporting seems to shrink in significance, and what remains most relevant is the quiet moments at my desk," he concludes. "I could sit at home and learn as much or more about the frame of the campaign as I could on the road."

There is one critical force that has changed the nature of American politics left unexamined: White's own influence. When he first reported from New Hampshire, he was one of seven newsmen covering the primary. Today, with a thousand journalists on the snowy trail, every candidate is subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: What is being scrutinized is changed by the very scrutiny. Presidential campaigns are now traveling media circuses rather than romantic quests ripe for the retelling. This alteration of campaigns and campaign coverage is the legacy of the maker of the "Making of the Presidents," one Theodore H. White, godfather of modern political reportage.

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