A Personal Adventure
War and famine in China. Europe rising from its ruins. The carnival of that most American of spectacles, a presidential campaign. Eyewitness to all these events, and more, Theodore H. White has produced a steady flow of distinguished reportage for four decades: stirring dispatches for TIME and LIFE magazines from Asia in convulsion; a bestselling book on the civil war that eventually brought Communism to Peking, Thunder out of China (1946); another on Western Europe's phoenix-like recovery from the devastation of World War II, Fire in the Ashes (1953); and then, after his return to a changed and changing U.S., the biggest hits of all, The Making of the President series (1960 to 1972).
But Watergate erupted just as White was completing his study of the 1972 race. Thus, even as he began work on the next volume in that series, he found himself increasingly disturbed by what he saw as his failure to understand fully the connections between politics and power, his inability to answer that most vexing of questions: "What's it really all about?" So he set aside The Making of the President, 1976 (he hopes to complete his presidential series in 1981) to write what he calls neither an autobiography nor a political history but "a long essay"—a try at fitting together the sights, sounds, persons and episodes that he had witnessed as he had been whipped around in the slipstream of American power. In Search of History: A Personal Adventure will be published in August (Harper & Row; $12.95). It traces White's life from 1915, the year of his birth in Boston, to 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy's murder, a year he terms "the Divide"—not simply for him but for an America on the edge of upheaval. (White plans a second volume covering the '60s and '70s.) The following excerpts span three continents and a tempestuous quarter-century.
MacArthur: The Napoleon of Luzon
After leaving Harvard in 1938 with a degree in Chinese language and history and a traveling fellowship, Teddy White made his way to Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's mountain-girt wartime capital. There White began reporting for TIME, and in 1940 the magazine sent him on a tour of Southeast Asia that eventually took him to Manila and to a man who was then an outcast from power or influence, but not for long:
When I met him, on this trip, he was, by my youthful judgment, a very old man—over sixty! I went to see lim because in my military survey of Southeast Asia had been so disappointed by the U.S. Army in the Philippines—commanded by dull men who had contempt for the "aging" and retired one-time Chief of Staff of their army, Douglas MacArthur. They called him "the Napoleon of Luzon," and one spokesman told me that he "cut no more ice in this U.S. Army than a corporal." MacArthur was just an adviser to the Philippine Army, he said, not worth seeing. So I went to see this relict of history, this great soldier, now a field marshal in the Philippine Army.
MacArthur at sixty, on the eve of his great war command, was, I found, still a spectacle. His hands trembled; his voice sometimes squeaked. But he paced, and roared, and pointed, and pounded, and stabbed with his cigar, and spoke with an intelligence and a magniloquence and a force that overwhelmed. He was holding himself, he