The Press: Makings and Unmakings

Since 1961, Theodore H. White's colorful, magisterial narratives of presidential campaigns have become a standard part of the election returns, a quadrennial post-mortem on the body politic. In The Making of the President—1972 (published this week by Atheneum), White faced his severest test to date. The 1972 campaign, dominated by a challenger who could not get started and an incumbent who would not come out to fight, was short on political blood and guts. More important, the campaign's invisible drama—Watergate and related skulduggery—did not begin unfolding until White was in the final...

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