(9 of 10)
The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf that was told from Grendel's point of view. There is a scene in which a wandering bard arrives among the drunken cretins and begins to sing beautiful songs to them about what they have accomplished that day in battle. Atrocity becomes glory, bloodletting becomes heroic. It is a shrewd point about mythmaking, and perhaps about the making of the myth of Camelot.
But there is, more and more, a countervailing mood of anti-myth that may also be one of the insoluble dilemmas of American politics. What able man or woman is willing to submit to the inquisitions of the press into private lives, into any previous lives they might have led? Would John Kennedy have survived in the politics of 1960 if his extracurricular adventures had been investigated?
White's book about 1960 is in some ways a hymn and a poem not only to American democracy but to the American landscape and American people, to their varieties and resonances. White's writing then strikes a heroic note that sounds odd to the American ear now. But perhaps a sense of eloquence and size has passed out of history's favor.
A presidential campaign is still a fascinating trajectory, over time and vast landscape. In the very American way, it is a moral itinerary, an idea proceeding across both biographies and territories.
Now the candidate's chartered plane fires back across the continent against the direction of old westering tracks 30,000 ft. below. Inside the plane, the clerisy of "spin," that is, the priesthood of partisans sent around to see reporters after major campaign events and impart the right spin, have done their work up and down the aisles, like Polonius and Hamlet discussing the ! shapes of clouds. The candidate is dozing up front. The jackals of the press have settled into their routines of mild carousal.
The jackals haven't the barnacled, bad-liver look of some who covered the 1960 campaign. They don't, like Teddy White, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, or filtered either. They play poker sometimes, or blackjack, and one throwback even asks for a Jack Daniels. A group clusters around the seats behind and plays a game of Jeopardy on a laptop computer -- in answer to which the candidate's press staff, quite justly, chants in rallentando: "Boring, boring, BORING!" The journalists all have toys White never imagined -- cellular telephones, laptops, tiny portable television sets, all the magic paraphernalia connecting them to the New World that America has entered.
Still, it is the old America too. The plane drops into cold drizzle at Green Bay, Wis., and there a crowd awaits that would have been no different from the people Kennedy or Nixon might have dropped out of the same sky to try to win. The band, a little forlorn in the night, is drums, electronic keyboard piano and electric guitar, and it sounds like a Milwaukee roadhouse on a Saturday night. It plays Happy Days Are Here Again. The scene is fervent and lonely.